You’ve probably heard that blogging is something you “should” do as a real estate agent, but what’s in it for you? How does writing about your job on the internet help your bottom line? REAL ESTATE AGENTS START BLOGGING
There are three ways in which blogging can directly grow your business. Maintaining a real estate blog helps you establish your expertise with potential clients, improve your organic SEO rankings, and generate quality leads.
Below, we’ll break each of these down to help you understand how blogging will benefit your bottom line. We’ll also give some tips on how to maximize each to your advantage.
BENEFIT #1: BLOGGING HELPS YOU ESTABLISH EXPERTISE AS A REAL ESTATE AGENT
When choosing from the dozens of real estate agents in your area, potential clients will look you up to decide whether they should hire you.
If you’re new to the game, a real estate agent blog can help establish your credibility and knowledge in the absence of referrals or glowing reviews. It’s even helpful after you’re established – you can show off knowledge of your chosen niche, illustrate your expertise in negotiations, and help confirm your word-of-mouth reputation with something tangible.
Also, people tend to trust professionals who give a little advice for free, and blogging is a way to do that without stretching yourself too thin. You can use it to establish some goodwill, hook and nurture new leads, and point clients to handy resources that are personal.
REAL ESTATE BLOGGING PRO TIP
Client questions make great blog topics, as do misconceptions and how-to guides. Keep a running list of things people have
asked you so you can write about them later.
Once you’ve been at it a while, you can remix, reuse, and repurpose content to make blogging and social media posting easier. Come at topics from several angles, make short videos based on past blogs to reach a different audience, and periodically update and repost old articles – your audience will turn over often enough that repeating topics once a year or so will be helpful, not annoying.
Finally, if you’re part of a brokerage or a specialized real estate team, then each member of the team can take turns contributing so that a single agent doesn’t shoulder the entire blogging load. This also provides a variety of ideas and perspectives.
BENEFIT #2: BLOGGING INCREASES TRAFFIC AND BOOSTS ORGANIC SEO
In addition to establishing your credibility, blogging is a great way to increase website traffic for real estate agents. Generating helpful, specific content for your realty blog can draw eyeballs, both from social media posts and web searches.
Why does more traffic matter? To earn that internet voodoo, you’ve been told that you need search engine optimization or SEO.
To understand the benefit of blogging for SEO, let’s think about how you got here. We offered a helpful answer to a question you had on your mind. Our website’s general SEO was already strong enough that this article ranked toward the top, you saw it, and you clicked.
But what if your website is brand new and ranks terribly in SEO? The only way to improve it is to start generating traffic. Your terrible SEO means few people will scroll far enough to see your article in search results, but if you share blog links on social media, you can attract traffic.
The more traffic your website gets, the higher its organic SEO ranking and the higher your blog will appear on the page. The higher it gets, the more traffic, which raises your SEO ranking more. It’s a positive feedback loop you definitely want to get into.
We’re actually using you for this right now. This topic doesn’t directly relate to the services we offer (real estate education), but it’s something many real estate agents search for. That makes it a good topic to showcase our SEO, even if we can’t directly sell you anything.
Plus, if we make this article helpful and then seed it with links to other content on this site, you might stay to browse and give us even more traffic.
REAL ESTATE BLOGGING PRO TIPS
Keywords always play an important role in generating valuable SEO content, which is why you should use the AdWords keyword tool to determine the most searched terms and phrases. These can serve as inspiration for blog topics, but you’ll also want to work keywords organically into your content.
Additionally, most blogging tools for your website will let you add tags to each article. It’s a good idea to add relevant and commonly searched keywords or topics as tags on your blog, like “first-time home buyers” or “how to finance a home.” Tagging can help the content score get a higher natural rank on organic search engine results pages, as well as direct your content to the right audience.
Finally, tagging makes it easy for people already on your blog to find similar content relevant to them.
BENEFIT #3: BLOGGING CAN GENERATE LEADS FOR REAL ESTATE AGENTS
The top reason for blogging is that it provides a vehicle for cost-effective lead generation. Quality leads.
When consumers want to find information about a big purchase like real estate, they go to the web. Blogging can lead them to you through organic traffic or social media sharing.
Once you’ve drawn them in and proven your expertise, it’s important to provide one or more methods to reach out to you as their next step. Lead forms, chat tools, phone numbers, and email signup lists are all good lead-gathering options. REAL ESTATE AGENTS START BLOGGING
REAL ESTATE BLOGGING PRO TIP
If you want to boost the reach of your posts early on, you can also use targeted social media advertising to get your lead-generating content in front of the right audience. The modern internet is an amazing, highly customizable marketing vehicle. Social media ads can help you reach a specific yet varied target audience of future home buyers in your area for very little money.
BOTTOM LINE REAL ESTATE AGENTS START BLOGGING
Blogging is the ultimate budget hack for marketing. It’s a cheap way to establish your reputation, boost your web presence, and attract new clients. It allows you to market your business with very few recurring charges. You can find course to help at ACE Training Platforms and ACE Continuing Education Credits and ACE Home Mortgage.