There’s always something to howl about.

Nine months on the trail: Whither BloodhoundBlog?

I don’t like mission statements, but I’ll give you one for BloodhoundBlog:

Everything you wish were in Realtor magazine but isn’t.

That’s pithy but inadequate, because there’s more here already than Realtor magazine — or the Specialist — would ever take on. We have three lenders to take us inside the mortgage industry. We have two investment experts to brings us hard-core, hands-on advice. We have some of the best writers in the RE.net — who produce some of the best reading in real estate writing, period, weblogged or printed.

And we are nine months old today.

Our traffic grows month-by-month. In addition to the folks who see our work by RSS feed, we are routinely attracting more than 1,000 unique visitors a day on weekdays. We’re slower on weekends, but we’re right on the verge of hitting 30,000 visitors a month. Our readers take in just short of two pages each, on average, so a lot of what we write is getting read. We throw off at least 500 outbound clicks every day, which means that the sites we link to are seeing quite a few Bloodhounds in their kennels.

This is all great, but I want more. We’re building the Russell Shaw Sales Success curriculum, and, by the time we’re done with it, we should have something that will provide tremendous value to Realtors and other sales professionals for a long time to come. I have no expectation that Teri Lussier and I will win the Project Blogger contest, but I plan to make the course material I’m developing available via ebook to any Realtors who hope to join the burgeoning RE.net. Our contributors are becoming steadily better known, and this cannot but produce interesting opportunities for them in the long run.

Even so, I want more. I am very proud of everything we have done so far — and a week’s worth of BloodhoundBlog content is an over-scale pound of meaty reading — but I want to come to the place where a day’s work is of that weighty scale. I know we can do this. There are days when we do it already. There will come a time when we will do it every day.

We are sometimes the first word in a debate, and that can be fun. We are very often the last word. But what I want, now and always, is for BloodhoundBlog to be the best words in the conversation, the most thorough, the most informative, the most cogent, the most persuasive. At our best we are not writers but rhetors, eloquent docents on the path of reasoned discourse.

At our absolute best we are Bloodhounds — unabashedly proud, fiercely independent, tirelessly hardworking — indefatigable hounds on the trail of truth.

Three fingers of Old Bushmills on the rocks: Happy nine-month’s birthday, BloodhoundBlog. The best is yet to come…

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