This should be one of your easiest content resources.  There should be several mortgage brokers willing to write for your blog site.  Let them write instructional items, all about mortgage types, hints for buyers, etc.  What they will definitely want to do is to publish updates of mortgage rates, and hopefully even a commentary on the current market.

You offer them the platform, and they send the comment.  If they aren’t into blogging, it’s doubtful that you can get them to post directly as an author, but you can receive via email and copy/paste for a pretty quick post.  It made my mortgage person happy to know that I set him up as an Author anyway.  This way, he gets an author page, and his posts are kept together for access.  To show you how that works, I’ve created Sam Gotthemoney as my mortgage guest author.  I’ve selected his name as the author for this post.

You’ll see that he then has a page with a brief bio that I’ve inserted, and his posts will show all together at
photo credit: Foxgirlthat page.  It creates on-the-fly, much like a category page.  Anyone wanting to look at his posts over time, say for a look at the movement of interest rates, would select his author page to view all his posts.

You should get his company logo as well, and place it in the posts, either top or bottom as I’ve done here, and link it to their site.  Of course, these posts go into our Mortgage child category under the DemoTown Real Estate Info main category.

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This is our sticky, stay-on-top post for our Business & Government category.  We will be using the category page link to get to it from the About DemoTown page.  You may want to separate out business and government, and that’s very OK.  You could also, if you want page links in the left side, make a page and redirect it to the category page as well.   However, I don’t like a lot of page links in the left side or top navigation.  It can confuse the visitor or just make them leave from link overload.

By using the category page, and linking off of the About DemoTown page, we get them to their desired location in an acceptable two clicks.  You’ll also find that doing the writing well, you’ll get most of your visitors to these business pages going directly to the page from searches.

***********  Example Content for This Post *********

This is going to remain the top post, so you’ll want to write up a general post about the business climate in DemoTown, business growth, any special niche businesses, just a bit of general information.  If you’re doing government here as well, do a brief description of local government.  You’ll be doing short individual posts with contact information about government departments and agencies.

Tell the visitor here that there are profiles of business in this area, and the best way to locate specific businesses or types is to use the search box at the top.

photo credit: natalie_guinsler

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Our sticky post at the top of the Shopping Category has an example Google map using Denver’s shopping centers. I mentioned that you can place a link in your map location icon display, and that link could be to your post about the location. I can’t edit that map, as I didn’t build it, but pretend that I had placed a link at the Cherry Creek icon to this post.

Here you could list stores, phone numbers, link to their mall store locator, and you could place a video you’ve taken, or someone else’s, as I’ve done here.

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We’ll want to make this a sticky post to stay at the top of the category page. Here you’ll want to write generally about the shopping opportunities in DemoTown. You can, if you like, do some location information for major shopping centers, but you should really have individual posts, and maybe even videos, later for each major shopping center.

One thing you can do is a Google map of the major shopping centers, place it on this page, and use the linking ability off the map to go to the post about each center. Below I’ve embedded a map from Google with Denver shopping centers. If you click on Cherry Creek, you’ll see that you can click on a link to take you to their site. You can build your own maps on Google and place links to pages on your site. So, you would do a map of shopping locations, and link each to a post/video/photos on your DemoTown site.

photo credit: louderthanadam

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Though we’re linking to what visitors might think is a regular page for Attractions (From the About DemoTown page), this is really a post. We’ll make it a sticky to keep it on top, and then we’ll link to the category page from About DemoTown. This way we can keep writing about attractions and have all our posts show up, newest on top under this one.

You’ll want to write general area attraction information in this one. You could also do a video of a montage of attractions, or, even better, once you have a bunch of YouTube videos of the area, just show it here as a custom player as below.

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Keep using your real estate key phrases, and we’re going to create a post for every area and subdivision. Here is where we embed our first Google Map. I’ll do a tutorial on this, but this is an example of a map of an area in my MLS. Here’s how you might structure your area posts:

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Either above or below the map, write your description of the area. Don’t violate any fair housing laws, but describe the architecture or type of homes in this area. You can give some very simple previous year numbers for dollars, numbers of homes sold, etc. Or, if you want to be a bit more detailed with statistics, you can link out to a separate post with sold statistics for this area. That post would be in the Statistics category.

**Note: Capturing leads is critical, so here’s one very effective way. Develop a PDF file of detailed sold property statistics for the previous year, and including all areas broken out, as well as totals for the entire MLS. I’ll show you in another tutorial how to deliver it automatically and free, while you’re capturing their information. On every area page, and every stats page, offer a link to get this report, and the link will be an email “mailto” link.

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In this category, we’re really going to have a huge amount of search engine clout.  So many visitors to your site will end up getting there from searches on names of subdivisions or named areas of the MLS.  Every listing they see will place the property in an area, and they may not be familiar with its location or the types of homes located in the area.

Your goal for this category is to have a short description of EVERY MLS area and subdivision in the area, whether you want to practice in that area or not.  We’ll be embedding a Google map with the areas marked, and you want one post per area or subdivision with demographic, and preferably sold property statistics (very general for the last full year).

Your sticky post (this one in our example) will give an overview of the entire area, tell the visitor how many MLS areas and subdivisions you’ll be covering, and even tell them to use the map and the search box for faster access to an area’s posts and information.

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This is one of your easiest categories to keep fresh and full of content.  It will also bring you search engine traffic.  First, if your favorite mortgage person will not write regular updates and rate announcements for you, get another mortgage person.

I have a person who sends me a detailed email each week that has current information about my local market mortgage rates and availability.  It’s three minutes to copy out the text and chart into a post.

Of course I write also, but this section is always fresh without me providing any original material.

Make a general sticky post to stay on top with general and evergreen information about your local mortgage market.  Then add all the new material, latest post will always be at the top, just under your sticky intro post.
photo credit: lumaxart

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When you sit down with a real estate professional to go over area sold property statistics and market competition, don’t leave out the allowance for human nature in setting your home’s listing price.  The best deal is one in which all participants feel like they’re a winner.  It’s human nature to want to bargain a bit.  The DemoTown real estate market is no different.

Setting your price at your rock-bottom could place you in a tough position when a buyer brings an offer and wants a bit of “back-and-forth.”  This includes some allowance for the second stage in negotiations, the inspections and repairs.  Pricing too high could solve your negotiation problems as well…as you may not get any offers to negotiate….

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You get the point of this type of post.  You want to write posts that educate your buyers and sellers in preparing for negotiation.  This will go into our Negotiation category, and will display under the sticky post with the general negotiation introduction information.

You WILL get site visitors from Google and other engines on search phrases about negotiations in your market area.  This section builds credible text for the engines and for your visitors.

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This is another page that will be linked to from the Real Estate Info page, as it is a category page.  Category pages are built on-the-fly by WordPress when they’re called up, and they show the latest posts on top.  We’ll use this one a s a Sticky Post to stay on top.

If you want any of these category pages to show up in the side page box widget, you would create a blank page with the right title, and then use the “redirect” plugin to take the visitor to the Negotiation category page URL.  Otherwise, the only way they will find this page is with the Category dropdown box we’ve added to the sidebar, or through links from another page, as in our Real Estate Info Page.

You’ll want to make general statements about negotiating in general in this first post.  You can begin to talk about what you’ll be writing in detail about later.  Then, create more posts for the Negotiation category from both buyer and seller perspective, initial price negotiations, inspections and repairs, etc.  You can even use specific real deal examples as long as you don’t divulge any personal or private information.

Image is an example from the PhotoDropper Plugin, though probably not what you’d want to use on this page.  I think we strive for a better interaction between buyer and seller…but it was funny.

photo credit: ben pollard

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