This is a guest blog contributed by Ben Fisher, a real estate agent
at Summit Sotheby’s International Realty in Park City, UT.  Ben’s service area
includes Park City Real Estate & Deer Valley Real Estate.

In my previous post, Two Strategies for Managing Your Real Estate Blog, I gave a few ideas for getting your blog active again and generating results.

Whether it be scheduling yourself posts throughout the week, or posting about new bank owned properties that hit the market, you must have a consistent schedule to keep your blog busy with fresh content.

With Google’s recent freshness update changing 35% of search results, this is more important now than ever.

How are you going to stay ahead of your competition in your local market?  Consistently update your blog with local news!

Use Google Alerts For Research on the Competition

One tool I use frequently for keeping tabs on my competition online is Google Alerts. By entering your target keywords into Google Alerts, you will be notified (in my case every morning) of Google’s recent indexing of pages that match your specific terms.

Typically the news results are not accurate for my area since I am using very common keywords (Ex: Park City), but under the Web Results is where the real value comes. I can see who is recently adding pages to their site, doing press releases, or posting on blogs.

Blow the Competition Away

What can you do with this information on your competition? Let’s say a competitor is posting on their blog about a specific area within your community. In this case I would create my own blog post about this topic, make your post even better and add more content, and post a few backlinks to this blog post from other websites. Do everything you can to make your post outrank your competitors while improving your SEO at the same time. If you do this consistently, you will end up dominating numerous areas of your marketplace.

Use Google News to Make Your Blog the Freshest News Around

I recently began to utilize Google News to keep me updated on all of the local events in my marketplace. With ski resorts opening, local events taking place, and sometimes real estate news coming up, I have an unending list of topics to post on my blog about.

If you can consistently be one of the first to post on a certain subject in your marketplace, you can take advantage of Google’s recent freshness update and generate further streams of traffic to your website.

To Summarize:  Regularly Update Your Blog with Local News
to Dominate Your Market

• Do the research on your competition
• Blow them away with even better content
• Be the first to post on local issues
  
• Generate leads to further your business!

Give it a try!

This is a guest blog contributed by Ben Fisher, a real estate agent
at Summit Sotheby’s International Realty in Park City, UT.  Ben’s service area
includes Park City Real Estate & Deer Valley Real Estate.

The Problem

In the past few years, blogging for real estate agents has become one of the most popular online strategies to generate traffic for their site in the hopes of gaining new clients.

While utilizing this strategy, you tend to run out of topics to blog about and this is when your blog can start becoming stale. The internet is filled with real estate blogs that started off with a huge push and then died off before they had seen any ounce of success. How can we overcome this?

Strategy #1:  Make a Schedule

First you need to put your blog onto a schedule so that you never miss a beat. I am guilty of not sticking to my schedule as well, but am on a big push to get back on the horse.  For me, I schedule 3 days a week to highlight a few different things.

Strategy #2:  Define Global Topics

Monday is usually my “Deal of the Day” post. Thursday is “Featured Neighborhood of the Week”, and so on. I would stick with 3 scheduled posts a week so you will not spread yourself to thin in generating fresh and UNIQUE content.

I see a lot of agents doing this incorrectly. Simply posting about a property with a small paragraph of stats and a picture isn’t going to cut it to generate significant results. Your content needs to be eye catching and formatted in a friendly way.

Fill the page with unique content about the home, neighborhood, area, whatever you can come up with. Do this consistently with intermittent posts about news on your area, and you are on your way to seeing some great results, and paychecks.

Tune in next week for content ideas outside of properties and neighborhoods to feature on your blog!