Real estate blogging or real estate content marketing gives you the opportunity to interact with clients before meeting them face to face. Your content is one of your first impressions to potential homebuyers and sellers, and everyone has access to it via the web. The most important goal of your content marketing activities is to motivate a potential customer to reach out to you.
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits and disadvantages of real estate blogging.
Pros of Real Estate Blogging
- Establishes you as a professional
One of the greatest benefits you can get from real estate blogging is a reputation for being a professional agent. Naturally, people associate those who constantly blog about what they do as an authority in their niche that others look up and by providing valuable information to your potential customers (home buyers and sellers), you can easily position yourself as an expert. People are more likely to deal with someone they perceive as a professional.
Pro Tip: By constantly providing valuable content, your real estate blog will be a go-to resource for information
- Helps you generate new leads
Another benefit that blogging can offer you is the generation of new leads or prospects. Because blogging helps you build trust (people naturally trust those who they perceive as experts in their fields) people would feel more comfortable reaching out to you about one of the listings they have found on your website or subscribing to your newsletter.
Pro Tip: Add Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons urging your readers to subscribe and [or] create lead generation resources such as ebooks, videos and whitepapers.
- Helps get you found online
About 90% of homeowners in the United States look online for information during their home search process. Which means your real estate blogging will yield good fruits in terms of search engine results. Another complementing benefit is that your content can last infinitely online and if it is valuable, it will still generate leads for you in the long term.
Pro Tip: Insert relevant keywords into your blog targeting your local area.
- It is Cost effective
Real estate blogging can be a cheaper alternative to direct mail, cold calling, radio and TV ads, paid social media ads etc.
Cons of Real Estate Blogging
- It takes time to see results
When you first venture into real estate blogging, you’re destined to feel frustrated. That is because it takes time to see ROI. For the first few weeks or even months; your site won’t have any authority, your blog won’t have any reputation, and your social media won’t have any followers.
Pro Tip: Be patient
- It takes copywriting skills
Online readers have a short attention span and if your writing is not clear and concise; they’re likely to lose interest. Good writing motivates the reader to perform an action, or at least, leads them to the end of the article.
Pro Tip: If you’re struggling to write your blog posts, consider outsourcing to a real estate content marketing company (like us)
- It is time-consuming
Even though the costs of real estate blogging are potentially very low, it does require a heavy investment in time. You can’t write one post a month if you want to see results; rather, you need multiple, high-quality posts (which require intensive research), and you also need to promote that content as much as possible. This requires many hours of work every week.
Pro Tip: create a content marketing strategy and an editorial calendar that you can use to keep track of what needs to be done and when.
- Not knowing what to measure
Another disadvantage that many real estate agents face with blogging is that they don’t know what to measure in terms of the effectiveness of their efforts. If you don’t know what KPIs to measure, you won’t know what to improve.
Pro Tip: Outline your content marketing goals before writing your next blog post.
In conclusion
As a real estate agent, you need to start a blogging. The benefits far outweigh the disadvantages. If you are having trouble getting started; check out our services to see how we can help you attract more leads.
