Real Estate Agent and Brokerage Blogs

Since you are obviously interested in blogs and blogging, it would probably help to first define what a blog is and what a blog isn't. Wikipedia defines a blog like this.

"A weblog, which is usually shortened to blog, is a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order."

By the very nature of this definition any business person would wonder what the point of a blog is when it is meant as an online diary. The answer is simple. If that is what you intend to use it for then it is of little use at all from a business standpoint.

The primary features of a blog
A saavy user however will notice that a blog offers a number of great features like integrated searching, archiving, linking and in some cases easy editing through a WYSIWYG editor. These basic features combine to create a powerful system that allows easy editing of your website without having to call a web developer or some other IT person.

That having been said, a blog user can control their own destiny without being at the mercy of another persons schedule, whims or attitudes. And yes, you will run across these types of things when you run a web site. It also means not having to pay someone for something that you can do yourself but why would you want to write any articles at all on the internet? Because it is a tool that drives traffic to your site.

If you know a lot about your community and you happen to be a great realtor then prospective clients would flock to your site because they want to know the hip places to eat and what side of town would have the best housing prices and what the current real estate trends are. They can do that by visiting your blog at any time of the day or night, locate what they need, contact you if they are interested and it is always happening and always on. I don't know about you but I am not interested in staying up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to answer these kinds of questions when I can just point someone at a web site and let them find it on their own.

The next benefit of a blog is that it satisfies a basic requirement of many search engines which is fresh content. Read any article on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and you will find that the top SEO item is always fresh and frequent content. In todays world that can be difficult because there are many calls to make, places to go and personal committments but a blog is at your fingertips at all times and it can be edited when it suits you so you can write an article while you are in an airport or down at the local Panera's.

There are other elements of SEO like meta tags, keyword generation and histograms, properly structured content and many other tips that help make a site more searchable and more readable. The bad news is that most blogs do not handle this part of SEO very well so some opportunity to rise in the engines is lost because of the way the articles are published. This site uses a custom blogging platform that handles nearly all SEO tasks automatically so this article was written and SEO'd in the time it took me to type and then click the save button but that is a story for another article.

The content is lively and the site is SEO'd but it is missing something. Maybe it is multimedia and thanks to the advent of Podcasting and VCast you can insert video, audio and pictures into a blog. That means you can greet your visitors with an audible welcome message or have a video showing homes that are available in your area. All done with relative ease and comfort.

So now you have a cool looking blog and fresh content but how do you tell the world? You do that through the use of ping services like Pingoat and many other sites that make their living (freely I will add) by notifying search engines around the world to the fact that you have new content. That happened when this article was published and you will not doubt see references to this article on various websites.

As you can see, a blog is actually a diverse media publishing system and due to the ever changing definition of a blog, there are more and more features piled on top that make a blog a compelling replacement to a conventional website. Now why would you want to throw out your existing website and use a blog instead? Well that is discussed in part two of this series...