How a Blog Can Save Your Real Estate Business

Whether you heard it at a real estate tech conference or were advised by a colleague: Start a blog. Sounds simple enough. Set it up in Wordpress or another free program, add your credentials and start writing. But once you get into it, you soon realize it can be a bear. What do you write about? How often do you post? How do you get traffic to the blog, and where do you promote it? Basically, how do you turn the time, money and effort into something that stimulates your real estate business?

Tampa Bay Realtor Rae Catanese started a blog in 2006 when the phone stopped ringing and “sales tanked.” Little did she know that several years later the blog would be driving 85 percent of her thriving business that now includes three other agents to keep up with everything.

How did she do it? According to the St. Petersburg Times, “Catanese interacts with readers. She answers questions and finds ideas for new articles from the questions. She researches and writes, instead of just copying and pasting from other news providers.”

In the interview linked above, Ms. Catanese explains that consistency — slow and steady blogging — is partly the key to its success, plus patience.

“It’s going to be a challenge for anyone to start this,” she said. “Everybody wants instant gratification, and this didn’t happen overnight. You have to gain authority with search engines to be on the first page, and that can only happen if your site has been around a long time and you consistently post new content. That is what the search engines look for. There is a misconception about how much time goes into this. It has taken me five years to learn this stuff.”

Most importantly, Rae recognized the fact that technology is not going to go away, and that it’s changing the way people search real estate listings. Word of mouth and driving through neighborhoods has moved aside for Internet searches for real estate agent reviews and listings.

For more information on how to get started on a blog, click here.

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