In commercial real estate brokerage today, the blogging process will help you build market share and professional profile. That being said, the strategy does require commitment and focus. It is certainly something that you should carefully consider as part of building your professional image and social media strategy.
It is worthwhile noting that this process should only occur if you have a reasonable command of the written word and your property topic. Quality and information should flow through your article and your blog process.
So why is this so important? The process of blogging allows you to display your skill and knowledge to the Internet world, and potentially the clients and the prospects in your market today. When you do this correctly, the search engines will see you as an industry expert. You can also link up your social media activity into your blogging process.
There are always plenty of listings on the Internet, and you will have your fair share of those. The blogging process is entirely different to property advertising, and is based on information sharing. You will be writing about the marketplace in a valuable and meaningful way. Blogging is not a process of advertising properties, as that already occurs on your website and the industry portals.
So here are some things to think about as part of building your online profile in this way:
- Understand your niche market when it comes to property activity. Also determine the critical issues that relate to your geographical region, town, or city. From these factors, you can select keywords that apply to your region and property type. Those keywords can be fed into the articles and blogs that you write. You can research some of those keywords on the Internet based search engines using a keyword search tool. In most cases you can download the keyword search results using an excel spread sheet. That information will be quite valuable when it comes to connecting with your marketplace, writing advertisements, and building market share.
- Every article or blog that you write should be content rich. In other words you should write to a topic and a specific local property issue. The search engines love to see quality content relating to a topic. Choose your topics wisely and match them to the concerns and the activities of the property market today. Think of your blog as a newspaper that is talking to the market about relevant issues related to property. What would the readers like to hear? Within reason, you can be controversial and yet also remaining professional to the industry and the current property market.
- When you place a blog online, you can use tags or labels in each case to focus the search engines on your article. Choose those tags or labels based on the central topic, your location, and the property type. When you correctly do this, you will find that the blog will receive good hits and maximum exposure.
- From any blog that you write, you can link the article back to your social media activity. The same rules apply to linking back to your e-mail newsletter. Interesting information displayed in a concise and well-presented way will help you when it comes to professionalism as a top agent.
- To make the blog and the topic meaningful, write approximately 400 words in each case and with each topic. Split the article up into sensible paragraphs and dot points. That helps the readership conversion and retention.
- It should be noted that this marketing process is relatively low cost if not free. You only resources required will be your time and your intelligence.
So this becomes a specific strategy within your personal marketing plan. The blog should be something that you control and write to on a daily or weekly basis. Frequency is quite important when it comes to attracting the search engines. Most of your competitors will not be doing this at an individual level. On that basis, you can easily move up in the search engine rankings as an industry professional.
If you want more tips on commercial real estate brokerage, join our Newsletter here.
