Let's say you're a skeptic. You've heard about blogging as a means of building your business but it just doesn't make a lot of sense to you how posts about home buying and selling tips, local events and subdivisions and searches for houses with four car garages an in-ground pool and a barn can turn into paychecks at the closing table, but it can.
Now blogging isn't some silver bullet cure to doubling your business in 4 weeks or less. It's not like most of the "cures" you hear at some convention for $499 (but $399 if you act TODAY).
Here's the secret about blogging:
IT TAKES WORK & TIME.
From a cost perspective it's pretty cheap.
ActiveRain practically gives you the keys to the kingdom for virtually free. The annual charge gets less and less until it's FREE at 500,000 points. If you're dedicated to blogging you can hit that in about two years.
Now to really maximize your returns we've found that we needed to add two more tools to our blogging toolkit:
1. IDX Search
2. Wordpress site
We use IDX Broker (Platinum) version for about $80/month.
Because we're fortunate enough to have learned how to maintain and tinker with our own Wordpress site (MANY THANKS TO OTHER RAINERS FOR SHARING AND TEACHING), our Wordpress expenses are minimal. A few dollars here and there for hosting, a couple of premium plug ins that make my life easier and all told our site is a BARGAIN. All told we're not spending much more than a grand a year for our blogging & Wordpress/IDX site.
Our business is basically 100% organic. We don't run pay per click campaigns, we don't buy zip codes from anyone, we don't buy grocery cart ads or school scoreboard ads or anything of the sort.
We blog.
We build pages on our WP site, search after search.
We develop our niche.
Our blog drives traffic to our WP site and from there we get calls.
And many of those calls are from buyers that are VERY close to making a decision and want agent help.
Now I have no pretense of every being the number one agent in my market. Fact is I'm pretty happy to close 20-30 transactions a year and blogging is a VERY cost effective way to hit our targets.
Counting pendings we have 22 transactions to close in 2016 and another four new construction for 2017. Although it's not ALL we do, our niche focus on patio homes and new construction patio homes means we pushed up our price point per transaction. Our 2016 production is currently 50% ahead of 2015's total.
All four 2017 transactions are COMPLETELY due to our AR/WP/IDX work.
Of the 22 transactions for 2016, at least 12 are due to blogging or fruit of the vine from blogging/WP/IDX.
While in the past we've had agent to agent referrals this year just hasn't worked out that way.
But here's the other aspect of our business this year: we've been doing more referrals to other agents in our office. We get a buyer or seller call that doesn't fit our core business or catches us at a time when we're swamped, we refer them out. If it works out for the other agent, great. And if it doesn't, no loss on our part because it wasn't in our best interest to take them on.
The fact is that blogging to the extent we have means we get more opportunities because in addition to the long tail searches we get found more and more often for terms like "real estate agents in Mason".
Bottom line, blogging CAN add to your bottom line, it's just a matter of focus and targeting for YOUR market.
Good luck!!
Until next Tuesday, just Ask An Ambassador if you need help!
Bill of Liz and Bill aka BLiz
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