7 Real Estate Blogging Blunders

Real estate agents are always looking for ways to differentiate themselves from other agents. As a thought leader, one of the best ways to share your local knowledge is to blog. But not all real estate agents are professional bloggers or have the ‘gift’ or even time to write. To help you tread the blogging waters, we’ve put together this list of roadblocks and how you can overcome them:

#1 Overthinking and Losing Focus

Blogging doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Stop focusing your energy on the big things (keywords, rankings, traffic, SEO) and just write. They say that if you’re passionate about something (in this case, real estate and your local community), then writing about what you know and what you do should come naturally.  Write with your own voice and style. The important thing is to start now, and commit to doing it on at least a weekly basis.

• If this is your first time to do it, try creating a spreadsheet that contains your “editorial calendar.” You will list all the topics that you want to write about here. Write down and spread out the topics by week.
• Come up with a list of topics that are interesting. There’s no need to talk about big or serious topics all the time. It can be as simple as something you learned at a recent open house, or a post about the upcoming establishments that will be of interest to people looking to relocate in that area.
• Some agents make the mistake of losing focus and start blogging about topics that veer too far away from real estate. Balance light hearted topics with market-related topics but don’t lose focus.
• Avoid these blunders:
  • Making your posts too complicated or too dry with just numbers and stats
  • Using your real estate blog as a personal diary
  • Putting too much focus on churning out a high number of articles over curated quality ones

Tweet This: Blogging Blunders No. 1 – Overthinking and losing focus! #AgentImage

#2 Boring Headlines

Titles and headlines are the first thing people see. The trick to creating good headlines is to read it aloud and see if it’s something that you would click if you’re the reader.

• Rather than writing a featured property blog post titled: “Apartment for Sale at 123 Main Street”, consider highlighting its benefits to the buyer – “3 Reasons Commuters Will Love About Living in 123 Main Street”.
• If writing is really not your forte or if you just don’t like doing it, you always have the option of hiring professional real estate bloggers.
• But don’t just rely on the pros, marketing yourself through the content you create is really something that you have to learn at some point. Don’t forget that you are the one who knows your business best.

Tweet This: Blogging Blunders No. 2 – Boring headlines #AgentImage

#3 No CTAs

At the end of every blog post, if there is no “Call to Action” or CTAs, your audience will just walk away thinking, ‘hmm, interesting blog’…hit exit button…forget about you. You want to write content that urges your visitors to do something after they read your beautifully written article.

• Promote interaction – end your article with a question that invites comments, make sure that moderated commenting is enabled in your blog.
• Share your post on social media – add social media sharing buttons at the beginning and end sections of your article. Talk to your web guy if you don’t have this feature enabled on your blog.
• Get people to sign up and follow your future blog posts – to make sure to have repeat visitors, a well crafted subscribe form is essential to your blog. Talk to your web designer or SEO specialist on how to position it.
• You can have the option to add another call to action graphic or button that links to the following pages. Just make sure to use one link at a time and use in rotation for your other blog posts:
  • Link to view your featured properties
  • Link to contact your team for more information
  • Link to a downloadable pdf guide or ebook that you’ve written
  • Link to a special offer or promo

Tweet This: Blogging Blunders No. 3 – No actionable button links #AgentImage

#4 Quality Errors

Learn to proofread and edit your own work. One of the most common blogging blunders are typos and grammatical errors.

• You are trying to set yourself apart as an expert in your field so quality check is essential in all sections of your site.
• While you are not claiming to be a literary expert, typos just make your site look sloppy and unprofessional
• That includes lazy content creation where most of your writing are copied directly from other real estate blogs or reference sites like Wikipedia or Realtor.org.
• Take a look at your blogs and check for these common errors and fix them immediately:
  • Rephrased content – this still counts as plagiarism
  • Grammar and Spelling Errors
  • Style and Formatting Errors
  • Broken Links
  • Missing Images/Videos

Tweet This: Blogging Blunders No. 4 Not proofreading your work #AgentImage

#5 Sporadic Posting

This is usually a result of disinterest or frustration with the difficulty of maintaining an active blog.

• Posting sporadically gives the impression that you are not very serious about your business.
• If you post at least once a week, that is consistent enough to keep visitors looking back to find out more.
• But if your blog goes months or even several weeks without new content, people will become disinterested and the chance of outranking your competition by way of content marketing will go down the drain.
• Even if you are posting status posts or sharing article links on your social media sites, you still have to invest the time to create content for your own website.
• Your website is your online business card. Don’t make the mistake of making social media your main place for posting content.
• Rather use social media to direct traffic to your real estate website so they can see the homes you’re selling and the great articles that you’re producing.

Tweet This: Blogging Blunders No. 5 – Irregular posting #AIInsights

#6 Wrong Target

Say that you sell luxury real estate but all of your blogs are targeted to middle income millennials without the resources to buy luxury property.

• You are speaking to the wrong audience. One of the biggest blogging mistakes is not considering your target demographic and creating content that is useful to them.
• That does not mean that you completely ignore the larger demographic of homebuyers. It just means that you will have to devote blogs to spark interest in each of your groups. You do not have to choose one over the other.

Tweet This: Blogging Blunders No. 6 – Topics that speak to your target market #AgentImage

#7 Useless and Forgettable Content

One way to ensure that your blog content is useful is to stop writing specifically to generate more traffic.

• Start with sharing useful knowledge and the traffic will naturally follow. Make your content memorable so that readers leave your site knowing something that you taught them and that they will want to share with others.

Tweet This: Blogging Blunders No. 7 Is your content forgettable? #AgentImage

The above points are just some of the many roadblocks that real estate marketers need to address. Are there more roadblocks that you’re currently encountering? Or maybe strategies that worked for you? Feel free to share in the comments section!