Episode #34 – The Secret To Blogging For Motivated Sellers

You're listening to the REI Marketing Nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of Ad Words Nerds, a high tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition and live a freer, more awesome life. And now, your host, Dan Barrett.

Dan: Alright, hello everybody and welcome to this week's REI Marketing Nerds podcast. This is Daniel Barrett here from AdWords Nerds, how are you? My stomach is rumbling in the background. I was a little sick this morning. I was trying to fend off a cold because I'm going to have a busy weekend and I was chugging apple cider vinegar and drinking pureed garlic and all sorts of disgusting stuff, and I think in the process of doing all that I forgot to eat breakfast. [0:01:09.8] So if you can hear my stomach in the background, that's what that is. So, how are you? I hope you're doing great, hope you are killing it. This week I want to talk about content, and content for real estate investors. This is something that a lot of people think they know about, but I think very few investors really do well, and I think there's a lot of misinformation and I want to clear some of that up, and I want to give you a pretty clear path for how you can move forward and use this to differentiate yourself in your market.

Just as a bit of background, real estate investing and specifically getting deals, leads, appointments online, this is really a matter of you being better than your competition. If you look at any market, almost every market's got multiple real estate investors that are doing the online thing, maybe they've got an Investor Carrot side or they've got a lead propeller side or whatever. [0:02:09.6] There are going to be people out there trying to compete online. Google's going to have ranked those people. Basically Google, it's a popularity contest with only one person whose opinion matters and that's Google. So Google looks at this group of your competitors and says, "Okay, this guy, he's the best, he is going to be on top and then this person is second, this person's third”, you know, the majority of the time. Now, it is true that in general we want to be the best and we want to be the highest possible quality that you could possibly be. And generally, that's going to be good for us, it's going to be good for Google, but really if the goal here is to get leads, all we need to be is better than the next guy. All we need to be is better than the person on top, and if we can do that systematically and consistently, we will rank. [0:03:03.6] So it's not about being perfect, it's about being a little bit better than our competition. Now, what does that mean better than our competition? Well essentially a lot of the times, and not always, but a lot of times it means we need to have better ranking signals and a ranking signal that matters quite a bit and is important to Google is the amount of content we have on our site, the amount of times we use valuable keywords on our site and how often our sites are updated and having content like on a blog or something like that is a way of checking all three of those boxes. It puts lots of real estate investing, specific content on the site. We're going to naturally use keywords that are important, we're going to update the site frequently, which Google is going to like, and if we're writing really good content, this is sort of skipping ahead a little bit, we can generate links to our site. [0:04:01.8] That's another really, really valuable ranking signal. So content is generally a pretty good way getting a lot of leverage in trying to rank our website and doing a lot of things at once.

Now here's where that tends to go wrong in the investing space. If you go, and I suggest that you actually go do this, go look at your competitors' blogs, go look at any real estate investing blog and check out the articles that are there. What are people posting as this content? Generally, it's going to be extremely thin, what we call thin content. This is kind of like low quality, low information density stuff and it's very hard to imagine any actual real person reading any of this stuff. Or if you've got a blog post it's like how to sell your house fast in Tennessee, that's not meant for any actual person. [0:05:01.4] It is purely meant for Google. It's just going through the motions in order to say the right keywords more times than we'd be able to do otherwise; it is purely performative with Google being our audience. I want to be clear that I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Lots of people do lots of stuff just to rank better in Google. Ranking bettering Google is worth a lot of money, so hey, if it works, do it. And in the beginning in the early days of real estate investing and in the early days of online marketing this absolutely worked and absolutely did the trick and that's why people do it. But the problem is, we're not in the early days of online marketing and we're not in the beginning of competition for real estate investors online. We are in, probably what I would call the middle stages. What worked in the beginning isn't what's going to work now and this is exactly what we're seeing. [0:06:04.4] What we're seeing is that everybody does this kind of low information density, thin content strategy, and because everybody does it, it gives nobody an advantage, and if it gives nobody an advantage, well my question is why are we doing it. Now the good news is there is a way to do this so that it actually gives you a significant advantage in your marketplace and that's what I’m going to talk about next.

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[0:07:08.3] So if the old way, this think content strategy isn't working, what does work? Well content itself is quite valuable but it's only valuable in the sense that it does a couple things. One, it's got to be relevant. It's got to have valuable keywords in it, it's got to be about the thing that we're trying to attract, in this case motivated sellers, and it's got to be about selling your house, got to be about real estate. But not just about those things because you think about, we're also trying to generate signals for Google about where we're located. These are localized search signals. You're not investing probably anywhere, you're investing in a certain area, certain market. And so content can be about the market as well. Now on top of that, it's got to keep people on the site. I think the rule that content can really play is being actually interesting enough so that someone might actually want to read it, and if someone's reading it, they're spending a longer period of time on our site and they are engaging with our site more often. [0:08:11.3] Now I don't know this for a fact, because you know Google doesn't tell us exactly what goes into their ranking algorithm, but I will tell you that in AdWords Nerds with our SEO clients, because we do full service SEO for real estate investors, we do notice a correlation between time spent on site, meaning the amount of time that the average visitor is spending on our website and how that website ranks. So I do think that writing content that engages people and keeps them reading, keeps them on the site, that can provide really valuable ranking signals on top of the fact that I think that somebody just engaging with a lot of our stuff and reading our material is actually just more likely to go with us in general, so we're getting kind of a dual benefit there. [0:09:00.1] I think it's going to be an easier close as a deal and I think we're sending positive ranking signals to Google. The third piece is that I think content has to give us a way of engaging with our communities in such a way that it can help us generate links.

I think the problem with how a lot of investors do link building is they just go for something that's easy and fast. This is typically something you can buy. You go on Fiverr, go on UpWork, find somebody that says they're going to build you links, pay them $50, $100, $500, and they go out and they build links. But the problem is, link building is hard. It should be hard. It gives you a massive benefit. It gives you a massive advantage and ranking, as I mentioned before, ranking in Google for these kinds of keywords can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, we should expect it to be hard, to build something that's going to give us such an advantage in a pursuit of something so valuable. [0:10:06.1] So investors generally, and I'm not pointing fingers, but I think that investors generally have been fed this line where, "Oh yeah, pay me some money, I'm going to build you a bunch of links." it's just not true, and I'll give you a real perfect example.

We have a client of ours, client is doing SEO for us and we're doing our kind of typical slow link building strategy. Well, this person had gone out previously to working with us, had paid someone to build links for them, and those links took a long time to get indexed by Google, but when Google did index them, it realized these links are essentially spam and it knocked this investor’s website off the map almost overnight. Literally they were de-ranked for hundreds of keywords. They lost thousands of positions overnight because Google found this low-quality link building work. [0:11:06.6] You may remember a couple weeks ago I actually did an episode on this. That was a different client, this happened twice in like the last couple months. I think it's going to happen a lot more as Google gets better and better at finding this stuff. So again, link building is difficult. Well, how do you do legitimate link building that is really going to help you and isn't going to come back and bite you in the butt? And the answer is by building really powerful content that people in your community actually want to engage with and link to. It's harder than it sounds but it's valuable. So again, we should expect it to be hard.

So, content can fulfill a lot of these things, can perform a lot of really valuable roles in our business and I haven't even got into repurposing that content on channels like social, like Facebook for example. [0:12:00.0] So there are a lot of ways to use content. Now, I think the problem with content is that people find it very hard. I think investors, specifically investors are pretty busy and investors find it very hard to do content consistently, which is one of the keys. So, you have a variety of options. We're actually developing a full-fledged content service for real estate investors so you can always hire content service, I think that kind of thing makes sense, but I think the thing to remember and to look out for when you're thinking about using a content service is one, is the content original. In our service every single piece of content we create for every single investor is original. Original title, original language, original points, everything's original. We don't use templates, we don't use old blog posts. It would be a lot cheaper, but it's just not as good.

Then the second thing to look out for is like just what's the quality. Is this something that you're just putting up to put up? [0:13:00.3] I mean at this point, honestly, it's like yeah, you can fill your blog with this kind of low effort stuff, and you know, it's whatever. I don't think it hurts you but you're kind of at the point where I don't think it matters a whole ton, so it's like why are you doing it? If you're going to do it, let's do high-quality work. Let's do actual articles that are well researched, that are relatively in-depth, above 500 words that someone put effort into. And I think we can all tell like how much effort did someone put into this. So just ask yourself like would someone ever save this article to read later or print it out to read, and if the answer is no, then I don't think you need to do it.

The third thing is just if you're going to pursue content, and I think you should, you've got invest in it. You've got to think of this as a whole additional marketing channel. When someone does AdWords or Facebook ads you think of it as a marketing channel that you invest in. When you're doing social media you think of it as a marketing channel you're investing in. [0:14:01.6] When you do your direct mail you think of it as a marketing channel you're investing in. Your content is the exact same thing. It is an active marketing channel that can make you a ton of money, so invest in it. It doesn't have to be money. It could be time, it could be effort. If you don't have time or effort it could be money, but invest something into it if you expect to get something out of it.

Now a lot of investors will say like, "Well, no one wants to read my content, no one cares about real estate investing." And the thing I always say is like, "Hey, there's a whole TV network that basically just shows videos of people flipping houses literally all day every day, so yes, people do want to consume content about real estate investing. It's just got to be good." I don't mean to say that you have to be HDTV quality, you don't, but answer this question. If the thing that you're doing, and this applies to content, but applies to any kind of marketing you're doing it real estate investing. [0:15:00.3] If the thing that you're doing is easy and it's cheap, why do we expect it to make us tons and tons of money? To help us do dozens of deals? Why do you expect that? You don't expect to go in the gym and lift a one-pound weight three times and then expect to get a ton of muscles. You don't expect that when you start a business you just kind of put a sign outside your door and people are suddenly battering down your door to get in and give you money. Things that produce high amounts of value are almost necessarily difficult, require investment, require effort on somebody's part. Now the ROI on this can be absolutely massive but don't think of it as something where it's like, "I got to set it and forget it and I don't never have to think about it again." Either put the effort in yourself or work with somebody that knows what they're doing and is going to put in the effort for you. But remember that as a content producer this stuff can be difficult, it can be time consuming, but the value, the value is really there. [0:16:00.9] To take it back all the way back to the beginning, remember that you don't have to be perfect, you just have to be better than everyone else. And I got to be honest, I've said this before, the bar is low in the real estate investing world. It's not hard to be better than anyone else. Just invest in the channel.

I hope that makes sense. Hey, if you are listening to this and you are not in our free Facebook group, the REI marketing nerds Facebook group, you’ve got to get in there because I'm in there every single day, I do free trainings. I’ve got kind of bunch of video stuff. I'm in there answering questions. I go live and it's just an awesome place to hang out because real real estate investors are in there sharing their tips, their tricks, their strategies, asking questions. It is the best place to learn more about online marketing for motivated sellers, and you can get there by going to AdWordsNerds.com/group. That will forward you to the Facebook group, just request to join, someone will add you in the next 24 hours. Again, that's AdWordsNerds.com/group. [0:17:00.6] And hey, one of the best things about that group, no spam, absolutely no spam. I spend a lot of time deleting spam from that group, so it is pure information and I hope you join us because I would really enjoy that. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you got value out of this leave me a like or comment or subscribe or leave a review, I'd really appreciate it. As always, I'll talk to you next week, this is Daniel Barrett from AdWordsNerds.com signing off. Bye.