The title of this post was a quote from yours truly during the recent Real Estate Barcamp in Houston during a discussion led by Paul Chaney about social media and its effectiveness.  This pretty much sums up my personal perspective on the act of blogging as it applies to my business.

When I first started blogging four years ago on another platform, I used it just for personal opinions, rather than anything that I thought could actually help me make money.  You may be surprised to learn that many of my posts were political in nature, considering the fact that I have written exactly ONE post on that topic here on ActiveRain, and that was yesterday! 

I was invited to join AR back in December 2006, so I set up a quick profile, then proceeded to do.......absolutely nothing. 

Well, I did write one post in March 2007, so that must be when I really got rolling, right? 

Wrong. 

I didn't return again until August 4, 2007, when I wrote this gem of a post:

Austin Real Estate Market

Truthfully, that might just have been my shortest post on record.  Perhaps there are those of you who long for me to return to such simplicity.  :)

After I got the hang of things around here, I started regularly posting 10 times/weekly, with very few exceptions.  This may seem like drudgery or highly time-consuming, but it is neither.  I sincerely enjoy writing, sharing information, and making new friends, which I have since found out is the essence of a solid social media strategy.

I am happy to have received a good number of leads, referrals, and closing from my ActiveRain blog, but I would probably have continued consistently posting even without the concrete results. 

But why? 

Well, that's easy.  This network has brought me so much good knowledge and so many friends that it has been well worth the investment of my time.  Since the economy has been much less strong over the past year, this has enabled me to devote a certain amount of time every week to blogging.  When the market makes a turn (and it will likely turn around in Austin before many other areas of the country), I feel that I have done a reasonably effective job of getting my name out there to other real estate professionals who have the potential to send me business, all while having fun, too.  How great is that?

So, if you're new to blogging, I have a few words of advice:

• Write a lot - It doesn't even matter what you write about, as long as it isn't offensive - just do it.  The process of committing to a certain amount of content will make you a better writer over time.
• Read a lot - There is a wealth of terrific advice, tips, and news here to be found.  It's much like having a stack of real estate and blogging textbooks at your fingertips 24/7.
• Don't expect immediate results - This is not the type of thing that will necessarily bring quick leads/prospects.  Don't be discouraged by that - continue to plug away and it will happen.
• Take advantage of the Google leverage that AR has developed - you will be found!  Post it and they will come.
• Explore other sites, too (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.).  I have received leads from several of these during my foray into social networking over the past 16 months or so.
• Don't worry about comparing yourself to others, or trying to model others' writing style.  Just be you (and I know that sentence isn't grammatically correct - who cares?).

I hope this stuff comes in handy for you.  Feel free to ask any questions you might have.  Thanks for reading!

My RSS feed is http://activerain.com/jasoncrouch/rss

I don't consider myself to be a social marketing guru (yet), but I do spend a little time each week on all of the top social media sites that I know about.  Sometimes, it's just a few minutes per week.  Obviously, I spend the majority of my online time right here on ActiveRain, but I have become more active on Twitter lately - both are highly addictive, in my humble opinion.  Facebook also seems to have some interesting potential as a business tool, if used properly.

I just wanted to take a minute to share some of my experiences with the other two sites.  Clearly, I have written a good number of posts about sales and referrals that have come from ActiveRain already.  My primary advice on AR is to be yourself and write about stuff that actually interests you, rather than simply focusing on real estate all the time.

FACEBOOK

When I was first invited to Facebook by Jennifer Bukaty last fall, I knew a very small handful of people on there at the time.  I would get random email messages like this:

• You have been SUPER-POKED by Rob
• Mary hurled a ghost at you!
• Tom set you up on a date with Monica Lewinsky
• Sue wants to dirty dance with you in front of your kids!

What the heck is all of this stuff, anyway?  Clearly, this site must be worthless for business, right?  Actually, that's not true.  At this point, if you are not a member of Facebook, the jokes above make zero sense to you, more than likely.  If you ARE a member, you are probably still laughing (at least I hope you are). At any rate, I kind of avoided the site for awhile, then decided to re-evaluate it later, and I'm glad that I did.

Despite all of the silliness and random applications, and Scrabble games, and videos, Facebook has also brought me a handful of leads.  As a bonus, my AR blog has developed a strong following among my Facebook friends (over 1700 now), and sometimes they comment directly on Facebook.  But how?  Well, I learned how to "feed" my AR blog posts to Facebook awhile back, and this gets me additional exposure in a group of non-AR members.

I have had a handful of decent leads from Facebook so far, all of which came (so far) from people which I did not previously know, but who have seen some of my posts and know that I am a real estate broker in Austin.  I am still pleasantly surprised when I realize that one of my "real life" friends found my blog via Facebook.

TWITTER

Using the ActiveRain feature to automatically send links to your public posts straight to Twitter is very cool indeed, but I would recommend also actually hanging out there sometimes, rather than just sending the occasional link.  When you develop relationships, it will begin to pay off and they will read your stuff IF they get to know you.  Otherwise, it seems a bit random in the middle of all of the conversations going on and no one will pay attention.  I was guilty of this before, but I have changed my ways now. 

As with Facebook, I have developed a healthy readership on Twitter, with about 425 "followers" there.  I got a lead today from a guy that I only knew tangentially - awesome!  So far, I have received about five leads from my relationships there, as well as solidifying some friendships and contacts that I already knew from ActiveRain.  In case you didn't realize this, there is a large contingent of AR members on Twitter, which makes it even more fun.

For specific instuctions on how to achieve this, please check out my post here:

How to Feed Your ActiveRain Blog Directly to Facebook and Twitter - Get More Exposure for the Same Effort!  

If you have questions, I would be happy to help, time permitting.  Thanks for reading!

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jasoncrouch

I have been playing here in the Rain for just over a year now, and I have been fortunate enough to have received a good number of referrals from my friends here.  For the past 12 years or so, I have been selling homes here in Austin, Texas.  Since our primary company website gets decent traffic, I usually get a few referrals just from random agents looking on Google or Yahoo.  ActiveRain has enhanced these numbers considerably.

As a result, I have a new outlook on referrals, and I hope other members here share this mentality with me, as it will help all of us.  When I am speaking with someone who is looking to relocate to Austin, I now know that I have an extensive network of solid agents around the country that I can depend on to help any potential clients who have a home to sell.  Granted, this is not a quick process in some parts of the world, but I feel confident that I can find a professional with a moderate amount of research here on AR.  Of course, there are certain cities where I don't have to think twice, as someone has already captured that area in my mind.

This is a big paradigm shift for me, since I never used to seek much referral income.  If someone asked if I knew anyone in (Fort Worth, Scottsdale, New Orleans, Topanga, CA, Long Island, wherever), I would look at them blankly for a second and say something like, "I'm sure I can find someone good there," which meant Googling the area.  In other words, any referrals that I sent kinda fell into my lap.

This is no longer necessary.

Now, my face lights up: "As a matter of fact, I have a good friend there who has been in real estate for eight years.  You HAVE to call him if you are moving."

What a difference a year makes!

The same goes for my listing clients, if they are moving to a new area.  "Have you found a good agent in ________ yet?  If not, I would love to help.  I know a LOT of agents across the country, thanks to my involvement in ActiveRain, which is a blogging and networking site."  Yes, I have said this, pretty much verbatim.

If you are not on the lookout for these types of opportunities, you may be letting some income slip through your fingers.  If you are looking for someone in Austin or central Texas, look no further.  I would love the opportunity to help!  If I am not able to help, I can guarantee that I can find someone suitable. 

In fact, writing this post has given me a new idea.  I need to promote this concept more heavily on my website!

Yesterday morning, I closed a referral from an agent in Boise, Idaho.  It took me very little time, and the agent called me today to thank me for a job well done.

Thanks for your time!

Copyright 2008  Jason Crouch   All rights reserved  Austin Real Estate

DISCLAIMER: I apologize in advance for the sheer length of this post, but I had a lot to say apparently.  I didn't want to include images this time, as I thought they might detract from the message I am trying to get across.

I have seen a bunch of posts with regard to what is "proper" content on ActiveRain lately.  Unless you live under a rock, you have probably also seen these around lately. 

I left the longest comment of my entire blogging career last night on Jessica Horton's featured post (Working the Net or Networking? Which has value? ).  She gave me some good-natured grief about this on Twitter, calling the comment "Lord of the Rings".  Despite the fact that I had mentioned there that I wouldn't write my own post on this topic, I was encouraged today by a good friend to do so, so here we go:

In a nutshell, some people seem to be concerned about the balance of real estate related material written here vs. the "fluff", which is sort of a catch-all term for jokes, recipes, family stories, and other "non industry" posts.  They feel that if too many of these types of posts are made public (instead of Members Only), it could harm the Google juice/power that AR has notoriously harnessed, because Google might somehow devalue the site and see it differently. 

As with the other posts, the stuff I am about to say is my opinion, since I am not on staff at Google, or Yahoo, or any other search engine, so I am not privy to their algorithms.  However, I have been doing my own SEO for my sites since early 1998, before Google was even being used.  Back then, we optimized for search engines like Altavista, Lycos and Excite.  Yes, really.  I feel old now.

At any rate, to make it really easy to understand, Google LOVES new content.  With 85,613 members as of this writing, ActiveRain is generating new pages of content just about every minute of the day.  Every post marked "Public" is a separate page of content. 

With that in mind, AR is viewed by Google's spiders as highly valuable and as an "authority site" for real estate.  You have probably read anecdotes of members who have had pages indexed onto the first page of Google within a few minutes of posting.  This is because Google is constantly spidering this site looking for new pages. 

Does it spider "Members Only" posts?  Not really.  There are tags called "nofollow" tags that will disallow those posts from being indexed in the search engines, and they are automatically generated when we post to Members Only. 

Google cares about the page's structure, along with its content.  The skeletal structure of EVERY SINGLE page/post on AR is built and optimized in exactly the same fashion.  If you look at the bottom of this page (which is the same basic look across the board here on AR), you will see the following keywords and links:

Find TX real estate agents and Austin real estate here on ActiveRain.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
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