The most common complaint or comment that I see from agents is:
“Great make content, but I sell actual real estate. When the hell am I going to have time to do all this? I have showings and actual open houses and clients with real world problems. I can’t worry about posting 20 Instagram stories a day.”
Or, “I don’t even know what to post,” or “I’ve been creating content for years,” or “I’m simply just burnt out.”
These are very valid—and yes, content creation is overwhelming and exhausting. I feel you. All you’ve been hearing at conferences is to post nonstop, flood content, create short-form video, and then you go to BAM, and we’re talking about it. And Gary Vee’s in your ear, telling you to post 15 times a day on all platforms.
Now you have to worry about LinkedIn and TikTok and Instagram’s new algorithm, and you’re like, “Dude, I have a request for repairs. My client just lost his job and we just fell out of escrow.”
So what’s my point with all this? My point is this shit is extremely difficult. I have days all the time where I cannot come up with anything. I haven’t sold a house in like two years. I used to be able to just sit there and come up with like 10 funny tweets about real estate at a time. But now that I’ve been out of production, I’m searching for content to come up with and some days I’m just not creative at all. Same goes with podcasting and with BAM. Sometimes I just can’t think of an article to write or a video to do. I mean, look at this—this is basically about nothing.
My Mindset Surrounding Content Creation
Here’s what I know from my actual human experience. What I know is that the brain and the algorithms, all this stuff is very, very streaky. When you come to terms with the fact that not every post is going to be a banger, not every piece of content is going to hit, not every recording session will be good—and that you’re going to have weeks, maybe months, where you just don’t have it—that can be kind of liberating.
I’ll have weeks where my content sucks, or I’m in a rut. As I’m recording this right now, I’m in a permanent rut. But there’s some other good news—nobody else really notices or cares about how your content is performing.
People aren’t going into your feed and saying, “Oh, Jenny from RE/MAX has fallen off. Her last five reels are getting 20% less engagement than back in November. She’s done.”
No, nobody notices that. Everyone has their own lives and their own shit to deal with.
But this wouldn’t be a Marketing Monday post if I didn’t offer you some tactical solutions. So if you’re in a creative rut or you have writer’s block, here are a few strategies to help you get out of it.
Bulk Record
The first solution, of course, is to bulk record. Prepare yourself for the inevitable. You’re going to have weeks where you ain’t got shit and you have 10 escrows and your kid just bit you. So pick a day a month, bring different outfits, hire a cameraman or just use your phone and a ring light and shoot all your videos for the next month.
Plan your content. It will do wonders for you. This video is from a bulk recording session. I don’t just wake up and start filming these videos like a complete psychopath. I plan it out and then I pick a day and I film 10 of these so I can free up my time.
Take a Break
The second thing I recommend doing is taking a week or two break from doing anything at all content-wise. We had my good friend Taya DiCarlo on the Over Ask Podcast, and she talked about how she went on a two week hiatus and it did wonders for her mindset and for her creativity. When you’re in the weeds of all these apps constantly consuming and posting and engaging and captioning, it gets exhausting and sometimes you overwork your creative muscle. You find yourself saying the same stuff over and over again and no new ideas are coming to you.
Sometimes when I’m playing a lot of golf, I’ll go to the range every day and work on my swing, and after 10 days in a row, I’m worse off than I was the first time. It’s because my body is exhausted, my mind is exhausted. I’m overthinking everything. But then if I just take a week off, it resets and I’m better than when I came back the first day.
So take a little breather, schedule your recorded content and maybe just focus on your actual life. The content rat race is not a fun place to be in.
Work Out
Another thing I recommend doing when you’re burnt out and can’t think of anything else to do is honestly go work out or do something active.
I certainly didn’t come up with the strategy of working out, but it is worth repeating. When I sit at my computer and I’m trying to think of something funny, I almost never can. You need oxygen flowing to your brain to come up with ideas. I always come up with my best content when I’m on the Peloton or I’m doing my 500 pushups per day.
Sitting in your content cave, trying to spit out a post is not effective. So get moving, get active and get an Equinox membership. If you’re out doing real estate activities, remember to just record what you see. Write down ideas in your notes section on the go. Remember the questions that clients keep asking you because you can always turn these into videos later on.
Look through your past sales
Look through your past sales. I’m sure they will spark some memories of something crazy that happened or a scenario that you can do a video or a story or a blog post on. I bet you’ll come up with a lot of ideas by taking a few minutes to review past sales.
Farm Content from Yourself
Not everything has to be a new idea. Speaking of that, recycle your old posts. Turn your old feed posts into videos, your old videos into feed posts, or even just repost your best performing content. Chances are the majority of your audience never saw it before, and if they did, they don’t remember and they don’t care.
I do this all the time on The Broke Agent account. I have 4,000 plus posts to choose from, so I’m constantly repurposing and reposting them to my page.
Just Scroll
Finally, just scroll. If you’re stuck for content, scroll through Instagram, scroll through TikTok and Facebook and see what other people are posting and talking about. Go to Twitter and see what’s trending in housing. Go to YouTube and Google and literally type in “housing market” or something about your local community and cover that. The ideas will come.
I know this was a different style than I normally do—not as tactical, more mindset based—but my point is that content creation is exhausting. Engagement and ideas always come in waves. It’s very difficult to post 15 times a day. It’s very difficult to be everywhere,and it’s okay to take a break and come back when you are refreshed.
If you enjoyed this Marketing Monday, you should definitely check out BAMx, where myself and other BAM Creators dive deeper and actually show you how to implement these strategies in interactive courses and live streams. You will love it.
