The Realtor's threat of suit got her a membership, but what a way to introduce yourself. This is a great example of a "push" networking strategy. What if this real estate broker had been asked to join, or approached by the group to help them in promotional and community activities? That's just what you can build in your area if you'll think in the "pull" networking way.
A website on a blogging platform will allow you to encourage community participation. The more popular the site gets, the more you'll be approached to feature posts about local organizations, government and business. This isn't speculation. It has been proven many times over. The opportunity is that there are still very few real estate blogs or sites out there that are doing this properly.
If you are concerned about the time involved in an endeavor of this type, it isn't as extensive as you might think. One broker set up a blog site, had the Chamber of Commerce put out an email announcement, and began to work with groups and business in a great many ways:
- A local PR firm feeds his event calendar for the area.
- The town government PR person sends him meeting minutes and government announcements to copy and paste into posts.
- Business people write up descriptions of their companies, products and services for posts.
- A local mortgage person writes a weekly mortgage market update for the blog.
All of the above require very little of the Realtor's time, as it is just copy/paste from the submitted emails. The vast majority of posts for the blog are written by others. The growing notoriety of the blog is now allowing the broker to lure guest authors to write about the local arts community, outdoor activities and more.
There is an opinion that the site will suffer in the search engines for key phrases specifically related to real estate. This is likely accurate, as the ratio of real estate related content to the content of the site as a whole will be much lower than a site totally dedicated to real estate articles.
This broker has decided that, over time, there will be so many more readers and subscribers to the blog simply because it is presenting content of interest to them at all times, not just when they're thinking of buying or selling real estate. The bet is that this will pay off when they all eventually enter the market as buyers or sellers. I'm placing my money on this broker's strategy.
