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Marketing Tips for Brokers – BLOGS

A FEW TIPS ON HOW TO WRITE BETTER BLOGS.

HOW TO WRITE BLOGS THAT GRAB PEOPLE’S ATTENTION!

You know you need to blog if you want to stand out from your rivals. But how do you write blogs that potential clients and referral partners actually want to read?

The answer is by doing these two things:

  • Making your content relevant and helpful
  • Putting your content in an attractive package

If you do those two things, your blogs will grab people’s attention.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR CONTENT RELEVANT AND HELPFUL

If you want your content to be relevant and helpful, you need to do some or all of these things:

  • Solve problems (e.g. explain how to get a home loan if you’re self-employed)
  • Answer questions (what’s the difference between offset and redraw?)
  • Bust myths (the cheapest loan is not always the best loan)
  • Share news (APRA regulatory changes)
  • Analyse trends (the increasing use of buyer’s agents)

You also need to make sure your content is aimed at your target market, because different audiences want different content. For example, the problems you’d need to solve for young first home buyers would be different to the ones faced by middle-aged property investors.

Also, use the words ‘you’ and ‘your’ as often as possible. That way, your audience will feel you’re speaking directly to them.

HOW TO PUT YOUR CONTENT IN AN ATTRACTIVE PACKAGE

It’s not enough just to write content that’s relevant and helpful – you also need to make it interesting.

To quote Howard Gossage: “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes, it’s an ad.”

You want your clients and referral partners to think of your blogs as interesting content, not boring advertising.

That means you need to do two things:

  • Use enticing subject lines / headlines
  • Make the text easy to read

USE ENTICING SUBJECT LINES / HEADLINES

If you send out blogs via email newsletters, you need to use enticing subject lines, otherwise people won’t open your emails.

People have full inboxes; that means your emails will be competing with dozens of others for attention.

So avoid boring subject lines like “Monthly newsletter” or “Latest news from ABC Finance”. Nobody will open those emails.

Instead, use enticing subject lines like “The three big mortgage mistakes you’re probably making” or “Why the government’s new home loan rules spell danger”. People WILL click on those emails.

For the same reason, you need to give your blogs attention-grabbing headlines:

  • Bad = “Meet John Smith”
  • Good = “How John Smith saved $81,786 on his mortgage”

MAKE TEXT EASY TO READ

Good writers make their blogs so readable, they could be understood by children.

Bad writers make their blogs so complicated, they could be understood only by other mortgage brokers.

If you want to make your blogs easy for clients and referral partners to read, you should:

  • Choose simple words – not complicated words
  • Write short sentences – not long sentences
  • Use self-explanatory terms – not mortgage jargon (serviceability, LMI, LVR, etc)
  • Break up the text with subheadings and bullet-points – don’t use big, intimidating blocks of text

WHY YOU LIKED THIS BLOG

You’re already at the end.

That wasn’t hard, was it?

The reason you liked the blog was because the content was relevant and helpful, and it was in an attractive package.

More specifically, you liked the blog because it:

  • Solved a problem for you (how to write attention-grabbing blogs)
  • Spoke directly to you (the words ‘you’ and your’ were used 46 times)
  • Used an enticing headline (“How to write blogs that grab people’s attention”)
  • Was easy to read (simple words, short sentences, no jargon, subheadings, bullet-points)

See, this stuff really works!

HUGE THANKS TO Nick Bendel for penning this BLOG for me. Nick is a former journalist with The Adviser and Mortgage Business. Nick is also the owner of https://hunterandscribe.com/, a content marketing agency that creates blogs, social media posts, ebooks, website text and other content for mortgage brokers. If you need help with your writing, contact Nick at nick@hunterandscribe.com

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