Your Real Estate Blog – The Networking Monster in the Closet

Tap the Awesome Power of Your Blog for Networking

Debates never stop among real estate bloggers as to whether a real estate blog should stick primarily to real estate content, or whether it should have a significant amount of local community and neighborhood coverage. The argument also extends to whether one should promote their listings in their blog. Let's look at who to blog to, as well as what to blog about, and why a great deal of community content can be a huge business builder for the Realtor.

• Everyone will likely be buyers or sellers at some point.
• Only a tiny percentage are buyers or sellers right now.
• The competition for that tiny percentage is huge.
• There is only so much real estate content to hold their attention.
• Time using the web for real estate research in increasing.

Those experts who want you to focus like a laser on the Internet prospect in the real estate market right now are not wrong. Obviously, our efforts will bring business faster if we can target the current buyer or seller. However, that is such a small percentage of the group who have various interests in what's going on in the community. So, what does this mean to our content choices?

• Local calendars, community government & business info and the like are of interest to a much larger group.
• Sooner or later, most in this group will want to buy or sell real estate.
• If your site has provided interesting & useful community content, it's likely that they will come to you with their real estate business.
• Your community oriented blog is a networking miracle.

The first three are self-explanatory. The last one is the monster hiding in the closet. A real-life example is a broker who works alone in a resort community. He is an excellent practitioner, but dislikes the networking side of the business, preferring to work his website successfully for out of area buyers. However, when he changed his site to reside on a WordPress platform, made it very community friendly, and began to feature stories about local government and business, things started to happen. Organizations began to contact him to place their announcements in the blog. Offers to write articles began to arrive. He met people at a rapid pace, and far more of them than had been his habit in the past.

So many real estate professionals spend a great deal of time participating in community, supporting causes, and attending functions and meetings. This is just a change in the way you choose to participate, or perhaps just an additional piece.