4 Benefits Of A Resident Blog For Apartment Websites
Attaching a news blog for residents to your website is an easy thing to do. However maintaining it with good relevant content is where the real work comes in. You can either rely on your staff to write the content or have a 3rd party like Resident360 write it for you. Regardless of who writes it’s, the content needs to be worthwhile and engaging for your residents.
Let’s review four important reasons why you should even consider a residents blog. After all, it’s one more thing that needs to be maintained, so unless it’s going to be quality and done right, don’t waste your time.
Benefit #1: Useful for Residents
The first benefit of a resident’s news blog is that it provides useful information to your residents. Of course, there’s no limit on how many articles you can post each month, but the goal is quality, not quantity. The news posts can be about improvement projects at the community, new hire information, employee awards, community updates, local community topics, neighborhood information, resident and local events, etc.
The goal is to provide engaging content that your residents will find helpful or interesting.
Benefit #2: Gives Insight for Prospects
The second benefit of a resident’s news blog is that it gives prospects insight into your community. Prospects can see your engagement with residents and learn more about what it’s like to be a resident at the community. It can serve as a tool to show future prospects that you are involved and that you care about the community and take an active role in it.
Benefit #3: SEO Boost
The third benefit of a resident’s blog is that it gives your website an SEO boost. Google loves fresh content and when you are posting articles weekly or monthly, Google will index this content and will reward you for it. But with that said, let me reiterate, it’s about quality, not quantity. If your content is high quality and engaging, Google will reward you for this. If it’s poor quality, Google will pick up on this as well and it can actually hurt your SEO.
A well written, engaging resident’s blog can also help your SEO by driving your residents back to your site regularly.
When visitors are continually coming back to your site, Google will recognize this as a site that has good, fresh content and will reward you for it.
Benefit #4: Partnership Marketing
The fourth benefit of a resident’s blog is partnership marketing. This is something I don’t see much of when it comes to resident blogs, but if done correctly, can be a new low cost source of high quality leads.
Apartment residents are a demographic that many local business’s will leap at the opportunity to get in front of. If you offer local businesses the opportunity to guest post on your blog, they will usually jump at the chance. You simply have them write the article, and you screen and approve it to ensure it provides value to your residents. This is also a great strategy to generate quality content for your blog.
In exchange for letting the local business post on your resident blog, they should allow you to have print collateral in their place of business in the form of poster boards, flyers, and in other applicable areas of their business. They also should have no problem allowing you to have presence on their website.
For example, let’s say there is a local community college down the street. They can promote their college and education opportunities to your resi- dents, and you can have print collateral scattered around their campus and on their website. Of course partnership marketing is nothing new, but the angle of the resident’s blog should be a much easier sell with less effort in most cases.
Conclusion
When deciding whether a resident blog is right for your community, consider these benefits when making your decision.
If you have a partnership marketing story you would like to share, I would love to hear about it. Click here to use the contact form to let me know.
Written by Josh Grillo
Josh Grillo is a #1 Best Selling Author, Speaker and Co-Founder of Resident360.
