Throughout this series, you’ve learned ways to spread the word about your blog and thus your business through all sorts of social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, and even LinkedIn. But there’s been one question which The RE Coach hasn’t addressed yet – what do you blog about in the first place?
Your wait is over. In this latest installment of KISS RE, The Coach presents three major tried and true blog themes which will certainly convince perspective clients that you’re knowledgeable, both about real estate and your community.
On top of that, he also presents five key steps to a good blog. If you watch any episode in this series, this is the one.
If you’ve been with us, we have been building the online outline. An internet presence that’s going to have us found when people are searching for real estate-related information that we can help them with.
We talked early about branding and how important that branding is. Go back. Watch these videos again, because these are key items that you have to focus on. We talked about the blog being the center of the world, and then we added some social networks to it, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube. Then, I showed you a couple of cool tools to bring it all together. Why? Because I don’t want you spending your entire day on social networks. I don’t want you spending all your time internet marketing. It’s a small piece of what you do. Everything else has to stay in place. Hopefully, when you put this all together, what you’re able to do is produce content, produce quality information in a simple form, maybe 30 minutes a day. 30 minutes is all I’m asking you to do. And if you do it, and you do it right, and you follow the steps, I promise you – it’s going to work for you.
I’m one of the few presenters that, live on stage, will bring up Google and prove to people that what I’m telling them works. It’s a dangerous proposition, you never know what’s going to pop up when you’re live on the internet. But I’ve done it over and over in my presentations because it works.
So let’s put it all together. We’ve got our online outline. Now we need to start creating content. Content is the king. Content is what gets you found on the internet. Nothing else. It’s not your sterling personality, trust me on this. It is what you write about. It is what you share. A blog post is the finest piece of content you can have. Why? Because it brings people back to some place they can connect with you and communicate with you. There are reasons to write a blog post a specific way. Most of it has to do with search engines and algorithms and all the goofy geeky stuff that nobody really cares about. I just want it to be found.
I’m going to give you some basic information about how to do that. Let’s start off with what you write about, the content itself. You’re a real estate professional, I’m assuming, because you’re here… So, you want to write about things that will drive real estate-related traffic to you. Here are three that I think you’re going to like.
Number 1: Answer questions. We talked about it earlier. Answer questions people are asking. Why do I need a termite report? What’s an escrow? There are thousands. Trust me. You guys answer these questions every day. Write about those questions.
Secondly, tour your neighborhood. Tour your market. Tour your farm, and share what’s great about that farm. Look at the local businesses. There’s a street here with retail and restaurants and bars. Far be it for me to tell you what to do, but I would go and talk to those people. Talk to the barkeep. Talk to the manager of the dress shop. Let them share who they are and what makes that community amazing. Trust me on this. It might be tough for you at first, but once you get through 15 to 20 videos, you’re going to be a star, and those videos are going to get you found. And you’re going to be able to share that content on your blog and bring people back.
Thirdly, here’s a one that scares a lot of real estate agents. Thirdly, here’s the one that scares a lot of real estate agents, and I’m not sure why, because it’s your business. But your neighborhood and what’s going on in it is vitally important, so if you were to go to your farm and stand in front of the listings for sale, the current listings, and you were to hold up your camera and behind you was that house, and you spoke of that house based on the description placed in the MLS. Then you put up a blog post. When people typed in information about homes, three bedroom two bath, the neighborhood, the zip code, the address, where do you think they’d end up? They’ll end up on your blog. So that’s three powerful blogs you can write about.
Now, what are the five steps for a good blog?
Number 1: Title. Vital. It needs to be the question that you’re answering, the address that you’re standing in front of, or the community and business that you’re relating to. Think back to the three I gave you earlier. That title is it. That’s the number one piece for search engines to find.
Number 2: The body of that post. This is where you type in your words, right? You can type them in, you can have your video transcribed, you can write a synopsis of what you said on the video, you can read an article on WallStreetJournal.com, write a synopsis, and share that with people. That’s where the keywords go. Try to use a lot of them. Home. House. The community name. Vital keywords in the center.
Third: Your categories. Your categories should be broad-based. More of the neighborhood, the area. Broad-based.
Fourth: Tags. Specific, so if I’m writing about Belmont Shore businesses, that’d be a category. But the tag would be “Joe’s shoe shop,” right? Broad-based category, more specific tag.
And the last thing you need to make sure you have media on your blog. And put a featured item photo in there. Because in some cases your blog post is going to show up as a synopsis, and that photo’s all that’s going to bring them to you.
So, I gave you 5, right? Five steps. Good strong title. Body with a lot of keywords. Categories broad-based. Tag is more specific. Make sure you’ve got a featured photo. Make sure you’ve got some media in your blog post. Nobody wants to just read words anymore. A solid blog post has pictures, slide shows, videos. Make it fun for them, relate the pictures to what you’re writing about, and people will come back over and over again to your blog to find out specific information about your farm.
That’s how you create a solid blog post. This has been Tech Tuesdays. I’m The RE Coach. Check in with our next video, which is vital. And I can’t tell you, if I were to do one video out of this entire series, it’d be the next one. It’s called “Google Places,” and if you don’t know what Google Places is, wow, you’re going to love this. It is absolutely vital to your business.
I’m The Real Estate Coach. If you’d like to get ahold of me, give me a call, 562-646-6710, or hit me up on gmail, TheRECoach@gmail.com. If you’re a broker or an office manager and you’d like some of this material in your sales meetings or in a training, get ahold of me. It’s what I do.
This is Tech Tuesday, I’m The RE Coach, I’ll catch you on the next one.
