As I have written about before, my business was one of the first victims of the credit and real estate crises.  Basically, I couldn't have timed a merger worse if I had tried.  By taking over my largest competitor I ended up expanding into a declining market.  A rapidly declining market!

I was forced to make some drastic moves.  I shut two offices down and laid several people off.  I don't know if any of you have ever been in this position before, but it sucked!  I felt so bad for the people and my ego took a hell of a blow!

For a while, I crawled off and found a quiet space to lick my wounds and to feel sorry for myself.  Having two kids in college at the time, I didn't have the luxury of not being able to generate income, so I took a job driving a taxi.  When that proved impossible to manage while keeping my real estate and mortgage company afloat, I switched to driving limousines. 

I caught a fair amount of grief for doing this from some other people in the field.  I had competitors actually call my clients and "out" me as not being a "full-time" agent.  Fortunately the clients that I had at that time were understanding and I had been very upfront with them.  I also had remained a "full-time" agent in that I was still putting in more than 40 hours a week working at keeping my company alive.

As I mentioned before, this is when I found out about the power of blogging and of Activerain.  I started the process of building my web site into what I hoped would be a powerhouse.  ValueListre.com had been a basic real estate agent web site.  Pretty much a canned product that I had purchased from Homes.com.

Through Activerain I learned about search engine optimization and about the so-called "web 2.0".  I started adding content and optimizing my web site.  We went from page 235 on a google search to page 2 for the most widely used search term for our market.  I also went back to the basics as far as marketing my company.

So, here we are a year and a half or so later and it's starting to click!  Over the last couple of weeks my phones have started to ring.  The efforts that I had made on faith that they would pay off have started to.  As I mentioned in my last blog, I've gotten two listings from my website in as many days last week.  I've also gotten some buyer inquiries and while I haven't reeled them in yet, it's a start!

Yesterday was the first day in a long time that I could actually say that I was working to keep up.  Between taking care of the details on my working transactions and a couple of projects that I had started, I worked pretty steady from about 8 in the morning to about 6:30 in the evening.  Several times during the day I had multiple people on the phone.  This morning, I'm hacking this post out, then running down to South city to take a look at a two family to list.  Later on, I've got to do comps for this one and another one that I'm working on.  Then I've got to finish up those projects that I mentioned above.  Basically, it's starting to feel like I'm back in business for real!  Back in the saddle again!

I don't know for a fact that this trend is going to continue, but I have the feeling that it is.  I've talked with a fair number of other agents here in St. Louis and none of them are claiming to be busy, so maybe it is just me.  If that's the case, I can only attribute it to my work here, as well as my concentration on marketing basics.

So, in addition to writing this post for the 200 points (;0), I'm writing to let those of you out there who haven't seen a bunch of return on your blogging investment, please know that this stuff really does work!  Keep at it and be consistent.  My challenge right now is not to let it slide if I do get really busy.  That said, it won't be any harder to do that than it was to drive a taxi 50 hours a week and work my company 40! ;-)

R.B. "Bob" Mitchell

ValueList Real Estate Services, Inc.

Bob Mitchell is president of ValueList Real Estate Services,  St. Louis' largest discount/full-service real estate and mortgage company.  If you would like to find out more about Bob, ValueList or our flat-fee listing program, please feel free to visit our web site at valuelistre.com