CCAR Help :: Technical Training and Support

Your Sphere of Influence

You are creating a real estate blog, so obviously your topic matter will somehow revolve around real estate. But that being said, there are still innumerable ways to define your topic matter and style. Since we are presumably trying to maximize our return on investment, our goal will be to help you project your sphere of influence into your blog.

Your sphere of influence, in real estate terms, is the group(s) of people that you might have influence over. Many factors may combine to determine your spehere; gender, generational cohort (baby boomers or Gen X?), prior occupation, education, recreational habits, etc. I would argue that this sphere of influence will translate well to your blog. As I will say many times, you want to write yourself. be authentic and transparent. Whatever your particular niche is in face to face interactions, your sphere and style of influence, should be poured, as is, into your blog.

The topic matter that you excel in should also become your primary focus for materials, of course. Do you have genuine, hard earned knowledge of a particular community? Transaction type? Property class? Are you adept at providing consumers with advice, guidance and tools on financing? Do you know more about in-law unit zoning regulations than most?

The topic can be as core or esoteric as you like, with the obvious drawbacks to both. If it is too ‘core,’ too standard (e.g. My guide to how to buy a house) then it may be lost in the noise. Too esoteric and no one might care. Don’t be afraid to experiment, and remember that it takes time to create a brand and a style, and that an adventure into blogging needs to be viewed as a long term commitment to growing the resource. If you follow that path, you will doubtless reinvent your blog(s) many times.

Of course you can vary your topic matter, but it is difficult to be expert on many subjects, and your blog will benefit more from real expertise in a small area more than a diverse but less potent variety of materials.

Understand your liability. Your blog posts need to be considered as your most sensitive communication form. Exercise extreme caution throughout the entire process to limit your liability. As a general rule of thumb, if you wouldn’t put it in an email to 5000 people, don’t put it on your blog.

Blogging cycle

Don’t get trapped into the idea that you have to create content out of thin air, or at a certain frequency. Certainly the more quality content, the better. It is painfully obvious, however, when you are posting just to post.

What you should focus on is putting yourself in a position to blog as often as possible. This basically means three things.

First, don’t lose the ideas. Ideas come at us at the weirdest times. Keep a notepad, or send yourself a text from your phone, etc. Make a habit of reviewing these little self reminders so that you never have a shortage of topic ideas. We will review some other tools to help you both keep track of this sort of list from anywhere, and also some high tech tips for mobile blogging later.

Second, convert interesting questions or circumstances into posts. Get a great question from a consumer? Give them the cliffs notes answer in person, but then later send them a link to the completed ‘post as anonymous response’ (do not use their name) and tell them that you liked the questions so much you sat down and wrote out your thoughts. They will likely think this is cool, and you get ‘legs’ out of the answer (which you needed to provide in any case). This is the key value to blogging, in my opinion. Get repeated return on your investment in an answer. Those answers are your trades artform - frame them as such.

Third, get into the habit of writing when the mood strikes. A post can often be rattled off in less than 20 minutes once you get proficient. Write anywhere, just try to keep it digital so you don’t have to transcribe. Write yourself an email if you happen to be in email when it hits.. keep notepad open on your computer. If you have to write on paper, actually sit down and transcribe it ASAP so it doesn’t get lost. The growing wealth of information that you have ‘created’ will eventually be its own reward.

s is about include Google News, Topix, href="http://news.search.yahoo.com/">Yahoo! News, href="http://www.bloglines.com">Bloglines, href="http://www.technorati.com">Technorati and href="http://www.blogpulse.com">Blog Pulse (among others).