5 Ways to Quickly Generate New Content for Your CRE Website
Specializes in providing actionable insights into the commercial real estate space for investors, brokers, lessors, and lessees. He covers quarterly market data reports, investment strategies, how-to guides, and top-down perspectives on market movements.
Publishing quality content on your commercial real estate website is crucial for demonstrating your market knowledge, establishing your local authority, and driving traffic to your website.
But creating quality content takes time and specialized skill. And, as a busy commercial real estate broker, you have other business tasks that require priority!
That’s why real estate content writer, Michelle Clardie of KeyRealEstateResources.com, has put together this list of the top five ways to quickly generate new content for your CRE.
Quick note: if you need help creating your real estate website, you can use this free, step-by-step guide to building a real estate website.
#1 – Publish Content From Local Organizations
Your local Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Board might regularly publish newsletters with local news stories and calendars of events, both of which are relevant to your audience. Ask permission to share this information on your website. Boom! Instant, free content for your site!
If the Chamber or Board only distribute this content via email and print (as opposed to publishing it on their websites), you get a huge boost for your site because the search engines will read your site as the originator of the content (even though, of course, you’re giving full credit to the original creator). This increases your chances of getting organic search engine traffic for your site!
If the Chamber and Board already publish this information on their own sites, you can still use the content, with their permission. You just won’t get credit from the search engines for being the original creator. So you’ll be able to provide the valuable content to your existing readers, and you might be able to drive traffic to your site by promoting these posts on social media, but you won’t get organic search engine traffic in this case.
#2 – Offer Guest Posts and Sponsored Post Slots
Lots of writers are willing to provide free content to boost their own writing portfolio or grow their exposure. By getting an article posted on your site, the writer can add you to their list of publications, effectively boosting their resume. This is called a guest post.
Similarly, many brands are looking to boost their exposure and improve the SEO for their own website by getting articles published on sites like yours, with links back to their site. This is called a sponsored post, and in most cases, the writer will actually pay you to publish the article. This is just one of several ways to make money blogging about real estate (aside from the obvious money-making boost of increased sales and rentals).
You might find writers on sites like LinkedIn who you can reach out to about guest posting on your site. If you’ve had a blog up on your site for a while, you might even have writers already contacting you to ask for a guest post or sponsored post slot.
The primary downside to this strategy is that the quality of the writing can be hit-and-miss. You may have to invest a bit of time in editing your inexperienced writers. You’ll also want to check the links that your writers are using to make sure they are only linking to sources that you approve of. And make sure that you are the exclusive publisher for the piece so that your site gets credit as the originator.
#3 – Have Artificial Intelligence Create Your Content
AI content is hot today, with the recent release of ChatGPT 2. Chat GPT is a free program that allows you to provide prompts for the AI bot to “write” for you using your parameters.
For example, you can feed this prompt into ChatGPT: Write a 500-word blog post about the three most common mistakes made by commercial real estate investors. And you’ll get exactly that! The more information you give ChatGPT, the better the content.
You can:
- Offer background info. I am a commercial real estate broker in Los Angeles.
- Add a goal. The primary goal of the post is to inform commercial real estate investors about common mistakes made by other commercial investors, as well as ways to avoid these mistakes. The secondary goal is to promote my service as a broker.
- Set the tone. The tone of the article should be knowledgeable, professional, and helpful.
Of course you’ll want to carefully review your ChatGPT output to make sure the post flows well and is factually accurate. You can even make revisions by adding a new prompt like make this draft sound more casual.
One word of warning: search engines can tell when content is AI-written. And because search engines keep their algorithms under wraps, it’s unclear how search engines will treat this type of content. The worst-case scenario is that search engines could penalize sites that publish bot content by knocking those sites down in the search results. Even if they don’t start out penalizing bot content, they could flip the switch if they ever deem the content to be “spammy.” So tread lightly here.
#4 – Hire a Content Writer
If you are serious about generating organic leads from search engines, and you don’t have the time or desire to write your content yourself, hiring a content writer (or writers) is the way to go.
While this is the most expensive option on this list, it’s also the one that consistently generates the best results. Good content writers are knowledgeable in their fields, can optimize SEO, and can be relied on to reliably produce ready-to-publish work with little-to-no editing required.
This means you:
- Won’t have to spend any of your valuable time educating your writer on CRE,
- Can be sure that the writing will attract favorable attention from search engines, and
- Won’t have to remind your writer of deadlines or waste hours editing their work.
Finding a qualified real estate content writer isn’t difficult, but you need to know where to look. You can find writers for hire on sites like Fiver, Upwork, and ProBlogger. Or you can choose a specialized platform like ClearVoice, which thoroughly vets their writers and provides professional editing for each piece.
Regardless of which platform you choose, take a few minutes to research your writer. A quick online search of their name should return many articles they have written for other sites (although it’s important to remember that many writers “ghostwrite” content, meaning that the person they work for is the one being credited as the author). Serious writers will also have their own websites to explain their services and offer several writing samples.
#5 – Create Content in a Time-Friendly Medium Yourself
Writing in-depth content for your CRM website takes a lot of time. But there are other, more time-friendly mediums, that you can use to create quick content.
Take video for example. If speaking about a topic is easier for you than writing about it, simply record yourself providing the information, and publish it on your site as a video. As an added bonus, you can trim your full-length video down into bite-sized snippets for your social media channels.
Images are another solid option. You could, for example, publish a list of the most beautifully designed buildings in your area, using royalty-free images, with just a few explanatory lines of text per image. Or you could use your stunning listing photos to create posts about design trends or hot properties on the market.
Quizzes can also be a fun addition to your site. It doesn’t take much time to write quiz questions, but this type of post is popular on social media, and it could bring in more traffic!
Content Is Worth the Effort
Creating (or curating) quality content for your CRE website takes some time and strategy. But when you see those passive leads rolling in ‘round the clock from organic search engine traffic, the effort will have been worth it!
Author Bio: Michelle Clardie
Michelle Clardie is a seasoned real estate expert with over 15 years in the industry, covering everything from luxury property management to property tax consulting to investing. With an MBA in Management and Strategy, Michelle’s journalistic work has been featured on sites like Yahoo News, Inman, and Mortgage.com.
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