If you’re like most marketers it feels like you don’t have time to get anything done. The same holds true for writing blog posts. You never have time to sit down, research, write, iterate and finalize a perfectly crafted post. So what do most marketers do? They end up not writing any blog post at all.
This is the worst case scenario!
Having at least some content with some degree of value is better than nothing. Not everyone likes hearing that, but as it relates to value for prospects, customers, investors or partners a little can go a long way. The problem is ourselves. We believe that if a piece of content doesn’t have “Everything” we believe that it should then what’s the point. The point is that all content is valuable.
So how can you actually write a blog post in 15 minutes?
This blog post is the perfect example. I actually sat down without a plan for any specific topic and said to myself “I’ll just research ideas and then write a post later”, but I actually needed to get a new post published and then thought “No, I will do this now and do it in 15 minutes.” Which sparked the idea to simply write the post on how to write a blog in 15 minutes.
The only way to actually pull this off is to write on something you know a lot about. This is typically something that you do every day, a primary responsibility, something you’ve evolved in over time. The reason this is important is that it allows you to quickly write down all of the things you already know (but others don’t and is why this is so valuable).
Examples of 15 minute blog post topics
How to negotiate a lower price on design work
3 tips on getting your team hyped during a meeting
What is the difference between Class A and Class B multifamily real estate
If you can put topics like that into 500 words or less, you will easily pull of a 15 minute blog post.
You’ll have to not worry about perfect grammar, spelling or formatting because you can always come back to that later.
And you have to just let yourself go and “let it flow”, don’t overthink or complicate the idea. Write down exactly what you are thinking about and Viola! you’ll have your next post.
Now we don’t advocate doing this for every post you write, but in a pinch, this works wonders.
If You Are Looking to Get More Traffic, Leads or Have Questions, Call Us at 866-357-7422
As a Partner, Managing Director or Marketing Leader within a commercial real estate investment firm or CRE fund you may have asked yourself if blogs are something you should write and publish as a part of your overall marketing strategy. This is a great question and you may have come here to this article in search of that answer or you may know that you want to write blogs for your firm and simply looking for blog topic ideas, but either way we’ll break down the why and the how to move you in the right direction.
So what are good commercial real estate blog topics?
And should you write blogs for your CRE firm or fund?
Does Blogging Help Commercial Real Estate Firms?
We’ll start by defining what a “blog” actually is as it relates to your firm.
In general a blog is just a short article that you will share with your audience, but there are specific goals that this blog may need to achieve.
The Goal of a Blog Post
Is your blog being created similar to a press release and it will be used solely to direct existing investors, partners or prospects to the article so they can remain aware of your firm or up to date on status of transactions, fund launches, syndications, etc?
Or is the intention for writing a commercial real estate blog post to gain visibility in the search engines so that when a prospective investor or deal partner searches online for an answer to a question they have related to CRE you show up?
If you are creating press release blog posts and that’s all you plan to do then you probably landed on our blog post by accident because those who are seeking CRE blog post topics are in need of ideas beyond the typical PR style posting.
So we will assume that you are a decision maker at your firm and are looking for blog post topics that commercial real estate investors are interested in or prospects within the deal flow chain such as business owners, partners, board members, intermediaries, CPA’s, etc.
Do Blog Posts Help?
Yes. You just need to understand what “Help” you need from the post.
How to Come Up With CRE Blog Topics
Now that it’s established blog posts can help your firm achieve a goal and assuming you are “bought in” to the theory of how and why this works, let’s focus on how to come up with good commercial real estate blog post topics & ideas.
Where to Find CRE Blog Post Ideas?
An easy way to generate blog post topics is to visit commercial real estate industry blogs. Their sole model is creating content that engages the industry and can leave clues as to what could be successful content for your blog. You just need to make sure that the publications you research aren’t creating content for YOU, the CRE firm, but instead your target audience.
So in a sense these publications are your competition.
If you Google Top Commercial Real Estate Blogs a good list of them will come up.
Many of them are writing content that would be more interesting to you, but then you have people like Shane Melanson who has content that is catering more towards the investor and is a good place to find topics more relevant to CRE investors.
Topics like “Developing Your Commercial Real Estate Exit Strategy” or “8 Questions Every Real Estate Investor Should Ask to Assess the Risk of a Property” are good as they are covering areas that CRE investors are interested in and will get value from.
These types of topics are driven by questions asked by your target audience.
For example, an investor may be searching “When is the Best Time to Sell of My CRE Portfolio?”
Or “What questions should I ask a seller when looking to buy a commercial property?”
The two blog post topic examples we shared are prime posts to get found by investors asking these questions online.
This doesn’t just apply to investors but this works the same on the deal flow side when those targets search for answers to their questions online as well.
How Else Can You Come Up with Commercial Real Estate Blog Ideas?
While getting ideas from other blogs is great, it’s also slightly diluted because you’re focusing on topics that have already been covered. So a good thing to do here is write derivatives of those topics you found. A derivative blog post topic could be “7 Questions Investors Should Ask Before Buying a Multi-Family Property.”.
Alternatively you can use data provided by Google to give you ideas based on demand.
This is commonly referred to as Keyword Research. And you should definitely do it.
Google Ads has a tool for current advertisers, but if you don’t have access to that tool, use Ubersuggest instead ( https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/ ).
We did a quick search for Top Cities for Commercial Real Estate Investing and it didn’t show any specific search volume but it gave us the keyword idea of “Best Cities for Commercial Real Estate Investment”. That term had an approximate 10 searches per month. ** In reality it’s probably 100+ searches per month, but these tools give very conservative estimates
So that is a great topic to write on.
And in the screenshot below you can see the tool gives a list of pages that show up in the search engine results for that keyword / keyphrase.
You can click through to these posts to see how and what they are writing about in their post to give you ideas on how to write your blog post and ultimately outrank them in the search engines.
Hopefully this has given you a good start to coming up with blog post ideas for your CRE Firm or Fund, but if you are wanting more help on your CRE Content Strategy then let’s talk. We are working with and marketing for PE firms including Commercial Real Estate Investment Firms that syndicate, are in multifamily, industrial and more.
If You Are Looking to Get More Traffic, Investor Leads, Increased Deal Flow or Have Questions, Call Us at 866-357-7422
