The real estate blogosphere in Australia is huge. There’s a wealth of information, and with that information, unfortunately, comes a whole lot of misinformation.
In this article, we’re going to take you through 7 of the biggest mistakes you can learn from other real estate blogs, so you can make better content choices in the future. Read on to find out more:
1) Ignoring Best Practices for Structure
Although it’s by all means okay to put your own stamp on your content and express your brand’s individuality, that doesn’t mean you should ignore industry best practices If your blog posts include paragraphs that are longer than 5 sentences, you need to break them up to boost readability.
You can do this by including headers, sub-headers, bullet points and block quotes to make the information easier to digest.
2) Not Understanding the Value of Blogging
Blogging has been known to produce continuous, consistent paybacks to real estate agents. For example, if done correctly, it can help you to boost your brand authority and get more pages indexed on Google, which will help increase your organic traffic.
Research has shown that internet users in the US spend 3 times longer on blogs and social networks than email, a statistic likely to be shared in Australia. Additionally, 40% of Fortune 500 companies have a blog on their website.
If you want your clients to start discovering you, as opposed to you driving for business constantly, a blog can help you achieve it.
3) Not Listening to Content Best Practices
Sadly, it’s not enough anymore to simply sit down at your keyboard and start throwing your words of wisdom onto a page. If you don’t format your blog properly and follow best practices, you run the risk of losing your audience’s attention.
Above all else, your blog posts need to clearly demonstrate value to the reader.
In each post, you need to identify the problem your target audience wants to solve, then define how you’re going to solve it for them. Additionally, you need to choose your topics carefully. Producing blog posts about the listing you just put up is only going to be of interest to a small portion of your audience, and you run the risk of putting the others off.
4) Focusing on the Sale Over Providing Information
Your primary goal with blogging shouldn’t be to sell. Sure, that’s your end goal, but your blog posts, first and foremost, should be produced to provide your audience with valuable, engaging and insightful information.
Hardly anyone is going to go to your blog to be sold to. Offer them answers to their questions in your content, and you can always push a sale at the end with a call to action. This should be short, sweet and to-the-point.
It doesn’t even have to drive readers to contact you – your call to action can be something completely different. For example, if you’ve produced an article about spring cleaning, it could be “Have you got your spring cleaning routine down? Share it with us in the comments below.”
5) Not Promoting Additional Content
If your audience are reading your blog post, they’re interested in what you have to say. So, if you’re not capitalising on that opportunity to guide them towards other blog posts they might find interesting, you’re making a mistake.
By adding in hyperlinks throughout your content to other articles that build on the topic in question, you’ll be able to both increase the time readers are spending on your site, as well as send signals to search engines that the content you’re producing is valuable.
6) Skipping the Proofreading and Editing Process
This is a huge one. When you’re writing, you won’t believe some of the stuff you’ll come out with that you think makes sense at the time but is actually complete gibberish. There have even been instances online where writers have left feedback for themselves in the post, then forgotten to remove it before it went live.
These mistakes are easy to avoid. If you write your blog posts on Thursdays, block out an hour on Friday morning to read over them and make any required edits. You’d be amazed at how much better they read after you’ve gone over them a couple of times.
7) Failing to Promote Your Blog Posts
You could have written the most insightful blog posts to ever hit the real estate world, but if you don’t promote it, not many people are going to find it. In addition to following SEO best practices, promoting your content on social media will help to build your online presence. Publish your posts to LinkedIn, Facebook, and any other social platforms you use to maximise the number of readers it reaches.