You want to be a successful blogger?
Different audiences need different approaches.
If you have a sphere of people that already follows you, you have a lot of freedom in choosing your topics. There's already a base level of trust, so it's easier to mix in topics that have nothing to directly do with real estate, but instead are about building relationships. Everybody eats, so your favorite recipe may be a great way to get interaction with your target audience. Posts about your grand kids, your cat, your dog, pictures from your garden, all become fair game. You'll still want some real estate posts to demonstrate your expertise and to remind people what you do for a living, but they don't need to be ALL you write.
If on the other hand you do not have a captive audience, you may need an entirely different set of topic choices. The free range audience has a different need, they need information that answers their questions.
Ever known any home buyer or seller that starts their home search with "beekeeping real estate agents near me" or "engineer real estate agents"? Not me. Those are things they find out about us later but those facts are not what will initially bring them to us.
Instead, the free range audience is using Google/Bing/Duck Duck Go or some other search engine to seek information and your job is to be at the top of the search results.
If you answer the questions they have:
Where can I find Cincinnati 55+ homes for sale?
Where can I build a new home in Mason Ohio?
Homes for sale with in-ground pools in (fill in school district)?
You'll notice the questions you can answer are long tail queries, not short tail.
You try for the top level "Homes for sale in Cincinnati" you're going to lose to Zillow/Trulia/Realtor.com and their millions of dollars of ad budgets and brand awareness. But they leave potential home buyers and sellers wanting when it comes to specifics. Regularly we have buyers (and the occasional seller) reach out to us because of subdivision specific posts and IDX search pages. Instead of a conglomerate, they're seeking the boots on the ground agent that has detailed knowledge about where they want to be and what they want to buy.
Bottom line, understand what type of audience you have for your blog. Either develop a larger captive audience, or throw out lots of digital seed to attract the free range audience.
Until next Tuesday, just Ask An Ambassador if you need help,
Bill & Liz aka BLiz
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