To stay top-of-mind, you must constantly be in touch with your client base. Email marketing and social media are great ways to reach many people quickly; the challenge is creating or finding great, relevant content to share.
Few people create all their own content and finding and sharing this content can be time-consuming. Here are a few ideas for content and four tips to help you save time.
There is no shortage of content available to share; you just have to know where to find it. Start with the national and local newspapers, décor sites like Houzz.com or HGTV, your local city’s tourism site for events and your local real estate board. Once you have an idea of the topics your clients are interested in, spend a few minutes searching for keywords and you’ll likely come up with a dozen or more sites from which you can pull content. Remember to give credit to the author and link back to the site, and never reproduce the entire article.
Once you’ve found a few sites you like, there are four ways you can have the articles delivered right to your inbox:
1. Google News alerts are your new best friend.
Chances are you’ve done a Google search in your lifetime. The default search is for websites, but you can also choose to receive news emailed to your inbox that is relevant to specific keywords that you select. Set up as many alerts as you like and specify the frequency; do you want a daily digest or do you want to receive them as they are posted?
I suggest setting up an alert for your own name as well. If someone out there shares your name and is doing something unsavoury, you want to make sure to differentiate yourself.
2. Sign up for email newsletters from organizations that write interesting articles.
Any content creator on the web is going to be sending out an email newsletter to help spread the word about what they’re talking about. Their goal is to have their readers share that content. Click on the link that interests you and you cut and paste it onto your Facebook business page, Twitter feed or LinkedIn profile. Facebook should pull in a photo and caption for you. Add a few words about why you think someone would be interested in reading it and post!
3. Follow content creators on social media.
Content creators want their posts to be shared. Spend a few minutes to follow magazines, newspapers or blogs you like on social media and all you have to do is go to the site to find some content.
4. Use a news aggregator like Feedly or Flipboard.
Sign up for a free account (if you’re on Facebook, Google or several other channels, it’s one click). What these sites do is give you a list of headlines from all the websites you plug into it. Spend a few minutes entering in your favourite sites or keywords and you’ll have more content than you need just by visiting this one site.
If you have any questions about finding and using content online, please get in touch.
Mark Brodsky has been working with Realtors since 2008, producing monthly newsletters and social media management. Send him an email or visit his website.
