The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing [Infographic]

If you like it, you can find it here…

Some of you might know that my “day job” is as a real estate agent with Century 21 Results Realty.  My office is in Cumming, GA, but I generally work in Gwinnett County, in the suburbs of Atlanta.  If you watch my real estate blog, LaneBailey.com, and read the market reports I post up, you would see that here in the Atlanta market, we have definitely moved from a Buyer’s Market to a Seller’s Market.  I can’t say that the real estate recovery is built from bricks, but it is certainly not just sand.

Data provided by ActiveRain, the #1 social community for real estate professionals.

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• Suwanee, GA, Market Report, January, 2013

Washington at Valley Forge (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here’s wishing you a great 4th of July.  As you celebrate, don’t forget the reason for the celebration.  Brave men and women gave us a gift by demanding and then fighting for OUR liberty.

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For all of the marketing I see aimed AT real estate professionals, I’m amazed to see how little we (individually) actually spend ON supporting those vendors making their livings from us.

Of course, there is the fact that nationally there are millions of real estate agents, and even in a market like Atlanta (where I am), there are tens of thousands of licensed agents.  With those kinds of numbers, it doesn’t take much from each to support a vendor…

The other thing that I see is that successful agents spend a LOT more on technology and marketing that agents that aren’t successful.  The question is, though, did the spending or the success come first.

Regardless, it is VERY important to know what tools are being leveraged by those that are more successful in our business.  Whether we need to emulate them or see more efficient ways to do business, we need the baseline understanding of what is driving their success.

Keep in mind that this data is coming from ActiveRain.com… which wants you to be a member there.  And it is also coming from some of their sponsors… and they want you to join them as well.  Also, I AM an Active Rain Ambassador and have been a member since 2007.   While I am not being compensated for this post in any way (unless you join through my link below… then I’ll get points which won’t buy me a darn thing…) I do feel it is a worthwhile community and that it fosters increased professionalism in the real estate industry.

Data provided by ActiveRain.com. Join 220,000+ Real Estate Agents on the world’s largest Real Estate Social Network. To read more about the things that differentiate real estate agents that are thriving from those that aren’t, click here.

No, this isn’t an apology post about a missed blog deadline.  Rather, this is a post about what happens when you miss a self-imposed deadline on your blog posting calendar.

Nothing…

Unless you are Seth Godin or Chris Brogan, there is a good chance that the only person that will notice is looking at you in the mirror every morning.  That isn’t to say that your posts aren’t being read, but the value isn’t in being posted on time, it is in being posted.  Please note… missing a deadline is no big deal.  Not posting at all is a problem.  Not posting regularly is also a problem.

Just about every “how-to” post on blogging says that you need to post up at least once a week or your readers will get bored.  And I think that is very reasonable… and a minimum.  I think that posting at least once or twice a week should be an attainable goal.

When I first started blogging, I was so wound up about posting every day that I would go back and post for any days I missed.  But there were two things that I noticed…

• When I tried to cram in posts to meet an artificial deadline, the quality of the posts suffered.
• I stressed myself WAY out.
• Nobody noticed that I was posting up every day… or that I had missed days.

One day it hit me.  Chill out.  And I did it across all of my blogs.  I backed off on the schedule and instituted a calendar to try to be better about being regular.

But on the not to do list is write apology posts when you miss a posting deadline (or even a bunch of them).  Just post up good content and move on.  The apology doesn’t help move your blog forward… and your readers don’t want to spend their time reading it.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll see if we can come up with ways to make keeping up with those post deadlines easier to meet.

I enjoy blogging.  But there are a lot of folks that would rather have their teeth pulled than sit down and write 300 words on a regular basis.  And there are a few reasons that keep coming up.  How many of them have YOU said?

• I just don’t want to…

English: Screenshot of the blogging system WordPress using the theme “Twenty Ten”. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To get past this one, we have to ask WHY don’t you want to… those are the real reasons. “I just don’t want to” is an excuse, not a reason.  Of course, we’re all big kids and so we don’t HAVE to if we don’t want to.

• I’m too busy…

How many of us can identify with that?  Sitting down to write a few hundred words after spending 10 hours with clients… while still looking forward to a few more hours of paperwork, and maybe even a little marketing so that the pipeline doesn’t dry up in two months… isn’t exactly appealing.  But at the same time, blogging IS marketing.  It’s also a great way to educate your clients, and catalog a resource of that education.

Besides, with video blogging or using links and curation of content, it can be done in minutes instead of hours each week.

• I don’t know how…

This is one of the most common, and while blogging is not really that technically difficult, there is a technical component.  My favorite platform, WordPress (self-hosted), does require having a hosting account and getting under the hood, so to speak.  However, there are a lot of other ways to do it.  You could use Posterous, Tumblr, WordPress.com, Pinterest, YouTube or probably 50 other platforms.

• I don’t have anything to write about…

Blogging Heroes (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Seriously?  Any real estate agent that doesn’t get 30 questions a day that might be worthy of a blog post or 10 strange experiences a week, is not working hard enough.  Everything from “How’s the market” to “I wonder why all of the bedrooms have security cameras?” can be the basis of an interesting blog post.

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