Content marketing can offer significant advantages to a real estate agent. It offers an inexpensive way to build a brand, drive traffic to your website and increase the number of leads that come your way. But keeping up a steady stream of content for site visitors is also a lot of work. If you are like most agents, you probably have your hands full with your real estate work, and therefore a limited amount of time to spend writing original content. I have taken the time to help you understand content marketing for Realtors by showing you all the places I use content marketing for real estate. These are all great places where you can use to drive traffic back to your own blog site.

Real Estate Content Curation

This is why many website owners – not just real estate agents – also choose to curate content. Content curation involves finding content on other sites that you like, that works with the purpose of your site, and redistributing it on your own site. It is a great way to spread quality information, to stay relevant, and to draw additional visitors to your site. You can also add commentary to the content when you post it, allowing you to establish your own perspective on whatever information you present.

It is important to follow proper etiquette when curating original content from another site. You want to explain to your readers where the information came from, and avoid pulling the entire piece verbatim. Small-sized excerpts are fine, but copying an entire article can hurt your rankings on search engines and make your efforts look questionable to site visitors.

Good content curation means taking relevant information, and adding your own commentary or takeaway from the points being made. As long as you attribute the source and use it to make something worthwhile for your readers, you can expect the original creator to appreciate the increased exposure, and your readers to enjoy your perspective on new information. Case in point - here is a community guide to Franklin Massachusetts Real Estate. The guide serves as a helpful piece of content for those home buyers who are relocating into the Franklin Mass area.

Using content broadcasting or curation I am able to add this Franklin real estate guide into other social channels further increasing my reach with this piece of content. Below you will see exactly what I mean as I show you some of the more popular content curation sites a Realtor can use.

Sites To Use For Content Curation

You can pull content from anywhere you want to, but some sites make it easier than others. Here are a few options that may work for you as a real estate agent:

Listly

Listly makes it very easy for you to curate any content you want, and includes tools to make the whole process easier. As the name implies, it is great for making lists – Top towns for real estate in Metrowest Mass, for instance – because it allows you to paste in numerous sources with just the URL. Listly gathers all of the relevant information, like associated images and text, and keeps it all organized for both you and your readers.

Listly works well with Google, organizing your curated content in such a way that it is easy for the search engine to index it. The platform is user-friendly, making it fairly easy to start curating content even if you are new to the process. It also makes dealing with larger lists much easier, because you can sort the information you have according to tags you assign. People love posts with lists! There are endless possibilities for using Listly when it comes to real estate. Another good example would be making a list of ten great articles with tips on selling a home in the winter.

Storify

Storify is another interesting option for curation, one that allows you to pull information from all major social media channels. One of the company founders was a journalist, and wanted to create a better way to use social media posts to contribute to news stories.

Storify taps into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, Flickr and more. You search for a term, and the site brings back posts that are relevant to that term. The coolest part is how you can use those search results. The Storify platform lets you pull and drop posts, including images and video, to create a story, where you can ad commentary as you like.

You can get quite creative with this, and develop curated content that is unlike anything anyone else has. Here is another example of curated content for top Massachusetts communities for real estate. Notice I was able to add in multiple sources that all appear on the storify page I have created. You can see I was able to feature Framingham, Ashland, Holliston, Milford, Bellingham, Grafton and Franklin which are areas in which I sell homes. I tied it all together by including another source which had these towns and others as a community guide on real estate.

Rebelmouse

Rebelmouse is another popular tool used by content curators. You can create an account on Rebelmouse, which you can then use to build a profile related to your real estate business. You tell Rebelmouse what information you want it to bring to you, and the site will pull in a range of relevant social media and web content.

Rebelmouse offers a full-featured platform, one that could possibly compete with more popular options like WordPress. It lets you write, easily pull images, GIFs and videos, and find social media posts related to your work. This should make it faster to curate content from a wide range of sources. You can see an example of how I have used Rebelmouse where I created an article on how to use content marketing in the real estate industry.

Scoop.it

Scoop.it is a probably one of my favorite content marketing platforms because of it's ease of use. Essentially all you do with scoop.it is copy and past the URL of the article you want to share. Scoop.it will populate your page with all the information including the title of the article, meta description and graphic used in the original article.

What you do however is what is most important! Good content curation includes changing a few things including the title to the post and most importantly adding your take on the article. Maybe you have a different opinion or something else you would like to add? The value you add is where it becomes worthwhile. Over at Scoop.it I have three channels including real estate, social media and search engine optimization. You can see my real estate scoop.it page which happens to be one of the more popular real estate channels on the site.

Tumblr

Tumblr may be known for its wild side, but it is also a great source for content curation. Everything posted to Tumblr is tagged, which makes it fairly easy to find text and images related to what you are searching for. You can also create your own Tumblr account, where you post information and images related to your real estate business. The more active you are on the site, and the more people you start following that post content of interest to you, the more you will find possible content to curate.

Tumblr is much like a blog site but social media is also integrated into the site. You can see how I have used it for real estate by reading about the destination towns for Massachusetts real estate. I have actually made a summary of some of the other places that have been shared for reviews on where I sell real estate.

Bundlr

Another exciting option for content marketing is Bundlr. As an agent, you are trying to create as many different types of content as you can, so you reach the widest audience. This means sharing great photos, exciting videos, tweets and of course your standard documents. But how do you keep all of this stuff together when you want to share it with an audience? Bundlr provides one option. Bundlr allows you to collect all of these different types of content into one convenient “bundle”. You can even create a bunch of different bundles on different themes. You could have a lifestyle bundle, a neighborhood bundle and a listings bundle. Really the limits are endless. Once you have your bundles, you can easily share them through Bundlr.

Here is an example of a bundle of featured communities for buying Massachusetts Real Estate. As you can see featuring numerous reviews of excellent cities and towns for real estate becomes easy! I was easily able to share information on Hopkinton, Framingham, Grafton, Bellingham, Ashland, Holliston, Westborough, Southborough and other towns that I service.

Bundlr also offers a pay feature, where you can get a bunch of useful features in addition to the basic bundling. With the pay service, you can make some of your bundles private – useful for sharing with a particular real estate client, but not the world. You can also display your bundles on your website without any Bundlr branding, and you get access to statistics on who visits your content and where they come from. Here is my Bundlr profile to see everything I have shared.

Pearltrees

Pearltrees is another cool content sharing and collection option. Pearltrees is designed to let you gather all of your interests into one place, including web pages, photos, videos and more. It allows you to organize all of this in a natural fashion, dragging and dropping into different categories. Like the name suggests, you collect your little pearls of information and images into different branches of your account, or tree. Pearltrees is useful for real estate agentsbecause it lets you bring all of your different content into one place, and to organize that content exactly how you like. It also lets you explore the trees of other users, which can give you a bunch of ways to gather new content for your purposes.

If you see someone who has a home design category, you can diver right in and pull out a bunch of ideas for your own business. Pearltrees is also interesting for its look. Few sites look as elegant as Pearltrees, making its interface appealing to both you and your audience. Best of all, Pearltrees is free. Of course, a pay option may be in the works, but for right now you can use all of the features for no out-of-pocket costs.

Bag The Web

Bag The Web is a relatively unknown site when compared to the others but another place for your real estate content marketing, none the less. With Bag The Web you are essentially sharing "bags of content" that is either your own or curated from other sources around the internet. Like any other content curation tool it is important to make some quick changes when sharing a link to one of your real estate articles. Be sure to add a nice description of what the article is about. Do not copy and paste from something that has already been used. Write a nice unique summary. Make absolutely certain that you also change the title of the post and do not use the original article title. You can find my Bag The Web real estate profile by clicking the link. Here you will find some of my better real estate and social media articles. Above else remember that you do not want to duplicate content. Add value to what you are sharing by adding your own thoughts around the topics you are sharing.

Comprehensive Content Curation

All of the above options work great on their own, but the best content curators use more than one source for their work. Some sites are aware of this, and will allow you to add multiple sources into one account. Storify, for instance, will let you add a Rebelmouse account to your list of options you can use for creating a story. This makes the possible sources, and combinations, extremely diverse. Producing quality, original content is a must if you want to market your real estate site effectively. But content curation offers a great way to add to the value of your site, and it may give you some ideas for original content of your own as well.  

About the author: Bill Gassett, is a Nationally recognized leader in his field. Bill can be reached via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or by phone at 508-625-0191. Bill has helped people move in and out of many Metrowest towns for the last 27+ Years.

Thinking of selling your home? I have a passion for Real Estate and love to share my marketing expertise!

I service Real Estate sales in the following Metrowest MA towns: Ashland, Bellingham, Douglas, Framingham, Franklin, Grafton, Holliston, Hopkinton, Hopedale, Medway, Mendon, Milford, Millbury, Millville, Northborough, Northbridge, Shrewsbury, Southborough, Sutton, Wayland, Westborough, Whitinsville, Worcester, Upton and Uxbridge MA.