Real Estate Blog Growing Pains? Share the Load, Multiply the Success.

In preparation for my participation at Inman Connect 2008, I have been thinking a lot about our panel topic, Growing Pains: Take Your Blog to the Next Level.

Today’s post is a run-together of the relevant points on this topic, the way I see it.

If you are experiencing “Growing Pains” in your blogging, I guess it would entail that you have been at it now for at least the last year, and in some cases much longer.  In addition, you probably find the following list familiar.

1. Your blog is at the center of your Online Marketing Strategy.
2. You enjoy the Discipline of blogging regularly.
3. You have integrated your blog into your Offline Marketing.
4. You are Generating Leads and Clients as a result of your blogging.
5. You have earned Prime Position in the Search Engines for desired terms.
6. You are recognized as an Authority on the topics you cover. 

So where does a real estate blogger go from here?

Well, what are your Needs?

1. More Content
2. More Authority
3. More Exposure
4. More Business
5. More Relationships

The Tendencies are to look for New Tools, New Design, and/or New Knowledge.
However, I don’t know that any of these will make any real difference.

In an earlier post, I penned that the Future of the Real Estate Blog is inevitably going to yield to proficient video bloggers.  However, I don’t feel that embracing video is the next step for bloggers experiencing growing pains.

Although I still believe that video will be an amazingly successful tool for those that master its application, I don’t see it to be universally leveraged in the real estate industry.

(On a side note, if you want to watch what fellow panelist Daniel Rothamel’s first thoughts on our topic are, go check out his vlog.)

Blogging, even with all the attention it has garnered over the last couple of years, is only being used as an effective marketing tool by less than 1% of active Realtors.  Vlogging (video blogging) is a similar effort to blogging, in that to be successful it will require discipline, creativity, consistency, skill and practice.  Given the effort required, I’m not going to broadly encourage bloggers with growing pains to jump on the vlogging train to solve the above Needs.

What then?

My first impression of the Real Estate Business was watching my father, who has been the broker of a successful boutique real estate office for longer than I have been alive.  Admittedly, as a boy, I had little understanding of what he actually did for a living other than:
1. He took lots of pictures of houses and property.
2. He seemed to know everyone in town.