Neighborhoods Undressed

What Is A Blog Anyway? And Our Version?

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.

Dear T

I have this little blog, it is mostly about St. Paul and about real estate, and once I wrote about socks. It isn’t always easy to have such a blog and sometimes I need help, but we won’t go into that too much.

I asked Dear Abby for help several times with blog posts, and with the demented commenters who spew on my blog. Then I discovered that there is no Dear Abby for bloggers. So now I am on a mission, to fill that gaping hole. Just call me Dear T, but say it softly I have a headache, from listening to other peoples problems. I don’t know what I am talking about most of the time, but it doesn’t matter because no one else knows what I am talking about either.

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I have previous experience as Dear T. For several years I acted as an employee advocate in a large, mindless money grubbing, heartless, greedy corporation. I listened to peoples problems all day long and provided solutions. Most of the time they solved their own problems but thought that I did. Which was nice because I got to keep my job which paid an obscene amount of money, yet left me feeling cold and empty at the end of the day. I left the job after five years, when I started it I was tall and blond and had legs up to here. By the time I left I was the short dumpy person you see before you today. The nervous twitch went a way a few months after I left the job and it took awhile, but my hair all grew back. I still have the nightmares, even when I am awake but the pills and the shock therapy really help with that.

If I can help, which I can, please leave a comment on this post or contact me at: Teresa(at)tboardman.com. Please keep your problems limited to 1000 words or less and they should be blog or at least real estate related. I hold real estate licenses in MN*, state law prevents me from giving legal or tax advice. In general I am not responsible if my advice causes you to make a career limiting move. If you take my advice and your wife leaves you keep in mind that she probably would have left you long ago and has just been waiting for an excuse.

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Dear T, was released onto the Internet about 10 months ago. She gave advice to bloggers and then disappeared for several months. Some say she was hiding until her hair grew back, others have suggested that she was thrown off the Internet. Larry Cragun talked her into coming out of hiding. We can only assume that Larry has his reasons, and is prepared to clean up the mess.

*Also a MN Real Estate Brokers License, MN fishing license, Notary license, International Drivers License, and a MN drivers license.

Dear T, My Page Rank is Oh so Low

“Dear T, my blog only has a page rank of 2 and it is keeping me up all night and giving me an inferiority complex. My neighbors site has a page rank 4 and her site is really rank. I just don’t know what to do. could you please help me?

signed.. real rank.”

Dear Real Rank,

I think you are looking for some advice on how to achieve page rank. What do I look like? (A question that you should not consider answering)

You are beyond help, but I like a challenge, heck for me everything is a challenge. Have you tried praying? Probably not, it sounds like you don’t have a prayer anyway. As for not sleeping, that sounds like a personal problem, I don’t do personal.

First of all, if you are a Realtor with a blog that is about your market area, and you have that blog so that you can meet the people who live inside your computer and maybe help them with their real estate needs, why do you care about your page rank? Why do you care about anyone else’s page rank? What exactly is the correlation between page rank and your ability to meet clients through your blog? Did you bother to read my posts 1 and 2 about SEO, and glean from them that content is the magic bullet, and the only thing that matters?

It isn’t about page rank or even about traffic. It is about who is reading your blog, and what you are writing for them. Are you writing posts for consumers who may be in need of your real estate skills, which I sincerely hope for their sake are better than your blogging skills?

I have looked at your blog and if you ask me Goggle is being generous with the 2, it could be zero. Have you considered posting more often? Have you thought about keeping your content focused? Have you ever tried actually writing about your neighborhood or about real estate, instead of American Idol, the Iphone, and what you ate for lunch.

Have you thought about starting a blogroll, or writing something that someone might want to link to? Have you ever left a comment on a related blog? Did you even know that getting links to your blog improves page rank? Why don’t you just go back to your blog and start writing some content that is of value to the buyers and sellers who are on the interent and stop looking at your page rank. Blogs are about content, just worry about that. Keep it real and keep it focused, and write to your intended audience, the rest will come.

Stop Googling yourself all the time, that isn’t helping either. My head hurts and I think my hair is falling out again. I have to go now, time to work on my people skills.

Next . . . .

If I can help, which I can, please leave a comment on this post or contact me at: Teresa(at)tboardman.com. Please keep your problems limited to 1000 words or less and they should be blog or at least real estate related. I hold real estate licenses in MN*, state law prevents me from giving legal or tax advice. In general I am not responsible if my advice causes you to make a career limiting move. If you take my advice and your wife leaves you keep in mind that she probably would have left you long ago and has just been waiting for an excuse.

Inman News Just Named The 25 Top Real Estate Bloggers of 2007

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.

Taking Pictures

Notice I didn’t put the word “photography” in the title, I find the word intimidating. I also find it fascinating that when I write a really great blog post, no one ever asks me what kind of a keyboard I have but when I take a great photo I get emails and comments asking me what kind of a camera a I used. The pictures I have on my blogs are the most popular feature, or at least what is commented on the most by other bloggers and by people who are looking for information about real estate or about my market area.

There is more to writing than keyboards, and more to photography than camera’s. I was asked to write a post for a social network that I belong to about photography. I started like I always do when someone brings up the topic: “I am not a photographer” I did mention the camera in my post and three people immediately went out and bought one. I recommended a book too and at least one person ordered it.

Camera

I have a couple of them, but the one I use the most is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX07, that I bought at best buy, an “open box” special. It has a wide angle lens and takes 7.1 Megapixel pictures. It also has extended optical zoom, which means I can take pictures from far away.

The camera is small so that I can have it with me at all times. I have actually read the manual and have learned how to use all the features, so I get more the most out of the little camera. It is very possible to have a great camera and take lousy pictures. There is more to pictures than cameras.

When I choose a camera I see five factors as being important:

1. A camera that I can figure out how to use.
2. A camera that is small enough so that I can have it with me at all times. A camera is useless sitting at home in a camera bag.
3. The camera has to have a rechargeable battery, mainly because they seem to have a much longer battery life.
4. It has to have a stabalizer, I shoot pictures from my car.
5. A wide angle lens, is a must have for interior shots. (Pictured below: Schurmeier Lofts - Unit #204)

Taking Pictures

Light is everything. I took the picture posted above because I saw it as I drove by. The light was perfect, and the clouds were perfect, stacking the odds in my favor that I would get a good shot. The photo was the first shot I took. I named it “lucky shot” because I used the extended zoom feature without a tri-pod, a big no no, if the goal is to get a sharp, clear picture.

1. Don’t try to take pictures into the sun, a well duh! but I see it all the time, or photos taken in such intense sun light that they have that washed out look.
2. It is possible to take a great picture on a dreary day or in a dark room but it isn’t easy.
3. When taking pictures of houses or people they seem to look best at a slight angel instead of head on.
4. Your tripod is your friend. I found one that folds up to less than a foot long. It is like my camera, always available. I keep it in my car with a small screw driver, a flash light and a magnifying glass for those photo emergencies. I can set it up in a minute or less.

What to take pictures of

I take pictures of anything that I see that I either want to show my blog readers or that I like looking at, or that might make an interesting post. For a real estate blog, pictures of real estate, like houses and buildings seem to work best. I take pictures of the Mississippi River because I see it every day and I walk along the walking paths.

Sometimes when I go out taking pictures every picture turns out. Sometimes none of my pictures turn out. I save the good photos on CD’s so if I need a photo for a blog post I can usually find one.

Digital Camera’s and PC’s

With my last two digital camera’s I never hooked them up to my PC to down load pictures. I have SD card readers built into my computer, and put the card in the reader to down load the pictures. I also have a separate card reader that plugs into a USB port. My daughter took her digital camera to France. She did not take the card reader I gave her. I asked her why she wasn’t uploading pictures, there has to be something to take a picture of in the south of France. She said she couldn’t get the pictures off of her camera and onto her computer. I mailed her my card reader, now she is uploading pictures a couple of times a week. Don’t mess around with hooking a camera up to a PC, use a card reader. She is my daughter, I thought I taught her to never leave home without her card reader or attempt to connect a digital camera to a computer, in the field.

How to get the pictures ready for the internet

I use photoshop elements 5.0., but there is a newer version, 6.0. It costs about $100 but is worth every penny of it. The features I use the most are the automatic fix, the cropping tool, and the re-sizing tool. Most photos need to be brightened before they are put on the Internet.

Raw photos from a digital camera are too large to put in a blog post. They need to be made much smaller. Often the software that comes with a camera can be used to make pictures smaller. If not photo shop elements, will do the job. Picasa and PhotoFiltre are free programs that will resize photos and much more.

Digital Photography

The best thing about digital photography is that I can take as many pictures as I want. If they don’t turn out I can delete them. Sometimes I just keep taking pictures until I get it right. I use a 2 gigabyte SD card, so I won’t run out of space. The more I practice the fewer shots I have to take before I get what I want.

A photographer recommended a book on photography that I really like, the author Scott Kelby, has a wonderful sense of humor and the book is just fun. I use it for reference and read his “recipes” which are how too guides for taking pictures. From the book I learned how to photograph landscapes, sunsets and how to take pictures at night.

The Digital Photography Book, by: Scott Kelby

Pictures are an essential ingredient on a real estate blog. Not pictures of me, but pictures of St. Paul and of houses. I also belong to a group on a photographers web site and have met some interesting people that way. I have a Flickr account, pro level, only $25 dollars a year and worth it. I have participated in some local groups and projects through Flickr and have met some neighbors. Take advantage of your flickr account, it is a great way to network.

** note - the pictures at the top of this blog were taken by Neighborhoods Undressed bloggers, we have some excellent photographers in the net work, visit their sites and check it out.