Writing posts for your real estate syndication blog is so much more than just putting up content. It’s one of the best ways to establish your real estate syndication’s brand as a thought leader in your industry and help build trust with passive investors, lenders, brokers, and other people important for building a successful real estate syndication business.
Even if you use real estate syndication software like ours to showcase your deals and your syndicator bio, having your own blog and website can be crucial for building that trust and credibility.
Blogging is also essential for thought leadership and for giving search engines the right signals that your syndication website is active to index it frequently to surface new content on the search engine results page.
However, running an engaging blog takes work, research, skill, and patience. To succeed, you need to produce content that is 10X better and different from your competitors. Even when you cover similar topics to other blogs, you need to find new angles, fresh information, and, most importantly, integrate visuals. Make a great infographic, add images, custom designs, and videos.
But what if you are too busy scouting new deals, closing, and raising capital, and your budget doesn’t allow you to hire designers, writers, content strategists, and SEO specialists?
We created this post especially for early syndicators like you to walk you through budget-friendly yet efficient tools for developing your real estate syndication blog. Let’s dive into the top things you need to know to succeed.
#1 Free keyword research tools for your real estate syndication blog
The best place to start when planning your blog content is keyword research. Suppose you write your content with specific search terms in mind. In that case, search engines will show your pages to people interested in these particular topics as long as the algorithm considers your page content-rich and relevant. You should carefully choose your keywords with your audience in mind and place them in your text, image file names, alt text, meta descriptions, and page titles.
For example, you are writing a blog post to attract passive investors to your website. In that case, you need to investigate what interests them, what questions they ask, what problems they are trying to solve and develop your content to help them find solutions. Don’t try to sell them anything at this stage. You will have an opportunity to talk about yourself and your syndication once you build trust with these people.
So how can you find the right keywords? Here are some free tools to get you started. We will list them from the least to the most efficient ones. Remember that with free tools, you might not get the same features that come with premium tools, but you can get a lot of value when using these tools together and correctly.
KeywordTool
Using a free version, https://keywordtool.io, allows you to see search suggestions that can help you develop the topic ideas for your blog. For example, if we enter “real estate investing,” these are the results we get with this tool:
Keywords Everywhere
Once you download a freemium Google Chrome or Firefox extension, this handy tool will help you estimate search volume and analyze keyword trends once you perform a Google search with your target keywords. It also shows you related keywords, and other terms people search for (people also ask) if they use these search terms.
SEM Rush
In the free version (you can also try all the features for free for 30 days with this link courtesy of Chase Reiner), you can analyze keyword volume, difficulty, view the top five keyword variations, questions, related keywords ad history, examples of ad copies, and top 10 SERP results.
Google Sentiment Checker
With Google Natural Language AI, you can put in any text, and it will show you the sentiment analysis around this text. Let’s try it out with our article on choosing real estate syndication software:
This is a great tool to analyze how search engines read and categorize your web pages. You can view the content categories it assigns to your page and the dominant sentiments in your content. It’s more of an audit tool than a keyword research tool, but it can help you analyze your competitors’ pages and structure yours more efficiently.
Google Trends
This 100% free tool allows you to see keyword search trends for different periods, from the past 24 hours to 5 years. It also shows related topics and queries. If you create your keyword research sheet, you can add those to suggestions provided by other tools. You can also use this template by Backlinko to track and analyze your keywords.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is the tool that all the other tools pull from. It gives you keyword search volume, CPC, related terms and queries, as well as location-specific data. So if you want to find out how many people search for “real estate investing” in Texas because you target the local market, Google Keyword Planner is the best tool to do your research.
There is a close relationship between CPC and keyword difficulty. The more competitive the keywords, the higher the CPC. The reason for this is that these keywords usually have strong buyer intent.
However, whatever the keyword difficulty, you need to focus on providing currently unavailable solutions. If you pick a competitive keyword, write similar content to your competitors, and keep everything else more or less the same as them, the chances are you won’t rank high.
Choosing the right keywords when starting your real estate syndication blog
When starting out, don’t go for keywords with high search volume. Pick lower competition and lower volume keywords because they will be easier to rank for.
Remember: the number one ranking factor for Google is how many websites are competing for your keyword. For example, if you would like to rank for “How to invest in real estate in 2025”, you can easily do it because there will be little or no competition for this keyphrase in 2021.
Every tool we mentioned uses its proprietary metrics to measure the keyword difficulty. Still, the best way to check how many websites are targeting a specific keyphrase is to do a simple Google search:
intitle:”your keywords”
Search results will show you all the pages with these keywords in the page’s title (different from H1s or H2s that can also rank for these keywords when you perform a regular search). Here is the result for “real estate investing.” Look how many search results are there for these keywords:
Now, compare it with “multifamily real estate investing.”
You see when you use more specific and niche keywords, the competition is getting less.
And once we get even more specific, we only compete with 88 pages that target these keywords.
It’s a no-brainer which keywords are easier to rank for. So consider this when planning your blog content.
#2 Free tools to generate topic ideas for your real estate syndication blog
The first step in finding your topic ideas is deciding who you want to write for. As a real estate syndicator, your primary audience is probably passive investors already familiar with multifamily real estate investing or those investigating alternatives to crypto and stocks.
Therefore, you can structure your real estate syndication blog in a way that both audience segments find helpful. You can have sub-sections, tags, and categories for people unfamiliar with real estate syndication and those who know the basics. Let’s have a look at a couple of examples.
Someone inexperienced with multifamily real estate will look for: “Real estate investing vs. crypto” or “real estate investing vs. stocks” or “shall I invest in multifamily syndication?”
People who already passively invest in RE and are looking for new opportunities will search for queries like: “Top multifamily real estate markets to invest in now” or “Houston vs. Austin for multifamily real estate investing,” or “How do interest rates affect the housing market?”.
Keep your target keywords in mind
Once you decide who you are writing for, you can start your topic research, keeping in mind your target keywords. We prepared this template for you, where you can organize your ideas.
You can integrate this template with the previous keyword research template mentioned above and have a comprehensive document with everything you need to craft a winning content calendar for your real estate syndication blog.
Now, let’s dive into the free tools to help you generate topic ideas.
Answer the Public
This is a convenient and visual tool to help you brainstorm real estate syndication blog topics. Just enter your main keywords, and it will generate questions, propositions, comparisons, and an alphabetical catalog of topics that your audience might find interesting. The free version is good enough for basic topic research.
Frase.io
Frase is my favorite tool for topic research, estimating word count, and the number of images I need to use in our blog posts to stand out from the competition and create something better and different from top-ranking sites. They have a free trial that is enough to generate topic ideas for three months if you put a few hours into research.
If you want your content to be exciting for readers and search engines:
- Study the headers that top-ranking pages use and find new angles and topics to cover.
- Avoid repeating similar article structures and creating content that resembles other’s blog posts.
- Use Frase to analyze what NOT to write about when covering your topic.
- Studying headings, Quora, and Reddit questions will also give you an idea about what people ask, find questions left unanswered or answered in a non-actionable manner and craft your content around them.
Here are some examples of what Frase can do for your real estate syndication blog 
Questions Ninja
Questions.NINJA is a free tool that searches the web for questions related to your seed phrase or keyword. It is a fantastic way to find out dozens of questions and create content around them. You can either add these questions to your existing blog content or write new pieces of content.
#3 Free design tools for your real estate syndication blog illustrations
No blog post will rank in search results without some visuals. Stock photos can help, but Google loves both unique text and unique visuals equally, including images, graphics, and videos. You don’t need to be a designer or hire a professional to design basic blog illustrations. So here are some tools you can use to help you master this skill:
Figma
Despite being known as a tool for wireframing, Figma is super easy to use to create simple illustrations for your blog, add frames to images, and design blog covers. You can hire a designer to create for you an asset library with blog frames, elements, graphics, etc. Alternatively, you can make those yourself.
However, you will need to use Adobe Illustrator or similar to create the designs and transfer them to Figma. So my advice would be to hire a designer, pay a few bucks to get your asset library up and running and then just drag and drop images and text to create your blog covers and illustrations. Here is how I made the cover for this blog post:
Canva
Many of you know Canva as a tool to create social media posts. Did you know that you can also make great infographics, roadmaps, and other awesome stuff with this tool? In the free version, you will have thousands of templates to choose from. Enough to get started.
You won’t be able to use some images and elements in the free version, but you can manage without those until you grow your blog audience a bit. Check out our Syndicating a real estate deal article. I made illustrations for this post with Canva.
Freepik & Flaticon
You indeed heard about Unsplash and Pexels. However, there is another resource where you can find free photos and icons (you have to credit the author, though). The good thing about Freepik is that in addition to photos, there are hundreds of free vectors, Psds, and icons that you won’t find on Unsplash or Pexels.
I use paid version. However, compared to Shutterstock and other similar websites, Freepik is super affordable and costs $14/month for unlimited access to all their resources. Whenever I need a stock image or a vector – Freepik is my go-to resource. Another advantage of this platform is that it is not as widely adopted as others. Therefore, the chances that you will use the same image as hundreds of other blogs are minimal.
Bonus: blog title generator.
As a bonus, you can also play with this free and fun tool that will give you numerous ideas for your blog titles. It’s a great solution when you are stuck or not sure how to name your article. Just enter your keywords and see the magic work!
I hope you found this post helpful as I tried to share as much as I could about making your real estate syndication blog stand out from the crowd and getting you that quality traffic of your future investors and partners flowing to your site.
