How do you make your real estate blog a must read, a must revisit and/or a must subscribe to visitors on their very trip to your site? Simple, you have Flagship/Cornerstone content available to them from the very moment they arrive. Basically, just like the anchor store in your local mall, you need to have a few pieces of content that stand leaps and bounds above the rest in terms of search engine juice, usefulness, and overall emotional engagement. This content needs to be easily accessible from every page of your site so you can draw readers deeper into your real estate blog and share your most useful information readily.

What is Flagship/Cornerstone Content?

Flagship/Cornerstone content should actually make a readers life better, richer, easier, faster… Something that they search for in Google to find you by or something that directly benefits them. According to CopyBlogger, Cornerstone content is “something that is basic, essential, indispensable, and the chief foundation upon which something is constructed or developed. It’s what people need to know to make use of your website and do business with you.” 

6 Types of Flagship/Cornerstone Content

1. Series Posts

Come up with an educational, funny, controversial or down-right necessary series of posts. Find a topic that would resonate well in your area. For example, here in Florida, a series of posts about Hurricane Safety and home preparedness or how year round residents should handle the Snowbirds would be appropriate. Moving guides that include all the local utility service and emergency numbers along with day care or senior care services would make for a great enduring and searchable post.

A multi part post allows you to easily manage your time by only having to research one topic to research and write on for days or weeks by breaking the subject up into digestible pieces for readers. Another fun idea for series posts, is once you have completed the series, place them all into a PDF and offer them for download through your blog. The value of that is that you have now created link bait – meaning something that will drive both traffic and links back to your blog. Be sure to brand out that PDF so whenever someone reads, they know exactly who wrote it and what site they got it from. Promote yourself unashamedly throughout the PDF!

Examples:

• Christine Adler, without question, has some of the most entertaining real estate blog posts out there. She covers a lot of celebrity and luxury property happenings in the Fort Lauderdale area. But her recent series of TOP TENs really caught my eye: Top 10 List to Top All Top 10 Lists
• 1 Year’s Worth of Real Estate Blogging Ideas : notice that there is a link to this series on every page of the RSS Pieces website
• Blog-tionary: glossary of technical blogging terms : notice that while this series is not accessible from each page of the blog, it contains a number of very searchable terms and provides RSS Pieces with high volumes of search traffic as evidenced by the huge viewership on these posts. (The first post in this series, What is a Trackback went up within the first month of our blog going live and is to date our most popular post with 24,381 views. That’s what I call Flagship Content.)

Ideas for Realtors:

• How to buy your first home in Cape Coral (cover any of the particular laws, zoning, processes specific to the area)
• Weekly Restaurant/Nightlife Review
• Weekly High School Student Spotlight (this kind of post will draw in new local traffic as proud parents and friends will want to check your coverage of their loved one)
• Real Estate Glossary of Terms: create a new “glossary of real estate terms” category and add a single term each week to easily and quickly grow your glossary category

Notes for series posts:

Remember to always have a compilation post, listing all the posts in the series for easy access.

2. List Posts

People love lists. Think about People Magazine’s Most Beautiful People issue.  It is historically one of their best selling issues each year. Simple lists catch people’s attention. It gives them knowledge in bite sized pieces. List posts are simple aggregations of information. People like to be able to scan over large bodies of text quickly to find what they are looking for. Make the copy easy to read by breaking it up with numbered lists or bullet points. Use a bolder font for topic headings and always include lots of white space. The easier your posts are to read, the more reads they will get. Visitors feel overwhelmed when they are faced with text that seems to go on and on forever, so use formatting techniques to break up the text into easily digestible chunks.

Ideas for Realtors:

• Top 10 things to do in Area X when you’re retired
• The 20 most important things to do when staging a home for sale
• Top 10 ways to get more for your money when buying a home

Examples:  

Nothing drives traffic and subscribers better than a good tutorial post. Why? It certainly isn’t because we want to learn anything new.   We all have more than enough to do already. It’s because tutorials promise to make our lives easier, faster, richer, etc.  Every state has different housing, taxation and mortgage regulations. By creating a very specific, step by step guide to buying and selling in your home state, you can build instant credibility and become a referenced resource. These tutorial posts can easily be compiled into Ultimate Guides for easy reference for new readers. You can even convert your tutorial posts into an ebook (pdf) and create a little linkbait.  

Examples

• How to write a blog that generates leads
• How to write a killer tutorial post

Ideas for Realtors

• How to Short Sell in Cape Coral
• Ultimate Guide to Moving to Cape Coral

Notes for tutorial posts

No matter how kitchy a title you can come up with for posts like this, ALWAYS name your tutorial a “How to…” Why? Because, that is how people most often search for these types of articles on major search engines.

4. Tools

Build or use great tools on your website. If you can’t afford to hire a developer to build the greatest mortgage calculator or home search on earth, then find a vendor like 1ParkPlace that can give you high end lead generating tools that not only benefit your business but also your web visitors.

Examples

• Free SEO Tools for Realtors
• The Gellens’ Lead Generating Home Search

5. Research articles

Compile great research on any given topic then write a well thought out post. This kind of post takes time to research and write, so be aware that a single research post can take a few weeks to put together but it will be well worth it. It’s the kind of post that is interesting, searchable and worthy of the carnival of real estate.

Ideas for Realtors:

• What’s happening to the Cape Coral housing market and how it affects your ability to sell
• How will subprime lending companies filing for bankruptcy affect lending practices

Examples:

• How Windows Vista will Affect Blogging
• Cybersquatting Research

The keys to successful flagship content:

1. Link to it from your homepage, so it is easy to find for first time visitors
2. Update it often so the information remains current
3. Pepper it (and everything else you do online) with keywords!

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