If you’re going to write three to ten blog posts per week, week in and week out, and still spend time showing homes, taking listings, and otherwise serving your real estate customers, it stands to reason that you’re not going to be Shakespeare every day. But don’t worry, the only guy who was Shakespeare every day was Shakespeare, and even he used formulas like reworking older stories and making them his own.

Sometimes you just won’t feel like writing, and sometimes you won’t know what to write. When that happens, you can fall back on these twenty-one simple, tried and true formulas and whip out a post in anywhere from three to thirty minutes. This list gives you both some general-purpose blogging formulas that apply to any blog, as well as some formulas that work especially well for real estate blogs.

This is the first part of a three part series. The rest of the series will be published later in this week and early next week. To be sure you don’t miss any of it, Subscribe Here.

1. The Real Estate Market Update
   I list this one as #1 for the simple reason that this is my personal favorite “article crutch”. Whenever my brain is in low gear, I do one of these. Or often I’ll sit down and do a week’s worth in a day. Start with an Excel Spreadsheet with two columns, one for the month just ended and one for the same month one year previously. List your average sale price, median sale price, average price per square foot, and any other data of interest you want to write about. A third column should have a formula that shows the percent change between the two columns.Save a blank copy with any Excel formulas you need as a template. To do your market update, go into your MLS, and enter the data for a given county or city or subdivision or what have you that you want to write about. Setting up the spreadsheet the first time may take up to a few hours depending on your Excel skill — if you need samples let me know. However, once you’re set up, you can research and write a post in about twenty to thirty minutes or so.
2. The Long Term Market Report Post
   There are many variations on the market update that compares year-to-year performance based on one-month snapshots one year apart. With some creativity and Excel you can create charts covering a whole year or more for whatever statistics you want to report on. Another variation is to simply enter a bigger set of data than a month for your snapshots. Sometimes you almost have to do this, especially if you’re reporting on a small sample of data.
3. The Newspaper Article Response Piece
   Did you see something in the newspaper that would help your readers? How about something that told them the real estate sky is falling, which got you madder than heck? Don’t hold it all in. A link to the online version of a local real estate article can be an easy springboard to a response piece. The articles of this sort that I’ve done seem to have been great comment generators.
4. The Client Shout Out
   Did someone close escrow recently on a great bargain home that you helped them get? Sure they did! How about a short piece congratulating them and talking about the process or the problem you helped them solve. Be sure to get your client’s permission for this one, and be sensitive to privacy issues (they may not want their last names or address used, for example). Photos of happy buyers in front of the home never hurt if you can get permission to use them.
5. The Local Shout Out
   Did your hair dresser make you look like a superstar recently? Or how about a restaurant you visited that gave you great service. Everyone loves to have their work appreciated, and people often will Google themselves or their businesses. Wouldn’t it be nice if they found you talking them up when they did? You might also use this type of piece to get your readership involved, by asking people to talk about local businesses that have done a really great job for them.
6. The Consumer Watch Dog Piece
   The flip side of the local shout, which identifies a purveyor of excellent service by name, is the anonymous consumer watch dog piece. You could write about mortgage fraud, or high mortgage costs, or “buying the listing”, “Listing Agent Scams to Avoid”, or any other practice or list of practices that is illegal, harmful, or disreputable. For this type of piece you generally don’t want to name individuals or businesses by name, but you do want to point out the trap that you’re hoping your client will avoid. Of course the implication (sometimes not so thinly-veiled) of these pieces is that the best way to avoid these sleazy operators is to pick a great agent like you who contains neither asbestos nor transfat.The down side of consumer watch dog articles is that their focus is on the negative side of things. As such, I wouldn’t rely on them too heavily, but they work well as an occasional piece.
7. How To (Do Something Something)
   I must admit that I sometimes find the real estate uses of this formula to be a bit hackneyed, so I wouldn’t rely on it too heavily, but it still works in a pinch. There are probably more articles online at this very moment about how to get your home ready to sell than there are atoms in the ocean — well, OK, maybe there aren’t that many. But what the heck, there’s room, write another one. Better yet, write one that somehow highlights what you bring to the table. Maybe you offer a staging credit, or maybe you’re good at staging a home yourself. If so, work that in.Another hackneyed use of this format is “How to Choose a Realtor®”. Such articles usually tend to tell people how to pick the author as the Realtor® — “It’s important when choosing a Realtor® to pick someone named John who’s more than six feet tall and drives a Honda”. Better: tell people to check references, and then link to a page where they can request YOUR references.Still, consumer watchdog style pieces fit the how to format nicely, e.g., “How to Avoid Getting Ripped Off at the Closing Table”, and the “X Web Sites That Can Help You Y” format is basically a How To variation. Specific variations on this formula can make for an original and interesting article. “How to Calculate the Total Cost of Ownership on a Condo”. Hey, that’s a good one. I think I’ll go write that one.

See Also:

Twenty-One Easy Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part II

Twenty-One Easy Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part III