Thanks, Russell Shaw!

In a recent Agent Genius article, Russell Shaw asked,

“I am pretty impressed with most all of the graphics and photos that accompany the posts on agentgenius. Is there one main genius who should get the credit for all of those cool graphics or are each of the individual geniuses just that good?”

One of the major functions of being a CCC rather than a MAB is focusing on the experience of the reader by creating a conversational community rather than a pulpit and ensuring that the ease of reading is conducive to a comfortable experience as well.

As part of the experience, we have extensively focused energy on the aesthetics of each and every article and by doing so created a new standard in blogging, not just real estate blogging. As the founder of Agent Genius, Benn created a specific formula for layout management that has been a major part of the explosive growth of AG. Although any of us would love to take complete credit, most authors bring their own art to their articles.

The [photo + white space + clean wording = 600 x 120 or 400 x 400 banners plus h2 tags] formula has created a clean, comfortable feel on the blog and in your reader and I assure you that I have personally lost sleep over making sure things are executed to the best they can possibly be.

Here’s how two recent articles look in a feed reader:

But why is something this small so important? Not only does our layout management maintain the look and feel of AG, but is part of a bigger effort of feed reader marketing. If you look at how AG articles appear with each story in succession, you see RSS blog art at its finest. We’ve spent a long time in the blogiverse looking at blogs and are repeatedly disappointed. Because we pay attention to the experience of our readers, we’ve set out specifically to raise the bar of the visual experience of blogging.

Why is feed reader marketing and aesthetics important for you as a real estate professional to consider? Think about it- as you introduce more and more of your clients to your RSS feed, how do you appear to them? The marketing of your blog and website shows clients exactly how you will market their property. If your blog appears outdated, boring, sloppy or plain, the automatic assumption is that your marketing of their home will be in that same spirit.

In short, I wanted to sincerely thank Russell Shaw for noticing- it’s the little things that make AG contributors’ laboring over aesthetics all worthwhile. Thanks, Russell Shaw!

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(photo credit)