Death of a Blog
A couple of Fridays ago I caught up with a few other real estate agents at a local watering hole. After a few too many margaritas, one of those agents, a guy named Walter, pulled me aside to gush about the work I was doing. What Walter said went something like this: “You’re out there, man. You’ve by passed all of us. You know what you’re doing, and you’re doing it right… blogging and stuff. That’s just genius.”
It was at that moment that I realized several things. First and foremost, Walter spits a lot when he’s drunk. (Seriously, if you’re in my office and go drinking with Walter, watch out!) Second, there were a number of agents who had taken notice of my sales team’s rapid growth but didn’t quite comprehend just what it was we were doing to get it.
The next day, I was reflecting on Walter’s comments- in particular, his belief that blogging was playing a large part of our success. It was amusing because it had honestly been over a year since I was actively blogging. For all practical purposes, I viewed my blog as dead.
And that’s when I came up with the idea for this blog...
Before I go any further, however, let me stop and explain a few things. First, my wife Kimberly and I are often viewed as relatively new to real estate by “veteran agents”. Second, most of the “veteran agents” I know hold fast to the belief that it takes 5-10 years to build up a successful real estate practice. Yet over the past year our business has exploded. We now have three other agents on our team and in April we were named as one of the Top 10 agent/teams in a company of 600+ agents, as well as the number one agent/team in our office. As a result, there are a lot of agents with 10-20 years of experience under their belt asking the question, “How are they doing it?” (For more on who we are, I’ll post a short bio on us later.)
Just One Word… Plastics.
As we get other agents wanting to “pick our brain,” I often find myself wanting to parody that classic scene from “The Graduate,” where a young college student is being given sage career advice: “One word… Internet. Think about it, enough said.” Although in all actuality there are a variety of things that I think has led to the success we are having, it has been our use of technology and our ability to harvest successful leads off of the internet that has really been at the core of our growth.
And that’s where this blog comes in…
My background prior to entering real estate was in marketing and technology. Because I’m on a team, I have the luxury of specializing on just real estate marketing and technology. Since most of the agents I know are effectively one person businesses trying to do everything, I’ve met very few agents who give as much thought to their marketing and technology solutions as I do. (Not to beat my own drum, because I’m completely incompetent when it comes to everyday real estate tasks such as filling out a contract or managing inspections because there are other people on my team that handle those things).
But with that said, other agents routinely come to me for advice on using and implementing technology in real estate, yet I’ve found virtually no one I can turn to for higher level advice with my questions. Coming from the world of technology sales, I’m used to being able to turn to dozens of industry newspapers, magazines, and websites that rate, review, praise and skewer products, companies, and the people who promote them. Thinking about opening up a computer store? Computer Reseller News and Value Added Reseller News (and their websites, crn.com and var.com) will give you the skinny on which company’s products to sell and which to avoid; where you can make the most money selling technology and where you will get the biggest customer headaches. As a sales person in that industry, you could be guaranteed poor products would disappear from the market- or suddenly improve- once the negative reviews started to come in.
Yet surf the web for products sold to support real estate agents and you will find a multi-million dollar industry has developed to sell mostly shoddy and in some cases near-fraudulent technology and internet services to unsuspecting real estate agents- and virtually no firm resources to help agents weed the good from the bad. Our industry trade associations, franchises, magazines and websites spend very little time rating, reviewing, or covering the value (or lack of value) these products have- in many cases because they are the very companies bringing them to market. Seem like a conflict of interest? Not in the real estate industry. Rarely will you find a real estate magazine article written by someone who isn’t trying to sell the reader their latest book or audio tape on how to be successful in real estate. It’s truly maddening.
So, this tiny little corner of my customer website is now dedicated to talking to other agents about the things I’ve done that have been successful and the products I used to get me there as well as my opinions on the products I’ve seen or used which were, shall we say, lacking. It is written to be read by other real estate agents- not because I have something to sell you (at least not yet) but because I hope that ultimately I will be able to strike up dialog with a few forward-thinking, technology-using agents who in turn might share with me their successes and failures to make me a better real estate agent. If you are the type of agent who’s afraid the guy in the next cube over will somehow gain your trade secrets, then this blog isn’t for you. If you believe there is value in networking and you have something constructive to share, then please post it below in the comments section.
So that’s how a conversation about a dead blog created an idea for this one.
And with that said, for my first topic I would like to tackle the very subject which I’m currently taking part in- blogging. Hundreds of you now do it. From a business standpoint, there are probably more real estate blogs than any other segment of business (besides the porn and gambling industries of course). Yet thousands of you have started real estate blogs and then given up. More of you grapple with the very concept of what a blog even is, and I’ve even talked to agents that were convinced blogging could harm their business. So what’s my opinion on the value of Blogging? I’ll post that in my next article.