Before teaching you best practices for blogging, it’s important that you are clear on what a blog is, and how it differs from a website.
Many agents already know that having their own website is a great first step toward building an online presence. Websites are great for displaying information that you know will not change often, like your bio, your contact information, or general information on your city. A website is a great place to offer tools for your customers to use, such as mortgage calculators and MLS searches.
What those same agents may not know is that having their own blog is an essential part of establishing their valuable, interactive, online presence. The term blog is short for “web log” and a blog is just that – an online log or diary. A real estate blog is an ideal place to regularly post timely information on local market conditions and updated details and photos of various neighborhoods. Blogs also allow readers to interact with the blog author, as well as with other blog readers, by commenting on posts and responding to other reader’s comments.
Let’s look at the specific differences between websites and blogs.
Websites :
- information that is not changed very often.
- have no active author “voice.”
- offer one-way communication: author to reader.
- have no means of reader to reader interaction.
- usually have a more formal tone: business to customer.
Blogs:
- are regularly updated, either on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
- are defined by the author’s personality or “voice.”
- offer three-way communication: author to reader, reader to author, and reader to reader.
- allow reader to reader interaction through the use of post comments.
- usually have a more conversational tone: person to person.
It’s also possible to have a blog on your website. This is sometimes called a “blogsite.” It could be argued that many current real estate “blogs” are actually “blogsites” since they feature characteristics of both a blog and a website.
We will talk more about building and maintaining websites, blogs, and blogsites in upcoming TechShorties lessons at http://www.techshorties.com
Exercise: Look at the following sites and decide if they are websites, blogs, or a combination of the two. Which characteristics do each of them have that led to your decision?
- http://allaroundktown.com
- http://www.realtor.com
- http://techcrunch.com
- http://www.newstechzilla.com
- http://www.wikipedia.org
- http://www.mashable.com
