(I wrote this article over a year ago when we launched Localism in its BETA form. With the pending launch of the New Localism, it's still very much applicable ~ Jonathan)

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The end game in real estate blogging is blogging about your local geographical area of expertise. 

Why blog about the real estate industry? Why blog about the latest real estate technology that was just announced?  How is it going to generate you business? 

It isn't going to generate you much unless you are a real estate coach, someone amazingly interesting, or a company selling real estate blog sites! Home buyers and sellers just don't care. Internet home buyers care most about three things:

Listings, home values, & neighborhood information. 

Listing information can be found on thousands of agent, broker, and lead generator websites.  There was a time not too long ago that you could generate a lot of business from throwing up an IDX feed on your website. That time is no longer.

In Fortune magazine's most recent issue they did a cover story on Zillow and referred to home valuation websites as "real estate porn". However inappropriate they were in their description, I think they described the Zillow site pretty accurately. Consumers love their site and the love will only continue to grow.  It will grow out of our society's craving for "more information now". The values on Zillow are just accurate enough to be captivating, but home buyers and sellers still need a real agent to fulfill their true valuation needs.

However, I am getting off point. You've already heard all of this a million times before. What I should be talking about is:

"What should agents do in this day and age to generate business?"

The consumer's great appetite for information is being neglected when it comes to Local Neighborhood Information. When someone wants to move across country, across state, or sometimes even across town, there is no where to go on the Internet to find information about the character of certain neighborhoods, or even what neighborhoods exist.

This post really starts here: 

Localism.com is not the big picture. Localism.com is only a symbol or a glimpse at where we are going as an industry with local content.  The big picture is localizing your content. You localize your content when you geocode a post and make it available for syndication onto other sites.

Localism will not be the final destination, no more than google is. Localism will resemble more of a search engine than a national-local weblog. Don't get me wrong, the site will be really cool; it will likely generate a lot of press, rank high in the search engines, and most assuredly generate a lot of clients for the agents that are creating good content now.

But the big vision is in the action now known as localizing.

Localizing means that someday soon every local post you write will not only have city, county, and state, data associated with it, but it will also have specific latitude and longitude coordinates embedded into it.

As a consumer looks at an online map, a newspaper article, or even a local house listing, they will have the option to see the best local content written or created by their local real estate experts.

You will have the option to select which web sites/portals you would like your information syndicated to.  Or if you don't want it syndicated at all.

Every article you write will be attributed and link back to you. 

This will be our industry's chance to firmly reestablish ourselves as the center of the real estate transaction.

The end game in real estate blogging is blogging about your local geographical area of expertise. 

Why blog about the real estate industry? Why blog about the latest real estate technology that was just announced?  How is it going to generate you business? 

It isn't going to generate you much unless you are a real estate coach, amazingly interesting, or a company selling real estate blog sites! Home buyers and sellers just don't care. Internet home buyers care most about three things: Listings, home values, & neighborhood information. 

Listing information can be found on thousands of agent, broker, and lead generator, websites.  There was a time not too long ago that you could generate a lot of business from throwing up an IDX feed on your website. That time is no longer.

In Fortune magazine's most recent issue they did a cover story on Zillow and referred to home valuation websites as "real estate porn". However inappropriate they were in their description, I think they described the Zillow site pretty accurately.  Consumers love their site and the love will only continue to grow.  It will grow out of our society's craving for "more information now". The values on Zillow are just accurate enough to be captivating, but home buyers and sellers still need a real agent to fulfill their true valuation needs. Due to Zillow, Housevalues.com won't have a place at the home buyer's/seller's table anymore, but the real estate agent is nowhere close to losing her seat.

I am getting off point. You've already heard all of this a million times before. What I should be talking about is: What should agents do in this day and age to generate business?

The consumer's great appetite for information is being neglected when it comes to Local Neighborhood Information. When someone wants to move across country, across state, or sometimes even across town, there is no where to go on the Internet to find information about the character of certain neighborhoods, or even what neighborhoods exist.

This post really starts here: 

Localism.com is not the big picture. Localism.com is only a symbol or a glimpse at where we are going as an industry with local content.  The big picture is localizing your content. You localize your content when you geocode a post and make it available for syndication onto other sites.

Localism will not be the final destination, no more than google is. Localism will resemble more of a search engine than a national-local weblog. Don't get me wrong, the site will be really cool; it will likely generate a lot of press, rank high in the search engines, and most assuredly generate a lot of clients for the agents that are creating good content now.

But the big vision is in the action now known as localizing.

Localizing means that someday soon every local post you write will not only have city, county, and state, data associated with it, but it will also have specific latitude and longitude coordinates embedded into it.

As a consumer looks at an online map, a newspaper article, or even a local house listing, they will have the option to see the best local content written or created by their local real estate experts.

You will have the option to select which web sites/portals you would like your information syndicated to.  Or if you don't want it syndicated at all.

Every article you write will be attributed and link back to you. 

This will be our industry's chance to firmly reestablish ourselves as the center of the real estate transaction. 

As our development team enters the final stages of the Localism rebuild we will be spending more time talking about how to achieve success through hyper-local blogging and web 2.0 consumer centric conversations. I believe that the new Locailsm site will be revolutionary for the real estate industry and over the coming weeks I look forward to revealing the specific components of the site that will make it a game changer.

In the meantime, leading up to the launch, we have begun the process of manually reviewing every Localism post authored on ActiveRain in the last six months. I noticed some similarities amongst the best posts and wanted to share my findings with you.

1. Write about some place local:  The smaller the region the better.  A community post is generally more valuable than a city post, and a city post is better than a county post.

2. Provide original and interesting content: Actually say something.  Don't just link off to other web pages.

3. Post lots of pictures: There is nothing that captures the spirit of a place better than a picture. Except... Video.

4. Take a video: Videos of communities will be all the rage starting in 2009.

5. Do not post a bunch of self serving marketing material on the bottom of your post: If a home buyer or seller finds your information interesting they will figure out how to contact you.  Also, our editors highly downgrade posts with built in - self serving marketing messages.

6. Write about current events happening in your community: Opening Day for Boating, Seattle's Pioneer Square Art Walk

7. Write about people in your community: Saline Chief of Police

8. Write about local businesses: Everyone loves to get the inside tip from the "locals" about the hot places to try. This is your chance to be that local.  Bubble's Boutique in Laguna Beach, New Rita's Restaurant

9. Write about tourist attractions and points of interest: They are called "attractions" and "interest" for a reason.  People are attracted to them and will be attracted to the posts you write about them.

10. Don't write about yourself or simply recite what you did: People want to see your personality shine through, but they are on Localism primarily to learn about a new place. Once you prove to them that you are a good source of information then they will become interested in learning more about you personally. No one cares about these posts: "I joined the Bellevue Washington Chamber of Commerce". "Last weekend I river rafted in the Wenatchee river"  Instead write this post: "Upcoming Dover New Hampshire Chamber of Commerce Events" and "Hood River is Hot" Unless you are providing good pictures and an interesting read to go along with it, no one is interested.

Bonus:

We are creating a site to attract the consumer and hopeful draw their participation.  Post sparingly about real estate.  When you do write about it, write about new home developments, and subdivisions. Barclay Park Condos

Yesterday we launched Outside Blogs beta and as expected we have discovered a few issues with the product.  I would like to use this post as a place to update all of our members with the list of known issues and their current status.

Outstanding Issues:

• New issue - DNS rerouting does not seem to be working correctly.  We found one bug and fixed it, but that did not seem to solve the problem. This is of highest priority and we will keep you updated. (This is the reason some custom domain names are not working yet)
• No Index tags should be placed on all sub-domain Outside Blogs.  See Bob's duplicate content post for further explanation.
  
• Some changes on ActiveRain blog posts are not showing up on the Outside Blog 
• Single sign on functionality for commenting on Outside Blogs is not always working.
• Outside Blogs need to add an email field for commenters so that they can be notified of new comments and blog owners can contact them.
• Email address of blog owner should not be displayed on Outside Blog (front page and about me page). Fix to include similar contact box as ActiveRain.
• Under blog post title on Outside Blog, authors name should like to about page on Outside Blog, not back to ActiveRain.
• Front page of outside blogs doesn't have meta-description and meta-keywords set.
• Alternative "about me" text entry field
  

Resolved Issues:

• Header Image not able to upload from Internet Explorer.  
• Header Graphic section is suggesting that the header image should be 760x105, when the image should be 742x105.
  
• Link to Localism on Outside Blog is not showing correctly.
  

This video has so little to do with real estate that I cannot even think of a clever tie in.  No abstract principle. Nothing.  I saw it first about a month ago and enjoyed it, and then just stumbled upon it again this morning and realized that I needed to share it.  I hope someone else out there likes it as well. F.A.B.

In reply to the post I wrote yesterday addressing some of the contributing factors to my success I received a number of comments that suggested that it is better to work smarter instead of harder. While that sounds good in theory, I do not think that advice is very pratical, and even if it is practical I don't think it is accurate.

It is not practical because working smarter is often something outside of my control, while working harder rarely is.

It is not accurate because a vast majority of the most successful people I know are definately harder workers than they are smart.

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave."
      (John) Calvin Coolidge

About 7pm tonight we made the last update to our server platform by adding two new database servers, both about 4 times faster than the last ones.  Right now ActiveRain is loading ridiculously fast. Or as Jorgen, one of our developers, puts it: "We went from a leaky dinghy to a multi-million dollar speedboat".

Now that we got all that server stuff out of the way maybe we can launch a couple new products (HINT HINT).  Stay tuned over the next couple weeks.

I regularly receive emails from people around the country asking me how to achieve success in real estate and business. Although shocked and flattered with each letter I receive, I feel that at this stage in my career, I am still fighting for survival each day. Still, I understand that to those looking in on my career from the outside, things look much better than they may seem firsthand.

I was responding to one of these emails today, and it occured to me that others may be asking the same questions and that I should be sharing these responses on my blog.  This particular response is practical advice, but I know that if I post answers to only the most unique questions, nothing will ever get published. So, without further disclaimers, I present an email Q&A:

____

"...I'm making a switch from a market research sales career into real estate and I'd really love any advice you have to offer as to how you've been so successful..."

____

The answer that immediately comes to mind is simple: Just keep pushing forward.  I remember the period of time from when I was 18 until I was about 25 that everything seemed so hard.  I worked too many hours, and there were many times that I felt like giving up and getting a salary-type job. During those times, I had two silly things I would do to help provide the extra motivation necessary to allow me to push through:

1. I would repeat this mantra in my head, over and over, "I made my first million dollars in real estate."  (Crazy, I know.) I don't know exactly what it meant because at the time I was broke and hadn't yet made much money in real estate, but somehow it worked for me.

2. I would visualize myself pushing a train up a hill. Of course the train represented my business endeavours. I would always gauge how tough business was by how heavy that train felt.  Doing this gave me comfort because I knew that all of that work would pay off when the train reached the top of the hill and I was able to ride off the momentum for the rest of my life.

Sure enough, after a long while, it started to feel like the incline was getting less steep, and eventually, I had the sense that I was at the top of the hill; now, it seems I am at the stage in my career where my focus is on increasing the momentum of the train. Once you have some momentum at your back business gets much easier!

Real estate sales and business are still very hard. It has also been my experience that everything I attempted to do in business is always 300% harder than I thought it would be when I began.

To sum it all up: work harder than everyone else, don't be afraid to make a lot of mistakes, and be open to learning from every experience you put your back into and every experienced person who shares their own struggles with the weight of success.