Blogging is a powerful strategy for a real estate agent. It can be used to show local expertise, specialties, earn trust, create brand awareness and for generating traffic and leads through a website. The key is understanding which topics generate interest and how to write about them. Lori Ballen is a real estate agent in Las Vegas and is a digital marketing coach.
**This post contains affiliate links and I will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on links on this website. [Affiliate Disclosure]
Quick Links
Should You Blog?
You have a lot on your plate. You’re juggling multiple tasks. You’re opening emails, responding to texts, listening to voicemails, reviewing your calendar for the day’s appointments – all while wondering what you might make for supper. Or what chores will be on your honey-do list when you get home.
Or if you’ll be able to make it to your little one’s sports game or concert recital. And nagging at you from the back of your brain is your inner marketer telling you that you should be blogging. Blog writing for your real estate blog is a crucial part of lead generation.
If you’re not generating leads, the money-machine stops. Then, instead of wondering what’s for dinner, you begin to wonder how you’ll pay for dinner! So you confront your inner marketer and agree to at least think about your real estate blog.
When a recently polled group of real estate agents were asked if they were blog writing, a few answered yes. They blogged at least once per week. But when asked why the remaining agents in the group (which was the majority!) weren’t working on a real estate blog, these were some of the replies:
- I’m too busy.
- I suck.
- I don’t know what to blog about.
- No plan in place.
- Deciding whether to write my own content to save money, or outsource to save time.
- Hard to think of topics.
- Poor time management.
- Laziness.
- Focusing on other areas of my website, such as community pages.
As you can see, you are not alone. Many genuine hard-working agents struggle with the same issues you are facing. Starting and maintaining an engaging real estate blog can feel like an overwhelming task. The good news is blog writing is not as difficult as you may think.
It is true that in real estate, community pages should be built out first – before your real estate blog. But blog writing can still be incorporated into your schedule. While you focus on building your community pages, commit to producing at least one blog post per month.
Some posts can be considered crossovers between community pages and blogs. For example, a top-performing post is Horse Properties For Sale in Las Vegas. It’s a community page because of the focus on a niche: equine properties. It’s a blog post because of its rich written content.
For those who have already got the blog rolling, aim for one blog post per week.
There’s no such thing as over-blogging. Over notifying, maybe. But not over-blogging. Try to focus on one healthy, informative, well-written blog post per week. Then work on other areas of your business.
What is a Real Estate Blog?
A blog post includes a Title and General Copy (article with paragraphs).
It can also include images, videos, links, tables, structured data, lists and more. A search engine optimized blog will include heading tags and schema.
Don’t get caught up in the how, just yet.
Where it comes to real estate, We blog to inform more than anything else.
Real Estate Articles can be very helpful to someone looking to buy or sell a house.
They have a lot of questions.
With a blog, you can be the specialist that answers those questions.
When you dive into a topic completely and give everything you have to informing that user, you prove you are specialists, to that blog reader, and to Google.
With the right calls to action on your blog post (such as home value offers, IDX, home buyer guides etc), you can generate real estate leads.
There is no doubt that it’s hard to compete with Zillow, Realtor.com, Trulia etc. for general “homes for sale” keywords online.
How you can compete, is through blogging.
We also blog using a hyperlocal strategy. As a real estate agent, it’s so important that you are showing that you know the area. This is what separates you from Zillow. You live there.
It’s YOUR sandbox.
First, consider hyperlocal content that would appeal to a buyer moving to your area. These are things like information around schools, jobs, transportation, zip codes, cost of living and income, weather and so on.
Once those are created, you can get into the fun hyperlocal blog content based around restaurants, entertainment, shopping, local events, and so forth.
Where to Blog for Real Estate
If your real estate agent website has a blog platform built-in, start there. Determine what your strategy will be for this blog. Decide early how your blog will generate traffic.
Is your goal to rank them on the search engines? Will you drive it all through social media? Are you going to add pay per click to generate traffic?
When you first begin with your real estate agent website, you may not have enough trust and authority to gain instant search engine rankings.
This can take time. How long will depend on your content, how often you publish great content, and the authority you create through backlinks?
Based on these facts, it may benefit you to blog on a 3rd party platform such as LinkedIn or Medium.
You can still post the blog on your own website, just include an original article link from the 3rd party blog post to your own.
While you don’t need to be concerned about a “duplicate content penalty”, you simply are allowing for a post on another website to outrank your own if Google decides to do so.
Google will probably rank the 3rd party website over your own because you won’t yet have the trust and authority you need to rank your own website.
This is fine as long as you have links back to your website to engage that blog reader.
Once you have search engine visibility, you may decide not to use that exact content on multiple websites.
At first, though, you may need it.
How to Blog for Real Estate
Your first year in real estate is a busy year. Tenderfoot toes lead you down paths you’ve never traversed before. You’re trying to build a name for yourself, to establish yourself as an expert in your field. Give yourself plenty of room to grow. Be patient with the process. If you’re past your first year but haven’t yet begun to build your real estate blog, it’s time to go back to the basics.
During your first year in building a real estate blog, focus your blog writing on two areas. First, build out your community pages. Second, produce one blog post per month having to do with real estate. Here are some examples of topics for your real estate blog.
- What first-time homebuyers can expect.
- What first time home sellers can expect.
- What is a mortgage?
- What is a C.L.U.E. report?
- What is a home warranty?
- What to look for when buying a home.
- How to stage various rooms in a home.
The list of real estate blog writing ideas is endless. But instead of trying to fill up your blog as fast as you can, bite down on one per month to start – and make it a good one! After your first year, you’ll have your community pages stacking up and your blog writing well on its way to establishing you as an expert in your industry.
Your first year will be chock full of real estate articles, videos, press releases, and marketing listings.
Tip: If you find yourself inspired with ideas but short on time, jot down the ideas and stuff them into an idea box. This can be a traditional box in which you put ideas on paper, can be a folder on your desktop or laptop, or a digital file in your smart phone. One day, you’ll find yourself scrambling for a topic to write about for your real estate blog, and you’ll thank yourself for the list of accumulated ideas.
Tip: When your prospects or clients ask you a question about real estate, add that question to your idea box for blog writing. Any question asked to you from a client is brilliant real estate blog fodder.
Blogging Process
- Choose your Topic
- Determine your paragraph topics (These will be H2 Headings)
- Write each paragraph (200-300 words per paragraph possibly.)
- Use Semantically related keywords (SEMrush can help with this)
- Choose a Video or Graphic for each Paragraph
- Internal link from appropriate keywords on your blog to other pages on your website.
- Include a few outbound links to other sources. Notify the other sources and let them know you wrote about them and encourage them to share.
- Include a call to action. Where do you want this visitor to go next? What do you want them to do? Browse homes, download a guide, get an instant home value?
- Consider including an IDX or home value widget if makes sense.
- SEO your images, video, title tag, and meta description
- Markup your structured data with Schema [Advanced]
- Check Spelling and Grammar with Grammarly.
- Add Lead Magnets and Offers with software such as Optinmonster
Hyperlocal Blogging
Your first year in real estate blog writing was focused on community pages and real estate language. By your second year, your website and blog should have some maturity under their belts. You’ve defined your service area. You’ve developed your niche. You’ve established yourself as an expert in your industry. In your second year, it’s time to plant seeds. Year two is for establishing and cultivating relationships for a future harvest.
Hyperlocal blogging is laser targeted local information – specific information about a particular area or neighborhood that generates a lot of interest.
Some ideas for hyperlocal blog topics include:
- Best places for kids
- Best restaurants
- Holiday events
- Where to take your Valentine
- Easter egg hunts in your area
- Where to see the best fireworks
- Parks
- Tourist attractions
- Farmers markets
- Coffee shops
- Travel options
When you’re engaging in hyperlocal blogging, your goal is to bring people into your funnel to cultivate relationships. Your funnel is your campaign management: emails, phone calls, text messages – your “touches”. The top of your funnel is new leads. The end of your funnel is closed transactions. Your hyperlocal blog writing is to bring people into the top of your funnel as locals. Then cultivate those relationships by providing locals with lots of great information about your area.
These people may have no desire to buy or sell real estate today. Cultivate the relationship anyway. Continue sending that visitor pertinent information and value-packed newsletters. When they are ready to buy or sell real estate, your real estate blog comes to mind. Or, if that visitor knows someone who is ready to buy or sell real estate, they may be more likely to recommend your services.
Each of your blog posts should include an offer of some sort. An offer is an item of value for which viewers will be willing to exchange information. In the registration form, you can include a checkbox asking the viewer if they’re interested in buying or selling a home. If they do not “raise their hand” by expressing an interest in real estate, they’re not considered a lead. They’re considered a registrant. They’re sorted separately. They’re counted separately.
Consider creating a subscriber list exclusively for registrants interested in hyperlocal information. Registrants automatically go into a CRM such as Infusionsoft, Constant Contact, or Convert Kit and they begin receiving materials from the local campaign created for them.
Every month, those registrants receive hyperlocal content: Where to take Mom for Mother’s Day, Free things to do in _______, Where to see holiday lights, what to do for Cinco de Mayo.
Refresh Older Blogs
When you have a page that’s performing well, a page that has evergreen content, there’s no point in refreshing the page unless your rankings drop or it the content could use updating to catch up with new material.
Pages that aren’t doing as well at generating traffic, or that have outdated information, may need to be refreshed with better performing or current material. Dig out that old, underperforming content, dust it off, throw a fresh coat of creativity on it, publish it as new to your real estate blog, and re-blast it to your social networks. Then continue tracking to see if the changes you made were successful.
To publish an old post as new, simply change the date from the previous publication date to the current date. That post is now extracted from your archives and back on the list of fresh content. Use caution, though. In some blog platforms, such as WordPress, If you’ve created parent categories or child categories related to the post you’re updating, the hierarchy changes when you change the publication date. Only update pages in your blog that are stand-alone pages, not pages that are connected to others through parent or child pages.
Hyperlocal blog posts are refreshable. Although they’re not evergreen material, you can easily recycle hyperlocal blogs. When you’re creating your first holiday-related blog post, for example, do not include the year in the URL. Then next year, when that same holiday rolls around, see what’s new and update the post. Remove any out-dated content. Change the publishing date and send it out as new material for the current year. But hyperlocal posts in your real estate blog aren’t the only re-usable pieces.
Consider this. During your first year, you spent time each month carefully crafting a real estate related article. Some were geared towards buyers. Others were pointed to sellers. Now, you might create a post in your blog called, “What Every Buyer Needs to Know”, or “What Every Seller Needs to Know”. On those pages, include links to your previously published real estate related blog writing. This is a clever way to recycle old material in a new way.
You may have divided your home staging articles by room. How to stage your kitchen. How to stage your bathroom. How to stage the outside of your home. How to stage a bedroom. You could then create a single blog post called “How to Stage Your Home, Inside and Out!” and include links to each of those articles.
At year’s end, you could have a “Best Of…” blog post featuring your most popular posts from that year.
Using Yoast
Check out this article from YOAST on how to SEO your blog post.
How To Hire Real Estate Writers
If there’s one thing you’ve learned during your climb to the top of your real estate mountain, it’s the power of delegation. Use that. Delegate to someone in your team, or outsource the blog writing to ghostwriting services. There are ample ghost-writing services on the Internet just waiting for you to assign work to a freelancer or starving artists, such as Crowd Content, Hire Writers, and Ghost Bloggers. Others have had luck with Fiverr.
Ghostwriting services come with options. You can pay by the word, or by the project. You assign the subject and the guidelines, and the writer conjures the content. Of course, you still have to proof-read and process the information so it’s blog-ready, but the writing of it is handled. The threat of the blank page is vanquished.
Real Estate Blog Topics
Here are some great local and real estate blog topics to keep you busy all year. Wherever you see X, you would use your city or neighborhood. A few categories you may build under are living in X, best of X, things to do in X.
- Things to do in X
- The transportation
- Average Temperatures
- Things to do on a date (Valentines Day)
- Best places to see holiday lights (Christmas)
- Free things to Do
- Best Restaurants
- Best places to get Pizza
- Best Happy Hours
- Day Trips (short drives to fun excursions)
- School Supplies List
- Best Haunted Houses
- Spring Egg Hunts (Easter)
- Best Pumpkin Patches (November)
- Things to do for the 21st Birthday
- Local Zip Code Map, Stats, etc.
- Summer Camps
- Best Local Mechanics
- Will New Construction Change my Home Value?
- How to Bring Good Luck when Selling a House
- Local Discounts
- When is the best time to sell a house
- Things to do with Kids
- Getting Married in X
- Things to do this weekend
- Cool Things to Do
- Exciting Things to Do
- Things to Do at Home on a Rainy Day in X
- Cheap things to do
- Things to do in Summer
- Things to do with toddlers
- Random things to do (these should be super local and fun. Only things local really know)
- Things to do on your birthday in X (Local specials should be added)
- Things to do with your boyfriend (Yes seriously – 12,100 people a month search this term. See Examples)
- Things to do in the City
- Crazy things to do (Think of skydiving and dangerous activities)
- Things to do at night
- Romantic things to do (Valentines / April make good seasons for this)
- Visiting X (This should be from the standpoint of Tourism)
- Best Places to See Movies
- Best Dog Hotel
- Bathroom Ideas (Popular search terms. Use sites that give you embed permissions for images like Houzz)
- Moving? 10 Things to do before you pack
- Real Estate for Beginners – 5 Things you may not have thought of yet
- De-clutter your life with these 9 steps
- The first time homes buyers comprehensive guide to a mortgage (Think 2000 + words on this one for sure)
- 101 Real Estate Terms you should know when buying and selling a house
- Are your neighbors affecting your home sale?
- Why didn’t my house sell the first time?
- How much is my house really worth?
More On Blogging
- 50 of The Best Real Estate Blog Topics
- Cornerstone Content – The Key Pages on your Website
- How To Start a Blog | Blog Topics, Keyword Tools, Content, SEO
- How To Generate Traffic To Your Blog
- Learn with Lori Ballen
- Using Quora Questions to Find Blog Topic Ideas [Free Tool]
- Watch Me Blog on WordPress
- Ghost Writers and Blog Writers – How Real Estate Agents Can Tap Low-Cost, High-Return Blog Writers
- What Is Long-form Content?
- How to Create a Blog out of a Video for Search Engines and Social
- 🙌 Refresh your Blog Content on your Real Estate Agent Website [Video]
- How to Create a Blog Post on ActiveRain, The Real Estate Blog Network
- Orphaned Content | Remove it, Redirect it, or Revive it!
- How to Publish a Blog on LinkedIn [Step by Step Video]
- Copyright Infringements, Plagiarism and Stolen Content
- How to Blog on your Real Estate Agent Website
- Getting To Know Your WordPress Website
- Quality Content for Search Engine Optimization
- Real Estate Blog Ideas | Light Up the Holidays
- Blog Writing | Create Killer Content for Your Blog Post
- Real Estate Images: 5 Stock Photo Resources for Real Estate Agents
- How to Install WordPress
- Create an Interactive Map | Using Google Maps in your Blogs
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