Is Blogging Daily A Bad Thing?

Is Blogging Daily A Bad Thing?

Of course if you follow us regularly, you'll already know our viewpoint on that one!

Of course not, providing you can keep your quality level up!

We're here at least once a day, sometimes twice! We'll never catch up with Richard and his 1400+ consecutive days of posting, but we just finished 365 days straight Sunday.  Has it been easy to post every day?  Not always!  It's taken special planning around holidays and vacations, a few posts stashed in the Draft bank ready to switch to Public from the Crackberry if necessary :)

Now what have we gained from being daily bloggers?  Considering we just started blogging a couple of months prior to starting our daily streak, quite a bit!

Since we view it a necessity to blog daily, we've become much more attuned to our environment for inspiration.  We've developed quite the data stream to pluck ideas.  The daily and weekly paper, radio, Facebook and Twitter, area blogs and websites, local organizations, they're all prime sources for our posts.  We rely HEAVILY on Localism posts, especially during these summer months when SO much is going on in our local area. 

Another gain is our personal knowledge of area activities.  We're much more attuned to area events, and places we used to just drive by....well know we know what they do!  It NEVER hurts to know more about your local market nor develop relationships with local businesses and promotional organizations.  Now does real estate allow us the time to take advantage of many of these events personally?  Well that's an ongoing challenge!

Our blogging inventory continues to grow, and thanks to sharing of information by people like Judi & Brad, we've found more FREE places to get blog photos to enhance our posts.  Initially, spiffing up our posts with the "just right" clipart or photo was the hardest part of a post.  We've taken quite a few photos ourselves, but when we need something we don't have, we're off to morguefile.com or Wikimedia Commons!

We've get found!  It might not always be by our target market, but we get found!  We've had calls from a bunch of teenage girls wanting to know about the curfew rules for St. Rita Fest, a call about setting up a vendor booth at a Christmas festival, a call about bringing pets to the Kitefest!  But yesterday we were contacted by an AP Reporter doing a story for a local magazine.  How did he find us?  Our Active Rain blog about the school district levy failures and the impact on property values.  If he uses our phone interview, we'll get some nice exposure in Cincy Magazine!

And we've gotten business!  The checks haven't cleared yet, but we've got a patio home new construction due to finish around November and we just listed a condo Monday, all directly attributable to our niche Outside AR Blog on patio homes.  We need to do more focus on community type posts to increase these contacts.  We can see from Google Analytics the posts are getting visited.

So our Internet presence has expanded tremendously in the last year.  Google has found us, and for some key phrases we just about own page 1, and all this from tidbits we've picked up reading and learning from our AR friends!

We've evolved how we blog quite a bit over the last year.  The topics we do and don't choose have changed.  We try to keep a positive outlook, and if we feel a need for a rant, we'll just turn loose Miss Bad Manners, SMAK and Fluffy for a little fun!

We expect we'll continue to adapt, to seek what the consumer wants and needs.  What makes the phone ring?  That's the Holy Grail of Real Estate isn't it?

And the bonus part of blogging daily?  We get to interact with lots of great people on Active Rain!

So while we may not always get that first post out by 9 a.m. E.S.T., rest assured we'll have a post out at some point daily!

Keep on Blogging!
Liz and Bill aka BLiz