Learning from Past Blogging Mistakes

Blogging is one of the primary activities associate with real estate web 2.0 and a vital means of creating community, according to Brian Boero of 1000Watt Consulting in his post-NAR interview on Inman TV interview with Joel Burselm.

While Blogging can be a powerful tool, we are noticing that without adherence to a set of standards or sticking to a cohesive theme, there is a tendency for bloggers to venture far from their early path of building a strong, locally-driven focus, and delve down the road of interpersonal socializing with other real estate professionals all within the same Blog platform. This is understandable since real estate professionals are social creatures, but the result is an unfocused mix of topics and subject matter. This may satisfy the blogger’s need to engage the community and socialize with industry peers, but it renders the blog ineffective when it comes demonstrating local market expertise and professionalism. To the local customer / reader who has serious real estate needs, the off-topic posts can render the blog frivolous and not usable.

In building our blogging system on Zolve, we took note of this issue and with the help of RSS Pieces we created a customer-facing Blog for our local Colorado Springs market — Colorado Springs New Homes Real Estate to test a theory.

On 10/19/07, we began posting religiously every day using what I now coin “Mary’s magic formula”. After 20 days the results were in; the Blog made the first page of Google for “Colorado Springs new homes real estate.” While this is not the top new home search term in our market we still lapped dozens of top-performing websites that have been gaming for Google search engine placement for Colorado Springs new home terms for up to 9 years! As of the date of this posting, we ranked 5th!

The importance of this, as it relates to Blog content is as follows:

1. When we first started publishing on the Blog, we covered everything from sports to foreclosures, essentially mimicking the wide span of a newspaper. But after researching successful Blogging techniques that included the positive effects of building on a singular theme, we emerged with a concise informational site about Colorado Springs new homes. An on-task Blog with no distractions – that produced our desired business results.
2. By adhering to a stricter editorial policy that included writing standards, and well placed key phrases for the post at least 4 times throughout a Blog post, the results dwarfed all earlier attempts.

I understand the need for agents to socialize with each other. As agents, we ourselves cannot underscore the importance and value of this dialogue — through this or any kind of social network. But I also understand how critical it is to separate your inner industry dialogue from your public facing needs of branding, imaging and overall customer acquisition. As a result of this experience, Zolve members will soon have access to a separate platform to socialize, communicate, and network with each other that is distinct from our public facing blog platform we provide on member profile pages. The goal is to provide our members with a safe & private place to socialize with industry peers and engage in conversation that is better served internally and away from public scrutiny.