Thread: It does surprise me that there are no blogs

as of yet. I've been blogging real estate for about 8 months, but its hard to find others (in real estate-especially in NY) that care to express the level of transparency that a blog offers the public. check out:URBANFOTO and LOFTBLOG

I'd love to know what you think. As a real estate agent, I tend to be a little more artistic than most, so as to "buffer the bullshit" that most agents in NY dish. I study urban anthropology (more specifically, gentrification) and currently i plan to aquire a phd--essentially, I create my own subject matter. If this is interesting to you, write me and we can discuss. I look forward to checking out all of your blogs....best regards, justin

I'm not too surprised there aren't more real estate blogs. As a matter of fact, I'm quite pleased that the market isn't saturated with real estate blogs. It makes it easier for those of use who have one to gain positions in the SERP's!

My real estate news blog is Arizona Real Estate News, http://www.ArizonaRealEstateNews.com and it is gaining momentum! I emailed over 1100 past, current and potential clients about it a few weeks ago and the response has been great (especially the added traffic I get now)!

Asking an agent to post a paragraph or two once a week amounts to overloading them with work

Seriously, I see on overwhelming majority of agents either trying to hit a home run (one multi-million dollar sale) or sitting around waiting for someone to call or drop by their office.

We ask our agents to give us 1/2 hour each month. A few easy blog posts and 2 or 3 paragraphs for a newsletter for us to format and distribute. Sometimes it's like pulling teeth.

Then we have some super agents in our market. One of them is consistently among the top 2-3 Realtors in the nation each year for overall sales. Not only does he work his tail off, but he sells everthing from $200k homes (that's the low end price in our market) to $15m homes. Base hit or home run, he takes them all.

Blogs and newsletters are high tech relationship building and sales tools. I'm truly surprised that more agents do not put an effort into this aspect of their business.

If you guys want you can PM Martin here for Free Real Estate Blogs. Here is an example for Coronado Real Estate

Originally Posted by SiteTutor

If you guys want you can PM Martin here for Free Real Estate Blogs. Here is an example for Coronado Real Estate

Is there an advantage to having a blog with realestateforum url as opposed to having a blog from your own site?

The main advantage I can see is when you give a link to your site(s). It has more weight from RealEstateForum.com when going to your site than from your own site to your own site.

Does that make sense?

Truthfully, I've never visited a blog I liked. I'm not purposely being anti-blog -- I just don't "get" why blogs are popular (at least to readers).

Forums I get because they are interactive. Short headers where you can read the post and provide feedback. It is interactive.

Blogs just sit there. A bunch of stuff on a page. If you remember, that's what web sites used to be like in the olden days. One long page of stuff.

Then, we learned people would rather click than scroll. Short pages developed with internal navigation. To me, it seems like blogs are going backwards, not forwards.

How many people actually READ any blogs? I don't. Do you?

Originally Posted by RealEstate ABC

How many people actually READ any blogs? I don't. Do you?

shucks! I just wrote a whole bunch and lost everything...

well, I'll make it simple - Yes, I read blogs and a lot of them.
Try the following:
http://www.seroundtable.com - Search Engine Marketing related blog by Barry Schwartz (aka http://www.rustybrick.com ). Covers the most important SEM related topics from a lot of related forums, SE conferences and news. Very professional and informative.
http://battellemedia.com/ - another very informative search engine blog.

There are whole bunch of blogs by professionals, Yahoo and Google employees which proved very interesting informations and very often their own comparison, suggestions and experiments.

If you have RSS/XML headlines reader like Siege for FireFox or MyYahoo I would suggest to conntect to a few blogs and just watch their headlines for a few day - those that don't say anything useful will get deleted and the most interesting ones will stay.

BTW RSS/XML feeds are very useful not only for blogs, but for forums and your site too Terry - if you write your articles on regular bases RSS feed would let people know about the new material immediately and would drive direct traffic. Plus RSS feeds help index new articles faster (at least from my experience).

I understand your thoughts about blogs, but looks like you haven't found ones that you would like. I'm not big fan of private blogs where people write what they ate this morning and how sucked friday evening because there wesn't anything good on TV. But there are planty of professional and very interesting written blogs that are pretty competitive with news web sites.

I recently started 2 blogs:

Sarasota Real Estate News

This one ranks #5 and #6 in Google for "Sarasota Real Estate News"

My other blog is:

Bradenton Real Estate News

This site is brand new so it won't be found yet (except MSN). Don't ask me if I am doing this blog correctly.

Originally Posted by marcinsarasota

I recently started 2 blogs:

Sarasota Real Estate News

This one ranks #5 and #6 in Google for "Sarasota Real Estate News"

My other blog is:

Bradenton Real Estate News

This site is brand new so it won't be found yet (except MSN). Don't ask me if I am doing this blog correctly.

Are you looking for others to post on your blogs? Posting on each others' blogs can be a fun way to exchange links.