Should You Start a Real Estate Blog?

According to the blog tracking site Technorati, everyday an estimated 1750,000 blogs go online. That’s almost 2 blogs created every second of every day.

The question is: should you jump on the bandwagon?

Peter Alexander at Entrepreneur.com things you should…if for no other reason than to take advantage of an effective marketing tool. Peter points out that in a recent survey  by research firm MarketingSherpa, blogs were voted the No. 4 tool for generating sales leads.

So, starting a blog doesn’t sound like a bad idea, does it? Okay, well, what exactly should you blog about?

The Technology Evangelist recommends “real estate agents should blog about things like market reports, updates on local developments, real estate finance and opinions on other local real estate news.”

But it’s got to be stuff that would set you apart from other agents in your market. Then the leads might roll in…

By proving your expertise on a blog, you’ll get more phone calls from highly qualified buyers and sellers. You’ll get more referrals from agents who get to know and trust you through your blog. Furthermore, you might even get media mentions from local reports who know they can turn to you for a quote when writing on a subject you’ve carved out as your own.

Yet, before starting a blog, you have to figure out what it will be known for.

For example, our Real Estate Marketing Blog is founded on providing real estate agents tips, ideas and strategies on the four profit-pillars of real estate: prospecting, negotiating, listing and selling. These are the only areas an agent makes money in real estate and it’s why you should read this blog. It’s our cornerstone content.

What is cornerstone content?

Chris Garrett asks “Is there anything that you could point to that your blog really owns?”

“It could be a single post, a series of posts, an over-arching ‘message’. This is cornerstone content. Over the course of time, the post, series or “message” is added to and referred to repeatedly over time, increasing the original value and relevance and also keeping content fresh. And while the main benefit is branding and educational value, there are other benefits as well.”

Brian Clark, the Copyblogger, says,

“And when approached in a strategic fashion, this content can rank very well in the search engines. The key is creating compelling content that’s worth linking to, and then finding a way to get the word out.”

But as you might imagine, writing good content is hard and time-consuming.

However, the web usability guru, Jakob Neilson, writes a compelling argument on why you should make the effort. In a nutshell, you should write content rich articles to avoid commodity status. Otherwise, you’ll get lost in the garbage and your effort will be wasted. So if you are going to do it, then it’s worth the time to do it right.  In depth content is value added content that demonstrates authority, gets people to trust you and link to you and helps you rank in the search engines.

So tell me: if you don’t have a blog, are you considering starting one now? If so, when? If not, why not?  Looking forward to hearing from you!

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