Time Saving Blog Tip for 2014
Dear Readers -
Rich Cederberg shares an excellent idea - in a clear manner.
We all need more time each day. Rich has detailed a way to make the post research time do double duty.
Another excellent point in his post is the depth of understanding he reached by thoroughly checking into each area. Rich, thanks for the great lessons!
Have a happy day -
Lynn
The longer you're in business, the busier you'll get (hopefully), so if you want to continue to blog you'll need to start to look for ways to maximize your time.
Some blogger's answer seems to be syndication - that is, write one article, then post it in multiple places.
Whether or not you believe that this duplicate content strategy is sound or not, I've never been a fan of this approach. Algorithms change, and what is OK today may not be OK tomorrow.
For me a better approach that I'm starting to use more and more for my market reports involves pulling data that I can use many times in many differnet ways.
Pull Your Data Once Then Use it Repeatedly
One time saver I've been using is when I pull data for market reports, I try to pull enough data that I'll be able to use it to create mulitiple blog posts.
Here's an example.
Last week I pulled zip code data from the Albuquerque MLS for 2013. Using a spreadsheet I created on Google Drive (easy to access from anywhere), I listed these numbers: total number of sales, average sales price, days on market, percent of short sales and foreclosures.
I had a ton of data, then the only questions was how many different posts can I get from this material?
So far I've created four posts using it:
- Top Selling Zip Codes in Albuquerque
- Most Expensive Zip Codes in Albuquerque
- Most Affordable Zip Codes in Albuquerque
- Zip Codes with the Most Short Sales and Foreclosures
Time permitting, I may write two or three more posts. These are relatively easy posts to write that do not take much time because they all follow the same format, and remember, the time consuming part, the research, was already done.
Create Relevant Pages on Your Website
As I wrote these posts, as I learned what zip codes were the ones I wanted to spotlight in my blog posts, I created zip code search pages on my website so I would have relevant information to link to. I hadn't created zip code search pages before this because key word research had shown me that consumers didn't search for homes by zip code.
However, just because people aren't searching by zip code doesn't mean that users on your website won't find the information useful. In fact, it may be especially helpful for people who are relocating to your area.
Another added benefit to creating new search pages on your website: the more ways you have to search, the more navigation links users have to click, the lower your bounce rate will be (bounce rate may be one of the metrics Google uses to rank web pages). Because of this, on my blog, my bounce rate is only 3.09%. That's pretty darn good.
Of course, once you've got your zip code home sales data at your fingertips you'll want to include it on the search pages you built. If you've already got these pages built, you may just want to add one or two short paragraphs to your existing content to freshen it up.
Wait, You're Not Done Yet! Promote Your Posts on Social Media
How you promote your blog posts is just as important, if not more so, than creating your post. After all, if you don't eyeballs on your content, what was the point?
Once you have search pages and blog posts written, then you'll have a treasure trove of content to spread around the web where duplicate content doesn't matter at all. Promote your blog posts on Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter utilizing different intro commentary to highlight different facts in your post.
Twitter is an especially good tool for this, due to it's short lived nature you can send your posts out multiple times with different intros and noone will care if it clutters up your home page.
Now I can hear some of you groaning when I mention Twitter, but as Bobby Carroll mentioned in this Google Hangout about social media, even if home searchers aren't scouring Twitter for market stats it can be a great way to get the attention of the news media and other places that may want to link to you.
Taking it One or Two Steps Further
There are other great places to share your already created content including Scoop.it, ShareBloc.com, RealtyTimes and List.ly, to name a few.
The best part of the social promotion strategy is that this part can be give to a support person to handle for you. While I wouldn't recommend turning over your entire social media strategy, especially commenting to an assistant, but you certainly can assign the responsibility of distributing content to the different social networks to one using Hootsuite or another tool.
Final Thoughts
Yes, this was a lot of information for one post. To help keep track of my zip code project, I made a list of the steps I wanted to accomplish and checked them off as I went.
Maybe you don't want to do zip codes? You could do a new area of town you haven't yet blogged about? In my case that's going to be the east mountains.
I'll have to by honest, I haven't completed all of them yet, due to time contraints, but one thing is for certain, I'm not short of easy to produce content.
Rich Cederberg, Albuquerque Real Estate Agent
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"I'll always keep your best interests in mind"
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