In Part 1 of this series on real estate blogging platforms, we discussed social networks like ActiveRain. In part 2 we take on another low cost alternative, the standalone blog.

The Stand Alone Blog

Companies such as Blogger.com allow you to set up and run a free blog. If you want, you can purchase a domain name and point it to your blogger account. I recently helped Purva Brown do this with her Sacramento Real Estate Gal site.

On the plus side, with a free blog, and a domain from Godaddy.com or another low cost Internet domain registrar, you can have a blog up and running for less than $10 per year. Just add the sweat equity of an hour or more of writing every day, and if you pick your keywords and topics wisely, you’re in business!

Also on the plus side, if the social networking sites buried your content under layers of clicks (e.g. State -> County -> City), the stand alone blog puts all your content right there on the home page. This is a very good solution in terms of Search Engine Optimization, especially if you take care to optimize the “front matter” that appears above your posts.

On the minus side, I believe that the big down side to the standalone blog approach for Realtors® is the is the problem of how big your audience is. A lot of (electronic) ink is spilled on the virtue of establishing yourself as an expert and gaining a following in blogging, but the fact remains that the blogs with the biggest audiences in real estate are not about their local areas, but are really blogs about blogging, or blogs about real estate trends or technology in general.

At the national level, It’s great to have a readership of 4000 or so out of hundreds of millions of Americans. But if your focus is local, your local area blog will do the most good when integrated into an IDX solution where your users can search for real estate listings. Otherwise you’re developing content that may attract a search engine, without the “killer offer” of homes for sale.

In Part 3 of the series, we’ll address this problem when we take a look at the third (and, we believe, the best) option for a blogging platform — combining your blog and web site into one site.

One other possibility that we should mention in passing is creating “a standalone blog”, but setting it up on what will later be a full fledged web site. Though it may seem counterintuitive to put a blog in a “subdirectory” when there’s not much going on in the main directory, the advantages to this approach are the ability to begin to get content indexed and to establish reputation with the search engines. (The well known “Google sandbox” effect is used to describe the fact that Google does not rank new sites very well). Though somewhat more expensive than creating a free standalone blog and later moving it to a web site, this approach ensures that all the links to your content will remain in place once you move.