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I’ve just started (barely) a new section on the site, the Free Real Estate Content pages. Of course, there’s no content there yet. You get what you pay for.

No, no, just kidding. The intent is that over time I’ll be putting some original articles and pages there for general use. The license is the only thing there now, but I’ll be creating pages that Realtors® can use on their web sites. Over time as well I may also get back into the software business, since I have a great web designer who wants to join me to work on real estate sites, so if you don’t have the web site on which to put the content, we may have that covered, too.

As an intermediate step, what would be neat for the free content section (though it would take longer than simply putting up some articles) is to do some real estate forms in conjunction with the content. In other words, lead generators. Those actually aren’t hard to do at all, I just have to work though making sure you don’t get spammed via the form.

Anyway, our free real estate content is already free. Now all it needs to do is grow up to be content.

I wanted to congratulate David Porter for being hailed as a Small Business Communications Pioneer. David’s a good guy and a blog roll partner, and I enjoy his work quite a bit, since I don’t really think anyone’s doing as well as a blogger in the mortgage field. Since I may be getting into the finance end of the business more and more myself once my license upgrade happens, and since I’m an avid blogger now, obviously that’s of interest.

The reason for the “Congratulations … (I think)” in the title is something that lurks in David’s post and that’s been on my mind as well. When he talks about his audience, David mentions that his audience from his own clientele is small, but he’s appealing to a national readership. I wonder if he’s talking about the same sort of sales disconnect that I mention in my You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere post.

I had a serious comment from someone in the internet marketing field that the point of a blog was not to generate traffic or leads, but to become a “thought leader”. Meantime I also heard from a nice young lady writing an article on real estate blogging. She was trying to find someone who used blogs as a lead generation tool, and hadn’t been able to find anyone.

Well, duh.

But then, if it isn’t, what am I doing here?

So don’t get me wrong, David Porter’s still a swell guy, and there’s nothing wrong with being a small business communications pioneer. Heck, I wish someone would hail me as one of those. But if it were my mortgage blog, I know what I’d want. Five or ten more loans.

So we’ll see. One of the things I’ll be trying out on my Sacramento Blog is to pick some topics of interest to some of my traditional “strong buyer” clients. Of course, you can read between the lines of that post, too. If most of my clients are actually from around here, why is my strength in sales so much in relocation? (Actually, I partly know the answer to that — it’s because people here often already have a Realtor® here, whereas relocation clients are “ours to lose”).

I feel like I should run a year end closeout of crazy web ideas from this past year, to make room for all the crazy web ideas I’m having now.

One slated project I hope to implement in 2006 is some free web site content for Realtors®. I’ll have more about that as I do it. This will consist at first of free articles you can download and install on your site, with a small link back to me at the bottom that will “pay” for the article. Over time I may also host some free contact forms, but there’s a bit more software development I’d need to do to make that happen.

We’ll have more about this as it develops.