Today I had an excellent talk with several of the leading real estate agents in Sacramento. We were discussing the idea of blogging, and how important it is for the modern day business. There were about 14 people in attendance, and they all agreed that the benefits of blogging, including SEO, building trust, etc., were critical to their success.
When we started talking about costs, most agreed that blogging is not nearly as expensive as they had assumed. At a rate of once per week, professional blogging is only about $180 or so dollars per month (depending on rate and the number of weeks in the month), which is a fairly small investment for agents spending as much as $3000 a month on advertising.
But it’s still an investment, and so the decision is really about whether or not the risk is worth the reward.
Money in Real Estate
Because of time, there was a point I wasn’t able to drive home – namely, that because of the high commission that comes from selling just a single home, the value to a real estate agent is greater than the value of blogging to other small businesses, like psychologists and long care companies. That’s because in real estate, all you need is one single sale as a result of more than two years worth of blogging efforts to make your attempt at blogging worthwhile.
Imagine you’re an agent that makes $5,000 per sale. Weekly blogging will cost, on average, about $2080. In two years, that’s $4,160. If you sold only one home over a two year period as a result of your blogging efforts, you’re still profiting $840 off of your investment, and your blog will still be providing hits for years to come. You don’t need your blog to be that successful in order to have it pay off. If blogging helps convince just one or two home buyers over the course of a two year period to become your clients, you’ve already paid off the cost of blogging and profited from it, and that doesn’t even include the value that can come from Word of Mouth marketing, branding, trust development and more.
Blogging and Content Writing are Permanent
In addition, unlike other forms of advertising, the blog posts you create and the content you add to your site will never go away. Even if you stop blogging or drastically decrease the frequency, the blog posts you already created are still going to be generating hits and possible business for the rest of time – or at least until the internet is replaced by robots.
Blogging is beneficial in every industry. With psychologists, lawn care companies, etc., blogging helps develop trust, improves SEO, and more. But the profit for these businesses isn’t immediate because have to retain the client in order to keep earning money, since the profit is only a few hundred dollars up front. One client MIGHT cover the cost of the investment, but if the client drops out it may not.
In real estate that’s not the case. All you need to do is help sell a single property and you are going to make your money back and then some. This minimizes the risk dramatically, and it’s why blogging – and content marketing in general – is such a crucial component to a successful real estate business model.
