Why Start a Real Estate Blog?

You may have heard that a real estate blog can help your online marketing. Blogs -- web sites or web pages with entries arranged in reverse chronological order so that the most recent posts are on top -- are becoming more and more popular, but why should a hard working Realtor® devote the time to write a new web site entry once a month or once a week or -- horror of horrors -- every day?

I mean, let's face it, we want to be selling, right, not writing? Isn't that what being a Realtor® is about, isn't that how we get paid, by selling?

Well, done correctly, blogging is selling. No, I don't mean you should promote yourself directly in a blog, that's not it at all. Nothing is more entertaining (in a "laughing at you not with you" sort of way) than reading a blog that says something like "I specialize in providing real estate service to buyers and sellers." Oh, really, you mean the kind with money?

Yes, blogging is about selling, but it's not about the presentation stage -- it's about prospecting. Let's look briefly at two important ways a blog can give your online marketing campaign a boost.

1) The Traditional Search Engines - Publish or Perish

The academic world used to be -- maybe still is -- dominated by the phrase "publish or perish". As search engines become more and more sophisticated in their ability to separate spam from content, having heaping helpings of the latter at every turn has become more and more critical. The days when one could do any good by stuffing the "keywords" meta tag full of what you wanted the search engines to find you for were short lived at best and are now nothing more than a dim memory. Moreover, simply getting tons of reciprocal links won't help you build your reputation as well -- or as quickly -- as it once did. Google and other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms -- the rules they use to index content -- to make every kind of cheating you can think of more difficult to do.

Trust me on this: you're going to have to break down and write something.

Search engines want to see sites with lots of content. There's also at least anecdotal evidence that search engines prefer content that is fresh and updated regularly. Search engines prefer sites with incoming (and outgoing) links that are related to the theme of the site. Bloggers tend to link avidly, both in the text of the posts themselves and in blog rolls -- those collections of links you see on blogs.

2) A Whole New Audience

In addition to the major boost you get from the traditional search engines, blogging introduces you and your services (and perhaps your existing web site) to a group of clients and online searchers who may not have found you any other way. The blogging world -- sometimes called the "blogosphere" -- has its own directories (like this one), and even its own subculture. There are specialized search engines like Technorati that are updated in real time as new posts are written. Most of all, the blogsphere is populated by lots of readers, and if you have the best real estate blog in town. Many faithful blog readers use aggregators -- special online services or desktop software -- to track several blogs at once. Sure, not everyone falls into this category, but those that do are yours to gain or lose. Some sites like this one will even republish summaries of your content -- and that means even more free links to you! (If you have a blog already and would like to add your blog to this site, click here.

Getting started is fairly easy, and inexpensive. Technorati has a good introduction to what blogging is all about, Blogging 101. You can get a blog started fairly easily at Blogger.com (Free), or Typepad ($4.95 per month and up). If you have an existing web site on an Apache host (ask your web company if unsure), your webmaster may be able to integrate Wordpress into your site. Having a blog be a natural part of your site helps your site build content and get the benefits of all that good writing you'll be doing, but it does require more technical expertise to get started.

Most of all, you'll need to set aside a small amount of time to keep your blog updated. Remember, blogs are like news feeds or diaries, the best ones are up-to-date. A small post every day is a good goal at first to really get the traffic going, but you can cut back to twice a week or less and still be considered fairly current. For ideas, check out other Realtor's® blogs like the ones we link to here. One idea we get a lot of mileage out of are market updates. They're fairly easy to prepare, and they offer a good service with local information. Some blogs that feature market updates fairly heavily are my Sacramento Blog and Gary and Lori Woods' Beautiful Santa Barbara blog.