Developing a blog for your real estate business is a great way to take advantage of the full power of content marketing. A blog can serve as a launchpad for the content that you’re going to launch on video sites or social media.
It takes work to get any blog off the ground. Some of the most important work you’ll do in the early days of your blog is planning out the topics that will be featured. In this guide, you’re going to learn about some of the considerations you need to make, and steps you need to take to develop an effective list of topics.
Before we get into the steps you need to take, let’s take a moment to go over the role that these topics play in content marketing.
How blog topics fit into content marketing
Content marketing is a strategy for reaching customers by providing them with value rather than by directly promoting your services.
The goal of content marketing is to earn leads by developing a relationship and reputation with your target audience. This can be more effective than traditional ads, particularly with online audiences who have learned to ignore banners, pop-ups, and sponsored search results.
Content marketing typically involves many different kinds of content. Long-form content—the kind of writing that appears in blog posts—is some of the most important.
Social media content, for example, has to be snappy and short. In most cases, it only serves to entice people to follow a link to longer content. Video content often works the same way.
It’s also necessary to note that social media and video content often must be hosted on platforms you don’t control. You’re only closer to collecting a lead when the traffic has moved from those platforms to your website. That’s what your blog will help you achieve.
How to plan your real estate blog topics
- Use research to reach your target readers where they are
- Plan out your topics before you publish
- Focus on areas where you have special expertise
- Match topics to existing or upcoming image/video assets
Use research to reach your target readers where they are
Research is essential for the success of any content-related strategy, and blog topics are no exception.
Performing research helps you understand the audiences that you are trying to target so that you can spend less time and money guessing what they want. Skipping the research step can lead to wasting a significant amount of money on content that’s not going to be effective.
You should begin with the following types of research:
- Keyword research: This research examines the search volumes of different terms. It is necessary to understand what terms are most widely used to describe a topic, how popular it is, and whether interest in it is trending up or down.
- Competitor Analysis: This research examines how topics are being used by your competitors. It often involves finding the most successful examples of a given topic in your field or geographic niche. It is necessary to get a good idea of what approaches to the topic are the most likely to be successful.
You may need to turn to professionals to handle either of these types of research. However, you can handle some of this work on your own. Check out our guide on keywords for real estate investors here. Stay tuned for an upcoming guide on how real estate investors can develop their own keyword research.
Plan out your topics before you publish
It’s a good idea to plan out at least the first few months of content in advance. One of the best ways to do this is to develop a list of topics and organize them into a calendar. Match the topics you create to the dates that you want to publish them.
You want to do this for several reasons.
- It gives you a birds-eye view of the information you’ll cover
- It helps you set research goals so that you can gather data for more than one post at a time
- It helps you avoid repetitive coverage of topics
- It helps you identify gaps in information that you can fill with new topics
- It helps you theme your content to the right season
- It gives you something to share and develop with other people in your organization
Prepare a calendar sheet even if you haven’t developed a single topic, yet. That way, you’ll have a place to put your topics and pace them out as you choose them.
Focus on areas where you have special expertise
Your research will tell you what kind of topics are popular with people in your niche. However, when you’ve discovered those topics, you should focus on the ones where you can contribute something valuable to your audience.
Start with the topics that align with your personal expertise. For example, you may have a lot of experience with choosing the right markets for property investing. If that’s the case, you can try the example topics below:
Example topics about investing in housing markets
- How to Spot Neighborhoods that Will Increase in Value
- 10 Signs that Housing Demand is Likely to Increase in Your Area
- 10 States where Housing Costs are Likely to Go Up
- 10 Housing Markets that May Lose Value Soon
- 10 Types of Development (Downtown Revitalizations, Stadiums, etc.) That Increase Property Values
If, on the other hand, you tend to focus on the market where you live, you may have more expertise with getting houses ready to sell at a greater profit. You could take advantage of topics like those below:
Example topics about flipping houses
- 10 Housing Problems that Are Cheaper to Repair than You Think
- How to Get the Most Value from Contractors
- 10 Signs from a Listing that the Seller May Accept a Lower Offer
Many property investors aren’t looking for houses they want to sell immediately. They’re looking for properties that they can rent out. If this is where you have experience, you can try topics like the ones below.
Examples of topics about renting out properties
- How to identify a good rental property
- Where to find laws about renting properties in [state]
- Should you work with a property management service?
- How to develop strong contracts for rental properties
Match topics to existing or upcoming image/video assets
No matter how good your topics are, they’re going to be more effective if you have excellent media assets to back them up. Good images, infographics, and videos can help you make your points more effectively. They can also help push your readers further into content that they would normally abandon.
These kinds of assets can be costly to develop. Creating them yourself may require hiring editors and videographers. Licensing assets from others can easily double the cost of developing content.
That’s why it’s to your benefit to focus on developing the topics that you have existing content for. For example, if you are creating a topic about flipping houses, you can use images of the work that you have done to upgrade past houses.
If you took any images of houses that you scouted and eventually bought, you can use those images to upgrade the content that you’re creating about investing in properties.
If you are building out videos for a YouTube channel, you can cut longer videos into smaller segments and post those clips around your content when you cover the same information.
The right topics can take you to new heights
A blog can be a powerful tool and an essential part of an overall content strategy. Use yours as a way to draw people from other platforms onto your site, so that you can finally collect them as leads. Now that you know how to create topics, you can do that more easily than before.
Remember to use research to discover what terms your target readers are using, and to be sure of what they want to learn most. Plan your topics out beforehand so that you know what kind of information you’re covering, and what gaps you may need to fill in later.
Start writing about areas where you have some valuable expertise to offer. If you care about producing content for the most efficient cost, make sure you match topics to image and video assets you already control or may develop in the future.
Once you’ve followed these steps, you’re ready to start building a blog that can grow.
