Blogs

Crystal, it will help your search engine rank. You can set one up easily for free. You can use Blogger or wordpress.

Hi Crystal! I am on ActiveRain.com. It will help your "searchability," but you will have to post blogs and invite your associates to join. I am also part of the NAR and CAR groups on LinkedIn and Facebook. I would try joining those as well. The best way is to stick to two or three and not try to cover the "social networking world" if you will. Biznik is probably one of the best since it seems that the architecture is open so the search engines pick it up more readily. Please let me know if I can help you in any way. Cheers, Dawn Thomas www.TheDawnThomasTeam.com

the best way to have a blog help your search engine ranking is to syndicate the content/posts to your site/linkedin/facebook

Crystal - for the price of gas and lunch I'll give you a blogging 101 for real estate. ;)

I have actually been on ActiveRain since it started. There is a ton of useful advice on that community, but unfortunately a ton of bad advice too. I just wrote a piece on my blog there covering the painful side of service with Advanced Access.

For real estate pros, it really has mostly to do with consistency, finding a voice to have a niche in, and understanding when/where/how you can syndicate your information.

It also comes from understanding how to "work your network" online, and a blog just plays one part of that puzzle.

Blogging will definitely help drive business to your website, but make sure you use social bookmarking sites such as Digg, delicious and stumbleupon and a judicious use of tagging to make your blog stand out.

Crystal: I am also on Active Rain and find it very useful. The ability to communicate with my smarter peers is appealing plus, occasionally, my blog is read by the public. In other words, it's all good! Good luck!

Paul

Crystal - lots of good advice here, I'm sure, and I recommend to take advantage of Barry in every way possible, he will save you more time and money in 5 minutes than you can imagine. And every move he recommends will leverage that same time and money to your benefit.

DD

Hello everyone. It looks like there has been a lengthy discussion going on regarding blogs and some other aspects of social media. Barry has already offered his time, but if anyone else would like I would be happy to jump on a phone call and/or screen share to provide some guidance regarding blogging and what to focus on regarding social media.

To piggy back a little on Barry's comments on Active Rain, I am not intimately familiar with the site. Based on my experience it looks to me like Active Rain is adding far too much noise instead of signal to what could otherwise be a great opportunity to showcase your expertise.

Additionally it doesn't seem to give much room for personal branding. I strongly suggest, at the minimum, you look into installing a Wordpress blog on your own domain, getting a clean looking theme to make it presentable, and start blogging away.

Bring interested visitors to your home on the web where your the star, not where your sharing the stage with the entire cast.

Quick tip to generate blogging topics: What are the top 5 questions that you frequently answer for customers? If you have answered them once, twice, or a dozen times, chances are others out there will be asking the same question. Write a 300-500 word article on each of those subjects.

What are the top 7 things you would suggest your customers should/shouldn't do? That could be a post and each bullet point could be expounded from there.

Your building up: 1.) Search engine sensitive information on your own blog/site 2.) Demonstrating your experience in your field. 3.) Providing some well needed FREE information to your visitors and potential customers.

All these birds with one stone.

As Barry said, this is one component of the larger picture, but its an important one. I also completely agree with phrase "work your network". I use that alot. Spend time cultivating your network.

Once you get at least 5 good articles up on your blog, then share with your network.

I hope this helps a bit. Sorry for the long reply.

Actually Adam I think it's quite helpful. This kind of direction helps some of us get focus and what to do and how to go about it. My blog posts have tended not to be so focused and I should probably write and article... Thanks.

Dennis

Digg is a social book marking site. I wrote a recent article on it for Biznik. Go here to read more: http://biznik.com/articles/social-bookmarking-how-it-can-help-you-raise-your-visibility

Taylor,

Digg is a great place to generate traffic, but tends to have a very specific demographic of users who are particular about what they promote. Real Estate and chiropractic content would not necessarily be what interests them unless its incredibly earth shattering and/or offbeat. I would suggest providing a few ways for users to "share" your content. Digg is fine, but much less likely for that content than sites like Reddit or Stumbledupon.com.

I mentioned other sites in my first comment, as well as in the article I referred her to.

@Crystal

Syndicating your information means knowing how your data can be distributed. As a few mentioned already- some common distribution points are Biznik, ActiveRain, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit.

Some real estate pros also use vFlyer, Craigslist, and the local news community (such as the Seattle PI blogs)

There are different kinds of data that can be used for online syndication: the one most commonly thought of in real estate is using your MLS info and making sure it is in Zillow and Trulia. You can also create new data (I.E. articles), but that takes times and effort.

You also have syndication channels with sites like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and YouTube depending on your niche of real estate.

I would also side with Adam on using your own site as the "foundation" for your efforts. If you blog on another site, you gain some short term benefits, but you lose control of branding and ownership (which are two pretty big assets)