There are a number of types of blogs. Blogs are not a one size fits all idea. Depending on your writing style, target audience, business goals, and personal interests
Personal Blogs
Blog started as online journals. A personal blogs have no real specific focus. They are usually a fairly random scattering of thoughts on a wide range of subjects. On the plus side, it enables you to. Its weakness is that it’s not focused on any one topic — the only people likely to follow a personal blog regularly are people you know that want to keep up with your current thoughts and others why may find it and love your writing style and voice.
Hyper Local Blogs
A blog dedicated to a specific geographic area such as Seattle, Portland, or Charlotte. This is the most common blogging strategy taken by real estate agents because it provides the best avenue to attract buyers, sellers, and home owners interested in a specific geographic area.
Niche Blogs
A niche blog is essentially just a blog about a very targeted niche. A few examples of niche blogs that you could undertake:
- Cooking
- Microfinance
- Seattle Seahawks
- Travel
- Chicago Bulls
- Extreme Sports
- NASCAR
- Mojitos
- Classic cars
- Location Independent Living
- Hunting
- Web 2.0
Niche blogs are great for a few reasons:
- SEO – Many choose to build out multiple niche blogs as an SEO strategy, with the goal of building another authoritative web property to direct link “juice” back to a hyper local blog that makes you money.
- Relationship Building – A niche blog is a fantastic way to build relationships with others with similar passions as yourself. They may not be interested in buying or selling real estate now, but that doesn’t mean they won’t need to buy or sell at some point down the line — or possibly have a friend to refer to you.
- Follow your Passions – Spend your time creating content about topics you are passionate about means the chances you’ll succeed are infinitely greater than spending time creating content about something you hate.
Starting a niche blog is a bit of an advanced blogging strategy for the average real estate agent given the time it takes to build a successful blog. Until you have successfully built a hyper local blog focused on your community and gained business from it, we don’t recommend you start down the path of developing your own a niche blog. In the interim, the better approach is to “guest post” on a few niche blogs you follow. You can read more about guest posting in the linkbuilding module.
Multi Author Blogs
A multi author blog can be any blog that has multiple authors contributing to it. For instance, Geek Estate Blog is a multi author blog focused on real estate technology.
Strengths:
- Shared Content Creation – You aren’t forced to write every last piece of content on your own
- Feedback – Provides a great way to get feedback on your writing from someone else vested in the success of the site
- Shared Promotion – Chances are good the other authors you recruit will tell all their friends that they are contributing to your site.
Weaknesses:
- Time – You can’t underestimate the time it takes to recruit new bloggers. Guest bloggers are usually unpaid, so you’ll need to maintain a close relationship with them in order for them to write regularly.
- SEO – Most guest posters contribute to other blogs in exchange for links back to their respective sites. You’ll either need to give your contributors links or pay them cash for the content they are creating for your website. If links are what they get, it means your site will have more outbound links directing people to other websites. That said, the SEO trade off is usually worth it if it means getting fresh and original content from a variety of authors — as long as your authors are not competing for the same keyword that you are.
Questions? Ask them in the Geek Estate Pro forum.