You need a blog to get ahead in real estate marketing

At least, that’s what all the would-be marketing gurus tell you. And it is true - Sometimes.

What they invariably forget to tell you is the fact that making a blog successful and having a blog are two entirely different things. I am not going to repeat all the things every one else has already said about blogging, other than to say it is a lot harder than you think.

It is estimated that 98% of blogs fail, and the Kevin Costner adage, “If you build it they will come,” only applies to baseball fields in the middle of nowhere. Certainly not to real estate blogs in a sea of real estate blogs.

So, if you are thinking about setting up a realtor blog, or have set one up and are thinking, “OK, now what do I do?” Here are a few useful insights, opinions and options. In true blogging style, these are other people’s opinions, but absolutely worth reading.

Terry Heath asks - Where have all the bloggers gone?

Everything might be going along fine, then one morning you wake up and just don’t want to do it anymore. The same blog which used to be your pride and joy, where you watched its statistics improve like an over-protective mother, now feels like just another nagging chore. You would delete the whole thing if you hadn’t invested so much time already. Nobody told you it would be like this.

Mark Eckenrode over at homestomper lists 5 reasons you should have a real estate blog. Although, like many suggesting this, whilst his reasons are good, he carefully neglects to mention the amount of work involved.

You may or may not know what a blog is but by the time you finish reading this article, you’re going to want one.

Seth Godin thinks you should have a blog even if you only have one post in you. I actually thought I was going to disagree with something he said, but he qualifies this statement, and if you want to know how, you will have to pay him a visit.

A lot of people have blogs. But most people don’t.

I think you should. Even if you only have one post in you.

I myself, have even left a few blogs to languish in the blogosphere and bloggingtips will tell you some of the reasons Why Blogs Die.

Technorati’s State of the blogosphere report last year stated they were tracking 70 million weblogs and were seeing 120,000 new blogs being created every day. Whichever way you look at it, that’s an awful lot of blogs. An interesting snippet was also a new word in my vocabulary, a splog. A splog is a spam blog and Technorati claim to have purged 341,000 splogs from their system

Joel Burslem over at the future of real estate marketing wrote a useful piece on Curbed and the future of real estate blogging.

Lockhart Steele is up on stage to keynote Bloggers Connect. He’s a great choice, being one of the most successful consumer-focused real estate bloggers on the web. Curbed is an example of what a dedicated group of good writers can do with a real estate blog.

Assuming you have now decided you want a blog. Or even that you must have a blog to get ahead in real estate marketing, what are your options? These are just a few and by no means a complete list. But I have experience with all these platforms and ways of blogging. I have left out the more technical ways of doing it, i.e, setting up and hosting a website yourself. These are the basics.

1. A free WordPress blog. Easy to set up, easy to manage, loads of limitations, but you are not going to shoot yourself if it fails and you decide to delete it. This blog is built on a self-hosted WordPress platform - slightly different, much more customizable and I would shoot myself if I had to delete it. About.com has a “blogging guru,” who can show you just how easy it is to set up and make a blog work, but I refuse to add a link to his post, because it is just about the worst friggin’ advice I have ever seen on making a blog successful. I can only imagine this guy has never, ever set up and run a money-making blog - ever. About.com suck as a resource as far as I am concerned and I will never link to them.
   
2. A free google blogger blog. Very similar to WordPress, but no self-hosted option. If you set one of these up and then decide to upgrade to a self-hosted version, that means learning to use a whole new setup.
3. A free Yahoo 360 blog. Once again, similar to both blogger and wordpress. A little more complicated and heavily populated by sploggers. When I have found content stolen from me, it is often here that I find it. I personally find their interface a little less intuitive than either of the previous two.
4. A free Active Rain blog. This is an interesting option for real estate agents. Quite a simple interface, reasonably easy to use, but you are surrounded by hundreds of other real estate blogs. There is nothing other than real estate blogs here. That can be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on your needs. Personally, I think this option is a waste of time, unless you have several other blogs and want to link them together, or wish to spend a lot of time interacting with other real estate agents. If either of these is the case, they are worth a look.
5. Guest write on some one else’s blog. This is an attractive option if you want to get your voice out there and develop a reputation, but either don’t have the time, or the skill set to promote a blog. However you cut it, promoting a blog takes time and effort, which may be better spent in other directions.
6. Set up a blog and pay some one else to write it and promote it for you. Pro-bloggers don’t come cheap though If you think just paying a stay-at-home Mom two dollars a post will do it, think again. Good places to find bloggers worth having are few and far between, but Deb at Freelance Writing Jobs is a good place to start.

There are any number of alternatives, but I will deal with the more complex variations in another post. And if you are wondering why MySpace is not on this list, pay a visit to a typical MySpace user.