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Find Ways to Use These Groaning Resources

It’s time for the Week In Review, so I’ll publish Part III of Twenty-One Easy Real Estate Blog Posts on Monday. 

This week I found a new tool to help me gather my Week In Review links, Awasu (Gesundheit!).  Awasu is a very slick — if, at times, somewhat buggy — RSS feed reader for Windows.  I’ll probably have an in depth review in a future post. 

Pet peeve time:  People who use "Blog" to mean a single post on a Blog.  These are no doubt the same people who say Real-a-tor.

This week’s Web 2.0 "There Must Be Something We Can Do With All These Web Sites" award goes to John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing for his brief Let’s Get More Social article.  Sometimes I think Social Networks should be the butt of the joke we used to tell in college about sociology — that it’s a subject in search of a subject matter.  As John says, "You’ve got to get in there and find ways to use these growing resources." (Right — because it sure ain’t obvious).

On the other extreme, the winner of this week’s "The Heck With That, I’m Growing My Own Resources" award is Elite Properties’ own Sacramento Real Estate Gal, Purva Brown, who graciously calls me a mentor even though most of her success is just from getting in there and learning and making things happen.  Purva just escaped the Google sandbox yesterday and is now appearing on page 2 of Google for a keyword combination with 725,000 competitors.  Not bad for six months!  Go Purva!

In other Web 2.0 news, Bruce Clay’s web site scared the tar out of me when I glanced at an article Why Social Media.  Bruce is a very renowned SEO expert, so if he’s telling you to yank your YouTube [I can't believe he said that], part time luddites like me are in a heap of trouble.  It turns out the article was by a guest author, so it looks like I dodged a bullet for this week.

New reader and fellow Real Estate Marketing author Tim O’Keefe throws a much needed wet blanket on the often lightless fire of ActiveRain. 

Back in the heady world of experimentation, this week social networking for Realtors super-trailblazers Ashley Drake Gephart and Bill Gassett invited me to a new business social network, Konnect.com.  Social network #1,327, please fix your search engine if you want to be taken seriously before the Internet moves on to the next big thing.

You should be reading this guy, if you’re not already.

Do you need a free ratings widget for your blog?  Chances are good that you don’t.  No link for you, Outbrain.  (Doh!)

Meantime for those of you who are not content with these mere seven-day retrospectives, Tamar Weinberg has prepared a list of 2007’s Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts, hat tip to Andy Beard.  Those of you who feel compelled to take on John Jantsch’s challenge to "find ways to use these growing resources", please work your way through the list and report back.  Hey, come to think of it, Ashley and Bill should be guest authors here…

With so many ways to get started in real estate blogging, which one should you choose? Should you have a standalone blog, or a web site and blog integrated together (sometimes called a “blogsite”), or should you simply start blogging at one of the many free sites that offer you the opportunity to start blogging with zero investment of money and very little learning curve?

In this article we’ll go into the pros and cons of the various choices. Fair warning: I’m a big fan and vendor of the integrated blog + web site approach, so there’s likely to be some bias in that direction. That said, I’ll try to be fair to the other approaches.

Part 1 of this article deals with social networking sites. In Parts 2 and 3 we’ll discuss standalone blogs and blogs integrated into your main web site.

Social Networking Sites

In 2006 and 2007, a number of companies began offering blogs to Realtors®. Most famously, ActiveRain provided a real estate community that was free and easy to use. ActiveRain also provided a strong social network with a good sense of community. Other attempts to capitalize on the popularity of the real estate blog soon followed. Real estate web site vendor RealEstateWebmasters.com began offering free real estate blogs, and soon after, even Realtor.com figured it out and started offering blogs as well.

In the Fall of 2007, many of the members of ActiveRain were somewhat chagrined to learn that their beloved real estate social network had been the subject of a failed sale to Move.com, the parent company of Realtor.com. The management at ActiveRain were quick to do damage control with a post claiming that ActiveRain members own their own content.

To me, there are some far bigger question than who owns the content, however.

The first is, who owns the offer where the content is placed? If I write for ActiveRain, I get a free service and that’s great, but what we’re selling on every page is not something that’s going to lead a visitor to use me — what we’re selling on every page are products and services aimed at Realtors®.

A second important question about where your content goes on a social networking site is this: who is the content aimed at? First and foremost, ActiveRain is a social network. The content there is a discussion among Realtors®. To be sure, ActiveRain later launched Localism.com as a site geared to real estate consumers, but localism.com has yet to make important inroads for the more major keywords. Even on relatively easier keywords, I have perused the Google search results several pages in in vain to find much in the way of an impact of localism.com. (Indeed, you have to go back a few pages to find much impact from ActiveRain.com, for that matter).

Finally, there is the question of where on your site your content appears. To be sure, on a huge aggregate site like ActiveRain, you get the benefit of hosting your content on a site that has a lot of “authority” (sometimes colorfully called “Google Juice”). For really “long tail” (obscure) niche keywords and titles, this is a good thing, but anything more obvious is buried several clicks away from the main page, and has to compete in the search results with sites that are competing for the same keywords from the home page or a click away from home.

ActiveRain gets extremely high points for user-friendliness and ease of use. In terms of impact on your bottom line business, however, I believe that owning both the content of your blog and the offers it promotes will lead you to a much higher conversion rate.

In Part 2 of this article, we’ll talk about another low cost or no cost real estate blogging solution, the stand alone blog. Then in Part 3 we’ll talk about having a blog as a fully integrated feature of your real estate web site.

Part 2 — Stand alone real estate blogs

Part 3 — Integrated  Web Site with Blog