Does blogging take time? Of course it does, but it can also save you great deal of time. And what’s more, it can save you a great deal of heart ache and repetition. Repetition is death to business owners. If you’re doing something over and over again, it needs to be automated, wouldn’t you agree?
How Real Estate Practitioners Screw it Up
A lot of us (I’m included in this, so don’t think I’m playing the holy-than-thou card!) answer the SAME questions for prospects and clients over and over again.
- Do I qualify for the first time home buyers credit?
- So what’s new in the market?
- Is it a good time to list, or should I wait til spring?
- Do you have buyers looking for a home like mine right now?
- Why should I list with you as opposed to any other broker in town?
- Can you show me just your listings or anything in town?
- Should I get pre-qualified now or later?
- How much money do I need to put down (btw, Trulia did a survey that revealed over 40% of their users are currently under the impression they need to put down at least 20% to buy a house in the current market)?
Sound familiar? Feel free to grab each of these questions and use them for blog posts if you like. So where do real estate professionals screw up? They answer these questions over and over again! This takes a lot of time, don’t you agree?
Leverage Yourself with a Blog
So what’s a Realtor to do? Make a well-researched and comprehensive blog post that answers each question definitively. Then when someone asks you (you know it’s just a day or two away!), say “that’s a great question. I actually just published an article about this exact topic. Good timing! Please check it out here (place a link to your article here). Let me know what you think!”
So what happens?
- They get a great, comprehensive question to their question.
- You get the benefit of answering the question once, instead of over and over. Remember, TIME is your most valuable asset. If you’re going to have to do it multiple times, AUTOMATE.
- The prospect gets exposed to your blog and potentially subscribes.
- The prospect potentially shares the article with OTHER prospects, increasing your exposure even more.
- The prospect benefits even beyond this, because they will see other articles, quite possibly diffusing other questions they have in mind without you even having to deal with them. Needless to say, this saves you even MORE time.
- Your expertise becomes evident to the prospect, because it’s clear you are a resource of helpful information.
- Witnessing this builds trust and makes your working relationship go much smoothly.
We all know the value and pleasure of working with referrals. Why is it that working with a referral can be such a breeze? Because trust is established right out of the gate. You don’t have to fight for it. Blogging establishes trust just the same. Instead of a past client referring a client to you, clients refer themselves to you. This smooths things over, and that saves you time. Loads of it!
by on January 7, 2010
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