Writing content is for your real estate blog is great; everyone is doing it. And if you stick with it long term, it can help pick up long-tail keywords on Google and drive more traffic to your website.
What everyone is not doing (yet) is writing content that they know will interest people. Rather than coming up with a random idea and writing about it on your blog, you can use these essential resources to help you figure out what people want to read.
Then you can write real estate content knowing it has a good chance of becoming popular with your audience.
1. Forums
One excellent place to find a forum is city-data.com.
They have a forum for just about every city or major area in the United States. When you browse through the forum, you’ll see questions from people about all types of issues — including real estate.
A quick browse through the forum brought me to a question about a new gas tax on Jan. 1. This question already has more than 2,700 views and a couple pages of people responding to it.
What does that mean for you? People are curious about this topic, and if you have knowledge to share, it could make a popular blog post.
The great thing about forums is that they will always have new questions that will also be popular topics to farm for your blog posts. When a forum thread is covering a topic on something new, such as the gas taxes, you’ll also have less competition on Google for those search terms.
2. Zillow Advice and Trulia Voices
These two places are gold mines for ideas for your next piece of real estate content. You’ll find people asking real estate-related questions, most of which will be awesome content for your blog. Cover these questions in-depth in a blog post and share it knowing someone is looking for an answer.
A quick trick is to use the Zillow Advice or Trulia Voices search and see how many people asked a particular question. You know that the more popular a question is, the more people want to learn about this issue. When you use one of those questions as blog post fodder, you can be sure that whatever you write about there will be someone interested in reading it.
3. Your local sub-Reddit
Reddit is an online community that operates like a blend between a social network and a forum. The community on Reddit is tight-knit and doesn’t like spammers. I would suggest that you use your local sub-Reddit for content ideas and only post in the forum if you’re thinking about joining it.
A quick browse on my local Reddit (www.reddit.com/r/orangecounty) led me to some awesome potential topics, including “best pizza in Orange County.” This is not obviously real estate-related, but as a Realtor, you should also know everything about the community. This would be a fun piece to write for get easy clicks to your blog via social media. You could even follow up with all the businesses you mentioned and get them to share the posts on their social media accounts, as well.
“How necessary is air conditioning in Irvine” or “holiday visit to Orange County” would also be good blog fodder — and there are many other topics you can cover. Remember: Your blog doesn’t have to be 100 percent serious all the time. Making it fun will help draw people in.
4. Social media groups
Just about every major social network you’ve joined has some type of group that’s perfect for you. There are LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, Google Plus communities and many more, and each one contains thousands of active local community members.
Browse through your local community groups and see what hot topics everyone is discussing.
5. Real life
What common questions are you getting from buyers, sellers and investors? Those are great topics to write about and even refer back to after you have content covering them. Imagine an investor asking you about the return on investment for duplexes. You answer him, and then you forward him an email with a link to your blog post, which is an in-depth breakdown of his question. He’s going to be very impressed (and so will Google).
Writing about these types of topics that you experience in your daily life is a good way to set yourself apart from the competition. They’re going to be trying to rank for some of the very competitive search terms while you’re covering topics and search terms that they’re not even considering.
Using data to form your content instead of just random ideas will help you get more views because you can base your content off already proven topics that people are discussing. Spend time researching what’s popular in these communities. Then build a piece of content around it to help save time while also giving your content a higher chance of success.
Andrew Gale is the founder of FlyerCo.
