Happy Mother’s Day!  I hope that you get to spend it with your family.  If your Mom is still alive, I’ll bet that she’d love to see or hear from you!

Because I am spending Mother’s Day with Family, I am re-posting a January 2010 post that has information that I think you may be interested in seeing again.  If not, just hit delete and go spend the time with your family! 

I was reading Chris Brogan’s post on “Slicing Your Social Media Pie” over at American Express’s Open Small Business Forum on Saturday, and it got me to thinking about our business.

Chris asserts that “There are three basic components to social media: listening, creating, and communicating. That’s it. Listening is how you find out what people are saying about you, your competitors, your community, and whatever else matters. Creating is where you make blog posts or shoot video, or build upon ideas that show you’re a thought leader in the space. Communicating is a mix of commenting, responding, reaching out, and taking part in community.”

He goes on to share that he slices his “pie” as 20% Listening. 40% Creating and 40% Communicating. In other words, if you spend 2 hours a day on your social media tasks, 24 minutes should be on listening, 48 minutes on Creating and 48 minutes on Communicating.

I think that is excellent advice and here is how I would advise Realtors® to go about accomplishing it.

Google Alerts – for Listening

One of the best FREE ways for you to hear what others are saying about you, your competitors, the market, a neighborhood or anything else that you can think of is to create a Google Alert. Head on over to Google Alerts and fill in the simple form. You don’t need a Google account, but you do need to find the confirming email that Google sends and click on the link it contains before Google will start sending you alerts.

So what is a Goggle Alert? Here is what Google has to say: “Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms. You can also choose to have your alerts delivered via feed to the feed reader of your choice (e.g., Google Reader or add the feed to your iGoogle page). We currently offer alerts with results from News, Web, Blogs, Video and Groups.” You can have up to 1,000 alerts. Each alert has a link to the content that Google found so you simply click on the link to read what it found. In other words, you have set Google up to automatically search Google for you.

This gives you the opportunity to keep your finger on the pulse of what people are saying, both good and bad. Once you know what is being said, you can respond accordingly.

Blogs – for Creating

One of the all time BEST tools available to a Realtor® today has got to be a blog. A blog allows you to create your own customizable “home base” on the Internet. You can store and display all of your past sales, your current listings, any documentation, forms and check lists that you’d like current, past and future clients to have, and it can all be done by anyone with only a basic knowledge of computers. You can link your blog to your current static website, but you could also get rid of that website (and the monthly bill it generates) and put the content that it contains that is yours on your blog. And there are many free choices for you: Blogger, RealTown Blogs, Realtor.com Blogs and my personal favorite and the one I heartily recommend, WordPress.com.

I know that writing content can be difficult for some, but if you are listening you will be presented with many ideas for content. Even so, some people would rather have others write the content for them, so here are a couple of services that will do that for you. (Note: I am an affiliate for both of them. This means that if you buy their services I will earn a commission. It won’t be enough for me to make a living on, but it will help to defray the costs of running this blog).

The first can be found here: http://budurl.com/LeadBC. For $29.95 a month (at the time of this writing) they will produce 20 articles that you can insert into you blog after you do some minor changes like adding your name and location. These are real estate specific and will give quite a bit of content for about a dollar a day.

The second source is here: http://budurl.com/brtb. For $57.00 per month they will create a daily blog post for you and actually place it on your WordPress or Blogger blog. Again, this is real estate specific content.

Facebook and Twitter – for Communicating

The final piece of Brogan’s pie is communicating back. A large part of what makes social media marketing work is the act of engaging with people. One of the finest tools available today is facebook. With over 350 Million users worldwide, it would be the third largest country in the world, behind China and India, if it were a country.

Join Facebook and fill in your profile completely so that you are able to be found by people that you went to school with, that you worked with, that you served with and by people who live near you. Search facebook for the same groups of people and connect with them. Then engage in the conversation. Don’t talk about yourself from a self centered approach, instead talk with them about their lives and then some about yours. Be interesting, fun and educational. Provide value in your commentary so that people look forward to what you have to say.

Do the same with Twitter. Here you are limited to communicating in short burst of no more than 140 characters, so this will force you to get good at saying a lot in a little space…it can be done!

Once you are engaged with people on Facebook and Twitter, it’s an easy and believable step for them to visit your blog when you invite them to do so and you may find that because they feel that they know you well from your Facebook and Twitter interactions, that your referrals from them will increase.

And that my friends, is the Holy Grail.

Realtytechbytes.com by Jerry Kidd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.Realtytechbytes.com. Did you know that I have arranged for readers of my blog to receive licensed software for free? And that there is something new everyday? Click on the link to go to the blog and look for Give Away of the day in the sidebar.

Listen, Create and Communicate

Last week I talked about your need to have a prospecting plan that brings you the customers that you want to work with, instead of always having to work with whoever shows up! Wouldn’t it be nice if we always had a steady stream of prospective clients moving towards us as we move towards them? Well, wouldn’t it?

Why is it important to have clients that we like? Because life is too short to put up with people that grind our souls. You know who they are…you’ve even had a few in the past. You may even be working with one now.

Time to get off of that bus, now. Fire the turkeys and look for the eagles.

Here’s how I suggest that you go about it. First, let’s start with the premise that in order for people to want to do a transaction with you (assuming that they have choices) they have to TRUST you. They have to trust that you are the right person for the job, that you have their best interests at heart and that you will help them get to the goal they are seeking.

In order for people to trust you, they have to LIKE you. I can hear some of you say that you have trusted people that you didn’t like. Really? Really trusted? Maybe so, but for most of us, trust comes from liking.

In order to like you, people have to get to KNOW you. How do we do that in everyday, face to face life? By finding them, meeting them and interacting with them. By sharing things about our lives and being interested in their lives. And over time this leads to liking … or not. Liking leads to to trust and trust, for us, leads to transactions.

The good news that I bring you today is that the new social tools make all of this a reality and do it in a way that hits everyone of last weeks points.

Here are the social tools platforms that I think a REALTOR® should consider adopting:

Have a website or a blog. The blog is preferred over a website because it gives you the ability to update it with current information, showcase current listings and past transactions, solicit feedback, have private areas for clients where you can provide information relative to a transaction and more. You could do that on a website, but you’d be contacting or paying a webmaster every time you wanted to make a change. You’d also miss out on the fact that blogs generally rank higher in search engines than do static web sites, the fact that a blog can be totally free or trivially inexpensive, the fact that blogs can be subscribed to and the fact that blogs can foster community by eliciting comments and feedback. On the downside, you have to continually “feed” a blog…it needs fresh content to remain relevant and to keep people interested.

Have a presence on Facebook. Facebook has two faces. It has the personal profile and it also offers a business the opportunity to create a business (fan) page. The personal profile is where you can connect with family and friends, to share items of personal interest and to reconnect with people that you may have drifted away from. The business or fan page is where you connect with customers and potential customers. It operates much like a personal profile page in that it has a “wall” where you can post things that spark conversation and where others can contribute to the conversation. You can do so much more with a Facebook business page. Things like share listings, showcase past sales, describe your services, show videos and photos and much, much more. Think of your business page as your blog or website inside of facebook.

Build out your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn started out as a place for headhunters and job seekers to connect with each other and has grown from there to be a place where professional people congregate. If you imagine Facebook personal profiles to be a backyard barbecue, then you can imagine LinkedIn to be a Chamber of Commerce Mixer. LinkedIn gives you the perfect venue to showcase your past accomplishments (think very detailed resume), as well as a place to search out people that you’d like to meet…like the HR Director of that company who is moving people in and out of your market area.

Start using Twitter. Twitter offers you the opportunity to have short conversations with many people in a very compact period of time. There are tools available that allow you find and connect with people based on demographic criteria that you choose. You may wish to find people in a zip code, or community. Perhaps you’d like to find people who are talking about moving or buying or selling a home. Twitter gives you that ability.

Right about now, some people start squirming over the issue of privacy. Rather than go into that here, go read what my good friend, and social media maven, Ginger Wilcox has to say about privacy. UPDATE: This class took place in 2010. While you are there, sign up for her updates and you may even want to register for the webinar that she and Amy Chorew are putting on about privacy issues.

The next thing that comes up is time. Where do I get the time to do all of this? I’d like to trivialize this, but the truth is that you will have to expend some time. But, instead of dismissing these tools because of time constraints, why not take a good hard and honest look at how you allocate your prospecting time now. What is working for you? What is not working for you? Take the things that are working and continue with them. But stop doing that which isn’t working and start looking for ways to fold these tools into whatever you are currently doing that is producing results.

And if after you have honestly evaluated your time expenditures and find that you really aren’t consistently prospecting for new business, why not start now? The social tools that I outlined here can all be used, or you can select the ones that resonate for you. Anyone one of them can fulfill the criteria that I laid out last week. If you can do them all, I believe that you will be able to be selective about the clients you work with sooner rather than later.

If you need help in setting these up, strategizing how to utilize them, or just need some help in getting your business up and running (or back on it’s feet), feel free to contact me. It’s what I do these days!

Realtytechbytes.com by Jerry Kidd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.Realtytechbytes.com. Did you know that I have arranged for readers of my blog to receive licensed software for free? And that there is something new everyday? Click on the link to go to the blog and look for Give Away of the day in the sidebar.

Get new clients using social tools ~ Part Two

I have long held the belief that in order for me to be happy in my business life, that I really need to work with people that I like and to avoid those people who seem to make it their mission in life to grind down my soul.

• It needs to be actionable
• It needs to be realistic
• It needs to be done with reasonable frequency (Everyday!)
• It needs to be effective
• It needs to be enjoyable
• It needs to be inexpensive or free (Especially if you are starting out)

If you can implement such a plan, finding the right people to work with can be an easy and enjoyable process. If you don’t have a plan, then you get to work with whoever shows up wanting to work with you! And that will bring you turkeys as well as eagles!

So much for your side of the story. But what is it like for the prospect trying to choose someone to “hire”?

If they are looking for a REALTOR®, they can look at magazine and newspaper ads, they can ask friends for a recommendation, they can visit open houses, they can rely on past transactions, they can visit web sites or they can use social tools.

Although all of the above methods work, the one that I believe benefits both the REALTOR® and the consumer is the social tools method. And here is why:

For the REALTOR®, the social tools method covers every one of the requirements of a good prospecting plan (see above).

But the consumer also benefits if the REALTOR® has done a good job of filling out their social graph. (More on that next week).

The consumer can interact with the REALTOR® long before they are ready to transact. That interaction will give them the time to study the REALTOR’s® past performance, response time, marketing plans, resources and other tools that a REALTOR® uses to practice their craft.

You as a REALTOR® also get to examine the potential client as they interact with you! You can spot a turkey a mile off by using the social tools to look at them as well! Over time, birds of a feather will flock together!

So what are the social tools I recommend using? That will be next week’s topic. If you want to be sure to not miss that post, go ahead and look at the top right of the sidebar on my blog and subscribe via email. (or click here) Or use your RSS reader to subscribe by clicking here.

And in the meantime, be sure to let me know what your thoughts are; am I on track or way off base?

Realtytechbytes.com by Jerry Kidd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.Realtytechbytes.com. Did you know that I have arranged for readers of my blog to receive licensed software for free? And that there is something new everyday? Click on the link to go to the blog and look for Give Away of the day in the sidebar.

Get new clients using social tools ~ Part One

One of the questions that comes up a lot in the hands on classes that I teach has to do with Copyright. People either want to know how to protect their work, or they want to know how they can use work done by others. So, I thought that I’d share some of the resources that I use to answer those questions.

Bur first, a disclaimer. I am not an attorney. And, if I was, which I am not, I am not your attorney. This is not legal advice. You use this information at your own risk and after having thoroughly investigated every link I present here. To be on the REALLY safe side, consult an attorney. Preferably one who is conversant with Copyright Law.

Now that I have that little bit of nastiness is out of the way, let me tell you how I deal with these questions.

To start with, it would be a very good idea if you took a few minutes to check out all of the free information there is on the web. Instead of ending up a some random web site that offers questionable advice, why not go straight to the source? If you are in the US, the US Copyright Office is conveniently located at http://www.copyright.gov/. If you are a fan of multimedia learning, go straight to Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright located at http://www.loc.gov/teachers/copyrightmystery/ which is a animation designed for teachers and students. I found it to be a good resource for a quick understanding. You can also get a plain text version of the animation at http://www.loc.gov/teachers/copyrightmystery/text/. Another good page to check out is the FAQ page at http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/

There is much more to read on the site, but as a minimum, reading the suggested pages will get you off to a good understanding.

While Copyright law covers much of what you want to do on line, there is yet another type of non-governmental protection available through something called Creative Commons. You can learn about that at http://creativecommons.org/.

Essentially, Creative Commons has created standardized licensing procedures that allow you to modify your Copyright rights. Here is the link to a page on that site which explains what it is, why it came into being and how you might benefit from Creative Commons licensing: http://creativecommons.org/about/what-is-cc. Be sure to take the time to watch the videos there and you will not only get informed, but you’ll be entertained along the way.

Finally, you could always just ask someone for permission to use their material. Novel concept, but it works. I often will purchase photos from www.istockphoto.com to use on this blog, but occasionally I have found the perfect photo on www.flickr.com. In order to use the flickr photos, I just emailed the photographer and asked for permission. When I got the ok back, I just went ahead and used the picture.

If you are publishing a blog, or laying music down with a home tour that you built (I am not talking about the third party tours that come with music), you’ll definitely want to check out the US Copyright Office and the Creative Commons websites and save yourself a load of trouble.

Realtytechbytes.com by Jerry Kidd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.Realtytechbytes.com. Did you know that I have arranged for readers of my blog to receive licensed software for free? And that there is something new everyday? Click on the link to go to the blog and look for Give Away of the day in the sidebar.

Copyright, Creative Commons and you

I was one of those people who stood in line for over 6 hours in July of 2008 to buy the iPhone 3G when it came out.  I wasn’t happy to do it, but I endured the wait because the reward was so worth it.

Then Apple came out with the iPhone 3GS.  It had a feature that I really wanted and that was the ability to shoot video with the built in camera, something the 3G lacked, even though it’s camera and hardware was completely capable of doing it!  I didn’t rush out to get the 3GS because I wasn’t “seasoned” enough in my contract with AT&T and would have had to buy my way out the contract so that I could enter into a new one with AT&T for the new phone.  I wasn’t willing to do that.

There was another option for me to be able to shoot video on my iPhone 3G and that was to “jailbreak” my phone.  Jail breaking a phone is the process of installing some software that allows you to install other software that permits the phone to do things that Apple and AT&T did not want done.  Like shooting video!

The problem with jail breaking a phone is that it possibly violates the warranty and the possibility of “bricking” the phone is very real.  “Bricking” is a term used to describe the phenomenon of rendering your phone unusable and irreparable.  Even as geeky as I am, I didn’t want to risk that.  So, I contented myself with the thought that I had to stick to my Flip camera for mobile video.  I like the Flip and and have used it frequently. but it means carrying another device all the time.

I just ran across the answer to problem. Ustream has released an iPhone app that will allow my iPhone 3G (and the 3GS) to shoot live video and upload it to their website and make it available to be watched by others and embedded into my blog or Facebook page.

And, it’s FREE!  It’s called Ustream Broadcaster and you get it at the iPhone App Store.  You’ve got to have iTunes installed on your computer to get it.

They have a very extensive help page to get you up and running so you should be able to get this done in short order.

So, problem solved, angst with the iPhone reduced, but not gone. (When can I tether my iPhone to my laptop?  Come on Apple and AT&T, get with it!)

How might you use this feature?  I’m thinking it makes for a great tool when out on tour.  If you see something your client might like, whip out your phone, shoot a quick video and Tweet about it or load it to your Facebook page (Both features are built into the app) and let your client know.

How are you going to use it?  Share your ideas by leaving a comment.

Realtytechbytes.com by Jerry Kidd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.Realtytechbytes.com. Did you know that I have arranged for readers of my blog to receive licensed software for free? And that there is something new everyday? Click on the link to go to the blog and look for Give Away of the day in the sidebar.

iPhone 3G pet peeve solved!

I was poking about on Google today, in a behind the scenes sort of way and somehow ended up looking at Google Directory.  Google Directory?  I didn’t know that Google had a directory.  Like most of us, I know Google as a search engine par excellence, but as a directory?  Who knew?

What’s the difference between a search engine and a web directory you might be asking? As usual, I headed on over to Wikipedia for the answer:

»A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links.

»A web directory is not a search engine and does not display lists of web
pages based on keywords; instead, it lists web sites by category and subcategory. The categorization is usually based on the whole web site rather than one page or a set of keywords, and sites are often limited to inclusion in only a few categories. Web directories often allow site owners to directly submit their site for inclusion, and have editors review submissions for fitness.

»RSS directories are similar to web directories, but contain collections of RSS feeds, instead of links to web sites.  Go here for more from Wikipedia on web directories.

I did a quick search for real estate agencies in my area and found the results quite surprising because of who was listed, and who was not listed.  Here is the link to the spot on the directory where you can begin your search by selecting your state, then your county or locality. http://budurl.com/GoogDir

Are you listed?  Do you care?  Maybe you should.  From Google’s help section on it’s Directory I found this:

»The Google Web Directory integrates Google’s sophisticated search te
hnology with Open Directory pages to create the most useful tool for finding information on the web. Key improvements include the following:

»Importance ranking. The Google Web Directory starts with a collection of websites selected by Open Directory volunteer editors. Google then applies its patented PageRank technology and other factors to rank the sites based on their importance. Horizontal bars, which are displayed next to each web page, indicate Google’s™ view of the importance of the page. This distinctive approach to ranking web sites enables the highest quality pages to appear first as top results for any Google directory category.  (Did you catch the underlined words?  Human’s rate the directory contents)

»Smarter search within directory categories. Google uses the advanced technology that powers its regular web search to learn more about each page listed in its directory. This capability enables users to search deeper within categories and produces more relevant results than any other directory search.

»Web search integration. Google’s innovative classification technique connects regular Google search results with information in the Google Web Directory. This technology gives users one-click access from regular Google search results to the most relevant hand-selected web pages in the Google directory.

»Clean, uncluttered user interface. The Google Web Directory uses the same no-nonsense, user-friendly interface design that distinguishes the google.com site from other search engine sites.

You may also want to know how people can make use of the Google Directory. I did.  I figured that if Google didn’t heavily promote it’s existence how important could it be?  Here’s the answer to that right from the Google Directory help page:

When would I use the Google directory instead of Google’s regular web search?

• The good news is that you don’t need to choose between the two. Google’s regular web search results are enhanced by information from the Google directory. Look for the addition of editorial descriptions and links to Google directory categories in some search returns. These additions mean that Google has found relevant information about that particular page in the directory and is bringing it to you. Click on the link to find similar pages in the same category or to find other categories like the one for your result.
• While Google’s regular web search is likely the fastest way to find information on a specific subject, the Google directory is particularly useful when you’re not sure how to narrow your search from a broad category. The directory can help you understand how topics within a specific area are related and may suggest terms that are useful in conducting a search. It can also give you an idea of the scope of a given category, such as the number of newspapers in California.
• Google’s directory engine also lets you search within a category once you’ve decided on the specific subsection of the web that interests you. In this way, you’ll get only responses that fall within that category. For example, you may want to search for teams named “Cougars” within the college basketball section of the directory only, instead of across the entire web.
• Finally, you might prefer to use the directory when you only want to see sites that have been evaluated by an editor. The Open Directory project has 20,000 volunteer editors reviewing websites and classifying them by topic. Google’s search technology lets you arrange those sites by their importance instead of alphabetically, which means you’ll get the benefit of both human judgment and a sophisticated ranking algorithm.

That all sounds good to me. Google uses human editors to review the web sites that it includes on its Directory.  It ranks those entries based on human judgment and integrates the Directory results with its keyword based search results.

What that means to real estate people is that getting found on a Google search is something to strive for, but then having Google pass on it’s opinion on the ranking of the search results delivered is something we’d all like to have.  Especially if Google determines your site to be an authority site.

So, how do you get your site in the index? From the very bottom of the Google Help page on Directories, we find this:

How can I submit a web page to the Google Directory?
The web pages in the Google directory have been selected by thousands of volunteer editors from the Netscape Open Directory Project. If you would like to submit a web page to be included in future versions of the directory, you may submit the web page directly to the Open Directory by following the instructions here.

If you go there and read all the steps, you may notice that it could take several weeks for them to even get to your submission.  No mention is made of how long it takes them to approve your site, but they do say that it could take several months before an approved site shows up on the Directories they serve.  From what I can see, a single submission gets your site (once approved) onto “AOL Search, Google, Netscape Search, Yahoo Search, and hundreds of other sites”

So why are you sitting there reading this?  Get cracking and get your site listed. It can’t hurt and it may be just the little bit of information needed by a web searcher to choose you and not your competitor who doesn’t know about this!

Realtytechbytes.com by Jerry Kidd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.Realtytechbytes.com. Did you know that I have arranged for readers of my blog to receive licensed software for free? And that there is something new everyday? Click on the link to go to the blog and look for Give Away of the day in the sidebar.

Google Secret Tool Can Increase Your ranking

Everywhere you turn these days you are hearing about blogging and why you should be doing it.  You may have even taken some classes on blogging or maybe you read some blogs written by others, but still haven’t been able to decide if blogging is for you.

I am going to give you 10 reasons why you should blog, and 5 reasons why you shouldn’t in this post.

First the reasons why you should be blogging:

1.  Search Engines love blogs. The search engines are all looking for new content and it’s not unusual for a search engine to find a new blog post in minutes.  The more information a search engine has indexed about you, the better your chances are of obtaining a high listing on search results.  You might go so far as to say that Blog stands for Better Listings On Google!

2.  A blog is trivial to update. Having a blog allows you to get current, relevant information out in front of people faster, easier and less expensively than a traditional web site does.  You are the “webmaster”.  You don’t have to contact, explain and pay for changes you want done.

3.  People can subscribe to your blog. Using the magic of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) your readers can read your new posts in their email client, web browser or RSS reader with out having to visit your site.  This level of convenience makes it more likely that you will be read.  Your readers can also subscribe to your blog via email.  The new Post will turn up in their email boxes as a regular email.

4.  You can archive your past posts. What this means is that you can write a series of posts on the process of buying a home in your market area just as you would explain it to a new client.  Then in the future you can just refer people to it as necessary.  That will save you both huge amounts of time and it becomes an online reference for your client.  You could do this for every aspect of your business and over time build a large reference library that would help you attract new clients.  (remember the search engines are watching and indexing your content).

5.  Brand building. A blog is a great way for you to build your personal brand.  Are you a real estate agent who is heavily into community service?  If so, talk about that in a section on your blog.  Do you specialize in certain property types or geographic areas?  Talk about that.  Let your imagination go and think about ways that you could meld your after hours interests with your passion for real estate.  You will attract like minded people through the reach of the search engines.

6.  A blog is a differentiator. A blog lets you tell your story in multiple different ways.  The more you can tell it, the better you become at building your brand.  If your competitor is not blogging you can leap ahead of them to reach the people in your market who do read blogs.  And if your competitor is blogging and you are not, you can catch up.

7.  Build relationships with your clients. A blog gives you the opportunity to show your personal side in a way that will go much further than just posting a picture of you with your family ever could.  We all want to feel like we really know the people that are handling our biggest transaction.

8.  Focus on a niche. For the price of registering a domain and a few hours work you can have a blog that is laser focused on a particular market niche.  Real estate web sites that attempt to be everything to everyone rarely are as effective as sites that speak to a single demographic,.  The cost of building a real estate web site is high as are the monthly fees, so we tend to only have one such site and because of that it has to be very general in it’s approach.  Want to reach investors?  Build an investor centric blog for the cost of a domain registration and some time.

9.  A blog can do everything that a web site can do. Everything that is currently on your web site can be duplicated on your blog.  You can have your past sales, your current listings, community resources, testimonials, photos, videos, informative guides, maps and even IDX property search.

10.  The price is right. How does free sound to you?  You can get free blogs on WordPress, Blogger, ActiveRain. RealTown and Realtor.com to name a few.  It is true that there are limitations on what you can do with a free a blog, but don’t let that stop you from trying this method of getting your message out.  You can always upgrade to a more robust platform if you find that blogging is a useful part of your business strategy.

Having given you 10 reasons to blog, I’ll turn it around and give you a few reasons why you shouldn’t blog now.  Yes, that’s right, blogging is not for everyone.

1.  You don’t have the passion to take this on. Creating a blog becomes a bit like grabbing a tiger by the tail.  In order to get all of the benefits described above, you have to be willing to publish new content at least weekly.  Posting more often is preferable to build reader interest.

2.  You are not “into” computers, blogs, social networks, etc and don’t care about reaching potential customers who are. Studies have shown that more and more of our population is venturing into and adopting these methods of communication as time goes by, but you are not one of them.

3.  You are afraid of something new. Sometimes fear of the unknown keeps us from exploring new methods.  Sometimes that can be overcome and sometimes it cannot.

4.  You are afraid that you won’t be able to do it. Actually, blogging is as easy as sending an email message.  If you can operate a web browser, and log on to a Multiple Listing Service and run a search, you can blog.  The skills are almost identical.  But you may be afraid to try.

5.  You don’t have the time. It’s true.  You might have to invest 2 or 3 hours a week into prospecting for new clients and engaging present and past clients via the blog.  But, how are you doing those activities now?  Can you re-purpose some of that time to blogging?

So there you have it.  10 reasons to blog and 5 to not blog.  Which ones speak to you?  Which way are you going to go?

Realtytechbytes.com by Jerry Kidd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
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10 Reasons to blog and 5 reasons not to blog for Realtors®