I’ve been upgrading some of my blogs to WordPress 2.5, and the results have not been pretty.  The mistakes I’ve been making along the way are pretty amateurish ones, but I’m professional enough to make my amateurish mistakes first on low priority blogs of my own rather than on one of my important blogs or on a client’s blog.

Mainly what I’ve been bumping into is deleting my backups prematurely.  Don’t do that.  Backup everything, and keep everything for a week until you find out what the upgrade broke.  That way you’ll keep your old “wp-content” directory, and the “upload” directory off of that, which (unless you changed the setting for this) contains all the images that Windows Live Writer uploaded automatically for you over the course of the months, ever since you went through my Windows Live Writer tutorial video — for example.  (Ironically, the image link to that tutorial was one of the images I lost, so I just had to re-create it.  Live by the sword, die by the sword, etc.).

So if you’re going to do an upgrade, I recommend you start by reading Lorelle van Fossen’s Upgrade Preparation Checklist.  And then where Lorelle says Backup Everything, you might substitute: “Backup everything, and then don’t be an idiot and delete it right away once things are up and running — do extensive testing over several weeks and then delete the backups.”

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.

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.

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

If you’re going to write three to ten blog posts per week, week in and week out, and still spend time showing homes, taking listings, and otherwise serving your real estate customers, it stands to reason that you’re not going to be Shakespeare every day. But don’t worry, the only guy who was Shakespeare every day was Shakespeare, and even he used formulas like reworking older stories and making them his own.

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. This list gives you both some general-purpose blogging formulas that apply to any blog, as well as some formulas that work especially well for real estate blogs.

This is the first part of a three part series. The rest of the series will be published later in this week and early next week. To be sure you don’t miss any of it, Subscribe Here.

1. The Real Estate Market Update
   I list this one as #1 for the simple reason that this is my personal favorite “article crutch”. Whenever my brain is in low gear, I do one of these. Or often I’ll sit down and do a week’s worth in a day. Start with an Excel Spreadsheet with two columns, one for the month just ended and one for the same month one year previously. List your average sale price, median sale price, average price per square foot, and any other data of interest you want to write about. A third column should have a formula that shows the percent change between the two columns.Save a blank copy with any Excel formulas you need as a template. To do your market update, go into your MLS, and enter the data for a given county or city or subdivision or what have you that you want to write about. Setting up the spreadsheet the first time may take up to a few hours depending on your Excel skill — if you need samples let me know. However, once you’re set up, you can research and write a post in about twenty to thirty minutes or so.
2. The Long Term Market Report Post
   There are many variations on the market update that compares year-to-year performance based on one-month snapshots one year apart. With some creativity and Excel you can create charts covering a whole year or more for whatever statistics you want to report on. Another variation is to simply enter a bigger set of data than a month for your snapshots. Sometimes you almost have to do this, especially if you’re reporting on a small sample of data.
3. The Newspaper Article Response Piece
   Did you see something in the newspaper that would help your readers? How about something that told them the real estate sky is falling, which got you madder than heck? Don’t hold it all in. A link to the online version of a local real estate article can be an easy springboard to a response piece. The articles of this sort that I’ve done seem to have been great comment generators.
4. The Client Shout Out
   Did someone close escrow recently on a great bargain home that you helped them get? Sure they did! How about a short piece congratulating them and talking about the process or the problem you helped them solve. Be sure to get your client’s permission for this one, and be sensitive to privacy issues (they may not want their last names or address used, for example). Photos of happy buyers in front of the home never hurt if you can get permission to use them.
5. The Local Shout Out
   Did your hair dresser make you look like a superstar recently? Or how about a restaurant you visited that gave you great service. Everyone loves to have their work appreciated, and people often will Google themselves or their businesses. Wouldn’t it be nice if they found you talking them up when they did? You might also use this type of piece to get your readership involved, by asking people to talk about local businesses that have done a really great job for them.
6. The Consumer Watch Dog Piece
   The flip side of the local shout, which identifies a purveyor of excellent service by name, is the anonymous consumer watch dog piece. You could write about mortgage fraud, or high mortgage costs, or “buying the listing”, “Listing Agent Scams to Avoid”, or any other practice or list of practices that is illegal, harmful, or disreputable. For this type of piece you generally don’t want to name individuals or businesses by name, but you do want to point out the trap that you’re hoping your client will avoid. Of course the implication (sometimes not so thinly-veiled) of these pieces is that the best way to avoid these sleazy operators is to pick a great agent like you who contains neither asbestos nor transfat.The down side of consumer watch dog articles is that their focus is on the negative side of things. As such, I wouldn’t rely on them too heavily, but they work well as an occasional piece.
7. How To (Do Something Something)
   I must admit that I sometimes find the real estate uses of this formula to be a bit hackneyed, so I wouldn’t rely on it too heavily, but it still works in a pinch. There are probably more articles online at this very moment about how to get your home ready to sell than there are atoms in the ocean — well, OK, maybe there aren’t that many. But what the heck, there’s room, write another one. Better yet, write one that somehow highlights what you bring to the table. Maybe you offer a staging credit, or maybe you’re good at staging a home yourself. If so, work that in.Another hackneyed use of this format is “How to Choose a Realtor®”. Such articles usually tend to tell people how to pick the author as the Realtor® — “It’s important when choosing a Realtor® to pick someone named John who’s more than six feet tall and drives a Honda”. Better: tell people to check references, and then link to a page where they can request YOUR references.Still, consumer watchdog style pieces fit the how to format nicely, e.g., “How to Avoid Getting Ripped Off at the Closing Table”, and the “X Web Sites That Can Help You Y” format is basically a How To variation. Specific variations on this formula can make for an original and interesting article. “How to Calculate the Total Cost of Ownership on a Condo”. Hey, that’s a good one. I think I’ll go write that one.

See Also:

Twenty-One Easy Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part II

Twenty-One Easy Posts for Your Real Estate Blog, Part III

Here is a tutorial about getting started with Windows Live Writer. It takes you through the process of downloading and installing the software and configuring it for your Wordpress Blog. Enjoy!

Peter Thompson, author of Illinois Mortgage Rates and News, was kind enough to write testimonial below and send it along over the weekend. Wow, this is really nice. I appreciate you putting this together, Pete. It was a pleasure working with you!

If you are even thinking about starting your own blog site, you need to talk with John Lockwood. John helped me with my blog, Illinois Mortgage Rates and News. When I started blogging on Active Rain a couple of months back, I felt I was really on to something. I was new to blogging, but I knew the mortgage market and writing was both a hobby and a compulsion. This seemed like the right fit.

One of the best things about Active Rain is that it is a great resource for information about anything related to real estate, including real estate marketing. I knew nothing about blogging or search engine optimization but I found several experts in the community and read everything I could find to get me up to speed on the ways to make my blog a success. The posts on John’s blog, Elite Properties Sacramento were a real help and he was one of my first subscriptions.

As I learned more, it seemed that starting my own stand-alone blog was the best way to gain an audience and increase my exposure in my target market. I made a couple of calls to experts I found on Active Rain. One of the calls was to a leading name in the industry. A representative called back and we had a nice conversation. He emphasized how their company trained bloggers by teaching them to blog from the ground up with a several month long course with a set lesson plan. It sounded interesting, but my impression was that they had a one size fits all program, and I wasn’t sure it fit my needs. My other concern was the price. He quoted a number high enough to make me gasp.

As luck would have it, I came across a post on Active Rain from a Realtor who was thinking of starting her own blog but had no clue on how to start. In the comments section, John said that he was expanding his business into this area. I knew John from reading his blog and I respected his expertise, so I decided to give him a call. We hit it off and I knew right away that he was the right choice.

My first goal was to get the blog site set up and running, but he offered much more. By researching key words he was able to give me some targets where I had a chance to dominate in my competitive market. He listened to my goals and helped me to devise a strategy for long term success. We talked about ways to promote my blog and build traffic as well as what I needed to do to get ranked higher with the search engines. It was a lot of information, but it was focused on my specific needs.

John had the technical knowledge to make the most of setting up the site. He helped me pick a Wordpress template that was easy to use and easy to read. He customized the template with my personal info, added widgets, set up contact boxes and a navigation bar that integrated my blog with my web site and optimized the site for search engine traffic. The site looks great, better than I imagined.

John got me off to a great start. Long term success is up to me, but I don’t know where I would be if I tried to do this on my own. If you are even thinking of starting a new blog you really should give him a call.

When I first got into Real Estate, I came from a background in software development (including, most recently, web site development). Because of this background, as soon as I learned that people were meeting real estate clients on-line, it became my goal to create a profitable web site. Soon afterwards, I set out to create and maintain several profitable web sites.

When I first heard about blogging in 2003, I thought of blogging software as a way to do help me do just that. They say if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see everything as a nail. In my case I saw my task as content development, so every type of software I looked to me like a content management system.

With the rise of social networking, I began noticing a shift away from creating your own content on your own site to hanging around with your friends. In the last year or so, I’ve been repeatedly surprised by the extent to which people — including my colleagues, other Realtors® — are content to rent instead of own their online properties. This was driven home today by an outstanding article by CopyBlogger’s Brian Clark, Are You Someone’s User Generated Content? Clark points to many articles by leading bloggers discussing the regrets people have felt when they neglected their own Internet properties — their blogs — to explore social networking.

Clark sums up my own feelings about frittering one’s time on Facebook, (or mismanaging it on MySpace, if you prefer):

For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating “user-generated” content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.

This metaphor should be especially apt to Realtors®, who know first hand the benefits our clients can derive from their own sweat equity.

Is your sweat equity being invested in your own online real estate, or are you remodeling someone else’s kitchen for free?

RELATED ARTICLES

Real Estate Social Networks, Their Lure and Limitations

Comparing Real Estate Blogging Platforms

I don’t usually like blogs with a lot of Adsense ads staring you in the face.  However, I did enjoy Brandon Cornett’s article on How to Write a Real Estate Ad - Magazine Ad Writing 101.  Too often we speak in generalities like “excellent customer service”, and Brandon talks about how to get down to specific real estate stories of interest and calls to action. 

Brandon’s example of an online real estate forum is an interesting idea and might be useful as a lead incubation strategy.  One reason I’ve never launched such a forum myself, however, is the issue of size.  I wonder if one can run a successful forum when the number of people buying or selling a home is fairly small.  Even in a great month in my area, for example, there are only a couple of thousand homes changing hands.  I guess on the one hand you don’t care how many people are there, as long as some of them turn into customers, but to me the most interesting forums are the ones with lots of members.

Speaking of interesting forums, RealEstateWebmasters.com just announced a fairly major upgrade to their free real estate blogs.  Real Estate Webmasters blogs provide an excellent opportunity to showcase your content, and they have very good search engine authority as well so you might link back to your other site from your Real Estate Webmaster blog.  Don’t overdo it, though — remember the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

At the same time, ActiveRain recently announced a sneak preview of their new outside blogs.  I’m sure they’ll sell a lot of them if they price them right, because they have the ideal audience for such an upsell, but I do admit I take issue with two items on their feature list.  First is the idea of not learning a new blogging platform.  Well, that’d be ok if their platform was the superior one, but I imagine I might get Pete Thompson to vouch for how much easier the Livewriter / Wordpress combination is to use, and the latest (finally not beta) version of Live Writer makes it really easy to set up for your Wordpress blog. 

Secondly, the outside blog announcement said, “You will be able to benefit from the SEO knowledge and power of ActiveRain.”   The myth of ActiveRain’s SEO mojo is an oft-repeated one — Mike Jones boasts that “Active Rain works (brings Google to your door) regardless of your ability to write or your desire to blog”.  Wow, that’s not only incredible, it’s not credible.   Mike cites his Tucson area colleagues, including Marsee Wilhems, “one of Tucson’s most successful REALTORS”.  OK, I’ll bite, let’s see where the first ActiveRain blog is for the key words “Tucson real estate”, shall we?  I tried “Tucson Real Estate” on Google, and got to page 10 without finding ActiveRain anywhere.  (And yes, I tried “localism”, too.  If any true believers wants to begin the hunt for ActiveRain results starting at page 11, let me know).  I’m sure Marsee Williams is successful, but I suspect her success is minimally related to ActiveRain’s content-free Google fairy dust.

There is no silver bullet, folks, sorry.  The alternatives are:  open wallet, pay Google or Yahoo, or massive content published over a long period of time combined with sensible link building.

And that’s the week in review.  Have a great weekend.

On a business level, I’m so passionate about Internet marketing because it works so well. But underneath it all, what really drives me is that I get such a boyish geek kick out of watching new web sites start to take off and start to be able to make their owners money.

So naturally it gives me great pleasure to see how successful Pete Thompson’s Illinois Mortgage Rates and News is in after only a short time. We’ve been having a phone conference every other day or so to get his new blog established, and it’s really fun to see the creativity and humor he brings to bear. For example, in a recent post, Pete dispelled the myth that mortgage brokers have packed it in and no one’s getting loans any more. (This point is less obvious than it appears. Listening to some of my clients, I’m beginning to think that tales of people not qualifying for loans have taken on the status of urban legends!)

Pete’s already had a few people stop by and comment, and he’s indexed by some of the more important blog search engines and social networking services, and Google’s started picking up his content as well.

What really gets me excited as well is that he’s well on his way (we’ll do a few more tweaks over the next few days), and he was able to accomplish this for about 1/6th the cost of one of my competitors. So in the first year, he’ll save some $2,800 for the same results, and he’ll continue to save year after year on his web hosting bill.