You may have heard. When the going gets tough the tough gets going. You also may have heard that Seth Godin told real estate agents to get out or get very local.
This is about you and our network to help you get going, get hyper local, and participate in the best marketing tool available.
Visit our slide shows website and see the following and more:
10 Reasons Real Estate Agents Should Blog In The Neighborhoods Undressed.com Network.
It is about writing great content and being part of a network and brand. The longer you write the more you knock out the competition. Our Issaquah Undressed.com blog and Issaquah Highlands Undressed.com are the Kings of our area in Google and Yahoo, probably MSN we don’t check on it. These are not only the top real estate blogs in the community, they are the top real estate sites, with the best local content - written with real estate accumen. With our support, training, and coaching, you can be dominant in your market too. They are the ultimate long term solution: local real estate blogs written by a local real estate agent.
Photos are an important part of our blogs.
Probably most of you that drop in could answer this question. For you we add our twist. Kathleen started this article in response to a question by one of the owners of our real estate office.
What is a blog? A blog is a word derived from web log. It is like a website but the content is continuous and can be added upon easily and often, as often as the blog writer wishes. The most recent article (post) is at the top and each additional post pushes the other further down. All posts can be put into categories (which you can title). The categories can be clicked on to retrieve all posts written in the category.
A blog is very 2.0, meaning it isn’t just you writing to others but it allows others to make comments and you can even ask guest writers to post if you choose.
Links are a common component. You can link to whatever website you choose; schools, traffic cams, chamber of commerce, etc.
All articles you write are always there. The content of a blog can quickly become huge. There are many ways to send people into your blog, which is part of our training. Needless to say, the more often you write, the better.
Our blogs have a local focus. We host sites written by local agents that know their communities as well as real estate. We have a most effective way to show a community. It is a public service. Our agents provide an MLS search and access to mortgage lenders we have had experience with.
Blogs can have a very powerful search engine result. Search engines are notified when new content arrives, done right you will move to the front of the line in Google. That too is part of our strategy.
| And guess who was at the top of the list:: Our Coach Teresa Boardman WAY TO GO T 25 Most Influential Real Estate Bloggers: 2007 |
|
| Inman News has compiled a list of the 25 Most Influential Real Estate Bloggers of 2007, reflecting bloggers who are well-known, well-read and have a knack for stirring up debate on important industry or local topics.There are hundreds of real estate-focused blogs online today, which made choosing only 25 bloggers difficult. The 2007 list includes bloggers who showed influence on issues, consistently attracted eyeballs, stimulated conversation and added a fun voice to gnarly real estate issues. | |
| Broker and Agent Blogs | |
| Teresa Boardman Founder, St. Paul Real Estate Blog Realtor, Keller Williams Integrity Realty Teresa Boardman is a Realtor and licensed broker with Keller Williams in St. Paul, Minn. She started The St. Paul Real Estate Blog as an experiment in 2005 and quickly gained national and local attention. Her blog focuses exclusively on the city of St. Paul, and contains hundreds of individual posts and more than a 1,000 photos of the city. She claims the majority of her real estate business comes from people who meet her on the blog. Constantly innovating, Boardman just launched a neighborhood wiki at stpaulneighborhoods.com. |
|
This is an opinion, but it is based on two years of personal experience, and the experience of others, so I think it has some validity. A business blog is not very useful if no one reads it. According to Technorati there are over 90 million blogs in there directory and only a small percentage get any traffic.
People who write real estate blogs are writing to a niche, composed of the people who are interested in real estate. Real estate professionals are the most interested in real estate. With a lot of hard work and writing this group can be attracted to a blog. Larry’s real estate undressed blog is a great example. He has a large national following, and has the talent and imagination to keep them coming back.
It doesn’t work that way for everyone, and if real estate business is the goal, consider a local blog. Larry has a couple of them and they do generate business. My local blog has as many readers, but it does not have as many of the same readers coming back everyday. Since the focus is on St. Paul and on real estate, who would want to read about that every day? Yawn.
My blog works more like a web site. It covers a small niche that few others are writing about. When people are interested in St. Paul and in buying or selling a home in the area they find me through Google. The competition for my product is much smaller than the competition for a product like Real Estate Undressed, so I come up first in many searches.
The regular readers that I have are area residents who either know me or who just like seeing a blog about St. Paul and are interested in the local market conditions posts which show home prices and sales by St. Paul neighborhood. They don’t necessarily read me becasue I they think I am a great writer, they read me becasue I provide information that no one else is publishing and in a unique format. They can’t go to a national real estate or news blog and find the same content. I only have to compete with a few excellent local bloggers.
That is the beauty of a local or neighborhood blog. Coverage of a niche in depth. Kind of like selling real estate. Most of us are licensed in a state, or maybe two but we sell in just a few neighborhoods, some specialize further still, becoming experts in one type of housing or clients. As I drill down on the internet to the neighborhood level there is less competition than there is at the city or state level.
If you are a real estate professional who would like to start a blog that will help generate real estate business consider writing a neighborhood blog. You may not get national attention or a huge following but the people who are interested in your area will find you and you will stand out as an area expert. Your readers will also get a feel for your personality and if you are lucky you will build trust with them to the point where they will contact you and ask for help with a real estate transaction.
REALTORS who use business planning usually work on the plans this time of year. If you are considering a blog for 2008, put it in your plan and allot time each day for reading and writings. Make some projections. In your first year with a local blog you can count on your posts resulting in real estate transactions. I was going to throw out some numbers but there are many variables. Traffic increases when market activity is up and there are seasonal variations too.
The number of blogs on the internet is growing and will continue to grow. A local blog is a way to compete, and win business in your own niche. If you currently have a blog, don’t be discouraged if it isn’t paying off yet. Blogs are like farming in that to get results you have to stick with it for awhile. Also keep in mind that Who is reading your blog and why, may be more important than the number of readers. We have not yet found a correlation between the number of readers and the amount of business a blog can attract.
Artwork is of downtown St. Paul, with the Mississippi River in the foreground.
