Ok…In my last post I set today as my personal deadline for posting part 2 of 365 in my Mega Monster Broker Blog Experiment….
So here we go.
But first things first.
Nobody reached out and volunteered to pay me the big bucks….
Bummer. But don’t cry for me. Rejection has forced the establishment of a model for this thing that might actually allow for the accomplishment of the holy grail in Real Estate blogging.
Yep. I think I may have actually figured out a way to get a large group of agents consistently blogging! And of course, the local broker pimp is nowhere to be found in this wicked little piece of innovation…
Fun Digression
I realize that my warnings that this would be a costly venture probably scared a lot of BHB readers from getting in touch with me, but I was surprised that none of these York Pa Area brokerages even responded to my emailed offers to talk to them about proceeding with this project locally. Even those recruiting fiends at KW didn’t respond to try to land me as an agent. (Ouch!)
My response? A Well Meaning “You Still Check Your Email Guys?”
And a…
(Self-Censored, Click At Your Own Risk)
if you didn’t respond because you don’t see the value in the idea…
🙂
Proceeding Without A Broker…
Here’s the thinking: Since I haven’t been picked up by one brokerage, I’m free to recruit agent contributor’s from amongst any of the thousands currently practicing in the CentralPa region, right? And with no interloping brokers there will be more left on the table for the agent contributor’s, right? I think so…
So HeyCentralPa.Com will be exactly what I said it would be a few days ago – A monster online publication written and sustained by a cooperative group of real estate agents looking to farm individual neighborhoods or niches by blowing the local chunks. The only difference – these agents won’t all come from the same office, and no one broker will benefit from the blood sweat and tears of their content contributions. Instead, HeyCentralPa.Com will run as a cooperative, with all agent partners receiving their fair share of the spoils.
What what what?
I feel your questions coming because they’ve been keeping me awake at night for days now. So let’s address a few of them:
Q. What Exactly Will The Agents Get Out Of This?
A. A pre-packaged, easy to manage web presence along with guidance from yours truly that will help them dominate a niche. Plus, they’ll get a share of ad revenues for years to come. Plus when this thing sells to the Tribune Company for big bucks, they’ll get a fair share of the profits.
Q. Who Will Get The Leads?
A. Whoever’s most appropriate based on the geographic or niche related nature of the lead of course!
Q. What about the IDX/Property Search?
A. DWELLICIOUS BABY, DWELLICOUS! And of course, individual agent partners will be free to divert traffic over to their own search pages if they’d like.
Q. What profits?
A. We’re going to become very attractive to local advertisers by creating incredible, locally focused, diverse content and delivering it to hungry former newspaper readers via a monster monster aweber list + blog broadcast setup.
Q. What will the agents write about and How will you get them to contribute?
A. Simple. Membership in the cooperative will be contingent upon agents following a very simple content creation schedule complete with templates, suggestions, and of course the ongoing expert guidance of yours truly!
Q. Ryan, you’re friggin nuts. What’s in it for you? (Are you going to run any of those juicy leads? )
A. ( No…I don’t plan to establish a practice locally, so no leads for me. I’ve come to realize that I’m too distracted with all this tech type stuff to be able to live up to the fiduciary duties that go along with working with the public.
But hey…As I said in the original post…. I do intend to get paid! So I’m thinking about retaining a fair share percentage of the site’s ownership?
What do you guys think would be fair for this “share?”
I don’t want to take too much because I want to make sure the agent partners are properly incentivized. The leads and the training should be motiviation enough, I know, but lets be real here. It’s the allure of cold hard cash that’ll get em bloggin…
So, What Do You Think?
Am I hugging a doable tree with all this co-op talk? Any input/participation/guidance that I can get in the comments below will be very much appreciated…
(And Oh yeah, I almost forgot…As promised, the first 2 “How-To-What-To-Do Screencasts” are up over at HouseYourMom.Com! )
Teri Lussier says:
Oh dang. I don’t want to be the first to comment, but my day is about to get really bi-zay, so here goes:
Um. Ryan, about that animation… I’m a mom and uh well… oh nevermind.
This smells like that great social engineering experiment called Localism and I’m scared, and maybe not too smart. Give me the pitch. Address my objections. Tell me why this is different. 🙂
April 16, 2009 — 12:27 pm
Ryan Hartman says:
Thanks Teri…
You’re right all around. From now on, I’m gonna go with a WWTS (what would teri say) approach to pushing the limit, so I’ve self censored the image. 🙂
And…yeah it is like Localism, except the contributors don’t have to pay and instead will benefit from enhancing the value of the publication.
But that does cause me to stop and think. Perhaps the ads/profit motive is a big mistake. Instead, the attention that contributing agents (and I) get for our our personal businesses should be enough, right?
Ok…actually makes it more fun and simpler. My new proposition to would-be contributors — “This is going to be tons of fun. It’s not going to cost you anything except for some time. Plus, you’ll get business from this and so will I?”
April 16, 2009 — 1:02 pm
James Boyer says:
Hi Ryan, You continue to show that you are out there, way out there. But that is good, because that is likely what it takes to be monster successful in the long run, or go broke I guess.
Keep it up man, if nothing else you are highly entertaining.
Jim
April 16, 2009 — 1:10 pm
Rob Chipman says:
Hey Ryan:
How you get so lightly with the self-censored “your mom” slays me, but I am absolutely not going any further down that road!
Very interesting idea, and I’m going to keep a close eye on it. I’ve had a hard time getting my agents to buy into blogging for leads/web presence, even thoug we can already draw a straight line between the what we’ve done on the web and the deposit book. Its been somewhat like pushing string, but the fault is probably more with my execution than the idea. I look forward to watching this develop.
April 16, 2009 — 3:36 pm
Teri Lussier says:
Hey Ryan- No censorship for my benefit, please- I was just teasing you. 🙂
>if you didn’t respond because you don’t see the value in the idea…
Yup.
Create a hyper-local Zillow. Create an interface for consumers and agents to have hyper-local conversations, get their own HCPestimate (I like that name!) Who wants to read a bunch of agents blabbing about the local Easter parade? I want to hear little Johnny talk about his first community egg hunt, no, I want to see Johnny’s first hunt with video. And watch Mom and G-ma get all teary eyed as they watch. Then a very tiny call to action wrapped up in a PS/ Oh-by-the-way about local market prices.
A lotta work for a single agent. Easier for a brokerage or a team, with a geek who can work up an estimator thingy. Yeah. Anyway. I’ll go back to watching. 🙂
April 16, 2009 — 6:52 pm
Ryan Hartman says:
Teri,
That’s sorta what I have in mind. The individual area pages will look a lot like this, where the content is largely automatic, dynamic and plentiful, but also integrates the fluffy bloggy agent stuff (along with the agent’s contact info, etc.)
A lot of the other stuff I have in mind pertains specifically to what/when/where/why of the content that will be expected of agent partners. For example, it will be recommended that participating agents do 1 business review each week.
The desired effect? The Belly-to-belly interaction with the business owner and the putting of said business owner’s venture in “lights” might increase the agents sphere/reach?
I guess what I have in mind is less of a localism type “platform” and more of a “system” whereby agents are semi-forced into enhancing 1.0 cat skinning with a little 2.0 voodoo magic (and/or vice versa).
Don’t know if I’m making any sense here…but bottom line is this. I really appreciate your questions, because as Greg mentioned in an earlier comment about writing solidifying thoughts (or something) it’s the scenius type stuff going on here that will hopefully force some fun synthesis…
And along those lines and fwiw, Teri… I knew you were kidding about my little mom.gif… but your comment made me realize that I might have been unnecessarily distracting from the overall integrity of what my real goal is here — not to get laughs, [while possibly offending some nice folks], but to get some help with pushing this idea a little further on down the track…
April 16, 2009 — 7:37 pm