Dave

Excellent education on blogging and on Real Estate

 Thanks for your efforts.

Eric

Eric, I hope you have great success with all your blogging and real estate efforts.

Dave this is awesome!  I need to learn about the 'meta' stuff so I'm looking forward to the next post!

Bookmarked so I can follow this.  I decided recently to start a neighborhood site, and I just launched one by Real Estate Tomato this weekend.  Since we are starting at the same time, it might be interesting for us to compare notes along the way.  I'll try to follow your series and post to the comments.

Interesting notion to use the neighborhood as the domain name. I'll have to check back for your next post on this subject. Thanks.

Good Idea,

I've tried neighborhood websites before - they never got off the ground because they are too static!  Now a neighborhood blog would be a different story!!  I am going to bokmark and follow this post too.

Margaret, I think that's a great idea to have multiple sites to compare. Is yours already launched? 

Debbie, great point and one I want to address in some detail. My goal in this is to do no more than an hour a month on this site (I have plenty of others to take my time). I wanted to see if being THE expert on HOA docs and listings in one subdivision would keep me on top of the Google search results for that subdivision. On top of that I was curious if I would generate any leads, either for listings or buyers. I am not planning on a quick ROI, but getting even one listing would more than pay for the tiny cost of setting it up and maintaining it. The side benefit to this activity is a decent excuse to canvas the neighborhood explaining the site, asking residents to sign up for the email newsletter, and getting to introduce yourself and hand out cards. Cold calling is challenging work, but it's a lot easier when you are serving as a reporter for the neighborhood website.

With your interest in blogging you'll end up doing more work to keep the site updated, but reports on school sports, job changes, and yard sales will at least keep your site fresh and keep you in close contact with the neighborhood. Those two models would be interesting to compare in neighboring subdivisions of the same size, price, etc. 

Great Post thanks for all the info!  I look forward to the next one!

I would use a free blog then switch over to wordpress later if needed. Why easier to change and update. Plus to add content and keep it fresh with out having to do a lot of work add RSS.

Jeff, those are good suggestions. RSS is a giant topic in it's own right. Most people don't know "Real Simple Syndication" or even "Syndication". I know a lot of people would love to just change the name of RSS to "news feeds". It's easier.

Still, for this particular project of trying to create a site that ranks high on Google for a specific subdivision, I'm going to stick with my straight HTML recommendation rather than a blog. For getting started and for a simple tool that's in the user's control you can't beat a hand made page. On the other hand, if a user wants to do it in a blog rather than HTML, that's fine with me. The point is for agents to think local and build relevant web content that will put them at the top of Google results for their neighborhood subdivisions.

This will be interesting to watch, Dave. I'm particularly interested in seeing the parallel progress of your site and Margaret's neighborhood site.

I've purchased neighborhood domain names in the past.  Then I build a "hidden" page on my website and point the domain to that page.  It pulls up a specific page on the community, pictures, listing etc.  Once there they can surf the rest of my website.  Keeps my site from being to overwhelming but doesn't lose all the work I've but into the information.

I do not understand a lot of the 'meta' tags, so thanks for the info!

Deb

Cindy, that's an excellent idea.

Sharon, this has turned out to be even more interesting than I thought. I have purchased the domain name wikiupgreens.com, and I have actually built our demo page there, but it's got a name that Google wouldn't find, so I haven't started that part of the "competition" with Margaret. Just talking about it on ActiveRain, however, already has my ActiveRain discussion of the site as #4 on Google results. For anybody who wonders about the power of ActiveRain to work locally, wonder no more. 

I have subscribed and will watch to see your results and hopefully learn something.  Thanks for sharing.

David - great idea - I pulled up my desk for the lesson. Thanks for preparing the cliff notes for us too!!

Dave,

Looking forward to following along!

Cheers,

David Swierczynski