How To Cut Your Real Estate Blogging Time in Half and Re-purpose Your Content Three Ways with the Time Saved

One of the burdens challenges of being a content creator is providing consistently focused content that will be of interest to your readers.  If you are blogging 3-5 times per week or more content creation can become difficult for many real estate bloggers.  Now if you add in the creation of email marketing campaigns, strategic micro-blogging on Twitter or Posterous, newsletters, and generating additional content for your business peers this challenge can be dizzying.

This is where the value add of web 2.0 tools comes into play.

Problem:  Generating valuable content in a timely and consistent manner for multiple platforms and purposes.

Solution:  Use Gmail and WebNotes to help you collect, organize, generate, repurpos, and syndicate your content.

 

Here's How to Cut Your Real Estate Blogging Time In Half and Repurpose Your Content Three Ways with the Saved Time

 

1.  Use Gmail to Collect and Organize Your Research

Add a folder to your Gmail account labeled "Research-Blog".  Everytime you receive an email newsletter, a notification of a new blog post, or even a question that you could use from a consumer/prospect as content for your blog move a copy of that email to your "Research Blog" folder.  If you don't do this right away, at the very least, star the email so you can move it your "Research-Blog" folder later. 

 

Add a label to your Gmail account to organize your blog research

 

If you find content outside of your email account no worries, just write a quick note by emailing yourself and include a link.  I personally do this all the time and find it to be simple, quick, and highly effective.  Mark the subject line of the email to yourself "Research-Blog" so you can move it to your labeled folder later.  In both Firefox and Internet Explorer there are options that enable you to email links and web pages to yourself.

 

2.  Open an Account at Webnotes and carefully sift through your "Blog-Research" folder

  • Use Webnotes as your "go to" research tool.  It will allow you to highlight and add sticky notes to web pages, blog posts, and pdf's (Pdf's only if you purchase the paid version). 
  • Register for an account with Webnotes.  I choose the paid version because I review several pdf's a week, and download the webnotes toolbar. 
  • Go back into your Gmail account once you have downloaded the webnotes toolbar.
  • Use the time you have allotted to read and research the contents of your Gmail "Research-Blog" Folder.
  • Open up each webpage that you will use as a resource to create your newsletter and use the Webnotes tool to highlight and annotate the document.  You do this by clicking on highlight and sticky notes right from the Webnotes toolbar.

Highlight and Create Sticky Notes In Webnotes

The more thorough you are with your note taking the quicker it will be to create your content.  This is where the time savings will really come into play.

 

3.  Generate your Content

Once you are done researching it's time to create your content.  Go back inside your Webnotes account.  You can get there by clicking "View My Webnotes" on your Webnotes Toolbar.

You will see a results page that looks similar to this,

A look inside your Webnotes Account

 

Webnotes keeps the title and source of all of your notes including a hyperlink to the original source.  It also records your highlighted text and your sticky notes. 

Open up your blog editor and start blogging your post.  If you took copious notes the advantage is three-fold:

  1. You now have a more conversational tone to write your post because you wrote the notes without hesitancy and in your own voice.  You will also be able to check spelling, grammer, style, and switch copy around to have more of an active than passive voice.
  2. You have written most of the content that you will need for your post minus a few tweaks and copy and paste actions.
  3. You will be able to easily cite material correctly by giving proper attribute and you will easily be able to include helpful links.

 

4.  Use the extra time you saved to work your SEO

  • Check for use of keywords frequently and effectively.
  • Tag your blog post with all appropriate keywords.
  • Take advantage of additional features (If you are in the ActiveRain platform or another social network) by adding your post to groups and taking the time to add your post to the proper ActiveRain Channel- an often overlooked feature.
  • Use Header tags properly.
  • Scan for visibility and make sure your images are aligned, crisp, and help to paint your story as well as marked with ALT tags.
  • Create a call to action on your blog posts.

 

5.  Re-purpose your blog content in three ways with the additional time

a.  Create an embeddable report

In webnotes you have the option of creating a report of your notes in html or pdf format.  If you use the pdf format you can upload a copy to scribd or docstoc where people can subscribe to your notes and where they can be indexed on Google.  You can also embed the report to Posterous if you have an account there or share it on your Facebook Fan Page or LinkedIn.


Summary Notes Report- Marketing to Women

b.  Send a newsletter

Announce your research to your database via email.  You may include all of the content or just a few items in a newsletter to your database.  There also might be some lefotvers-items when you researched that you did not include in your blog post- that could be perfect for content in your newsletter.

c.  Twitter with a real estate marketing purpose

In performing Step #2 if you find a resource/link that could generate a conversation and you have taken the  time to annotate and highlight thoughtfully share it with the your Twitter followers.  There is a share button in the Webnotes Toolbar. Click "Twitter" and you are good to go.

Use Gmail, Webnotes, and the method above to cut your real estate blogging time in half and re-purpose your content three ways with the Time Saved.

 

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14 Comments on How to Cut Your Real Estate Blogging Time In Half and Re-purpose Your Content Three Ways with the Time Saved

NOV
05

Rebecca,

Like your ideas  - in fact I am already in the habit of sending myself emails with links & ideas included & I have a "Blog" folder to store it in.

 

12:35pm • #1
113,851 Points 1 Featured Post Outside Blog

You sure do provide tons of valuable info.  I am slow but getting around to getting on board with all this stuff eventually and just want you to know I appreciate you.

Also, I am curious to know what you think of a cool little tool I discovered at BlogWorld...it's called Zemanta.  I was impressed by it, but don't know enough to know what the drawbacks entail.

1:28pm • #2
Outside Blog

Rebecca- my head is swimming!  I've been copying & pasting links to articles that will help me with my blog and sending them to myself via email.  It looks like your method should save me some time.  I'm curious about Zemanta too.  I'll come back to check on the comments.

1:54pm • #3
Localism Sponsor

Some great ideas, I currently use google reader which allows me to star post etc... so if I like something I can go to my stared folder!

2:03pm • #4
473,566 Points 1 Featured Post Outside Blog Hit Router

Rebecca

Information that can readily be applied; thanks for the information.

2:41pm • #5
138,085 Points 29 Featured Posts Localism Sponsor Outside Blog

Lani- Excellent...notes to yourself fan very cool.

Amanda- First off thank you.  Second I reviewed Zemanta.  They had a similar tool (or maybe it was the same one) last year at Blogworld expo.  I think it's a good way to help people generate content, however, here are my caveats to that. 

When I create a post I want to use interlinking as much as possible, in other words I want to link to myself.  I want to also add photos, when possible that I have generate myself or images that I have altered myself.  If I link out I want to choose who I link out to or what resources I link out to.  The content inside of your post is the most precious commodity you have and so you want to be careful about what you promote and what you do with it...it's your most valuable property.  Vendors know this and of course they want to get inside of your blog post's content.

I wrote a post about that topic after I came back from Blogworld.  You can find it here if you'd like to take a read:  Your Blog's Content is A Commodity.  Treat it Like One.

I hope this helped.

3:20pm • #6
138,085 Points 29 Featured Posts Localism Sponsor Outside Blog

Kathy- I used this method to create a blog post that I published yesterday and then to pull some content and repurpose for a newsletter that I scheduled for this morning's delivery.

Dan- Excellent.  I have a Google Reader account too. 

Tom- You're welcome thanks for reading.

3:49pm • #7
1 Featured Post Outside Blog

Hi Rebecca-  I new there had to be a better way than bookmarking everything on my Active Rain page that I need to go back to.  Thanks for the info (again)!  --Sara

9:35pm • #8
NOV
06
138,085 Points 29 Featured Posts Localism Sponsor Outside Blog

Sara- That is one of the things I was thinking about as I was blogging it.:)

7:52am • #9
NOV
09

This is great stuff.  I will print it out and incorporte it into our Biz.

4:33pm • #10
138,085 Points 29 Featured Posts Localism Sponsor Outside Blog

Mike- Awesome.  I am glad you will be able to use t his.  It is a complete time saver.

9:51pm • #11
NOV
17
112,710 Points 1 Featured Post

There are some very good ideas here. Keep them coming!

7:59am • #12
NOV
20
292,161 Points 16 Featured Posts Outside Blog

Rebecca, yet another great post written for those of us who choose to learn and to use the tools that are out there to help us in writing great blog posts. Thanks so much for all of this great info!!

12:20pm • #14

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Rebecca Levinson, Real Estate Marketing Consultant

Lake Geneva, WI

More about me…

Real Skillz-Clear Marketing for Your Real Estate Vision

Address: Lake Geneva, WI, 53147

Office Phone: (262) 203-5231

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Real estate marketing blog chock full of real estate marketing tips, strategy, advice and inspiration to enhance your real estate marketing skills.

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