Jim Kimmons at RealEstateBusinessSuccess.com Blog has come up with yet another simple solution to the issue of using local real estate weblogging content as bait for leads. That makes four of these, by now, I think.
Okayfine. Jim may have the better mousetrap for two reasons: He’s linking directly to the blogging Realtor’s IDX search page. And he’s teaching his wanna-bloggers how to scour Google News for local content.
Do we want to declare static-content real estate websites dead? We just might. Do we want to declare real estate weblogs ascendant? If we do, can we take a moment to count how many Realtors we expect to be local-blogging (in some form) in any particular locale? How many spots are there on the first Google page again? Is it plausible that, a year from now, local-blogging Realtors will have traded static-content Google-obscurity for blogged (or pseudo-blogged) Google-obscurity? Have I made a mistake in my arithmetic?
I do not like the trolling-for-leads model of real estate weblogging. Local real estate weblogs that deliver real value are treasured resources. But the more people focus on SEO tricks or copywriting tricks or quid pro quo tricks, the more real estate weblogs start to look to me like just another form of advertising.
This is not the end of the world. It’s just the end of weblogging. It’s arguable to me that commercial weblogging, in se, is abhorrent. BloodhoundBlog doesn’t take advertising because I never want for anyone working here to feel that they might need to temper what they have to say for a pecuniary reason. I have no objection to real estate weblogging that is presented in such a way that readers ought to choose to become clients. But when roping up and tying down clients becomes the overarching objective, I don’t see the difference between that and an Adwords campaign.
At a certain level, it doesn’t even make sense to me. As with an Adwords campaign, the people attracted are a random mass, mostly buyers, often relos-without-relo-packages or people who are sublimely under-qualified financially. Certainly that’s what’s going to emerge from Jim’s new venture: It’s target assumption is that the users are buyers.
What would I want, if I were pre-qualifying over-the-transom leads? How about prosperous sellers looking to move up locally? Jeff Brown knows exactly who he wants: Investors with at least a moderate stable income and available real estate equity or accessible savings.
How would you get folks like those, or other market segments targeted to deliver more dollars than heartaches? I think you have to deliver value over the long haul. I don’t even know if a prosperous seller is going to be swayed by a weblog. You’re probably much better off hitting home-run after home-run with your listings — and listing homes as close and ever-closer to your target-market as you can get. Certainly no investor worth working with is going to call you on the spur of the moment, having seen one weblog post — I don’t care where — that turned up at the spin of the Google-dial.
Here is a way of thinking of a local real estate weblog that to makes sense to me: As another form of farming. We farm neighborhoods, warm networks, clubs, professions, our own past clients.
We say over and over again that a weblog is a community, and I don’t think there is any way of escaping this, in the long run. I don’t want to escape it, but huge SEO-driven results from real estate weblogging will be a short-run phenomenon for all but a lucky few, just as huge results from static web sites go to the lucky few right now. There are ten spots on the first Google page, and only one first spot. Number eleven prays a lot. Number thirty-one doesn’t even bother to whimper.
So what would be the point of treating a local real estate weblog like a farm? To farm it, of course. As with your warm network, if you act like The Real Estate King, you’re going to drive everyone away. But if you can build a stable and growing community of people who stop by to hear what you have to say, you will be nurturing and cultivating clients as a secondary consequence. And they will be self-selected clients who are responding to you, not to a picture of a house or simply a random urge. If you tailor your content — like Jeff Brown — to deliver precisely the message you want to deliver to precisely those people you want to hear it, you should have good luck, over time, at attracting the people you want to target market.
I have written before about how to connect with people locally. At that time, I mentioned that I have an insanely great idea for local real estate weblogging. I thought of this last Summer, so I’ve been sitting on it for close to nine months. It’s time to give it birth. We’ll talk about it with Teri, first, and then see who else can make it work.
I think Jim Kimmons has a great idea. It may succeed fantastically as a lead-generator. But it will fail as weblogging because it isn’t weblogging. It’s a decoy devised to do something that looks like weblogging to generate a lead. That’s fine, but it’s no different from any other decoy Realtors use — open houses, ad calls, sign calls, etc. — to snare buyers by deceptive means. Certainly, Jim’s ad-supported business model is preferable to all the fee-splitting lead vultures out there, so he deserves two-and-a-half cheers just for the chance that he might put them out of business.
But real real estate weblogging is a different thing, with a different way of working and different objectives. Jim’s way might work as well as an Adwords campaign. But true weblogging has the power to engender vast new warm networks — not just clients but life-long clients who are also friends…
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Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
John L. Wake says:
Okay, Greg this is a subject I’m very interested in… and in fact I’ve created yet another local real estate blog.
http://www.mccormickranchrealestatehomes.com .
Have you ever noticed that a common strategy used by many successful Realtors is to become an area specialist? One of the most successful Realtors in my part of Scottsdale specializes in one community. She is the “name” Realtor in that community. And there are several others like her each specializing in their own communities.
“Those Callaways,” for example, specialize in 85254 and Russell Shaw said on one of your interviews that they do more business than he does. Wow!
I don’t think a local blog will be enough to get established in a community, I assume direct mail will also be needed and a lot more, but a local blog could be a key component.
The unique feature in the local blogs I set up is the “homes sold” data. I email the data into the blog once a week. The email/post is generated by a Perl program similar to the one I’ve used for over 5 years to create the Home Sale News e-newsletters (HomeSaleNews.com).
My goal is to cherry pick the communities I want to sponsor/blog and eventually sell sponsorships for other Arizona communities.
This would have search engine advantages as well as community learning advantages. Local blogs are evolving quickly and if a group of like-minded bloggers share their successes and failures, they will have a better chance of success… and it would be more fun.
I think James Kimmons’s is right on target, “posting about their local area to include real estate, events, tourism, restaurants, business, politics and other community and local information.”
Or the way I say it, “This blog is about homes in McCormick Ranch and living in McCormick Ranch.”
Greg, you worry about a flood of bloggers and only 10 decent positions in 3 major search engines.
I don’t worry about it.
Blogging is easy for you but it’s not for most agents. For example, I created 2 blogs that I provided free for 2007 to a couple of friends in exchange for them helping me to debug the system. Both are super intelligent Realtors who are excited about the blogs.
However, in almost one month, between the two of them, they generated a grand total of two posts (until today).
I’m not expecting to find a flood of Realtors with the technical knowledge AND the writing ability of a Greg Swann, Teresa Boardman or Jim Cosgrove. (BTW, I hope to achieve a “voice” in my local blogs similar to Jim Cosgrove’s voice in mainecoastpropertiesblog.com.)
I think the bigger problem will be how few leads are generated when you rank in the top of the search engines for a community name.
Nevertheless, there are additional advantages. I’m tired. Good night.
March 20, 2007 — 12:56 am
Jim Kimmons says:
Greg:
As always, your posts and comments are never bland and the reader has no problem discerning where you stand on a topic.
Actually, I’m pretty pleased with your post….I think? It’s a way for the non-blogger to get on board and actually do something that might bring some business. I’m OK with your assessment as to whether it’s blogging or not. If we took the (L) from Leads and called it “Logging”, I’d be OK with that too.
Thanks for the exposure.
March 20, 2007 — 8:20 am
Greg Swann says:
John: You’re running ahead of me, but in just the right direction.
Jim: I do believe that, of the four sites doing this, you have the better mousetrap. I hope beyond hope that you can snuff out other forms of lead generation. What you’re doing doesn’t qualify as weblogging, by me, but it doesn’t have to. It’s a brilliant approach to the problem, and I hope it slays giants in the marketplace.
March 20, 2007 — 8:51 am
Loren Nason says:
Well Said Greg
Loren
March 20, 2007 — 7:50 pm