By now, you know what a blog can do for your property management business. Blogs give people a reason to visit your website, help you rank higher on search engines, and also establish your company as an authority. But, maybe you’re trying to come up with blog topics and you’re not sure where to start or what to talk about. Today, we’ll show how you can be a property management blog topic brainstorming machine. Follow these steps to come up with enough property management blog topics to last you for the next year.
1. Check Your FAQs for Property Management Blog Topics
First, you need to start with the most frequently asked questions that you receive. They make for great topics because if you have people asking you these questions directly, you can count on many other people searching those same questions online.
It’s a good practice to keep track of the questions people ask you, whether it’s through phone conversations, emails, or the chat function on your website! Gather these questions and answer them in blogs and you’ll realize just how valuable blogging can be for your business.
If you don’t have a log of questions yet, that’s okay. We did a previous video that covers the 5 questions that are most commonly asked of property managers. Check that out and you’ll have a good place to start.
2. Make a List of What You Do
Many property managers tell us that they don’t have anything to talk about when it comes to blog topics. As a property manager, think of all the specific functions that you serve in your job. On any given day, you are handling:
- maintenance
- leasing
- screening
- advertising
- inspecting
- setting rental prices
- and maybe even some evicting.
And no doubt there are many other things you, in your role as a property manager, handle over the course of their day. You do a lot of things to make properties run smoothly and all of these tasks self-managing landlords will inevitably have to handle. This list makes for very relevant blog topics, but on the next point we’ll show how you can triple your output of topics.
3. Map Out Content
You can create several blogs from one topic. Think about every part of the process, each one of those ideas can be a blog topic. For example, consider tenant screening. Surely it will be difficult to cover everything that goes into screening tenants in one blog. You’ll need to discuss what it takes to screen a tenant in your city, what to look for when you’re placing a good tenant, common mistakes that landlords make when screening tenants, etc. But you know what? Each one of these make for great individual topics for your blog!
Let’s do another example, this time with maintenance: you can create a blog on how to hire vendors, the difference between preventative and deferred maintenance, and how to respond to emergencies. You get several different blogs and you can easily map out a strategy.
Have writer’s block on topics? AnswerThePublic is a helpful resource for pulling questions that searcher’s make on Bing and Google.
4. How to Prioritize Your Content
Now that you have a list of blog topics, which ones should you work on first? It would be great to have a landlord friend to run these topics by; however, a great tool to help you prioritize content is the Google Ads Keyword Planner. This allows you to use your location to determine how many times people in your area have searched a given topic. You can also see all the variations of keywords that people are using to search for information – great for creating SEO-optimized titles.
In order to use the Google Keyword Planner, you’ll need to have a Google Adwords account. If you don’t have one already, you can set one up in a few minutes. It’s a free tool, just follow the prompts, enter some information about you and your business, and you’re in. It’s a tool for advertisers, and you’ll run into a lot of features in the tool (like suggested bid features) that won’t be useful for you.
5. Use a Content Calendar
Now that you are sitting on many blog topics (enough for a year!) and have a good idea as to which blogs you should prioritize, it is now time to schedule out the blogs you’ll publish with a content calendar. You don’t want to publish everything at once. With a consistent and steady calendar and process, you can be prepared and feel organized. Perhaps this week you’ll publish a blog on screening, and the following week on maintenance. Have a plan and put it in a calendar so there’s no confusion about where you’re going. A good schedule when starting out is posting a blog once every two weeks, it gives you the ability to have consistent updates to your site on Google, which helps you rank higher. Trello is a simple tool that we like to use to help us organize our blog content. It is an easy way to manage your projects throughout a whole process.
At Fourandhalf, we help property managers with all facets of the blog creation process, we write the blogs, optimize them for SEO, publish it on your website and promote it on your social media pages. All you have to do is film the videos and send it to us. If you need help with any part of this process, give us a call and we’d be happy to answer any questions you have about this, or about marketing your property management company in general.
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