I “re-posted” an article from the local online paper that has gotten more interest/comments than a lot of others. I just need to get in front of people. If a post about the police does it, I’ll take it. Each person knows – what 300 people? I don’t make a habit of it, but I get tired of talking/writing about real estate.

I read my blog more than anybody else. I want to enjoy it and want others to as well. I think if readers see my enthusiasm it will be contagious.

It is imperative that it does not scream “advertisement” or “real estate agent trying to sell a house”, however.

Also agreed, that maybe not a “full blown blog” where you update content constantly – but to stay on top, you do have to update periodically.

http://forsalebylocals.com/localdata/m/english/united+states/fl/miami+shores

There is an RSS feed in the upper right hand corner to which anyone can subscribe and a search mechanism to find your local area at the bottom of the page. All of the the marketing reporting reports are geolocated by lat/long so they know where they are in relation to other content. We have a process that works in the background to constantly improve initial results based on 5 relevance measures – you can see examples of changes that have been made by the automatic process at http://forsalebylocals.com/tools/selfcorrectingcontent.asp.

Hopefully, this can be make the list as another free resource to help those looking for local content.

Tony

Daniel – Thank you for addressing some of the issues with the strategy, your answer aligns with my reasoning also.

I mentioned the customer life-cycle in the post to explain why I think this approach is worthwhile. The news-style blog building I am describing helps you create an online resource that would/could be noted, bookmarked and hopefully returned to repeatedly by residents in your local area…the ones you would be wanting to target if you were to spend money on an ad. The repeat exposure is exactly what an agent needs…

It definitely doesn’t present itself as a real estate site. Of the people who land on the site looking for various local topics, many can tell right away that it is serving as a ‘media’ outlet first, on par with the local paper or magazines. This gives it “3rd party” street cred. So we get credibility combined with repeat exposure.

I notice real estate companies and builders placing ads month after month in local publications. They are aiming to catch readers in the market and hopefully increase name recognition. The scope of content is going way beyond real estate, but it presents more opportunities to publish relevant stories. It’s no different than running an ad or renting billboard space on a local street.

My #1 goal has been to build a base of local traffic… not sure what I am going to do with it outside of placing ads yet. It’s a work in progress. But I bet a real estate agent would like to own it if I were to offer it.

One thing is for sure… it’s a ton of work. I am not a Realtor, but have local writers contributing on the site so they trade content for exposure…and the aggregate of the efforts benefit the group as a whole when it comes to traffic – much like AG. The content would not flow as well without them. I have not added a home search feature or any messages aiming to convert real estate leads yet.

I’m working through the process and sharing what I have learned so far.

I noticed that you come up on the first page of Google for “Katy TX’ and “Katy Texas” searches. I’ve achieved the same thing in my town and found that while not every visitor is a current buyer you are building a great long term marketing strategy. It’s also great place to advertise the vacation rentals that I manage. Most readers are either going to be local (in which case statistics show they’ll probably sell their home in the next 7 years), visiting (need a place to stay), or considering moving there (want to buy or rent a home). That is every aspect of our profession covered with one effort.

I’d like to offer my answer to everyone’s question: Yes, it is a lot of time and work (but it beats paying for leads or costly mailouts and print advertising) and it IS worth it because readers can tell the difference between quality articles and regurgitated feeds from other sites. Topix is hardly all inclusive and is watered down with useless information. Running a blog like this allows you to filter the news and provide relevant material to your readers and build a larger following.

PS – Once you’ve been blogging for a year and cover reoccurring events you can link to the new post from the old post and often gain very high search results. My suggestion to the naysayers is to never under estimate the power of helping people, because it will be returned to you.

Not going to repeat what Jonathan and Mark said, but don’t see the branding. Are any of the realtors seeing any clicks thru to their sites, any successes? How is the workload trying to keep up on everything?