Regular blogging for your real estate agency is a great way to create ongoing engagement with both existing and potential customers – who will hopefully value the content you produce and start interacting with, liking and sharing it.
Blogging used to be for individuals wanting to share their thoughts, personal stories and experiences – needless to say, blogging for business requires a completely different set of rules. If written properly, your blog posts will help position you as a credible real estate agent and specialist in your field. What better way to convince a potential property vendor to pick up the phone and engage your services?
What is good blogging? We thought it would be useful to collate our top tips:
Blog, don’t flog – If there’s only one thing you take away from this blog post, make it this – blogging is not about direct selling. The moment you start talking about how great your agency is, is the moment you’ll lose trust and connection with that reader.
Be authentic – Your real estate agency blog is an extension of your brand. You’ll be surprised to learn just how easy it is to spot a fake personality online. Ensure that what you say and how you say it, is really you. Does it sound like you when you read it back to yourself? Are you using phrases that you feel comfortable with? Read your blog post back to yourself a couple of times before you post it.
Produce great content – you might initially struggle with content ideas, but it’s easier than you think – you just need to think a little outside the box. Think about what your buyers and sellers want to know about when preparing their move. Talk about your expert opinion on the real estate market, share details about useful online tools, talk about what works when it comes to preparing properties for sale or leasing.
Be consistent – Maintaining consistency in the style, tone and frequency of your blog posts will help your clients get used to your blog posts at regular intervals and become familiar with the personality that has been carved out through tone.
Don’t go overboard – Putting pressure on yourself to produce a masterpiece each and every time is unrealistic, even for the most informed and skilled writer. Keep your blog post concise (a few paragraphs is usually enough), informative and entertaining to read.
Ask your customers – You might want to consider asking your customers what they’d find useful to read about. Maybe you don’t even need to ask them – think about the common questions and frustrations you hear time and time again by buyers and sellers. What can you write about to help them?
Use your SEO keywords – Hopefully you’ve already done some research into how renters, buyers and vendors might be searching for your real estate services online. Weave your SEO keywords into your blog posts for extra SEO juice, but refrain from keyword stuffing – aside from being unpleasant to read, Google’s ever-changing algorithms will actually penalise you for it.
Share your content – This is the first step as soon as you’ve finished writing your blog post. If you don’t start sharing your own blog posts, you’ll struggle to build your audience. Choose two or three social media outlets and concentrate on those – don’t try to cover all bases, you’ll fail miserably.
Make your content easy to share – Ask your website developer to ensure that LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook plug-ins are automatically embedded at the bottom of each blog post. If you don’t make it easy for your readers to share your content, they never will.
We’re always posting fresh content on the Commission Flow blog. Make sure you keep visiting each week for the next round of what we think you want to hear about. In the meantime, if your real estate agency could do with some cash flow support, get in touch by calling 1800 003 569.