Real Estate Agent, Brokerage and Mortgage Blogs

When I look around the blogosphere and see so many Realtors blogging their little hearts out, I cringe when I see how few are really utilizing the full potential of RSS technology.  Yeah, just about every blog allows visitors to subscribe through RSS feeds, but did you know that the same technology that allows users to subscribe to your blog allows your blog to pull in other RSS feeds and automatically build content on your site?  Did you know you could use RSS to personalize feeds to subscribers for automatically delivering new home listings that match their search criteria right to their RSS reader or email?

It's time to get on board with all the utility of the RSS technology now because in January, Microsoft is releasing its new OS, Vista.  One of the most talked about features of Vista is the integrated RSS reader.  Having seen and played with Vista already, I can tell you- you want to start using RSS on your blog for not just syndication but also feed pulls for building content and personalization of feeds that you syndicate.  Let's take a brief tour of RSS in this article.  I'll go through what it is, what it does, what it means to Realtors and how you will be using it in the future.

According to wikipedia, RSS is a simple XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite websites. Using RSS, webmasters can put their content into a standardized format, which can be viewed and organized through RSS-aware software.  Basically what that is saying is: the contents of various blogs to which the user subscribes are delivered directly to their email or RSS reader so they dont have to keep going back each site to read new posts every day. 

Its simple.  When you read a lot of websites each day or want to get a lot of information on a particular subject, RSS allows you to basically build your own personalized magazine.  You tell your feed reader which websites you want to read daily by entering that websites RSS feed and your reader pulls in all the new contents from those sites each day.  For example, my reader pulls in the contents of about 20 Real Estate related blogs, a handful of SEO blogs and a few web design blogs.  That provides me with about an hour or so of hard industry reading before I begin my workday- it keeps my skills sharp forces me to stay abreast of new technologies, so I can sit here and blog about relevant topics for you all.

Increase your knowledge base.  Download a feed reader and subscribe to some of the top real estate related blogs out there and use those sites to sharpen your skills.  For an excellent list of blogs, visit growabrain.com (http://growabrain.typepad.com/growabrain/real_estate_blogs/index.html)

Automatically build content on your blog.  Tired of doing all the work yourself?  Blogging is hard work and while RSS feeds alone cannot replace quality original content, it can help to boost quantity.  Use RSS to pull in real estate, weather, sports or any other kind of news from your local area through Google searches or display content directly from other real estate related blogs in your blog or website.  You can use highly customized scripts to tailor the feed pulls to your needs or eliminate competitors or illicit content sites from your feed pulls.  Any competent programmer should be able to do this for you at a reasonable price.

Automatically markets your website.  Because RSS allows other web sites and visitors to subscribe to your feed, it is a key tool in marketing your site to a new audience through other websites displaying your content and retaining the visitors by remarketing them with each new post in their RSS reader.

• Free marketing
• Increases visitor retention
• Increases personalized contact with visitors
• Increases lead generation
• Builds your knowledge base

Lets start with saying that everyone from Firefox to Google is providing an RSS reader.  Why? Because the most used software and Internet browser on earth, Microsoft will be releasing an RSS reader integrated into its next operating system release, Vista.  Right now, its mostly the techno-savvy crowd using RSS, but once everyone has access to this technology through Internet Explorer, you as a Realtor will want to be using RSS.  The key to using it properly is getting on board now while you can still play with it.  Cold hard fact is, if you arent properly using RSS when Microsoft Vista comes out later this year, you will be left in the dust.

The future of RSS is personalization.  People will be able to personalize the feeds they receive from a single website by subscribing not just to all new posts, but only to those posts that meet their search criteria.  For example, a buyer would only want to read posts you write about buying houses- they probably arent interested in those posts targeted to sellers.  This would also mean that if you are using a blog like myrealtyblog that can display MLS/IDX data, a user could subscribe to a feed that would deliver new home listings that met their search criteria to their feed reader daily. 

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