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Published on Thursday, July 29, 2010, by Josh Schoenly (reposted today)

In an effort to “Bild” your business, I subscribe to countless sites and online magazines in an effort to glean the best information to pass on to you. You don’ t have the time to read everything out there – and there is a lot! So, I will do it for you. The article below is yet another way to stay in front of your clients without blasting them – or you can email blast to let them know you have put on a particularly great article on your blog and want to bring it to their attention. Thus, introducing them to your blog if they haven’t been there yet. You DO have a blog, right? If not, you are missing out on a great way to deliver info and resources to your clients – current and potential. There are many platforms to choose from – Worldpress and Blogger, just to name a few. If you want help setting up your blog, or run into a glitch, or maintain your blog feel free to contact me. In the meantime – read below what content you can write on your blog!

What’s the number 1 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 video’ing), and how will it get me business?”)

Don’t Worry — It’s Not Your Fault That You Don’t Know What Kind Of Content To Create, It’s YOUR BROKER’S For NOT GRABBING YOU AND SHAKING A NICHE OUT OF YOU!

Here’s the thing: 99 out of 100 Real Estate brokers out there are just plain ignorant or willfully blind to this next point – If everybody in your office was mandated to create just 1 piece of targeted, niche focused content per week (or even better per business day!), your office could surely dominate the local marketplace in a short time.

We’ve talked about this concept a number of times before on notably, when 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 & Brokers

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. (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. (Trust us, 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.
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 expecially 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 – 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?)
5. 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! (York Pa Dog Parks) WOOF!
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 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]
7. 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.
8. 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 a little tipsy are. Stuff like that. (What an easy way to generate spiderable 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, do this now!

There are a ton more ideas out there but this is a great start and should give you more than enough to get the ball rolling.

Here’s the thing, the content you created today will most likely = traffic to your website tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and probably years and years for 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 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… Honestly, that piece of cyberspace could be worth 6 figures a year from now if you play it right)

By James Kimmons, About.com Guide

There is absolutely no doubt that email is extremely important to our real estate practice from both a customer service approach as well as a marketing tool.

It’s a real shame that most real estate agents and brokers spend marketing money for web sites, only to drive away their future commissions by poor real estate email practices. We actually encourage third party lead aggregators to sell us back our own leads by allowing them to more quickly serve the internet prospect’s inquiries than we do.

Learn what you should NOT be doing as far as email practices and you’ll reap commission rewards down the road.

1. Don’t Use the Generic “I’m Too Busy” Autoresponder

We’ve all gotten them. The email that pops into our inbox right after we’ve sent one. It says something like: “Thanks for your email. It’s very important to me, but I can’t answer right now. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

The person on the other end knows they’re important. They don’t need you to tell them that. They also know that this is a canned email and they just have to delete it. That alone tells them you really don’t consider them that important. Tricky wording like “I was on my way out, but….” only works once. Once they email you again, they know the score.

2. Don’t Write a Book – Email is a Concise Medium

Answer the prospect’s questions, don’t add in a big sales pitch about yourself. If they ask for detailed information, then they expect to get a lot of text or an attachment. If they just asked a question, making them weed through your resume to find the answer isn’t going to make them want to deal with you again.

3. Don’t Delay Checking Your Email and Answering Inquiries

Email and the internet have created an “immediate response” monster. Whether we like it or not, the internet real estate shopper is expecting some kind of meaningful response to an inquiry in a very short time.

They also begin their research by inquiring of a number of agents and web sites. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a client say “You got the business because you were the first and only response to my email.” If you truly are busy and “on the way out”, it’s OK to answer with a quick email that says so and tells them you’ll get back to them with the XYZ property info quickly. Then do it.

4. Don’t Ignore the Prospect Who is Early in the Process

The internet has allowed the real estate shopper to begin their property research much earlier and for a longer period without any sales pressure and anonymously. Many of them start a year or more early. One successful broker with all his business from a web site cites eight months average from first email exchange to a buyer contract.

The good news is that it’s not that difficult to keep them happy during this period. Just answer their emails and send them information.

Welcome to My Blog …. I hope you will find it useful and will refer to it often. I will post tips, news and items to improve your business and marketing. You will find out no matter what size business you have, I can Bild a Better Business for you giving you the competitive edge to be at the top.

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