Neighborhoods Undressed

Do you Squidoo?

It is just too much fun! Can I say that on the internet? What is Squidoo? It is a way that anyone, and I do mean anyone can whip up a web site. The idea is to focus on a single topic. I picked my topic a couple of days ago and did most of the work while I was on the phone . . with someone really boring. Introducing the Squidoo Lens of Neighborhoods Undressed, complete with feeds from each members blog.

Here are a couple of my favorite lenses; Non-Electric about power and this little beauty is about Funky Chic, Cool Lap Top Bags. As you can see my tastes are a bit eclectic but my point is that a lens can be about anything. Larry can create a lens about bugs. Bad idea. Bad, bad, bad idea.

Squidoo is free and easy to use. It consists of individual modules. The lens master chooses the modules, arranges them and puts in the content. The Lens was invented by Seth Godin and first launched in October of 2005. They are supported by advertising which is shared with the lens master. A portion of the money goes to charity, and lens masters can set a lens up so that all revenue from it goes to charity. . . all $.49 of it . . .

Lenses have RSS feeds and move up in rank as they get traffic and good ratings. The best way to get traffic to a lens is to put links to it from blogs or web sites, build a great lens, and of course write a blog post about it. The neighborhoods undressed lens will promote each blog in the network.

Undressing SEO (Part 2) Content

Content is King is not a new concept and I have written many posts on the topic, including my most recent post on The Real Estate Weenie, the bad blog cleverly disguised as a hot dog stand. There is a battle going on for our content, I say we should keep it. It is ours and it is a powerful tool for generating business.

In my last post I suggested that R E bloggers have become obsessed with SEO, when what they should be obsessed with is content. If the goal of the a local Realtors blog is to meet people and win clients content is key.

Writing about other blogs or writing about what everyone else is writing about isn’t the answer, unless of course you are the very best writer then you can do anything you want to. There are many excellent writers out there writing real estate content every day but not many if any writing about your neighborhood or town.

The best blog posts come from last nights conversation with the sellers of that new listing, or some comments buyers made while they were in your car. The question a neighbor asked, or your mothers remark about Realtors.

Numbers make great content but if they are charts or numbers that are available through multiple sources they are not as powerful. Your commentary or analysis of those numbers as they pertain to your neighborhood or town are needed to make the content unqiue. Providing facts and figures can make a blog boring to read so don’t do it everyday.

Humor works well in local real estate content. People seem to appreciate posts that make fun of Realtors or maybe something in the city that isn’t quite right.

Local content comes from being local, your own observations about your city or neighborhood. Show blog readers your town or neighborhood through your eyes, it is the best way for them to get to know you and at the same time learn about your market area.

Photos make great posts. Not everyone has spectacular views of oceans, mountains or rivers to photograph but that is OK. Taking pictures of the ordinary helps blog readers see your town and understand it. Pictures of houses, buildings, local shops and parks work just fine.

Often real estate bloggers don’t understand the importance of posting every day. It does take discipline. I consider writing a blog post to be part of my job and I treat it as such. When I can’t write a blog post and have no stored content to draw from I find a guest author, or take a picture. A short post is OK too, it is usually better than no post.

Keep it focused. Google will do the rest, and people will find your blog. Posts should be about your town or about real estate. Keep in mind that while it is nice to have other real estate professionals and friends reading your blog, they are not your audience. Write to your clients past present and future and to your neighbors. It doesn’t matter what other bloggers or other real estate professionals think of your content or if they read it at all.

The biggest obstacles for real estate bloggers are writing and coming up with topics to write about. I can’t believe I am doing this but I would like to say something about writing. I am not a writer and I don’t see writing as one of my strengths. I pull it off because I think about the reader.

I hear, or read people commenting on posts that are “well written”. I don’t understand what that means and I never have, it is subjective. I think the point is to use a conversational tone and create posts that are easy to read and to understand.

Keep it simple and most importantly keep it real. Imitating someone else’s style or their blog isn’t going to work. Find your own style. It will be comfortable and easy. Get ideas from the blogs you like to read but make the posts your own.

Undressing SEO, Part 1

I never thought I would be writing a post with a title like that. SEO, is shorthand for search engine optimization. Real estate bloggers seem to be obsessed with the topic these days. The coaches, and the vendors that sell blog platforms write on the subject almost daily. There are groups of real estate bloggers who discuss it endlessly.

In the real estate industry I think the obsession with SEO is because in our industry we like to look for magic bullets and we search for ways to get rich quick. Blogs are almost magical but they are not quick. They take some hard work and dedication. Yes there are stories out there about people who found fame over night because of a blog but that is rare. Most have to work at it over a period of time.

Agents start blogs and after a few months if they are not getting enough traffic they read up on SEO. In some cases writing blog posts on a consistent basis, like every day, would be more beneficial and writing content that is of value to the intended audience would also help.

Some of what I have read about SEO seems to be designed to frighten bloggers and make them feel like they are in over their heads. One of the reasons blogs have become so popular is that they are so easy to create, a technical background or technical experience is not needed. Yes it is possible to screw up a blog but it isn’t as easy as we are lead to believe.

I ran my own site through a kind of SEO tester about eight months ago. My score was 95, which means that my blog was better, from an SEO stand point than 95% of the web sites out there. I ran the same report over the weekend and got a score of 88. My score has dropped a bit but my readership has about doubled. 64% of my readers find me through search engines. Even though my report has a B on it instead of an A, it doesn’t matter in terms of readership, and I am still meeting clients through my blog. I found the report interesting but I don’t plan on correcting any of the defects becasue I don’t think they are having a negative impact on my business.

When the blog was a page rank three I got just as much business through it as I do today with a higher page rank. The number of readers may not matter at all. Who is reading it is much more important. Traffic is nice to have but the right kind of traffic is wonderful and where I think the magic comes in. Those notes from people asking for help buying or selling a home. In the beginning of the note, or sometimes at the end it will say I love your blog, or I have been reading your blog.

A successful blog is about writing and posting consistently. A blog post does not have to be a great literary master piece. Instead it should be written in a friendly conversational tone and should be short an easy to read. As a rule less than 500 words is good. No one really talks about frequency of posts or what to write about. Blog posts should have unique content and sometimes it is the ordinary day to day occurrences that make the best blog posts.

After I wrote this I found two of the best posts I have seen on the topic of SEO for Realtors. I was going to delete my post but instead I will put in some links: SEO De-Programmers Needed for Re bloggers and Target and Focus Your Local Content

Hope Dave Smith at the blog Lab doesn’t mind, but his posts are excellent.

Local Agent, Local Blogger

When I started my real estate blog there were not many real estate blogs around and no blogs about St. Paul. I was lucky. My instinct told me that if I wrote to consumers, and kept it local because real estate is local, that people would read my blog and that I would get to meet them, and maybe they would become clients. I learned to keep it real and to be myself and not to imitate others or try to be something or someone that I am not.
Then at some point, maybe about a year ago the real estate industry got interested in blogs. I started seeing them everywhere. Many of the bloggers would start out the way that I did. After a few months they would begin writing to other bloggers and giving advice on how to blog. I understand how this happens. It is hard to stay focused especially in the beginning. Writing a local blog can be a lonely experience, even more so for someone like me who does not live any where near Seattle, but in fly over land where blogs are not as popular.

In most cases local bloggers do not get national recognition. I have had national recognition but only because I was an early adapter.  There certainly are better blogs than mine. The first time my blog was noticed was by the Chicago Tribune and the reporter wrote about it because she was not finding local blogs written by agents. She was finding blogs written by Realtors for other Realtors. When she came to mine she found pictures of houses because I was writing a series on local architecture that week. The other blogs she visited had pictures of iPhones on them because that is what everyone was talking about that week. Those architecture posts generated about a million dollars in sales, the iPhone posts got more traffic and comments and links.

My goal was and is to stay focused and if you read my blog you will see that I have stayed on track. It can be fun to write to other bloggers who will leave comments, but my goal is to write about St. Paul and about real estate and it is a lot of fun to come up number one in the search engines, organically for keywords that other companies pay for.

Why am I writing all of this? Mostly to explain the undressed network. The idea is to have a local blog because real estate is local. Blogs are not technical, they are about content. What to write and how to write it. The undressed network is not about getting national recognition or about seeing which blogger can have the most real estate professionals reading. It is about building relationships with the consumers who live inside of our computers, so that they will contact us and ask for our help when they need to buy or sell real estate.

I contend that the real estate industry does not yet understand local blogs or the power that we as individuals have on the internet. As an industry we reward bloggers by how many others in the industry read them and have not yet embraced the idea of writing to potential clients. It is about being real and local and giving consumers the information they are looking for. It is about honesty and integrity and yes even undressing. In writing we are undressing online. We are exposing our beliefs, values and ideas. That takes courage but it is powerful.

I guess I have just exposed my beliefs and values about real estate blogs. It is OK to have a national blog, I have one of those too, and I read them, but if the intent is to win business try a local or neighborhood blog. National bloggers have a lot more competition because there are so many of them. There is almost no competition for local bloggers making it a great opportunity for agents who want to have a strong web presence that generates business,