Generating new leads matters. Every real estate agent needs to bring in new leads they can work with to buy or sell a home.
It can be difficult to figure out what type of lead generation methods work and which ones are a waste of your time. With limited time, you don’t want to be wasting it on methods not producing quality leads.
So, what’s the answer to this lead generation issue? Start your own real estate blog and watch the leads start flowing in!
Starting Your Own Blog
When you decide to add a real estate blog to your website, you gain the ability to capture leads while they are searching for your local area. Maybe somebody is considering relocating from across the country and they find your blog so helpful, they decide you’re the agent they want to hire. With the right content marketing, this is certainly possible.
Blogging is very inexpensive and becomes quite effective if you stick to it. You cannot expect to put up a couple of blog posts and get hundreds of leads in just a week. Blogging is a long-term solution, but once the ball gets rolling, it will produce new leads over and over again.
A Quick Cost Analysis of Blogging
You’re a real estate agent, which means, you’re probably far too busy to keep up with regular blog posting. This means you need to outsource the task to a highly-skilled writer capable of putting your blog on the automatic setting for you.
Depending on the size of your market and your overall goals, you will need between 1 and 5 blog posts per week. Each blog post should be no less than 350 words, but it’s better to keep them around 500 or more words. Longer content ranks better and posts of more than 1,000 words are the best choice. My SEO Content Strategy includes much longer, much better content than the average blog posts. Assuming an average cost of $75 per blog post, you might spend between $75 and $375 per week to add fresh content to your blog (based on 500-word blog posts).
While $75 may seem affordable and $375 may seem a bit high, this needs to be put in perspective. You pay $75 one time for a blog post that has the ability to produce leads for years into the future. If one out of every 25 blog posts you put up produces a lead and you make a commission, chances are, you’ll more than double your money from blogging.
Blogging Helps Overall SEO
Along with producing leads from the blog posts themselves, blogging will help the overall SEO profile of your website. Neighborhood/area pages can be created and linked to from blog posts and just the fact that you will have fresh, high-quality content will make a world of difference.
3 More Reasons to Start a Real Estate Blog
If the cost analysis and the SEO benefits are not enough to convince you that a real estate blog is necessary, here are three more reasons you should start blogging immediately.
Pull Leads Instead of Push
Blogging is a strategy known as inbound marketing. Instead of trying to attract leads with outbound marketing strategies, such as direct mail and print advertising, you’ll be pulling leads to you with blogging.
Outbound marketing requires the potential lead to take action in response to an advertisement. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, has the potential lead seeking the information you provide on your blog.
Appeal to the New Generations of Home Buyers
With more than 90% of home buyers searching online before they ever hire a real estate agent, you need a strong online presence. Newer generations don’t answer the phone, especially for sales calls, they don’t have much brand loyalty and they want to do plenty of research before they ever contact a real estate agent.
With blogging, you have the opportunity to intercept the potential home buyer or seller as they are doing research. Your blog posts give you more authority with Google, allow you to target more key phrases, and help you to cast a wider net.
Help You Build a Large Email List
Another reason you need to start a real estate blog is to build a large email list of potential home buyers and sellers. As your blog posts go live and they get shared across social platforms, you gain multiple opportunities to capture leads for your email list.
This makes a difference when you need to sell a newly listed home or you want to stay in contact with those home buyers and sellers that may re-enter the market later on. If a potential buyer or seller hasn’t signed on with you yet, receiving quality emails from you might be the push they need to become a client.
There are several great reasons to start a real estate blog and every agent should have one. No matter how big or small your market is a blog will help you attract new buyers and sellers interested in your expertise.
