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.
As a CRE professional you’re an expert in your particular practice area, whether that be retail, office, industrial, sales and/or leasing. You also know that blogging is an important and powerful medium by which you can express and communicate your expertise. But you’re new to blogging, and it’s something for which you have more questions than answers. Below are 5 tips that will get you started down the road towards writing effective and compelling CRE blogs.
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Many CRE professionals have the same concerns when it comes to blogging:
- How do I generate interesting blog topics?
- How long should the blog be?
- How often should I blog?
- How can I tell if my blogging is working?
- And, how do I find the time to blog?
These questions, and others like them, present a formidable obstacle to any one getting started with blogging. While we aren’t going to answer all of these questions today (we will in subsequent posts), we will address one of the more important challenges to blogging: How do I generate interesting blogs that my customers and prospects will actually want to read?
5 Tips to Generate Interesting Blog Topics
1) Write about your industry, not yourself
Many CRE professionals make the mistake of writing about themselves, their company or their own brand of services. Your customers aren’t searching for your specific business. They are, however, searching for solutions to their business needs. By focusing too much on your own business, you will erode trust and your post will come across as a sales pitch. No one wants to read a sales pitch.
2) Write about common problems
People are searching for solutions to their business problems and questions. Your posts need to address these problems and provide answers to them. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and think about what information would be relevant, compelling, and useful to them.
3) Identify the questions your customers are asking
One great way to write about the problems that your customers are looking to have answered is think about the questions your prospects have. Write down all of the questions your customers would have about your service. Your answers to these questions become the topics of your blog posts!
4) Focus on one topic per blog post
Simplify blogging by keeping things, well, simple. While writing your blog you may generate a bunch of ideas and themes related to your topic. Don’t be tempted to stray off in other directions. Write about one topic per blog and one topic only. Staying focused will make your blogs more powerful and memorable. And, you can pull out the additional ideas and use them as topics for future posts!
5) Don’t try to cover too much ground
Look at your topic and ask yourself if there are sub-topics that fall underneath it. For example, you could write about sales, but a sale is made up of prospecting, lead generation, the sales pitch, the proposal, the close, etc. Each one of these subtopics is a separate blog. Writing shorter, more concise blogs make for a more compelling read.
Follow these steps when writing your blogs and you will end up with unique, interesting content that will educate your customers and prospects.
