About Real Estate Weblogging 101
Real Estate Weblogging 101 emerged from BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry, technology and marketing weblog. Greg Swann of BloodhoundBlog had been writing general-interest posts on real estate weblogging for the first year of the blog’s existence. When the Project Blogger competition came along, Greg recruited Teri Lussier as his apprentice, inviting her to contribute to BloodhoundBlog as she was building her own real estate weblog, TheBrickRanch.com. The two wrote many more posts on real estate weblogging, theory and practice, tricks and techniques, art and commerce.
Greg’s posts comprise the bulk of the “chapters” here, followed by Teri’s. Kris Berg, Brian Brady and Allen Butler, all themselves also intrepid real estate webloggers in their own right, and all of them also BloodhoundBlog contributers, submitted apposite posts of their own. Other prominent real estate webloggers have been invited to submit articles, so this book-in-weblog-form will grow through time, becoming more detailed, more pertinent, more useful as we go along.
There are two sorts of people who might read this book — this weblog doing the job a printed book might once have done.
The first kind is the sort of person who adopts and adapts to new software easily and wants to get a leg up on using that software to the utmost. This book is most definitely targeted to that kind of person.
The second kind is the type of person who is looking for carefully detailed step-by-step instructions for mastering the arcane world of real estate weblogs. This book is probably not for that kind of person.
It’s not that we’re trying to exclude the second type, but the people who contributed their writing to this project are very decidedly of the first type. Hands-on, nuts-and-bolts, get-in-there-and-work-it-out kind of people. For that kind of person, robust weblogging software like WordPress is made to order. There are a few tricky little details to be ironed out, but only a few. After that, the software is fun, fast — and free.
For people who prefer to work things out in a step-by-step kind of way, there are printed books available that might be more appropriate to your needs. Examples include Realty Blogging and WordPress Complete.
A third option is to hire a vendor to do the scut work for money. This is somewhat distasteful, inasmuch as real estate professionals are too often the victims of third-party vendors selling off-the-shelf technology at exorbitant prices. Even so, if you need it, you need it. As deeply satisfying as it might be to control every last detail of your weblogging experience, if you don’t know how, you simply don’t know how.
But this in turn suggests a fourth alternative: WordPress.com (not .org) will provide you with a free weblog on their host. This is not ideal, but you’ll get the power of WordPress at the price charged by the very much inferior Blogger.com.
The point of this discussion is this: Get going. If you can hold your own hand, so much the better. But even if not, real estate weblogging is something you can start today, inching your way toward perfection as you go along.
An apology in advance: This material is intended to help any real estate professional — indeed any professional generally — do a better job of weblogging. But the contributing authors are almost all Realtors. You may have to adapt some of the ideas presented here to your own field of endeavor.
Software bias: As indicated above, the contributing authors are largely biased toward WordPress as a weblogging platform. Blogger, while free, is inadequate to the task of maintaining a useful commercial weblog. MoveableType and TypePad are adequate, and most of the ideas discussed here can be applied with those weblogging platforms, as well as to leading edge systems such as Joomla. If you know enough about weblogging to know about these many different products, go ahead and keep your own counsel. If you can’t tell the difference in a glance between a Blogger.com weblog and one independently-hosted using the latest version of WordPress, you’re probably best off following our lead. We might be biased, but we’re very knowledgeably biased.
Submitting articles: This book is built to grow through time. If you have a standing article or weblog post of general interest to the audience of this book, send it in. If we like it, you’re in. You’ll be named as an author, and we’ll link back to your weblog in the article and on our blogroll. No fortune, alas, but all the fame you can handle.
Comments policy: We encourage a free and spirited debate about the issues we raise here. We police comments with a very light hand, deleting comments and banning commenters only for extreme obscenity, flaming or flame-baiting, plagiarism, spam, impersonation (sock-puppetry) or copyright infringement (a fair-use quotation with a link is fine). Nota bene: When you’re done, you’re done. Anyone can make a mistake, but if your behavior is palpably malicious, you will be banned from RealEstateWeblogging101.com forever.
Privacy policy: Email addresses and any other contact information collected by RealEstateWeblogging101.com are kept in the strictest confidence. Contact information is never shared with third-party vendors, other web sites or telemarketers, nor will anyone from RealEstateWeblogging101.com solicit your business in any way.
Blanket assertion of copyright: Pages, weblog entries, images, audio or audio-visual content and comments on RealEstateWeblogging101.com are the exclusive intellectual property of their authors and are used and archived here by permission. In addition, the form and substance, look and feel, images and user interfaces of RealEstateWeblogging101.com, its syndication feeds and any derivative variations thereof are the exclusive intellectual property of BloodhoundRealty.com, LLC, an Arizona corporation. ALL RIGHTS ARE RESERVED. Republication or resyndication of content originating on RealEstateWeblogging101.com in any form without expressed, written permission from BloodhoundRealty.com, LLC, is prohibited. As provided for in United States Copyright law, a brief fair-use quotation with full attribution and a link back to the source page on RealEstateWeblogging101.com is permitted for non-commercial purposes. Any reuse of content originating on RealEstateWeblogging101.com for commercial purposes is expressly prohibited. BloodhoundRealty.com, LLC, will defend its copyrights to the fullest extent of the law.
June 22nd, 2007 at 7:28 pm
[...] Some of the real Estate Agents and other industry professionals who attended the Conference did not have a blog; they barely knew what a blog was or what it could do. Others were thinking about starting a blog. Still others were there because they thought their blog is not “working.” Time flew by and a little over 2 hours was not nearly enough to quench the audiences’ thirst for information to help them to arrive at their own conclusions about whether or not they wanted to begin to blog or continue to blog. But, early that morning the blog that may become the Holy Grail of Real Estate Weblogging was revealed: Real Estate Weblogging 101. [...]
July 28th, 2007 at 11:11 am
Why not create at least one printed copy and enter it in the next Lulu Blooker Prize competition? If you do, let me know. I have a blog about blooks and the way your blog is set up is super. I’d love to discuss it, particularly the navigation system and WordPress, but I don’t do online books, only the ones who make an eventual appearance in dead tree format. Great site!
March 13th, 2008 at 7:30 am
Our new international real estate blog is on wordpress platform not sure if we have done the right thing?
I am running this by allowing agents to express thier expertise in each region. This again is experimental I go with two heads are better than one and I quite like user generated content.
Whats your experience where do you think i will; get my problems.
March 13th, 2008 at 7:41 am
> I am running this by allowing agents to express thier expertise in each region.
It seems to be working. You have a lot of good content, and the search engines should be your best friend for traffic. What’s the test: Not traffic, not leads but converted sales. If it brings you the business you want, it’s working.
March 13th, 2008 at 7:47 am
We are experiencing new interest in USA real estate from the UK and Europe. Investors are not getting a good deal in the UK at this time and trying to make a capital profit will take them too long. The curreny rates and low low US prices makes it an interesting time. Like the blog if we can link from our to yours for the benefit of our new bloggers I will do so
June 30th, 2008 at 3:31 am
[...] business of Real Estate for the past couple of years and let’s make this project one to write another book about (or at least push the old one out of [...]