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Local Agent, Local Blogger: copy
When I started my real estate blog there were not many real estate blogs around and no blogs about St. Paul. I was lucky. My instinct told me that if I wrote to consumers, and kept it local because real estate is local, that people would read my blog and that I would get to meet them, and maybe they would become clients. I learned to keep it real and to be myself and not to imitate others or try to be something or someone that I am not.
Then at some point, maybe about a year ago the real estate industry got interested in blogs. I started seeing them everywhere. Many of the bloggers would start out the way that I did. After a few months they would begin writing to other bloggers and giving advice on how to blog. I understand how this happens. It is hard to stay focused especially in the beginning. Writing a local blog can be a lonely experience, even more so for someone like me who does not live any where near Seattle, but in fly over land where blogs are not as popular.
In most cases local bloggers do not get national recognition. I have had national recognition but only because I was an early adapter. There certainly are better blogs than mine. The first time my blog was noticed was by the Chicago Tribune and the reporter wrote about it because she was not finding local blogs written by agents. She was finding blogs written by Realtors for other Realtors. When she came to mine she found pictures of houses because I was writing a series on local architecture that week. The other blogs she visited had pictures of iPhones on them because that is what everyone was talking about that week. Those architecture posts generated about a million dollars in sales, the iPhone posts got more traffic and comments and links.
My goal was and is to stay focused and if you read my blog you will see that I have stayed on track. It can be fun to write to other bloggers who will leave comments, but my goal is to write about St. Paul and about real estate and it is a lot of fun to come up number one in the search engines, organically for keywords that other companies pay for.
Why am I writing all of this? Mostly to explain the undressed network. The idea is to have a local blog because real estate is local. Blogs are not technical, they are about content. What to write and how to write it. The undressed network is not about getting national recognition or about seeing which blogger can have the most real estate professionals reading. It is about building relationships with the consumers who live inside of our computers, so that they will contact us and ask for our help when they need to buy or sell real estate.
I contend that the real estate industry does not yet understand local blogs or the power that we as individuals have on the internet. As an industry we reward bloggers by how many others in the industry read them and have not yet embraced the idea of writing to potential clients. It is about being real and local and giving consumers the information they are looking for. It is about honesty and integrity and yes even undressing. In writing we are undressing online. We are exposing our beliefs, values and ideas. That takes courage but it is powerful.
I guess I have just exposed my beliefs and values about real estate blogs. It is OK to have a national blog, I have one of those too, and I read them, but if the intent is to win business try a local or neighborhood blog. National bloggers have a lot more competition because there are so many of them. There is almost no competition for local bloggers making it a great opportunity for agents who want to have a strong web presence that generates business.
