This has been a busy week.  I was very gratified to get Dave Smith to come by and take part in our new series, What’s Your Internet Marketing Strategy, and Dave was a big enough draw that subscriptions went up quite a bit after his article.  I’ve started making inquiries of some exciting new authors.  If you have people you’d like to see, drop me a comment.

Over on Sacramento-Home.com, I had to play fix-the-code-that-Metrolist-broke after our local MLS changed its database structure.  I’ve been able to put together quite a few interesting web site features using a combination of MLS exports, a MySQL database, and some PHP programming.  The neat thing about such work is that you can offer your users some really custom content and search options, and I’ve found this goes over really well.  In spite of all the hype about blogging, home shoppers aren’t looking for a pundit — they’re looking for a house.  The down side is that every year or so you need to spend a day or two fixing code, but for the benefit, it’s certainly worth the time.

Everyone is hanging around on Twitter this week.  A few weeks ago everyone was hanging out on FaceBook.  As social networks go, you have to like Twitter, because once you’ve set up TwitterFeed to blab at your friends for you, you don’t actually have to spend any time blabbing at them yourself.  Well, there I go being a Luddite again.  If you want to try your hand at using Twitter to promote your blog, check out Chris Brogan’s guest post on ProBlogger.  That’s much better.  I’ll have to do resource post on Chris over at Inklit — he’s got some great stuff going on over there.

New Social Network alert.   Come play over at FriendFeed.

Many of our readers will recognize Dave Smith as the author of The Real Estate Blog Lab, a very popular blog about Dave’s experiments with using Wordpress. Dave also runs several blogs for his wife, Barbara Lasky, including the Tucson AZ Real Estate Blog and Tucson Real Estate In the News. Tucson Real Estate In the News has propelled BarbarLasky.com into a first page position on Google, while his other blog ranks equally well on MSN. Answering my call for guest authors to write about their Internet Marketing Strategy, Dave emailed me details on his real estate business. These included some production statistics that Dave later asked me to delete; I hope Dave will forgive me if I let you in on the secret that they were excellent.

Dave writes:

About 85% of our business for 2007 came from our Internet marketing. This is what I’m in charge of doing (you probably already had that one figured out).

2007 was our best year yet. Barbara has been in the business full time now for six years. I’m a newbie at just over two years, but was the database administrator for Long Realty Co. with more than 1500 agents in fifteen offices. They have expanded since I left.

I don’t know how many prospect/clients we are working with currently. I know it is quite a few. We have two sources of business.

1. Past clients and referrals from them.
2. The Internet marketing.

We have done more referrals this year than ever before. We have two commercial deals closing this month with a 20% referral which will be somewhere around $2.3 million between the two of them. These came from Internet leads from our blogs.

We do almost no print advertising except on our Sunday insert a few times a year. No magazine or other media. No mailings, nothing else except a small drip campaign: once a month a post card goes out with a tip of some kind from Barbara’s sharper agent account.

More Guest Authors Wanted

Do you have experience marketing your real estate business online? Has your web site rescued your business from the gloom of oblivion? If so, our readers want to hear your voice as part of our ongoing series, “What’s Your Real Estate Internet Marketing Strategy?” Please contact John Lockwood if you’re interested.

Related Posts:

What’s Your Internet Marketing Strategy: Author’s Guide

Well, you can sure give it a try!

I’ve been having great fun working on my 101 Subscribers in 30 Days promotion on my new Inklit Writing Blog.

A lot of people have stopped by and have helped me out tremendously as I work on the program.  Wasilla Realtor®, Marty Van Diest came by and lit a fire under me that I know needed lighting, to allow email subscribers as well as RSS subscribers.

In a matter not so much related to getting 101 new subscribers in 30 days as it is to overall gratitude, Authentic Real Estate Engagement expert, Dustin Luther, stopped by a couple of weeks ago to help me out on another issue that I needed some help with.  I appreciated his visit and the support.  You should check out Dustin’s blog if you’re a real estate agent / broker interested in taking full advantage of Web 2.0.

Win a Six Month Ad on a New Blog

I realize you’d rather have a six month ad on Problogger, but I didn’t write that one!  Those of you who like contests and who don’t mind taking a bit of a risk (your time only, not your gold) on a brand new venture may want to try pitching in to see if you can win a 6-month or 2-year ad at InkLit.com. 

Here are the Rules for the Ad Contest.

Santa Clarita Real Estate Blogger, Linda Slocum, went above and beyond the call first by being the only commenter on this cleverly re-titled post.

Following up on this, she promoted the contest for me on FaceBook.  I’m hoping to do well there.  People with their face in a book are a natural for a writing blog!

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.

Occasional Internet real estate marketing blogger, John Lockwood, who had been missing from his blog for several weeks, was found today at his keyboard.  Doctors commented that for someone suffering from exposure, he looked surprisingly well fed.

The rescue team that was sent out to find Lockwood had little comment on the discovery.  Rescue dog handler, Norbert Dimwhistle, had this to say about his dogs’ discovery:  "I don’t know.  Usually when the dogs sniff someone out, they get all excited and bark their heads off.  With Lockwood they just curled up nearby and went to sleep.  I don’t think he’s all that exciting."

Hi There, John Lockwood Here

Well, it looks like "The Onion" won’t be hiring any new writers soon.

January and February were somewhat busy months in real estate, with me working with several buyers of my own — sometimes productively and sometimes not.  So part of the answer to the question of where I’ve been has been that I’ve been selling a house and driving around a lot.

As soon as things wound down a bit at the end of February, naturally I couldn’t just show up here and work on business interest #2.  No, dumb time-management school dropout that I am, at that point I had to stick another iron in the fire, a brand new blog about writing, Inklit.com.

Oh yes, and I almost forgot:  while I was missing I also invented the Real Estate Johnosphere.

As Warren Buffet remarked famously:  Diversification is for the ignorant.  I plead guilty.

Now you know why he’s a billionaire and I put search and rescue dogs to sleep.