5 Reasons Why Every Real Estate Agent Needs a Blog
March 3, 2020
Benjamin Ehinger
The number one problem most real estate agents face is a lack of hot leads. You network locally and hand out business cards like they’re candy, but you just can’t seem to generate consistent leads.
Finding your target audience might seem difficult, but it doesn’t have to be so hard. With more than 90% of home buyers and sellers starting the process online, you need an online presence.
Opening up shop online with a real estate website is just the beginning. Your website needs content. From neighborhood information to home listings to buying and selling tips to local attraction reviews, you need to fill your new website with quality content through blogging.
A website without a blog is like a home built on a foundation of sand. It will just slowly sink and nobody will want to visit. Here are 5 reasons why every real estate agent needs a blog.
1. You will pull leads instead of pushing leads
Most advertising for real estate agents is all about pushing leads into your sales funnel. In other words, you’re trading X amount of dollars for a billboard, bench ad, social media ad, etc. hoping potential buyers and sellers will take action and contact you.
Pushing leads is done through traditional marketing, such as sending out postcards and cold calling. Pulling leads is done through blogging, social media posting, and proper search engine optimization (SEO).
This style of marketing is referred to as inbound marketing and it’s highly impactful, incredibly cost-effective, and well-targeted to your specific audience.
Instead of you reaching out to the potential client, they will be reaching out to you. You’ll generate regular hot leads ready to work with you because they found you!
2. Appeal to younger generations
Real estate agents always need to be thinking about how they can appeal to the next generation of buyers. Right now, the next generation is Generation Y (those born in the 1980s and 1990s).
If you want to reach Generation Y, stop cold calling, stop sending postcards in the mail, and start blogging. This generation doesn’t answer the phone and they spend hours researching online before making a buying decision.
Casting a wide net of content through blogging provides a viable strategy for reaching younger buyers and sellers. High-quality blog content targeting long-tail keyword phrases will help draw in new leads, consistently.
3. Establishes authority and trust
When you post to your real estate blog regularly, you’ll become the go-to choice for local information about your market. Readers will trust you and turn to you as an authority, even if your content isn’t always related to real estate.
In fact, many real estate agents have found great success by blogging about local events, attractions, and things to do. Becoming a go-to source for community information shows potential buyers and sellers how well you know the area.
4. Makes your social media marketing easier
Coming up with new, engaging posts for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest isn’t simple. Blogging makes it easier.
Every blog post provides the opportunity to share at least one new post on each of your social media channels. Long-form blog posts (1,200+ words in length) offer multiple opportunities as you can share a new post about each main section of the article.
If you want to engage your social media followers, start blogging!
5. Creates better SEO
Blogging isn’t a quick strategy. It’s a long-term play as you will be building up an online content library.
Each post provides opportunities to link to listing pages, neighborhood pages, and other pages for better on-site SEO. When blog posts are written with proper, natural SEO, each post becomes a mini traffic generator.
Imagine if every post brought in 10 new website visitors every week. After posting 100 blog posts, you’d have 1,000 visitors every week. With proper SEO, blogging simply becomes a numbers game.
While blogging won’t fill your calendar with appointments overnight, it will provide consistent lead generation for the long-term. If you’re ready to create a foundation capable of providing hot leads for many years to come, it’s time to start your real estate blog.