"I'm new to blogging. How long will it take to get business?"
And the answer? The ever popular...
"It depends".
There are more than a few variables that directly impact your timeline to gaining business.
1. Do your blog posts have an opportunity to be seen by the public? Hint, if you're a Rainer and not a Rainmaker on this site, you can write the world's best public facing content and you'll get nada, zilch, zero publicity to your potential clients. Without a Rainmaker account, your work is not submitted to the search engines. No search engines, no consumers.
2. Are you writing content that meets the needs of your potential clients? If you have an established audience, you can write about ANYTHING. But if you don't, the majority of your blogging should be focused on unmet home buyer and seller needs (information about homes, new construction, niche information, etc.) to optimize your chance of being contacted.
3. What's your competition level? No other bloggers in your area? LOTS of them? Are you going head to head with Zillow and the other portals for popular keywords, or working the short tail terms?
4. How regularly do you post? Think of blogging as more of a marathon than a sprint. You need to steadily build relevant content.
5. Is it clear where you serve and how to reach you easily? Especially important if you work in an area that has multiple places in the country that share the name (or nicknames such as Tri-City, Tri-state or Tri-County".
6. Is your content easy to read? To be frank, if you need a PhD to interpret your work, the average consumer isn't going to bother. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, if your content is littered with typos and just all around bad grammar, that's not going to work on your behalf either.
7. Aesthetics. Ever seen the posts that fit the "wall of words" description? Small type. No spacing. Just one solid mass of type. You make your posts hard to read and again, you'll lose the potential clients. Throw in some visual eye candy.
8. Tone matters, especially in a flat medium like blogging. Assume EVERY post is the only post a potential client will read before making a decision to contact you. Rant posts might get engagement, they might even get you clients, but following the theory of like gets like, ranty posts get ranty clients. Is that what you need in your life?
9. Do you give yourself a shot with the SEO bots? I'm not an SEO expert, so I'm not going to get into optimizing keywords, ranking strategies or how long (or short) your posts should be, but if you don't get found by the bots and show up somewhere in the first page you're probably not going to get called.
10. Is your content evergreen (meaning it lasts year after year)? Some posts have short life spans, some have long life spans. Long life span posts (each subdivision specific posts) have a chance to work for you for years.
For me personally, it took about a year before I got my first call that led to a sale. When I look back on my blog roll, it's pretty obvious why it took that long. I basically didn't write the right stuff in the right way to get found. Once I learned to pivot to focus on the type of content that got us results, the frequency of our Google ranking improved and with that the number of opportunities.
You can shorten that time frame considerably by writing regularly with content that matters to YOUR potential customers. What works in my locality might not be best for yours, so watch your results and adapt.
Until next Tuesday, just Ask An Ambassador if you need help,
Bill & Liz aka BLiz
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