If You Blog It, They Will Come | The Residential Specialist

Blogging is a simple, low-cost—and even fun—way to attract clients, cement relationships and increase sales. Here’s how to blog like a pro.

By Eric Schoeniger

The internet is home to 500 million blogs, says the Hosting Tribunal. Is it worth your time to create one more?

Absolutely, if you want an effective way to build relationships with clients old and new.

“I average about 50% of my income from closed sales where the client found me from my blogs,” reports Mary Pope-Handy, CRS, a REALTOR® with Sereno Group in Los Gatos, California.

“When people read my blogs and like the content,” she says, “by the time they reach out to me, they already feel like they know me.” Pope-Handy’s blog sites are liveinlosgatosblog.com and sanjoserealestatelosgatoshomes.com.

Blogging lets you demonstrate your expertise. It can help you appear higher in online search results. Ultimately, it can help you make more sales.

5 steps to crushing the blogosphere

But success won’t come overnight. “Prepare yourself for the long haul,” writes Rob Powell, a successful blogger who provides top tips from 19 blogging experts at robpowellbizblog.com/19-experts-top-tips-first-year-bloggers. “One of the most important tips for first-year bloggers is ‘stay the course.’”

Want to Get Your Vlog On?

Video blogging, or vlogging, takes blogging to the next level. Vlogging is more than just adding a video to a text post. With vlogging, you video-record yourself delivering the expert information that you’d otherwise provide in written form.

Vlogging is a personal, engaging way of communicating with your audience. Most smartphones have video-recording capability, and several vlogging-optimized cameras are available for under $100.

To maximize your time investment, follow these steps:

Know your audience. Begin with your target readers. What kinds of clients do you want to attract? Which trends are affecting them now? Which topics will be most useful to them in your market? Then think about how overtly you’ll promote your business. “I do not list properties in my blogs,” says Al Cannistra, CRS, a REALTOR® with Texas Premier Realty in San Antonio, Texas—and an avid blogger. “My blogs are for connecting with my audience. When it comes time for them to buy or sell a house, they’ll know who I am.”
Grab the spotlight. Research suggests you have 15 seconds to hook your reader, who will then stay with you for less than seven minutes. So you need to capture and keep their attention. Start with a title that promises useful information: “6 Upgrades That Will Help Sell Your Home Fast.” Then, use an attention-getting opener: “What’s the one big mistake every homeowner makes when renovating their home?”
Hit your target. You’re a real estate expert. But you don’t need to cram everything you know into a single post. Instead, focus each post on a single topic. That will help keep your article to a digestible length, which is about 400 to 800 words.
Invest for success. “Plan to spend an hour a day on your blog,” Pope-Handy advises. “People ask me, ‘How do you find the time to blog?’ And I ask them, ‘How do you find the time to do an open house? How do you find the time to call your database?’” Blogging expert Powell recommends writing every day, even if it’s just jotting down notes for a future blog. “Writing is a muscle,” he suggests. “The more you use it, the better you’ll get.”
Rinse and repeat. If you post a few blogs and then lose steam, you can’t expect a lot of results. And even if you post regularly, the information in your blog can grow stale fast. So you need to post and update frequently.

Cannistra aims to post at least weekly. Pope-Handy posts or updates daily. “I’ve posted more than 2,000 articles, so at this point, 90% of my efforts are updating existing posts,” she says.

Supercharging SEO

Buyers and sellers often find an agent through a web search. So a top reason to blog is for search-engine optimization, or SEO.

SEO is complex, but simple actions can help. First, think about the topics your clients are likely to search for, and work those keywords into your post. Just don’t “stuff” your article with keywords, or Google’s algorithm will send your results to the bottom.

Finally, cross-post on social media. Cannistra automates social-media posts with RecurPost, which offers a free option.

Blogs are a great way to connect with and influence prospects and clients. And they have the potential to lead to sales. Cannistra’s advice? “Don’t be afraid to begin. And don’t give up. If you stick with it, blogging will benefit your business.”