Two things that brokers appear to struggle with is:
- updating their website content;
- finding stuff to write about.
one is related to the other. Here are some ideas to help get the creative juices flowing and get a wide range of article ideas and sources together.
Finding stuff to write about
Search engines and social media are great places to find a huge number of ideas you can use for the basis of content for your website. One thing we don’t advocate is simply ripping off other sites and cut and pasting their content – this will not help you and there are legal issues. But, by all means use them as ideas and resources to rework into your own voice.
News Stories
Here are some sites you can use to keep up to date with stories and news surrounding your industry. Simply use as search engines as type in your product keywords etc…
http://news.google.co.uk is Google news search facility.
http://www.newsnow.co.uk is a news aggregator with over 7,000 sources. Combined with Google news, you will have you finger on the pulse for your industry.
You can even setup daily alerts with Google so they will send you, via email, a summary of the days or week’s news, blogs and site mentions surround the keywords you choose. Simply visit www.google.com/alerts.
You can also create your own news source aggregator using a service such as Feedly.com. Feedly allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds (News / Story feeds) and collect them in one place, so it means rather than visiting lots of sites, you can log into your Feedly account and search all the stories in one place. This is great for keeping you up to date.
Social Media
Maintaining an active presence on social media will mean you will see others sharing news about your industry or even related ones which you can use to help craft your own content. They might also promote their own stories and content, so these could give you ideas you can use to create your own content.
Updating their website content
As you can see, there are a large number of places to get content ideas from which you can use to add new fresh content to your site. This will show you as the expert you are in your space / location.
One simple idea is you can write a roundup of related news in your industry and publish it on your blog or website each week. These roundups can be a great way to get people visiting your site and also used as emails to send out to customers providing them with useful information.. You can create evergreen useful guides and articles to help would be customers with their enquiries and questions. This content also helps Google answer their searchers questions, so you could attract more traffic from the major search engines. Try looking at different formats of content too. FAQ videos can be a great additional way to use content on your site to help drive traffic. We are seeing video become more and more prominent.
Hopefully this will give you a number of ideas to find and source ideas so you can update your web site more frequently and thereby attract more traffic and customers.
