Agents Only Blog

At the time, I was on vacation from my job and working 20 hour days trying to create marketing solutions for my fiancé who was struggling to start up a career in real estate sales. For months I had been watching her interact with customers and was convinced she was going to be a star. But her problem was marketing, she needed more leads- and my answer was to create a unique website with a blog.

2004 was the year of the blog. Heck, days before my first blog posting Time Magazine published and article saying so (which must make it true). Even if you were a Luddite who didn’t own a computer, it would have been hard not to have heard about blogging in 2004. Time went as far as to compare it to Radio in the 1930’s and Television in the 1950’s. Sure naysayer’s compared blogging to CB Radios in the 1970’s (i.e. a fad that would eventually die), but in 2004 blogs were making and breaking presidential campaigns, getting people fired, and making a handful of average people very rich and a lot of newspaper people very nervous- so it was a hot topic for a reason.

But since real estate agents are my target readers, let’s back up for a moment and assume you never really understood what all the fuss was about and give you a brief history lesson.

If you are reading this online, somewhere in the 1990’s you probably discovered the internet. Heck, it may have been the reason you bought your first computer. If you were a proactive technology oriented business person you probably rushed out to build a website (or paid some geeky person to do it for you). If you did it yourself, you probably came to realize how big of a pain in the rear it was to make changes and keep the website up to date- there was a computer programming language called “HTML” that you had to learn, once a new page was created every existing page had to be changed, then all changes had to be uploaded to the website. It was all very time consuming and extremely easy to make mistakes.

Blogging software, which is short for Web-Log (drop the We and you have b-log) was created as a way to make it easier to post content on websites. Basically, blogging software gives you a nice word processing screen to type on and with the click of a “send” button the computer creates the web pages for you and updates all of the other web pages to connect them together. Because blogging software keeps things in a chronological (log) order, blogs are often compared to online diaries or journals.

From a technology standpoint, that’s all there is to blogs- a simple piece of software that makes it easier to publish content to the internet in a journal fashion. So why all the fuss you ask? Well, for most people the difficulty of understanding how to “program” a webpage and upload it to the internet is what kept them from even trying. Because blogging software made the process easy, the average person didn’t need to know anything past simple word processing skills to publish on the internet. Basically, the barrier to entry in internet publishing had been removed. Students, housewives, and other ordinary average people were suddenly able to be internet journalists and authors.

The perfect example of how this changed the internet in 2004 could be seen in politics. In years past, politicians had static websites that would have been created by someone on their campaign staff. The websites would discuss the candidate’s political views and beliefs. However, much of the content would be created, published and go unchanged throughout the course of the campaign. If a voter wanted to know more about a candidate, odds are they visited the site once, read it and moved on.

In 2004, blogging software allowed politicians to publish their own website without the use of a campaign staffer. For example, a candidate who had just finished a speech might hop onto a bus and write a quick journal entry about the crowds’ response or someone whom they met that had a touching story while driving to the next campaign stop. As a potential voter wanting to know more about the candidates, not only could you read comments written directly by the candidate, but the website might get updated dozens of times a day (giving you a reason to come back and follow the candidate closely). This helped candidates make a personal connection with their voters and raise money from people who otherwise wouldn’t have made donations.

At the same time, there were average citizens who promoted themselves to journalists to discuss news stories that failed to get a lot of national attention by the mainstream media. Whereas the cost of television time and newspaper publishing would generally force a fringe political story to die in the mainstream media, bloggers with good writing skills and a desire to push their own political agenda could keep the stories alive with readers on the internet for months. Amazingly, once enough bloggers wrote enough blog articles, we saw many of these stories began to creep back into mainstream media- for and against candidates of both parties.

Suddenly the world was a journalist. The cost of “publishing” was reduced to owning a computer with internet access and having the desire to say something.

Of course making internet publishing this easy had ramification. Obviously, having a desire to say something and the ability to say it doesn’t mean you should post it for the whole world to read. That article in Time Magazine referenced a Delta Airline attendant who decided to post provocative photos of herself in uniform on a plane. Apparently she desired to be viewed as a sex symbol; instead she got fired. In 2005, it seemed every month brought a different news story about some idiot who developed foot in mouth disease- publishing their gripes about their workplace to the internet for the whole world to read and then acting surprised when their bosses read it and fired them as a result. My favorite was the rookie St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper reporter who suddenly found his personal blog ripping on the paper’s management reprinted in a rival newspaper!

Now despite this and the fact that others said blogging was a “fad,” it has continued. In St. Louis, where I live, there is a repository for local blogs called stlbloggers.com. It lists hundreds of area blogs. Some blogs have themes- talking about local sporting teams, politics, personal hobbies, clubs or social ills. Others are just a collection of ramblings by someone with a desire to write. Some are written well enough to get bloggers published as columnists in the local newspaper, others leave you scratching your head. Then there is the commercial application for blogs…

In early 2005, I was interviewed for a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article on blogging in the workplace. The reporter joked that she had been given the story assignment because blogs were in the news, but I was the only example of a commercial blog she could find in the St. Louis area. Yet in 2004, there were a lot of news stories being printed about how blogging would change the way businesses connected with their customers. So was St Louis just behind the rest of the country? Well, a quick Google search today produced hundreds of web pages discussing the benefits of commercial blogging, the reasons why commercial blogs don’t work, and a dozen people trying to sell consulting to businesses who want to start blogs. What I couldn’t find were a lot of ACTUAL commercial blogs- i.e. businesses blogging for business purposes- with a couple of exception, namely (surprise!) the real estate industry. On one national repository of blogs, it discussed the commercial value of blogging and encouraged business to register their blog with them unless it was for the pornography, gambling, or real estate industries (those categories were full).

As an agent wanting to know more about the commercial benefits of blogging, this should raise a lot of questions. Why are there so many real estate blogs? Why don’t other industries find this to be a valuable business tool? Is our industry on the cutting edge, or were we duped into believing there’s value in something that has none?

To understand this, I first suggest looking at the few non-real estate related commercial blogs that are out there to understand why they are being used.

Moveable Type, a software blogging tool (and the one used to create this blog), lists a few case studies here. As you read what makes these case studies successful, you see individuals within the companies who are really just looking for a way to connect with their customers on a different level as a way of building more customer loyalty. This isn’t marketing and it isn’t sales- its grass roots public relations.

- GM’s Fastlane blog isn’t trying to tell you why you need to buy a new Chevy in every posting. Instead it’s talking about the GM racing division, future changes to their lineup, and discussing the need to create better fuel efficient vehicles. Basically it’s car talk for people who love cars written with a GM slant by GM executives (and not the marketing department). What does GM get in return? Excitement about their racing division, feedback on unreleased vehicles from the average person off the street, and a connection with car enthusiasts who might otherwise believe the automaker doesn’t really care about them.

- A recent post on Stonyfield Farm’s Baby Babble talks about getting the Chicken Pox Vaccine. Now keep in mind Stonyfield Farm’s is a dairy that sells milk and milk products. But their blog isn’t designed to sell or even talk about milk- it’s designed to discuss health issues and dispense advice for some of their most important customers- babies. What Stonyfield Farms blog has become is a go-to resource for new mothers looking for advice. What they get in return is a happy, loyal customer base who feels that Stonyfield Farm’s cares about them and is looking out for their best interest.

- Whole Foods, a national grocery chain of organic foods, has a blog done by their CEO, John Mackey. The purpose is to keep customers informed with “open and timely communications” on the direction and focus of the company. In a recent posting, Mackey addresses negative comments about his company that were written in a book on organic foods- giving his view points and beliefs on the book.

So why haven’t more companies duplicated these blogs? Again, based on the “successful” commercial blogs that I’ve seen, the reason blogs probably haven’t been implemented by more companies is that they don’t help with short term sales. As someone with a college degree in public relations but years of experience in corporate sales, let me say that a LOT of corporations are run by people that came out of the sales department- and corporate sales managers are trained to look for the quick fix (not long term customer satisfaction). While employed at Hewlett-Packard, I worked for a company that reorganized its sales force every 90 days in an attempt to better connect with their customers- yet it was the constant reorganizing that customer complained was causing the disconnect in the first place!

With this in mind, the fact that other industries haven’t embraced blogging shouldn’t be of concern. That brings us to the next question, why is it real estate agents have jumped on the blogging bandwagon? My belief is that the answer is tied to the unique nature of the real estate industry. First off, no other industry gets the product they have to sell like real estate. Can you imagine a car dealership whose inventory was setting in driveways all across town and owned by dozens of individual owners instead of on a car lot owned by the car dealership? Second, we are an industry of “one person” companies forced to market ourselves against thousands of other one person companies. Even if an agent is with a large brokerage who is affiliated with a national franchise, they are still generally left on their own to sink or swim and have to perform their own marketing above and beyond the brokerage and franchise. This is because agents are generally hired as I-9 contractors verse W-2 employees- so even if a broker would like to bring structure and unified marketing to his/her sales team the laws governing I-9 contracting don’t permit it. As a result, agents are often responsible for setting themselves apart in the minds of the customer even from other agents in their very own office.

As an industry of individuals, we have thousands of tiny little marketing budgets. As a result, agents often have a strong need for creative (and cheap) marketing. And that is what has driven hundreds of agents into publishing low cost (if not entirely free) blogs.

Earlier I said that just because there’s a desire to blog doesn’t mean you should. Well in real estate blogging, just because there’s a need for cheap marketing doesn’t mean a free blog is your answer. Take a look at the real estate blogs that are out there and you will see that many of them are nothing but self-serving sales pitches- “Why buy a house from me,” “How I can sell your home faster,” “I’m a top agent,” etc. These blogs really don’t say anything- and that makes them very different from the successful corporate examples I mentioned above.

When I started blogging in 2004 there weren’t a lot of local commercial blogs (actually, I couldn’t find any- including other local real estate blogs). That was a problem because I really wasn’t sure exactly what my blog should look like or say. As such, I reached out to several other real estate agents who were blogging- including a gentleman named Hanan Levin, the co-owner of 'The Champion' Real Estate Company in Riverside, California and author of the Grow-a-Brain blog. Levin strongly felt that blogging had value to real estate agents, but he believed most agents were too short sighted to make them work. According to Levin the average real estate blog lasted just 90 days before the author abandoned it. So despite the fact that agents need creative, cheap marketing, they also appear to need creative, cheap and IMMEDIATE marketing. Unfortunately, from my experiences, that’s not blogging.

For the first few months I blogged, it was a real challenge because I questioned every minute I spent writing the blog since website traffic was confirming that no one was reading it. The first time a prospective client called and told my wife that they decided to call us because they were reading the blog I almost fell over. And this brings me to the actual advice I wanted to give regarding real estate blogging.

1) Know why you’re blogging. Sure, you want more customers, but that’s vague and often leads you to write self-serving advertising that no one really wants to read- and if no one reads it, you aren’t going to get more customers. The biggest problem I personally see with the real estate industry is that we have too many agents with virtually no knowledge of real estate. If you agree, then you probably want to set yourself apart from the “know-nothing” crowd. Is there a better (or cheaper) way to do this by dispensing advice and knowledge on the internet for all to read? Probably not.
2) Know who you’re blogging to. Who do you want to read your blog? What reaction do you want them to have to it? Simply saying you want everyone to read it will probably make it so vague that no one will. If your specialization in real estate in relocation, then write a blog offering advice to people relocating to your market. Isolate problems people have when relocating and talk about them. If you live in a small town, blog about the benefits and enjoyments of living in that town. Why would someone want to live there? Who are the major employers? What is going on at the high school, the library, and the local churches? If you want to work with more sellers, offer staging advice, talk about the steps to getting a home ready to show, etc. Be an expert and people will come to you for advice; be just another idiot agent and people will avoid you.
3) Define yourself and your blog. One of the biggest problems I see when I read blogs (including my original blog) is that they often are all over the place talking about a wide variety of topics. That’s fine if it’s a personal blog, but as a commercial blog whose ultimate goal is to help you connect with customers you aren’t going to be taken seriously if you are talking about your car breaking down, your dry cleaner ruining your suit or trying to start a grass roots boycott of Wal-Mart because you had a rude clerk. Hanan Levin, of Grow-a-Brain fame, said that early on he realized blogging was a creative release for him which he needed outside of selling real estate. As such, he broke the blog away from his website and evolved it into a personal blog separate from his real estate business.
4) Don’t be afraid to write multiple blogs. If you really want a creative outlet, like Levin, or have a hobby you love, then create a personal blog as well as a business blog. After six months of blogging, I realized that my blog really needed to split up into multiple blogs to make it easier to follow- and there is blogging software that will let you do this now. At the same time, most blog software now lets you assign categories to your postings (which my original blog software did not). That allows the reader to find articles written about relocation or selling a home, or what ever topic they are interested in. Again, it all comes back to the targeted reader, and the easier it is for them to read your blog posts the more they are apt to want to work with you.
5) Don’t expect immediate results. Once you write a blog post, there is no expiration date unless the post was time sensitive (like an event that happened last Tuesday). My wife Kimberly was contacted two weeks ago from a blog post over a year ago. As long as the post remains out there on the internet, people will continue to find it (and even though it’s old to you, it’s new to them!)
6) Don’t worry about posting every day. Moveable Type wrote an article about this subject. When you first start blogging it’s easy to get caught up in the belief that if you aren’t saying something every day people won’t take you seriously. When that happens, you will find yourself writing second rate posts just to have content. Not only will the blog suffer because the content is, well, worthless but it’s a real drag to write something you have no desire to write about. My advice, post when you really have something to say and have the time to say it right. After all, you’re a real estate agent with clients and other obligations, not a newspaper reporter whose obligations ARE the newspaper. (For the record, I’ve been working on this post now off and on for several days in a word processor; it will get posted once it’s done).
7) Remember, it’s not about the blog, it’s about the content in the blog. Why do people look for things on the internet? Because they seek knowledge. If your ultimate goal is to get people to find you on the internet, or decide to work with you because of your knowledge, then the most important thing to know about blogging is that quality content which demonstrates your knowledge is the only thing that will pay off for you. All too often real estate agents take short cuts with pre-constructed websites and canned marketing materials that 1000 other agents are using. When it comes to blogging, agents often cut and paste news from other sites. Unfortunately if your website or blog says the same thing as 20 other agents in town (or 1000 other websites), then the savvy internet surfer will just bypass you to the next site. There are no shortcuts.

So that’s my advice on blogging. Of course I’ve referenced that I quit blogging several times, so you’re probably asking why, if it’s so valuable, did I personally quit? Well, truth is, I didn’t.

When I started the original St Louis Real Estate Blog in 2004 it went hand in hand with the creation of a new website for Kimberly (what is now stlagent.com). Naturally, I was over budget at the time, so I found a free blogging software package called Greymatter which was one of the original blogging programs (Created in 2000). Unfortunately, the guy who wrote Greymatter stopped writing updates because he wasn’t getting paid to do so. That’s not to say I regret using it, Greymatter gave me exactly what I needed- it was very simple to use and the price was right. However by June of 2005, there were new blogging features that were changing the way users found and read blogs (a feature called RSS feeds) and Greymatter just didn’t support it.

So I suspended blogging until I could figure out a way to migrate the blog to different software. Unfortunately, something went wrong with my installation of that new software (a product called Moveable Type) and it didn’t work. This naturally happened during the summer when I was busy with listings. So, blogging took the backburner until September when I finally got the new software up and running.

By then, however, I became disenchanted with the fact that my blog was “separate and removed” from the website I was working so hard to build. This is a problem I see over and over again. Look at the time, work, and expense agents spend on their websites. Usually, they are logically divided into categories to make it easy for a user to navigate and it includes all sorts of user tools- mortgage calculators, IDX home search features, featured homes, etc. Yet the best original content the agent has posted in on a blog that is difficult for a user to navigate because it changes subjects every day and may actually be located in a different place (often on a different website like blogger.com or typepad.com). The blogging software obviously made posting content easier, but it seemed to me it was competing with the website it was designed to support. My answer was to initially duplicate things in both locations, which didn’t make my life easier. So, for example, should a lengthy article on buying investment properties be posted to the blog or should it be a part of my investment section on the website?

My answer to that was to purchase a “Content Management” software package and redesign the website (which was started but not finished). But that’s a whole different topic for a whole different day. Suffice it to say, the blog I proclaimed dead earlier in the post, really isn’t dead it’s just waiting for a website redesign so I can start posting again. The good news is I’ve thought up a 1000 different things to blog about over the past few months I haven’t been blogging, so content won’t be a problem when I get that far…