Content marketing has been around as long as marketing has been around.
And that’s a LOOOOONNNNNGGG time.
In fact, back before the internet, TV, radio, telephone, newspapers, and the USPS… content marketing was about all there was to sell your wares. You had some chickens, you were there in the market talking up why your chickens were so great and maybe even giving them a “taste” of it to reel them in.
Content marketing is giving people a “taste” of your best stuff and the value you can give them… in hopes of building that trust so the customer decides to do business with you.
But just over the past 5 years, it’s really caught on in the online marketing world. There are 2 big reasons content marketing works so well and is getting more popular.
First, Google loves great content…. and websites that update content often.
Second, with so many websites online today… content is a great way to differentiate yourself from your competitors
But the same issue has existed with Content Marketing, especially for real estate investors and agents that holds most people back from doing Content Marketing effectively as a part of their inbound online marketing strategy to pull in more real estate investing leads.
How To Write Effective Content With Less Effort?
The 2 main roadblocks that real estate investors and agents tell us are stopping them from doing more Content Marketing are…
- The time it takes them to write content
- How to decide what to write about
We’ll help solve both of those for you in today’s post.
So in this blog post we’re going to introduce you to the Content Marketing Pyramid to help you create more content with less effort (and make that content actually pull more traffic and leads for you that your competitors likely aren’t even going after)
The Content Marketing Pyramid: For Real Estate Investors
The Content Marketing Pyramid will help you shift your mindset around content marketing from, “It’s too hard and I don’t have enough time” to “This is much easier than I thought!”
Why The Content Marketing Pyramid Can Be Magical To Your Content Marketing Strategy
When I got started really learning how to drive traffic to my websites I started the same way everyone does.
I threw up a few blog posts… with no strategy at all… thinking people would miraculously land on the blog post and become a customer.
It doesn’t happen that way.
Every blog post I put on the website took me 2-3 hours to write, edit, and publish… and I thought I had to come up with unique real estate investing articles every week that I wrote from scratch.
It was a lot of work.
So I got discouraged pretty darn quickly because it was so darn time consuming, it was hard to come up with topics to write about that I thought were worth writing about from my brain, and I’d always end up quitting a couple months in.
Until I adopted a strategy similar to the content marketing pyramid above.
Here’s what following this framework for your content marketing for your real estate business can do for you.
It Helps You Easily Generate Effective Content For Your Real Estate Website That Positions You As The Expert
This post you’re reading right now is actually using a part of the content marketing pyramid.
The easiest way to come up with great content ideas is to get inspiration from other places.
That’s why I really love (but don’t use as often as I should) the bottom of the pyramid… “Curated Content“.
The Content Marketing Pyramid came from someone else’s website. I loved the concept and we decided to use it as inspiration for our own blog post (giving credit to Chief Content Officer Magazine).
You can get inspiration for your own content from lots of sources. Like BiggerPockets, our website, Inman News, Zillow, your local news websites… really anywhere.
I’ve seen blog posts that literally just took an infographic from another website, posted it, wrote a few sentences that were optimized for a keyword phrase they wanted to rank for… and they were able to grab a quick easy ranking with some great simple content.
Total time investment… maybe 15 minutes.
I suggest you focus on the bottom 2 sections of the pyramid…
- Curated Content (where you find content on other sites, use it as inspiration on your own website and give them credit)
- Unique Blog Posts And Pages (where you write more of that content from scratch or even use something else as inspiration like this post)
The rest of the pyramid is for the more advanced Content Marketer.
It Helps You Simplify Content Marketing In Your Mind
Too many real estate investors don’t want to put in the work to be successful.
They want to take the easy route… which I can tell you from personal experience, there isn’t an “easy” way as an entrepreneur.
But when it comes to content marketing, most real estate investors and agents immediately jump to the conclusion that it has to be tough and require a lot of work.
When you follow the pyramid and focus mainly on the bottom two sections, curating and summarizing other great content (60-70% of your content), and writing simple blog posts (30-40% of your content)… it really simplifies the process.
If you were going to write a blog post a week on your real estate investing website, here’s what I would do.
- Week 1: Curate and summarize an article in your own words from a local news station or blog’s real estate or financial section. 15-20 mins.
- Week 2: Write a blog post that answers a common question that your prospect thinks or asks. 15-30 mins.
- Week 3: Curate and summarize an article, youtube video, or an infographic you find in Google images 15-20 mins.
- Week 4: Curate a local news story in your area and tie it to a “hook” that resonates to your prospect. 15-30 mins.
We’re talking about a couple hours a month.
Everyone has a couple hours a month. If you don’t, you should think about cutting back on your cable TV or Facebook time ;-).
Content marketing done right is all about delivering value to your prospect and optimizing it for phrases that your prospects are typing into Google.
It’s not about being the best writer or having the most unique ideas.
Look at websites like the Huffington Post.
The majority of their articles are “curated” from other news sources that put the news story out first. They just gave it their own little twist and summary to the topic and posted it on their website.
So what’s the next step you should take? Get some content marketing going on your real estate websites this week!
Follow the Content Marketing Pyramid and let us know how it goes!
