I’ve toyed around with blogger.com and the most popular real estate blog at activerain.com. With both sites, I was ready to post blogs in a matter of minutes and the sites claimed to bring a ready pool of readers to my posts. Activerain’s blog highlighted my first post on their main page and over 30 comments followed mostly from members looking to get Activerain points by leaving a comment. The blogger.com site was even easier to set up but no one ever saw it as far as I could tell.
Both blogs included advertisements and Activerain even added a feature to search for property, but the search promoted my competitor. I discovered that I was basically creating free content for these sites which helped them sell ads and drive visitors away from my blog.
I had heard a lot about wordpress, but was afraid it would be too difficult to install and setup on my website. I was pleasantly surprised when the setup took only 15 minutes and my web hosting company even had an online tutorial . Wordpress.com claims you can install in 5 minutes and provides their own instructions on how to do so. My install took a little longer because of some extra steps my web hosting company required.
The Fitzgerald Realty blog at Activerain is still up and I guess it will remain there unless they start putting links to my competitors directly on my blog posts!
P.S. I started adding posts to localism.com but didn’t really get any response. No ads on that site but I believe the goal is to build content for each community and then sell rights to moderate the posts to that community to a local realtor in each city.
