Munira Al-Khalili's Blog

What Realtors Should Put on Their Blogs

Munira Al-Khalili (The Lilis Realty Group / Keller Williams Realty) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:54:23 -0700

A good number of Realtors are getting on the ball and putting up a blog. This is smart. It’s a powerful communication tool. It’s a powerful way to build your presence online. However keep a couple important points in mind:

It will only serve as a powerful communication tool if you actively use it to communicate. It’s an ongoing process!
It will only build your presence online if you actively build it!

In other words, a blog doesn’t build itself. Putting it up is step one. Step 2 through to step 10 million-bazillion are all up to you. And if you don’t do it, who’s gonna?

To put it better than anyone else I’ve heard…

One of the keys to blogging is to freaking post to your blog. – Grant Griffiths

When I read that in a recent post to his own blog, I knew I was going to have to quote him at least once, but that quote is awesome! It couldn’t be more true. This business is very simple.

It’s hard work to build your business online, but Realtors are already used to working very hard. If you commit yourself to the work that’s necessary, your blog can become the most cost-effective and powerful marketing tool you have ever used, period. And I mean that with every fiber of my being. I am 100% convinced your blog can change your business for the better a myriad ways, but you have to be willing to write regularly.

This is something many Realtors seem to struggle with.

An Unfortunate Trend in Real Estate Blogging

There’s a trend out there. And it’s a bad trend. The trend is that 99% of real estate blogs seem to be 99% listings. I’m generalizing of course, but this seems to pretty much be the norm. Why is this a bad trend? Because posting your listings is not blogging. Yes, you can share any information you want on your blog, and posting your listings to your blog is 100% valid. But trust me please…your readers (if you have any yet) and NOT going to your blog to see your listings. They’re not. They’re just not.

So if your readers aren’t interested in your listings, what the heck do they want from you? Believe it or not, they want to know what you think about the market! They want to hear from you…on a personal level…and regularly. And the more you can make your blog follow suit with this, the more success you will build over time.

For my post today, I wanted to share a few ideas and guidelines for the content every Realtor should post to their blog. Please comment and let me know what you think!

Listings should be 10% of your content, maximum.
Local stories, news, history. Do you love your town? Talk about it! What’s going on tonight? Are you going to a show? Are you meeting friends at a great historic pub downtown? Talk about what’s going down? As a committed and networking Realtor, you likely know a LOT of people and are very involved in your community. Seriously, talk about what’s going down in your town.
Respond to inquiries. As a Realtor, inquiries come in from a lot of different places. You get inquiries on the phone, by text, by email. You get questions at cocktail parties. You get questions from your website. And if you’re new, you can find TONS of real estate questions on Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn and a million other places. Answer the question, and post it to your blog! It will seriously take you 5 minutes, and you’re sharing valuable expertise with your readers. When someone asks you a question, answer it, and then say something like “That’s a great question! Do you mind if I put that on my blog too?” Of course they’ll say yes, and guess who’s going to be stalking your blog for the next week, looking for their name in print?
Have something go very wrong with a client lately? Lessons are learned every day in real estate. Share your insights. This is the GOOD stuff. Leave names out when necessary of course, but lessons are lessons. This is the foundation of your true expertise. If you’re not talking to your readers about these things, you’re withholding valuable info from them and practically begging them to cause the same problems with you in the future on future transactions
Have something go very right lately? Put it on your blog. Success stories are awesome. Everyone loves them! If you’ve been in the business for over a year, I guarantee you have some interesting stories!
Have a closing? Blog it! Congratulate your clients publicly and sincerely thank them for business. Also, publicly ask them for referrals! Email em a link to your post.
What do you LOVE about real estate?
What do you HATE about real estate?
Do you think NAR has done something god-awful-stupid lately? I know, this NEVER happens, right?
What challenges are you having in the current market?
What problems are you having with clients lately?

See, Realtors often tell me two things:

I don’t have time to blog
I don’t know what to write

Here’s the answer…I’ve given you topics that will keep you busy for years. And any post in any of these categories doesn’t need to take you more than 20-30 minutes maximum. Many posts could be written in 5 minutes. Don’t have time to blog? Are you kidding me? If you don’t have 5 minutes to throw down a post every day, how are you possibly going to have time to answer the phone when those leads come in? Don’t know what to write about? Seriously, give yourself some credit. You’re in an industry that the majority of people out there find pretty fascinating. You have a LOT to talk about.

by Christian Russell on November 19, 2009

One More Way a Real Estate Blog Will Save You Time

Munira Al-Khalili (The Lilis Realty Group / Keller Williams Realty) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:46:52 -0700

One of the most powerful things about a business blog for your real estate practice is that it saves you time. What’s that you say? That’s right…it SAVES you time. And you thought a blog would be a huge time sink, didn’t you?

Does blogging take time? Of course it does, but it can also save you great deal of time. And what’s more, it can save you a great deal of heart ache and repetition. Repetition is death to business owners. If you’re doing something over and over again, it needs to be automated, wouldn’t you agree?

How Real Estate Practitioners Screw it Up

A lot of us (I’m included in this, so don’t think I’m playing the holy-than-thou card!) answer the SAME questions for prospects and clients over and over again.

Do I qualify for the first time home buyers credit?
So what’s new in the market?
Is it a good time to list, or should I wait til spring?
Do you have buyers looking for a home like mine right now?
Why should I list with you as opposed to any other broker in town?
Can you show me just your listings or anything in town?
Should I get pre-qualified now or later?
How much money do I need to put down (btw, Trulia did a survey that revealed over 40% of their users are currently under the impression they need to put down at least 20% to buy a house in the current market)?

Sound familiar? Feel free to grab each of these questions and use them for blog posts if you like. So where do real estate professionals screw up? They answer these questions over and over again! This takes a lot of time, don’t you agree?

Leverage Yourself with a Blog

So what’s a Realtor to do? Make a well-researched and comprehensive blog post that answers each question definitively. Then when someone asks you (you know it’s just a day or two away!), say “that’s a great question. I actually just published an article about this exact topic. Good timing! Please check it out here (place a link to your article here). Let me know what you think!”

So what happens?

They get a great, comprehensive question to their question.
You get the benefit of answering the question once, instead of over and over. Remember, TIME is your most valuable asset. If you’re going to have to do it multiple times, AUTOMATE.
The prospect gets exposed to your blog and potentially subscribes.
The prospect potentially shares the article with OTHER prospects, increasing your exposure even more.
The prospect benefits even beyond this, because they will see other articles, quite possibly diffusing other questions they have in mind without you even having to deal with them. Needless to say, this saves you even MORE time.
Your expertise becomes evident to the prospect, because it’s clear you are a resource of helpful information.
Witnessing this builds trust and makes your working relationship go much smoothly.

We all know the value and pleasure of working with referrals. Why is it that working with a referral can be such a breeze? Because trust is established right out of the gate. You don’t have to fight for it. Blogging establishes trust just the same. Instead of a past client referring a client to you, clients refer themselves to you. This smooths things over, and that saves you time. Loads of it!

by Christian Russell on January 7, 2010

Your Home is NOT an Asset...until you sell it

Munira Al-Khalili (The Lilis Realty Group / Keller Williams Realty) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:05:29 -0700

For most people the idea of asset vs. liability is a blur. It often becomes more confusing when you go to your banker. When you go to the bank to get a loan, your banker asks you to list your assets as collateral to insure you can pay back the money they are about to lend you. What is most commonly listed.... house, car, jewelry...

This is the single most significant idea that keeps the middle class from becoming wealthy. They purchase long term debt items such as cars and jewelry as their earned income increases, by allowing you to list items that do not bring any kind of revenue into your cash flow your banker is contributing to the chance you are going to default. It is this idea that generates many other problems with a person's cash flow.

Those that are financially literate understand that an asset is something that puts money into your pocket each month, regardless if you work or not. Such as properly managed rental property or managed businesses.

A liability is something that takes money out of your pocket every month, weather you work or not. This is anything with monthly payments but usually a house, car, or other luxury.

If you get a raise and spend that extra money on something that locks you into an agreement to pay X amount of dollars for X amount of years, then you really have fallen into the middle class trap. By not investing your money into assets you have agreed to continue working for money.

Now that you understand the differences between these two concepts you should re-evaluate your current financial status. Do you indeed have assets or do you have a long term debt obligation for liabilities?

Some people will still argue that they can sell their car or their house to produce a revenue. They are correct but until the point they sell their liabilities off they are not assets and should not be confused with one.

>http://ezinearticles.com/?Asset-vs.-Liability&id=410972