Project Blogger is over — I think. Truly the fun never starts, but the drama never stops. I mostly ignored everything except the work Teri Lussier and I did here, at TheBrickRanch.com and at RealEstateWeblogging101.com. The contest pretty much ignored me, too, an unexpected delight.
We didn’t win — as nearly as I can tell. We developed a full-blown viral marketing strategy for locally-focused real estate weblogs, then codified the frolicking thing in a blogbook — itself something new under the sun. Teri understood what we were aiming for, but she understood it in her bones before we got down to business. To my knowledge, none of the other contestants paid the slightest bit of attention to what we were doing, even though we did it all in public.
All that’s as may be. I personally have been less than enthralled by the writing on the contestants’ blogs, but I confess to not having much tolerance for local blogs. To write about things of small importance, you really have to be able to write. I picked Teri to suffer through this with me because she writes so engagingly.
Pat Kitano was the judge for the last week of the competition, and he got to bathe in all that Project Blogger drama. One of the things he did that I thought was very smart was running Technorati rankings on each of the contestant’s weblogs.
This just by itself elicited complaints, which I thought were kind of funny. We said for months that the important thing is viral networking, with SEO factors taking a back seat. So the folks who listened not a word when we were demonstrating how to make a family of your farm were quick to pump their fists and shout, “Linking doesn’t matter.”
That’s not quite true. I wrote this in email to Teri tonight:
Technorati Authority is not vital to your purposes, since the users you want will find you by other means — local blogrolls, comments you make on local blogs, face-to-face contact, your local advertising, etc. But significant linkage from other websites will help your Google PageRank, which will help potential clients — locals, relos, investors — find you.
SEO is second, but it ain’t last.
And: Teri comes in first place in the objective category of Technorati Authority, the number of unique weblogs linking in to a particular weblog within the last 180 days. Why did she win in that category? When I recommended that contestants enter a ProBlogger weblogging competition, only Teri followed through.
There is icing on this cake: TheBrickRanch.com has a Page Rank of 4, another category Teri dominates. We devoted zero attention to SEO factors — and I think now I can get her up to PR5 at the next recalculation. She just wrote in a way that attracted links — starting, of course, with links from BloodhoundBlog.
In fact, that Page Rank will only help with over-the-transom search-engine-engendered visitors to her weblog. The real job is still the viral marketing job. But if there are local people, relocators or investors to be snared from search engine traffic, Teri is by now a very potent force in Dayton-area real estate.
Following Pat Kitano’s lead, I ran objective tests on all the contestants’ weblogs, including those that had essentially dropped out of the competition. I’m not kvetching about the results, I’m just interested to see how they performed in terms we all can understand. Some did fairly well, but others were all-but-invisible to the world of search engines.
Here are links to the contestant’s weblogs:
- Juilie Ferenzi
- Teri Lussier
- Ines Hegedus-Garcia
- Tisza Major-Posner
- Vali Wimberly
- Kelly Kilpatrick
- Jackie Colson-Miller
- Kevin Tomlinson
- Michael Daly
- London Whitted
- Madison Hildebrand
- Mary Pope-Handy
This is a delicate dance. The focus has to be local, and the content has to be viral in the way that we worked out here. But, even so, a locally-focused real estate weblog has to have some kind of SEO power, or, like some of these weblogs, it will be all but entirely unfindable.
In any case, Teri and I won everything that we could have hoped to win in this contest: She built a great viral weblog, and I got to meet and recruit another great writer for BloodhoundBlog. I wish every good fortune to the other contestants as they sail forth to blog in peace, without half the world looking over their shoulders. If you’re having fun weblogging, the people reading you will have fun, too.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Brian Brady says:
Greg,
Where can one can this data about his/her site?
July 17, 2007 — 10:37 pm
Todd Carpenter says:
Here’s how I would have judged the whole thing. Who garnered the most commercial success? Real leads, listing, potential buyers… anything. It seems to me that other RE bloggers are the worst people to be judging such a contest.
July 17, 2007 — 11:00 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Where can one can this data about his/her site?
Technorati: Search on the URL.
Page Rank: Paste in the URL.
Google: Search on link:http://theURL.dom/
Yahoo Site Explorer: Search on the URL.
July 17, 2007 — 11:13 pm
Tisza says:
Hi Greg,
Thank you for the information, I am still very much a work in progress (and my site is as well 🙂 so getting the opportunity to learn all that I have has been a wonderful gift.
I was very pleased to see Teri’s placement on week 13’s judging. It was great to see the writing and the blog as a whole being rewarded. Teri’s skill and style as a writer has never been in question and it has always been a pleasure reading her contributions.
Since we share a similar community size, there is much to learn here. Actually, one of the things that has made this experience the most challenging has been the competion aspect. As a blogger who wants to have the most successful site she can, sometimes when I see something great on someone elses site I want to use it on mine as well. But, as a competitor, I don’t want to “copy”. Now that the competion portion has concluded, I am asking for your advice on how you would suggest I improve.
Thanks for all that you have done for Teri and for all of us as well.
Take care, help lots of people and have a wonderful day!
Tisza
July 17, 2007 — 11:40 pm
Jay Thompson says:
Nice analysis. Search results ARE important, for if they can not find you, they will not come.
July 18, 2007 — 6:51 am
Greg Swann says:
> Now that the competion portion has concluded, I am asking for your advice on how you would suggest I improve.
Our best advice is collected at Real Estate Weblogging 101. As much as I might seem to emphasize search results in this post, I see them as an ancillary factor. The main job of a consumer-oriented real estate weblog is to engender a community of readers who will use and refer you and no one else.
That’s a long-term strategy. SEO can help by bringing you some near-term business, but my expectation is that other means of prospecting should be even more effective for that. In the long run, your weblog will attract the traffic you want organically. In the short run, we’re all praying for rain. 😉
Good luck to you!
July 18, 2007 — 8:16 am
Brian Brady says:
Thanks for the resources.
July 18, 2007 — 8:20 am
Derek Burress says:
Teri is amazing… I wrote about her site on my blog last night as sort of a addendum to the post I sent her via email when the project started.
I love Teri’s blog plus her interview has helped me a lot in terms of long tail. You should see some of the terms people have found my blog through – lots of Dayton, Ohio terms, smoke shop terms for tobacco shops in Huber Heights, etc.
July 18, 2007 — 12:34 pm
Art Blanchet says:
Great work together (can’t spell collaboration)!
You might feel like the John Wooden as he “coached” Lew Alcindor into being 7’2″ tall. The giant was emerging; Wooden just had to guide him a little around his future kingdom.
Teri can write! And write! You won and can share a well-deserved Bloscar.
Amazing accomplishment – and focus.
July 18, 2007 — 2:52 pm
Sock Puppet says:
Isn’t it all a little bit like judging a beauty competition based on the contestants baby photos though?
All early days yet.
July 18, 2007 — 4:34 pm
Teri Lussier says:
I think it’s too early to judge success as well, as these are all baby blogs.
In terms of the contest, I made a mistake early on and took your advice literally, spending weeks seeing what I could accomplish in just about an hour a day. Once I realized that wasn’t going to work for the contest, I did pick up the pace, and we had more consistent competition results, although it was too late to ‘win’.
Perhaps we lost the battle but won the war. Greg’s coaching gave TBR great bones, and I now have a blog I love and good skills and ideas for both the long haul and the real work of marketing to my community.
July 19, 2007 — 1:47 pm
Kevin Tomlinson says:
Teri
Like I have said before, I wouldn’t count yourself out.
I consider you the “quiet giant” of the competition.
July 19, 2007 — 4:20 pm
Mike Thoman says:
Greg and Brian: you can check most of these measures more quickly using dnscoop.com or smartpagerank.com – the only thing missing is the technorati part. I think that the Google Page Rank update, which is going on right now, may cause you to see a faulty picture of the numble of backlinks in google. When I check google backlinks right now, for example, I only see 5. That’s normal and they’ll bounce back. Also, using the www and non-www version of your URL will cause you to see different results.
Greg and Terri: You’ve laid a really solid foundation here. Good job. I would venture to say that she really doesn’t need to worry about improving her page rank, which will get exponentially harder to do.
Congratulations on your ‘win!’
July 20, 2007 — 8:25 am
Hunter Jackson says:
I truly do wish I would have been around in the days or project blogger…maybe start a new one up greg?
June 17, 2008 — 5:26 pm
Greg Swann says:
> I truly do wish I would have been around in the days or project blogger…
We documented everything we did at Real Estate Weblogging 101. I’m getting ready to install WordPress Multi-User. Maybe later this Summer we’ll built the prefect hypothetical hyperlocal real estate weblog as a skunk works project.
June 17, 2008 — 7:31 pm