It has been over a year since I started blogging. I started because I saw a need for day to day postings and fresh content for both my clients/customers and for the Googles of the world who love and rank fresh content and give rewards to bloggers for ongoing content. I wanted to talk about the hot topics of the day, like market reports and what is going on in Westchester County and this was the venue. I am not an expert but know what I see around me. Have my own opinions and I was willing to put them out there in the hopes that people would comment and agree or disagree and that a dialog would be started.
At the beginning it was difficult to think of things to write about. So I started to search out stories that I thought would be interesting and discovered that this could not be just my opinions but would need to be informed, educated, well read and researched content to be of interest to other bloggers or the public. So every day for the past year in the early mornings I read online all the sites that might have pertinent real estate content, Bloomberg, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, our local newspapers, Newsday, and many more. If I found an article that I thought would be of interest then I needed to start studying and researching the topic and developing my own spin so that I could write an original blog.
I found that first of all this is an amazing amount of work. It can take hours of reading and searching to study a particular topic. I was told that it is necessary to have three or more original blogs per week to keep people coming back to see what is posted. This was a committment of time that I underestimated. What started out with me thinking that I could just sit and throw a couple of paragraphs out there has evolved into something else entirely.
Then I was invited to join Active Rain. My little blogging project now took on formal rules of the road and I tripped a few times and read the rules and learned what to do and what not to do. My blogging evolved. Active Rain is over 60,000 agents, stagers, mortgages brokers and other related fields all doing what I had started to do with thinking up topics and researching, learning and then writting a blog for the public. The content is amazing. If you think of being in a Real Estate office with 60,000 agents you have all sorts of bloggers, funny bloggers, crabby bloggers, nasty bloggers and bloggers who are not in it to provide information to clients. As many bloggers as are on Active Rain are as many reasons people blog.
I have learned a lot from this experience; I have learned from the stories of other agents, from the feedback and comments received, from the research and studying I have done and I believe that I have become a more informed agent with expanded knowledge about all sorts of subjects. I can see where this is not for everyone - it is a hugh time committment. I wouldn't trade it -
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