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Posted by John Lockwood on January 7th, 2008

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.