Blog Content for Real Estaters

Some “Niche Content Creation” Ideas For Real Estate

Before you read the rest of this, imagine that you have 1 person on your team assigned to one of these ideas, with the requirement that they deliver the related content to (the site you own) on a regular basis. If that person is you you find a handful you really like and scale back the types. This will be an endless supply of content that the search engines will love, your prospects will appreciate and your compititon will hate. So…here’s a list of possible topics you and your team might be contributing to a blog site on a regular basis..) 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

• Daily/Weekly Transaction Report – Cut and Paste the Reported Transactions from Your MLS. (This will garner lots 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.
• 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.
• Business Of The Week – Same of the restaurant idea, recommend doing actual video tours of each biz, 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?)
• Local Dog Parks – Psst… 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! (Laguna Beach Dog Parks) WOOF!
• “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 email signup for folks to receive your latest pics so they can be one of the first to take a guess.) [Example of this in action here]
• Weekly Neighborhood News Update – Give each agent in your office an assigned neighborhood, require a piece of hyper local content. Run with this for a month and see what happens to your recruiting/retention efforts.
• Resident Interviews – Interview someone in your area. Ask them what they like about their town. What they like to do. Where the best places to get manacures, dry cleaning, etc are. Stuff like that. (What an easy way to generated spiderable content that’s interesting to inlookers!)
• “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, do this now!

Repeat: If you invest a few minutes creating content for your website today, it’ll pay off for years to come.
Repeat: If you invest a few minutes a week to create content (you are doing this stuff anyway, just talk about it in cyberspace), 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… Honestly, that piece of crap could be worth 6 figures a year from now if you play it right

Brazilian ad agency Moma created these fake vintage ads for Facebook, Skype and YouTube for a media seminar called “Everything Ages Fast.” Enjoy!

Social Media Manager

You understand the importance of social media in the real estate industry. You’ve heard that social media can be a very powerful tool when it comes to interacting with potential leads to earn their trust and effectively let them know that you’re an expert in your community. You just don’t have the time to incorporate social media into your overall marketing plan. Not to mention coming up with a strategy, setting goals and measuing the success of your social media efforts.

Blogging fequently and having an active presence on Facebook and Twitter aren’t really an option anymore. I know, you don’t have time. You don’t know where to start and you can’t even wrap your head around it.

Your Social Media Marketing Manager can:
1.) Create an extensive strategy for your social media efforts, specific to YOUR target market and community.
2.) Determine a  budget for your social networking campaign(s).
3.) Setup and maintain your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Blog accounts and more.
4.) Create frequent and creative (SEO’d) blog posts with information, events, stats and more, all local and relevant to YOUR community/target market.
5.) Notify you of any solid leads generated by the social networking efforts and interactions.
6.) Measure success and your ROI.

If you want to an expert in this emerging market, do not invest your time, invest your money, hire an expert and recieve the maximum return on investment. More Traffic, More Leads, Better Conversion. Contact us today.

Virtual Staging

Your home’s first impression may not be one that is face to face with a prospective buyer. The “Curb appeal” of yesterday is now the “Web appeal” of today. In today’s world, 90% percent of home buyers start their search online, as reported by the National Association of Realtors. The internet is the number one source consumers first learned about the home they purchase, 36% of home buyers first say their new home online. And the California Association of Realtors reports that the number one requested feature of online listings is media. These are impressive figures, and one that means your home needs to make a strong virtual impression.

Part of this impression is made through online photos and extends into virtual home tours and video. Showing your property is about creating a story line. A home buyer is looking for certain amenities and specifications during their buying process, but in addition, they are looking for a home that will give them the lifestyle they seek. To answer this need, you must make sure your property  has an ambiance that is appealing. This requires a visual marketing strategy, and a properly staged home can tell this story. Today’s technology allows for even more dynamic visual presentation of vacant properties with virtual staging.

To create a virtual experience and ambiance, one must develop a plan. What is the demographic of your buyers? Is this a home that will interest empty-nesters, large families, or vacationers?
Once you have distinguished this, then consider what story each room should display. Today consumers expect rich media from online listings and the most effective way to engage consumers and tell the story is an online commercial, or eMercial   Industry-wide media professionals agree that a well-scripted narration provides the emotional “sell”, enhancing the details provided by the visual images.

Los Verdes Golf Course

This article is your reminder. It’s August and hopefully you’re out and about in your market and neighborhood showing property or meeting with people. As long as you’re out there, bring a camera.

Sometime before next selling season — maybe during the time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, or maybe in that panicky search engine optimization/social media/viral marketing epiphany you’ll have in March or April of next year — you’re going to wish you had a nice photograph of something in your town. Maybe record a little video, too, if you’re ambitious. But definitely start taking some snapshots of the areas where you work. Obviously, I’m not talking about specific houses — hopefully they’ll be off the market and sold. I’m talking about the things that make your neighborhoods and cities unique and cool. Things you might like to write about on your blog. Maybe not today, of course, but sometime in the next year.

Media the you create now will have a better chance of helping you put the best face on your neighborhoods and cities. Having these resources on-hand now can make your winter season content-creation work go much easier. It also will allow you to get a couple months’ jump for any seasonally focused posts you might do. For example, you can release your classic fireworks blog post a few months early, along with photos of the neighborhoods that have good views.

Here are a few tips to help get you started grabbing images that you can use throughout the next few months to help prepare you for next year’s selling season: Carry a camera with you all the time. If it’s your iPhone, that’s fine — you just need stuff for your blog. It’s more important that you have a camera than that you have the best camera. Start taking advantage of “golden hour,” the first hour and last hour of sunlight. If you’re an early riser, take advantage of that and shoot pictures just after dawn. This early light will give you some great stuff to work with. The last hour of sunlight may conflict with your dinner plans, so go out to eat someplace where you can take photos of the neighborhood.

Make a list of blog posts you might like to write over the winter for next season, and then go out and take supporting photographs. When you download the pictures to your computer, change the file names from something like DSC101009.jpg to something descriptive like Best-Coffee-Shop-in-Newport Beach.jpg. Make sure to include the city in the name of the file, a property tagged photos and video are very search engine friendly. Shoot a wide variety of subjects. The only thing keeping them all together would be that they are in the markets you work in. If you really can’t think of anything to shoot, go to your favorite place in your neighborhood. Then take a picture of the most interesting thing you see, walk 10 steps, take another picture and so on.

Don’t have time to take pictures now? Find a high school kid you trust, hand the kid your camera. Offer him or her some money to go take pictures of cool stuff in the neighborhood. You’ll end up with some useless stuff, but you’ll likely get something good out of it, too.