🌇 Maximizing Real Estate Leads with Content

📖 Book

This is a summary and interpretation of Content Inc. by Joe Pulizzi, focusing on the most relevant ideas for real estate agents in the Philippines.

🏆 Goal

Get more clients.

🚩 Problem

You get some traffic to your website and social media, but very few visitors become clients.

💡 Solution

Develop content to build an audience around a topic related to your real estate business so they keep coming back to you as the expert on that topic.

🎯 Outcome

Many in your audience not only choose you as their agent, but recommend you to their friends and family.

✏️ Steps

To create content that will position you as an expert in your niche, you must perform these five steps:

Unlock Your Niche Potential

Find an urgent problem in real estate that you can solve by providing valuable information.

Identify your sweet spot

It’s easy to write about your interests, but not everything that interests you will interest your clients.

To find what Pulizzi calls your sweet spot, ask yourself, “What keeps my clients up at night? Is it finding the right property? Is it dealing with paperwork? Or is it dealing with a difficult seller?”

This will help you identify the areas where your industry-specific knowledge intersects with your clients’ needs.

That combination of what you know about real estate and your client’s pain points or desires is your sweet spot.

Discover your content tilt

To stand out from the crowd, find your content tilt. A content tilt is a different idea or perspective from what other real estate agents are talking about.

While your sweet spot ensures you’re helping your client with a problem that actually exists, your content tilt sets you apart from the tens or hundreds of agents addressing the same problem.

One way to discover your content tilt is to use Google Trends to find an untapped area of your sweet spot.

Examples of a content tilt…

• Real Estate + Homeowners Looking to Sell + Interior Design. If you are knowledgeable about interior design, you can post bite-sized social media clips on how to style a property for maximum appeal, and give advice on how to make a space more functional and attractive.
• Real Estate + Digital Nomads + Expat-Friendly Properties. You can target expats looking to relocate to your region of the Philippines. You'd provide information on the best areas for expats to live based on their preferences, insights on the local culture, customs, and lifestyle, and showcase properties tailored to their specific needs.

The Template for Unbeatable Content Strategy

A solid content strategy is your secret weapon for staying ahead of the competition.

Choose one platform

If you try to publish on multiple platforms from the beginning, you'll burn out fast.

Instead,  focus on one platform to grow your audience fast and gain traction.

When choosing a platform, consider:

• The type of content you’re looking to create.
• The best format for the stories you will tell.
• Your audience’s favorite hangout.

Come up with ideas

Coming up with new topics every day can quickly become tedious.

To prevent this, brainstorm ideas ahead of time.

One way to ensure endless content is to stay up-to-date on the news and comment on it. How does it relate to your content tilt? Talk about that.

• Being “the trade magazine for your industry”, as Pulizzi suggests, would not only keep your content fresh and relevant, but also grow your authority on your chosen platform.

Underrated benefit: the flexibility to choose a topic that suits your mood or current events makes content creation more enjoyable.

Create a content calendar

Relying solely on motivation to decide when to create content will result in infrequent publishing, which will slow your growth.

To ensure that you always have something relevant and timely to share with your audience, create a content calendar. This is essentially a schedule that lists the topics you plan to cover and when to cover them.

By following a content calendar and publishing even when you’d rather binge-watch your favorite K-drama, you will maintain a consistent online presence that generates leads and establishes trust.

Rocket Fuel for Building a Raving Fanbase

People who subscribe to your content are much more likely to become clients than people who don't hear from you regularly.

Start an email newsletter

Blasting a tweet asking your followers for their opinion on your latest video about properties in Pangasinan may not reach people who actually care about that topic.

To get meaningful feedback, you’ll want to connect with them directly.

This means going beyond spraying social media posts to anyone and everyone, and leveraging more targeted methods, such as building an email list, Pulizzi’s preferred method.

Your email newsletter should offer something not available anywhere else, such as exclusive real estate market insights, expert advice, or early access to upcoming listings.

Promote your email offering on social media

It will take a while for prospective clients to find your email newsletter through organic search engine growth.

For faster email list growth, post engaging content that aligns with your content tilt on social media.

Make this content informative, relevant, and engaging. Once in a while, link to the sign-up page for your email newsletter and let scrollers know how amazing it is.

Whether you’re using paid advertising or simply sharing your content on your social media channels, track your likes, shares, and comments to see what spikes dopamine and double down on it!

The Content Profit Powerhouse

All the hard work paid off and now you've got a large fan following. Time to enjoy the fruits of your labor (and maybe even do a little dance)!

Find a way to make money in the short-term

Pulizzi suggests that for content-driven businesses, "$5 million in five years is most certainly within reach for anyone in the world".

In the short-term, though, you’ll have to get creative and generate some quick cash as you build your ideal monetization model.

Ideas…

• Consulting services for clients looking to buy or sell properties. Offer professional appraisals, for example, to help sellers set a realistic price or help buyers make an offer.
• Market analysis and research. Clients may want to know more about the real estate market in a specific area, including trends in property prices, supply, and demand. Clients will pay to make informed decisions about buying or selling property.

Develop your revenue model

The quick cash you earned to stay afloat might not be the most profitable revenue stream you’re capable of building.

To scale your content business, explore multiple revenue sources.

Examples…

• Paid appearances. For example, offer speaking engagements at events such as real estate conferences or webinars. Pick topics you’re knowledgeable about, such as investment strategies or local market trends, and pitch them to event organizers and webinar hosts.
• Affiliate marketing. Partner with companies that offer products and services related to real estate, such as home improvement stores or property investment sites. By promoting them to your audience, you’ll earn a commission for each sale made through your affiliate link. Note that these don’t need to be Philippines-based businesses. If your target audience (which could include OFWs and nomad capitalists) will buy from them, they’re fair game.

Set and Forget: The Recipe for Automatic Content

Turn your eighty-hour work week into an eight-hour work week.

Identify the roles you need to scale production

With so many responsibilities on your plate, it can be challenging to publish consistently.

To grow faster, hire help. First, identify the key roles necessary to scale production and deliver high-quality content to your audience.

Examples…

• Hire a Content Strategist to repurpose your long-form content into multiple pieces and publish them on different platforms.
• Hire a Brand Manager to weave a digital quilt, stitching together threads of your online presence into a warm, inviting blanket that beckons your audience to snuggle up to your brand wherever they roam.
• Enlist the services of a skilled Graphic Designer to imbue your every digital creation, social media account, and website with a harmonious, visually enchanting essence that transports your audience to a realm of aesthetic wonder. (that got flowery)

Create systems

Some content teams are unable to maintain a consistent quality and style.

If you find your colleagues improvising in their daily tasks, create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), step-by-step instructions for each stage of content creation.

For each content type, create a short SOP for each of the below.

• Content Creation: What are the steps to create this type of content? Who will be producing it?
• Review: A second person should review the content to check accuracy and style.
• Publishing: Define the process for publishing the content to the target platform.
• Performance Analysis: Write the steps for analyzing content performance, including views, likes, follows, shares, etc.

Outsource content production

As your influence grows, you may stumble upon more content creation opportunities than your team can manage.

Once you have systems producing content consistently, and can thus measure the impact of any changes you make, it’s time to outsource!

For every time-consuming content task your team performs…

• Ask: Can I hire someone, or buy an AI app, or a combination of the two, to do this for a lower rate than I currently earn?
• If not, go to the next task.
• If so, try different combinations of freelancers and AI tools to see which one saves you the most time and money.

🧰 Tools

• GummySearch • Discover your sweet spot and content tilt on Reddit.
• Semrush Topic Research Tool • Produce topic ideas and compare their difficulty so you know which ones are easiest to rank for in Google.
• Newsletter OS • Build your email offering with this treasure chest of resources.
• Printful • Help loyal fans support you as you grow other revenue sources.
• Splasheo • Repurpose your long form videos into bite-sized clips for social media.
• Levity • Automate your most tedious tasks.