Posted by John Lockwood on January 3rd, 2008

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