Your Real Estate Blogging Mission
Your blog needs a plan. Answer these questions:
- What are the results you want to achieve?
- How do you expect these things to happen?
- What differentiates your site from your competitors?
- How much time do you have to dedicate to blogging?
- Is the amount of time you have sufficient to achieve your goals?
- Do you want your blog on a community site or a solitary url?
- Why are you using a blog instead of some other tool to accomplish your goals?
As real estate people, we love to look at the shiny new tools that come available to us each day. There’s so much to do. We know we have to market ourselves, but we have to make sure our efforts are dollar-productive and generate a good return on our time. Blogging, for example, is very inexpensive and often free. So the return on our money is infinite, but we only have so much time. And blogging can be time consuming. It’s important to realize it doesn’t HAVE to be time consuming though. And specifically for real estate professionals, we need to make sure we don’t make things more complicated than they need to be.
In other words, you’re in real estate, NOT interenet marketing! Don’t lose focus. You’re not trying to become a blogger or professional writer here. You’re trying to use new tools to market yourself, build your network and build your business. Stick with real estate…that’s what you’re good at (hopefully) 
Pay attention to that last one…why blogging? What are your goals for posting to a blog on a regular basis? And is a blog the best tool for this job? We are huge advocates of blogging, but that doesn’t make it a tool that fixes every problem. It’s not a catch all or a magic bullet. What blogging IS is a beautifully effective endeavor you can perform to build your sphere of influence, maintain contact in a personal way with a large number of people (great time management…good for you!) and really establish yourself as an expert in your market area.
It’s important to NOT think of your blog as marketing. Not really the point. Your blog is your online presence. In real life, you talk about real estate all the time. People ask you questions about homes. They ask you questions about the market and whether they should buy or sell, stay put or what neighborhood is best for them. Think about it: you’re already blogging! You’re just not capitalizing on it! If you’re conversing with people all the time about real estate…that’s what blogging is! Just type it up and click “publish”. That’s a blog. That’s all it is! And that’s why we’re so adamant that it doesn’t need to take a lot of time…you’re already doing most of the work!
Imagine something you’re ALREADY doing, that you can leverage to become the single most time- and money-effective way for you to maintain contact with everyone in your sphere, build your network, establish yourself as an expert and generate leads and referrals…what would you think of such a tool? It rocks!
But if your blog lacks a mission, it will not be as effective as it could be. At the front end, answer the above questions so you have a clear idea in your mind what you want to do. Then set about making it happen. It’s important to remember there’s no magic bullet, and there’s no such thing as a perfect blog. There’s always more to learn. Set it up and get going. Some of the highest trafficed blogs in the world aren’t even that pleasing to look at. The point is that it’s YOU that people want. Make it personal.
You are building your real estate success with your personality…working with other people. Your blog is an extension of yourself. For what it’s worth, some of the most successful blogs are very personal, even revealing, in nature. Just be you…that ought to be a mission you can live with!