How I got a bi weekly column on a local newspaper. 
Since I am not eligible for this week's New Creativity Challenge I thought I would give my answer as a separate blog post. The challenge was to come up a creative way to meet and make appointments with Realtors. So here is one of my strategies.
Where I live we have a local newspaper that is absolutely fabulous. It is not owned by some big corporation so that they can say what they want and most often do. Their editorial content is excellent both for national and world news and they provide equally excellent local coverage of events and happenings. Anyway, I had long been an admirer of this publication. I have been most impressed with the difference between them and the national owned "large" newspaper that is their competitor.
However, I had noticed that their real estate section was lacking. I got the idea to propose a column written by me that would interview local realtors. One of my observations since getting into the home staging business was the appalling lack of understanding of real estate, realtors, and how homes are actually bought and sold. So I proposed that we do a column to give Realtor's a place to speak about some aspect of Real Estate in an effort to educate the public on real estate matters. This would accomplish three major things. One it would expand the newspapers real estate section, adding local market information and providing a forum to attract advertisers. Two, it would provide each realtor interviewed a place to present themselves as having some expertise and thus added public exposure. And then finally, the big one for me, is it would provide me with a way to meet and get to know Realtors by first providing them with something to help their business.
Well, it just so happened that at the same time I proposed this, they had been considering expanding their Real Estate section so they accepted. This has been a win win win situation. It requires some work but it is a very fast way to get to know the Realtors on a different level than just doing a presentation at their office.
If you would like to view the publication see the following links. The first one is an article that I did with Josh Ryan, a Realtor in my area. The second link is one of the articles I did to fill in when a Realtor did not come through for me. It is a simple article on home staging.
http://www.rockrivertimes.com/index.new.pl?cmd=viewstory&id=16256 Josh Ryan on CMA pricing
http://www.rockrivertimes.com/index.new.pl?cmd=viewstory&id=17725 James Frazier On home staging
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