BloodhoundBlog at two: The scene of the real estate scenius

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog came into this world two years ago today. I had tried twice before to craft a workable real estate weblog. The second attempt donated its 60-odd posts to BloodhoundBlog on the way in. But BloodhoundBlog was different from our prior attempts right from the start. We were focused on the national real estate industry from the beginning, mixing good writing, deep philosophy and radical new ideas into what has seemed to be a consistently heady brew.

In our first two years, we’ve served over 1.4 million pages to over 750,000 unique souls. We’ve written more than 2,800 posts and hosted more than 25,000 comments. As I write this, we have 600 Technorati links and 67,000 Yahoo backlinks. Those are interesting numbers, but these are more interesting to me: In the past two years (less than that, really, since we didn’t start tracking for about two months), 37,347 people have visited here here 200 or more times. Just short of 151,000 people have visited us nine or more times. And keep in mind that we live by RSS and email subscription. The flip side of this is that just short of half-a-million souls have come to the site only once, which I think is a nice illustration of the relative value of search-engine borne as against more-organic sources of traffic.

And, in reality, none of that matters. BloodhoundBlog is influential because it is very loud voice in the RE.net, but BloodhoundBlog is influential because it is very serious about big ideas. From the earliest days of the blog, we staked out a ground — the philosophy by which the most serious, most dedicated real estate professionals would thrive in the Web 2.0 world — and defended it with the ferocity of real Bloodhounds. We are always about the grunts on the ground, never about the bosses and vendors who seek to bilk them of their hard-fought earnings. We’ve built an audience not by dumb SEO stunts, not by kissing up to the NAR or the Inmanosphere, not by fawning or flattery or appeals to pity, but simply by delivering the goods day after day, month after month. If you want proof that content is king — that exploring important issues in full detail trumps easy-reading, that telling the whole truth, no matter how much people might rather not hear it, is the naked essence of integrity and credibility — BloodhoundBlog stands as that proof.

I could not be more grateful to the people who have made this possible: Our fabulous contributors, past and present, our readers and commenters — even those self-drawn-caricatures who have chosen to define themselves by their opposition to us. Weblogging is a conversation, but BloodhoundBlog is a colloquium, a rigorous examination of how the real estate business will be conducted, going forward. I love it that we can pull this off — discuss the most important of issues, seriously, thoroughly, with a civilized respect for each other, all the while keeping things interesting, irreverent and fun. BloodhoundBlog is the scene of the scenius, and it is the work we do in the next two years that will determine who will still be working in real estate — and how.

And — to think! — Bloodhounds are puppies for three years. Our archives are already the encyclopedia of hi-tech real estate, and we are but barely begun. What’s the plan for the future? Keep growing. Allowing for everything, we’re probably talking to around 150,000 people often enough to make a difference in their lives. There are at least 3 million folks out there we could be talking to — at least half of whom are serious about doing this work wisely and well. We’ll keep running this trail until we track every one of those people down.

My thanks to you for being a part of the chase.

Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing