This guest post is part of a series on the topic of online lead generation for CRE brokers and firms. It is written by Greg Schraff, Managing Director, digetry, LLC – digital strategy and marketing company. The Massimo Group has had much success working with digetry related to their digital strategies.
On paper (pun intended), blogging seems like a good idea – you’re an individual broker or perhaps a firm owner who has a ton of great ideas, insight, and knowledge into commercial real estate and your marketplace. What better way to share your expertise than writing a blog?
In reality, however, blogging is something that takes discipline, planning, and a basic understanding of keyword optimization. It also takes time to write a compelling blog – something people actually want to read – and as a busy CRE professional, who has the time?
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Despite these challenges, there are three very good reasons to blog, reasons that positively impact your bottom line and ultimately make it worth your time.
3 Reasons to Blog
1) Blogs Help Attract New Visitors to Your Site
Your prospects and customers are searching for exactly what they want, and the terms they are using for their search are getting more and more specific.
For example, “multi-tenant property for sale downtown durham nc” is precisely what someone will type into a search engine if that’s what he or she is in the market for. If this is your area of expertise, you are much less likely to show up in the search results if you don’t have website pages dedicated to this topic.
Your job is to make sure that your area of expertise can be found online. The best way to do this is to write about it. Write about what you know in the form of blogs.
2) The More Blogs You Write the More Your Web Site Traffic Increases
Every time you post a blog you are creating a new web page. If this blog post/web page is optimized with the keywords your prospects and customers are searching for to address their need, you have a web page/blog post that addresses it.
It is a known fact that the more blog posts you have the more the traffic to your site increases. This seems obvious, but it’s not just simple math, the growth is actually exponential. According to Hubspot companies that blog 15 or more times per month get 5X more traffic than companies that don’t blog at all.
4) Blogs Convert Visitors Into Leads
Not only do blogs attract visitors to your site, they are attracting the right kind of visitor: prospects who are seeking a solution to their need or answer to their question.
If someone has clicked through to your blog and is reading it you have a captive audience. Naturally, you want to move them to the next step in the buying cycle and convert these prospects into qualified leads.
The best way to do this is to include a clear Call-to-Action (CTA) within your blog. A CTA button or graphic that promotes an offer from your business prompts the visitor to exchange her personal information for the offer, and now you have a lead.
Of course, the offer needs to be related to the blog post for it to add value, and it needs to be useful and relevant to the visitor’s needs for it to work.
Done correctly, blogging can be an excellent way to attract visitors to your site and turn them into promising, CRE leads. And that, ultimately, is why it’s important to blog!
