Want to Become a Better Real Estate Marketer? Follow These 10 Blogs

For anyone that wants to improve their real estate marketing efforts for their CRE business, it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends and best practices. Fortunately, there are many excellent marketing blogs overflowing with information to help you do just that.

From industry insiders to professional thought leaders and agencies that have done a bit of it all, these 10 blogs will help you become a better real estate marketer.

Social Media Blogs

Simply Measured

Simply Measured is all about Social Analytics and Social Listening. They produce a handful of products in the space, including a robust API, so their blog posts focus more intently on the data side of social media.

If you’re like a lot of business owners and marketing managers and want to know that your efforts on social media will have a return, this is the blog to read.

★ Top Posts from Simply Measured:

Dangerous Social Marketing Habits and How to Break Them
It’s easy to use social media, and therefore it is easy to use it wrong. This post goes deeper than best practices to discuss the bad habits a lot of marketers use and how to break them.

Social Media Needs a Rebrand: How We Graduate to the C-Suite
A direct and keen discussion of the role social media plays and how a lot of people in the marketing space view it within the marketing toolbox. A must read if you are considering starting a social campaign.

Buffer

A few years ago, you wouldn’t necessarily find a lot of corporate blogs on this list. But content marketing has changed that, and few companies better embody that than Buffer, a company that has zero marketing budget, and instead relies on its team to produce world-class content that drives visitors to the site.

Their Buffer Social blog covers all things social media, as well as more general marketing topics, tutorials for use of their Buffer tools (and other tools in the space), and much more. It’s a great place to start when learning about the power of social media marketing.

★ Top Posts from Buffer:

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy from Scratch
A monster guide that provides a comprehensive roadmap to build a social media strategy with a step-by-step plan.

Email Marketing Blogs

Customer.io

 

Customer.io is a messaging product that helps to improve delivery rates, open rates, and everything else related to email and communication with clients. Their blog reflects this with frequent articles discussing all things email and customer messaging.

From A/B testing to delivery rate improvements to the sliding scale of key metrics that depend on your industry and marketing goals, this is a must read when building out email campaigns.

★ Top Posts from Customer.io:

The Formula for Driving Action in Your Emails
Janet Choi, who voices most of the posts on the Customer.io blog, dives deep into a real world experiment and how it performed in driving action within an email campaign.

The Princess Bride Formula for Memorable Welcome Emails
This is the kind of post that makes this site a joy to read. Clever, insightful, and pretty funny.

Copyblogger

The Copyblogger team has built a small media empire out of his blog, which started as a focus on all things blogging. It has since then become one of the must read online outlets for conversion-focused, content-driven marketing efforts, specifically as they relate to email marketing.

While you will also find plenty of articles on blogging in general, website content creation, and marketing tips, the email content is among the best and is a must when preparing for your next campaign.

★ Top Posts from Copyblogger:

5 Innovative Email Marketing Tips That Drive Readers to Action
A dive into specific, actionable tips you can use in your email campaigns to drive people to take action when they open your messages.

Which Email Marketing Strategy Should You Choose: Full Meal or Just Aroma
A discussion of two different styles of marketing emails: the short and enticing and the long and full of useful information.

SEO Blogs

Backlinko

Backlinko is one of the most successful SEO-focused blogs on the Internet, and yet it only has a handful of posts compared to most sites on the topic.

Why? Because the founder, Brian Dean, has made an effort to focus on quality over quantity, spending 50+ hours on every post he writes and promotes and only publishing every 5-6 weeks. As a result, he has posts that generate millions of pageviews per month and is well regarded in the SEO space.

★ Top Posts from Backlinko:

Link Building Case Study: How I Increased My Search Traffic by 110% in 14 Days
This is Brian’s premier post and one of the first to catapult him to the top. It’s also still incredibly relevant and he updates it frequently to stay fresh. Describing the core of his own content strategy, it’s a must read if you’re publishing content on your site at all.

Search Engine Roundtable

Barry Schwartz is one of the most prolific bloggers on the Internet. He has produced tens of thousands of articles for his own website and those to which he contributes, including SearchEngineLand.

Where Brian Dean covers the depth of concepts in SEO, Barry covers the news, changes, and goings on of the SEO world – a space that is constantly changing. To stay up to date on how you should be optimizing your site and your content, keep his site on your radar.

★ Top Posts from SE Round Table:

12 Years Covering The Search Industry
SE Round Table publishes a LOT, so take a look at the top posts of 2015 for a good sense of what you’ll find.

Content Marketing Blogs

Neil Patel

Neil takes an approach similar to Brian Dean in that his posts are incredibly long, incredibly detailed, and pervasive in the marketing world due to their quality. He doesn’t publish nearly as often as other thought leaders, but when he does, the content provides deep insights into how to build relationships, drive action, and provide value in the content you write.

He does cover other topics on the blog beyond content production, but since the core of his success and his business model is in building content, this is where his site really excels.

★ Top Posts on NeilPatel.com:

The Beginner’s Guide to Writing a Data-Driven Post
This is the handbook for bloggers looking to build long, insightful, data-driven posts. The kind of posts that will generate massive organic traffic, huge share numbers in social media, and true thought leadership status.

Follow These Long Form Content Examples to Boost Your Rankings
A hybrid content and SEO post, this one covers the kind of content and subjects that help their authors build strong positioning in the search engines.

Unbounce

Unbounce is a landing page and conversion rate optimization company and therefore a lot of their content focuses on exactly this. They discuss how to make the best possible landing page using case studies and data-driven strategies. But more importantly, they talk about how to create experiences for users that will keep them coming back, and drive them to visit that landing page in the first place, almost all relating to content.

It’s a nice cross-section of all the different elements that must come together in a successful campaign to actually drive action.

★ Top Posts on Unbounce:

Are You Missing This Vital Ingredient in Your Content Strategy?
One of the most popular types of posts on the Unbounce blog is the “you’re doing it wrong” post. It started with their coverage of landing page do’s and don’ts and has extended now into content strategy and other marketing topics. This is a great example as relates to content.

13 Warning Signs Your Web Copy Stinks
This is one of the more popular posts on the Unbounce blog and again it hits on the “you’re doing it wrong” angle. If you enjoy posts that carefully illustrate the things you should avoid doing, this one is a very effective.

Hubspot Inbound Marketing Blog

Hubspot’s blog used to post 200-300 posts per month. These days they are down to a pedestrian 100 posts per month, each of them a deep dive into a topic related to inbound marketing.

Their marketing blog in particular has the kind of reach and depth that it’s hard to miss. Search for a topic related to marketing and you’ll almost certainly see a Hubspot article on the homepage, and while almost every post drives to a download or Hubspot product discussion of some sort in the footer, the content is impartial and action-oriented – it’s a great place to start for anyone getting into inbound marketing.

★ Top Posts from Hubspot’s Marketing Blog:

Reasons Inbound Marketing Campaigns Fail – And What to Do About It
A visual walkthrough what works and what doesn’t in inbound marketing. This is as good example of the type of content frequently posted by Hubspot, providing insights into how what they do works.

How Content Marketing Impacts Your Bottom Line
An in-depth infographic, the staple of many Hubspot blog posts, with insights into how to make content marketing work for your bottom line.

Content Marketing Institute Blog

Joe Pulizzi and the Content Marketing Institute team has put together a healthy portfolio of materials related to content marketing over the last decade. The blog is the heart of it all, with dedicated articles about content production, curation, lead nurturing, and more.

Focused on more in-depth and case study driven content than the action-tips style of post that Hubspot delivers, CMI’s blog is a nice counterpoint when reading up on inbound marketing.

★ Top Posts from Content Marketing Institute:

Build a Successful Content Marketing Strategy in 7 Steps
Written by the company’s founder, Joe, this article contains the 10 page framework CMI uses for building out a plan.

12 Things to Do After You’ve Written a New Blog Post
One of the big points preached by the CMI team is that content production is only part of the formula. Successful inbound marketing requires promotion in equal or greater measure. This post dives into the 12 things you should be doing after you write and publish something to ensure it gets traction.

Conclusion

Whether you’re building the digital presence of a business that has been active for years or you are launching a new real estate endeavor, success will be tied closely to your marketing efforts.

That’s why the marketing blogs in this article are so important. From industry best practices to hot new trends, they cover a bit of everything, and can provide the insight needed to stay ahead of the constantly evolving curve.