Real Estate Blog Ideas Podcast
In this episode we talk about the nature of blogging and content creation. We discuss how to generate real estate blog ideas, re-purposing your real estate blog ideas into other mediums such as real estate infographics, real estate podcasts, and real estate videos. Let us know what you think!
Show Notes
Content Creation Media [:30]
Mark Schafer – KNOWN [1:00]
Become an Authority [2:00]
Don’t talk about yourself [3:55]
What are the problems that Buyers and Sellers have? [6:00]
Remarkable Real Estate Agent Blog Ideas [10:00]
Pick your space [11:00]
Podcasting [13:15]
Re-purpose content [14:00]
Intent [15:30]
Infographics [17:20]
Seasonal Content [17:50]
Google Trends [18:00]
Content Calendar [19:40]
Podcast Transcription
Adam Small: Hi, good afternoon, this is Adam Small with Agent Sauce and this is the Real Estate Marketing Podcast. With me today is Douglas Karr of DK New Media.
Douglas Karr: I’m here.
Adam Small: All right, so Doug we were talking earlier about today’s topic and it’s gonna be Real Estate Blog Ideas and Content Creation Ideas.
Douglas Karr: The topic was talking about topics-
Adam Small: Yes we were trying to figure out the topic of the topic. Something along those lines. Contact creation ideas, right?
Douglas Karr: Yes-
Adam Small: That’s what we came up with?
Douglas Karr: Absolutely.
Adam Small: Real Estate Blog Ideas and content creation is an interesting thing in general, because you’ve got real estate blog ideas, you’ve got real estate social media posts, you’ve got real estate infographics, audio, you’ve got video, all sorts of stuff is in fact content, right? You got a wide range of opportunities and stuff, so what are some of your favorite things to write about or talk about?
Douglas Karr: On the subject, I gotta do a shout out to a friend of mine, Mark Schaefer, he came out with a book called Known. K-N-O-W-N and part of that book talks about getting known. Basically using the internet to be known. Not famous, but known. Known for, so in your case, known for real estate marketing, text marketing, mobile marketing-
Adam Small: So, kind of like becoming an authority on a topic?
Douglas Karr: Yeah, exactly, becoming an authority and some of the advice that he gives is just … What he did was eloquently put together a guide for people. I would encourage all of your listeners to pick up a copy of that book, it’s incredible. But the two biggies that he talks about is, command you place and then figure out your space. And what he means by that is and he didn’t rhyme it like that, I did, but obviously you’re an authority on something, right? That’s where you get your real estate blog ideas.
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: And even your real estate agents, but it’s not just real estate blog ideas. Some of your real estate agents are really great at young families. Some of them are good at relocating elderly people. Some of them are really good at dealing with-
Adam Small: Or could be any areas of expertise-
Douglas Karr: Exactly-
Adam Small: It could be certain types of loans, you know, you’ve got HUD loans, you’ve VA loans, you’ve got and they don’t do the loans themselves but they know all the hurdles to help somebody to get through to get that type of loan.
Douglas Karr: Right and so if you look out there at the content out there, so let’s say in central Indiana or wherever you’re listening from, is there an authority on that topic in that space already?
Adam Small: Right.
Douglas Karr: Because if you’re going to do it and you’re gonna compete with them, you might struggle, because they’ve already got authority, they’ve already got a following, everything else-
Adam Small: Not to say that it cannot be done though-
Douglas Karr: It can absolutely be done-
Adam Small: It absolutely can, it’s just gonna be a little bit-
Douglas Karr: But his point is that normally, typically, you can find opportunities where nobody is talking about a certain thing, and take your real estate blog ideas from there. Harlan Wilson, here, Harlan Wilson started a real estate company and he is totally working people that are care takers for their parents.
Adam Small: Oh okay-
Douglas Karr: And so he knows that those homes have to be specially outfitted and he’s got contractors to do that and everything else and he’s starting to write about it. He has an email list about it. Everything else. And so he has picked out a certain space that nobody else is really competing in-
Adam Small: And a space, which as baby boomers are getting older is really becoming a very important space-
Douglas Karr: Huge one, huge one. And so to me, that’s the first step is saying, “What am I gonna be known for?” Then, now the next step of that, that he talks about and I talk about a lot is, you don’t want to just keep talking about that every day. If you just talked about we don’t sit here on the podcast and talk about real estate marketing day after day after day-
Adam Small: Right, right-
Douglas Karr: We’ve talked about all of the different pieces associated to sales and mediums and-
Adam Small: And you’re struggling to remember it, because you just said it-
Douglas Karr: Analytics. Yeah, but we-
Adam Small: No we talk about all the different technologies and different things and items behind marketing as much as we talk about the marketing itself.
Douglas Karr: Right and so here is the deal. You own a real estate marketing platform-
Adam Small: Right-
Douglas Karr: Are we talking about your real estate marketing platform every single day?
Adam Small: No, as a matter of fact, most of the time we avoid talking about it so that we don’t seem like it’s all about promoting ourselves. What we’re trying to accomplish here, is to provide something of value, like real estate blog ideas, to people out there that may be customers at some point in time and hopefully helps establish us as an authority on the entire concept of real estate marketing. As opposed to just our platform-
Douglas Karr: Right, exactly and so each of these podcasts what you’re doing is you’re saying, “You know what I hear real estate agents struggling with real estate blog ideas, what to talk about, what to do videos about. We need to do a podcast to help them.”
Adam Small: Right-
Douglas Karr: So what you’re doing is you’re establishing your authority that you understand what their problems are and you’re trying to solve them. When real estate agents listen to 10 podcasts, 20 podcasts, they read your real estate blog ideas blog posts, everything else, over time they go, “You know what? Agent sauce really understands my job. They get it. You know what I’m going through every single day, I really want to work with these people.” And that’s the difference is, they’re gonna come to you not because of the features in your platform or anything else, they’re gonna come to you because they really know that you understand their business.
Adam Small: Right, because we’ve established the authority. We’ve established that we have knowledge, not just about our platform in that we’re really looking to help people out, instead of just promote our real estate marketing platform.
Douglas Karr: And so real estate agents, that are listening to me right now-
Adam Small: Can do the exact same thing-
Douglas Karr: Yeah, what are the problems? For sellers, it’s how do they increase value of their homes, how do they get the paperwork that you were talking out-
Adam Small: And it could be-
Douglas Karr: What other stuff-
Adam Small: Getting, well so much goes into selling a home, there’s title search, there’s insurance purposes, there’s just getting inspections and all the little things that you gotta do, that’s not even talking about finding the buyer. The largest part of it is finding the buyer, the largest time is what I mean to say is finding the buyer and that’s when the real work begins. Once you’ve got the offer, there’s this whole negotiation process and pricing and all that stuff, which you have to get through, so you can sell your home by yourself a real estate agent, it’s a lot harder, because you gotta make sure-
Douglas Karr: How do you dedicate 100% of time to it-
Adam Small: Dot all the i’s, cross all the t’s-
Douglas Karr: Yeah-
Adam Small: Yeah you know and you gotta work, do showings and all that stuff and negotiations. The real estate agent really provides a lot of value in helping to separate you from some of those things, make it easier for you and really … Your home, most of the time has a real emotional attachment, so it’s worth a lot and a lot of people when they do a for sale by owner, they over price it and then they end up under selling it, you know so-
Douglas Karr: Well in the for sale by owner, all they’re interested in is maybe I can save a few bucks on a commission and I can do this myself and they’re thinking about it tactically. But they’re not thinking about it strategically, like a real estate, you know I was talking to a lady, she’s a client of yours-
Adam Small: Oh yeah?
Douglas Karr: Jane Rhoads?
Adam Small: Oh yeah, okay.
Douglas Karr: I was talking to her a few nights ago and she was talking about how she has her face up at, she has a poster up at Marsh, you know with her face on it and it’s just kind of this greeting thing that she spends money on every single year but the fact is that a few people come up to her every once in a while and say, “I’ve seen your face.”
Adam Small: Oh-
Douglas Karr: Yeah, “I’ve seen your face.” And so that’s the thing is, she’s creating a rapport, she’s creating that authority, she’s maintaining contact with people that are interested in buying. So you’re not, if it’s a for sale by owner, you don’t have a list of people sitting there waiting-
Adam Small: Exactly-
Douglas Karr: And so real estate agents obviously have that, they know that they need their pipeline following, they know that they need the next person-
Adam Small: Right, they’re constantly working on that, whether it’s farming areas and so far as postcard sends or newspaper ads or whatever that technique is, they’re constantly trying to build up a list of potential buyers as well as sellers, because you cannot buy something you don’t have something on the market, but again, to that point though, there are entire groups and all they do is focus on buyers or sellers and sometimes they even get more specific that. Low income buyers, high income sellers-
Douglas Karr: Exactly-
Adam Small: That sort of thing and that’s their specialty and they just know how to work that and so-
Douglas Karr: And to write about that, right?
Adam Small: When we’re talking content, yeah-
Douglas Karr: So write about it and show that you have that expertise and don’t worry about do it yourself, always gonna do it themselves, they’re always, if they can scrape a nickel, they’re gonna do it. But what you’re after is that person that says, “Wow I never even thought about those 10 things, as we’re looking to sell our home. We need to call this person, because she obviously knows exactly, she’s worked with our buyers before. She’s worked with these types of situations before.”
Adam Small: Right, so you said write about it, so blog post, right? Blog post is a great opportunity to put something out there and have it be perpetually out there working for you. You write it once, you post it to your website and if it’s well written, if it’s good content, Google is gonna, I say Google, I should say any search engine is gonna index that and hopefully direct people to that, right?
Douglas Karr: Well you gotta make sure that it’s remarkable content, I would even tell people that if you’re spending a ton of time to write one blog post, let’s say a week and you’re just not seeing traction after a few months, it’s probably it’s not really that compelling and so or you’re doing the old, I think we’ve talked about it in another podcast, the guy that in my Facebook feed that I finally blocked, that he’s like, “Oh, writing up two more, oh sold another one. Oh, oh, oh.”
Adam Small: Oh right, right, right, right.
Douglas Karr: You know where he’s not doing anything-
Adam Small: There’s no substance to it, there’s no real value in what you –
Douglas Karr: He’s not connecting with me personally. He’s not telling me why I should be hiring him as a real estate agent and so when the time comes that I am gonna sell, he’s not gonna be the guy that I’m thinking about, these other people are and so I would say if you pick this space, that you want to own, so you talked about let’s say high income homes. High income homes might have other things associated with them like executives relocation, well then you might want to write a lot about executive relocation and tax breaks or whatever. Anything associated with attracting that audience and the thing is, is you want to write the best content, so here’s another tip for everybody that a lot of times we don’t write the best content, but we can find the best content. And so if you look up a topic and you go read a Forbes article in the Inc. Magazine article and whatever article and you compile all of that information into one really great, complete article, watch what happens.
People will notice, people will start having it take off, so remember I just wrote about this last week on our side but and I said content is king, but there is only one crown out there.
Adam Small: Right, so it’s gotta be good content-
Douglas Karr: It’s gotta be great-
Adam Small: It’s gotta be exceptional content right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah, it’s gotta be exceptional to get found nowadays.
Adam Small: Right, so along the lines of what you’re saying, target your real estate blog ideas, target what you’re writing toward the audience that you want, so if you’re looking to work with people that are selling those million dollar homes or buying million dollar homes, target your content to the challenges that those people have. Travel purposes, school purposes, that sort of thing-
Douglas Karr: Sometimes it’s even, we have smart home technology now, right? If you want to go really high end smart technology, you gotta go high income. So people might be interested in that. It might be Tesla’s latest car, anything associated with that family and their life style and everything else to let them know that you understand who they are. You are the right connection for them.
Adam Small: Now, we’ve been talking about blog posts, right? There are other mediums out there too, right? Podcasting is one of them, so talking about that as well, so podcasting you can do the same thing with podcasting. What about video, too right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah, here is what I would say, number one with podcasting is real estate agents spend a ton of their car, right?
Adam Small: Yeah, so?
Douglas Karr: So there’s amazing opportunities to just record yourself.
Adam Small: While you’re driving down the road?
Douglas Karr: Absolutely, have a conversation, if you just hit record, you’re not having to look down at your piece or anything, but you could really just sit there and talk for, I think a lot of real estate agents use dictation and everything else, and so I think there is times, where real estate agents could kind of cut corners, where they, they don’t have to sit in front of a laptop and wonder about what they’re gonna type next, they could go record it, either do a podcast, or send it to something like, was it speech pad, I think is-
Adam Small: Something along those lines, right-
Douglas Karr: There’s, there’s-
Adam Small: There’s transcription services-
Douglas Karr: Transcription services online and stuff and now you’ve got your real estate blog ideas post.
Adam Small: So you can re-purpose your podcast into a blog post as well, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah and then some of the stuff that we’re doing with some of our clients now is and Adam’s sitting here because we have all the a bunch of the equipment in front is, we’re gonna start video taping our real estate marketing podcasts. And so now we’re gonna have podcasts, now we can write real estate blog ideas posts about the podcasts and now we can video tape the podcasts.
Adam Small: You really get, by re-utilizing the content in different mediums, you really get a much bigger impact and a lot less work for that matter, because you get to use the same thing multiple times.
Douglas Karr: I think people really make the mistake that every time they look at a piece of content, they go, “I gotta think of something new and fresh.”
Adam Small: It’s gotta be unique.
Douglas Karr: And it doesn’t, it just has to be popular and so if you do a podcast and a video and an article on a real estate blog ideas that’s really good, you’re hitting three different audiences that never heard it or saw it or read it before. And then if it really takes off and people really love it, then you can combine the 20 real estate blog ideas posts into a little ebook or whatever-
Adam Small: Again, re-purpose the content and give it a new life in another medium.
Douglas Karr: We talk about a lot with our clients about everything should be intentful. It shouldn’t be, “I gotta write a blog post today.” Or, “I gotta do a podcast today”. Or, “I gotta do a video today.” It should be, “What am I gonna do today, that I can re-purpose over and over and over again? What can I do today that’s gonna save me time and money down the road, because we’re all so busy.”
Adam Small: Right, good point, makes a lot of sense to be able to get a lot more value out of your real estate blog ideas instead of just a one time bang you get multiple hits on it and multiple mediums, which means that you’re reaching different people and different audiences, because some people prefer to read, others want to watch a video and some would prefer just to listen-
Douglas Karr: Absolutely.
Adam Small: So you’re maximizing the opportunity for reach there.
Douglas Karr: The other one too is if you did an incredible, maybe you wrote a great real estate blog post on some crime that happened in the neighborhood or whatever. Well the next year you could re-purpose that same article and say, “Hey here is an update on what’s happened with this district.” And so the other one too is we go back to our old posts over and over again and basically refresh them and new statistics and new pictures and we publish them as new and they’re just as popular again a year later. Nobody ever writes and says, “We read that a year ago.”-
Adam Small: “Saw that last year.” Yeah exactly. And so and you know another thing that we can do there too is take that real estate blog ideas content and depending on the nature of the content, you were talking about crime statistics, is probably a decent one and one that’s really a favorite with real estate agents is a market statistics, right, so if you have a podcast or you have content that you have created, you could actually, depending on the nature of that content, you could create an real estate infographic out of it as well and then you’ve got yet another opportunity for reach. You create a nice looking infographic, publish it out there, hopefully it gets picked up by others and put out there and so again, you’re reaching another audience and you’ve got another piece to share and if it’s a good piece, if it’s good info graphic, other agents will share it too. Then it ends up, if you do it right, you get links back to your site and everything and that all helps out from a-
Douglas Karr: Ranking-
Adam Small: Authority and ranking perspective, so-
Douglas Karr: Yeah-
Adam Small: Another great opportunity there.
Douglas Karr: Hey the last one that I wanted to talk about was seasonal content.
Adam Small: Seasonal, okay.
Douglas Karr: There’s, you guys do it, right?
Adam Small: Yeah-
Douglas Karr: You guys send out emails-
Adam Small: Emails, based on season-
Douglas Karr: Right around holidays and everything else-
Adam Small: Right, or spring cleaning or winterizing, depending on the season, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah and so if your audience ever looks at Google trends, that’s a great resource, if they say, “Boy, I’m thinking about writing about.” I’m gonna make something up, drones. I’m gonna write about drones. Is it popular right now to write about drones? You can go to Google trends and you can actually see, you can break it down to your region of the country and see whether more and more people are searching for that type of content and-
Adam Small: So for those that don’t know, how do you get to Google trends?
Douglas Karr: Google.Com/Trends.
Adam Small: There you go, pretty easy, right.
Douglas Karr: And so you can search Google trends too, but the nice thing about Google trends is let’s say you were gonna write about, we have a client that’s in the pest control industry and so, one of the things that we’re keeping an eye on is, if we write about ant problems right now, it doesn’t mean anything-
Adam Small: When it’s cold out-
Douglas Karr: It’s not gonna help anybody, but if we write about ant problems three or four weeks before the season when ants go crazy and start breaking into everybody’s homes and everything, then the content is gonna be fresh and it’s gonna have up to date stats and everything else and so you’re utilizing Google trends to plan out your year and, “Oh I need to write about this.” Snow removal, right? Snow removal is a great one-
Adam Small: You don’t write about that in July though-
Douglas Karr: Yeah, but you could have it sitting and ready and then when you, here Paul Poteet, the weather man say, “Hey, we got a snow storm coming.” Boom, you publish it and say, “Hey, here’s some great resources on snow removal, home remedies for not slipping on ice.” All of that stuff. And so there’s a lot of great real estate blog ideas that you can use to preempt the demand for content and-
Adam Small: So put a real estate blog ideas content calendar together, right?
Douglas Karr: Yeah absolutely-
Adam Small: And pre populate the content, make sure you’ve got it written ahead of time, scheduled ready to go out and by creating the calendar like that you know what you’ve gotta be working on and so you can work on it now and you can have all those individual pieces ready, you can have the blog post, the podcast, the video, the info graphic and whatever else you’re working on, you can have it all ready to go at once when it’s time.
Douglas Karr: And you get to take a look at your year and say, “Have I really completely talked about everything that I want to talk about?” And if the answer is no, well where am I gonna fit that in? Or if the answer is, “Wow, I’m starting to duplicate.” Or whatever, well then you want to say, “Okay, what else can I write about?”
Adam Small: Exactly, exactly. So good info, appreciate the time. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at Info@AgentSauce.Com or visit us at AgentSauce.Com. Thanks and have a great day.
Great list of real estate related blog sites to follow.Thanks for shearing this valuable blog