If you want your real estate firm to totally dominate its market space, creating incredible content is still one of the ways to do it. A recent study by the CAM Foundation showed that the marketing trend that was going to trump all other online methods of attracting online traffic was content marketing.
The good news is that based on studies and surveys, businesses still know where to place their online efforts. It’s also notable that email marketing is still one of the top methods that can be somewhat automated and utilized as well.
The downside to this is that the lazy man’s path to online success is going to get tougher. Happily, we’ve long passed the days of keyword stuffing and posting irrelevant and random information, and moved to a point where outstanding content and information is the order of the day.
Having said that, the new objective for website owners and entrepreneurs that want to generate interest in their businesses is to have amazing content in every piece of marketing copy they produce.
Recently, I reviewed several websites of top real estate investment firms and developers. In almost every case, the landing page copy was boring and irrelevant to the needs and desires of the people landing there. Actually, I’d be surprised if I found out that the sites were converting at all.
It’s not that these companies were unsuccessful businesses, but they were probably not bringing in prospects and new clients by their web sites. Obviously, the grunt work was being done by salesmen or women that did a lot of cold calling from leads. There’s nothing wrong with that if you like forking out high commissions to these people or having professional counselors spend most of their time doing hard –core sales work instead of managing portfolios and giving their clients quality services.
The reason why using a lead generating website would be so much better is for several reasons:
- Using a landing page, if done right, will enable you to separate the tire kickers from the people who are really interested in what you have to offer. So, a landing page can be used to prequalify your prospects so that you will know who is truly interested. By going to your landing page and filling out your opt in form, they are basically raising their hand and saying, “Yes, please tell me more about what you have to offer because I am interested.”
- In the world of lead generation, having people go to your landing page and fill out a form so that you know they want you to contact them is extremely easy. When you consider all of the other ways of generating leads like cold calling, running advertisements, speaking engagements, social media coddling and so forth, a good solid landing page that converts well is a gold mine that is cheap, and will save you a bunch of time.
- Having a good landing page will enable you to place your offers in front of prospects. Instead of having to send out a direct mail piece with a response card, you can place your offer online and it will be seen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It will work for you while you are sleeping, eating, working or whatever you happen to be doing, and if you have a compelling message with an irresistible offer and it, and the copy is solid you’ll get leads without lifting a finger. (Of course you will need to have copy written for your site professionally, so that your traffic will convert. However, if you spend the money and get it done right, you will quickly see the financial benefits.)
- Once you have used your landing page to collect data about your clients, you can then use that data to find out more about what your clients are interested in. Usually, opt -in forms on landing pages ask for at least an e-mail address. Once you have that address you can use it to send other messages to engage your audiences which will help you find out what they are interested in. It is not uncommon for email marketers to ask subscribers to fill out a simple survey once in a while. This will help you collect more data on what these people are interested in, and how you can add more services and ideas to your business. Think about it: it is information about your prospects that you would normally have to pay a lot of money to find out about.
So, why should you have great content on your website?
Good, solid content will get crawled and indexed better by search engines as well as being passed around and shared. This will give content more reach while allowing your posts and articles to be visible to the types of people that would be interested in your business. Not only that, but if your content is sterling, then you will get noticed by other people in your industry that are professional, and they will share your content with other professional’s in your industry, thus giving you authority status.
Here is a video that will show you how to create content in a reasonable amount of time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmXXz65auIo
Once again, people that read your articles will be interested in your line of business and come to your site and they will already be primed for what your niche is. If your articles are about the real estate development industry, then chances are they will already be a rather selective audience. They certainly won’t be looking for articles on how to make fishing lures or bake cookies.
Here are a couple ways to make content on your site work for you.
- Create totally original content. You can’t use any black-hat tricks or content generators to create content for your site. The way this type of software works is you type in some words into fields the software provides, and then the software magically creates articles for you. You barely have to do any work. However, most of the content created makes little sense and almost comes out looking like gibberish. If you are in a business where you’re trying to build your reputation, then this type of content could do a lot of harm. The last thing a business that deals in professional real estate services needs to do is to present articles that look like an illiterate person wrote them. Another avenue to getting content on your site would be to hire a writer to create content for you. Once again, trying to go the fast and cheap route here can get you into trouble. People that freelance cheaply, like those that sell their services on Fiverr, will not produce great content for you. You will need to hire someone that understands how to create content that will engage readers in your niche market. So, you are either going to have to hire folks that know how to create great content for you or do it yourself and that is going to cost you marketing dollars. There’s nothing wrong with that if the content you’re writing is bringing home the bacon.
- Make well written and useful content. Sure, content is going to be king for a while, but that doesn’t mean your content should be thrown together in a slap-dash manner. You need to research your topics and give your audience the best information you can muster. One of my pet peeves is entrepreneurs that throw together info-products that are obviously substandard. I believe that the days of creating ho-hum info products are coming to a close as well. If you’re going to create an information product, then it had better be good, because at this point, people’s hard drives are jammed with crappy e-Books. Businesses that create well written material that engages their readers are the ones that will get noticed, and that will include information products, white papers, blog posts and anything else that is information based. If you are going to use content as a lead generator, then you need to make it well written and useful.
- Try to post regularly and often. You shouldn’t try to create 3000 word posts if you are trying to run a business. Even Stephen King can only turn out about 1500 really good words a day. You might be better off writing posts that are 1000 or less unless your business is blogging. (If you want to write blog posts for a living, then you’ll need to spend a ton of time writing and researching.) However, it is sometimes more difficult to write shorter posts that longer ones, so write your posts the length you need them to be to get your message across. Frequency of posts is something that search engines notice, as well as how SEO for your articles has been handled. Keywords, links and other factors will figure into how you will rank for your posts on the search engine results pages.
Content is going to be a key factor in generating traffic in the foreseeable future. I would suggest you read some articles on how to create incredible content before beginning to write for your business.
Here are a few relevant links to get you started:
How Long Should My Blog Posts Be? – Forbes Magazine.
A Data Driven Answer to How Long a Blog Post Should Be – Neil Patel.
Boost Blog Traffic Site – Jon Morrow. If you are new to blog posting,, then read all of the Beginner articles on here.
Mark “Elmo” Ellis writes advertising copy for real estate developers and real estate investment companies. If you’d like a FREE report on How You Can Increase Your Website’s Response Rate By 72% Or More, contact him immediately at the email below and he will promptly send it to you.
Email: elmo033057@gmail.com