But maintaining a popular real estate website means you need to have a constant flow of new content. Freshly written articles and essays on a variety of real estate topics. Writing articles and essay writing doesn't come easily to everyone, which is why some companies even resort to hiring essay writing companies and content writing / SEO companies like designSEO.ca or even individuals who have a little or no writing experience.
Real estate websites after all are basically just online brochures designed to bring in customers - and the bigger the real estate website, the more content it has, then the more visitors the website will get - and the more homebuyers the website will attract.
But back to my 2nd point, many real estate agents have very busy schedules and don't have time to maintain their website.
To maintain a popular blog for example you need to be posting at least 80 new posts every year. So to compare that to mysearchforahome.com, I am not fulfilling the 80 posts per year needed to make this blog "popular". Instead the website has been averaging 36 posts per year for the 2010 to 2013 time period, which makes mysearchforahome.com what I would describe as "semi popular".
Statistically mysearchforahome.com brought in just under 5,000 visitors in June, and another 5,000 in July. But if I was writing on this blog more often (closer to 80 posts per year) I could be bringing in closer to 12,000 (or more) visitors per month.
Which would be approx. 144,000 visitors per year.
(Note - The older the website is, the more visitors they can also get too. A website with 80+ posts per year for many years will have significantly more visitors because the older content keeps bringing in new visitors too.)
I estimate it takes me roughly 60 to 90 minutes to write a good quality real estate blog post. Averaging roughly 1.25 hours per post. Sometimes it is much shorter, sometimes significantly longer. It really depends on the level of effort and research put into an individual real estate blog post.
That means to write 80 posts a year I am spending 100 hours each year working on just that one blog. That is like working two 50 hour weeks, doing nothing but writing blog posts for just 1 blog.
(And I should point out I operate over 100 blogs and websites, not just mysearchforahome.com. One of my biggest projects is cardiotrek.ca - which is averaging approx. 177 posts per year for the 2012 to 2014 time period and pulling in approx. 30,000 visitors per month currently. That means each year since its creation I have clocked an average of 220 hours/year blogging for cardiotrek.ca.)
And this is my point - quality writing is time consuming.
And it is often also creatively draining. A lot of creativity goes into being a writer. To the extent that a person is mentally exhausted by the time they are done writing whatever it is they are writing.
In some cases I have even hired content writers to write content for me because I don't have the time to write it - or the topic that needs to be written is too boring that I simply don't want to write it myself, and/or I am too busy doing other work.
It makes me realize why sometimes students in university cheat on their essays and hire an essay writing company. Because they're lazy, disinterested and possibly too busy. Most likely it is the first two, as from what I remember of university the slackers / procrastinators were the ones who resorted to essay writing companies to get their assignments done on time.
But their academic dishonesty is not the same as someone who is simply overworked and depends to contract out their content writing for their business.
A real estate agent who contracts out such writing to a professional content writer is not breaking any rules of ethics. They are simply doing what the market and the situation demands of them - and the demand is for lots of quality content so that their websites rank higher and more often in search engines.
Modern real estate advertising has become largely digital. Traditional modes of advertising - newspapers, magazines, billboards, the Yellow Pages are basically all obsolete or becoming obsolete.
Today websites - including social media websites like Facebook, YouTube and even Twitter - have different roles to play in attracting new customers to a business.
And the more productive a website is - including real estate websites - means the more productive their business will be.
