Let’s talk about real estate weblogging, shall we? By an accident of synchronicity, that seems to be what bubbled up to the top this week. The Odysseus Medal goes to Gary Elwood for Naked Conversations: The Lynchpin to Your Real Estate Marketing Blog:
In a nutshell, blogging is one of the best ways to communicate with your market. Better than postcards, email newsletters, flyers, magazine articles, weekly radio shows.
How are blogs better than these communication channels?
There are six key differences between blogging and any other communications channel.
1. Publishable. Anyone can publish a blog.You can do it cheaply and post often. In addition, each posting is instantly available worldwide.
2. Searchable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.
3. Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.
4. Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a news service. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.
5. Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free “home delivery” of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.
6. Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.
Of course you can find each of these elements elsewhere. And none is, in itself, all that remarkable.
But in final assembly, they are the benefits of the most powerful two-way Internet communications tool so far developed.
However, bloggers and sophisticated readers of blogs will sniff you out as a fake if you lie, hide, withhold or micromanage information.
Successful blogging is about being off-the-cuff, transparent and off-the-record so to speak. Even if you sin.
SEOBook has a tutorial on SEO for webloggers up today, and this is a rockin’ thing — in context. Real estate weblogging is relationship-based and ideally viral, so SEO cannot ever be more than a secondary consideration. But doing it right is fast and cheap, and there is always the chance that you will forge a viral relationship from a long-tail search. In the same respect, understanding how to communicate with your prospects matters, which is why Krista Baker is the winner of this week’s Black Pearl Award with Reader Q&A: How To Write Your Message from Your Prospect’s Perspective:
Your website’s copy should talk directly to their emotional and logistical concerns. It must educate them so they understand and appreciate the value you bring to the transaction. It should explain intangible terms like “service”, “quality” and “dependability” in ways prospects understand.
For instance, don’t say you provide “quality service”. Explain that you have an office staffed with 12 people while the average real estate agent works from home. That your office staff works 12 hours/day, 7 days a week while the average agent in your area only works 40 hours/week and that someone is available at any time to take your call and answer questions. Explain that the average sales price in your market is $X but your average sales price for homes is 10% more because you have a house mailing list of 10,000 people, you’ve built relationships with other real estate agents over your 15 year career and know how to find buyers, that you spend $X on advertising their home in newspapers, etc. Provide testimonials from happy clients that demonstrate and support your copy.
Don’t just say you have “neighborhood expertise”, give them a picture or video tour of the neighborhood on your website. Show them the different kinds of houses in that neighborhood, pointing out the differences and the good/bad points of each structure. Explain the history of the neighborhood. Show them the best places to eat or shop – you can even interview the owners. Do an informal poll of the neighborhood asking residents why they live there. What the best features of the neighborhood are. What they like best. Then, write up the results. (This would also be great to mail to residents in the neighborhood as most people are interested in what others are saying.)
And keeping with the blogging theme, The People’s Choice Award this week goes to Dan Green for Oh, The Bloggers You’ll Meet, The People You’ll See (Wrapped Up In A Tidy YouTube Video).
You don’t have the shield your eyes, I’m not going to embed it. It’s completely contrary to my nature to put something like this on the short list of nominees. But: I knew it would win, and Dan has produced a film that is the very essence of The People’s Choice: Many of the people in the video chose it!
Nota bene: If you didn’t check out this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal, you should. As always, if you come upon a whisper from the Muses, nominate it.
Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own work or any post you admire here.
Congratulations to the winners — and to everyone who participated.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Lani Anglin says:
AWESOME choices this week- well deserved, everyone!!!
November 26, 2007 — 1:38 pm
Bob in San Diego says:
>”so SEO cannot ever be more than a secondary consideration”
The more you tell this to agents in my market, the more I like you.
November 26, 2007 — 6:35 pm