A great content marketing plan starts with a high-quality blog that’s updated often and consistently with useful, educational, and entertaining content, especially for real estate.
Bloggers, including real estate bloggers, make common mistakes that can ruin their chances of success.
You want to increase brand awareness, trust, word-of-mouth marketing, sales, and loyalty with a blog if you’re using it for content marketing.
Your chances of reaching that goal drop dramatically if you make such mistakes.
It is important to develop a blog strategy that prevents you from making these critical errors.
Here are several common blogging mistakes to avoid at all costs if you want your real estate blog and business to succeed.
Duplication of content
Duplicate content can greatly reduce a blog’s search engine traffic.
That’s something you don’t want to happen!
Write high-quality posts to share your expertise, stories, tips, warnings, and opinions to attract Google and other search engines.
Duplicate content doesn’t just mean republishing another author’s work. That’s plagiarism, and it’s illegal. It also includes your own work.
The bottom line is that if Google crawls your blog post and finds it has already been published elsewhere online, it could flag it as spam.
Sites that publish duplicate content (even if it’s your own) are penalised by Google and banned from search results.
To avoid publishing duplicate content, use tools such as Copyscape and Plagium before publishing.
Keyword stuffing
When caught, SEO spam techniques like keyword stuffing can get you in trouble with Google.
When a blog post or web page uses a keyword or keyword phrase too often, it is known as keyword stuffing.
You might be tempted to repeat a phrase in your blog post if you sell pearl necklaces and want your post to rank at the top of search engine results pages for pearl necklaces.
It’s not worth it!
Stuffing keywords into your blog posts and website could hurt your search engine results.
The solution is to stick to a keyword density of no more than 3% in your blog post, so you don’t get flagged as spam by search engines.
Publishing Thin Content
An article or web page that adds little value to users is known as thin content. Typically, for a page to rank high in search engine results, it must be filled with useful information in order to provide users with the best results based on their search terms.
Thin content is not only unlikely to rank well, but could also be flagged as spam.
It includes images with no text, duplicate content, affiliate or syndicated content, and automatically generated content (this includes blog post category pages).
Again, your best solution to this mistake is to always publish high-quality, original content that helps, educates, or entertains your users.
Failure to cite and link your sources
This is a step you should never skip, even though it takes a few seconds to cite and link to your sources in your blog post. You should cite your sources first. Second, it’s common courtesy to give credit where it’s due, and third, you could get in trouble if you don’t.
It is very likely that the original author or source of the idea, fact, data, or news you discuss in your blog post will be upset if they discover you’ve taken credit for their work.
Your reputation online could be damaged and sales may be lost as a result.
You will get caught. Savvy writers and businesses monitor their online reputations and content (and you should, too).
Copying content, ideas, tips, and more is not cool, and you don’t want to tarnish your brand by doing so.
It’s important to work with blog writers who understand the written and unwritten rules of writing great blog content. Only then can you be confident that your blog will benefit your business.
Excessive promotion of your business and brand
Consider your audience’s perspective. Would you want to read a blog that’s self-serving and consists largely of written advertisements?
Educating, informing, or entertaining people is the purpose of most ads, so your blog posts should achieve one or more of those goals.
It does not mean you can’t promote your business, products, or services in your blog posts. The key is to do so when and where it makes sense.
You’re launching a new listing? Blog about it. You’re having an open house? Blog about it.
Do not publish self-promotional posts more often than posts that educate, inform, or entertain your audience.
Solution: Make sure 80% of your blog posts are not self-promotional, and only 20% or less are self-promotional. It’s a balance that most people are willing to accept without feeling like they’re reading ads.
Blog mistakes are easy to make, but the good news is that they are also easy to avoid.
Take some time to learn how to write a blog post from concept to results, be mindful of the mistakes to avoid, and you’re on your way to blogging success.