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I have been talking for the last couple of years about how important and useful blogging can be for a Realtor. I am looking at going to Blog world Expo and see that there is a special day that has been set aside called ”

The Real Estate and Mortgage Conference at Blog World and New Media Expo

They really need to get a better name. Anyway this trade show There will be a seminar, booths and training, here is what they say

A full day of seminars, panels & workshops focused on the nuts & bolts of leveraging social media tools like blogs to enhance the marketing efforts of real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and anyone working within the field of real estate.

This event is taking place in Las Vegas on September 19 with the rest of the Blog World Expo taking place on September 20th and 21.

Here is a page that will tell you the top 5 reasons to go to the Realtor Blog World Expo as well as more info about it

If you ever go to Inman news you know how fast the news comes and then suddenly disappears. Well I found this great article at the Inman news site that I thought I would share on the power of blogging for Realtors.

Blogging can be more than a communications tool and networking platform for real estate professionals — it can convey personality, generate leads and boost business, say real estate bloggers.

“My whole business is blog clients. Most of my clients read the blog and then call me — almost all of them,” said Ardell DellaLoggia, a Seattle real estate agent who blogs at RainCityGuide.com and SearchingSeattle.com. “It became my main marketing channel.”

Ardell, who participated in an Inman News audio conference about blogging on Monday, also said this “is a little scary” because she never intended for the blog to bring in so many clients.

The number of blogs focusing on real estate has increased dramatically over the last year. Real estate agents and companies are using blogs to inform and connect with potential customers and to network with one another.

Clients who are blog readers tend to buy faster than the average online consumer, she said. “The blog clients that I’ve had almost always buy immediately, so it’s different than … lead-generation-type sites. By the time someone contacts me on the blog they are absolutely ready to go buy a house.”

Noah Rosenblatt, a real estate broker who created the UrbanDigs.com blog that offers tips for New York City buyers and sellers, agreed that blogs can be a powerful business tool. Prospective customers who reach out to him through his blog are often “ready to go,” he said. “They know they want to work with you. That, in itself, makes it a much higher quality of lead.”

Local content can be key for Realtors who are seeking to drum up business in their market areas, Rosenblatt said. “Real estate is local. (Consumers) need that insight into the market. Tell them what’s going on in your local market via your daily experiences.”

Read the rest of this entry »

What is a blog?
What is a weblog? Well simply put a weblog is a journal that is kept online. In it’s simplest form a weblog will have an article every day or week that says what the person is doing.

I’m not a writer, what can I write?
A great way the weblogs are now being utilized is as a marketing device that allows a person to market directly to their customer without the hassles of email or especially direct mail. A blog will help you to become a real person in the eyes of your future customers and is an opportunity to research the market and then explain it to the people you will work with. Anyone can do this and you for one should be doing this

Tone of your writing
One of the reasons that blogging should come eaily is that you should write as you speak. Use the style and type of language that you use when talking to live customers in your writing and always, always be asking questions to draw in your readers.

Subjects to blog about
Just off the top of my head I can tell you what kind of information can be included in these weblog articles: info on new market trends, personal achievements, buyer and seller success stories, personal stories to personalize yoou to youor public. How else can you do this? With a website you would have to update it often and a weblog is built for this so there is no hassle. With direct mail such as newsletters you would have a high cost to send and a time lag to customer seeing it where with a weblog it is instantly accessible and free to post, and finally with email newsletters you have to keep track of a list and if you sent to them every day you would run into trouble with keeping a good list when everyone is being buried by your emails and think of them as spam.

It’s been years since blogging has been practiced. But it’s just recently that it has been considered as one of the addicting fads. Many teenagers have resorted to blogging as an outlet for their emotions, a little online nook where they can blurt out whatever just bugs them or whatever makes them feel elated. Savvy marketers have discovered that blogging is one of the best Internet marketing methods that won’t cost you a cent.

What exactly is blogging? Blog is the widely used term that refers to web log. Basically, a blog is an online journal. A blog could be set up to no cost at all, and can be used for just for the fun of it or for business reasons.

Blogging for your Internet business is one surefire way to boost the visibility of your products and services. Here are a few ways to boost your internet advertising with the help of a blog:

1. Make your clients or customers abreast on your website’s alterations. Your new products and affiliate websites could also be announced through your blog.

2. Keep track of your business objectives and plans through open writing. Your blog content can be easily stored through archives. What could be better than searchable information that could be easily accessed by anyone browsing the web, right?

3. Air your opinions, advice or reviews on specific services or products that are related to your business. Publishing is a very easy process with blogging.

4. Include links that will fetch back links and subsequently improve your ranking on search engines. This could be better executed through putting well-written articles in your website. Affiliate links could also be included in your blog to earn more extra income.

5. Collect response through the ability of blogs to fetch comments from your blog readers. You can learn and improve your products and services through with the feedback from your readers.

6. Connect easily with other bloggers. When other bloggers notice that you have something good in your blog, they will put you in their favorite lists that will automatically link you to their blogs.

So, how do you set up a blog? Here are some of the options you can make use of to take advantage of this fun way to advertise your Internet business.

Either you load a blogging software or let a blogging hosting service do it for you. Host services such as LiveJournal and Blogger.com are the most popular in this field. Those hosts will provide you with easy instructions on how to put up your blog.

It’s been years since blogging has been practiced. But it’s just recently that it has been considered as one of the addicting fads. Many teenagers have resorted to blogging as an outlet for their emotions, a little online nook where they can blurt out whatever just bugs them or whatever makes them feel elated. Savvy marketers have discovered that blogging is one of the best Internet marketing methods that won’t cost you a cent.

What exactly is blogging? Blog is the widely used term that refers to web log. Basically, a blog is an online journal. A blog could be set up to no cost at all, and can be used for just for the fun of it or for business reasons.

Blogging for your Internet business is one surefire way to boost the visibility of your products and services. Here are a few ways to boost your internet advertising with the help of a blog:

1. Make your clients or customers abreast on your website’s alterations. Your new products and affiliate websites could also be announced through your blog.

2. Keep track of your business objectives and plans through open writing. Your blog content can be easily stored through archives. What could be better than searchable information that could be easily accessed by anyone browsing the web, right?

3. Air your opinions, advice or reviews on specific services or products that are related to your business. Publishing is a very easy process with blogging.

4. Include links that will fetch back links and subsequently improve your ranking on search engines. This could be better executed through putting well-written articles in your website. Affiliate links could also be included in your blog to earn more extra income.

5. Collect response through the ability of blogs to fetch comments from your blog readers. You can learn and improve your products and services through with the feedback from your readers.

6. Connect easily with other bloggers. When other bloggers notice that you have something good in your blog, they will put you in their favorite lists that will automatically link you to their blogs.

So, how do you set up a blog? Here are some of the options you can make use of to take advantage of this fun way to advertise your Internet business.

Either you load a blogging software or let a blogging hosting service do it for you. Host services such as LiveJournal and Blogger.com are the most popular in this field. Those hosts will provide you with easy instructions on how to put up your blog.

I was reading Lee Oddens’s article RSS Buttons for Your Blog and wanted to make sure to remind you of an important source of traffic for your blog and that is RSS feeds of any kind.

All blog software allows you to create an RSS feed and I my self use both bloglines and Sharp Reader to read RSS feeds. These RSS feed are just machine readable posts from weblogs that you can read in anoither application. Many people may already be reading your blog posts this way as it is a very efficient way to get your news. I watch about 300 different blogs and news sources this way.

Having these buttons on your blog makes it very easy for people to subscribe to your blog and therefore able to return very easily and see alll of your content as you create it.

If you have the ability to edit the template of your blog these buttons are a great addition to get more traffic.

Is finding having a blog really helps his Real Estate business. On Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger
Robert Scoble, one of the true geeks who worked for Microsoft and has a Realtor friend outlines how this friend advertises properties on Craigslist and includes his blog address. This is interesting as maybe an emial address is not nearly as useful anymore compared to your blog address, and he is getting a lot of traffic to his blog thanks to the listings.

OK now that you have a weblog, adwords account, focussed customer pulling website, it is time to make sure that people can also find your website in Google and the other search engines.

The besy way to rank well in search engines is to be focussed on what you write. Start brainstorming articles and think about how people will find these areticles in Google. Lets say that you would like to corner the condo market in your city. Here is an almost foolproof strategy.

1. Create a category in your weblog for the condos. lets say you will call it Calgary Condos, that is if you live in Calgary.

2. Write an article a day about Calgary Condos and make sure to focus each of these articles, make them about 500-800 words each (Microsoft Word has a word counter) and make sure that you do this for about five days or so. Articles could be; Searching for a Calgary Condo, Areas of town for a Calgary Condo, Costs for a Calgary Condo. What are factors to look for in a Calgary Condo…And make sure that you use the term you want to rank for often in your articles…but not too often to make it look funny.

3. The day after you write each Calgary Condos article upload the article to 3 or 4 article directories so that you can improve your exposure but still making sure that the search engines know that the definitive article is sitting on your weblog.

4. After you have written all of your articles up and submitted to the search engines make sure that you go to PRWeb and submit a free press release so that you can get a bit more exposure.

After this four step process you can look a coup;le of weeks later and hopefully each of the search engines should have you ranked highly for that term and the people that you are looking for, calgary condo buyers in this case, will be able to find your good articles and have that trust to contact you.

Many Realtors do not have much expereince writing except for feature sheets and listing descriptions so when I say that you should write blog post often I know that many of you just glaze over and look for another idea. This is a mistake as writing can be both therapeutic for you as well as informative for your readers. Successful Blog writer Liz Strauss has this article, Things Every Reader Wants from a Writer. This may give you a muc better idea of what you should be writing about and give you a good idea of what your blog should contain to humanize you and still set you up to be a professional that people should deal with.

If you have not read Successful Blog before I have to tell you that there are many articles that I have picked up from there that are a great into for you to be a better writer and marketer.

Seth Godin my favorite marketer has a list of 56 things that can get you more traffic to your blog. How to get traffic for your blog is a great list that tackles some of the most importnat topics; good posts, interesting, tackle small tight topics, edit yourself. Lots of great stuff here and a lot I myself had not thought about in the past myself.