Scale your locally-focused real estate weblog down to the size of a good time. Why? Because there’s no place like home . . .

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri has a weblog. It’s just a prototype for now. She’s shopping for theme so that we can make something truly unique and Daytonacious. I am by now at the point where I can set up a WordPress weblog in my sleep, which is lucky because, with 23 hosting accounts still to be moved, that on top of the normal crush, I’m not sleeping very much.

Teri already owned the domain, so all I had to do was redirect the nameservers to our new semi-dedicated file server. I keep a standing folder of WordPress-the-way-I-like-it on my desktop, so I copied that in, created the database, plugged the files into the database and — Eureka! Done.

A lot easier to say it than to do it, for most of us. My experience this weekend taught me a new trick, and this is strictly for the propeller-beanie set: If you have a certain way of setting up WordPress weblogs, you can save yourself the effort of setting your preferences with each new installation. Here’s how: Get a prototypical weblog set up the way you like ’em — settings, plug-ins, the works — then save a back-up of that set-up to your hard disk along with all your set-up files. When you make a new clean installation, inherit that backup into your new database. The new install will be a mirror of your prototype, fully-formed and fully-armed.

If you’re a propeller-wanna-beanie, Dave Smith of The Real Estate Blog Lab has prepared a step-by-step tutorial on setting up a WordPress weblog from scratch.

But: That’s really the easy part. In my view, the hard part of setting up a locally-oriented real estate weblog is scaling things down to what Robert Mosescalled “the size of a good time.” Moses built Jones Beach, among many other enormous masterpieces, but he was always aware of the small touches that would make people feel at home within his immense vision.

So what are we looking for? Hmmm… There’s no place like it, and, when you go there, they have to take you in…

We’re looking for home, of course. If I could lay one blanket complaint against locally-oriented real estate weblogs — allowing for particular exceptions — it’s that they are way too much locale-oriented and way too little focused on — what? — on homes and families.

Russell Shaw is beyond brilliant, and BloodhoundBlog is very lucky to have him as a contributor. But if no one learns anything else from Russell, please read, learn, mark and inwardly digest this sliver of his genius: Buyers don’t want agents, they want a house.

The very first thing I want to see at your neighborhood/community/town-focused real estate weblog is a house. A nice, big, homey house, with a welcoming front door. I want to see a gleeful little girl on a swing-set and a Chocolate Labrador playing Frisbee with her brother. I want to see the Spring flowers and the Autumn foliage and the glowing of Christmas candles — all at the same time. I know you can’t do all that, but I want to feel that way anyway.

I want for you to have made me feel instantly at home.

At a minimum, that means adapting the stock weblog theme you’ve adopted. Okayfine. Get on it or hire it out. First impressions are lasting. If you don’t sell me on the idea that there is no place like your home on the web, I’m movin’ on. Buyers don’t want agents, they want a house.

In truth, I think your target market should be sellers, not buyers, but it’s going to be people with their buyer’s hat on — even if they need to sell their current home to buy the next one — who are going to come shopping at your weblog. All is not lost. Even when your buyers put their devastatingly logical seller’s hat back on, they want to know that you can market to buyers. Plus which, they want to believe that you have plenty of buyers to bring. Buyers should hate Dual Agency, even though for the most part they don’t. Sellers love Dual Agency — at least in the abstract.

In any case, what I want to see are houses, lots and lots of houses. When I’m writing at BloodhoundBlog, I tend never to use an image except when I have to for clarity’s sake. I abhor the notion that readers — that would be you — can’t read without interstitial graphic relief. But there is no better passive tool for selling a house than photography. Here’s my outline of the ideal locally-oriented weblog post:

• Headline
• Photo
• Brief copy
• The “more” tag
• Many more photos
• Much more copy
• Links to relevant sites and documents

This is nothing like a BloodhoundBlog post. I don’t even know how to use the “more” tag. But what we’re doing, essentially, is building a single-page website for the home with the weblog entry as its teaser. Buyers want houses. Sellers want to see houses being marketed. Give the people what they want, for goodness’ sakes.

The headline is address-specific and locale-specific, along with giving the reader a promised benefit for reading the copy: “Are you longing for country living without the commute? Beavercreek’s 517 North Pastoral Lane is a mini-ranch in the midst of everything.” The copy should emphasize those long-tail keywords again, and the photos should be big and beautiful.

(How big? I really like 640 x 480 pixels, and this is a factor you should take into consideration when picking your weblog theme. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of small video monitors out there, so you probably need to limit yourself to a theme no wider than 800 pixels. Ergo, you may need to lay hands on photo editing software that will reduce whatever your camera produces to whatever your weblog can support. Do not scale images in HTML. You’ll waste your readers’ bandwidth and the results can be hideous, especially in Microsoft Internet Explorer.)

You can do other stuff — news, upcoming events, community involvement — but I want to see a lot of houses. Your own listings, your competitors’ listings — even homes that you just happen to like and want to draw attention to. Everything is done with permission, of course, and I would make all comments moderated, so you can kill the graffiti before anyone sees it. But I don’t think there is any content that is as important, overall, to a locally-focused real estate weblog than the regular promotion of well-photographed houses.

(I have another take on this subject that we’ll get to in a future post.)

Passing notes: Tony Marriott is playing long-tail games — and winning. Jonathan Dalton has started a similar experiment.

Homework: Get a weblog set up if you haven’t done this yet. Whittle your own if you’re of that bent, hire it out, or take a hybrid solution from a vendor like WordPress.com. Pick a theme you think expresses what you want to convey — in the main — then adapt it to your particular needs. Then: Start blogging. You should have content ready from the previous assignment, so get it in there and see how it works. Revise yourself to perfection.
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