As one of the highest recommended ways to gain new leads, blogging is something every real estate agent should be doing. It’s a part of the marketing you simply cannot ignore. Your competition is blogging and you need to stay one step ahead of them.
While blogging may seem tedious, boring or even unnecessary, it’s a way to create a steady stream of leads coming to your website every single day without investing in outbound marketing. Instead, blogging is one of the most powerful forms of inbound marketing you can use.
If you’re not familiar with the different, inbound marketing draws people to you by their own actions, such as clicking on a blog post shared on social media or finding it in the Google search results. Outbound marketing is more traditional, such as print advertising or pay-per-click marketing.
The biggest difference comes with blogging causing leads to come to your website over a longer amount of time. With outbound marketing, you have to continue to invest if you want leads. However, when you use blogging, you invest once in each blog post and it will draw leads to your website as long as it remains published.
Along with providing leads, here are five of the other top benefits every real estate agent gains from blogging.
Relevant Content for Social Media
Sharing the 10th house you’ve sold this month with the new owner pictured in front of it may seem powerful on social media, but it gets old after a while. You need to mix it up and blogging allows you to do just that.
Every single blog post you publish gives you something to share on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and all of the other social media sites out there. Your posts allow you to stay connected with your community and grow your followers.
Become an Authority
It won’t happen overnight or even in your first year of blogging, but if you keep at it, you will become known as an authority in your community. If you’re a real estate agent in Dallas, maybe after a couple of years of posting three or four times a week, you become the go-to website for buyers looking for a home in Dallas.
Authority also allows you to become known within the industry as the place to turn. When this happens, search engines respond by rewarding you with higher rankings.
Target Long-tail Keywords
One of the major benefits of blogging for real estate agents is the ability to go after the low-hanging fruit or long-tail keywords. You cannot possibly target every single real estate-related keyword for your target areas with your website. However, your blog allows you to go after all of them.
For example, maybe you’ve targeted the keywords “Dallas homes for sale”, “Buy a home in Dallas” and “Dallas real estate”, but you were not able to target keywords, such as:
- Historic homes for sale in Dallas
- Condos for sale in Dallas
- Homes for sale in X neighborhood
- Hiring a Dallas real estate agent
- And so on…
No matter where you’re located, there are thousands of keywords you can target through your blog.
Provide Relevant Community Information
A very powerful way to draw people to your blog before they even know they need to buy or sell a home is by providing relevant community information. This could be information about the local attractions, restaurants, things to do, events, developments, and anything related to your specific community.
Blog posts about the community draw in those not yet interested in real estate. Then, when they follow you on social media, they will come back over and over for other blog posts. If the time comes when they are ready to buy or sell, they are already familiar with your website, so they turn to you as their real estate agent.
In addition, those looking to relocate from other areas of the country may find your blog posts when searching about your city/community. This can be a very powerful way to connect with those looking to move to your city and gain qualified leads without having to advertise in cities all across the United States.
Gain Better Search Engine Optimization
SEO isn’t going anywhere, but it’s always evolving. The best way to ensure your website stays on top of the rankings is by adding new, relevant content. Your blog makes this part of SEO very easy.
Another SEO benefit you gain from your blog is the ability to build natural links. When you share your posts on social media and other bloggers or website owners find it, they may use you as a source and link to your blog. This helps to naturally boost your overall SEO profile.
Blogging also allows you to establish excellent on-site interlinking. When you write a blog post and you mention a neighborhood, you can link to the neighborhood page you already have on your website. This works with buyers and sellers guides, listings, and all sorts of other pages, as well.
No longer do we live in a world where you can ignore your online presence. You need a website, but you also need a blog. While writing blog posts yourself can be very time-consuming, you don’t have to do this on your own.
Hiring a qualified writer to create regular content for your blog will help you keep up with the competition. With the right team, you can put your content marketing strategy to work this year and crush the competition.
