If your marketing focuses only on traditional, outbound efforts—direct mail, cold calls, email blasts—you’re missing huge opportunities. Inbound marketing activities attract potential clients to your business rather than you targeting them. Here are five inbound marketing ideas to get you started.

Share Your Knowledge

Create and share interactive quizzes or simple explanations to help consumers understand various aspects of real estate. Possible topics could be basic contract terms like the termination option, finance concepts like mortgage pre-approval, and leasing terms like security deposits.

Answer Questions

Use online forums, such as Quora and Reddit, to answer consumers’ questions about real estate. Since consumers are starting the conversation, they’re more likely to engage with you. Also, you can pick and choose the questions that match your expertise or market niche.

Launch a Side Gig

Landscape, handyman, concierge, and similar services allow you to interact with people at their homes—a natural place to talk about real estate.

Be Vulnerable

Many agents post photos of happy clients. You can also share online stories of your disappointments, failures, and fiascoes. It’s counterintuitive, but showing your faults makes you stand out—you’re a real person, not some idealized marketing creation. Be sure to include what you learned and any details about how you turned a negative situation around.

Restrict Your Content

Limiting what’s available for “free” on your website shows the value of the content that you don’t make available to all visitors. Require a person to provide an email address or other contact information to see your videos, blog posts, and other information. Some people will input fake data, but many who are genuinely interested will provide real contact information.