Your Blog and Creating Content That Will Serve You in the Future

As a real estate agent, the idea of starting a blog and finding the time to keep it up-to-date may be very overwhelming. On one hand, a blog can be an integral part of your marketing plan and can help you to build your own brand as an agent. On the other hand, blogging can also often become a time consuming activity. As a busy agent, you may question the amount of time that you spend keeping your blog current if you're not seeing results.

I recently attended a blogging and social media conference, and one of the key points that I took away from it was as follows: everything you do on your blog should be something that will serve you now and in the future. Whether it's next week, or whether it's five years from now, your content should always be beneficial to you in some way.

When crafting a blog post, going viral should never be the end goal. Instead, think about how you can create good content that will serve you on a continuing basis. Some questions you may want to ask yourself are:

• Will creating this resource now save me time in the future?
• Will this topic help establish me as the expert in my niche?
• Will these keywords help me with search engine rankings?

Asking yourself these questions should help you determine which topics and resources would get the most good from your time. Ideally, you would want to create resources that you're going to benefit from on an ongoing basis. What are some ways that you can do that?

Create Assets That You Can Reuse

Resources that won't go out of date can be used continuously on your blog. Do you have some great tips for creating the best porch appeal? Or what about a guide on how to prepare for a showing? Package these in an appealing way and link back to that original post whenever relevant.

Here's an example: create a series of blog posts on questions that home sellers who are empty nesters may have about downsizing, and create a roundup post that links to each of these posts. In your blog sidebar and in each of these series posts, use an eye-catching graphic to link to this roundup post.

Plan Keywords in Advance

Whether you use an editorial calendar to plan what's coming up on your blog, or whether you write a handful of posts at once and schedule them to be published over a longer period of time, knowing what you are writing about in the future can actually help you prepare current posts for that future information. You can then prep your current readers for upcoming posts, but more importantly, you can also save time when going back to past posts that you think should link to this new post. Instead of needing to rework content so it all flows well together, you'll just need to link already worked-in keywords to your new post.

Linking older posts to a newer post will help search engines recognize the newer post for the linked keywords, and will help drive users from these older posts to the new ones.

Bring in Additional Experts

As a real estate agent, you're already an expert when it comes to your specific niche. That doesn't mean that you're necessarily an expert in every step of the home buying or selling process. Bringing in another expert for an interview or a guest post can provide you with great content for your blog that you can refer people to in the future.

For example, think about bringing in a home inspector to do an interview on what kind of things homebuyers should be looking at when purchasing a home. Then when a reader has a question about home inspection, you can always refer them to this post!

Since time is one of your greatest assets, you definitely want to be crafting blog posts so you don't have to recreate or adjust what you've already done. Planning ahead can help you prepare for future posts. Providing expert information can help frame you as an expert and can provide you with answers for questions you may get moving forward. These are three simple ways that you can create content on your blog that will benefit you both now and in the future.

How do you plan on writing content for your blog that will help you on an ongoing basis?

To view the original article, visit the Lone Wolf blog.