Bill Gassett”Actually it was fairly quick. I first started seriously blogging around eight years ago. In the first few years I started blogging I would estimate that I had at least a handful of deals directly due to people seeing a blog post and calling me because of it. While a handful of deals is decent production, I would not consider that earth shattering.
This all changed in my third year of blogging for a couple of reasons. The first reason is, the more content you write the greater chance you have of getting business. You really will not start seeing business until your blog becomes established both from the standpoint of people who follow you, along with coming up in more Google searches. It is good content that drives traffic. This is an area that most real estate agents fail at. They don’t spend enough time creating what would be considered “epic” content. Many do what they can to just to get by.
As with anything else in life- you get back what you put in. One of the things I am conscious of is never hitting the publish button until I feel the content is really worth reading. What most people do not realize is that the average length of a blog post on the first page of Google for a competitive search is 2050 words. The average REALTOR® will type a 500 word article and will wonder why they never see their posts in a search. This is one of the reasons why!
What really changed my business when it comes to blogging is when short sales became en vogue. With so many people suffering because of the great real estate collapse, I jumped at the opportunity to help those who were in dire straits by writing about short sales. I would get people from all around the country calling and emailing me daily. It was absolutely amazing!
One of the smartest things I did was to add language to the end of all my blog posts stating “if someone outside of Massachusetts needed to find a short sale REALTOR® in their area I would help them find one”. I was averaging around $45,000 a year just in the referrals I was sending to other agents around the country who also handled short sales. Think about that for a minute. My blog was paying me that much money for just picking up the phone and calling another REALTOR®! This was just for referrals and doesn’t even speak to the fact that I had tons of people in my own area listing short sales with me.
One of the best things about a blog is that it establishes you as an authority, if you do a good job writing. People were starting to recognize me as a “short sale expert” even though I never once ever said that about myself. The blog established that for me. Over the last seven years I have sold over 100 short sales. Nearly all of this business came to me from my real estate blog.”