Mortgage Broker Blogs: How to Use Blogging as a Marketing Strategy

Mortgage broker blogging is a versatile marketing strategy with endless potential. It can increase your search engine visibility, bring more borrowers to your website, and support your lead generation efforts.

But take it from someone who has been involved with mortgage broker blog marketing for over 15 years. When it comes to generating positive results, there’s a right and wrong way to approach it.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn the right way to go about it. You’ll learn how blogging works, what kind of content you should be publishing, and how to use a blog to grow your mortgage broker business over time.

How Mortgage Blogging Works, in a Nutshell

Blogging is nothing new. It has been around for nearly two decades, for the simple reason that it still works. I started my first mortgage-related blog in 2005 and it’s still going strong today, attracting and educating thousands of visitors each week.

As a mortgage broker, you can use blogging to attract home buyers, homeowners and mortgage shoppers to your website on a regular basis. Blogging goes hand-in-hand with other content marketing strategies. It gives you an easy way to publish new content to steadily grow your audience.

But let’s start at the beginning.

What is a mortgage broker blog, exactly? How do you get a blog up and running on your website? And what does a long-term mortgage blogging strategy actually involve?

What is a mortgage blog?

A blog is a regularly updated website (or a sub-section of a larger website) that offers new content on a regular basis. They’re usually presented in reverse-chronological order, with the most recent entries or posts appearing at the top of the main page. The act of publishing a blog is referred to as “blogging.”

How do I get one up and running?

Before you can launch a mortgage blogging campaign, you need to have a blog program installed on your website. There are several options to choose from, including Squarespace, Wix, Weebly and WordPress.

I recommend using WordPress when creating a mortgage blog. It’s open-source and free to use, and versatile enough to power an entire mortgage broker website. You can run your entire website on WordPress, or install the program as a sub-directory of an existing site.

(Your website hosting company can install this program for you. Your web developer should be able to do it as well. So we’ll skip over the technical details for now.)

You can use a WordPress “theme” to change the look and feel of your mortgage blog. You can change the colors, add a logo, create new pages, adjust the menu, etc. Most importantly, you can do these things without any knowledge of website coding.

That’s one of the major benefits of using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress to support your mortgage blogging efforts. It simplifies the publishing process to the point that anyone can do it.

Once you’ve got your blog program up and running, you can start publishing high-quality content geared toward your specific audience.

What should a mortgage broker blog about?

A mortgage broker’s blogging strategy can include many different types of content. It’s your blog, after all. So you can publish whatever you like.

But if you’re starting a blogging campaign to attract potential clients and encourage them to contact you, you’ll want to develop a specific content strategy.

The goal here is to publish blog posts that: (A) relate to your products or services, (B) align with the search patterns of your chosen audience, and (C) deliver useful and helpful information.

The blog topics used for a mortgage broker blogging campaign will vary depending on the business model, niche and audience. You have to know your audience in order to give them what they want—that’s step one.

Here are some topics a mortgage broker could blog about to attract clients:

• Local home price trends and forecasts
• Mortgage rates with a local angle
• Real estate market trends, updates and predictions
• Different types of loan products and programs
• Closing and escrow process, costs, etc.

I emphasize the local nature of these blog topics because most mortgage brokers serve a particular geographical area. If you want to attract local home buyers, homeowners and mortgage shoppers to your website, you have to “localize” your blogging strategy and content.

But there’s no need to guess at these keyword phrases and topics. You can use a keyword research tool like Semrush, Ahrefs, or Google Keyword Planner to find out what kinds of keywords your specific audience is using.

These and other tools can help you create a more focused (and ultimately more successful) mortgage broker blogging strategy.

How does the blogging process work?

Your blog strategy should align with your business model, your mortgage niche (if you have one), and your specific audience. Because of this, a mortgage broker blogging strategy can vary from one person to the next. But the process is the same.

Here are the steps for researching, writing and publishing blog posts:

1. Create a list of keyword topics related to your niche and audience.
2. Create helpful, informative and keyword-rich blog posts for each topic.
3. Optimize your post with keywords in the title, sub-headers, and body.
4. Promote your best posts through social media and other channels.
5. Monitor your website analytics to see which topics perform well.
6. Rinse and repeat. Revisit popular topics while also testing new ones.

How Blogging Can Benefit Mortgage Brokers

Let’s shift gears and talk about the benefits of blogging for mortgage brokers, and why you should consider adding it to your marketing strategy.

1. Blogging helps you build authority and trust.

Blogging is a great way to build trust among your target audience. Think of it as a kind of educational outreach program. By publishing helpful information on a regular basis, you’re also establishing trust among your key audience. You’re giving them the information they need to succeed.

As a result, your website visitors will be more likely to contact you.

Forget about the technical aspects of mortgage marketing online. Trust is the number one ingredient for generating valuable leads. If people don’t feel they can trust you, they certainly won’t fill out a form or send you an email.

Mortgage broker blogging can help you break down the barriers and open the lines of communication. It helps you overcome one of the biggest obstacles to customer acquisition in the finance world.

2. It has unlimited potential for traffic, visibility and leads.

With some mortgage marketing strategies, you’re either limited by materials or budget. It might be nice to appear on billboards all over your target geographical area. But you might not have the marketing budget to do that.

Mortgage broker blogging is different. It’s a relatively low-cost marketing strategy with truly unlimited potential.

Think about it this way: Every blog post you publish onto your mortgage website has the potential to generate consistent traffic, day after day. Now multiply that by two or three articles per week, spread over a year or more, and you can see the long-term potential.

From a marketing standpoint, mortgage broker blogs have unlimited potential. Want to bring more visitors to your website? Just publish more content.

With the ever-changing nature of the real estate market and mortgage industry, there is practically no limit to how often you can blog, or how much content you can produce.

The more you publish, the more benefits you gain in the form of traffic, visibility, lead generation, relationship building, and overall business growth.

3. It keeps people on site longer, increasing conversions.

An effective mortgage broker blogging strategy can also keep your visitors around longer. This in turn will increase the likelihood that they reach out to you in some way, whether it be by email, phone, or filling out a form.

Informational, well-organized websites tend to retain their visitors longer than sites that offer fewer resources and less value. And that’s something you can incorporate into your mortgage marketing strategy.

In internet marketing lingo, this is what’s known as creating a “sticky” website. You want people to stick around for a while, so they’ll be more inclined to contact you. And one way to do that is by offering lots of information and resources on your mortgage website.

4. Blogging attracts people who are in “research mode.”

If you send an unsolicited email or postcard to someone, it’s like hammering a square peg into a round hole. You’re hoping that this person is in the market for a mortgage loan, or that they will be in the near future. It’s a clumsy approach.

Mortgage broker blogging flips the script. Instead of pushing your message to people who haven’t asked for it, you are pulling research-minded folks to your website.

They find you through search engines and other sources while they are actively researching the products and services you provide. They are warm prospects, instead of cold ones.

5. You probably already have the required skills.

Can you create a Word document, write a few paragraphs of content, and save it? Can you answer a client’s questions by email?

If so, you already have most of the technical skills needed to launch a mortgage broker blogging and content marketing strategy.

Sure, there are some technical aspects to the blog setup process. But all of that can be done in a day. Your web hosting company can even do it for you. And once your mortgage blog is up and running, the publishing process is straightforward.

You already have a lot of knowledge relating to home loans and the lending process. By channeling that knowledge into a web-based content creation platform, you could greatly improve your website traffic and visibility over time.

The bottom line: Mortgage broker blogging is a low-cost marketing strategy with unlimited potential. It can help you attract people to your website, encourage trust, establish authority, and grow your business over time … and at little to no cost!

Best Practices to Help You Succeed

Welcome to the bonus round! In this section, I’ll share some best practices and lessons learned from 15+ years of full-time mortgage blogging and consulting.

• Analytics: Install a website analytics program onto your site, so you can see how your blog posts are performing in terms of traffic and visibility. Google Analytics will work just fine, but you have other options to choose from as well.
• Expertise: Showcase your expertise when creating blog content. This will make people more inclined to contact you with their questions. It can also help you improve your search engine rankings, since “expertise” is one of Google’s ranking factors.
• Frequency: Publish new posts on a regular basis, without sacrificing quality. With all other things being equal, a mortgage broker blog with 100 articles will generate a lot more traffic than one with only 10 articles.
• Helpful: Create content that truly helps your intended audience. This will keep people on-site longer, build trust, encourage first contact, and boost search engine rankings. As it states in an article on the Google Search Central Blog: “After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?”
• Length: Develop in-depth, comprehensive mortgage blog posts that fully explore the topic. Enhance your content with statistics, quotes from experts, personal anecdotes, and infographics. The goal is not to hit some arbitrary word-count goal, but to create superior content that educates readers.
• Links: Improve your search engine visibility by gaining “backlinks” from other websites to your mortgage broker blog. You can acquire links by (A) promoting your best content through social media, (B) publishing guest posts on other sites, (C) engaging in local community events, and (D) developing a more “link-worthy” website.
• Originality: Create your own original content tailored to your specific audience. Avoid using duplicate content that already exists on other mortgage broker websites, as this could prevent you from showing up in search engines.

Two Ways We Can Help You

We can help you get even better results from your mortgage broker blogging efforts. Whether you’re taking the DIY approach, or prefer the do-it-for-me model, we’ve got you covered. Check out the two options below to learn more.

1. Consultation and training phone calls

Have questions about blogging as a mortgage marketing strategy? Schedule a consultation call to get insights from the author of this article. It’s a great way to point yourself in the right direction, before investing a lot of time and energy into blogging.

2. Blogging and content marketing services

Want to launch a mortgage blog campaign to grow your traffic? Check out our content marketing services package. It covers many of the methods and strategies covered in this article, including content creation, SEO, promotion and more.