Blogger Outreach: Addicted to Property

An interview with Nelly Berova, business development manager at Addicted To Property, one of the UK’s leading property blogs. Nelly spoke to us about how she and the team are focused at making property talk fun on the blog, working with brand marketers and influencers and being positioned as the go-to agency for property marketing and consulting

Why should people read your blog? What makes it different? Our blog is the ultimate bite-size option for discerning and time-squeezed property fanatics. Addicted to Property has a colourful and friendly ‘vibe’ and offers a series of concise modern property stories primarily from London. The idea is to move away from the dreary type of property blogs we see so much these days and to keep our audience up-to-date and engaged and most of all to make property fun! It’s a tough job keeping attention spans in an era where there are so many distractions on the internet. However, we think we’ve done a good job – and our traffic demonstrates this. We get readers from across the board: investors, buyers, sellers – or just anyone interested in property news.

How do you measure the success of your website? We measure the traffic – we’ve seen an increase steadily – especially over the last year. As well as this, we pride ourselves on the amount of social media ‘shares’ we get – as this is increasingly important as a key indicator of how popular our blog is..

What’s your favourite blog and why? This is a tricky one! There are so many good blogs out there – but here at Art Division we like those who go out on a limb and do things a bit differently.  Although it can be rather pessimistic about the property market, we like the rat and mouse.co.uk. This is because the blog gives regular, up-to-date information and the style is quite unique. However, we generally love London and value the boost the property market is giving to the economy – although we recognise new policy needs to be introduced to make homes more affordable.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a blog? Patience, persistence, regular updates and, most importantly a plan! Slow and steady wins the race as they say and it’s been proved that those who persevere and use a series of KPIs to measure their results will end up being successful to a degree. Another good thing is to build local influencers – a merger of off and online PR, if you like. Oh, and do something you enjoy (it always helps).

How do you work with marketers and PRs? We have our own in-house marketing team generally who work on a combination of content and social media strategy, SEO and PR outreach to well-known bloggers and press. We use this combination as we’ve tried and tested it over a period of time – and we NEVER offer this to clients before we can prove it works and we try the methods with our own brands. Occasionally we work with other contacts and suppliers – but generally we try to keep the team the same in order to make sure things develop in the right direction.

Who do you work with in brand marketing? PRs? SEOs? Anyone else? As stated above – we tend to keep our team in-house; but we do also work with freelancers – usually people we know quite well. For example, we have our in-house developers but also work with coders on a freelance basis when we need to develop more complex sites; but as we expand we’ll be looking for more full-time staff – watch this space!

What can marketers do better in working with you? If we use external marketers at all we value initiative, out-of-the-box thinking (it may sound cheesy but it’s vital) and we also look for those who are wanting to work with a loyal and ambitious team. We focus on these things as we pride ourselves on our devotion to our clients as we really go the extra mile for them.

What was your blogging highlight of 2013? We were very excited to be nominated for a couple of blogging awards. Also, we liaised with Kirsty Allsop on one story about a show she was promoting – and we’re delighted to say we got hundreds of Facebook likes and retweets. The power of celebrity and influencers is always something that can help new blogs especially and we’ve learnt how to use this throughout the years

What will be big in your blogosphere in the coming months? Well, we’ve just revamped our ezine “Property Division”. This will largely focus on investors and give tips to them on how to find the best deals and of course keep them updated with the changing legal aspects of everything property. We’re very excited about this – as we believe it’ll offer something fresh and really highlight us as the go-to agency for property marketing and consulting.

Editorial information on Addicted to Property and thousands of other media contacts and outlets, can be found in the CisionPoint Media Database.