RISMEDIA, September 2, 2010—What’s the number one absolute best way to get more organic traffic to your real estate blog, website or lead capture pages?
Content creation. (“But, what on earth am I supposed to be writing about or videoing, and how will it get me business?”)
We’ve talked about this concept a number of times before, and a few months ago we detailed a plan for how this might work, called the 2010 Real Estate Broker Market Domination Plan. The plan itself lays out a strategy for how you might go about creating an architecture for leveraging agent created content to zoom the GCI of your office or team, but it doesn’t go too much into specifics about what kind of content you might create.
So here’s a list of possible topics you and your team might be contributing to a central real estate blog monster site on a regular basis.
9 killer niche content creation ideas for real estate agents and brokers:
Before you read the rest of this, imagine that you have one person on your team assigned to each of these ideas, with the requirement that they deliver the related content to the site you own on a regular basis. Or if you are a single person shop, simply pick one or more and make it your job to create one piece of content for your real estate blog or website each and every day.
1. Weekly market update – Take a 5 minute video or screencast interpreting data from your MLS and the general mood amongst buyers and agents in order to deliver a public update on the state of the local real estate marketplace
2. Daily/weekly transaction report – Cut and paste the reported transactions from your MLS as this will garner a lot of organic traffic especially long tail stuff related to property addresses in your area. Be sure to include “real estate sales transactions” in the title of each post—wherever you are, people are searching those keywords.
3. Restaurant of the week – Want to charm the pants off of a local restaurant owner and provide a valuable resource for folks relocating to your area? Do a restaurant review once a week and be sure to include a picture of your dish and why you loved it so much. Chances are good that especially for smaller restaurants and markets, your post will rank organically for people doing a direct search of the restaurant name.
4. Business of the week – This is the same as the restaurant idea listed above: recommend doing actual video tours of each business highlighting the coolest service/product to buy from the place. Can you see this helping you gain top of mind status with the local business owner, then a bunch of referrals as he talks you up to other patrons?
5. Local dog parks – People moving to your area with pets are going to do a search engine search for dog parks in the area. Talk about a non-competitive keyword.
6. “Where in (insert your area here)?” – Take a random photo of a person, place, or thing in your area and post it to your site. Offer a prize to the first reader who guesses what the picture is. Be sure to offer an e-mail signup for folks to receive your latest pictures so they can be one of the first to take a guess.
7. Weekly neighborhood news update – Give each agent in your office an assigned neighborhood and require a piece of hyper local content. Run with this for a month and see what happens to your recruiting/retention efforts.
8. Resident interviews – Interview someone in your area and ask them what they like about their town, what they like to do, where the best place to grab a drink with friends is and anything else along those lines. This is an easy way to generate content that’s interesting to onlookers.
9. Contract chronicles – Grab a clause from one of your real estate forms and tear it to pieces—a nice way to demonstrate competence while creating content that’s sure to be indexed and searched. If you don’t already have an article and a downloadable copy of the standard “Residential Lease” for your state on your website, be sure to get this on your site now.
Here’s the thing, the content you create today will most likely equal traffic to your website tomorrow, next week, next month, next year and probably years and years for now.
If you invest a few minutes creating content for your website today, it’ll pay off for years to come.
If you get 20-50-100 agents in your office each investing a few minutes a week to create content, it’ll pay off for years to come, help you establish local market dominance and make your website the most valuable asset your business has—your piece of cyberspace could be worth 6 figures a year from now if you play it right.
Josh Schoenly and Ryan Hartman are co-owners of ReTechulous, LLC.
