Which real estate blogs should you be following in 2017?

Leaders read, and if you want to be on top of real estate and business trends it pays to be tuned into great information feeds. Blogs are a great way to get the latest tips, keep up with what’s happening out there, and spur creative thinking. You are probably already watching the big staples like Zillow, Houzz, and your local newspapers. Here are ten more worth checking out for new ideas…

1. Wills, Trusts, Estate

The willstrustsestate.com blog offers deeper insight into long term planning for real estate investors. Includes tips on finding the right estate attorney, legacy planning, protecting your real estate assets, and the tips of property to have in your long-term portfolio.

2. Mesocore

The Mesocore blog provides insights into the latest green home technology, building affordable homes, and designs for off grid vacation homes. Recently featured on the Discovery Channel.

3. Baluch Bulletin

Run by author, investor, and doctor, Amir Baluch MD, the Baluch Bulletin provides detailed insights on market conditions and data, as well as smart financial moves for busy professionals.

4. Legendary Custom Homes

The Legendary Custom Homes blog delivers an interesting look at how house flippers can find their own niche in the market. This firm specializes in teardown-rebuilds and major remodels to like-new in the Cincinnati, OH area.

5. Realty 411

Realty 411’s news feed offers updates on the latest nationwide real estate investment events, as well as exclusive interviews with CEOs and industry leaders at top firms like Rodeo Realty, B2RFinance, and more.

6. REWW

Real Estate World Wide’s blog publishes a blend of tips for finding motivated sellers and cash buyers, as well as building a fast-growing real estate wholesaling business.

7. Sky Five Properties Blog

Sky Five Properties is a Miami based brokerage headed up by Kaya Wittenburg. Via the blog Kaya, a multi-billion dollar producing broker, speaker, and former model, delivers thoughts on the future of real estate like floating homes, and luxury real estate design.

8. BiggerPockets

BiggerPockets’ carefully curated blog is one of the portal’s best assets. The forums can be a big distraction and wild goose chase for many investors, but the official blog offers a more organized and thoughtful chain of learning. Check out contributor Sterling White’s posts on building a real estate business, personal growth, and making offers on sight unseen properties.

9. Kent Clothier

Kent Clothier’s personal blog is a great resource for time management hacks and tools, staying motivated for investors, and ideas for giving back and making it go viral.

10. Best Transaction Funding

Last but not least; keep tuned into the BTF blog for more lists like this, educational pieces on deciphering market data and making the best moves, real estate marketing trends, and how to get your house deals funded.

Others worth checking out include CT Homes LLC which has become a model that has spawned hundreds of other real estate blogs, Rosa Houghten’s real estate blog for new ways to think about paying it forward and real estate fashion, as well as Black Belt Investors, which has now upgraded its multi-media blog to a multimedia member only online training platform.

 

What’s your blog? Which are your favorites to follow? Let us know so we can add them to the next list!

What can the world’s top marketer teach real estate investors about blogging?

Seth Godin is a Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame inductee, author of 17 best-selling books, and the blogger that top bloggers go to for advice. How can real estate investors replicate his success and rocket the results from their blogs?

Blog Consistently

Seth is a national speaker, teacher, and writer, yet he manages to blog every day. In a recent interview with Tim Ferriss he says he actually writes 5 blog posts every day. While most property wholesalers, flippers, and real estate CEOs don’t have that kind of time themselves; they can recruit outsourced assistants and ensure they publish something on their blog each day, week, or month. Everything else comes second to this consistency.

Give Value First

Seth rarely pitches his own products on his blog. And that is no doubt one of the reasons people keep opening his email updates and read it religiously. He gives, gives, and gives some more. By giving he earns trust and attention. When he does get around to pitching a service or product, his blog readers know that because of his generosity that whatever he is selling must be worth it.

Give People What They Want to Buy

Want to sell more? Give people what they want to buy, and read. What is it that your prospects really want to know about? What type of service are they really looking for? It really doesn’t matter if you think it is important or valuable. It is about what they want.

Short Blog Posts Still Work

While some real estate blogs are continually trying to stretch the length of their posts to 800 words, 1,000 words, and even over 2,000 words. Often just because they heard someone say that Google likes longer posts. How many properties has Google bought from you or sold to you recently? Meanwhile Seth Godin is famous for blog posts which are often just a couple lines long. And people read them. Both long and short posts can work, but don’t forget who you are writing for.

You Are Capable of a Lot More

If there is one thing that Seth wants you to know it is that you are capable of achieving a lot more. If you just set your goals a little higher, or a lot higher you may be amazed at what you can achieve. Can you get to daily blogging on your real estate website? Then scale from 10 deals a year to 100 deals a year? How about finding an even more impactful way to leave a legacy than just amassing lots of zeros in your bank account?

Focus on what is Most Important

Streamline your life, your real estate marketing, and your blog to get more of what matters most. Say no to more distractions. Don’t get side tracked with all types of bells and whistles. Don’t go off on detours which just take you further from your goals. Seth’s blog is truly no frills. Yet, it works. And he still has time to cook dinner for his family every night.

Constantly Be Learning and Discovering

If you want more success you’ve got to be constantly be learning, discovering, and trying things. Seth says he only has more successes than most because he has tried more times. He also has more failures than most, and is most proud of that. Because he tried. He doesn’t sweat the typos, or worry about making wrong predictions, or reading opinions about his work. He just keeps trying new things. Try real estate blogs that are short, long, medium length, that have links, or no links, that use keywords, and no SEO keywords, that blatantly sell, and others that don’t sell at all. You can’t get more results and close more deals unless you are trying new things.

 

Authored by Best Transaction Funding BestTransactionFunding.com is the leading source of transactional funding and hard money loans for real estate wholesalers in the US, where 100% financing, and saying “Yes” is what we love doing all day long.

How can real estate wholesalers boost their online visibility to capitalize in the new surge in business?

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen a variety of data showing a dramatic surge in delinquent mortgages, REOs, home searches, and demand for wholesalers. Of course, that only helps those in the real estate wholesaling business if they can be found online today. And especially when it comes to being found in Google searches. Unfortunately most real estate wholesalers are doing pretty terrible in this arena. Some haven’t been trying. Others simply haven’t been investing enough back into it. And there are those that are completely hurting their own online real estate marketing efforts. So how can they change that?

How is it Working Now?

The biggest problem is that many have no idea how they are doing right now. They don’t really know if what they are doing is really working or not. They don’t know which things they are doing are working. And which need to be improved upon. So they aren’t always reinvesting in the best marketing. Many have no idea where their online traffic comes from, or what the ROI on different marketing channels is. So the first step is to check out how your real estate wholesaling website is ranking for different keywords and search phrases. Many will find they really haven’t been making a dent at all.

Choosing the Best Real Estate Keywords

Showing up at the top of Google searches and gaining more leads depends a lot on using the right keywords in your website content, and in your real estate blogs. Unfortunately there is a ton of confusion about this. So what makes great keywords?

The short answer is keywords that have high search volumes, low competition, and deliver highly targeted prospects that are ready to act.

Most of those that are new at SEO marketing tend to trend to far to one end or the other. They either focus on keywords that have high volumes, but are expensive to compete over, and deliver poorly qualified prospects. Or they hone in on highly targeted long tail keywords that can’t deliver enough leads. You’ve got to find balance. And understand that this changes on a monthly basis.

The Quirks that are Sabotaging Your SEO Marketing

However, even with great keyword choices some wholesalers are missing out, and sabotaging their efforts.

This includes:

• Failing to incorporate keywords into other parts of your website
• Not interlinking web pages and blogs together
• Not having a mobile friendly website
• Forgetting they still need to deliver readable, interesting content
• Ignoring the importance of off-site SEO and back links (like from press releases)

Conclusion

Now is the ideal time to up your online marketing and SEO efforts as a real estate wholesaler. There is a massive windfall of business volume up for grabs, if you can leverage Google to participate.

The above can give you are great head start. But it is also worth considering hiring someone to handle it so that you can focus on what you do best, and actually get to closing deals and making money.

 

Authored by Best Transaction Funding BestTransactionFunding.com is the leading source of transactional funding and hard money loans for real estate wholesalers in the US, where 100% financing, and saying “Yes” is what we love doing all day long.

How can real estate wholesalers help homeowners overcome sales aversion to land more deals?

There are still over 200 billion dollars in defaulted loans and REOs at banks in America. This doesn’t even take into account all of the other foreclosures pending due to delinquent property taxes and HOA dues, nor all the motivated home sellers that need to sell their houses fast for other reasons.

The bottom line is that there are plenty of distressed properties, and potential for scoring deep discounts on homes that are ripe for wholesaling. There are many sources of these properties. Going direct to homeowners is still one of the favorites for the ability to cut out other costs and difficult to work with parties. However, despite the urgent need for many of these property owners to sell, and do it fast, and the valuable service that real estate wholesalers can deliver, there can still be a disconnect that prevents owners from taking advantage of the help.

Often this comes down to Sales Aversion. There are times when consumers want to be sold, for example when they really want to justify an expenditure to buy a luxury item. However, in general most of the population has come to avoid being put into positions where they are to be in high pressure sales pitches. They’ve learnt the hard way after falling for timeshare offers, being strong armed into overpaying for gym initiation fees, friends hosting parties with MLM motives, and even just being lured into giving up email addresses, only to be hounded with never-ending spam.

Consumers don’t want to be cornered into uncomfortable and abrasive sales pitches. They definitely don’t see why they should spend in order to be put in these positions either. Why should they take time off work, and drive miles to a used car dealer that refuses to give any upfront information? Why take the day off of income producing work, and endure a day of family stress to accommodate a property showing to a wholesaler who is vague, won’t provide detailed information upfront, and is expected to try and hard-sell them on committing to selling their home for pennies on the dollar?

This pain can be worse than just sticking with the status quo, even if they are in a tough spot. Sales 101 says that in order to make a deal prospects need to be shown a path out of their current pain toward pleasure.

Many of today’s wholesalers don’t realize that they aren’t accomplishing this.

Yes, property owners might be in distress. Yes, the best move for them may be to sell. It may even make sense for them to sell at serious discounts and just get out of the debt and walkaway. Wholesalers armed with transactional funding which can free homeowners, and even put cash in their hands may be their best option. But, in order to truly effectively convey that and make the process palatable and appealing can take a little more effort than some appear to be making.

So how can real estate wholesalers overcome sales aversion and close more house deals?

There are many ways to connect with motivated sellers. However, it really all boils down to two marketing strategies:

Notification Marketing

Word of Mouth Referrals

There is absolutely a need for Notification Marketing for new wholesalers. They need to get the word out about their services and product. This can include direct mail, social media advertising, Google Adwords, press releases, and email marketing. It can also include inbound marketing via articles and real estate blogs designed to help prospects in discovering solutions and meeting needs on demand.

Word of mouth marketing has evolved significantly too. The original form still applies, but this has also morphed into using affiliate marketers, social media, sponsorship, and strategic referral partnerships.

Whichever real estate marketing strategies are being used, one principle applies to making them effective for landing more real contracts today.

Doing business with wholesalers, and even just contacting them, and agreeing to meet them requires making it easy and attractive to do so. It has to offer the promise of more pleasure, while diminishing their current pains.

There are two critical parts to this. The first is overcoming objections in advance. This involves education, defining expectations, transparency, and clarity. This can be done upfront online, on real estate wholesaling websites, and in initial interactions.

The second part, which builds on the first is making it appealing to pick up the phone and call you, give up an email address, fill out a form, or arrange a showing. The anticipated experience should be appealing, not simply the homeowner opening themselves up to a high-pressure, hard sales pitch.

Define the process upfront, and offer a win-win for them for taking the action you desire, even if the two of you don’t wind up making a deal on this transaction. Cut the mystery, increase the clarity. This will boost your reputation, and the eagerness to share you by others.

 

What does an effective email auto-responder series look like for real estate wholesalers?

Having a real estate wholesaling website and strong opt-in magnet is great. However, all savvy marketers know that it can take several touches to convert new prospects, and especially in the world of flipping houses it can take recurring outreach to connect the right deals with your buyers list. So what do successful email campaigns and auto-responders look like for property wholesalers?

Right Expectations

Success in email auto-responders, and avoiding complaints and wasted time requires building a list with synergy, and setting the right expectations. Your opt-in needs to be relevant to what you’ll be emailing them about on a regular basis. Be transparent. Let them know if they should expect instant updates when you post a new real estate blog, weekly updates on new wholesale property deals, or something else.

Style and Design

There is no single right answer about what your emails should look like. The best look is really about who your list is made up of, and your branding. If you are simply messaging personal contacts and have a basic real estate website then a personal looking, plain text email message can be the perfect fit. In contrast; if you have a high profile luxury brand, in a high end market with a very design conscious database it may be wise to include visuals. New templates from AWeber and other email services can help wholesalers craft emails which mimic their website pages for a seamless user experience.

Content (What to Email)

What should you be emailing to your list? What you promised. It can be quarterly newsletters, daily real estate wholesaling blog posts, an email training series, or notifications whenever new wholesale deals come on board. There can be occasions to deviate such as holiday wishes and notable product or service changes, but don’t stray too far from what they are anticipating, or they’ll turn off, doom you to the spam folder, and cause issues with your email provider, regardless of how much value you think you are adding.

Length

Email auto-responders should never really end. Messaging should be ongoing once a name is added to the list. To get started new real estate wholesalers may want to launch with a set of 4 to 7 emails and then invest in more as their list takes off.

Length of individual emails can vary. Some of the most effective are just a line or two. At the same time, some very successful bloggers and email marketing experts claim that extremely long emails (running into multiple pages) have performed the best. Think about who is receiving them, why they want them, and what action you want. If it is clicks to site then make that as easy as possible.

Calls to Action

Don’t forget your calls to action. Use multiple links, social icons and URLs and your phone number if you want to generate live calls.

Want More?

Want more tips like this in your inbox? How about hot news on new investor funding for wholesalers form Best Transaction Funding? Use the link at the top of the blog post to subscribe to weekly blog updates for wholesalers and get notified first when we roll out new funding programs…

Is beauty in design and long word counts for real estate blog posts really essential for successful property wholesaling blogs?

Despite the hype, the hard data might show that real estate wholesalers should be focusing on a completely different set of criteria…

Now that real estate investors and wholesalers have access to virtually unlimited working capital via BestTransactionFunding.com and hard money loans, all they really need to crank up the volume is the end customers.

Real estate blogging for end buyers, and even renters, motivated sellers, and investors is one of the best ways to reach them and build a high volume business. Unfortunately there are many myths holding investors back from seeing the results they desire in this area. Two of the biggest right now are real estate blog design, and word counts for higher traffic levels and Google rankings.

Designer Blogs vs. Craigslist

How beautiful do real estate wholesaling blogs and websites need to be, in order to be successful?

Craigslist has proven that you don’t have to be beautiful to be successful. However, few investors and real estate websites have found the same level of traffic and traction without investing in some beautification. In fact, many completely fail because their online appearance lets them down.

For real estate website and blog owners that haven’t been seen the results they hoped for yet, check out SkyFive Properties Blog. SkyFive founder Kaya Wittenburg has applied years of working with top international fashion designers like Versace and Armani to real estate. The result; selling over four billion dollars in property.

Those that recognize their online assets could use a bit of a facelift might find this is the optimal moment to move over to stunning responsive HTML5 website and blog design for WordPress. Give your content the chance of being read, by not turning off visitors as soon as they land on your page.

Dueling the Search Engines for Rank, with Word Count

A post on Inman News recently argued that real estate professionals need to be writing 1k+ word posts to get noticed by Google. While slowly showing up in more Google search results 2k+ word ‘in-depth’ posts they haven’t necessarily been delivering better results for real estate bloggers. Often the results are only served up from high level news publications, and are very aged, not new posts.

Bloggers should carefully measure ‘time-on-page’ before making all of their posts this long. They may find no one takes the time to read them. On September 25^th, Google announced another Panda algorithm update, following on from the August 2014 ‘Pigeon Update’, meaning quality is more important than ever. However, bigger certainly isn’t always better for generating online traffic and real leads.

Our results in testing shorter posts is definitely testimony to that. Our piece on the Google pigeon update scored more visitors and Facebook likes than most real estate related bloggers’ long form content.

While industry brands like CT Homes LLC seem to have gone with all long form posts recently, and are apparently doing well with it, best-selling author Seth Godin rarely publishes blog posts over 100 words. Then just look at Pinterest and Twitter which have achieved content marketing fame with 140 characters or simply images.

What Really Matters for Creating a Real Estate Wholesaling Blog that Works…

What really appears to matter most for building real estate blogs that deliver real results is:

• Valuable content
• Interesting content
• Digestible content
• Consistency in publishing regular blogs

Do this and it will grow, and readers will share, come back, and do business with you when they need help.

Are aging, low tech real estate agents and investors actually making it easy for newcomers to win more business on the internet?

Inman News and NAR have recently raised the issue of today’s aging real estate professional population, and the opportunities it offers for the young and ambitious. Even though most Realtors say they plan to stay in the business for another two years, the average agent is now 56 years old. This, along with the new growth phase we are entering, has led to real estate has been dubbed one of the best careers to get into.

While older generations have been adopting technology, and iPads have become one of the most popular presents for grandma during the holidays, many real estate workers have been very slow to integrate. It took years for many to start using email. The latest statistics suggests that despite the presence of drones and Skype, many are still not embracing the most basic forms of online real estate marketing.

A new 2014 Member Profile report from NAR suggests the vast majority of Realtors are spending very little on internet marketing.

The report found Realtors spend far more on their vehicles than any other business expense. The median amount spent to maintain their real estate websites in 2013 was just $200. Many top real estate wholesaling gurus spend far more than 10 times this amount on online marketing per month.

A little more than half of Realtors say they now use social media for real estate marketing, but few reported have a blog. Industry news analysts have been criticizing agents for their poor use of SEO, while others highlight the data showing low repeat business and referral statistics as a percentage of total business volume.

This suggests good wholesaling websites, real estate blogs with sustainable SEO strategies, and automation for follow up and asking for referrals could help both agents and wholesalers quickly rise above much of the perceived local competition, while increasing net earnings.

Those on extremely tight budgets could find the web their best ally in getting more out of their marketing dollar.  Affiliate programs which generate referral income for everything from real estate books to recommending the best transactional funding lenders, can also be used to increase income and offset online marketing investments, all while increasing their value in the marketplace.

For those without the patience or desire to learn new technologies, summer interns, apprentices, and hiring young tech savvy freelancers on an as needed basis could provide a dramatic edge. Who knows, you may just discover the next manager to help you head up your real estate business so you can hit the beach or golf course, and simply collect the rewards of the infrastructure you have created.