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There’s been a lot of hype around real estate blogging, and a lot of it is well deserved.  Real estate blogging is a great way to promote yourself online, and it helps both human beings and the search engines come to know you over time.  Do it often enough, consistently enough, and you almost can’t go wrong.

If you read that last sentence carefully, however, you’ll see that therein lies the problem with real estate blogging.  "Often enough".  "Consistently enough".  Real estate blogging needs to be done repeatedly — ideally once per day or more for a new blog especially, day in and day out — to be successful.  That’s a pretty big investment in your own time.  For those of us who are prone to writing addictions, we certainly don’t mind the time invested — that’s what we do. 

For those traditionalists who believe in do-it-yourself content, you may enjoy our series on Twenty-One Easy Posts for your Real Estate Blog.

Who Uses Real Estate Blog Ghostwriters?

For others, there may be good reasons to occasionally or regularly seek the services of a ghostwriter to help in their real estate blogging efforts.  A real estate blog ghost writer may be a viable solution in a number of different cases:

• The real estate top producer looking to have a blog as one marketing piece among many, for whom blogging is a less productive use of time than being in front of clients.
• The brokers or team leader who wishes to use blogging as part of a larger strategy to drive traffic and leads to their web sites, but who prefer an investment of money over an investment of time to get this done.
• Real estate bloggers who want to have more content to use than they can reasonably produce themselves, in order to attract more readers than they could gather alone.
• Real estate agents or brokers who have a number of marketing ideas but who dislike writing or being "chained to their computer."

Weighing the Pros and Cons

The main advantage to using a ghostwriter is that you free up your time for other tasks.  The main disadvantage, of course, is that you’re negating one of the aspects of blogging that made it so cool to begin with:  the ability to create real estate leads through a combination of sweat equity and verbosity. 

Another thing to consider before hiring a ghostwriter is that in the short term, you’ll probably get more "bang-for-the-buck" from a pay-per-click advertising campaign.  Whether you write it yourself or hire someone to write it, the beauty of content is that it will be indexed for a long time, so although it may provide results more slowly and unreliably than a pay per click campaign, the results it does provide are more persistent.

This is the third article in our three-part series with tips and suggestions for making your real estate blogging easier using common writing formulas.

See Items 1-7 in Twenty-One Easy Blog Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part I.

Items 8-14 are in Twenty-One Easy Blog Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part II.

We now conclude with items 15-21. Readers, if there are other formulas that you use to make your writing easier, please share them in the comments section and if we get enough of them we’ll publish a follow-on article based on your input!

15. The Feed Bag / Link Karma / Week In Review Post
    Athol Kay has an occasional post he writes, the Feed Bag, which is just a few links out to articles of interest. Brian Clark at Copyblogger does the same thing, and often under the title “Link Karma”. I have a long winded series that I run here, The Real Estate Internet Marketing Week In Review, which essentially does the same thing with some commentary thrown in.What I’ve found from the Week in Review is that these articles can actually take some time to write if you’re not keeping up on your reading, and the reading and surfing can be somewhat labor intensive. Because of this, I would think twice before making this a regular series, but if your feed reader has a lot of blogs in it you may find it easier to bang these out.A tip from my weekly series: I tag articles I want to remember with the date for that week’s article on my del.icio.us account. To make this easy to do with one click, I’ve installed the del.icio.us browser extension (see the Firefox or Internet Explorer version).
     
16. The Colleague Shout Out
    This is similar to the blog article response piece, but focuses on the individual colleague or perhaps their whole site rather than on a particular blog post or point of view. Maybe they linked to you and you just want to say thank you and do a short write-up linking back to their site. Or maybe they just really have a great search tool for the greater Possum Ridge area, and you wanted to tell the world.
     
17. X Web Sites That Can Help You Y
    For our purposes, X is a number and Y is something that your readers would want to do that’s related to finding, selling, or owning a home. This variation on the How To article could be anything from “Five Fabulous Home Improvement Web Sites” to “Possum Ridge Sheriff’s Office Crime Maps”. Or how about a list of school web sites, or school district web sites. At the national level, sites like CLTA.ORG, where buyers can shop title insurance rates, are a great consumer resource and show you’re looking out for your clients’ bottom line.
     
18. The New Listing Post
    To my way of thinking, this is a no-brainer, at least to people who recognize it to be a no-brainer by virtue of having a brain. (Yes, sorry if that’s a bit controversial and ad hominem). If you have a listing, your seller has hired you to expose it to the world, so flaunt it! Vflyer.com has a free service (with a low-cost ad-free upgrade available) to create beautiful online flyers you can use. Posting your flyers will give you HTML you can copy as is into your blog post. To see some examples of how these look, check see for example the Elite Properties VFlyer site.
     
19. The Best Deal In Possum Gulch
    (…Or Squirrel Peak, or Cougar City, or whatever other town you sometimes work in). This is a formula I’ve wanted to use for some time, but never got around to actually implementing. Meantime an agent in my market area, DeeDee Riley, recently reminded me of this unkept promise to myself by doing an excellent job with this formula on her Realtown Blog. The idea behind this formula is to write about homes that are priced well (check price per square foot in the MLS) and that show well (from your own touring with clients or previewing).A possible limitation of this approach is that you have to be aware of MLS rules about advertising other peoples’ listings if you use this formula, so you may want to talk it over with your broker first. On the other hand, most listing agents would undoubtedly give you permission if you call them.
     
20. The Featured Neighborhood Post
    Featuring neighborhoods (or subdivisions) is a great way to capitalize on so-called “long tail” search results. In other words, by talking about specific neighborhoods, you reach readers who are interested in a very specific area for one reason or another. If you do it consistently, you have an opportunity to position yourself as something of a “neighborhood expert” in that area. Starting from scratch, your MLS can serve as a guide to when the homes were built, what they’re selling for now, price history, inventory, etc., etc. These are easier posts to put together. More ambitious posts could include interviews with residents or the like.
     
21. The List Format
    Like the How To post, this is a general blogging formula so tried and true that it bears mentioning in this contest. How about “Twenty-One Easy Blog Posts for Your Real Estate Blog” — hey, that’s this article! Or think about David Letterman’s famous top 10 list. Can you use this format to write a humorous article of your own, perhaps with some local interest. A How-To article can also be in list format, as can practically anything else you can think of. “Five Great Local Neighborhoods” is a variation on the Featured Neighborhood Post.Of course, any list can be as long as you want it to be, but some of the tried and true numbers that are often used are Three, Seven, Ten, Twenty-One, and 101. Longer and more useful lists can serve as great link bait (oh sorry, was that a hint?), but of course, they’re harder to write.

Find Ways to Use These Groaning Resources

It’s time for the Week In Review, so I’ll publish Part III of Twenty-One Easy Real Estate Blog Posts on Monday. 

This week I found a new tool to help me gather my Week In Review links, Awasu (Gesundheit!).  Awasu is a very slick — if, at times, somewhat buggy — RSS feed reader for Windows.  I’ll probably have an in depth review in a future post. 

Pet peeve time:  People who use "Blog" to mean a single post on a Blog.  These are no doubt the same people who say Real-a-tor.

This week’s Web 2.0 "There Must Be Something We Can Do With All These Web Sites" award goes to John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing for his brief Let’s Get More Social article.  Sometimes I think Social Networks should be the butt of the joke we used to tell in college about sociology — that it’s a subject in search of a subject matter.  As John says, "You’ve got to get in there and find ways to use these growing resources." (Right — because it sure ain’t obvious).

On the other extreme, the winner of this week’s "The Heck With That, I’m Growing My Own Resources" award is Elite Properties’ own Sacramento Real Estate Gal, Purva Brown, who graciously calls me a mentor even though most of her success is just from getting in there and learning and making things happen.  Purva just escaped the Google sandbox yesterday and is now appearing on page 2 of Google for a keyword combination with 725,000 competitors.  Not bad for six months!  Go Purva!

In other Web 2.0 news, Bruce Clay’s web site scared the tar out of me when I glanced at an article Why Social Media.  Bruce is a very renowned SEO expert, so if he’s telling you to yank your YouTube [I can't believe he said that], part time luddites like me are in a heap of trouble.  It turns out the article was by a guest author, so it looks like I dodged a bullet for this week.

New reader and fellow Real Estate Marketing author Tim O’Keefe throws a much needed wet blanket on the often lightless fire of ActiveRain. 

Back in the heady world of experimentation, this week social networking for Realtors super-trailblazers Ashley Drake Gephart and Bill Gassett invited me to a new business social network, Konnect.com.  Social network #1,327, please fix your search engine if you want to be taken seriously before the Internet moves on to the next big thing.

You should be reading this guy, if you’re not already.

Do you need a free ratings widget for your blog?  Chances are good that you don’t.  No link for you, Outbrain.  (Doh!)

Meantime for those of you who are not content with these mere seven-day retrospectives, Tamar Weinberg has prepared a list of 2007’s Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts, hat tip to Andy Beard.  Those of you who feel compelled to take on John Jantsch’s challenge to "find ways to use these growing resources", please work your way through the list and report back.  Hey, come to think of it, Ashley and Bill should be guest authors here…

This is the second article in our three-part series that shows you how to ease your writing load by using some easy to follow formulae for your blogging.

See Items 1-7 in Part One of the Series.

See Items 15-21 in Part Three the Series.

Sometimes you just won’t feel like writing, and sometimes you won’t know what to write. When that happens, you can fall back on these twenty-one simple, tried and true formulas and whip out a post in anywhere from three to thirty minutes.

8. The Bad MLS Photo
   If the real estate market update is my favorite crutch, Athol Kay pioneered the use of bad MLS photos to create articles that take perhaps one tenth the time of a real estate market update. Of course, the down side to less text is less text, and in Athol’s case the bad photos serve to promote his photographic interests (and business). But to the rest of us, as space filler the bad MLS Photo is hard to beat.
    
9. The Local Photo of Interest
   Do you enjoy taking pictures of the local architecture? Or maybe golf courses are your thing, or beautiful local landscapes or parks. An interesting photograph can serve as the centerpiece to an excellent local interest piece, while your title can help you go after a great long tail search result.
    
10. The Mortgage News Update
    If you have a terrific lender who’s willing to put together a series of pieces updating your clients on the latest finance trends, consider yourself fortunate. Good mortgage bloggers are even more rare than good real estate bloggers. But you don’t have to let that stop you. One great source for such a mortgage update piece is Freddie Mac’s weekly Mortgage Market Survey. You could either build a weekly piece based using this survey as a starting point, or just quote the results occasionally.This should go without saying, perhaps, but for this and all the suggestions in this article, always remember to be fair to the copyright holders — quote your sources and stay within fair use guidelines.
     
11. The Reader Contest
    You might try getting your readers involved by offering a prize. It doesn’t have to be expensive, a $5.00 Starbucks gift card or similar token will work. Having your readers “Guess the Comps” on homes will tell other readers a good deal about how Realtors and the public come up with prices. Or you could run a local interest contest (see tip #5, the local shout out), asking for tips for the best local restaurant, park, club, or the like. A variation here is to sponsor a contest for local authors to contribute some local interest articles to your blog. Sponsoring a school essay contest gets us outside the realm of “quick and easy”, but it’s a great way to get your name in front of the community.One thing you need to be careful of before using this approach (or the next one) is to have an awareness of how big your readership is. If you’re sponsoring a community contest, that’s not so much an issue, but if you’re asking your readers to respond to a contest or survey and your blog is brand new, you might find that the results are embarrassingly lukewarm. But if you think you have enough readers to make it work, don’t be afraid to try it. The nice thing about a blog is that your mistakes will scroll down!
     
12. The Reader Survey
    Another way to get readers involved in your blog is to ask them for a response in the form of a survey. You might ask people to respond (without naming names) to tell you how happy (or not) they were with the last Realtor® they used. Or you might your readers to tell you what the most important features of a home are, or what people like best about a given area.You might combine the survey approach with a contest (see last item). Again, you want to be aware of the size of your readership and keep your questions broad enough. Asking people what they like best about their home on Podunk Street on Possum Ridge’s Lower East Side probably narrows things down a bit much.
     
13. The Industry News Update / Response Piece
    We’ve already talked about the local newspaper response piece, where you discuss a local-interest article that either helps your readers or that you respond to critically. The industry news update is essentially the same sort of piece, using a different source. In California, for example, our state Realtor® association publishes monthly updates about real estate industry news, and their legal department now has their own blog that we can subscribe to. Are you mad about the NAR rule that local associations can say that everyone but us can use the term “MLS”? Then tell people how stupid it is. Did outlawing crossbows in listing presentations in your local area take the pressure off of sellers? Then you should endorse that! (I wish the MLS story was made up like the crossbow story — unfortunately that first one’s true).
     
14. The Blog Article Response Piece
    Did someone write something great / interesting / stupid on another blog? If they did, this may be a good opportunity for you to highlight / mention / punish them. Responding in some creative way to another blogger’s work is a time honored and common blogging technique, and it’s also a way to get your blog noticed among your peers. The only thing you want to be careful of is to make sure the original post — or at least, your response to it — is something that’s of interest to your readers. Bloggers sometimes suffer from a fair amount of echolalia, and often the most cited and most popular blogs among Realtors® have little or nothing to say to consumers.

See Also:

Twenty-One Easy Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part I

Twenty-One Easy Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part III

If you’re going to write three to ten blog posts per week, week in and week out, and still spend time showing homes, taking listings, and otherwise serving your real estate customers, it stands to reason that you’re not going to be Shakespeare every day. But don’t worry, the only guy who was Shakespeare every day was Shakespeare, and even he used formulas like reworking older stories and making them his own.

Sometimes you just won’t feel like writing, and sometimes you won’t know what to write. When that happens, you can fall back on these twenty-one simple, tried and true formulas and whip out a post in anywhere from three to thirty minutes. This list gives you both some general-purpose blogging formulas that apply to any blog, as well as some formulas that work especially well for real estate blogs.

This is the first part of a three part series. The rest of the series will be published later in this week and early next week. To be sure you don’t miss any of it, Subscribe Here.

1. The Real Estate Market Update
   I list this one as #1 for the simple reason that this is my personal favorite “article crutch”. Whenever my brain is in low gear, I do one of these. Or often I’ll sit down and do a week’s worth in a day. Start with an Excel Spreadsheet with two columns, one for the month just ended and one for the same month one year previously. List your average sale price, median sale price, average price per square foot, and any other data of interest you want to write about. A third column should have a formula that shows the percent change between the two columns.Save a blank copy with any Excel formulas you need as a template. To do your market update, go into your MLS, and enter the data for a given county or city or subdivision or what have you that you want to write about. Setting up the spreadsheet the first time may take up to a few hours depending on your Excel skill — if you need samples let me know. However, once you’re set up, you can research and write a post in about twenty to thirty minutes or so.
2. The Long Term Market Report Post
   There are many variations on the market update that compares year-to-year performance based on one-month snapshots one year apart. With some creativity and Excel you can create charts covering a whole year or more for whatever statistics you want to report on. Another variation is to simply enter a bigger set of data than a month for your snapshots. Sometimes you almost have to do this, especially if you’re reporting on a small sample of data.
3. The Newspaper Article Response Piece
   Did you see something in the newspaper that would help your readers? How about something that told them the real estate sky is falling, which got you madder than heck? Don’t hold it all in. A link to the online version of a local real estate article can be an easy springboard to a response piece. The articles of this sort that I’ve done seem to have been great comment generators.
4. The Client Shout Out
   Did someone close escrow recently on a great bargain home that you helped them get? Sure they did! How about a short piece congratulating them and talking about the process or the problem you helped them solve. Be sure to get your client’s permission for this one, and be sensitive to privacy issues (they may not want their last names or address used, for example). Photos of happy buyers in front of the home never hurt if you can get permission to use them.
5. The Local Shout Out
   Did your hair dresser make you look like a superstar recently? Or how about a restaurant you visited that gave you great service. Everyone loves to have their work appreciated, and people often will Google themselves or their businesses. Wouldn’t it be nice if they found you talking them up when they did? You might also use this type of piece to get your readership involved, by asking people to talk about local businesses that have done a really great job for them.
6. The Consumer Watch Dog Piece
   The flip side of the local shout, which identifies a purveyor of excellent service by name, is the anonymous consumer watch dog piece. You could write about mortgage fraud, or high mortgage costs, or “buying the listing”, “Listing Agent Scams to Avoid”, or any other practice or list of practices that is illegal, harmful, or disreputable. For this type of piece you generally don’t want to name individuals or businesses by name, but you do want to point out the trap that you’re hoping your client will avoid. Of course the implication (sometimes not so thinly-veiled) of these pieces is that the best way to avoid these sleazy operators is to pick a great agent like you who contains neither asbestos nor transfat.The down side of consumer watch dog articles is that their focus is on the negative side of things. As such, I wouldn’t rely on them too heavily, but they work well as an occasional piece.
7. How To (Do Something Something)
   I must admit that I sometimes find the real estate uses of this formula to be a bit hackneyed, so I wouldn’t rely on it too heavily, but it still works in a pinch. There are probably more articles online at this very moment about how to get your home ready to sell than there are atoms in the ocean — well, OK, maybe there aren’t that many. But what the heck, there’s room, write another one. Better yet, write one that somehow highlights what you bring to the table. Maybe you offer a staging credit, or maybe you’re good at staging a home yourself. If so, work that in.Another hackneyed use of this format is “How to Choose a Realtor®”. Such articles usually tend to tell people how to pick the author as the Realtor® — “It’s important when choosing a Realtor® to pick someone named John who’s more than six feet tall and drives a Honda”. Better: tell people to check references, and then link to a page where they can request YOUR references.Still, consumer watchdog style pieces fit the how to format nicely, e.g., “How to Avoid Getting Ripped Off at the Closing Table”, and the “X Web Sites That Can Help You Y” format is basically a How To variation. Specific variations on this formula can make for an original and interesting article. “How to Calculate the Total Cost of Ownership on a Condo”. Hey, that’s a good one. I think I’ll go write that one.

See Also:

Twenty-One Easy Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part II

Twenty-One Easy Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part III

When I first got into Real Estate, I came from a background in software development (including, most recently, web site development). Because of this background, as soon as I learned that people were meeting real estate clients on-line, it became my goal to create a profitable web site. Soon afterwards, I set out to create and maintain several profitable web sites.

When I first heard about blogging in 2003, I thought of blogging software as a way to do help me do just that. They say if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see everything as a nail. In my case I saw my task as content development, so every type of software I looked to me like a content management system.

With the rise of social networking, I began noticing a shift away from creating your own content on your own site to hanging around with your friends. In the last year or so, I’ve been repeatedly surprised by the extent to which people — including my colleagues, other Realtors® — are content to rent instead of own their online properties. This was driven home today by an outstanding article by CopyBlogger’s Brian Clark, Are You Someone’s User Generated Content? Clark points to many articles by leading bloggers discussing the regrets people have felt when they neglected their own Internet properties — their blogs — to explore social networking.

Clark sums up my own feelings about frittering one’s time on Facebook, (or mismanaging it on MySpace, if you prefer):

For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating “user-generated” content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.

This metaphor should be especially apt to Realtors®, who know first hand the benefits our clients can derive from their own sweat equity.

Is your sweat equity being invested in your own online real estate, or are you remodeling someone else’s kitchen for free?

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