So is blogging dead? Are all 150,000+ members of Active Rain wasting their time? 

Is that what David Gibbons (my birthday twin) of Zillow meant when he said: Blogging is so 2008 on Twitter the other day?

(read on or scroll down for an update about David.....)

 I keep hearing that blogging is a dinosaur, but 2009 seems a little different.  Twitter and Facebook have been around longer than 2009, but what has changed?   The growth they have both seen this year is truly phenomenal.  Is social media taking over blogging?  For some and that is a good thing.

This is my favorite recent quote out of a great blog post written by Brian Clark on Copyblogger:

"But the story remains the same: people who mainly want to socialize, share links, and post pictures of their cat should be using social networks instead of blogging, and that's exactly what's happening."

Blogging isn't dead. 

Social media is important in order to share your content with your network, but did you know that Facebook doesn't share its info with Google?  Facebook and Google seem to have emerged as arch enemies for Internet Dominance and it is really important for anyone launching or running a successful web campaign to be highly visible to both camps.  Blogging is going to help you with both.  Google will pick up your blogs when they crawl and you need to make sure you are posting wonderful relevant link bait on at least one of the two fastest growing social media sites: Twitter and Facebook.  If you are serious, you should be posting links to your content from both of these places. 

But don't think that is enough.

There are two more very important rules for success:

1. Create good content in your blogging efforts.  This not only attracts visitors, but if they take the time to click on your link and it is poor content, they won't stay and you will lose your credibility

2. Engage socially.  Don't just post links to your content.  Make friends and be social. 

In closing, I am being sarcastic with such a title....

It is important to know where I am coming from here.  Blogging on ActiveRain is one of the very best things you can be doing for your real estate business.  It is at least the very minimum in Internet marketing.  Whenever I look at the Google analytics for my Seattle real estate website, I can see that I get a great deal of traffic from a number of sites including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter and this pleases me.  When looking at page views per visitor, though, the number of pages that people view on my site when they visit from ActiveRain, Localism, or my Seattle Suburbs blog site are always much higher than the number of pages from other sites. A very targeted audience is reading your blog. 

Blogging is just beginning and Brian Clark is right, for the people sharing pictures of their cat the journey may have ended, but for the rest of us we should be creating compelling content to link to!

7/6/2009 Update:  David Gibbons posted a video response for us and he has some great things to say - if you have any time at all, please head over there and hear him out a wonderful explanation and good biz building tips as well:

David on Active Rain Video

(PS - You can find me on Facebook:  Courtney Cooper and also Twitter)