How To Create A Never Ending Supply Of Content For Your Real Estate Blog

We all know it is essential to keep our real estate websites up to date with content, however this is easier said than done.

Creating fresh, unique, and relevant content can be a difficult and time consuming process.

As a real estate agent you have a lot of other things on your plate demanding your attention.

One of the most effective ways to create great content in a short amount of time is to use curated content.

What Is Content Curation?

The general idea behind content curation is to take some (or all) of a piece of content created by someone else and feature it along other related content. (Always providing credit to the original source)

Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amount of content on the Web and presenting it in a meaningful and organised way around a theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information.

—Beth Kanter

The best way to think of it is that you’re finding content that you know your audience will be interested in and then connecting them to it.

One of the best ways to curate content for your personal real estate website is to find an article of interest for your readers and provide your opinion on it.

How To Get Started

To get started you need to find content to curate.

Come up with a list of 3-5 topics that want to focus on for your blog content.

There are a few tools that you can use when curating content to make it easier to find and keep track of relevant content that you can use.

Feedly

Feedly is a tool that allows you to follow multiple blogs and keep up to date with the latest content that they are producing.

When you first log into Feedly it has the option to search content by topic. This is where you can start adding blogs to your feed.

Search for the topics that you decided to focus on earlier and find some good sites to follow. Make sure to go into the sites and read some of their content initially to ensure that it fits the type of content that your audience wants to read.

Alternatively you can type in the URL’s of websites that you know that you already want to follow.

Click the plus next to each website to add it to your feed.

Try and find 3-5 different websites for each of the topics that you wanted to include on your blog. This will ensure that you always have a good choice of content to curate for your blog.

Google Alerts

Google alerts allows you to set up an alert whenever content is posted about a certain topic. This can be helpful to stay on top of any breaking news about a topic or your local area.

You simply just have to type in a keyword and your email address and you will receive alerts whenever new content is posted online.

Be careful not to be too vague in your searches here or your inbox will get flooded with new alerts for that keyword.

After you have your Feedly and Google Alerts accounts set up you should have a good source of new content that you can curate when needed.

How To Curate Content Properly

Lets say you’ve found an article like this one on realestate.com.au that you think your audience will find interesting or helpful.

The first step would be to decide how much of that article you are going to use in your post (you could use part of it or all of it.)

Once you have decided this you can copy the article onto a new post on your website.

Now you need to provide your take on the article. This is the part where you can add your own personality and opinions, which will make the content original and unique.

A paragraph or two here introducing and talking about the topic is enough to let your readers connect with your personality  and give some context before providing them with the content of the other article.

Obviously the more original content you can write the better.

So this is the general outline that your article should take. (Make sure to link to the source of the original article)

Content Curation Tips

A few tips on blog content curation from CoSchedule

Provide your take on things by giving every curated piece some context.

Whether it’s through commentary, quoting, or abstracting, you should always surround the content with your views, knowledge, and insight.

Keep a healthy mix of curated and original content.

To distinguish your brand from just another content aggregator, you should inject custom content that’s personal and customized to your audience.

Be very, very selective.

You’re trying to showcase your unique taste through these curated pieces. Pick only high-quality content that speaks toward how you’d like to be perceived.

Always attribute your sources.

Always attribute who produced the content, and let them know! More often than not, they’ll be happy to share the post, expanding your reach and views.