Blogging for Real Estate - Community Information or All Real Estate?

Time and the ability to create new and interesting posts for a real estate blog is important. If you're already stretched to the limit just writing about real estate topics, perhaps you shouldn't tackle community information.

One thing to consider is the help you can get from community members who have an interest in promoting their neighborhood, organization or pet project. Some real estate professionals have created an extensive community blogging presence with posts and commentary from community members.

How much time do you currently spend attending homeowner association meetings, local town council meetings, events and organization functions? This old style networking is effective, but the trade-off is your personal time and the limited number of contacts you can make with that time invested.

What if you could cut back on that time a bit, get participation and notes from those that do attend, and blog about these and many more activities. You will still be seen as participating, or at least contributing to these organizations and neighborhoods.

Related to the two points above, you can get cut-and-paste copy from a number of sources. When I started my community blogging, the town public relations person began to send me weekly email updates of town council meeting minutes and announcements. The beauty of this was that this content was nowhere else on the web, thus original search engine fodder.

One PR firm began to contribute automated content to my community calendar. Their first import was more than 200 local events out months into the future. I had an instant calendar with no effort on my part.

There is a trade-off here. As your real estate content will be a smaller percentage of overall site content, it is likely that you'll suffer in the search engine results for real estate keywords and phrases.

That is a consideration, however, you'll begin to show up in searches in all kinds of other subject areas related to the community. Your site will begin to be visited and read by a larger percentage of the population, as they aren't just looking for real estate content.

It is a very valid approach to keep your blog completely focused on real estate and related topics. You can focus laser-like on high search placement for those in the market to buy or sell real estate right now. The question is, what percentage of those interested in your area would that be?

A long term approach would be to develop a loyal readers that have an interest in what's happening in your area, like your content, and use your site to keep up with current events. That's a much larger universe of prospects, and sooner or later they'll want to do a real estate deal.

Whether you laser in on real estate and related topics, or spread your coverage out to the community and events, you can be successful in generating business.

You should look at your community, how you spend your time now, what you currently do to network, and how you'd like to position your blogging for the future. If you believe that you will ultimately benefit more from the wider net you'll cast with community blogging, it will likely work for you.

On the other hand, there's something to be said for knowing your hottest prospect, and focusing on capturing them when they're in the market. There's room for all types of real estate blogging. The key is to jump in and do something.