Last week I talked on a broader scale about internet marketing – updating a bit on some overall changes made in the past several months and what sort of direction you should look to take. This week I want to go a bit more into detail on the one thing I talk about alot, which is starting a blog style website for your property management business.

Today is all about getting in the right mindset, and preparing to move in the correct direction. If you have already done this and have a website set up where you update consistently with rich helpful content, then you are pretty much good to go. Half the battle however is getting started – and doing so in the right direction.

Whether you have minimal to no web presence, or you use a system like Propertyware, you should strongly consider starting a blog style website, or adding to your current web presence a section where you provide frequent updates of rich content that are geared towards enriching people. This will build a level of engagement with your customers that is crucial to long term success, and it will also give you the best platform for being discovered by people online (whether it’s through search engines, social media, or paid advertising).

Before you begin, it’s important to understand who you are speaking too. Much in the same way when you develop the marketing plan for the property you are managing, you need to know who to speak to. If you happen to manage a number of properties that have similar types of people in them (it’s super easy if all of your apartments are niche targeted to something like ‘students’ or ‘pet owners’), then you can create one centralized property management website for your management business – in addition to whatever web service you offer for each property.

Your situation may call for some unique web based strategies, but wherever you stand, ask yourself who you are speaking to before you begin. For the purposes of this article, let us say that you are going to be speaking to the typical apartment renter (yes this means different things in different places, but you can imagine for your own situation).

So now we know who we are going to speak too, the next step is to prepare ourselves for what we plan on doing with this web presence. As previously mentioned, having consistently updated content provides you a number of benefits in engagement and strength in search engines and discoverability via social media.

The key of course is quality content, and consistency. If you jump into this writing 2 articles a week for the first month, and then stop for a couple weeks, you will kill your momentum and hamstring your entire process. Engagement benefits from consistency because when individuals visit your website to view your content, they see that you update on a certain basis – let’s say every tuesday/thursday. So if they expect you to have new content on a tuesday, and then you don’t have that content there – you are in danger of losing those readers.

Think back for yourself, have you ever come across a great website that had some content you really enjoyed, and then suddenly they stopped updating? I know this has happened to me, and if it’s a website I’m used to visiting, I’ll keep checking back for a short time but then it will just fall off my radar. Afterall, if the last three times I visited didn’t give me something new, why would I think to keep going back?

You want people to come back to you. Even if they don’t rent from you, or click on your ads – you want to create a user experience that draws people in and makes them feel compelled to return. This is why Google ranks sites higher that have engaging content released on a consistent basis – because it’s much more enjoyable for the user. It’s that kind of experience that gets people to click the like button and which has your content get shared – potentially virally – on social media platforms.

So the right mindset – it’s pretty straightforward. Know who you are speaking to, and prepare to produce and provide high quality content on a consistent basis.