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If you are pressed for time and need to skip the rest of the post, I’ll sum it up for you. Blogging is supposed to supplement what we are already doing to grow and manage our business. It should not be done to the exclusion of growing our business. OK, if you have to go, catch you later. If you have time to read on, I’ll expand.
I cut my teeth as an agent knocking on FSBO doors, calling expireds, sending out just listed and just sold cards, and flat out hustling. I still target that niche. I added some innovative marketing, but my core practices, that is, the girl I brought to the dance, remain. I blog and I have a web page. But I am a broker first. I am always prospecting and experiencing my share of rejection and negativity. The nuts and bolts of growing in this industry remain human and not digital.
Some agents have a prolific web presence. They have six figure points on Active Rain. They have a Zillow profile, a Trulia blog, a Point2 fiefdom, a YouTube channel, a tomato blog and an enchilada, cold antipasto blog for all I know.
And many are broke. I know why, too. They are so busy twittering and facebooking and blogging and vlogging that they forget what this industry is about. If you aren’t talking to someone new daily about buying or selling a house with you in the next 30 days, you aren’t an active agent. You are hiding from the business part of the business and hoping that some ripe buyer or seller will fall in love with your rich prose or your glitzy home page and commit to hiring you. Or you hope that some Active Rainer in Shamokin will refer their cousin to you.
Maybe that will happen. But in this day and age, if you aren’t active in the field, consumers will know it. If you have a hot prospect dumped in your lap and you act like they are the first human being on your desert island in years (quick tip: they don’t like to be called “Spaulding.”), you’ll repel them. They may not say it to your face, but we’ve all been out with someone once and then gotten an email that their father died or they lost their job and they’ll get back with us when things are sorted out, but they never do. That’s buyerspeak for “you’re fired.” Even if you close a transaction with that client, you cannot do it in the volume you need to truly establish yourself in real estate. Not online alone, not yet.
When I got into the business in 1996, the Internet was just beginning. As a matter of fact, I remember being told that we should only do a website on spec and not expect it to generate any business. Frankly, even today I have yet to meet a full service licensee who makes 6 figures from their website alone. The web presence helps more and more, but it cannot stand alone while other profitable avenues are neglected.
You cannot get rich in real estate brokerage in your pajamas. Yet.
If you are a broker who blogs, I am preaching to the choir. If you are a blogger who brokers, close the laptop, take a shower, and start working with humans again. You’ll know you are on the right track when you are uncomfortable now and again. Feel the burn. Your checkbook will thank you.
