Even the most talented writers will tell you coming up with fresh new content can be tiresome, but they’ll also note there’s a trick to get around this stagnancy in developing original ideas.
By choosing one or a few series of blog post types that easily fit into topics you know well, you can create a plethora of articles on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis.
Take a look below at 20 distinct kinds of series of articles you can put into play for your real estate agent blog so you can consistently (and easily) provide content you know your audience enjoys consuming and gets tremendous value from.
Frequently Asked Questions Answered
Arguably one of the easiest real estate blog topics you can cover in detail is offering answers to frequently asked questions from your leads and clients. You assuredly receive a number of questions on a daily basis from home buyers and sellers you work and meet with. So, why not answer these distinct queries with exhaustive responses on your blog?
New York–based Realtors Keith and Kyle Hiscock provide in-depth answers to commonly asked questions from both buyers and sellers looking to purchase homes in the Rochester area on their well-run real estate blog. Aside from giving lengthy, helpful responses to help guide their niche audience, the Hiscocks also clearly take advantage of popular keywords related to their local market, helping them drive the right kind of traffic — those looking to purchase and offload properties in their area — to their website.
Explanations of Various Housing Topics
There are a seemingly endless number of subjects you can write about to give more insight into the buying and selling process for your audience, from what the process is typically like for home buyers to secure title insurance to understanding what an appraisal entails. Even the most experienced buyers and sellers still need refresher courses on the ins and outs of completing a property purchase and listing their homes, so use your blog as the ultimate resource for them to learn about the intricacies of housing transactions.
Use this resource from the National Association of Realtors to discover various terms and phrases related to buying and selling that you can use to produce real estate blog content.
Local Market Event Roundups
Where your housing market is located and what kinds of residents live there will largely dictate the types of events that occur with regularity. Regardless of these specifics, though, you likely have at least one large, niche audience for whom you can write a series of event roundups. If you live in a warm, coastal town, check out the event calendar for nearby beaches. If you live in a colder climate near mountains, take a look to see when ski resorts will be in full swing.
In California, the First Team Real Estate group produces a monthly real estate blog post series highlighting the most popular and appealing events taking place in the metro Irvine community for its culturally attuned audience, in turn keeping its regular blog readers (and prospective clients) in the know about interesting happenings nearby and showing it’s more than aware of what area residents want to learn about. Note the attractive featured image accompanying the article as well: Visuals can only enhance and never hurt your blog entries, so consider crafting ones using easy-to-master graphic creation tools.
Reviews of Local Businesses
If you’re going to use local dry cleaners, patron local restaurants, attend shows at local theaters, and consume an array of other products and services in your market, take 10 minutes to write down your general thoughts on each business and organization you come into contact with in your area on your blog.
Surely you’ll have negative reviews of some establishments, but your best bet is to save your complaints for Yelp and only post positive evaluations of nearby businesses. That doesn’t mean you can’t be honest and offer your opinions, even if they’re not overly praising the brands in question. For instance, if you’ve had four great visits to a local taqueria and the fifth visit wasn’t so hot, note how they deliver great food and service most of the time.
In short, no business in your community is too small to cover. Plus, if you give positive reviews for numerous brands in your area, you increase the odds of making new connections that could prove fruitful for lead generation (a.k.a. referral business) down the line.
Home Design and Decor Advice
Becoming a real estate agent means working with an array of different people in the home services field, including staging professionals who help make your listings look lavish and lovely for open houses and private showings. Take advantage of your relationships with these design-savvy pros by picking their brains to learn the top interior and exterior decorating trends and best practices — all of which you can relay on your blog.
Over on the Guidance Realty Homes blog, for instance, future and current homeowners can find expert tips and tricks on refurbishing their residences and advice on transforming their interiors via a series of intriguing real estate blog posts. Even if you’re a beginner real estate agent, chances are you can think of at least a dozen different ways for your clients to update and upgrade their homes — meaning each project you come up with is a unique article you can write up.
Opinion Pieces Regarding Local News
The impact local city council elections could have on your market, how new companies moving to your area will provide more job opportunities, why your community is the ideal spot to enjoy summers in the state — these are just a few of the numerous topics you can write about for your real estate website’s blog content. Just think of any issues, concerns, or news residents in your area find interesting and discuss frequently — that aren’t too political or divisive — and you have new subjects to cover.
Of course, the big concern is providing your thoughts on a touchy subject — for instance, the ramifications of knocking a historic structure to create a new office building — which could become a big turnoff for many members of your audience. But as long as you steer clear of taking any potentially isolating views on these matters, you can also touch upon them in your content and drive engagement for those in your community.
Interviews with Notable People
You might be surprised at just how receptive many people are when they’re asked to be interviewed. Many people love to have a forum to share their thoughts and insights, and your odds of securing them increase if you can prove your real estate blog gets a steady number of visitors each month — data you’ll need to provide a reason for someone to be interviewed by you.
The trick with interviewing people for your blog is finding those who have strong opinions and a wealth of knowledge on a given subject that others would actually want to hear from. For example, interviewing the superintendent of your town or county’s school system to go over news and notes about the upcoming school year could appeal to many parents in your community. Conversely, interviewing a kindergarten teacher on how she deals with nap time and finger-painting may not resonate with many (well, any) people in your market.
Inside Info for Buyers and Sellers
Simply posting a few data points related to home sales and prices in your market is … nice, but nowhere near as nice as going a step further and interpreting what those figures mean in respect to the future housing conditions for your area. Whatever day of the month local housing data tends to come out for your town, state, or region, mark it on your calendar so you can be the first in your market to offer up insights on what the statistics mean and how they could affect buyers and sellers in the near term.
The Raleigh Realty team in North Carolina understands how simply offering the latest housing market statistics and info on what’s going on in the community on their real estate blog can serve as an invaluable resource for buyers and sellers living and looking in the metro area. The Wethman Group in Washington, D.C., takes this blog series a step further by crafting explanatory videos that detail what the data means for its local area in addition to brief blog entries. The point is, as long as you package relevant and important real estate market figures in an easy-to-digest format on your blog, your content is very likely to resonate with many buyers and sellers.
Housing/Mortgage Regulation Updates
Given the myriad of issues caused by the housing crisis and the innumerable regulatory updates and additions implemented by the federal government, there’s never been a more confusing time to be a home buyer or seller. As an agent, keeping up with the laws, regulations, and rules pertaining to things like mortgage lending and first-time buyer incentive programs is more important than ever — and the best way to relay the information you learn about these changes with your audience is right on your website.
Head to your blog to demonstrate your understanding of how regulatory updates affect your local market in as basic a way as possible so that everyone in your audience perfectly comprehends the codes and decrees in question. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) offers plenty of resources to make it simple for everyone associated with the real estate sales and mortgage industries to know what’s required of them to complete transactions, so that’s a prime example to use regarding your own real estate agent blog ideas.
Spotlight Up-and-Coming Neighborhoods
Assuming you live in a suburban or urban market with a hefty population total, there’s likely always at least one neighborhood that can be labeled “the next big thing” or “on the up-and-up.” Even if you don’t primarily operate in these sections of town, you can still capitalize on their burgeoning popularity with buyers and renters by writing about them: their history, what stores reside there, if they have good schools and hospitals, and what makes them so unique.
Though this particular entry from The Village Green online news source in New Jersey isn’t featured on a real estate agent blog, it’s nonetheless a premier example of how you can put the spotlight on neighborhoods that have seen substantial changes for the better in recent months (e.g. growing housing developments, improved parks, new schools, etc.), so use it as a template of sorts to get your neighborhood spotlight series off the ground.
Compile Your Favorite Recent Content
Curating content for your real estate website may seem like a time-consuming activity, not a time-saving one, but it truly is one of the best ways to get fresh content on your site without the hassle of spending hours researching a given topic. All you need to do to compile this content is pinpoint great sources that regularly publish interesting articles, infographics, videos, and other content types.
Setting up RSS alerts used to be the best (and really only) way to find out about new content as it goes live online, but today, there are now numerous convenient content curation tools that can keep you abreast about the latest intriguing content. Your job is to find a common theme among multiple pieces of content for each individual blog post you publish. For example, one series of your articles could incorporate posts on the best places to visit in your market during each season — you can identify publications and blogs that publish posts on where residents should take road trips, go camping, and rent beach houses or cabins.
Share Others’ Interesting Social Media Posts
Embedding Twitter and Facebook streams into websites has become the norm for many professionals and brands, as it allows them to share what others are talking about when it comes to pertinent topics: everything from the latest awards shows to important business announcements. As an agent, you can use these streams in a couple different ways as part of different blog post series.
For starters, you can conduct Twitter chats and Q&A sessions with your audience in which you use a branded hashtag. Whenever the hashtag is used, it’ll appear in your stream on your blog, allowing everyone in the conversation to see what others are saying. Moreover, you can customize these embeds by adding specific tweets and status updates you want to appear in your blog posts. For instance, if you blog about the local economy and want to highlight what an economist had to say about the financial state of things on either social network, you can embed those individual posts throughout your article where they fit best into your copy.
Social Media Follow Recommendations
If you’re a regular fixture on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social networks (and we like to think you are by now), you undoubtedly follow the accounts, pages, channels, and boards of hundreds of different brands and people — many of them likely in your own market. If there’s one thing social media users have in common, it’s that they’re always looking for the next great person to follow, so share your recommended social superstars in a blog entry.
Even if you don’t follow some of the people and brands you recommend, you can still include them in your posts — just be sure to explain what makes them follow-worthy (e.g. “This pizzeria constantly posts amazing ‘Grams of its Sicilian masterpieces.”). As with business review articles, this can become another means for you to get an “in” with many local entrepreneurs and personalities, each of whom could end up as valuable resources for other marketing opportunities.
Turn Reviews and Testimonials Into Case Studies
Every story of and compliment from a happy client is a real estate blog post waiting to be written. Aside from adding testimonials and reviews across your website to act as social proof for your success and client satisfaction, use these quotes in longer-form blog entries that expound upon your clients’ contentment with your work.
Use real estate case studies to tell the tale of how they came to be a client, what it was like working with them, what their dreams and hopes are, and how the home sale or purchase you helped them with also helped them advance their life goals.
Create Educational Checklists and Guides
The first goal for your top-of-the-funnel inbound marketing strategy should be to educate and inform your general buyer and seller audience about your specific market, the quirks of buying and selling, and what they can do to get the process started.
The Great Colorado Homes blog run by Andrew Fortune features everything from housing regulations that are of concern to prospective home buyers to what the pros are of buying over renting. He clearly understands how to nurture leads who are still in the very early stages of deciding whether to buy or list.
In addition to writing creative blog posts, Fortune and crew also put together attractive infographics that help relay their points and cement their reputation as knowledgeable real estate professionals in their market.
Listicles on Practically Any Topic
BuzzFeed may be well-known as the best place on the web to get a steady stream of cat-related content, but you can’t say the people behind the uber-popular website don’t know how to get people to click on and consume their content. As Wired notes, the popularity of this site is likely to remain high for some time due in large part to listicles, which are also forecasted to be a solid content marketing play for years to come as well.
Because of this strong likelihood of listicles remaining favored by … well, everyone for the foreseeable future, it’s certainly worth your while to churn out the occasional listicle. Here’s one expert way to incorporate the blog post type on your site: Offer up the 10 or 20 things residents in your community need to know heading into each month. These can include fun events taking place, government meetings happening, restaurant openings coming up, and store sales on the horizon — anything that will interest the widest array of people in your market as possible.
Webinar, Podcast, and Video Transcripts
You do conduct webinars, run a podcast, and/or create videos, right? It certainly takes time to get each of these marketing tactics up and running, let alone all three, but each one can be a valuable marketing asset, and you can publish the transcripts from each multimedia type to your blog.
Not everyone is going to want to spend 15 or more minutes watching you share tips and tricks through a Google Hangout or YouTube clip, so it makes sense to provide the written versions everyone can consume by reading. The bonus of doing this is you get even more SEO juice from the copy, presuming it’s filled with relevant keywords that are part of your search optimization strategy (if you don’t mention your keywords verbatim in your webinars, podcast episodes, and/or videos, simply adjust the copy accordingly).
Dispense Wisdom and Inspire Others
Though you may not be one of the primary people your audience turns to for life lessons, don’t be afraid to show off your personal side by sharing some wisdom from things you’ve learned so far in life. You could offer financial tips based on fiscal situations you’ve gotten into in the past, for example, or perhaps tell a story about how you bought your first home and dispense any advice you have about the experience to potential clients.
As long as you’re able to seamlessly tie in your insights with your audience’s wants and needs (mainly what they should know regarding home buying and selling), you’ve got another viable real estate blog post series idea.
Photo Collection of Your Market
Listing photos with descriptions are great for your blog, but don’t forget the power of visuals in general for online marketing. Aside from listing shots, share unique images from other facets of your market.
If there’s a well-known photographer in your area, for instance, ask if you can showcase some of their best recent pictures taken around the community on your blog. The focus of the article could revolve around whatever subject matter the photographer’s pics entail (e.g. if they shoot photos of skyscrapers, talk about the history of the most noteworthy ones in your market and which businesses operate out of them).
React to a Trending Pop Culture Event
Thanks to sports, movies, music, and celebrities acting crazy, you have a wealth of pop culture inspiration to infuse in your writing and help you come up with topical real estate blogging ideas. While incorporating the Super Bowl or a reality TV show meme into your blog posts may seem like a weird way to attract eyeballs to your writing and attention to your brand, doing so can prevent your blog from becoming stale and formulaic and tie in humorous angles from pop culture into the world of real estate.
The great thing is this type of blog content doesn’t need to relate to new and upcoming pop culture trends. You can take iconic films, musicians, and society figures and events from the past that appeal to the masses (well, more importantly to your local audience) and mix them into your writing.
Whether it’s Harry Potter (“9 Hogwarts-esque Homes in the Local Market”), Star Wars (“How to Become the Jedi Master of Home Buying”), Taylor Swift (“The Best Way to Shake Off a Pulled Offer on Your Home”), or some other cult phenomenon, you can take advantage of these institutions for your real estate marketing.
