CCAR Help :: Technical Training and Support

Definitions and Introduction:

A Blog - short for ‘Web Log’ is at its most basic a diary or journal of thoughts. The term has mutated far beyond this simple conception, but the basic principle holds.

For Real Estate purposes, most Blogs are aimed at relaying professional information, whether on theReal Estate transaction, the industry, communities, neighborhoods, or properties themselves. That being said, it is important not to limit yourself as you conceive of ways to market yourself, your services and your listings.

Blogging itself is the act of creating content. You do this by gathering the materials for a ‘post’ (a particular blog topic which once prepared is ‘posted’ or ‘published’ online). A fuller description of a blog is posted here.

Ultimately any tool that can be used to record thoughts or display materials can be a ‘blogging platform.’

For instance, if you really wanted to you could create your blog by using an easel, brush and paint to record your thoughts. You could then take a digital photo of the painting and post that as a blog entry. This approach would certainly be eye catching, but hardly efficient.

At the opposite end of the spectrum you could simply use your computers notepad to write your thoughts, and save the documents as .html, and post them to your website. This is similarily inefficient, however, as you would then have to maintain the interface to display the latest posts, their relationship with each other, etc..

Fortunately, the rise in interest in blogging has driven the creation of a number of tools both online and offline that make effective blogging a snap. We will explore a few of these tools in this training, and even set up and publish to a blog account before we are done.

Where you blog is your choice. This is referred to both as your venue, and your platform. Your venue is basically your brand. Your platform is the software and environment in which you create, host and maintain your blog. We will further explore the how, why and where (and more) in this series "Blogging 101" curriculum.

Ultimately, you are encouraged to explore and exploit many different venues. Blogging can be an effective way to communicate not just your message, but your authenticity. Studies have shown that consumers are increasingly inurred to the “I am great” marketing that typified the last century. To blog effectively, however, you need to be familiar with several things, and prepare yourself in several ways.

These are the steps that this training course will lead you through. We have posted the outline and basic materials for this course online as a series of blog posts here at ccarhelp.com. If you find these materials interesting, please consider signing up for this course to get the full benefit of an interactive training experience.

In brief, this course will help you understand what a blog is, what it can do for you, and how to go about getting started as a real estate blogger.

As we evaluate what blogging can do for you, we will need you to be evaluating the following (and more) about yourself and your goals.

Your Voice. It takes a while to work this out, and it is something that you really need to discover for yourself.

Your venue. Again, you can blog anywhere, and if you blog for any length of time your choices about where to blog will mature. In the same fashion, you will discover your blogging style, your voice. As stated in the "I blog therefore I am" introductory post on this site:

" I write for myself. I assume that in so doing, I will be creating content that
is attractive to people like myself. Good blogging has one key ;
AUTHENTICITY/TRANSPARENCY. It is the antithesis of the ‘look at me I am great’ sales marketing that has dominated the last 50 years. You don’t put a post out there, you put YOURSELF out there, but it has to be the ‘real’ you."

Your content. This is the currency of your blog. It is what you spend all of your time creating, highlighting and maintaining. You need to learn to put yourself in a position to create, maintain, backup and benefit from your content. We will discuss these in detail, but for now, remember that as you explore your blogging voice and different venues to blog on, you need to capture your content.

When you blog ‘out of venue’, either on an experimental platorm or in a guest venue, keep a local copy. Ideally you will do this in a WYSYWIG html editor like Dreamweaver, but anything, even notepad, will work. Also, be sure to copy your content back to your own site. I actually prefer to write my content on my own site first, even if the thought is spurred by a topic or thread elsewhere, and then replicate it out. Be sure to backlink subtly to yourself (e.g. a small line at the end of every post ‘this post always available on my site here’ where the word site is a link to your website).

Your niche. We have devoted an entire post to this issue, as well as to the issue of naming and branding. We will discuss your web presence as a whole, how a blog can fit into and help you maximize your ROI and extend your brand. In the end, your niche, your brand, and your content should reflect you, and your expertise.

Your expertise and committment. by asking you to ask yourself a series of questions, we will explore what area of focus you should consider, and extend this into your brainding and content. The first question to ask yourself, however, is what expertise you bring to this endeavor, and how committed you are likely be to converting that expertise into a valuable blog resource.