Lately, as I read blog posts on many subjects including real estate, I am finding that many agents are subscribed to blogging services with what we would refer to as canned goods.
The same title and the same exact wording appears! The only difference is the photo and the location. The subjects are trite and uninteresting. It is the same old stuff, and re-packaged with second rate photos.
Recently, we responded to an S.O.S from a successful real estate marketing professional who put out this distress signal: "I have been blogging consistently. Why is no one commenting or following me?" "Is there anyone out there?"
For those of you who are experiencing the same frustration, here is an important tip: Discover and dominate an under served market niche and blog about it.
A niche is a specialized market. It is a market segment or a particular market “space”. An example of a niche in luxury real estate would be historic homes.
When we were in commercial real estate in Beverly Hills we specialized in high end retail and the entertainment industry. One of our jobs was to find potential tenants for retail stores and shopping centers that we represented exclusively, on Rodeo Drive, or surrounding areas.
In doing some research for an upcoming blog series, we found an excellent analogy for niches by Ray Wert on his Jalopnik.com blog. He referred to niches as the spaces between the marbles in a Mason jar that is full of marbles. If you were to pour sand in the jar it would fill those spaces and there would be a surprising amount of room for the sand.
Only when you can no longer add sand is the jar really “full”. The marbles represent what everyone else is doing, the niches exist in those spaces between the marbles that the sand fills. Essentially, that is how you find the under-served market niche. It is doing what no one else is thinking of doing.