The three most important considerations when buying real estate are location, location and location. Similarly, many experts, myself included, often have paraphrased that old real estate adage by referencing the three most important elements in an effective social media strategy as content, content and content. But I'm not so sure anymore.

Recently, I attended an event hosted by my community's Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber brought in two speakers from a network marketing company that is highly respected and, by way of disclosure, one to which I am a weekly newsletter reader.

The speakers talked about the role of a website and how to strengthen its search engine optimization (SEO) to garner favorable results from the major search engines. They talked about link backs, which means to have other sites link to your website as a method of demonstrating the value and importance placed on it by others; and which also measures SEO.

They focused how a blog adds to a business' overall ability to pull people in as a way to build leads. And it was in this area that the notion of “Content is King” was evangelized.

It certainly makes sense that quality information on your website provides greater value than just a list of your products and services. You need to provide other reasons, and ways, for people to discover you and do business with you.

There are lots of statistics about the value of blogs and their return on investment. Here are just a few:

Blogs are the single most important inbound marketing tool. When asked to rank the importance of the services they use, 25 percent of users rated his or her company blog as critical to their businesses, while a further 56 percent considered them either important (34 percent) or useful (22 percent) for a total of 81 percent (Source: Marketing Charts)
B2B companies with blogs generate 67 percent more leads per month on average than non-blogging firms (Source: Social Media B2B)
There are 152 million blogs on the Internet (Source: AllTwitter)
Companies that blog have 55 percent more website visitors than companies that do not blog
B2C companies that blog generate 88 percent more leads per month than those who do not (Source: Hubspot)
Social networks and blogs account for 23 percent of all time spent online, twice as much as gaming (Source: Mindjumpers)
Two-thirds of marketers say their blogs are critical or important to their businesses (Source: Marketing Charts)
Blog articles influence purchase decisions (Source: Marketing Charts)
The most popular frequency for blog posting is weekly (60 percent of bloggers); just 10 percent post daily (Source: Marketing Charts)
For those looking to outsource, a professional consultant will charge $1,000 to $3,000 for setting up a blog, $1,000 to $3,000 per month for ongoing content development/editing, and ballpark of $200 for a single guest post (Source: Mack Collier).

All of the stats are powerful reasons to justify having a blog. If you ask 10 people to describe the elements that make up a blog, you will receive 10 different answers.

There are numerous means of generating content for your website or to establish an online presence, and blogging is only one of them. Tweeting, pinning, Facebooking, even “checking in” through the many apps that incorporate that functionality all offer various methods of defining who you are and what your brand is. Some are just pushing opinion or tips; others are used to highlight value content from others; and still others are ways to define your beliefs by the reflection left when held up to someone else's image. We are what we consume.

Related: Read “ROI-al Waste“

A blog spurs dialogue and it should be crafted in a way to garner comment. It shouldn't be a one-way disgorging of opinion but rather a statement, support and a call for comment. That kind of dialogue already happens in Facebook or LinkedIn groups, or other public social media platforms. Getting it to happen on your business website or blog is another thing entirely.

That's the sweet spot of content development; it engages people and when done well, can build them into followers that become passionate about you and your information, which is the vitally important first step in gaining very warm leads.

But that's not easy to do and, as was echoed at the Chamber presentation, social media content shouldn't be about selling or about your company's products and services; it should be about providing valuable information.

As independent agents, you should ask yourselves, “What do my clients and prospects want to know?” It's easy to figure out. Have your CSRs write down all questions they receive. By the end of the week you will have at least dozens of different questions, and each one could be the focus of a blog post, tweet or even a Facebook discussion.

Keep doing it every day and you will see a pattern, which might lead you to make some improvements in your own workflow and maybe another blog post about “the top six questions most people ask about insurance” or “the most common mistakes people make after an accidents.”

Related: Read “Beyond BYOD“

Remember, it shouldn't be about your agency or specific questions about one of your companies. Instead, make it about the larger or more general issue being addressed. That's the kind of information people find very valuable and worth reading on a regular basis. “Regular” is the operative word, too.

The level of frequency of your posting is less important than the consistency of those postings. Whatever you do, whether it's every day or twice a month, keep it going. Obviously, more frequent posts will garner more information for people to want to read; posting with longer intervals between posts will take you longer to build a readership.

Building content can take many forms; content is not just the written word. In fact, from an SEO perspective, photos, videos, podcasts and other images can be even more valuable to search engines.

When you consider just these few facts you can see we already crave the visual content:

It's estimated there are 8 billion pages on the web (Source: AllTwitter)
There are 4 billion views per day on YouTube
People upload via Instagram 300 million pictures to Facebook every day
YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world.

As human beings, we have communicated in pictures long before we could ever write. Now we spend our time finding ways to take what we say and put it into images. Speaking of which, web search an infographic from All Twitter called “Vine is the Next Big Thing for Brands;” then read my March column at propertycasualty360.com, “Make a Scene with Vine.”

Special Reports /

Is Content Really King?

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