A couple of great questions from Ronnie Coleman of Gulf Coast Real Estate Services, Inc has prompted my response, and may prompt yours also. Very cool ideas here…
Allen,
A partner and I are hopefully about to launch a real estate blog here in Destin, Florida in the Florida Panhandle. Our market is upscale with about 4 million visitors per year and lots of second and third homes on the coast. My vision and slight slant is to put in play my avocation which is restaurant reviews. I was the restaurant critic here for the newspaper, judged our local wine festivals and have written a small book about our Top 40 Neighborhood Restaurants.
I have two questions — how do you feel about mixing opinioned restaurant reviews (with pictures) with a real estate blog and secondly (and maybe most importantly) should I buy an existing real estate blog template (I’m looking at something from RSS Pieces or should we start it from scratch by ourselves (we have some capability) or hire a local web/blog design firm?
And lastly I notice you have both a website and blog. Because I’m starting anew, I was thinking I would only go with a blog — do you think I need both?
Kindest regards,
Ronnie Coleman
Broker/Owner
Gulf Coast Real Estate Services, Inc.
My Response:
Hello Ronnie.
Excellent to hear from you. I think that your idea of integrating a restaurant review is a fabulous idea from a couple of standpoints. First, if you just started blogging like crazy about restaurants, you’re pretty quickly going to get noticed. But maybe not for what you’d like: real estate.
As I see it, there are a few ways around this. You could target the blog to out of towners who are looking for great places to dine. Featured prominently on the blog landing page would be large ads and hooks that draw people to look at your real estate web site. This has the benefit of adding dual credibility. One is linking to the other. Submit the blog to like minded sites in other cities and become part of a social network of food critics. Again, somewhat restricted real estate inclusion.
You could also launch a website like Agent Xsites that includes the blogging platform with the package, and is actually part of the website. This is probably a better idea. You can reserve a landing page on your real estate site that offers visitors to town some great food reviews. This, if nothing else, can be a great niche marketing idea. Out of towners will, through search engine traffic, find your real estate site by looking for food reviews. A two-edged sword.
If I were to do this, I would come up with a great site URL for the food review section, and one for the real estate side. Then link the food site to the real estate site on a separate landing page. I own 4 URLs: therealtybutler.com, realtybutlerhomes.com, therealtybutlers.com, and sellersuccesskit.com.
Each cost me about 30 bux for a few years. They all point to the same place, except sellersuccesskit.com, which lands on a special marketing page on my existing website.
Regards,
Allen
Jim Frey says:
Ronnie – great idea…connect with neighbors, clients & maybe others….put a personal spin on blog…..
June 25, 2007 — 11:25 am
John L. Wake says:
Ronnie, Mixing restaurants and real estate seems a natural, especially for a tourist town. Anything you’re interested in that is related to living in Destin should work well.
If you have some technical skills you might want to consider rolling your own blog with WordPress.
Probably the first thing you should do is get an IDX website. It will produce more business than anything else you’ll do on the internet. And it is a natural fit with a blog. If they are at your blog to read about real estate they are likely to want to see what’s for sale.
June 26, 2007 — 6:29 pm