Commandment Number #3 – Thou Shalt Blog
You’re gonna have to write/blog. Get over it. “But Paul, I’m just not good at writing.” Yes well, no one is at first. You are an expert in your field, but the internet doesn’t know that yet, and the only way to get the web spider bots to find out just how good you are, is to blog or make videos. More on videos later. “But Paul, what will I write about?” Everything. Write about everything you do in real estate. Particularly difficult transaction that you successfully navigated? Write about it. Just got a new listing? Write about it. Escrow bomb? Write about it.
Writing is absolutely necessary for inbound marketing. Blogging can help your website rank for more keywords on search engines. For example, if you only have a website page about kitchen renovations, then only that page is likely to rank for the search term “kitchen renovations”, but if you also have 5 blogs on your site about kitchen renovations, now you have 6 pages that could potentially rank for that search term. The idea here is the more pages you have focusing on a particular keyword, the more valuable you will appear in the eyes of the internet gods. So, if there is a particular neighborhood you want to be associated with, the best way to get recognized to write about this neighborhood. Over and over again. Blog about the restaurants in that neighborhood, the activities in the neighborhood, the local high school sports teams, etc. Think of yourself as a beacon of information about the neighborhood you want to specialize in. One thing that I like to do is offer all the local small businesses in my community a free 3D tour for their business that can be showcased on Google Maps, their site, and yes, on your site. This is an excellent way of contributing to the good will of others while still building content for yourself and your site. These tours can cost business owners up to $500 to create!
Finally, it’s important to remember how important stories are to people in general. We make sense of the world and entertain ourselves through stories. A personal story has an emotional impact that a list of facts and figures can’t make, and making the decision to buy or sell a home is just as emotional as it is logical (if not more so). Blogging will give you the opportunity to not only display your record of buying and selling homes, but also assure prospects that you can factor their feelings into the equation.
These are the single most important components of search engine optimization. Keywords are the words and phrases people type into the search bar at Google, Bing, or any other search site to find what they’re looking for. The more specific keywords become, the smaller the number of people using them becomes, and by extension, the fewer leads you’ll find by owning them. At the same time, the most general keywords are highly sought after by just about everybody in the industry, so that putting all your time and effort into “real estate” or “properties” hardly makes sense. Furthermore, even if you do somehow rank highly for terms like these, the percentage of highly relevant and qualified leads you’ll receive from them will be much lower. Instead, you should find a happy medium with terms of as few words as possible that relate to exactly what you have to offer: “new jersey real estate.” Figure out which keywords sound best and try to imagine every variation on them: “chicago apartments,” “apartment rentals chicago,” “find apartments in chicago,” etc. Once you’ve decided your keywords, you’ll want to make sure they appear at least in part in every element of a given webpage: not just page titles and body text, but also things your users won’t see most of the time: image titles, for instance.
