Charlie Allred

By Charlie Allred

We have all heard the statistic that 90 percent of all home searches start online. So how do we capture this online business?

My answer to this question is always: “You need a blog; your website should be a blog.”  I use the words website and blog interchangeably because a website without a blog is a static site, there is no new content added to it and it’s basically a yellow pages ad. For your website to be found by your potential client, you need to be adding new articles (blog posts) regularly.

I know this sounds daunting, you sell real estate and now you have to also write articles about selling real estate.

The goal of this post is to make your blog/website easier to manage. I know that maintaining a blog can feel very overwhelming and it’s often the last priority on your to-do list. But just think, when you need to find a location, a store, or a service provider, where is the first place you go to search? I’m sure your answer is the Internet. Real estate agents’ marketing is moving more and more to an online platform because that’s where the potential clients are searching.

In last month’s article, I emphasized the importance of keywords for your Pinterest boards. Let’s take a step back: The purpose of Pinterest is to drive traffic to your real estate website. I define “regular Pinterest users” as those who are browsing Pinterest for fun. These regular users are your potential clients and are potential traffic for your blog/website. If you are a “power Pinterest user,” you always have purpose in your pinning and your main goal is to drive traffic to your real estate website.

In a previous post, I mentioned the four categories of Pinterest boards you should include in your top 12 boards.  These categories are:

1. Your interests: cooking, exercise, kids, etc.
2. Real estate: this is all about helping buyers and sellers.
3. Home related: home organization, storage, home decor or anything home related.
4. Community: this is everything local. You can, of course, niche it down to “Scottsdale parks,” “Scottsdale festivals,” “Scottsdale kids,” – anything related to community events that bring value to your potential clients.

Once, you’ve done your keyword research for your Pinterest boards, you will have a ton of keywords that can all be used on your blog too. Keep a list of these keywords at your desk to refer to when you’re writing your blog posts.

It’s best to choose four or five topics that you will cover each month on your blog. If you write one article a week, you will cover each topic once a month.

Make sure your real estate blog topics are very similar to your Pinterest boards. If you are regularly pinning to your top 12 boards, you will notice some pins are more popular than others, these popular pins should become blog topics for your blog. Here are some examples:

• Local real estate: I write a Phoenix and Scottsdale market report each month.
• Community/Local happenings: An agent that I coach in Pinterest marketing writes about upcoming neighborhood restaurants in her area.
• Your interests: Utilize your pins that perform well as the topic.
• Home Related: Another area where you can utilize pins that are heavily shared.

If you use a pin topic that is popular to create a blog post, the best part is you can send traffic from Pinterest to your blog post. This creates instant traffic to your website and that particular blog article.

The next step is keeping the potential client on your website.

For example, if a potential client came to my website from a “Scottsdale restaurants” pin and it went to my blog post on the “5 Best Restaurants in Old Town Scottsdale,” I could then direct the visitor with a link to my post, “Districts of Old Town Scottsdale,” or “Top 7 Restaurant Patios in Scottsdale.” These other articles will likely be of interest to this potential client. Since you are writing on the same four or five topics each month, you can link to previous articles on the same topic within your blog.

For a quick starter guide to keywords, you can head to Pinnable Real Estate and download a free list of my favorite keywords in three topic areas (all home related categories): home staging, home organization, and home decor. These top six to eight keywords in each topic will give you a good starting point for using keywords on Pinterest.

If you want to learn more about Pinterest for your real estate business, head to Pinnable Real Estate to register for the Newbie Pinterest Online Course or the Advanced Pinterest Online Course (both are free).

Next month, I plan go more in depth on the topic of blogging. I’d love to hear your struggles and successes in blogging as well.

Charlie Allred is a Phoenix-based designated broker for Secure Real Estate and author of the book “Pinnable Real Estate: Pinterest for Real Estate Agents.” She is a Pinterest expert coaching agents on how to gain more leads, followers, and clients by using Pinterest. Learn more at her blog: www.PinnableRealEstate.com.