The 3 Types of Articles You Need to Write for a Successful Blog

I’m writing my 16th blog post here on BiggerPockets, which has pretty much given me the stage to teach people in the real estate industry all about the marketing side of real estate. If you go back to my first post back in August, you will read that my overall goal here is to explain the marketing side of real estate on this blog.

We already have great bloggers on the site who do a fantastic job of covering the investing side of things. Heck, I even picked up on things that I didn’t know about certain aspects of real estate investing that I thought I knew. This proves that even if you think you know it all, there’s someone else out there who may have a few nuggets to share with you.

The journey here has been amazing, working with people like BiggerPockets Lead Editor Allison behind the scenes on getting these blog posts out. She does an excellent job, so I would like to say thanks for all that you do to keep this train moving forward.

Moving On

Over the past three months, I’ve covered a number of topics from website setup, building an online presence, local market research, keyword research, competition analysis, and profile listings to promoting your online presence to massive amounts of people.

You see, this is the route that you follow first if you want to start the process of dominating your online market. Without these steps here, you risk following into the “monkey see, monkey do” syndrome, which is doing what everyone else is doing. You find yourself spending more money on advertising through direct mail, postal lists, newspaper ads and some online ads.

I’m a big believer in spending money on things like this when you’re able to afford them. The issue is that most of these forms of advertising don’t work effectively enough because the foundation wasn’t set up right from day one. This is something that I talk about a lot with real estate people all across the world when I’m having Skype calls and conference meetings online. Most people want to know why they’re not getting the results they should over a certain length of time.

It’s usually simple for me to find the issue when I see that 80% of them don’t have websites, and if they do, they’re not up to the standards of what they need to be to capture leads. I would say that 90% of them have absolutely no online web presence at all to place them in the search engines to be found. So at the end of the day, they’re actually banking on the old traditional way of marketing/advertising.

Today is a special day for all the BP members who come here and read all of the incredible content, from podcasts and books to the BiggerPockets Forums. What I’m going to do for FREE is teach you all about how to blog the right way. I’m looking to show you how simple pieces of content that are educational and engaging on your website can bring in thousands of leads every year.

The things that I will be sharing will be taking into account over 15 years of experience in writing content for you, the reader, and for the search engines. Most people don’t have a clue on how to write for both sides of the room without their content coming off as being spammy.

The topics that I’m going to be covering are things that you will not be able to find on the internet in the form of doing real estate marketing. Yes, you will find books, online courses and Google search results on blogging information. But you won’t be able to find what I’m sharing with you all. Since I’m a big fan of this site — especially two of the guys behind it, Josh and Brandon — I’m going to teach you guys how to blog for about one hour a day to bring in thousands of potential leads each and every year.

Blogging 101

The ultimate goal of blogging is to create something that people will be willing to do two things for:

READ and SHARE

If you can achieve this, it will allow you to educate your readers, who are the buyers, sellers and those in other real estate-related categories. You will be able to grow your business so massively on a local level that over time, your opt-in leads will gradually grow.

What you want is highly targeted content surrounding local real estate keywords and local current events, as well as networking posts to highlight other businesses in your market. Let me explain all three of them so that you get the full understanding of how powerful this is when it comes to getting unlimited leads without you spending a dime on advertising.

3 Essential Types of Blog Posts for Maximum Local Leads

1. Posts Based on Local Real Estate Keywords

Keyword research is something I’ve already discussed in length in my previous post on how one homeless guy found 8,300 buyers and sellers. This goes a whole lot deeper than just building an online presence because here we must create high quality content that should be optimized and formatted correctly. Overall, we want to find all of the targeted real estate keywords and build content around them.

If we find 500 keywords surrounding our local real estate market, then we want to create 500 blog posts that center around those targeted terms using what we call long-tail phrases, or longer, more specific keyword phrases that may draw fewer searches, but which will draw more focused, more committed traffic that is more likely to end up converting.

2. Posts Concerning Local Current Events

You may be saying, Why should I write about the Chamber of Commerce having meetings or about the fundraiser being held locally? No matter what’s going on in the community, it would be very wise to write about it on your website even though you’re in real estate.

Why? Content like this gets picked up by the search engines, and people are able to find it. Plus, you can possibly get picked up by the local newspaper, radio or news station. This is all free publicity you can take advantage of by getting your website and business out there in front of thousands of potential leads locally.

3. Posts Used to Network With Local Businesses

Remember one key element of life when it comes to business owners: People love to talk about themselves and about their businesses. No one will ever turn down free publicity, no matter what form it’s in. Networking is powerful because once you start networking locally, people will begin sharing information about your website and business.

This is what I call more free eyeballs on your real estate website that can result in even more potential leads. Marketing like this is extremely powerful only if done correctly.

Blogging is one of my favorite ways to grow my own business, so I understand how powerful it is. Hopefully you’re able to take advantage of this form of marketing, so you can start dominating your local market one blog post at a time.

Investors: What kind of success have you had with blogging? What are your best tricks and tips for marketing this way?

Leave a comment below!

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