Blogging to Connect

As a real estate company in a high-tech city we know why we need to blog. We also learned that we need to do it regularly and do it well. It seems that the current trend with blogging is to do it often to generate a great deal of content for a website on the same topic. I see many blogs that do not offer real meat on the topics people want. The problem I find with many real estate blogs is that they seem to be a catalog of information that does not get in front of the consumer when it is most relevant to that person’s search.

We are working on that very issue. We are having agents post blogs on the topics and areas they like to write about. The first thing this does is allow the real estate agent to write about what they actually know, as opposed to trying to post on topics they do not know or like. When a post shows up on our blog, we find the most relevant page to put the post on. In an area like ours where there are many small towns, people want information about an area from someone who actually knows it. This is the need we are filling. This experiment has been in place for a couple of weeks now and we are starting to see results. When people did not find the information on a static page for the area, they leave our site and go elsewhere. Now these same people are going to the individual agent’s sites and doing their searches there. What we realized is that the company site could not offer the level of confidence that an individual could give a prospective client, so we are using the company website to catapult the agent’s websites into the markets they know. Our concern is not whether or not our company site connects with the prospects and clients, but whether or nor not our agents web sites do. We now know the same prospective client has, by default, been routed to the most qualified real estate agent to help them via the agent’s blog on the company site.

It is a new concept; we understand that. The issue we are trying to overcome is the fact that an overwhelming majority of visitors never even log in to our website. We feel that it is due to the lack of a personal connection. We started this project about three weeks ago with our agents and have now invited select professionals that we rely on, such as title companies, lenders, and home inspectors to participate. We are doing this so that our prospects will be comfortable with what we know, who we know, and how we get our information. To summarize this experiment, we are allowing our company website to reflect the knowledge and relationship of our agents and associates. I guess you could say that our website is like a small forum of real estate professionals we work with. No one pays for this, and the idea is that the information we provide our prospects and clients is objective. If all of this confusing to you, please take a minute and surf our website to see how the pages on certain areas offer recent information posted by agents and other professionals in our business.

The author of this blog owns a real estate company in Austin Texas. http://skyrealtyaustin.com The prime directive of the office is to help agents connect with consumers for the market the agents know best. http://www.skyrealtyaustin.com/selling.php