How to Gain a Blog Audience by Writing for Just an Hour a Day

Last week we talked about picking the right topics and keywords to start blogging on your real estate website. The key to blogging and attracting local leads online is to start writing about what they’re looking for.

Example: If I’m a mechanic in Shreveport, La and I have a website that lists all of my services, hours and location, my goal would be to start doing some blogging to get more content out there online when people are searching for local mechanics in Shreveport.

It’s all about writing on subjects that people are searching for so that they can find your content online and possibly give you a call or come in to use your services. The goal is to do the research for the topics and keywords people are searching for online, which we’ve covered plenty of times already here on BiggerPockets.

In simple terms, you’re generating leads online by producing local content people are searching for. Just to give you a taste of how powerful this method is, I did the research on the keyword “Shreveport mechanic,” and found that over 1,300 people per month search for a person to take care of their car needs.

Sad to say, none of the local mechanics in this city are taking advantage of this because none of them have websites or have content online to be found. So each one of them are missing out on hundreds of leads per month, which can mean thousands of profits for their business simply by not producing local content.

Writing 1,000 Words Every Single Day

The only way to become successful in real estate marketing online, when it comes to the blogging part, is that you must write, write and write some more. Taking it from a guy who has written over a million words in the past 365 days. Not only do I write content for my own personal local marketing website, I also write for great sites like this one here, as well as a number of other publications around the world.

What I’ve learned over the past almost 15 years of marketing online and offline is that you must create content for your business. Now, there are different levels of content from press releases, books and ebooks to newsletters, newspaper ads, videos and my favorite — blogging.

Think of blogging as a form of direct mail in that each blog post that you put onto your real estate website is like a sealed and stamped envelope that goes out to thousands of local leads. But the key is that people don’t get that mail until they’re ready to get it in the form of searching for it online.

Understanding that key element of marketing is what sets apart the people who are successful in real estate from those who continue to struggle to get leads each and every month.

The first step to marketing success via blogging is to follow my 1,000 words a day formula.

I write around 1,000 words or so per day to grow my online presence. Not only do I work with many people in the real estate industry, I also educate those in other highly targeted niches. So for those reasons, I have to be consistent on writing and publishing targeted content.

This system is easy to do, and simply doing this on a consistent basis for a while will get you into what I call the groove of writing. Once you start, it will be impossible to stop knowing that all of the hard work you’ve put into it will go to waste.

To be able to write 365,000 words for the next year, you will have to write about 1,000 words per day. This is extremely easy to do, so don’t think that this is something that will take up all of your time. All you have to do is sit down for about 1 hour per day and start writing on the topics and keywords centered around your local market.

It usually takes me about 30 to 45 minutes to pump out about 1,000 words, but I’ve been doing this for a long time so I have the method packed down. The key is to write about 500 words for each topic and keyword that you have to satisfy the search engines. You have to realize that the search engines work on a content performance basis, so in the local market, the website that can at least produce the most local relevant content is the one that gets the better ranking — supposedly.

Now, I used that word “supposedly” because that’s not always the case, but to not confuse you as of now, just concentrate on producing highly quality content for each keyword.

Potential Results

At the end of the day, we want to be able to produce local targeted content that is easily found online. Create more content than the local competition, and just knock them out of the water. So basically, if we have over 500 topics to write about, then it will take a year to write about each and every one of those topics at around 500 words each.

Remember, what I always say is that it will take me anywhere from 6 months to a year to dominate any local market. Knowing that the road will be long and tedious, I’m willing to put in the hard work at the end of the day.

If we fast forward 365 days from now, going into the new year, we should have 500 topics written on our website. We should be getting thousands of visitors per month to our website from all of that content being listed online locally. We should be getting more and more leads, and most importantly, building great relationships with those who want to be on our team.

That is the goal, but just producing good content doesn’t make this dream come true. There are many steps that you have to take once you have this content on hand to be posted onto your website. Next week I will go over how you need to format your content so that it stands out and is easier to read. Doing it in this manner will just skyrocket the potential leads that you can be generating.

What challenges have you faced trying to establish your real estate blog? What advice would you add to my article?

Leave your best tips and tricks below!

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.