Building Your Own Blog: A Primer in Two Steps

It’s becoming standard practice for agents to establish themselves by building an online brand, and often the first step is to create their own blog. There you can show off your expertise, highlight your experience, and share your unique personality.

“Having a blog is key to having unique content, getting your name out there, and building relationships, plus it gives you some unique content to post socially, which the search engines just love,” said Catherine Heeg, founder of Customized Management Solutions.

While creating a blog may seems like a daunting task, especially for internet-illiterate folk, it’s really fairly simple to do.

Step One: Conquering WordPress
It all starts with understanding perhaps the easiest-to-use blogging tool, WordPress.

More than 75 million websites are run on WordPress, making it one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in the world. And while it’s robust enough for businesses like The New York Times and CNN, it’s also user-friendly enough for an agent with no tech background at all.

Using WordPress requires no coding or web design experience. It does take some time and patience to set up a blog, but it’s not the same kind of monumental task as building a website, for example.

“To me, it’s intuitive, it’s the best,” said Heeg. “A lot of agents I know are using WordPress.”

Heeg suggests first looking around at other blogs, choosing some you like, and then using the same templates. Then go to the WordPress homepage (www.wordpress.com); all that’s needed to sign up is an email address. Choose from among the hundreds of easily adapted templates, all of them customizable, to build the kind of blog you have in mind.

There is no charge for using WordPress but the add-ons do have costs. Premium themes and other plugins, for example, entail fees, and a unique domain (as opposed to a WordPress one) costs up to $25 a year.

But for agents wanting to get a simple, professional-looking, easy-to-use blog published on the web quickly, WordPress is a good, affordable option.

Other Platform Options
There are a number of other popular blog platforms as well, including Squarespace, Posthaven, and Ghost. Each provides a good alternative to WordPress, in that they all create professional-looking and easy-to-edit blogs. All involve costs for some features.

If you aren’t quite ready for prime time, or don’t need a full blog, you can always market yourself on the social media sites. Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media provide space to post the same relatable client content that might go into a blog, Heeg said.

No matter the method, “it’s about connecting with clients and providing them with great content that’s usable and relevant to that person,” she said.

Step Two: Build Your Content
Just start by writing about the things you know.

Use your blog to showcase your knowledge of the destinations you sell to current and potential clients. If you’ve just been to a fam trip or ship site inspection, write about it. Add brief lists and posts like “Why New York is a great fall destination” or “How to take advantage of Norwegian’s freestyle offer.”

Supplement that content with photos and videos—all easily embedded into WordPress and most other CMSs—to make the page more attractive and inviting.

Include some links to, and comments on, articles you have read and found interesting, or in which you are quoted as an expert. Leaving a trail of related articles allows clients to feel more connected.

“If you’ve written a blog post about Hawaii, at the very bottom put links to two or three other related articles,” Heeg suggested. “That gives people something else to click on and another piece of action to take.”