You’ve heard about blogging. You’ve probably read a few. And now you think you want to jump on the real estate blogging bandwagon. Here are just a few ways to get started.
What is a blog?
Before you can know how to blog, you need to know what it is. Roughly defined, a blog–short for “web log”– is an online journal. At its beginning, blogs were purely personal “how my day went” posts and a few soapboxes. Nowadays, you’ll find blogs for everything from gameplayer granny to corporate employees. Here we’ll be specific and talk about real estate blogging.
Blogging software
Blogging doesn’t technically require any special software. However, blogging software and services do make it much easier to post and manage. The most common software I’ve seen are:
- Blogger (service)
- TypePad (service)
- LiveJournal (service)
- Wordpress (installed)
- Movable Type (installed)
- TextPattern (installed)
There are many others that I do not mention, but these are the major players in blogging and they’re all free, or at least have free service-level options. The ones labeled “service” are hosted blogging services. The ones labeled “installed” are software that you download and install to your own web server.
For those just getting started, a turnkey blogging service is the way to go. All you do is signup for an account and start posting. I must add, however, that for a professional site you should have your own domain. Although you use a service like, say Blogger, to write your posts, you should setup your blog so that it gets published to your own web server and not the common yourname.blogspot.com (the domain Blogger uses to publish your blog).
Publishing your blog to your own domain gives you a few things.
- Professionalism - Your own domain name is less that $10 a year. Would you rather be johnvilleblog.blogspot.com or johnvilleblog.com (or johnville.com/blog)? It just looks better to your prospective clients.
- Branding - You can be more flexible with choosing a domain name or URL. This can help you to maintain a consistency with your marketing through both name and look.
- Search Engine Indexing - Your blog can achieve good placement even if you are something.blogspot.com. However, wouldn’t you rather have yourdomain.com appear in the search engines? This leads us to the next benefit.
- Market Authority - When someone is searching for real estate information (your blog), wouldn’t it be nice if your site always comes up to the top? With excellent search placement, people will believe that you are the information authority for your area.
Real Estate Blog Topics
So what do you write about? Well… anything! That is anything real estate related.
One of the purposes of a reak estate blog is to create a dedicated following of people that will visit your blog, read often, and eventually buy through you or refer others to you. Your job is to be a real estate expert for your market. That’s why people hire you.
You must be personal, yet always professional. Let the words you write represent who you are–your personality, your interests, your opinions. Do this in your blog while feeding your readers good information about things that affect real estate in your area. Topics could include:
- Updates on local mortgage rates
- Updates on local market conditions
- Commentary on recent local news items
- Announcements (i.e., open houses, team accomplishments, new information or features added to your site, congratulations to new homeowners with pictures)
The most important thing is to be yourself. If you have team members, let them blog too. This will give potential clients the ability to get to know you and your team. If you need some help on real estate topics or would like to see what other people write, see the CyberStars blog section of my site. These blogs can sometimes be a source of insipration when the creative juice stop flowing.
Happy Real Estate Blogging!
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