How to Develop Ideas and Generate Traffic for Your Real Estate Blog
A strong content strategy is essential for any real estate business looking to grow online. This puts pressure on agents to produce new blogs, posts and tweets on a regular basis. All this content requires a steady stream of ideas. Many agents believe ideas appear spontaneously. In fact, good ideas come from good preparation. In this post, we will show you how to develop ideas and generate traffic for your real estate blog.
Let’s start with the basics.
Have the Right Expectations
The first step to developing ideas for your real estate blog is having the right expectations. You won’t have a million ideas at once. Instead, you should recognize that developing blog ideas is a skill. You can improve this skill by learning where to look for inspiration and how to identify a good idea. Over time, you will get better, and developing blog ideas will become more natural.
Be Knowledgeable
To generate blog ideas about real estate, you must know about real estate. Some have decades of personal experience in the industry. For the rest of us, it’s important to read regularly. Pick out a few blogs, news sources and magazines and integrate them into your work routine.
Be Persistent
Many new bloggers hesitate because they don’t know if their idea is good. Hesitation won’t help your SEO. Not every blog idea needs to be a shiny gold nugget of perfection. So, be persistent. Keep blogging about your ideas. You will naturally grow more confident in them as you gain experience.
Own a Niche
You can’t be an expert on everything until you are an expert on one thing. So, find a niche. It can be anything. It can be Icelandic interior design. Literally, it can be anything. Work on blog ideas for this niche. Own it, and strive to be the definitive source on the subject.
Write Down Ideas
Productive bloggers keep a running list of ideas they can turn to at any time. You should do the same. When you finish one blog you will immediately have an idea for the next.
Be Ready
Keith Richards used to keep a tape recorder at his bedside to capture song ideas even if they came in his sleep. Maybe you don’t need to go that far. But you should build a system to quickly save ideas at a moment’s notice. Real estate blog ideas are fleeting, so you need to be ready to document them anywhere and at any time.
With the foundations in place for good ideas, you can start actively looking for them and boosting your organic content.
Where to Look for Ideas for My Real Estate Blog?
Real estate blog ideas are all around you. You just need to learn where to look and how to identify them. Here are 12 tips.
1. Listen to Your Clients
If multiple clients ask the same question it means the answer is probably not readily available online. This is a good opportunity for you to provide information and generate traffic for your real estate blog.
2. Look for Clues in Your Own Reaction
If something evokes a strong reaction in you, most likely you are not alone. Put your reaction in words. Voila, now you have a reaction piece.
3. Follow Changes in Your Neighborhood
People like to know what is going on in their community. Top real estate agents harness local information to become community experts. Plug yourself into the neighborhood gossip. Go to local town meetings. Follow local developers and builders. These steps will keep you close to information that will likely interest your clients.
4. Watch Comments & Mentions
How people react to your content can give you clues about their interests and ideas about what to write next.
5. Follow Your Sense of Curiosity
Your intuition is a good guide. If you find something interesting and little has been written about it, there is a good change it will make a good blog post. If you want to dive deeper into a subject, don’t hesitate.
6. Look at Context
There is endless content out there. Many of it has real estate applications even if it is not written specifically for real estate. Can you reverse engineer a non-real estate blog for a real estate specific audience? A simple change of context is often enough to give you a unique idea.
7. Track Analytics
Analytics help you determine the types of blogs that are the most popular on your site. You can often slice this information to gain demographic or geographic insights. Knowing what is working will help you recognize good ideas when you encounter them.
8. Search Keywords
You can always search keywords. Many sites provide lists of the most popular keywords for a given subject. These will be general and highly competitive, but you should be able to generate ideas by adapting them to your specific audience.
9. Look to History
Everywhere has history. A lot of it is really interesting. How did this neighborhood/community/road get its name? The simplest questions can have extremely fruitful answers. Take Franklin Township, Pennsylvania for example. After some digging, we’ve found it is named for Ben Franklin who acquired land in the area to cover a post office debt.
10. Consider New Information
The world is not static. As a result, no blog post will be relevant forever. Good bloggers use this to their advantage. They take any information that applies to an old blog post and use it to generate a new idea.
11. Recognize Inflection Points
People are naturally interested in change. Change affects their work and often their livelihood. Change occurs at an inflection point. If you can recognize these inflection points, you can generate good real estate blog ideas.
12. Identify Trends
Pattern recognition is extremely important in data analysis. We can use the same concept in blogging. If you are able to identify a trend or pattern in your market or community, this has blog value. It probably has business value too.
Having the right foundations and knowing where to look is everything you need to develop ideas and generate traffic for your real estate blog. For more on real estate blogging check out our articles How to Write a Real Estate Blog Post that Ranks on Google and How to Write for ActiveRain and Get More Points.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.