A few months ago I read and enjoyed Youtility for Real Estate: Why Smart Real Estate Professionals are Helping, Not Selling by Jay Baer and Erica Campbell Byrun.
This $3 eBook is a special edition of Jay’s New York Times Bestseller Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help not Hype.
If you don’t “get it” already by the title, the central idea behind the book as Erica writes in the foreword is that “if your content provides useful information to the consumer, you can worry less about selling, and more about teaching better.”
As it relates to real estate marketing, Jay writes that his concept of “youtility” has three parts: self-serve information, real-time relevancy, and radical transparency.
Jay makes great cases for all three facets of “youtility” in the book, but I can personally speak to the third part, radical transparency.
One of my sites is focused on The Villages, a large active adult community in Central Florida.
The Villages also happens to be prone to sinkholes, a fact most real estate agents would prefer not to discuss or feel uncomfortable talking about at best.
On my site I have an article that tackles the issue head-on, and because of my “radical transparency” consumers reward me for being helpful. Check out this lead I received because of my sinkhole article:
This person went on to buy a nearly $300,000 house, and they found me all because of this one transparent article.
Being up front with the readers of your site builds trust.
So if you take nothing else away from this, think of some ways you can apply “radical transparency” to your content strategy and consumers will reward you.
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