For many real estate agents, starting a blog can be a daunting task. Let me first say this: if you don’t enjoy writing, or it is a chore for you, blogging may not be for you. However, the great thing about blogging is you don’t have to have your Master’s degree in English to write a great blog.

Your blog is your opinion on various subjects.

For real estate agents, your blog will probably include your opinion about your local market area, the communities you serve, local and national real estate laws, local lending trends, opinions about schools and neighborhoods, and much more.

Here are 5 elements to having a successful real estate agent blog:

1. Be consistent. One of the most important elements to blogging is to write consistently. When I first started blogging for FOREM, one thing that made a huge difference, was setting a blog schedule. For me, I am committed to 3 blog posts a week. By having that commitment, it makes it a priority for me. It also lets my readers know that I am serious about this blog, and readers more likely to follow it because they know content will be fresh! Tip: Look at your calendar and schedule 2 to 3 days a week that you will post your blog posts. Factor in the time needed to write, edit and publish.

2. Post local content. If I was a real estate agent, one of my blog posts every week would be a fun fact about the community or fun community event going on in the area. You hear it time and time again, but being the local source of great content is key. Still don’t think there is value in local content? If you haven’t already, check out this Facebook page started by a Realtor in Washington – all those posts originate from his blog. Did you see how many fans he has? As of right now, he has almost 9,000 fans! That’s the power of local content. Tip: Get local content from chamber web sites, downtown association web sites and your local newspaper online.

3. Post market stats BUT in an easy to understand way. Let’s face it: charts, graphs and an excessive amount of numbers are not very exciting for most of us. So post great market stats, but keep it to a couple graphs. The KEY is to add your opinion and your input to the market data. What trends do you see? What are some great finds you saw on Brokers Tour? What are your clients saying they are looking for. The story behind any stat is what makes a blog post engaging to read! Tip: Get local market stats from your local MLS, regional association, or from Altos Research – one of my favorite market stat companies for agents.

4. Do not post negative posts. There are many schools of thoughts about what type of blog posts to post – but in my experience it is best to ‘take the high road’ and not use your real estate blog for your ’soapbox’ of negative experiences. Keep it positive and people will respect you even more. Tip: If you aren’t sure whether to post something or not, write it, save it as a draft, and re-visit it the next day. Giving time to mull over a blog post gives you time to think if it is worth publishing.

5. Promote it! You can’t just ‘build it and it will come!’ You need to make sure you are promoting every blog post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and through your email list. For Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn you should re-post your blog post 3-5 times. I know many people think it is a “no no” to repeat content but I completely disagree – just ask Guy Kawasaki who notoriously repeats content on his Twitter stream. By re-posting your blog posts 3-5 times on these channels throughout the course of 2-3 days, your web traffic will be much higher. Remember, most people are only on their social networks for pockets of time throughout the day – so if you promote your blog on Facebook in the morning – you may be missing afternoon traffic.  Tip: Use Hootsuite – you can integrate your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles AND control what day/time your post goes out. Once you have your blog post done, log into Hootsuite and post a quick message with your link to your blog post and schedule the same message 3-5 times over the next 2 days. Here is a great blog post about all the things you can accomplish with Hootsuite, including some exciting new updates that happened this week.

Bonus: Want to see some great real estate agent examples? Check out this blog post Stacey Harmon just posted with examples of 32 real estate agent blog sites!

Do you have a blog you’d like to share? Do you have any tips to add to this list? I would love your feedback, please leave me a comment below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

Share on Facebook

Ork Posters prints beautiful neighborhood maps for cities across the US; including Seattle, Boston, NYC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago,DC and Philly, among others. The maps are designed by Jenny Beorkrem from trimtabdesign.com.

For the true font-o-phile, these works are wonderful typographic inspiration. But regardless, they would look great hanging in your office or conference room and make for a great conversation piece. Also would be a fantastic thank you gift; especially for any relocation clients moving in to a new city.

Posters are printed with soy-based ink on 100% recycled paper. Various color styles are available for each city and they run between $22 and $27 a pop.

Share on Facebook

Yahoo Real Estate, the nation’s #2 real estate search portal, launched a redesign today.

The site, which has adopted a much more muted color palette (lots of earth tones), offers up a new dynamic search results page and much larger photos in its listing pages (see Inman News story). It’s a decent catchup effort but still needs to go a bit further to keep pace with some of the technology leaders.

While the new Y!RE experience is intuitive, I found as I dug deeper into the results, it began to feel like there was often one too many clicks to get to where I wanted to go. This was a little frustrating frankly.

More importantly however, the individual listing pages still felt somewhat spartan and vaguely underwhelming, especially compared to some of the newer search offerings like those on MRIS’ HomesDatabase (see MRIS Takes on the Search Sites).

All that said however, Steve Schultz, Senior Director for Yahoo! Real Estate writes on the Yahoo! blog that this is just the beginning; more is coming, including “a greater emphasis on property photos and meaty new personalization and sharing services.”

In conjunction with the new public face to Yahoo! Real Estate, the company has also introduced a range of new features for Real Estate professionals. Brokers, if you’re already syndicating your listings to the portal, you can now log into Yahoo! and manage them all online.

Agents interested in tapping Yahoo!’s reach can purchase a classifieds listing on the site for $49.95 and are also encouraged by the company to give Yahoo! Sponsored Search a whirl to build traffic to their websites.

Despite a tough market and months of turmoil at the company, Yahoo! has made some impressive strides over the last couple of years in this space, and it looks like they are still committed to seeing their presence dial up. I’m looking forward to seeing more from them in the future.

Yahoo! Real Estate, Yahoo!, real estate search, real estate 2.0, real estate

Share on Facebook

real estate brokerage, real estate websites, real estate 2.0, real estate

Share on Facebook

Neighborhood research sites come and go. But none of them have seemed to stick around for very long.

Word that Homethinking has added some very cool neighborhood matching tools excites me as a technology watcher, but I have to wonder, sadly, if it will ever get used.

On the surface neighborhood research seems to make perfect sense. People should want to learn more about the neighborhood they want to live in. What are the schools in the area? How do they perform? How close is the nearest Starbucks? How walkable is the neighborhood (see Measuring Walkability with Walk Score)?

But the graveyard of neighborhood research tools is also littered with recent attempts to make this work.

The ghosts of Neighboroo (see Neighboroo Adds New Data To Neighborhood Research) and Neighborhoodmatch (see Finding the Perfect Location with Neighborhoodmatch.com) still haunt us. High profile plays like YourStreet that are still with us have radically shifted gears (see Yourstreet is Now Empty) – and even Terabitz switched its focus to becoming an enterprise web site provider.

Still, that doesn’t stop others from trying:

Homezilla

Homezilla is a new site north of the border that takes on neighbourhood (Canadian spelling, natch) search. The overall experience is pretty usable – results are dynamically generated and plotted on a Google Map. I really liked how you can layer in different data sources and that there were several ‘unique’ choices I could pick; the availability of liquor stores and bars were especially appreciated.

Problem is – the data was poor to terrible. A search in my old neighborhood in Vancouver revealed neither the elementary school I went to nor any of the pubs that I frequented later in life.

Nevertheless, I liked the experience. Largely because Homezilla continues the encouraging trend of search tools adding ‘real world’ filters that people can actually use in their searches; like proximity to transit options (see Estately Comes to Portland).

(Speaking of which, would one of the search portals please layer in access to FIOS and/or 3G cellular coverage as a search criteria. Geeks like me who are looking for a new home demand it.)

UpMyStreet

UpMyStreet is a British web site that tries a slightly different approach – rather than a fancy map mashup, UpMyStreet parses all of its neighborhood data into paragraph form. It creates a much more academic experience but one that is frankly, a bit muddled. I found it a bit confusing to navigate and the advertising very distracting.

That said, it was a tool that I could see myself using – at least tangentially alongside another search site.

The problem with any of these sites, may very well be that neighborhood research is only a small and limited part of the real estate search process for some (if at all) and one that is quickly overtaken by the hunt for a specific home.

And so I suspect that without having listing data attached to the site, a dedicated neighborhood search tool simply can not go very far.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for this type of information. I just think it means it’s up to the property search sites to do a better job of helping consumers decide which neighborhoods fit their needs.

Share on Facebook

If you don’t like commercial pitches, don’t care what I do from day to day, hate Inman News and are otherwise disinterested, move on. Go ahead and hit that J key in your reader…

The rest of you, we’ve spent a lot of this week working on this summer’s Connect conference and I’m really stoked.

We’ve got some great speakers lined up; Merlin Mann is keynoting (how cool is that?) and we’ve got lots more to be announced soon.

Plus, based on the feedback of our fantastic advisors, we’ve rejigged the format of a couple of our pre-conference workshops into formats that I think are going to be way more instructive for everyone.

We’re updating the web site as I write this, so check it out over the next couple of days for more information.

But that’s not really why I’m writing this today…

The reason I’m plugging Connect today is that today is the last day to register at the early bird rate. You’ll save $280 if you register today. Monday – the prices all go up!

So if even if you’re thinking of wanting to consider the possibility that you might try and come out to San Francisco from July 23rd to 25th – make sure you make that decision today and try and save yourself some bucks.

It’s probably not a bad idea to book your tickets now too – who knows how expensive the fuel surcharges will be come summer. Just make sure you pick an airline that’s not going to A) fall apart or B) go out of business.

One more thing, if you’re coming out to Connect, make sure you come a day early and check out ReBARCamp too – it’s going to be a gathering of true real estate geeks. I’ll be there, I’m the tall guy with the shaved head. Come out and say hi.

Look forward to seeing you all in San Francisco.

Share on Facebook

RealEstate-turk.com launched today and is an interesting new service that leverages the power of a distributed user base to complete one of the most unpleasant real estate-related tasks online, finding a new home.

Much like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, RealEstate-turk is all about crowd sourcing your home search. For a flat fee (pricing to be announced separately) “Turkees” on the other end of the service troll real estate search sites like Zillow, Trulia, Frontdoor and Realtor.com to find potential homes for you and email you listings as soon as they find them.

It’s really very simple, you provide basic information (city, State, bedrooms, pricing, etc.) through a secure form to RealEstate-Turk.com and they farm out the criteria to an army of overseas workers connected through a common search interface. When one of them finds a match for your search criteria you are automatically emailed with that listing. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed of all the properties they find.

I think this is a service that has real potential.

Say you’re too busy to find your own home… why not let a crowd of anonymous Internet users do it for you?

The popular book 4 Hour Work Week talks about outsourcing your inbox and I think RealEstate-turk.com is the next logical step following the same methodology. As our lives get increasingly busier and busier, finding efficiencies (wherever they may be) will ultimately be the secret to more productive days and more productive real estate searches.

Share on Facebook

YouTube is giving video creators a deeper look at the viewing trends of the videos the publish on the site. From the Official Google Blog:

…uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.

I think this is a critical step forward in evaluating the ROI on video in general, but especially real estate video. The geographic statistics alone are worth their weight in gold; you can now see where people who are watching your videos are coming from.

Video is an emerging medium in real estate – one that I’m convinced will gain greater and greater traction over the coming months/years.

Contests like the one that Century 21 is hosting (see Century 21 Puts Open Houses in Youtube) or the one that ActiveRain is holding (see ActiveRain Video Contest – best prize yet, I promise) serve to introduce real estate professionals to the power of video on the web. Many will try their hand at video, and many more will certainly be put off by the production effort required – but I believe it will become an essential tool in a Realtor’s arsenal whether they are producing the videos themselves, or outsourcing to a third party.

At the REtech South conference in Atlanta today video is a hot topic of discussion (The Real Estate Bloggers has a great run down of the conversation) – and it’s one that will surely come up at future events (like Connect, natch) as well.

I’ve written before about how you can integrate video into your real estate marketing strategy (see Why Having Real Estate Video Distribution Strategy Matters or Creating a Real Estate Video Channel on YouTube) but a missing piece of the puzzle to date was the ability to evaluate and measure how your videos were being consumed beyond the simple number of views. Previously, you had to rely on web sites like TubeMogul.com to get that information (still a great tool though).

I’m definitely encouraged by this step Youtube has taken and look forward to experimenting with the new Insight.

Share on Facebook

I wrote a post on the Inman Blog recently where I described one application of the service; how you could use it to subscribe to news and essentially build a real time teleprinter for your desktop (using a desktop client like Twhirl).

The group blog agentgenius.com is using Twitter to integrate live feeds of all its contributors “tweets” into a rolling stream of consciousness.

But here’s the killer app for Twitter. I think Jeff Turner might have stumbled on to it in his post when he searched Twitter for the word “Realtor”. Twitter is a fantastic tool for business intelligence.

Why? Because you can use it to hear what your customers, clients, users are saying about you.

I use a site called TweetScan to search for keywords through the Twitterstream – this is what I found out in one sitting for searches on a couple of Real Estate 2.0 sites, for example.

Real-time Twitter Search – Zillow

My takeaway: People are still using Zillow – but disappointed by what they’re seeing. Will they keep coming back?

Real-time Twitter Search – Redfin

My takeaway: People are using Redfin to research the market looking for bargains. Seems like their marketing angle (see Redfin’s Business Model Better for Consumers) is bang on.

These are just a couple of examples, but you can see how you could use Twitter to keep a finger on the pulse of your customers’ feelings.

If I were working in the marketing or communications departments for either of these companies, I’d be trolling the Twitter feeds looking for these themes and answering any questions – so where’s DavidG on Twitter?

The best thing is that Tweetscan makes it easy to subscribe to an RSS search of a particular keyword (I subscribe to Inman, for example) which makes that job even easier.

Part of the challenge in marketing for many years has been trying to figure out what people think of your product or service. That’s why you often had to resort to focus groups, user questionnaires, surveys and all kinds of brute force methods to figure out what people think.

Twitter on the other hand is a real-time, real-world glimpse into the minds of your customers. Granted right now it’s a small, technologically literate slice of the population using Twitter – but if that’s your demographic, you should be paying attention.

Share on Facebook

I’m going to disagree with Dustin (see Zillow gives us some remodeling porn), Zillow’s new Dueling Digs game isn’t that much fun.

But I suspect I’m not the target market for this sort of game. Online real estate is strictly a utilitarian activity for me (wow, the presbyterian Scot in me really comes out with that sentence).

I use the tools of Real Estate 2.0 to evaluate the market and to help me find a new home to live in. I don’t really go for the whole real estate porn thing — I get my kicks in other ways…

(Motorcycles and snowboarding, people – keep your minds out of the gutter.)

But Zillow definitely seems to be angling for that market (the real estate obsessed) though. So I guess if you we’re to boil down each of the Big 3 Real Estate 2.0 search sites’ audiences to their core, you’ve got:

• Zillow – For the Real estate porn junkies
• Trulia – For the Real estate search nerds
• Frontdoor – umm… for people who watch HGTV?

While I tease them all a bit, I do think that’s pretty close assessment. Correct me if I’m wrong, by all means.

And I do think Dueling Digs is a smart move for Zillow. It’s a very savvy commercial move since it gives them some additional unique sponsorship opportunities by leveraging a pretty deep asset (their listing photos) that otherwise adds little to the bottom line.

I noticed for example, John Deere was sponsoring the yards section. One could easily see a brand like Behr sponsoring the living spaces section or Kohler sponsoring the bathrooms section too.

But more than just an ad play, they’ve also added some interesting community angles to it too where the votes are all tallied together to see which is the most popular bedroom or bathroom. From Zillow® Blog:

Your votes are then tallied with other players’ so you can also see what the Zillow community likes the most — which kitchens are most popular, for example. We have millions of home photos on Zillow and users are adding even more every day, so you can expect to stumble upon new pictures — and new inspiration for your own home – each time you play.

(How’s that for bragging rights – I have the most popular bathroom in America!)

It sounds like Zillow knows their user base and knows what they want. And while the game doesn’t do much for me, I do think they will find an audience for this.

The good news for Zillow too is that that audience does seem to be growing. Despite a period of relatively flat growth, they’ve seen a recent uptick (according to Compete anyway). Interestingly, at the same time, Trulia’s recent fast climb seems to have stalled.

For more on online real estate games, read Realius Lets the Games Begin.

Share on Facebook