You may have heard about business blogging and may be asking yourself, does my business really need its own blog? The answer is yes, absolutely. You likely have a few other questions as well, and I’m here to help answer all of them.
First of all, what is business blogging?
Business blogging is a marketing strategy that helps get your business more visibility on the internet by using blogging. Blogging, short for web logging, is when you publish content to your website in the form of posts (in other words, articles) or videos. The content should be related to your business, so in this case, real estate and anything about moving homes. Visibility is a term that means to make your business easy to find online, so when people search for anything related to buying or selling a property, your name will pop up in the search engine results.
It’s important to be aware that business blogging is different from standard blogging. Standard blogging serves two purposes: it’s either a personal blog often centered around a particular hobby or interest, or it’s a way of making an income stream where the blog becomes a business in itself. Your business blog does neither of those things. Instead, it’s a form of indirect marketing that aims to make your business grow. It’s another marketing channel, like your social media platforms, that helps bring more people to your website and turns this traffic into paying customers.
Here’s why you should be using business blogging as part of your marketing strategy:
- It increases the number of website visitors
How do people currently find your website? They probably type in the name of your business into their browser address bar, and your site appears. However, these are people who already know about your company. What you want to do is reach an audience that could be interested in your services, yet don’t know that you are out there waiting to provide them with exactly what they need. In order to connect with this audience, you have two options. You can pay for ads that will help you get new visitors to your site but will be extremely expensive to maintain. Or, you could set up a blog that will create more pages on your website and give you more opportunities to show up in the search engine results. This in turn, will drive more visitors to your website and help you grow your audience.
- It provides content for your social media pages.
Not only does increasing blog posts add new pages to your website and help it grow, it also gives you plenty of content to post on your social media pages. This will save you time having to constantly create new content for social media; you can simply post your blog posts instead. This makes sure that your social media is active and that you continue publishing informative posts for your audience, as well as providing another way of getting more people to your website.
- It helps turn website visitors into leads
What are leads? Leads are individuals who are interested in the products or services that you offer. The more people that you have visiting your site, the more opportunities you have of turning these visitors into leads. To do this, add a ‘call to action’ at the end of each blog post. This call to action is usually something like a free consultation, a selection of exclusive articles, an e-book, to name a few. In other words, you are asking a visitor to provide you with their relevant contact information, which will go into your database so that you can continue to market to them later. In return, you’ll provide the guest with a valuable free resource in exchange for this information. It is the technological equivalent of someone putting their business card into a fishbowl to enter a type of contest, only they are all guaranteed the prize, and you’ll grow your customer database.
Though not all visitors will become leads, the leads you do have will become crucial to your success. By accessing their contact information, you’ll now have the ability to send them a personalized email or give them a call to chat about their real estate needs and see how you can help them. It’s the moment when you turn your marketing efforts into sales.
- It helps position you as an expert, or authority in your field
Your blog should provide plenty of informative posts about real estate and answer any questions that your website visitors and leads have. If your blog does this, then it will position you as an expert in the world of real estate and people will trust in you as an agent. It’s also a useful database of information for you to direct clients to when potential customers contact you with questions regarding real estate. You can follow up that contact by sending them links to specific articles you’ve written that provide an in-depth answer to their question. In a way, this also shows someone not only that you know what you’re doing, but that you’ve been doing it for some time. People always feel more comfortable about visiting a business that has a brick-and-mortar over visiting a stranger’s home – likewise, they feel more comfortable doing business with an agent that has a strong online presence than someone who seems to have come out of thin air. Your blog, in many ways, can serve as a resume and referral all in one.
- It’s a way of building a long-term marketing strategy
Business blogging is a long-term marketing strategy. Let’s say you spend a lot of money on ads to get more visitors to your website. Once you stop spending money on ads, the traffic to your website will stop. It’s a temporary marketing tactic. However, let’s say that you invest your time into creating an informative blog with lots of posts and content. One blog post you publish now will rank on the search engines. Once it’s there, it can help bring visitors to your site today, tomorrow, next week, next month, even a few years from now. This means, when you are out dealing with clients directly or even when you’re enjoying your free leisure time, your blog is working by itself to bring more visitors to your site and turn them into leads. The majority of traffic to your site (traffic is another word to say ‘visitors’) will come from old posts so your efforts of today will really pay off in the future.
Blogging is an essential marketing tactic for business growth and one of the most effective ways of organically growing your audience. For more articles on how to develop a successful real estate business, check out the Leads using social media.