Realtors’ Down Market Tip #8: If You Refuse To Blog Here Are 15 Reasons To Convince Your Broker To Blog

NOTE: If you are a Realtor who reads this blog this may be the most important article I have ever written about your industry. If you wish continued success, survival in a very down market environment, or if you wish to flourish while your competition flounders then please read this article and consider the suggestions and data presented.

In “Realtor’s Down Market Tip#7: If You Refuse To Blog Make Your Website A Problem Solver!” I outlined marketing strategies for Realtors, thanks to Walt Goshert, who would not adopt blogging. For those Realtors who will never create their own blog, I strongly urge them to ask their brokers to create a company branded blog.

Broker’s next generation online marketing presence will be accomplished through what Pat Kitano and Kevin Boer of Domus Consulting Group call Local Blog Networks. The power of this blogging platform and strategy will change the face of the real estate industry as you know it now. The era of your local newspaper and magazine listings, photos, and ads is quickly being overtaken by the explosion of online blogs with rich consumer-user experiences.

In what I like to call the 3-D communication system, I consider email 1-D or one dimensional. The tone and message delivered is easily misunderstood and has little value aka newsletters. A 2-D communication would be “brochure-ware” Web 1.0 websites that do little but push info out with no direct contact and collaboration between the intended target of your message. If newspaper advertising is somewhere between a 1 and 2 dimensional experience then a Local Blog Network should be considered a 3-D delivery system.

In the 3-D system the message intended for a target audience is both rich with content and collaboration. The blog or blog network drives information to consumers, consumers can directly communicate and collaborate with the author(s) of the blog or blog network, and the blogger(s) are able to instantly measure their target’s feedback and reading habits.

If this is not enough evidence of the paradigm shift in real estate marketing provided by Domus Consulting Group and other independent Realtor blogs, then consider a report by Daysha at Blogbust about the 15 facts about blogging as presented at the Blog World and New Media Expo:

1. Over 12 million adults maintain a blog

2. More than 147 million Americans use the internet

3. Over 57 million Americans read blogs

4. 1.7 million adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog

5. 89% of companies surveyed say they believe that blogs will be more important in the next 5 years

6. 9% of internet users say they have created blogs

7. 6% of the entire U.S. adult population has created a blog

8. Technorati is currently tracking over 70 million blogs

9. Over 120,000 blogs are created every day

10. There are over 1.4 million new blog “posts” every day

11. 22 of the most popular 100 websites are blogs

12. 120,000 new blogs are created every day

13. 37% of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006

14. 51% of blog readers shop online

15. Blog readers average 23 hours online each week

If I were a broker owner I would concentrate on a number of these facts that suggest that people’s media habits are rapidly changing in favor of internet sources rather than traditional channels. If your broker is unaware of this quickly evolving trend, ignoring the mounting evidence, or reluctant to adopt blogging then consider showing him/her examples of this industry change. You may just be saving your job.