Its great to find a community of like minded individuals that make you feel welcome and supported. It appears you have found your “voice”and are exercising it to great effect.

Great quote.

Bill – Hopefully I will see you very soon, but I still felt the need to reply. Its good to hear that even you struggle with it (as well as everyone else that commented). Its easy to think that those that blog and have been doing so for a long time are these superhero type legends and never fail or struggle. I think its a good thing for new agents and new bloggers (and old timers) to hear it once in awhile.

Missy – You and I spoke about this once somewhere (ActiveRain maybe) and much like I said to Bill above, its good to hear it. It gives new bloggers that bit of encouragement (which I must say the RE blogging community is great at) that we all need to push through the first handful of blogs.

Brad N – That’s the best example of how because writing is personal, its much harder to expose yourself to the world for the first time. With you, I think your military experience is a plus. Living in a military town myself, I find that ex-military thrive in real estate. They have the discipline, the structure, and (in San Antonio’s case) the client base and sphere of influence. My best referral source is military and he appreciates my attention to detail…which I find to be a big deal to most military buyers and sellers. I see your link goes to Ft. Hood, so I assume you’ll be working out of that area, so I think the start of your branding should be military. Add to that your personal touches and you can easily build yourself an identity that makes you stand out in the crowd.

Lisa – Your idea of writing privately is great…as long as you eventually do go public. I actually did a bit of that with my personal blog in order to a) question some peers (AG writers gave me a lot of input and helped guide me) and b) get more than one article on there when it went live.

One tip I heard somewhere for people who want to start blogging but haven’t, is to write but not make the blog site public yet. Write articles and practice composing out of the public eye. Maybe share an article or two with a peer. After you write a few, you won’t be able to resist going public. It’s a sickness

Thanks. I am retiring very soon from the military and Real Estate is where I am heading. I currently do some work In the field, mostly Lead maintenance, emails yada yada yada.

I am looking for the best way to brand myself, make myself stick out from the agents in our area. I have wanted to start a blog for a while. While I can kick in a door of an insurgents home and not bat an eye, having someone critique my thoughts and writing style actually makes me a bit timid.

Thanks for the encouragement.

I feel like everyone else was in my head in what they said to you already, so I wouldn’t dare repeat what they put so clearly.Just keep sharing what you think and feel and you and your readers benefit.

Dude, to put it plainly – You still rockthe house!

Next week appearing in San Antonio live!…..

As you share, I think the tonic is to engage, dive in, move forward, grow, learn and persist.

You also pointed out a inspirational aspiration – your fellow AG bloggers, readers and realtor friends encouraged and supported you. That’s something that is universally appreciated and makes the giver and the getter feel better and stronger.

Last, I love this quote: ” Some will, some won’t, so what.”

Thanks for sharing, I enjoy you.

Brandie – Worst critics is something I know a lot about. When I played the same songs night after night on stage and had a really bad show, I would destroy myself afterward. Furious that those kids in the audience had paid good money to come see us and I couldn’t even get the simplest of songs right, I would spend the next hour in the dressing room going over every thing I did wrong and beating myself up about it. After cleaning up a bit, I’d head out to the bus and say hello to the fans. Almost every time I had the worst show ever, kids would rave to me about how much fun they had and how great I was as a guitarist (which still doesn’t make sense to me, haha). They’d tell me it was the best show they’d ever been to and rave about it forever. I often wound up hanging out longer than I intended with those kids, because I saw the excitement in their eyes over the show they had just seen. It was quite uplifting and a serious lesson in perception.

All who read the comments – Please (and I mean this) don’t use the comments to tell me about me and that I’m doing a good job or that I rock. Its a weird request, but I don’t want the comments to become about me on this one. I’d love to see your thoughts on those feelings and if you’ve got any great suggestions to get over those humps, especially the initial hump of blogging itself, I’d love to hear those. I do love to hear good things about myself (who doesn’t), but I would rather see this help a new agent understand that its not them, its everyone – we all go through it. Thanks. You can save my ego-inflation for another day…haha.