There are dozens of reasons for real estate professionals to have blogs.  If you’ve given some thought to having a blog, but don’t know how to get started, here’s a guide to help you sort out your options.

Decide Who Your Audience Will Be

For real estate professionals, the first thing you’ll need to decide is whom you’ll be writing for.  Do you want a blog that connects you with other real estate professionals or do you want to write for consumers and the public?  Several sites make it easy for real estate professionals to create blogs to be read and commented on by other real estate professionals.   The best known of these is ActiveRain, but many agents also post on RealTown Blogs.

An ActiveRain “inside blog” is free and easy to set up, and with more than 150,000 members, it gives you great visibility among real estate professionals.  RealTown Blogs also has lots of members—more than 130,000—posting articles about sales, technology, and other useful topics.  Either one will give you a good introduction to blogging along with the opportunity to learn by reading the posts of other real estate bloggers.  Consumers can find and read your posts on either site.  But these blogs are primarily for real estate people to communicate and network with one another.  If your purpose for having a blog is to demonstrate your expertise, build a following among consumers, and generate leads, you’ll need to move beyond these blogs aimed at other professionals.

Choose a Turnkey or Custom-Made Real Estate Blog

Turnkey solutions provide you with everything you need to get started.  Select a design you like and the provider gets it up and running for a monthly fee.  Your site will probably include a feed from your MLS so your visitors will be able to search for properties.  You may also get syndication so your listings are automatically sent to sites like Zillow or Trulia.   You’ll probably also get some kind of lead capture tool—a way for visitors to give you their contact information so you can follow up with them.  Some providers will even write the blog content for you.   For turnkey blogging solutions, look into Point2 Homes, ActiveRain’s “outside blog”, or KineticKnowledge’s RealEstate Blogsites.

Real Estate Tomato custom designs self-hosted blogs (see below).  Each blog they create is different and uniquely designed to fit your business.  They also offer training in how to use the blogging software and how to get the most from your blog.  Because you’ll self-host the blog they create, you’ll pay a monthly fee to an Internet hosting company to keep your blog up and running.

Do It Yourself

Finally, there’s the do-it-yourself option. You can create a free blog at sites like Typepad, Blogger, or WordPress.  Blogs like these are absolutely free to create and maintain, and you can write for the entire world to see.  WordPress.com is the most popular of these blogging platforms; it’s easy enough to use that a beginner can have a free blog up and running in no time.

A free wordpress.com blog will allow you to establish yourself on the Internet and build your brand, but it has some major disadvantages for real estate professionals.  A big one is that it won’t allow you to include a feed from your local MLS, so visitors won’t be able to search for listings on your site.  In theory, if your blog is interesting enough, visitors will subscribe to it and read it anyway.  But the fact is, consumers want information about properties.  If you’re going to take the time to create a blog, you should probably create one that’s really going to work for you.

In order to include MLS listings, you’ll need a different kind of blog.  You’ll need what’s called a “self-hosted blog”.  The free blog from wordpress.com is hosted by the folks at WordPress.  They host it for free, but they set limits on what you can do with it.  If you want a blog that you control and that can include whatever applications you want it to have—including property listings from your MLS—you’ll need a self-hosted blog.  The most popular self-hosted blogging software is offered at wordpress.org. (wordpress.org is different than wordpress.com).

A self-hosted wordpress.org blog is probably too challenging for a beginner to tackle, especially since blogging is not your main job.  As it turns out, that’s what Real Estate Tomato does.  They design your self-hosted blog, get it installed on the Internet for you, and help you learn how to use it.   A self-hosted blog gives you the greatest degree of flexibility and creativity.   It might be the perfect choice for a broker with a tech person on the team, or an agent with lots of computer experience.  But if you’re new to working on the Internet, you may not want to start there.

If you’re a beginner, my recommendation is to keep it simple at first.  Try out a free blog and see how it works for you.  Once you get the hang of it and you’re ready to commit to writing articles and keeping your content up to date, then you can step up to something more sophisticated.

Any blogging expert will tell you that one secret to building readership is to be consistent about posting fresh and interesting content.  But sometimes it can be hard to come up with something to write about.  Here are a dozen great ideas that any real estate professional can use as a single blog post or as a recurring blog theme.

1. Property Listings. Use your blog as a showcase for your listings.
2. Housing Market Data. Share up-to-date information on home sales, home prices, or market time.  Be creative and post unusual information readers might not easily find elsewhere, like how much home a buyer could get for, say, $300,000 in one neighborhood versus another.
3. Local Reporter. Report on things that have happened in your town or your neighborhood, like high school games or school board elections.
4. Clients Say the Darnedest Things. Share stories about things clients have said or done over the years.  Use your anecdotes to help clients understand what they can do to make it easy for you to help them.  (Be sure to change the names and details so former clients can’t recognize themselves in the stories!)
5. DIY Tips. Are you good with gardening, keeping the lawn green, or fixing things around the house?  Share your secrets in your blog posts.
6. Personal Reflections. Write about what’s on your mind—but make sure it’s interesting or that it has relevance to your readers.  Endless stories about your kids or your pets may be appealing to your mom, but they aren’t likely to hold the interest of clients or help you build readership.
7. Photo Montage. Take photos as you go about your day.  Post them on your blog to document the natural beauty of your area, the elegance of the architecture, or the unique character your community.
8. Big Picture Economics. Post news and information about interest rates, consumer confidence, or cost of living trends.
9. Local Economics. Monitor economic trends that affect the housing market in your area and post relevant information such as local employment data, changes in personal income or construction of new homes.
10. Home Decorating/Home Staging Ideas. If you’ve got an eye for design or a specialty in staging, offer quick tips that your readers can put into practice.
11. Foreclosures and Short Sales. Many people think they want to do a short sale or purchase a foreclosure until they learn what’s involved.  Help troubled homeowners and would-be buyers understand the process.
12. Mortgage Information. Pass along information from a trusted loan officer or mortgage company about new programs and new products.

An agent asked me not too long ago if she should have a blog or a website.

Beginners often ask questions like that, but as Internet marketing guru Trish Jones points out, blogs can pretty much do what web sites can do.  That’s because a blog (short for web log) is a kind of website.  Blogs can have pages that never change.  They can have pdfs for clients to download, videos, music, and links to articles and other websites.  In addition, however, blogs offer some advantages over traditional websites.

• Blogs are dynamic while websites are static. With a traditional website, once your clients have seen it, they’ve seen it.  It doesn’t change much so clients have little reason to return to the site.  But blogs allows you to have fresh content all the time, which gives your clients a reason to want to come back again and again.
• Blogs are easy to update. Relatively speaking, a traditional website is hard to change.  Doing so takes time and may require the help of a professional.  If you’re blogging, on the other hand, making a change can be as simple as typing your new content and hitting “enter”.
• It’s easy to learn to blog. Most blogging platforms are so easy to use that you can have a basic blog up and running within a matter of minutes.  Start by writing and posting one article; gradually add more as your time permits.
• Blogging requires few financial resources. It’s free to get started and it’s free to run.  You don’t have to purchase a domain name or buy any software.  You don’t even have to hire a professional unless you’re trying to do something out of the ordinary with your blog.
• Blog technology helps you build your readership. Blog hosting sites automatically communicate with the major search engines making it easier for someone using, say, Google, to find you.  Blogs create RSS feeds automatically, making it easy for readers to subscribe to your content and receive notification when you post something new.

In fact, blogs work so well as a marketing tool, they have few drawbacks.  One of the biggest is that they’re not a set-it-and-forget-it kind of enterprise.  You can certainly write only one or two blog posts and never write anything again, but doing so defeats one of the best qualities of the blog—that it’s always new and fresh so it keeps people interested in you and what you’re doing.  To get the most out of your blog, you will have to work at it.

The other major drawback affects business people more than real estate pros: many blog hosting sites don’t allow you to run ads or use e-commerce applications to sell things.  For some business people this is a minor setback that requires special solutions.  For most real estate professionals, it’s not a problem at all.

So, blog or website?  Use what works for you, but don’t rule out blogging until you’ve given it a try.

Because most blog readers have a short attention span, it’s good to keep blog articles short, easy to read, and to the point.

One way bloggers accomplish this is by putting only a few lines of the article on the home page and requiring the reader to click “more” or “keep reading” to see the rest.

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