Video Transcript
Hey guys, my name is Stephen. I’m one of the co-founders at UpKeep Media.
Today I’m going to talk to you about how to generate content ideas for your property management blog.
So, before I get into that I’ll just run you through quickly why blogging is important for property managers and property management companies.
Why Blogging Is Important For Your Property Management Company
There‘s three main reasons.
1) Positions you as an Industry Expert.
When people come to your property management website and they see that you have a blog with a lot of detailed information, it shows that you know what you’re talking about.
They look at that and they say, okay you know what, this company clearly is someone that I can trust with my property because they are showing me that they’re able to handle all the issues that arise.
2) Long Tail Keywords
Another reason why blogging is so important for property managers is it allows your website to become indexed for what are called Long Tail Keywords.
As an example, let’s say that somebody owns a rental property in Memphis and they’re looking to attract tenants to their rental property. They’ll go to Google and type in something like, “how do I attract tenants or my rental property in Memphis?” or “how do I advertise my rental property in Memphis?”.
If you have a blog post specifically about that topic, your website is much more likely to show up in search engines. So, another reason why blogging is important is that you want your website to show up when people are looking for solutions to their questions.
3) Allows You to Earn Links
A third reason why blogging is very important for property management companies is it creates content on your website. This will allow you eventually earn links from other websites.
If you’re not familiar with what a link is that’s okay don’t worry about it for this video. If you are familiar, then you know that links are one of the main factors when it comes to ranking your website in search engines.
By having content on your website it allows you to reach out to other companies and possibly get a link from them. They do this because they’re interested in sending their readers to your content. That’s another reason why you want to create good articles on your website. You’ll entice the links from other websites.
How To Come Up With Property Management Blog Ideas
So, without further ado, I’ll get into the main topic for this video.
How to come up with topic ideas for your property management blog.
So, I have five ideas listed here.
I’ll take you through them and show you exactly how to go about it.
1) Quora
The first one being Quora. If you’re not familiar with what Quora is, it’s basically a website where people go and ask questions and then other individuals will answer those questions. You get points based on how good your answer is.
So, to show you – you just go to Google (I’ll head on to my screen) and go to Quora.com.
You’ll have to create an account but it’s super simple. You can basically just enter your Facebook or an e-mail address and you’ll get an account. When you have an account you’ll see this screen:
So, what you want to do is go to “Ask or Search Quora” at the top here. You want to ask a question related to your business.
So, in this case you always want to think of who your audience is.
Your audience for your property management blog is either going to be tenants or landlords.
You’re looking to attract landlords that are handling their own rental properties at the moment and are looking for solutions to their problems.
As an example, I’ll go into Quora and I’ll type in property management. You can’t get more vague than that but we’ll keep it simple for the sake of this example.
So, type in “property management” and now I see that there are literally dozens and dozens of questions related to property management. These are examples that you can use as property management blog ideas.
“Can a property management company demand a mid-term lease change prohibited smoking on the property?”
That’s something you could write an article about. You want to make it in depth. You know people are actually looking for the answer to those types of questions because you see it here.
So, you can go through this list and try and find some good blogging ideas.
I guarantee you will.
There are literally hundreds if not thousands of questions that are asked on this forum.
You can always change the search as well. You can change it to “landlord”, landlord-tenant law, etc. What are people asking about landlord-tenant law, here’s a bunch:
“What happens if I leave my apartment and break my lease without paying anything?”
That’s a perfect example of something that you could blog about.
2) Niche Forums
Another great way to come up with topic ideas is through forums.
You want to find niche forums, in this case property management forums or landlord forums and look at the questions that people are asking. You’ll then write blog content to answer those questions.
So, another example if I go to Google and I type in – you want to type in your niche – so “landlord + forum”.
This will provide you with a bunch of different landlord forums and you can come in here and look for questions that people ask.
First thing that shows up is BiggerPockets.com.
When I go to the site I see “Landlord forums and rental property questions”.
So, this is literally perfect because you have a very, very long list. It goes passed 1800 pages of questions that people are asking.
So, let’s find one right away.
“Charging tenants for your time…” Let’s see what they’re asking.
“What is a good general cost policy for charging tenants time for repairs made by yourself?”
These are the types of questions that you can use to get ideas to write blog content.
So, that’s another great way and you see as well there’s plenty of forums out there. This is just one forum, but there‘s literally dozens of forums dedicated to landlords. They have landlords asking questions. You can go take those questions and provide detailed answers to those questions on your website.
3) Reddit
Another example of a place that we love to go for content ideas (this is literally a gold mine of content ideas) is a site called Reddit.com.
So, if you just head over to Reddit.com, you’ll have to create an account. Again, it’s super simple.
If you come up here to the search bar and type in say, property management.
You’ll first get a bunch of groups related to property management. So if I click on to the first one, this is a property management group. It has a bunch of different questions related to property management. So, this is another place to gain a bunch of ideas regarding what you can speak about on your blog and what people actually want to find on your blog.
So here’s an example:
“Is it standard for property management company to charge for an application?”
That is something you can write about.
4) Facebook, LinkedIn, or G+ Groups
Another way to come up with some great content ideas for your blog is going on Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ groups.
Again, you want to see the questions that people are asking.
So, just a quick example, if you go to Facebook.com and you head on up to the search bar, type in property management (whoops, I can’t spell today).
So, this here is “Places” you don’t want to look at that.
What you want to look for are “Groups”, so if you come up here, there’s a tab called “Groups”.
Here you’ll find thousands of different property management groups. Again, in those groups people will be asking questions and you can provide answers to those questions through the form of a blog post.
You can also type in for example “landlord” because that would be your ideal candidates.
Again, you have dozens of groups.
You can go even more specific.
So let’s say you’re in Los Angeles. Type in “Los Angeles landlord”. So there’s literally Los Angeles landlord groups that has seventy members. You click on it. You can join the group, follow it and you’ll see what types of questions people ask.
I’m not a member of this group so I can’t see. But once you join you’ll be able to see the entire group and get an idea for what people are looking for.
You can do the exact same type of thing on LinkedIn, you can also use Google+ those are just some of the ways to generate content ideas.
5) Buzzsumo.com
The fifth method I’m going to show you is actually a paid tool. But it’s honestly one of the best ways to find topic ideas and you can still use it for free because they still show you some results.
So, head over to a site called Buzzsumo.com. What you want to do is – you should be shown this page – enter a topic. This is great for content validation as well as content ideas.
So, I’ll take you through a quick example.
If I type in “how to screen tenants” what it’s going to show you are a bunch of the top articles related to how to screen tenants.
Why it’s great for content validation is it also shows you the engagement. So, it shows you the amount of Facebook, either shares or likes. It shows you the LinkedIn shares, Twitter shares, Pinterest shares, and the amount of links.
You can see that many other websites are linking to this article. The reason why this is great is because you know that, for example, if the topic, “How to screen a tenant” has already got this many shares people are clearly interested in this topic.
So it’s something that you want to possibly look to include on your blog.
Another thing that’s cool is you can actually click through to the article, look at the article and see what they’re talking about. You can then figure out, how you can improve on this existing article. Take some of those ideas and then add on to it with your own flair and your own ideas to make it an even better article that people really engage with and gain value from. The ultimate goal of your blog is to create value for the people that come to your website.
Those are pretty much the five ideas I have for you today about content generation.
Below you’ll find out exactly how to validate your content before you begin writing. So, before even beginning to write the article you want to make sure that there are going to be people searching for those topics. We have a bunch of ways to make sure that the topic of the article is relevant and something that people actually want to find.
Content Validation
After using the methods in this video you’ll have hundreds of ideas for great content to produce. But how do you know which content is worth focusing your effort on?
Here are 5 methods we love using for content validation:
1) Google Keyword Planner
As a rule of thumb, if you’re new to blogging you should focus on creating keyword-focused content. This means you want to find keywords that have a high search volume and produce a blog article on it. You can use Google Keyword Planner to gain an understanding of the search volume for a specific keyword. You know that if there is a high search volume for a specific keyword there are definitely a lot of people interested in the topic.
Once you’ve written a few articles focused on high volume keywords you can venture out and write about different topics that you’ve found during the idea generation phase.
For these types of articles, we’ve put together premium content to show you how to validate your blog topic ideas.
[thrive_lead_lock id=’3488′]
2) Buzzsumo
While Buzzsumo is a great way to generate content ideas it can also be used for content validation. You can see which content is performing well based on the number of shares and likes it receives.
You simply need to enter your topic into the search bar and you’ll see the top performing articles related to that topic. If there are hundreds of shares, likes, and backlinks then it is a sign that your topic is valid.
3) Email Your Current Clients
You likely have access to many of your current clients’ email addresses. Who better to ask than your target audience?
Simply send out a quick email to your clients and ask them which topic is most interesting to them. You can use Google Forms to create a survey and have them select the topic they find to be the most interesting.
4) Twitter Polls
If you have a Twitter following for your property management company you can ask your followers which topics interest them the most. You can do this by using Twitter Polls.
Create a poll with the various topics you’ve come up with and then ask your followers to vote on the topic they find the most useful.
5) Facebook Polls
Find relevant groups on Facebook (Landlord groups, real estate investing groups, etc) and create a Facebook Poll with the topics you are considering. Ask people to vote on which topic they find to be the most useful.
[/thrive_lead_lock]
By implementing these methods for content idea generation and content validation you’ll be on your way to creating a successful property management blog. Creating a quality blog takes a lot of time and effort but the benefits are enormous.
If you’d like help with your company’s blogging we provide content marketing services for property management companies. Don’t hesitate to get in touch to find out how we can help you with your company’s online marketing efforts!
