Real Estate Blogging... WHY? (Part 6)

Article from: http://www.stlagent.com

Click for Larger Font | Click for Smaller Font

By: Darin "Sid" Cameron, CRS
Sat, Jul 8th, 2006 12:42 am

Why I quit (or didn't quit) blogging...

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 when I look at real estate websites.

Look at the time, work, and expense agents spend on their websites. Usually, they are nice looking and 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 absolute, best original content the agent has on their website is posted 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).

Blogging software obviously makes posting content easier, but unfortunately they often end up competing with the very website they're designed to support.

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 original answer to this problem was to initially duplicate things in both locations, which didn’t make my life easier.

My next answer to that was to purchase a “Content Management System” software package and redesign the website. Content Management (or CMS) is basically blog software on steroids. Instead of publishing a journal, you're publishing a newspaper.

But that’s a whole different topic for a whole different day. Suffice it to say, the blog I proclaimed "dead" when I started this topic, 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 1,000 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…