PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian R: Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt. So this week we have a special not so special guest he’s actually going to be my co-host for today, David Nyman, how are you, David?

David N: Doing fine. Thanks Ian. And I think I’m pretty special. So, it’s up to you.

Ian R: I do too. But for those of you who don’t know, David, if you’ve ever contacted our support, or read one of our blogs, or basically seen most of what we’ve done, David has touched it in one form or another. He’s technically called our content manager. He also runs the support team. And you’ve probably chatted with him online if you’ve ever contacted our support. Interestingly enough, David, you are our most looked at photo on Google business pages. I thought that was interesting.

David N: Yeah, I know, it’s not even a very flattering picture. So that’s impressive,

Ian R: yeah, you’re kind of sitting out on a lake on a rowboat. But people seem to look you up. They’re like, Hey, I talked to a great guy named David and, and here we go. So let me get this straight for the audience. We call you, David. Because of why? And not David?

David N: Well, I did grow up in Sweden, though that is the sweetest way to say, David. And I don’t pick on people for saying it wrong. Except for those that know me well, and should know better.

Ian R: Yeah. I appreciate your comments, David. So getting into our subject matter, I think there is no better person to have here with us today than David himself. David has probably written more home inspection content than anybody in the universe. I can’t even imagine the amount of blogs you’ve written on anything from nightlights to home inspection reports, and hydrostatic pressure and vermiculite, you’ve written about it all 1000s of blogs, I can’t even begin to count. So our subject today is making writing a home inspection blog easy. Because let’s be honest, how many of us after a long day of inspecting really want to sit down and write a blog, but it really is important to write one, isn’t it, David?

David N: Yeah, no, it’s very important. You might not think that tons of people are going to your website and reading your blogs. But there are many good reasons why you should have them on there and why they’re going to make a difference in your website.

Ian R: Yeah. And that’s kind of the thing we may say, Well, only two people ever read that blog. Okay, I don’t read my mechanic’s blog, but they have one. I don’t read my dentist blog, but they have one because I just really don’t care that much about gingivitis and carburetors. But they’re there for very important reasons. They have found that websites that have a blog have first of all, up to 55% more visitors than a website without a blog. So that just goes without saying, it goes right back to our podcast way back about fractional marketing. It’s grabbing those two people that otherwise wouldn’t have been at your website. And you know, that can snowball into other things. But also a website with a blog converts better. Can you explain that for us, David? Why does it convert better do you think?

David N: So when you look at a website, and you see that he has written, you know, this home inspector has written about 20 articles on different subjects about home inspections. Right away, you’re thinking, Well, this guy definitely knows what he’s talking about. And that makes you look like an authority on the subject.

Ian R: Yeah, and that goes back to a podcast last week, or a few weeks back that we did with Jason, talking about the customer journey. A customer just doesn’t look at your website and say, Okay, what’s his phone number? Let me call him anymore. Customers go on this really roundabout journey, they visit your Facebook page, has he posted things, what kind of reviews does he have? And part of that equation is your blog. So I hired a guy to do my driveway. That was one of the things that I looked at it I didn’t expect amazing writing that was compelling. I just wanted to see that he was current and up to date. There’s also SEO benefits to it as well, isn’t there, David?

David N: Yes, very true. Because even though you want to get people to your website, and there are also search engines that are crawling your website, looking for content, and when it finds content, it will actually raise your SEO score. And it’ll help you to pop up in searches for people that are looking for a home inspector.

Ian R: Yeah. And that’s important to remember. So I had a client not long ago that didn’t have a blog. So we built a website for him years ago, he hosted it himself. And he came to me said, Hey, Ian, my host went down or his domain name went down. So can you pop in there and fix it? So I popped in there and fixed it. He said, Oh, good. I wanted to make sure it was fixed before Google indexed it. So we looked and it had been like that for a couple of months. And he just didn’t notice it. And then his web host didn’t alert them. But Google hadn’t even been back to his website hadn’t even indexed it. Because he hadn’t put any new content on there. We could see when Google went back and re-indexed his website. It was long, long. appeared many, many months in between, because every time Google went back it said, Hey, there’s nothing new here. So the more we blog, the more Google visits our website to index things to, Hey, that guy has a new blog post on there once a month, twice a month, once every other month. And it’ll go back regularly to check it. So it’s a great way to get your website indexed and visited by Google more often. So it has a very, very important reason for being there. Even if nobody ever read the blog. It needs to be there for Google.

David N: I do want to say, though, that if my dentist would have blog and carburetors, I probably would read it.

Ian R: I would be interested to see that too. Is that what I said earlier? I’d like to see my mechanic write a blog on gingivitis. And see how that comes out. I’m sure that wouldn’t be accurate. So you write a lot of blogs, David, what do you think are the things that holds us back as home inspectors from actually sitting down and writing a blog?

David N: Well, I’ve seen a few home inspectors that have tried writing their own blogs. And it seems like they have very good intentions when they start out. But then as you look at the blog, the first one is maybe two pages long, tons of pictures, stanza content. And then every blog following that gets shorter and shorter and dimensionality stops. And it is something that, you know, if you start out really big like that, you’ll think, Oh, this is so time-consuming, I don’t have time to do this. I have, you know, so much work to do with my home inspections. And I don’t see the actual benefits from doing this.

Ian R: Yeah, and I think that’s the key point is it’s hard to see the benefits of doing it. It goes back to you will never know the leads that you missed, though. So it’s an environment that we create for people and our blog is an important part of that. But at the same time, if we’ve climbed through three crawlspaces, that day, it’s 800 degrees in southern Florida or minus 20 degrees up in Alberta, probably the last thing we want to do is say, Hey, let me write a blog about Polybutylene and see how this comes out. I think that’s why a lot of people hire us to just write their blogs for them.

David N: Yeah, another problem is that they do run into imagination issues, I could call it. So you might think as a home inspector, you know, there’s so many subjects you can write about. But when you actually sit down and write that writer’s block sets in, and now they can’t think of anything to write

Ian R: yet. And I’ll be frank about that, I write a lot of home inspection content. And sometimes you just need to get up and walk away. Because it can be mind-numbing. It’s not like we’re writing about our favorite sports team, or a cool car club that we’re in or something that we’re really feeling it. Sometimes we’re writing about, which is the best laminate flooring to purchase. And you know, it’s hard to get into that. So we came up with some ways to make it simple to write and maintain your own blog. Because if it’s not simple, most of us won’t stick to it. So again, you can always hire us, and we’re more than happy to write your blogs for you. But if you want to write it yourself, and you want to do your own thing, we have a few quick tips for you a couple of ways that we can make a blog easy. You want to help us with the first point there, David?

David N: Yeah. So you can think about what you do with your report or when you can communicate with your clients. Just a simple explanation that you send to your client about, you know, why is this an issue that popped up on your report? Well, just take that email, change the wording around a bit, and all of a sudden, you have an excellent blog posts ready to post.

Ian R: Yeah, and I think that’s a good thing to remember. Because a lot of times we write this big, long email, maybe we found polybutylene. We brought that up earlier. So let’s stick with that. And the client says, why is polybutylene bad. And we write this long, 300-word email explaining it going back and forth. We wrote a blog post. One thing that I found out to be very important is not to answer questions more than once. If someone asks me a question, the first thing I do is, instead of putting it into an email, I put it into a blog post, and then they send them a link to that. The advantage of doing that is now anytime somebody ever asks a question in the future, I just send them the link, and it explains it for them. It’s a great way to first of all have content. Second of all, get people to go to your website. So it builds traffic, and they’ll usually be there for a while reading it. And then third, it saves time. You don’t have to answer that question over and over again. Now you just have an arsenal of answers whenever somebody asks a question.

David N: Yeah. And it’s something that we use with our app Inspector Toolbelt. We make sure that every question that we get becomes a knowledge base article. Same thing there even though it’s not blog posts, it is content on your website and something that we refer people to when they have questions.

Ian R: Yeah, and even for the website development side. Out of things. Every time somebody asked a question we do put that into a blog post, and then we send a link to it out the next time that somebody signs up. And now they have the answer to their question, it works out really well, the client feels informed. And they can they see you as an authority on it when they read that, oh, he’s just not shooting from the hip. He wrote an article on this. This is good material. I’ve had a lot of agents also share my explanations of things, one of my most popular ones was how to start a generator, because a lot of my clients would ask that, so I would just send them a link to how to start my generator, then I found out agents were sharing that with clients too, it’s a great way to build up your SEO and to build up authority in your market. Before we go any farther, though, why is the length of the post important, but not overly important David.

David N: So it’s a fine line to walk there, you want to have enough content that it actually makes a meaningful impact when your site is getting indexed. But at the same time, like I said earlier, if you write too long posts, it’s going to take a lot of time. And it’s not going to give you as much bang for your buck. So to say.

 

Ian R: Yeah, and that’s a good point. A lot of times we’ll see stuff on the internet. Google wants articles, at least 700 words long, and I saw one recently, once it at least 2000 words long. And then I saw one recently, Google doesn’t care about the length of your blog. All of that is true and not true. At the same time, it’s more about people finding what they’re looking forward to Google, as a general rule, most, what we call high level blogs, you want at least 300 or so words at a minimum, high level blogs or things that you’re going a little bit more in depth to. And you’re kind of going into the subject a bit more than your standard blogs, which are somewhere around 200 words, so yet, you’re going to find a lot of content online to tell you your blog has to be at least 1000 words blog has to be 200 words, your blog has to be 2000 words I’ve seen it all really comes down to the user finding what they’re looking for. In my own market, I ranked number one with just one blog post in an entire area. And it’s only 150 words long. I outrank websites targeting that area with 150-word blog post. And I didn’t really say anything overly great. But for years, people still find me on that blog post. It was about an area that I grew up in, and it just spoke to people apparently. So worry about the content. What we don’t want is, as David mentioned, way too much content. Nobody’s going to read 3000 words of ramblings about hydrostatic pressure. But also we want it to be more than 100 words, let’s be honest, that that doesn’t really give us any meat to chew. And Google might even penalize it as quote-unquote, penalize it as being slight content. And if you have too much slight content on your website, in other words, lots of pages with just a few words on them. Google doesn’t like that. So another tip that we can do is talk to text. And I know this is something that you’ve done a lot of David, does it work?

David N: Yes, of course, there is no perfect service out there. I’ve used the free one that Google provides with your phone, you can talk in like you normally talk about a subject and it gives your blog, a very natural flow wording that is actually beneficial for your SEO score. And the thing is that you will have to take this that you actually spoke and edit it when you get back to a computer, you don’t want to post your raw feed, so to say because there’s going to be a lot of words that get messed up and some spelling that go wrong. But in the end, you can very easily get a long blog by just talking.

Ian R: Yeah, and I think it’s important to remember that we do have to edit it. Anybody who’s ever sent a text message using talk to text knows you need to check that text before you send it. There’s been some embarrassing stuff that’s happened. But talk to text actually makes it kind of easy. We’re driving along the highway; we might have an hour long drive to our next appointment. And we’re like, Alright, let me do some talk to text. And we could talk about what we just saw on that last inspection. Maybe it was a sewer scope we were doing, maybe it was a tile roof and there were some broken tiles. And maybe we want to talk about, you know, skylights or something like that. If we’re already driving, it’s just talking at that point. And then maybe we have somebody in the office, maybe it’s our wife or niece or an office person. And then after that, just shoot it over to him in an email, haven’t cleaned it up and post it. It’s a nice easy way to just be able to get a blog out there and have accurate subject matter that came from you, and then somebody to check the material afterward. It’s a nice way to put blog content there.

David N: And it is good to have a support staff available. For the longest time I use my wife as my proofreader. Eventually, she got tired of reading home inspection blogs. And still it was very helpful.

Ian R: You mean, your wife got tired of reading home inspection content?

David N: Yeah

Ian R: How dare she. It’s exciting reading about emergency shut-off switches, it’s what we do.

David N: I’m still working on converting her into the cause.

Ian R: There you go; we need to get her on the team. Another thing we can do is a two-edged sword in a good way, do an interview with an agent. So if you’ve never done this, this in of itself is one of the best marketing things that you could do. Just grab an agent that you know whether they’re new or experienced whoever and interview them, learn about them, ask them about what’s going on in the market, they’re going to love it, put it on YouTube, and post it on your social media. Now, take that interview, and have the video transcribed. So you can use a transcribing service online. Again, you just need to check it thoroughly. There’s a lot of them. Or you can just go to fiverr.com. And Fiverr has people that will transcribe it for you, depending on how long it is anywhere from five to $50. But there’s a couple of advantages of doing that with an agent, the agent is going to love you. And you’re also going to piggyback off of their SEO because when people look them up, they’re also going to find the interview that you did with them online. So now they’ve already met you so to speak online, they might find your blog that you put it in, you want to make sure you put that entire transcription and the video in the blog post, it’s a great way to create content. The other advantage of that is that the agent is contributing content. So maybe we’re just kind of a man or woman a few words, so to speak. Grab an agent that’s very talkative, ask them a simple question and let them roll. Now they’re producing content for you. All you need to do is transcribe it afterward. And we think of transcription is maybe a long, hard process, it’s really not, you can submit a transcription and then have it done in a couple of days off of Fiverr or use one of those services, check it over. It’s really not that long of a process to have it transcribed. Yeah.

David N: And these agents do they will get their internet fame. And you know, even though everyone can put a video on YouTube, a lot of times they might tell someone that they know, I do an interview with this home inspector. And then they’ll actually direct them to your website.

Ian R: Yeah, they start advertising for you. I’ve always been a big proponent of grabbing agents and interviewing them. It is one of the best marketing pieces. But now you can turn it into a blog. Why would we let that just waste so to speak, it’s great that there’s a video out there. But let’s turn that up a notch and take it even farther by having it transcribed now you have written content that Google can read, plus your YouTube video plus the agent marketing for you. A 20-minute interview with an agent turns into years of just autopilot marketing for you. I mean, those are some pretty basic tips. So basically, we want to try to make it easy for you to blog, we want you to be able to do talk to text, have a transcription, whatever it is, and turn it into a blog. Another idea that you could have just gone back to our first point is, if you write something up on a report, we’ve probably all been there, there was an issue. We try to be concise but some issues just need a lot of words. If you write up this big description in your report of 300 words of why this is bad. Can you change those words around and use that as a blog post? You failed polybutylene or you failed that there was no firewall between the garage and the house. And you just wrote this long section report, turn it into a blog we’re already writing. We as home inspectors find defects and communicate that information, turning it into a blog post. You’d be surprised the people that find it. But what are some things that we can do to dive in if we want to go a little more advanced. So we did talk to text we did transcription, and we tried to make it as easy as possible. But now we’re like, Hey, I’m really getting into this. I’m starting to see this build up. How can we go advanced?

David N: Well, one very important thing when it comes to SEO is your location. You want to be the first home inspector that they find when they search for home inspector in your area. So to do that you need relevant and location-specific information. So instead of just speaking about in general terms, you want to target your audience. So think about a subject that is something that people in your area specifically interested in. And make sure you include that information. Start your article out by saying For example, people in such a such a town In this in this state are very concerned about the quality of their well water. Since you know that’s an issue in the area, and people might have the exact concern, when they search for that problem, your blog is going to be one of the options that pops up.

Ian R: Yeah, so you’re going to know your local area better than we are, we can write about lots of different issues, but we’re not going to know everything that granular going on in your area. So think about the services you offer. For instance, maybe you offer Radon Testing. And you know that this particular town is known for radon, write some blogs that are like three to 500 words, but write them about that area and the radon levels. Talk about them talk about anecdotally, what you’ve seen, and things like that. So when people start looking up radon issues in that area, very likely, they’re going to find your blog eventually, oh, this isn’t just a general blog about radon in the country, or radon in the state is about radon in this town that I’m buying in. And this is about radon in the town that I’m living in. So guess who’s going to hire you for Radon Testing, and then find out that you also do home inspections, and then hire you for the home inspection. It’s a great marketing piece, you could talk about home inspections in a specific town, my favorite word, there was a couple of areas that were really known for termites, and I still get more hits than I can even think about on those blogs, because it’s something that people lookup. Like their agent says, Oh, you have to watch out for termites in the area. The first thing they do is whip out their phone and start looking up termites in that particular area. It’s a great way to advance your blog a little bit more, you can still use those simple suggestions we made before you’re driving away and pull over for a couple of minutes and do talk to text about termites in that town, or something along those lines, whatever it happens to be.

David N: It’s interesting, too, that you might have a specific town in mind. But it could also be several towns. So sometimes it might be good to list out several different locations where you’ve seen this issue, make it easier for people to find your specific blog.

Ian R: Yeah, so you can go about that two ways. You can list the areas that those issues are in and one blog, or you can write one for each town depends on your bandwidth and particular situation. One thing you don’t want to do is go County, you want to be very town and city-specific. people as a whole, don’t search for services and things like that by county as a whole. They do it very granular for some reason, that kind of like we look for a bakery, we don’t look for a bakery in our county, typically, we look forward in the area that we’re going to be in or near the area that we’re going to be in or where we’re at. Something else that you want to think about too, is using Google Search Console to submit your new blogs. So one thing that I’ve seen happen before is people will do new blogs. And then Google doesn’t index them, or an index is on but like six months later, when it happens to visit your blog. This happens, especially if you blog sporadically. If you’re more regular, you usually won’t have this issue. If Google knows, once a month, I get a new blog on this guy’s website, twice a month, three times a month, it’s going to go there regularly. But if you’re kind of like hit or miss, you’re going to notice that Google may miss may even miss a blog completely. Google Search Console is something that you connect with your website. So just Google it, you can start it’s completely free. And then what you do is every time you write a blog, copy and paste that out of the URL bar and into Google Search Console, and that tells Google, I have something new, please index this. Again, that’s a little bit more advanced. But it’s a great way to make sure that your content is actually getting found by Google.

David N: Yeah, sometimes you have to nudge Google a little bit to make sure that it finds your content, but it is a powerful tool to be using.

Ian R: Yeah, it really is important because it’s a Google-provided tool. The third tool that we can use is if we’re using WordPress, now WordPress is a bit more advanced. But if we’re using WordPress, use a tool like Yoast SEO. So Yoast is spelled like toast with a “Y”. There’s other tools are the one that we prefer. It has a lot of great features on it. But it especially if you’re trying to make your blogs SEO friendly, make sure that Google likes what it sees. You can think about the keyword that you want to target. Put that in there. And it’ll either give you a red light, a yellow light or a green light. And it’ll tell you the things that you need to change to make sure you get a green light. Green light means Hey, this is a great article. You can get a little bit more advanced that way it’s going to tell you things like you know give alt tags to your images and it’s going to tell you the length of your article is off or it’s going to say give alternate text to your links and different anchors. So some of it is a little bit more advanced. But if you want to get more advanced, there’s a lot of benefit to that too. So you can use a lot of tools like that. Can you think of anything else that might help someone start off on their blogging career in their home inspection business?

David N: Yeah, one thing that I definitely thought of is don’t force it. If you’re not feeling in the mood to write, don’t sit down and force yourself to write, because most likely, you’re going to hate it so much, it’s not going to last very long. But instead, all these methods were mentioned, when you feel like you have a subject you want to talk about, that’s the time you want to write about it. Don’t feel like you have to schedule yourself and be in a strict schedule. Because even when you do it professionally, like we do in our team, we write tons of blogs, but we mix it up, we do other things in between, because just writing and forcing yourself to do it is actually going to make you not want to do it at all.

Ian R: Yeah, and that’s a good point. Because all of our blog writers, we have a set number of blogs that they need to write and subjects and things like that. But nobody’s forced into you have to write at these times. Because if you do, it breaks your brain, and it’s just, you’re going to hate it to death. It’s kind of like anything else. It’s like, if you’re going to work out, are you a morning person or an evening person, you have to do things that work for you. So like David said, take some of these suggestions. But when you’re in the mood, and you’re like, Man, I feel really passionate about this subject, write it down, do talk to text, have a conversation with somebody, record it and then transcribe it with their permission, obviously, whatever it takes to get content out there, because as we mentioned before, up to 55%, more website visitors and better conversions, so more people convert, and it gives you more authority in your market. Having a simple blog is more than worth the effort, wouldn’t you say, David?

David N: Yes, definitely. And we do find that our clients that use us and use our blogs, they do notice an uptick in the traffic.

Ian R: Yeah, it’s a beautiful strategy for whatever kind of home inspection company that you run, whether you’re multi-inspector, or single inspector, but either way, incorporate blogging into your strategy. So David to take us out. How would you say Inspector Toolbelt in Swedish?

David N: I think you would say “besiktningsman verktygsbälte”

Ian R: I can’t repeat that. I don’t know, something about be sickening.

David N: “besiktningsman verktygsbälte” It’s been a long time since I was in Sweden. So I hope no Swedes are listening to this.

Ian R: Well, if you’re Swedish and listening to our show, thank you very much. And you can call David or chat with him on our website Inspectortoolbelt.com and make fun of his rendition of Inspector Toolbelt. But thanks for listening in. We look forward to listening in the next time.

David N:

Thanks for having me, Ian.

Ian R:

Thanks, David.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of inspector toolbelt talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at [email protected].

If you’re enjoying the conversation, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. Our podcast is available on all major podcast platforms. For more information on our services and our brand-new inspection app, please visit our website at Inspectortoolbelt.com.