You are a blogger — a publisher in your own right — and you have the ability to cover all types of local stories. Your goal as a blogger is to involve your community in your blog so that they are encouraged to visit regularly.  Think of yourself as a reporter, out to cover a story.  This provides a wonderful opportunity to connect with people in a non-Realtor way.  

Here are 6 practical tips for “going local” on your real estate blog:

1. Attend community events.
2. Take a lot of photographs.  (Remember to ask permission to take and publish anyone’s photograph.)
3. Hand out your blog/ business card to everyone you meet, tell them about your blog and encourage them to visit to read about your coverage (yes, they will also see all the other content). Continue reading this post

Use “spider posts” for new developments. Write a body post mentioning all the new developments, with location, builder, price range, amenities, etc. – a real master reference work. Then pick each one out for “leg” posts and talk about them again—maybe include a new or special listing. It’s a good idea to write about new developments or buildings because they often make the local news, whether in newspapers, magazine or ads. Folks wanting to know more will Google the name and find your spider post. That’s the power of blog marketing.

Blogging Tip courtesy of the HomeGain Blogging School Professor, Joseph Ferrara. Sign up for AgentView and the HomeGain Blogging School.

On Tuesday we launched the premier of the “Ask the Experts” live real estate forum. Thanks to our terrific panel of experts, a great turnout and active participation from the audience, the forum was a success!

Overall, participants rated each of the experts with marks of excellence for presentation and content covered. Due to the positive response, we’ll be continuing the series, so stay tuned for future Ask the Experts!

If you weren’t able attend, here’s your chance to hear the valuable information and advice the experts gave out to real estate professionals.

Listen to the full version:

Or, listen to the individual experts here:

Continue reading this post

Not! Does anyone want my advice on blogging? Ok, good, I’ll give you some advice: start by writing. It’s always best to start your blog by writing something.

Now you might ask—write about what?

And that would be a good question. Well, if you are a real estate agent you might want to write about real estate. That’s my first two pieces of advice—write, and write about real estate.

Seriously, if you are just starting or thinking about starting, there are a few things that might help. I will assume you’re an agent writing to consumers, and I will assume you’re not an experienced writer—otherwise you wouldn’t need my great advice. I write on several blogs, some related to the real estate industry and some related to consumers, but writing to consumers is the business end of blogging and it’s the main usefulness to you as an agent.

What are blogs good for?

They are good for informing consumers about your local market, about the real estate process in general, about market trends, about your services, about neighborhoods and listings and about how all this ties together.

You might want to develop a list of topics, such as: Continue reading this post

As an engineer, avid technology junkie and as my wife likes to say “all around geek”, it is just plain amazing even to me, at how fast our lives are transformed with the ever increasing technology changes that now invoke a major impact on the way we work, and interact with each other on a daily basis.

By now we all know some of the key buzz words like Social Networks, Web 2.0, Blogs, Virtual Tours, Syndication and the impact that video can have to help convey a story to prospective home buyers.

But how do these terms fit into the broader context of a Real Estate agents job function, and how do we see the broader forest for the trees?

The reason I ask the question, is because of the amount of information I consistently observe in Real Estate print media. This information often does not convey the entire message or the message is so confusing that it leads to the very thing that Real Estate agents have been accusing the media of for months now.

Scaring people!

In the case of the latter, it was clients who were not buying, in the case of the former it’s agents that are not fully engaged and embracing the technology changes because of the confusion.

So what do I mean? Well lets’ take this one step at a time. Continue reading this post

While the RE.net crowd promotes the power of networks and blogging,
some of them don’t seem to be adverse to doing a little paid search
on Google.

Looks like the 4realz seminars and
the Redfin blog forum are being promoted not just through their vast
Web 2.0 networks but also through good old fashion paid advertising. Continue reading this post