7 Reasons A Real Estate Blog Is A Lead Generation Machine

As a real estate agent, how do you drive traffic to your website so it becomes a lead generation machine? You probably use social media, real estate directories and paid advertising. But what if there’s one vital (and free!) channel you left unnoticed? Meanwhile, you’re using it every day: when checking out some useful info, reading fresh posts on the industry’s goings-on and much more. It strongly affects your opinions and preferences. This powerful medium is a real estate blog. Do you already have one on your real estate website?

Without content, the Internet would be empty. There would be nothing to read, view and share. People will browse pages in hopes of finding some info, only to discover there’s nothing to discover.

Fortunately, content is everywhere on the web. There are millions of blogs out there. Every more or less decent business has a blog and tries to invest at least a small fraction of time to maintain and grow it. And this isn’t surprising in and of itself. Companies are reaping countless benefits from blogging which often outperform all of their paid advertising campaigns combined together.

Still, many brokers haven’t embraced this blogging mindset yet. If you feel unsure why you need to start your own real estate blog, or doubt whether you need it at all, here’s the only right answer: yes, you need to blog or guest blog.

We decided to explore the most crucial reasons for every brokers working in a particular area to blog, hoping this will help you gain new insights into why blog could be your No.1 lead generation tool. Here’s what we found out.

7 Reasons Why a Real Estate Blog Help in Lead Generation

#1. A real estate blog drives you traffic

Raise your hand if you want more visitors to your site. Yes, we want them too 🙂

However, for real estate agents, traffic is quite an issue. How to attract people to visit a real estate website? Truth is listings are not enough to make your website compelling.

To better understand the real value of blogging, take a look at how people can find you online:

• they can google your name and click to your website. These are people who already know about you. They’re curious to learn more about what you have to offer. A very important audience it is, but it won’t drive you large traffic volume;
• they can click on your paid ads redirecting them to your site. This will give you tons of traffic, but the minute you run out of your advertising budget, that traffic will evaporate. Not to mention the fact that paid advertising is really expensive;
• they can come to your website from the paid email lists, but we’re pretty sure you’re not even close to using them as it’s illegal.

As you can imagine, none of these ways gives you a truly actionable means of securing fairly big and consistent flows of traffic to your website. So that’s where your real estate blog comes in.

It gives your visitors a good reason to come back to your site. If you publish info about local goings-on, useful home buyer’s information, share content from other blogs that people might also find interesting, your visitors will take mental notes to check it out every now and then and subscribe to your newsletter. And that is what you’re aiming at, right?

Add to this traffic from the social media that you get after posting links to your new blog post, and you’ll get a steady and gradually increasing flood of visitors to your website. Therefore, your real estate blog is a prime opportunity to level up both your SEO and sales.

#2. A real estate blog helps convert traffic into leads

As much as website traffic is important, the fact is you need to sell. So you won’t want people to visit your site a few times, only to forget about it within the next few hours. Thankfully, a real estate blog nails it too and there are plenty of ways to encourage your audience to stay with you. How exactly?

Your real estate blog is your 24/7 lead generation machine. Every post you publish is your next lead capture tool. Here’s how this works:

• you create a blog post, adding a clear call-to-action to it (a free download of a home buyer’s guide, an invite to subscribe to your newsletter or market updates, etc.);
• a visitor comes to your website and sees this call-to-action;
• visitor clicks a call-to-action button and get redirected to a landing page. This page contains a form asking them to provide their contact info in exchange for this free resource;
• visitor fills out their contact details and get the free offer. In turn, you get a brand new lead funneled right into your database.

Ideally, every post on your blog should have a call-to-action, offering people valuable, helpful and free information and encouraging them to engage with you. Once you have this info properly organized and formatted, just drop a call-to-action to download it in each of your posts.

#3. A real estate blog strengthens your social media and vice versa

You probably know that every time you create even the tiniest piece of content, you’re inviting people to share it on various social media channels, especially when you have those wonderful social share buttons on your real estate blog (if you don’t, add them asap).

Social media is a great discovery tool. These days people want you not only to have a website but be present across multiple social media channels. Chances are very big that you’ve already mastered a few of them. This helps you to expose your properties to new audiences that you might otherwise find hard to reach.

Search engines like Google, favor sites with a big social buzz around them. You can create this positive buzz by sharing every blog post across your social media. This way people will read your blog and stay close to you on social media, spreading the word out about you across their own networks.

Your real estate blog and social media are closely intertwined. Each medium is bringing traffic to another one. This means for every broker this is a huge opportunity to promote the agency without spending a dollar.

#4. A real estate blog boosts your website’s SEO

Every time you publish a post on your blog, one more indexed page appears on your site. If you’re blogging regularly, Google has yet another clue that it should crawl your website more often and update its rankings in search results.

Your real estate blog is also a perfect place to target your most important keywords. Your primary focus is creating your content around both short and long-tail keywords that are most relevant to your business. The latter are especially important for local real estate agencies. With long-tail keywords, you can deliberately target a specific area and even particular neighborhoods within that area and eventually rank high for those queries.

Ultimately, your goal should be trying to show Google that your real estate website is all about this city or area and deserves to be recognized as such by both people and search engines.

[You can also check out this guide on local real estate SEO for complete info on how to boost your local search rankings.]

#5. A real estate blog helps you build a reputation as an industry expert

What would you name as the key quality of a good business blog? That’s right, every good business blog is helpful. It answers questions people have around any particular topic within a niche.

This is exactly what makes random visitors come back to your website again and again and turns them into your loyal followers. Your readers trust you because your blog already helped them with something. Next time they’ll be seeking for new information, they’ll most likely check out your site as a trusted source of knowledge in this topic.

The following benefits of blogging are so important they deserve entire paragraphs just for themselves:

• you can make your leads more educated in a sales sense. People who’ve been reading your blog for a while will get a better clue of what your agency is all about and what’s your place in this market. From a sales standpoint, this results in much more productive sales conversations that you could otherwise hope for;
• a perfect way to address the questions your sales-ready audience are concerned about, is writing blog posts focused exactly on those issues. For example, as a broker, you probably faced tons of questions on legal issues. Why not write a complete guide with everything a buyer needs to know about buying a property in your Country?

All of this not only establishes you as a trusted and knowledgeable industry expert, but also answers your customers’ questions in exactly the right manner. You can move the sales process faster and more smoothly, helping your sales team secure more deals.

In fact, customers will manage 85 percent of their relationships without talking to a human by 2020. So having these questions already answered via your blog is actually what people expect of you.

P.S. Extra points if you include links to your blog posts in your next follow up emails.

#6. A real estate blog is your valuable long-term asset

Guess what’s one of the best things about blogs? The content you publish stays on the web for months and years to come. The effort you put today to make that blog post live can turn into hundreds of views and leads in the future.
In fact, you’ll often find that your older posts bring you more traffic and leads than your new ones.

This means blogging might not bring you traffic and leads overnight, but it’ll certainly bring them over time – without any new efforts on your part needed. You wrote that post, promote it, finally forgot about it and then boom… new leads arrived right from that good old post. Great, isn’t it?

#7. On your real estate blog, you set your own rules

One of the benefits of having your own blog to promote your agency is that you’re in complete charge of it. You’re not dependent on other editorial calendars, post guidelines, formatting, etc. to publish that awesome piece of writing you just managed to create.

On your blog, it’s you who sets the rules. You choose what you want to write about, how it’s going to look like and what specific purpose that post is going to serve. In other words, you’re free to highlight any topics in ways best for your business.

A single question that is probably bothering you right now

I never blogged before, how I can handle this?

Feeling like this by now? Not to worry! Believe it or not, this is a concern even for the most established writers. It’s natural to feel unsure if you can produce some good piece of content without going crazy at the thought you have to actually write something.

Good news is that you can totally handle this. Everyone who can think clearly can write clearly, as William Zissner often cited in his classic book, On Writing Well).

To get your writing juices flowing, here’s an awesome post you can check out. It covers every single aspect of writing and will help you to get started right away: 101 writing resources that’ll take you from stuck to unstoppable.

Final Touches

There was time when blogging was thought a tool not worthwhile any serious effort. You could do it if you like, or you could abandon it. Today, the situation has totally changed. Businesses of all sizes embrace blogging skills and techniques to get found online, drive motivated traffic and leads to their sites and sell.

It’s true that blogging takes tons of time and dedication. But it always pays off. Blogging is probably a single powerful promotion tool that won’t cost you a dime – it’s your time and dedication that you need to invest in it. Most of the customer lifecycle happens online and a real estate blog is an incredibly robust tool to become part of that lifecycle in a much more meaningful way than just cold-calling.