It’ll Only Cost You $24k to Blog for RIS Media
Yeah… I don’t get it either. Or, I do, but think this is a harebrained idea at best.
Here’s the deal, you pay RIS Media $2,000/month to write their “local” news. In return, you get priority sponsor placement on that section and all the linking power of RIS Media to your website - thereby raising your own website’s profile in the organic search engine rankings.
- You will be our weekly columnist for RISMedia.com/LocalNews/YourCityState.
- The Rismedia.com/LocalNews/YourCityState section of Rismedia.com will be sponsored by you, carry your message and link as sponsor on every page.
- You will be the source of a weekly column about local news in your area, professionally edited, syndicated and distributed by us to our entire worldwide circulation of over 335,000 and growing.
So, you pay $24k annually to be their weekly blogger and get all the link juice in return. RIS Media partnered with a company called SocialMediaSystems.com to make this work.
I’m actually not against people writing syndicated columns and raising their profile on the web. Having that publication link back to your own site in return is a great way to raise your site’s profile as well. If a popular and well-syndicated publication asks you to write a weekly or guest column, by all means do it.
However, seriously think about the value of paying $2,000/month for this service, if anything, they should be paying you. I’m not sold on the long-term viability and the promises of increased search engine visibility.
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Joe Dahleen | Oct 23, 2007 | Reply
$2000 per month for all you stated does not seem like a lot of money to me. I mean for $2k per month my brand is all over the place and I don’t have to spend too much time myself getting this task done. It’s worth it to me.
Bob Carney | Oct 23, 2007 | Reply
LMAO…this article is higher on Google (real estate marketing) than their website is in the example on why you should market with them. I am sorry but my low cost hosting is getting me all the high ranking I need.
$2,000 they need to get real.
Metrowest MA Real Estate | Oct 23, 2007 | Reply
Wow Joel that is a heck of a lot of money! I would be willing to pay something much less for this kind of placement if the inbound link was that powerful. $2000 though…that is crazy. I am sure the exposure would be great but with time you can create your own exposure for a lot less than 24k.
Joel Burslem | Oct 23, 2007 | Reply
@Metrowest - This post was written by Erik Hersman, one of the contributors to this blog.
I’m going to recuse myself from discussion on this initiative, since my employer (Inman News) is a direct competitor of RISMedia.
Todd Carpenter | Oct 23, 2007 | Reply
RIS Media has a Page Rank of 5. So does lenderama. If anyone here would like to contribute to lenderama for HALF as much as RIS is charging, let me know. If any wishes to contribute for 10%, let me know. If you just want to buy me a Chipotle Burrito… let me know.
Arlington Virginia Condos -- Jay | Oct 23, 2007 | Reply
So funny, Todd. That was great. I had just checked rismedia’s pagerank of 5 and thought to myself that pretty high price to be associated with a PR5 site. Excellent realtor sites can get PR 5 on their own much less pay that kind of money to get links from one PR5….One sale could pay for itself though if it made a difference. That’s way too big of an “IF” to spend the money.
Ken Horst | Oct 23, 2007 | Reply
I’d like to buy Todd a Chipotle Burrito every month for the next year!
Sol @ Forsalebyweb | Oct 23, 2007 | Reply
When you consider a prnewswire or businesswire release gets you on all the major sites, google, yahoo, and syndicated all over the web for less than $500, RISmedia is not such a great deal.
With all due respect RISmedia’s model is no worse than some of the real estate models that ask agents to cough up thousands. Let’s see what happens.
John Schroeder | Oct 24, 2007 | Reply
24k and my time and effort!!! If this was the only web page that showed up in any searches related to your specific area…then ok. It just seems to easy a concept to replicate. Then we would have a lot of people who have paid a lot of money to show up all together on the first page of Google. I agree with most of the previous posts. I will keep doing my thing. And watch my local Google, Yahoo, and the rest of the search engines results improve.
Mark Pilatowski | Oct 24, 2007 | Reply
They better hope that Google does not take a closer look at this. They have been on a rampage against link sellers lately. Go to Sphinn.com to see more about their war against link sellers. If they catch wind of this they may decide to whack them too.
Steven Groves | Oct 24, 2007 | Reply
Just saw I was quoted on RISmedia by an author I am not sure I’ve ever met, citing me at a poistion I have not held for 6 months… sharp reporting, those RISMedia people…
Metrowest MA Real Estate | Oct 24, 2007 | Reply
Erik my apologies I missed you were the author - Excellent post. I am with Todd…I will take the Burrito too!
Incredible Agent | Oct 24, 2007 | Reply
This seems a little excessive. I could understand paying some money for this, but not that much. I can’t imagine what the ROI on this would be. You would have to get a heck of a lot of leads to make it worthwhile.
Hawaii Real Estate | Oct 24, 2007 | Reply
Why pay to add content to another blog? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? If the users know that the “columnists” are paying to be there that’s called an advertorial, not a blog.
Kevin Tomlinson | Oct 25, 2007 | Reply
I can see that you are paying for eyeballs AND link juice. But do consumers actually read RIS Media?
That’s the fly in the ointment for me.
FYI, a page rank of 5 is not THAT hard. Get a good website with a moderate amount of content and your a five in two years.
Barry Hurd | Jan 10, 2008 | Reply
I just read this and thought it was insightful- that it goes to prove how little most real estate pros know about online marketing and SEO.
In the online marketing world- $2k a month is not a huge commitment. There are brokers that spend $2k a day on PPC in Google.
Joel has said it best here in another article- “But as I read more and more on the subject - one thing became increasingly clear. PageRank doesn’t really matter any more. Hear hear. I rarely ever checked my blog’s PageRank and care even less about PageRanks of the blogs that I read and link to frequently.”
Get it? PR doesn’t matter too much anymore.
Joel also nails it on the head with ideas about “The RSS subscriber count has become the new PageRank.”
In relation to that, while many professionals can do SEO campaigns for themselves- having a link-building campaign implemented on a hundred fold level for related search terms and long-tail articles found on a site with 20k+ real estate articles and syndicated in several high exposure sites cannot be duplicated by any broker (anyone want to guess how many hours it takes to write 20k+ articles and SEO them?)
The assumption that consumers do not read RISMedia is correct. 10’s of thousands of real estate pros do. While many real estate agents want to convert to home leads, most successful real estate brokers want home leads and agent leads (yep, we call it recruiting). With 10’s of thousands of agents reading the e-newsletter and site, brokers can build a brand and recruit agents.
The PR item is so pointless these days- that real state pros think getting a PR 5 site in two years is a chore. A decent SEO campaign should be able to do it in 3-9 months.
BTW- I’m the President of SocialMediaSystems.com.
Heath Coker | Jan 15, 2008 | Reply
I am a real estate broker. The “real estate pros” I speak to every day across the country, are not as uninformed as Mr. Hurd thinks and wants others to think. Peope are just led to believe, by the prevailing media, that no other agent/broker is thinking similarly. Many agents and brokers are actually thinking the same in CA, OR, FL, KS, MA, TX, and across the US.
If “pros” know as “little about online marketing” as Mr. Hurd states, why did the NWMLS, stop giving it’s listing content to the real tor.com type sites? Here’s why they stopped: they know the content they have been providing those sites is competing with their own efforts to get traffic. Other MLSs are headed the same way. This is an informed action.
Also, $2000/mo IS a huge committment in any marketing effort that is not in a major city. More and more listing agents and brokers are retaining more of their content, so their own sites will also retain more of the traffic. PR and RSS are dependent on content being supplied by “real estate pros”. The pros I talk to are concentrating on maintaining their own content rather than giving it (or paying $2000/mo) to their traffic competitors.
Before the Internet, listing agents and brokers needed other businesses to publish their listings. Now, the Internet allows every listing agent to be their own publisher. As agents and brokers control the places their content appears, they have more control of the traffic that content produces. The brokers and agents across the country are reversing some of the Internet trends in real estate traffic as they hold onto more of their own content, including listings.
By the way, I made a YouTube as my video expression of these ideas that agents and brokers and corp officers all agree is on point. (search heath coker on youtube)
Maureen Francis | Feb 4, 2008 | Reply
RealtyTimes had a similar program for $24.95 a month. Of course, it was not exclusive. I got one crappy call from it after a couple of years of subscribing. They syndicated their content to Realtor.com, which obviously has lots of consumers attention (but probably not on the market report pages).
Mike Parker | Mar 4, 2008 | Reply
Re: Ris Media’s 2K/mo blog
I have been laughing at the naivete of this “opportunity” since I first read of it. Anyone can be on the top pages of the major search engines for about $239 a month through CompassSearch (a company I advise- disclosure) and hundreds of agents all over North America already are.
If one looks at the “map” showing the location of these blggers, it appears that about 20 folks have gone for some iteration of this program. More power to them, but most folks who sell real estate tell me they’d rather hire someone to handle their SEO and with good reason: Consumers overwelmingly choose real estate agents websites; that’s what NAR says, at any rate, and they certainly should know.
I recently was reading a Point2 blog and came across an agent braggin that his blog had 27,000 hits last month. I quickly asked how many houses he sold from those hits. There was no response. I also asked the blogger how many hours he spent blogging. There was no response.
Blogs are wonderful when they are like this one, or like Active Rain, Internet Crusade, or real newsworthy and professionally operated sites with a real value to people in the industry, consumers, or both. I sincerely doubt whether the consumer is going to want to read ongoing gossip about the world of the local real estate agent and developments among those in the business enough to purchase a home from that blog, however. We recommend a service to those wishing to blog for a simple reason: 90% of blogs fail because the writer tires of what soon becomes a job and does not keep the blog current.
This is a really great blog. It has a real value. Sally Agent’s blog is far less likely to attract the audience that this one does, and that is the real issue: are you a real estate agent or a wanna be writer?
I say leave the blogging for profit to the professionals and go sell houses. If you want to blog, more power toyou, but recognize that it is for fun, not profit for the vast majority of agents.
Great job, guys. I really enjoy reading this blog!
Best regards
Mike Parker