The story of becoming a real estate blogger and how real estate blogging has changed my life

An interesting article published on the Zillow Blog today made me think hard about why I blog and how I got started in the whole real estate blogging phenomenon.

And then I thought "Do I really want to tell this whole story?  Is it boring?  Is it trite?"  It’s definitely promotional, but in my view, I’m not sure how any one could spin it another way.  I also figured after further contemplation, how many people can say, "Real Estate Blogging has changed my life"?

That’s why it’s taken me such a long time to finish these articles.  In fact, I have broken them into two parts so I can discuss real estate blogging from a realtor’s marketing point of view and then from a consumer-centric slant. 

This current post will cover the last two years of selling real estate in Vail since starting our Vail real estate blog. Part two will discuss the value of real estate blogging to the real estate consumer.  So here we go…

It was the fall of 2004 when my business partner, Kristen Veraldi, and I started the Vail Real Estate Blog for a Vail real estate brokerage, Gateway Land and Development.  

Both of us had been researching search engine placement, both organically and buying PPC, for Vail Property Search, a state of the art lead generation IDX website we had also recently launched for the company.  Through our research, we discovered this particular blogging platform and realized quickly that it had some special attributes that made it good for business, in addition to offering some interesting results for organic search. 

Kristen and I both understood technology -especially real estate technologies.  But we were not bloggers.Therefore, we looked in depth at all of the blogs out there.  One thing was for sure, the writing styles of existing blogs in 2004 were very bloggy - meaning, the blogosphere was being used mainly to talk about your most controversial viewpoints for such and such subject matter, even on most real estate blogs.  And that subject matter was all over the place, "in the weeds" as my Real Estate Blogsites’ partners call it.

Based on our assessment of the best use for this ‘instant syndication tool’ for business, we set out to offer professional guidance and manicured information about Vail Real Estate on this blogsite.  My first two articles were actually full blown reports on the Vail Valley Real Estate Market and Second Homes and Resort Trends; these took me over two weeks in my spare time to repurpose and post.  Frankly looking back, we didn’t have a clue what we were doing!

In the first many months of using the Blogsite, I talked internally as managing broker at our company meetings to our agents about using this tool to create thought leadership and share knowledge with buyers and sellers.  We tried to explain that real estate was changing and it was time to tell people what you know about Vail real estate.  I tried to make proofs that we were being seen in Google… by searching phrases like Vail Valley Trends and Statistics and Vail Trends and then Vail Statistics.

Let me tell you, our agents were NOT buying it!  First, they did not believe buyers and sellers searched that way for real estate in Vail and second, they were being asked to write concise information about the Vail Valley - information they did not necessarily want to share, not to mention the additional effort of writing content. 

However, some of the Gateway agents started to get it as we became more attuned to what and how to publish information using this real estate blogsite.

We started off writing about Arrabelle or Arrabelle at Vail Square or Arrabelle in Lionshead and then Red Sky Ranch, Arrowhead River Ranch, and One Willow Bridge Road. In fact, if your clicking through to the Google search pages above, it is and was obvious that anything we wrote about that was geocentric to the Vail Valley was being indexed.  In addition, when we wrote about the lifestyle and community (MTV Vail or Taste of Vail or Vail Forth of July) these phrases would rise to the top of the search engines.  It was also obvious that our lead generation website was receiving similar search rankings because it was being pushed to the top.  A phenomenon that can happen when a subdomain and parent domain are working in-sync.  We had some trouble with the term Vail Real Estate and Vail Valley Real Estate, but as you can click through as see, good resignation in Yahoo!  By the way, I should mention at this point that this paragraph contains links to live searches. 

There are many servers used for the individual search engines so your results may vary from time to time as all organic search results will do.  The point is, by amassing the content on Vail Real Estate using a Blogsite, we might not be on the first page for every phrase some of the time, but we are everywhere for most phrases all of the time.

Back at the office, daily leads were starting to come in via email addresses through the IDX website but more importantly, very qualified buyers and sellers were calling in to purchase real estate and ask specific questions on specific properties in the Vail Valley.  We knew these calls were coming from the blogsite.  Calls like, "I was reading your website and was wondering if you could tell me more about One Willow Bridge Road?"  Gateway was selling properties from the Blogsite.  (Notice at this time very few people knew the difference between a website and a blog - and still don’t for that matter!)

By the fall of 2005, the Gateway Land and Development real estate agents had embraced real estate blogging. 

However, the proof of search for very specific Vail real estate related criteria was not completely validated.  We continued to hone our skills as to best present a good "corporate" message to our constituents as well as continue to make information on the blogsite as insightful and easy to find for buyers and sellers.  It’s cool that the blogsite shows up under the search Ritz Residences Vail or Vail Ritz Residences, but how cool is it for our buyers and sellers that search Ritz Residences to find us on the first or second page of Google?

Currently, we have around 400 posts on our blogsite.  There were over 1700 unique searches used to find www.blog.vailpropertysearch.com in the last month.  In addition, over 4000 unique page views were seen by these visitors. 

There are far too many stories to tell about the real estate leads and relationships created during the last two years of the Vail Real Estate Blogsite.

This is truly a remarkable tool and it is one of the reasons that I co-founded Real Estate Blogsites.  It became apparent that agents and brokers could use this technology to reach their buyers and sellers in the real estate business and reasonably demonstrate their worth in the real estate transaction.

This brings me to the conclusion of Why I blog for real estate.  It’s because I am getting my professional message heard and that has allowed me to expand my core businesses to reach a bigger audience than I could ever have imagined.  Real Estate Blogging has changed my life!

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