The key to a successful real estate blog is generating and maintaining your blog's position as an authority on real estate in your farm area. A great way to do this is to connect with other real estate professionals and potential clients through various social networks on the web. So what is a social network? For those that don't know, a social network is an online community centered around a common interest. A very well-known example of a social network is MySpace, www.myspace.com. While social networks may not sound very business-like, they are valuable tools you should use to generate traffic to your site. There are many professional social networks these days, many not worth joining. Here is a list of the five social networks all real estate professionals should join:

• ActiveRain (www.activerain.com)-This is a community of real estate professionals that share real estate and mortgage information via their ActiveRain blogs. Membership is free to this site and the maintenance of a blog on ActiveRain can generate new business contacts and partnerships as well as increased traffic to your blog site.

• Squidoo (www.squidoo.com)-This site is a network of member sites called "lenses". Each member creates a "lens" on a particular subject. As a real estate professional, you would create a lens based on real estate in your farm area. Membership is free to this site. A well-maintained lens can obtain its own traffic and generate ad revenue for you as well as drive additional traffic to your blog site.

• HubPages (www.hubpages.com)-This site is very similar to Squidoo. It is a network of member sites called "hubs". You will create a "hub" for real estate in your farm area. Membership is free to this site. A well-maintained hub will generate traffic and ad revenue for you and your blog site.

• Facebook (www.facebook.com)-This is a well-known social network that was originally centered on connecting college students across the country. Now it has been expanded for use to people of all ages and businesses use it for promotion of their brand. Create a free profile for your real estate business and include a link to your blog site.

• Twitter (www.twitter.com)-This is a micro-blogging service that is based around one question:"What Are You Doing?" By answering this question and updating your Twitter account each time you make a new post to your blog site, you will attract "followers" that can later turn into leads.

Maintaining these sites and profiles may seem like a lot of extra work but there are ways to simplify that process. Here are a couple of tips to make updating your social network profiles and pages easy:

• Sign up for Ping.fm (www.ping.fm). You can update your Twitter and Facebook accounts right in one place. You can post new status messages here-include links to recent blog posts and any videos you may have on the web for additional exposure.

• Recycle blog posts for use on your ActiveRain blog, Squidoo lens, and HubPages Hub. Do this by rewriting an old blog post, making sure that it is different from the original by at least 30%. Post your rewritten posts to the other sites. This process makes sure that all of your sites are being updated regularly with fresh content.

To further maximize the buzz on your blog, consider the use of FriendFeed (www.friendfeed.com). FriendFeed gathers all of your updates to your various social network accounts and creates an automatically updating feed that you can use on your blog site. By creating a FriendFeed and implementing it on the home page of your blog site, you can significantly increase your sites importance in the search engines and get enhanced results.

For more information and additional tips on using social networking to promote your real estate blog, check out these great articles:

Problogger - How to Promote Your Blog through Networking

Kikolani - 9 Ways to Use Social Networking for Blog Promotion

Chris Brogan - Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts