(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.
