There you are, writing on Activerain or your website’s blog, and you’re posting about real estate, using the internet, your thoughts and experiences, really anything that might attract readers to your posts. After weeks and months of writing, and after dozens of posts, you ask yourself one fundamental question: how does blogging help me get customers?
Being a real estate agent is a lot like dating in that your chances for success are limited by one huge challenge: meeting the other person, either in-person, online or otherwise. If you never enter someone else’s consciousness as an option, you never have a chance to form a connection. That means you are limited by your own social circles, and these are often relatively small (under 40 close people and under 100 top-of-mind acquaintances), so trying to make a living (or have a healthy dating situation) off this single network is problematic at best.
Everyone within your social circle is what has been called a “strong tie” by sociologist Mark Granovetter (1973): each person has lots of ties to the other people in the network and is strongly connected to you (compared to a stranger or acquaintance). Think about what happens if you, for instance, were to strike up a conversation and then casual acquaintance with the butcher at the grocery store. While your knowledge and interactions with the butcher are limited and thus making this connection a “weak tie,” you are now connected to the butcher’s entire social network so that your total number of (potential) social connections has now substantially increased from just that one person. This is the basic idea behind “the strength of weak ties,” that certain people connect you to previously non-accessible groups of people. Blogging is, in essence, a way to capture weak ties and hence increase the number of people who might know about you or hear about you from a friend. When one of the butcher’s friends says she might be looking to sell her house, the chances of you being suggested went up from impossible to fairly likely - quite the pay-off for a casual conversation.
But why not just advertise to increase your social circle? Blogging is different from advertising in its choice-centric approach rather than presentation-centric. When you advertise, you are presenting something and trying to create demand for your product in the audience. With blogging, you produce material and it essentially sits idle until someone chooses to come looking for it, and thus also chooses to introduce you into their awareness. The beauty of this approach is that it is harder to ignore something you’ve chosen; the drawback is that you’re betting on eventual payoff and not an immediate effect.
In the end, blogging is just like starting lots of little friendly conversations: you never know which will pay-off, but the ones that do are priceless because they introduce you to a new social network you never had access to before.
- Brian
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