Real Estate Weblogging 101: Wringing actual commerce out of your commercial weblog

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m engaged in a debate with Dustin Luther at his place, but the issues are important enough that I want to highlight some of my remarks here. The meta-issue: Is linking back and forth among real estate weblogs an effective marketing strategy for a consumer-focused, client-seeking real estate weblog, or do other marketing techniques offer greater promise of financial rewards?

Notably:

[S]earch engines are suboptimal as a source of traffic for niche-based, consumer-focused weblogs. They’re going to get their long-tail searches anyway, but search-engine borne visitors are loosely-motivated and rapidly-bouncing. The objective should be to build relationships with future clients and to forge alliances that will result in even more of those relationships. Done right, the weblog doesn’t need search engine traffic — and the practitioner is immune to competition.

Professionals learning from experts is a great idea, which is why BloodhoundBlog is what it is. Professionals chatting with each other, as with Active Rain, is more than anything a pleasant diversion, a plausibly harmless waste of time. Professionals sending their prospects off to BloodhoundBlog or 4realz is a poor marketing strategy.

I’m sorry, Dustin. You’re simply wrong about this. It is to my benefit that so many locally-focused and hyperlocal weblogs blogroll BloodhoundBlog. But it almost certainly is not to their interest, nor is the conversation among such weblogs, nor is the incestuous cronyism among the webloggers — at least not on those weblogs. Flying fish don’t actually fly, and there is no rational convergence between fish and fowl.

Inadvertently, this becomes a commercial for BloodhoundBlog Unchained. We won’t teach you how to have fun publicly noodging other weblogs from what should be your office on the internet, but we will show you how to run a commercial weblog as a business.

More:

The larger topic is interesting to me, though, so maybe I’ll write about it. There is an extent to which the RCG model does a disservice to the idea of real estate weblogging. I make a point of telling our readers that what BloodhoundBlog does is not what they should do. Many of the major RE.net weblogs are modeled on RCG to greater and lesser extents. BHB was until December of 2006. That kind of hybrid might have made sense at the time, but it makes less and less sense now. We elected to go all industry. Some of those early weblogs have opted to go all consumer-focused. Most of those relatively few survivors are straddling the line. If it works for them, that’s fine. But the point about first movers is that it will be less and less likely to work for new entrants. And, all other factors aside, it is certainly a less-that-ideal strategy for actually forging client relationships — not leads, relationships.

Still more:

Dustin: “If someone wants free search engine traffic that amounts to more than a few dozen hits a day, then they will need to do more than write about niche topics for six months.”

This is the Fallacy of the False Dichotomy, and falling for it leads to a very poor strategy for promoting consumer-focused weblogs and the businesses they are built to sustain. Random, over-the-transom search-engine-borne traffic can turn into business. But actively engaging the community of potential clients face-to-face, with collateral material, by engaging other weblogs focused on those people, etc., is far more likely to result in actual cash-money business now and enduringly.

I am talking to the inlookers here, and I’ll take this up again at BloodhoundBlog, although we’ve discussed issues like this many times before. Your time and marketing budget are limited. Focusing your marketing efforts on other real estate webloggers may be fun, and it may make you feel like you’re in with the in crowd, but it is a less that optimal use of finite resources.

Your time is much better spent engaging your actual clients, past, present and future. To the extent that weblogging and weblog-promotion fit into that strategy, these, too, should be focused on actual, real, live, known-and-identified individual people.

Your weblog will attract a certain number of strangers no matter what, but marketing consists of selling real things to real people, not cavorting with other people in the business as a means of attracting unknown people in unknown locations with unknown motivations. A blind pig finds an acorn every now and then, but — if you’re not blind — why wouldn’t you keep your eyes on the acorns all the time?

Brian Brady calls me a farmer, and farming is in fact an excellent way to get your food — provided you’re not already starving. If you are, you’re better off working as Brian identifies himself, as a hunter. But hunters hunt for identified prey, and they don’t wait for the game to come to them — they go out and get it.

My general thoughts on the weblogging part of this strategy are taken up in detail at RealEstateWeblogging101.com. And we’ll be taking everything — hunting, farming, feasting — to the next level at BloodhoundBlog Unchained.

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