How to convince realtor boss to blog?

Content
1

I am the website person at our real estate company consisting of number of agents, plus the boss who is also a realtor.

Although it is common knowledge that informative, not too short / not too long blog posts, containing original material, and with reader interaction, are amongst a number of attributes that increase the chances to get incoming links (especially from relevant sites), and also to display your authority on a subject to website visitors.

My dilemma is is that my boss says he is “too busy” to write these blog posts, even though I have asked him if he can take a short time out of his week, say like just twice a week for 15-20 minutes each time to write a short blog post.

We purchased a digital audio recorder, and he said I should grab him a few times each week, sit down and talk about a real estate topic in the news (being talked about on other websites.)

On our first meeting, I had prepared some notes on For Sale By Owners (FSBO).

I started the talk off, but then it quickly went into a one-directional four minute talk from the boss to me on the subject.

So I went off and transcribed it, and uploaded it as a blog post.

Later my boss after having read what I had transcribed came back to me, and said “…this is not how it (I) should sound. Can you rewrite it?”

Here is a link to download and MP3 of our talk:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4809354/epstein-blog-fsbo-110920_001.MP3

Here is a link to the blog post:

http://www.mattepstein.com/2011/09/26/for-sale-by-owner-real-estate-realities/

I really am not the one to be writing these blog posts:

  • I’m just a website developer
  • I don’t know real estate
  • I don’t know our local area (I live almost 20 miles away)
  • I am guessing the majority of good realtor blogs on the web are written by real estate professionals

Does anybody have any advice how I can try and get my boss to come round to the world of blogging?

2

Maybe it’s not worth pushing too hard, perhaps one of the more junior realtors would be more interested, and almost as able?
Perhaps micro-blogging (aka, Twitter) could be something he isn’t too busy for.
If you can persuade him of the value of this, but he still says he’s too busy, he might be willing to pay for a copy writer to write up his 5 minute voice recordings?
No definitive answer unfortunately.

3

Thanks for the reply. Building quality, original content is what I am looking for - in order to generate backlinks (and show knowledge of local real estate market.) Wouldn’t an outsourced blogger / intern (unless they are local and know real estate) generate content that is easily seen through (by human readers, not search engine crawlers) and thus not memorable or worthy of a backlink to?

4

Discuss with your boss about how other companies are doing it. Also discuss the amount of SEO it brings the company. I have been in a similar situation and due to the fact the the client really didn’t seem to enthused of the idea, i just thought that it would be best if he didn’t do it at all.

5

Perhaps what you could do would be to keep doing the talks, but then hire a copy writer (either freelance or full time) to write the actual blog posts from the notes.

6

You deserve congrats for the pains taking PR work you did without being the one entitled to. It’s sometimes more difficult to deal with the company’s key men and convince them to do the right thing than with the public itself.
In theory, the most appropriate person to do the blog posts is the CEO, because he knows all the insights. However, in this particular situation I would suggest doing a short pitching with him every once in a while, jot down the ideas and then give the writing work to a copywriter, as the previous members have stated too.

7

I would suggest trying to explain that the search engines like fresh content. Try explaining what pull marketing or content marketing is and how it is being used by the biggest companies from other fields.

Blogging works for real estate companies if done correctly. Avoid the typical “buy now” cheerleading stuff and focus on showing your value by explaining local market conditions, talk about community events (hyperlocal) and if you are a REALTOR, there are free articles available from RCR.

8

This question was originally asked in October. If the op hasn’t found a solution by now, he probably has lost his job. Thread closed.