#300 Mail-Right Show: Successful Instagram Marketing For Real Estate Agents

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How Can Real Estate Agents Use Social Media To Make a Real Difference to Their Commission Checks?

We Also Discuss Neal’s Latest Book “The Age of Influence”

Neal Schaffer is an authority on helping innovative businesses digitally transform their sales and marketing. Founder of the digital marketing consultancy PDCA Social, Neal currently serves as a Fractional CMO to several companies. He also teaches at Rutgers Business School and the Irish Management Institute.

Fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, Neal is a popular keynote speaker and has spoken on four continents in more than a dozen countries. He is also the author of 4 sales and marketing books, including Maximize Your Social (Wiley) and the recently published The Age of Influence (HarperCollins Leadership), a ground-breaking book redefining digital influence. Check out Neal’s Maximize Your Social Influence podcast for marketing inspiration.

(00:00)
Robert Newman: Welcome back to the Mail-Right podcast. We’re excited for Both ourselves and our guests and all of you today because we have hit a historic milestone. We have done 300 shows and John and I have not managed to kill each other or fire each other, which is pretty miraculous.

(00:31)
Jonathan Denwood: We are still talking to one another, aren’t we?

(00:32)
Robert Newman: Yeah. So we’re lucky to have a guy that I have never heard of before, but he is a more, generalized social media guru and he has 45,000 followers on LinkedIn. And he’s got a social media agency that runs out of Irvine, California. He is definitely deeply steeped in the world of social media, marketing and promotion. So we’re extremely excited to have him on the show. We haven’t talked about, this particular category of digital marketing in quite a while. We’re hoping that he has some really good tips for our audience, which Neal, as I’m hoping that you know, is mostly real estate agents and brokers. So without any further ado Neal, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to our listeners and our viewers, and tell them a little bit about who you are and what you do.

(01:30)
Neal Schaffer: Sure. I’m what you would call a digital marketing, social media marketing author, speaker consultant. So I need to update my bio because the agency, I don’t run any more It’s a consultancy. but I work with a variety of businesses as a consultant. I call it fractional CMO consulting. I also have a digital, a membership community where I offer group coaching, and then I’ve written a few books. So my first two books are about LinkedIn, my third book was about social media marketing strategy. My most recent book, which I published last year was about influence marketing. And even though I don’t specialize in a particular industry, I do have clients in the real estate industry because really the concepts are universal. Right. So I know that there’s a lot of people like me that just do real estate. I mean, you know, names that you probably know.

But because I come from outside of the industry, I’m hoping to offer, you know, somewhat of a fresh perspective that maybe you’re not used to hearing. And because my background is B2B sales, which is why my first two books are about LinkedIn. I very much understand the sales aspect of the marketing and with the publishing of my book on influencer marketing, just the role that influences your customers, with your network, with your community, and how social media can help play a role in building more know, like, and trust for you and your community. So we’re sort of jumping the gun there and what we’re going to talk about today, but I bring a very holistic perspective. I’m not going to tell you, you need to create like five Instagram reels a day to be successful because that’s BS, right. But there are things you can do to connect with people, increase the visibility that I believe every agent should do. And I hope that we get to cover those today.

(03:15)
Robert Newman: Perfect. All right. And I’m of course here with my co-host Jonathan Denwood is an entrepreneur like myself. Who’s chosen to dedicate some of his time to the real estate space. He’s created an amazing real estate lead generation system that is a mix of WordPress and automation and Facebook marketing and CRM, and a lot of really cool things. But the really unique thing that he’s done is he’s focused on a side of the market that many of us, myself included kind of ignore, which is the people that are in the first, first one to five years inside their career. Many, many, many services are aimed at the real estate veteran, the real estate agent who’s already making 3 or $400,000 a year. You could find a slew of services designed to satisfy their needs. John focuses on helping people who really need the help the most. And I think that’s really cool. But anyway, John, wouldn’t go ahead and introduce herself too.

(04:16)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. So just go over to the mail riot website you should have your own website, your own platform. Don’t rely on your broker’s tools. You need your own database, your own website. We can help you with that. Back over to you Robert,

(04:31)
Robert Newman: Well, actually in this case, I’m going to serve it right back up to you. I am in the process of making sure that Neal gets in front of my audience today and our podcast. So why don’t you go ahead and tee up the first question for Neal?

(04:45)
Jonathan Denwood: Well so Neal. I think to say your title, your last book is a great title at the right moment would be an understatement. The age of influence. It definitely is. Isn’t it, when it comes to online marketing, it’s all about influences and being in front of the right people and having the right people. Now, when it comes to real estate it’s about building influence in your local community. Isn’t it, you know, being seen amongst all the other local competition as the person, the bee’s knees, we would say in England, you know the woman or man that you should if you’re looking to sell your house, they’re the one that you should talk to first. So start off got any insight A why are so many real estate agents, so bad at building influence and, B in the, in the brawl, which we’re going to get more specific got any tips or is it possible through social media and all the things we’re going to talk about to build this influence?

(06:08)
Neal Schaffer: Yeah. So I’m actually I’m sort of like this start-up specialist. So to me, a book as a start-up, I’m already working on as my next book. Right. But which is going to be more of a digital marketing playbook. And when we think about it, you know, John what you offer is, is awesome because you have the web aspect, which is for search engines, you have the email aspect CRM, and then the social aspect with Facebook, right? And these are the three areas that agents need to be. So I know that there are some older agents that just stay away from all of this, but people still read emails. And if you know the whole idea about building influence and building like know and trust, it requires several touches, several iterations, and email is, the best way to get that right, as well as social media.

The problem that most agents have is they look at email and social media as a way to bombard their database with promotions and not offering them any value. So immediately people unsubscribe potentially report as spam unfollow, and then agents wonder why email and my social media don’t work for them. They got off to a bad start. And unfortunately, that can really, I mean, first impressions count, right? So it’s really understanding the role that each of these has. It’s really about keeping top of mind, keeping in touch, offering value. And what’s amazing is that the agents that I know offer incredible value when I need, you know, a painter to do some touch-up, work outside first person, I called is my agent. If I’m looking for new pest controls or, or, you know, whatever, we, we found ants in our house, the agent knows all, if they’re a good agent. and even those that are one to five years in, you should be building out those echoes. So you should be able to be the key point person for everyone in your community who has a problem.

Now we can extend this to an, you know, when we think about social media, we normally only think about what do I post on social media, but groups are extremely powerful. You have Facebook groups, loads of local communities have their own Facebook groups. You also have next door, which is an absolute goldmine. There are people day in and day out asking these sorts of questions that you can go in and answer, pay it forward, build Parma. They’re not going to buy from you that day, but your name is going to get out there, right? You’re going to get additional impressions. And guess what? The next time someone’s looking for an answer, they’re going to do a search and find your answer. Digital lives 24/7.

Now, if you could meet someone, if you can meet a prospective customer, you know, every hour on the hour, every day, that’s awesome, but you can’t logistically, physically we can’t. That’s where digital comes. And that’s where email comes in. That’s where social comes in. It allows us to be alive and be out there and not working when we’re asleep potentially. So it starts with that mindset, right? How do I offer value and using social media to show one open house just listed for sale after another is an advertisement? It’s not offering value. You’re not, you know, people like no interest, people, not salespeople on social media. So the more of a person you are, the more, you showcase your own personal lifestyle, you know, the time you spend with your family your own sort of passions. You build deeper emotional connections with people. And that’s what social media is great at that I think most agents really miss out on. So I know that that was a lot, I’ll just sort of stop there.

(09:29)
Jonathan Denwood: I thought it was a great answer, actually. And I’m not, bum licking you. I’ve, you know, I actually thought that was a really insightful answer, Neal, over to you, Robert.

(09:45)
Robert Newman: So I’m kind of curious I didn’t get as deep into your historical background as I would have liked, but I did manage to figure out that you’ve got it-

(09:57)
Jonathan Denwood: You are so naughty Robert I sent you all the links, to do a big dive on Neal. It was all prepared for you, Rob. You just could be both.

(10:12)
Neal Schaffer: It started in the back of a 65 VW bus -.

(10:16)
Robert Newman: I did, however, manage to figure out that with your help because you do have a great profile on your own website, Neal Schaffer.com that you’ve got basically what appears to be 357,000 social followers of your own on six different platforms. Now, the things that- the platforms, that real estate agents tend to focus on our Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I’m not saying that those are the best or that those are the only, I’m just saying that that historically speaking, that’s what they tend to focus on. for the Facebook. You have 38,000 followers, Instagram, you have 15,000 followers on LinkedIn you have 43,000 followers, at least according to your own promotion, essentially like what you’re telling the world.

So I am curious to know, let’s call it with Instagram, the 15,500 people that your Instagram account has. Now, Instagram is a platform that I can verify and tell you that real estate agents absolutely can and do make true money off that platform. They have people that follow them, especially in the luxury space. That’s really where I’ve seen people really blow the doors off lead generation. I’m curious to know if you personally would have a tip for anybody in terms of like growing an Instagram audience.

(11:37)
Neal Schaffer: Yeah, so, and Robert that was bang on for agents, I would also recommend Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, obviously it skews younger, but you get more engagement and there are more younger buyers today, right? So if you want to serve the next generation of home buyers, you need to be on Instagram period. They’re not on Facebook or they’re not active on Facebook. Facebook is still where the older generations are though. So, you know, you still need to be there. How strategic is it going to be? And maybe the advertising platform is the most strategic thing in the groups are more strategic than your own profile, per se. Although you can still get some decent engagement from your profile. And then you have LinkedIn, which I think is a gold mine. It’s where the professionals are. It’s where, you know, the average household family income of a LinkedIn member is like, what? 75,000. I mean, it’s a really lucrative audience. And because it’s like a business networking audience, you’re free to network with people there that on Facebook is a little bit harder, right?

A lot of people just want to keep their Facebook private. So on LinkedIn, not necessarily the case and on Instagram, not necessarily case and Instagram, it’s a very open platform just in terms of the content. I mean, you create a reel and you’re getting a few hundred, if not a few thousand impressions, no matter how good or bad that reel is. that sort of organic, you know, visibility is not possible today on Facebook or LinkedIn. Although on LinkedIn, we could talk about polls and PDs, but I digress. So beginning with Instagram now what’s happened over time and I have built up large audiences because my business has been social media marketing. I have to use these platforms, right. So, you know, I joined LinkedIn back in 2004, one of the first million members, I joined Twitter 2008. You know, I wrote a book on LinkedIn back in 2009. So I’ve been, and I was on Instagram 2011 or 12 at the beginning. And I have a few-

(13:24)
Jonathan Denwood: But Neal you don’t look old enough.

(13:32)
Robert Newman: There’s, John with his English flattery.

(13:36)
Neal Schaffer: But I will tell you that it takes time, right? It takes time for people to like you. now with every social network. And we’ve seen it most recently with clubhouse. And we can talk about the clubhouse later if you’d like. but there are periods of time where people just joined the platform. They’re looking for people to follow. They upload their Facebook friends, which is how a lot of people start. So if you have a lot of friends on Facebook that comes to Instagram, that’s one way in which you get followers. The other way is obviously being more active. And today I think this is the main way. Now over time, there’ve been a lot of bots that have just automatically followed unfollowed people. And I think most people become jaded.

They already have their core number of people that they’re following, and they’re not looking to follow more people there- now with reels, I mean, their feeds are literally full of content, right? So they’re a lot more careful as to who they follow and therefore organic, growth on Instagram accounts has come to a, I won’t say a halt, but it’s very, very hard to grow an account organically today, but the way to do it, as you need to get more visibility. you get more visibility through content and through engagement, the content that gets you the most visibility today are our reels. Now you can get a reel, with a few thousand views and get no new followers from it. So, you know, I don’t think it’s just one reel. And I think it’s also the content and what have you.

Also the engagement is the other part is going into the profiles of people in your community or people that ate at the same restaurant that you ate at last night, that tagged that, you know, the restaurant you know, commenting on other people. And I think a lot of people also forget just engaging with your own audience, engaging with your own followers, and commenting on their content as well. Well is a way to get exposure. So, I mean, there’s no sort of secret or shortcut it. It requires a few things. If you really want to grow it organically, that’s sort of what it’s going to require. You got to go out there and network, you’ve got to go out there and sell it. You got to go out there and meet people. It’s no different in real life. You know, you go to a networking meeting and you stand there in the corner, nothing happens. You go out and you start to practically talk to people. And that’s where you start to build up a list of business cards and contacts. It’s the same thing with social media, with Instagram.

So those are the two things. If you don’t publish content, you’re not going to get the visibility when you want to publish content, publish it in the mediums that Instagram likes right now, that’s reels, but even static posts, static videos are okay. Use hashtags to get exposure. Although the exposure is not, what it used to be, we’re finding with the data but proactively, you know, follow people, engage with people like comment, almost spend as much time doing that as working on your own content. And I think that’s part of the secret in how you can gain you know, a larger following over time. If you were to do that religiously 15 minutes, a day, 30 minutes a day, you don’t even have to publish on Instagram daily, if you could. That’s great. But I know, it takes time to create really good content for the platform.

But if you could spend 15 minutes a day first engaging with your own followers, and then moving on to new people in your community, in various ways, you can find them authentically, you know, sharing comments. Those are, you know, that’s not rocket science, but it requires a little bit of time and sweat equity and most agents I know are like, Neal, I love what you’re saying. I’ll just give you $500. Can you do that for me? Right? The problem is maybe I could, but guess what your name and branding are going to be out there when you’re commenting. And when you’re liking what happens when you accidentally like a competitor’s post? What does that say about you? Right? Or comment on a competitor saying great job.

So there’s a lot of things that you need, you need to step up, you need to understand this is an investment in your future, in your career. And I generally think these are things that, you know, agents that are, are watching this or listening to the podcast. They really need to step up and do, but it’s not time-consuming. Once you get into the groove, it’s like muscle memory, right? Once you get into it 15 minutes a day, once you see the ROI, as you mentioned with luxury, I’m sure others have a lot of anecdotal stories that can share as well. It’s just a natural part of doing business today, right? The name of my next book is probably going to be something along the lines of digital-first marketing. We live in a digital-first world. So I know that some states are open up more than others, but at the end of the day, this digital transformation of how we consume content, how we network, how we engage is not changing.

We’re not going back to the radio, TV, TV, and radio on, you know, on the clubhouse and on Netflix. You know, it’s all digital. So you got to get, having a digital way of doing business is a natural thing. You need to learn how to do today It’s a core skill. It’s like Microsoft office. It’s like email. You got to learn how to do it If you want to be successful going forward. That’s what I think. And the younger you are, the more you understand that it’s just the older generations who weren’t born into the times we live in today, that don’t understand that, that need to be somewhat convinced, but those older people also get it. Cause they understand business etiquette, networking, netiquette. And once they realize that the tactical ways of doing it, they’re really, really good at it. So I’ll stop there.

(18:31)
Jonathan Denwood: I thought that was fantastic we need to go for our break Robert.

(18:35)
Robert Newman: All right. So ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, real estate agents and brokers of all types and stripes we’re going to come back. And when we come back, I am going to diverge. Well actually, I’m going to let John keep us as on target as he ever does, which is questionable. And then I, then I’m going to actually, move the conversation slightly because Neal does have something that almost none of our guests ever have, which is he seems to have a pretty dialed in the understanding of SEO, or he has somebody working on his blog who does, and I have some questions about some of the things that I’m seeing him a target that relates to social media. So I’ll stay on topic, but I have, there are some really creative things that he’s done. And I want to ask some questions about those. So without any further ado stay tuned, we’ll be back with more good stuff for you.

(19:31)
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(19:59)
Robert Newman: Welcome back to the male right podcast. We’re on episode 300 we’re meeting with Neal Schaffer who is a social media expert and actually appears to be a fairly competent SEO guy as well. We’ve been talking about LinkedIn, we’ve been talking about Pinterest. We’ve been talking about Instagram. We have given some very high-level subject authoritative kind of commentary on which of these platforms you might want to invest your time into. Neal has given us the expert’s view on which these platforms is worthy of your time and which ones are easier or harder to become currently gain an audience as well as his, a couple of really high-level tips on how you’re going to grow an audience and engage with that audience. So that’s what we’ve covered. John, take us away on that.

(20:55)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, just a quick follow-up question from part one, and then over to Robert of the 3 platforms we talked to, we talked about Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You didn’t mention YouTube and we’re being big pushers that agents got to get onto you to the other thing is, I’d say I liked your view on YouTube. And secondly, I think the neighbor is just going to become a dominant force. Cause I know they’re going public soon. They’ve got some major investors they’re going to be taking advertisement. I see neighbors just growing and growing as a platform. And I actually, if it’s handled in the right way, I can actually see it becoming a real competitor to Zillow in some ways. I just really quick, what are your views about now, neighbor. So YouTube and neighbor.

(22:00)
Neal Schaffer: neighbor as an N E I G H B O R in all honesty it’s an app that I’ve get to hear of. So now I’m not part of the real estate industry. Maybe it’s something that you, is it a real,

(22:12)
Jonathan Denwood: I must have used the wrong name. Next door sorry.

(22:17)
Neal Schaffer: Yeah. Next door, Yeah, I already brought up next door. It’s huge. And I find there are people next door that aren’t even on Facebook, probably that they don’t think of it as social media. It’s more of just this local community message board. So once again, 15 minutes a day, going to next door, answer a few questions. You can get a lot done. Getting back to YouTube. So, in digital marketing as a whole, there’s content that lives for a long time. And there’s content that is for a short time. And what I mean by this is the problem with social media, with Instagrams, you spend time, you get the perfect reel it’s out there 24 hours later no one sees it. If they go to your profile, they may see it, but that’s not necessarily the way that people mainly engage with stuff that’s in the feed.

Whereas a blog post, I still get transferred from blog posts from 10 years ago, right? If you look at the top 10 search results on Google, they often come from content that was created six months to two years ago. podcasts the same, I have my own podcast to maximize your social influence with Neal Schaffer. Last week was one of those rare weeks. My son’s soccer team did really well. They went to a tournament, they went into the finals, and like I lost three days where I didn’t get a podcast episode published. Right. Life happens. But guess what? Like I was moving up the charts this week because you never know when people get exposed to it in apple podcasts, in Spotify, wherever. And then all of a sudden they start downloading your podcasts, then boom, your rankings go up.

The same thing with YouTube, it’s a search engine. It’s a video search engine. Like Google is a blog search engine. And I know that you know, the Tom fare is the world, you know, for the last 10 years, it’s all about video. All of it. Yes. It’s huge. Right now. What’s important about the video to understand though, is what are people searching for when they’re searching for video? And this is where I might differ from some of the other real estate gurus that are out there. I know it’s been impactful. I’ve met agents that have done really, really well. And sure, if you have a listing, shoot a video, put it up there with the title description of that address so that when people go searching, because the problem with agents and SEO, whether it is Google or whether it’s YouTube, is that you’re competing against Zillow. You’re competing against realtor.com. You’re competing against Trulia against Redfin. And that is not an easy battle to win for any agent or, or any broker that’s listening.

But on the YouTubes, you actually might have an advantage because they are not going to do that. I mean, correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t think they’re doing that for every single listing that’s on their platform. So use that to your advantage. And anytime someone looks for information about your community, it’s not just for your listings, but also for community information. You should be the one. If there’s anybody who can monetize their community influence it is an agent or broker period. So that’s why if you want to become a community influencer, look if people want to become, you know, health and makeup influencers, they post content about health and makeup or health and beauty. If you want to be a fitness influencer, you post content about fitness. Why aren’t more agents posting more content about the community?

And then in next door, hey, what pest control service do you recommend? Hey, I did a review of the top seven pest control services, check out, check out my blog post, right? And then you bring in your blog during your pixel, et cetera, et cetera. And maybe they sign up to your email list, but that I think is a bigger potential, but yes, if you have listings, put it up there as well as all the other video platforms. If you’re already doing Instagram stories, please do YouTube shorts as well. It is an absolute no-brainer. I know it’s out of beta and well close to getting out of beta and I’ve seen some impressive numbers from there as well. So yes, I’m a huge fan of YouTube. I just think it’s, it should be used a little bit differently than you might think so.

(25:57)
Jonathan Denwood: Amazing answer thank you so much.

(26:04)
Neal Schaffer: Yeah. And we’ll finally, you know, Instagram last week said, we’re not a photo-sharing platform, so they’re all about video. So, you know, just as I say, you need to be digital-first and we say mobile-first, you really got to be more and more video first, if you want to have an impact with social media. So use, you know, use Instagram as sort of a testing bed, you know, experiment with lots of videos and then put the good stuff up on YouTube would be my recommendation.

(26:24)
Robert Newman: That was, that was amazing. What I heard you say was and for our audience, I heard Neal say and this is a social media expert, but not necessarily a real estate expert. And here’s what I heard him say that I really did, like, which was community, community, community. And I agree with that in a very intimate and intense way for so very long, every single real estate marketing company out in the marketplace has been focused on basically what you could call listing marketing. That’s what Trulia does that’s What Zillow does, you go there you see lots of listings, but they’re not. They focus on the lifestyle of the area that they serve as an ancillary benefit. It is not something that they really pay that much attention to.

They recently, well, they didn’t recently do this, but they added Zillow Porchlight to their website, which nobody’s ever even heard of and barely even understands what it is. And theoretically, they’re supposed to be talking about the lifestyle there, but there’s not very much lifestyle commentary, which leads to a wide-open space for the true local experts to have a voice in the local lifestyle. And guess who that is, that is you, which is what Neal has been saying now twice inside the same podcast. Once when he was talking about how you’d call your realtor for a painter or a pest control guy or anything like that. And now again, in talking about you know, talking about the lifestyle locally and so on and so forth, I couldn’t agree with you more Neal, I’m going to take this conversation in a slightly different direction. This is very much a Robert tangent and my audience, and everybody else just kind of puts up with it. Cause it doesn’t happen often, but I’ve noticed that you are-

(28:09)
Jonathan Denwood: Are you sure?

(28:12)
Robert Newman: no, but I’m going to say that, you’re a world-class SEO guy you’ve got probably I’d guess what 50,000 people coming to your website, but here’s what fascinates me is that you’ve got two top 10 posts that not even I thought of. And I look at this stuff every single day for the last 16 years straight. So when somebody surprises me I’m very surprised. You’ve got two of your top 10 posts that are talking about Chinese social media apps. And I am crazy curious how you decided to target that segment of search to start with. Then you’ve got a featured snippet on both of them, which for those that are uninitiated, that means that not only is the number one, but Google has separated out his answer to that particular query above and beyond all other answers in such a way that you actually have to scroll down the page to see the other answers past Neal’s answer. And he’s talking about social media apps, which are the top five apps, and which are the top five social media services in general. And those are his two top posts on the subject. So how did you come up with that?

(29:31)
Neal Schaffer: Wow. Well, first of all, I’m really honored that you said that I, I was really focused on social media marketing and what I began to realize really when I was writing the age of influence, but also post COVID when clients would come out to me and they’re like, hey, we want your help with influencer marketing, but I’d realized that they didn’t even have their own house in order. They weren’t building a list. Their website, SEO, sucked they didn’t really have any content. So like, okay we can do it influencer marketing, but when people come back to your website, they’re not going to convert there’s nothing to convert on there. There’s no you know, there are no lead magnets, there’s no email, there’s nothing going on. So there’s an order of things that we should have in place.

And that really is what began my journey in writing my next book is saying, okay, if in a digital-first world, it’s all about social email and search, then I have to become an expert in those. So I’ve been doing, I won’t say I’ve been doing SEO that long, but I really got, I really started doing more SEO with intent starting about two and a half years ago. And once again, I’m coming at it from a new, fresh perspective, hopefully, because I don’t speak that same language. Right. But because of that, it’s like, okay, I don’t have to worry about what’s happened in SEO in the last 10 years, I can look about what it is today. And when I realized, when we were talking about influencer marketing, what in the digital world, Google is the biggest influence you want to become friend, how are ways we become their friends?

So those blog posts, you talk about were before I was very serious about SEO. I had a lot of guest bloggers and, and, you know, I’ve had three different guest bloggers over the years. I opened up my blog to guest bloggers back in like 2010. It was not for SEO by any means. And there was a point where there were way more guest blog posts than my own blog posts, which at a certain point in 2019, I realized was a problem, but those were just truly organic posts that that did well. Now over time, I’ve gone back in. And what I did was it was back in 2019, it might have been already 2020. I had over the course of 12 years, I started my blog in July of 2008, which helps as well. I had 1,600 blog posts. but guess what? three-quarters of them were receiving little or no traffic. I have blog posts about Google plus irrelevant about, you know, the best LinkedIn articles from 2010. Irrelevant.

So I decided at that point, if, I want to buddy up with Google if I’m on Google to really see my site as being a site of great, timely, fresh information, every single post has to be evergreen. And therefore I got rid of three-quarters of those posts back in 2. I lost a lot of backlinks. I, you know, it is what it is, but they just were not real-. I did redirect, I did the things I should have done, but then I said, okay, the remaining one-quarter of the posts are all generating decent traffic. I want to make sure that they get into first, the top hundred. And then the top 10 and every blog post should have a targeted keyword. Some of my bloggers chose targeted keywords that were irrelevant, nobody was searching for them.

And those are a lot of the ones that got deleted, right? So what I was left with were decent-performing blog posts. I said, okay, if I can just make sure that every one of these is tart, you know, use Yoast, I’ve gone on beyond that. Now uses every blog post should have a specific targeted keyword. And more importantly, there should be actual search volume for that target keyword. Let me start there. So then I went through this process of optimizing all 400 of those posts. And now fast forward, I go through a process of beginning to republish posts after time, if I feel that they’re dropping in rankings, but also I can add a hundred words, 200 words, 300 words and then, you know, revise the wording and things. So it makes more sense. So I’ve gotten to a point now where it’s become a very very optimized machine.

So back to your original question, that was not, my intent was not to target Chinese social media as the by-product of having three different or four different guest bloggers who wrote about it. I do business in Japan. I actually speak Mandarin Chinese, as well as Japanese. And maybe that’s what attracted some of these bloggers. They saw my blog about Japan. And once one blog is about China, the other one’s like, hey, I’d like to blog about China too. But yeah, they’ve gotten great rankings, but it’s not strategic content for me. It, it doesn’t necessarily leave me, you know, I’m not a Weechat expert, right. So I keep those for the traffic, but I really focus on, you know, blogging with intent. So right now I’m actually blogging three times a week, one republished post two new posts. And it’s a concept I’ll be introducing to my book called a library of content.

If you want to be an influencer, if you want to have authority in a certain subject, then do keyword research, find 52 different search queries, and write independent blog posts for each one of those 52 posts over the course of a year, once a week. And I went through this process with influencer marketing. I wrote a book on influencer marketing I had very little blog content published about it. I knew I needed to appear in search results that people would buy my book. I went through the exercise. I’ve published like 49 out of the 52, but in search engine rankings, right now, I’m beating out HootSweet, I’m beating out Buffer, I’m beating out HubSpot. I’m beating out all these sites because I built authority in that area. And that’s the thing. Zillow and Trulia, they’re not going to build authority on Carson City, Nevada, or de Moines, Iowa, or Irvine, California. You can build that authority, you can beat the competition. And if they do have content about your city, it’s probably pretty bad. Cause they hired some cheap writer that doesn’t live there to write it So I’m a believer. If you-

(35:03)
Jonathan Denwood: Neal we are going to wrap up the podcast part-

(35:08)
Neal Schaffer: Oh man but I was just getting started

(35:12)
Jonathan Denwood: No but you are amazing to find [Inaudible35:16] I can tell Robert I can even tell you are amazing Robert. Can you stay on for another 10 minutes for bonus content? Is that okay? You’ll be able to find this conversation on the Mail-Right YouTube channel I suggest that you go over and listen because this is gold I could tell by Robert’s face. Over to you Robert.

(35:47)
Robert Newman: All right. So when we come back, we’re going to continue on, we’re going to do a slight tangent because what Neal is giving us right now is really good, like play by play, what you should do. If for some reason you drift into content marketing, which by the way, it seems like he refocused on. I’m not going to say drifted into it, but definitely –

(36:05)
Neal Schaffer: Double down, triple down.

(36:09)
Robert Newman: Double down on it. And I agree with everything he’s saying, and I’m going to have some comments about subject matter expertise and how it affects ranking because that’s basically what he was talking about. That’s why a thousand-word posts that he has on LinkedIn is number one for the key or not number one, but number seven for the keyword, what is LinkedIn, which if he is doing any affiliate marketing is probably making him more money than almost anything that he’s produced. And it’s a thousand words. So it’s well worth the effort. If for some reason you have a blog, if you’re ever going to focus on content, but we’ll get into that when we get to the bonus. In the meantime, though, for those that are going to tune out, not watch us on the Mail-Right YouTube channel, which is where you’re going to find this premium 10 minutes of extra content. If somebody wanted to find you, Neal, how would you prefer that they do that?

(37:04)
Neal Schaffer: Well, I am Neal Schaffer. So I’m the real Neal N E A L don’t make the Starbucks barista mistake. The last name is S C H A F F E R. So it’s Neal Schaffer everywhere on social media, Neil schafer.com maximize your social influence podcast, if you are a podcast listener. And then the age of influence is my latest book. If you’re interested in that digital marketing playbook, I plan to offer a preview of that, a free preview eBook. It’s literally in the proofreading stages. So go over to my site NealSchaffer.com just make sure you sign up on one of the widgets and then you’ll get updated when I have it.

(37:39)
Robert Newman: Lovely. And John, how would you like people to find you assuming that they wanted to?

(37:45)
Jonathan Denwood: Instead of that, I just want to thank the new audience that joined us. Our actual listening and download figures have really grown over the past three to four months. It looks like we’re going to, become the premium real estate focus podcast on iTunes. I just want to thank you for keeping with us and the new people that have joined us. And thank you, Robert, for being my co-host over the past two years almost. I think we built something very special back over to you, Robert.

(38:17)
Robert Newman: What an honor, John keeps track of the numbers, but I already knew we were one of the top shows and I’m waiting for the day that he comes back and says that we’re the number one show, cause I’m sure that it’s coming when it comes to real estate marketing. As far as I know, nobody does the deep dives, our amazing guests like Neal are what help us get us there. John does all of the work. He attracts these guests that we have. And I’m super thrilled to be a part of all this. Neal, thank you for joining the show for those of you who are listening when you go home tonight, tune in to us on your YouTube channel, do John favour and me as well. Give us a thumbs up when you actually watch the video on YouTube. It helps a lot with the YouTube channel and we’d appreciate it. Cause we spend a lot of time doing this work for you. All right. See you on the bonus content.