10 Ways to Earn Leads with Your Real Estate Blogging [Ebook]

Oh, the many myths about real estate blogging.

"It's really only good for brand awareness."

"There's no ROI you can attach to your blog."

"Why write posts when I can be prospecting?"

The list of blogging falsities goes on and on. In reality, your real estate blog — when optimized well — can be a strong source of lead generation for your business.

All you need to do to transform your blog into a lead-generating machine is understand the best ways to plan, produce, perfect, and promote your posts — something we explain in detail in our handy ebook for real estate pros like you.

Download our "10 Surefire Ways to Improve Your Real Estate Blogging" ebook by clicking below, and read on to get even more expert real estate lead generation advice you can use to enhance your blog today.

1)  Consider the information your audience wants to learn — and plan an editorial calendar that answers their questions.

It may sound simple to create a content calendar, but remember: You need to be completely in-tune with your local market and leads' needs before you should craft a single blog post — everything from homeowner's guides to buyer's and seller's checklists. This means you need:

Concrete buyer personas, each of which outlines the most common demographic information and housing preferences for your primary audience of real estate leads

Details on local businesses, schools, hospitals, major employers, and other foundational elements of your community so you can share info on each in your content

Lots of feedback from existing leads and former clients regarding what they want to know when it comes to buying or selling a home in your area

Once you've nailed down these details, you'll have a crystal clear understanding of the distinct value you can provide in your IDX website content — value that can help you earn the trust of site visitors' and turn them into new leads you can prospect in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

2)  Write in a natural, relatable tone, then optimize your posts with popular, locally focused, long-tail keywords.

As we note in the real estate blogging guide, you don't need to be a renowned novelist, award-winning journalist, or a veteran marketer to know how to write compelling content and leverage it to earn you new leads. What you do need, though, is a dedication to perfecting your writing over the long run.

An easy way to get started: Turn the article ideas listed in your editorial calendar into single paragraphs that explain the main message of your post. This can help you get going with your blog post creation. Then, just write in a voice/style that mimics how you'd talk to a family member or friend so you come off as human and personable (which is what your audience wants).

While you don't necessarily want to be as brief and to-the-point as Hemingway with your blog posts ("The market is good. The homes there are large."), you also don't want to drag on unnecessarily. If you can write a few 600-800 word articles weekly, you'll be well on your way to blogging success — which also means lead generation success.

3)  Edit your articles thoroughly, and add in calls to action (CTAs) that provide you with lead generation opportunities.

Once you finish a given blog post, it's time to proofread and edit the content. We don't mean giving it a once-over to ensure there aren't any grammar or spelling errors and then hitting "Publish." Rather, we mean enhancing your articles after the fact with long-tail, local market keywords (in other words, the most common, extended search terms your niche audience enters in Google and on your IDX site regularly) and adding in relevant calls to action.

Let's say you've completed a post that shares advice from homeowners in one particular neighborhood regarding how to easily dress up one's home for the holidays. You can add in a CTA at the end of the post that links to an area/community page for that given neighborhood and optimize the content with long-tail keywords for that section of your market (e.g. "Homes for sale in downtown [market name]").

4)  Analyze your blogging progress and, if needed, adjust your publication strategy and/or the content you write.

As with other inbound marketing activities for real estate agents, blogging is the "long play." While you can promote your IDX pages in text and display ads via Google and other ad networks, blogging is the long-term, organic marketing play that will gradually enhance awareness of and traffic to your site. To ensure your posts help with this, though, you need to look at your site's data.

You don't have to be Google Analytics-certified to comprehend how to leverage the data platform for your blogging efforts. The point is to figure out which keywords are helping your SEO cause and which articles are securing you the most leads. Just set some time aside to familiarize yourself with the software, play around with the many reports you can view in it, and, eventually, you'll gauge which reports give you the most and clearest insights into your blogging success.

Articles that don't seem to generate many new real estate leads can be modified (e.g. change the primary, end-of-post CTA to lead to a different page; change the keywords you use if the existing keyword group doesn't earn the post many clicks/pageviews). Conversely, posts that perform well — that is, help your lead gen goals substantially — can be left as is.

Just be sure to track your blog's data once a month at minimum to make sure your content is working for you.

How do you use your real estate blog? Is it more of a brand awareness tool, or have you spent time turning yours into a lead generation tool? Share your blogging approach with us in the comments below!

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Published on October 22, 2016

Written by Matthew Bushery

As the Content Creator at Placester, I'm devoted to producing content that helps transform real estate professionals' marketing efforts and bottom lines. When I'm not developing Academy posts here, I'm writing film reviews and screenplays (the latter of which will never see the light of day).

@MatthewBushery

Matthew Bushery

Source: 10 Ways to Earn Leads with Your Real Estate Blogging [Ebook]