Just finished reading a good post over at the RE tomato about blogging. They are right by saying blogging is not rocket science, but to be honest, I would still consider blogging to be in the early stages. Remember 10 years ago, trying to figure out email? Now that WAS rocket science.

What is the “To” for? what’s a “Subject”…I bet you remember those questions when you first tried Outlook, or Netscape.

10 years later, the questions are very very similar…What’s a ‘Post’, what’s a “Trackback”…

I’ve been talking to a lot of agents about web design, lead generation, top producer, and of course blogging. Here are a few tips I give.

1. get the word “blogging” out of your head. The Word “Blog” seems to freeze people when getting started. Honestly I don’t know why? think of it as a professional information source, or as Gary Keller said “This is my story, your welcome to jump on for the ride”

2. Keep it simple. The easiest way to blog is to find news on the web and give your 2 cents. If you look at the very bottom of the “Write Post” section in your wordpress blog you will see a thing called a Wordpress bookmarklet. Click and hold that link, then drag it to your bookmarks. Now whenever you are on a website that has a good story, just click that new bookmark you made. This will send you to your admin section and automatically fill your post with this link to that page. Write a paragraph or two (your 2 cents) and your done…simple and effective

3. If you do write a good original post, send to your local newspaper…or create a tearsheet or mass mail.

4. Don’t be afraid of negative comments. You have total control over what comments get posted on your site, and blogging is a great way to combat these negative posts.

5. your website or blog is not the end, it is the beginning. You now have to promote your website. I see so many agents get Top Producer and spend hours and days getting their action plans ready, and think the website will magically produce leads. This is completely opposite, spend time on your website, until you have the leads coming in, then get top producer. I’ve made countless e-commerce websites, and most people thought that it was really easy, just put up a site and let teh traffic come…buy some adwords, buy some links. This business will fail, and e-commerce site is the exact same as a brick and morter store…Your real estate website is the same.

6. Forget about SEO. Here is a good quote pulled from the tomato, by Teresa Boardman

Wordpress blogs are so great because they take care of all this for you. It’s not perfect, but it is good enough for you to forget about your page rank, and focus on getting the info to the public…page rank will follow.

7. Lastly, it is just a blog…it’s fun, it’s new, and you better get introduced because video blogs are right around the corner, and pretty soon everyone will have their own commercials.

If you haven’t tried blogging yet, go jump over to propblogs.com and try it. write some posts, gets some themes, I guarantee in less then an hour you will be well on your way to blogging bliss!

Popularity: 5% [?]