As a real estate professional, you’re no stranger to competition. You need to stand out from the crowd of agents and brokers in your market if you want to generate the best leads.
More than ever, it’s vital for real estate agents to have a robust online presence. A blog is a great way to showcase your skills, demonstrate your expertise, and prove to potential leads why they can trust doing business with you. This post will share some tips for starting a real estate blog that will help you reach your target audience and maximize leads. Keep reading to grow your real estate business with a blog.
Build a Website & Choose the Right CRM For Your Business
The first step to starting a blog is getting a website.
That may seem obvious, but it’s worth specifying. With so many social media sites and blogging platforms, it may seem like a real estate agent would have a bigger stage by going to an established network rather than starting a website from the ground up. However, every real estate agent or brokerage needs to blog from their own website.
Having a real estate blog isn’t about getting your thoughts out to the public; it’s about creating exciting and informative content that inspires people to hire you as their agent.
If you already have a website, you need to ensure that you’re using customer relationship management (CRM) software to meet your needs. CRM software helps you oversee communication with leads from beginning to end.
There are hundreds of options for e-commerce CRMs, but there are only a few CRMs geared exclusively to the real estate industry.
Popular features of real estate CRMs include:
- Data-tracking that highlights potential leads and monitors sales/marketing metrics
- Multiple backend communication options, including text messages, emails, and phone calls
- Contract and upload management
- Integration with the local MLS to display homes for sale
- A built-in blogging platform
Content Marketing 101: A Good Blog Funnels Buyers to Your Listings
A well-equipped CRM is the foundation of a successful content marketing strategy. Content marketing is about creating and sharing valuable content to attract leads and build trust with potential clients.
Your blog will be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, but it’s only effective when coupled with well-designed “money pages.”
In content marketing, “money pages” is a term used to describe the pages on your website that are responsible for generating income. Money pages display products and provide the necessary interface for making a transition.
Whether you’re a seller’s agent or a buyer’s agent, your product is obviously homes. However, in the context of content marketing, the homes aren’t your online products, per-se. People don’t click-and-buy homes on a whim as they would on other websites. In this sense, your website’s product is the information buyers can find about the local real estate market.
As you plan content for your blog, think about what buyers need during every step of their homebuying process.
People at the earliest stages of buying a home will want to know high-level information about the city. For example, what’s the local culture like? How high or low is the cost of living?
People who are further along will want to read blogs that break down specific neighborhoods or inform them where to find a specific property type.
Website visitors who reach the very end of the home buying process will be interested in browsing listing pages that highlight the current inventory in your area.
Your best-developed leads will be the people who are hooked into your website with your high-level content and follow the trail of information to your “money pages.”
Keyword Research: The Key to Data-Driven Creativity
To create a lead-generating real estate blog, you need to write content that answers buyer questions about homes for sale in your area. But how do you know what questions buyers are asking?
By conducting keyword research.
Keyword research is the process of identifying the questions and terms people use when searching for information about your products or services.
You can use keyword research as the first step for brainstorming blog topics.
There are a few different ways to conduct keyword research:
Look at search suggestions. The most accessible form of keyword research is the search bar on your favorite search engine. Start by typing an idea for a keyword into the search bar and browse the suggested search terms to get a broad idea of what people frequently ask about that topic.
Use Google’s Keyword Planner. Google’s Keyword Planner is a free tool that provides keyword suggestions and traffic estimates. It’s more detailed than using the search suggestions method but limited compared to paid tools.
Use paid tools. SEO platforms like Moz and Ahrefs provide the most detailed views in exchange for monthly membership fees.
All of these methods are effective on their own, but to get the best idea of what real estate investors are looking for, you can use more industry-specific tools like a heat map.
Nurture Your Leads by Organizing Your Blog in Content Clusters
Once you’ve brainstormed a list of potential blog topics using keyword research, you need to start organizing your ideas into content clusters.
A content cluster is a group of related blog posts centered around one main topic. The main topic, or pillar page, is generally a high-level overview of the subtopics. Remember, your money pages should be at the core of every content cluster.
Content clusters are one of the best ways to nurture leads on your real estate website because they can provide top-to-bottom information about potential investments. Having a variety of information on a single topic increases the amount of time people spend on your website, making them a better-informed lead by the time you make contact with them.
Well-organized content clusters also help your pages rank higher in Google search results. Google’s algorithms are designed to favor websites that provide a comprehensive view of a topic. If you insert internal links to all of the blog posts you have on a single subject, Google’s algorithms will be able to acknowledge you as an expert resource on that topic.
As an expert resource, Google will be more likely to display your pages as the first search results, which leads to more web traffic, leads, and sales.
Your Blog Topics Should Solve Problems, Not Describe Them
If you’re struggling to develop topics for your real estate blog, a great way to get ideas is by monitoring discussion forums and social media platforms where people talk about real estate investing.
By observing the questions and concerns that come up frequently, you can start to see what topics would be helpful to write about to attract leads who are further along in their investment journey.
You can help your website stand out by approaching popular topics from a fresh angle.
Consider the Wayne Gretzky quote: “Skate where the puck is going; not where it is.”
If you write the same thing every other real estate blog is writing, you’re unlikely to attract new visitors. Instead, create value by saying something new and insightful.
For example, if all the other influencers in your field discuss buyer fatigue in response to rising mortgage rates, don’t just pile on with the same information.
Think about what would be helpful to know as a buyer experiencing fatigue. Instead of defining the problem, offer a solution in the form of inspirational advice, underrated strategies, or unique budgeting tips.
Don’t Let Your Posts Die on the Vine: Conduct Promotional Outreach
If you want people to see your blog posts, you need to put in the work to get them in front of as many eyes as possible.
The most effective way to do this is by conducting outreach after you hit publish. Outreach is the process of contacting industry publications and other websites to promote your content.
Promotion from other platforms comes in various forms. If you’ve written a great blog on home improvement, reach out to remodeling contractors in your area to see if they can share it with their social media audience.
When it comes to improving your real estate SEO, building backlinks is perhaps the most valuable result of content promotion.
Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website. They’re essential because they show Google that your site is being talked about by trusted sources. The more backlinks you have, the higher your pages will rank in search results, which leads to increased web traffic and conversions.
Start by reaching out to publications and websites that are adjacent to real estate but that aren’t competitors to get backlinks. You can send an email asking them to read your most recent blog and insert a link to it on a related post on their page.
Asking for backlinks is a substantial request, and you need to understand that anyone who agrees to link to your site is doing you a favor. To make a better deal, consider what you can do to provide value for them.
Guest blogging is one of the most effective ways to get backlinks. You can offer to write a blog for another website in exchange for a link back to one of your articles.
This is also an excellent way to get your name and brand out there to new audiences who may not be familiar with you yet.
Building a Real Estate Blog Pays for Itself with Leads
Are you ready to create a blog that will help you find buyer leads? By following the tips in this post, you can set up a website that is both user-friendly and SEO optimized, choose the right CRM for your business, understand how content funnels buyers to your listings, conduct keyword research, create content clusters, and see where discussion is going instead of where it’s at. Outreach on your blog is key to generating leads – so get started today!