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