BCS Playoff Bracket (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Social Media Breakfast Atlanta is going to host a Blog Brawl this summer.  What?  You don’t know what a Blog Brawl is?  We can help you with that…

We will put together a bunch of blog battles.  There will be brackets like the NCAA Basketball Finals.  We’ll take 16 blogs and pair them up.  The blog that gets the most votes from each pair will advance to the next round… and it will happen again.  Only one blog will emerge victorious.

The brawl will be open to Atlanta area business blogs.  Starting date and details will be released in the next few weeks.  There will likely be some surprise twists and turns.

The goal will be to bring more attention to each of the bloggers participating in the brawl.

Next up, we will be looking for some groovy cool sponsors to put together a prize package for the winning blogs.  But every blog will be a winner… more exposure and new readers will be the prize.

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• Is Your Blog Brain-Storm More Like a Fog?(lanebailey.info)

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Here are two diametrically opposed viewpoints that need to be balanced.

Market or die!  If you don’t take the time to market now, you will have plenty of time later. 

and

DVRs were invented so that we could ignore marketers and commercials. 

Do It!

Mobile-phone-advertising (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m sitting here watching a little TV and it seems that the networks use a lot of valuable advertising time… time that could generate revenue… to promote new shows.  Do the shows pay for the time?  No.  But, if the show is popular, there will be viewers.  If there are viewers, the networks get to sell the advertising time for more money.  So, the networks take some of their most valuable inventory and dedicate it to marketing themselves.

Many small business owners, and it seems ESPECIALLY those in the real estate sphere, relegate marketing and advertising to the back burner.  There isn’t time to market when there is actual “revenue generating business” to take care of.  But, after ignoring the marketing and advertising aspects of their business, they found that the “revenue generating business” had slacked off.

I used to work for a photographer that reserved some of his most valuable time to talk with potential new clients… even if it meant turning down existing work.  Of course, we maintained a pretty tough schedule when things got busy, but the marketing was constant.  Even when we were shooting 14 hours days, from before sunrise until after sunset, we would come back to the studio and prep mailings and package stock photos for agencies.

There were a few other photographers I worked for.  They were happy when they were busy, and marketing like mad when they weren’t.  Business was up and down…

But Be Cool About It…

Football is ok, but I can go an entire season without watching a single game… and I’m cool with that.  But I record the Super Bowl.  I don’t really watch the game.  I watch the commercials.  But the rest of the year, I avoid commercials like the plague.  I have an Ad-Blocker on my internet browser so that I don’t see a lot of ads as I surf.  For the TV that we watch in the household, most of it cycles through the DVR so that we can skip the commercials.  When I am watching my FaceBook stream, I tend to ignore the people that just post up self-promotion.

So, how can marketing and advertising be effective if we all just ignore it?  And should we really contribute more to the noise?

It is a tough question and a difficult balance to maintain.  We HAVE to market, but if we do it too much, it has the opposite effect, we get tuned out by the very people we are trying to reach.

Mean it when you market.

Don’t overdo it.

Make it cool.

Keep it relevant.

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IPhone First Generation 8GB (3680455198) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I took a little time out and knocked out 3 blog posts for another of my blogs.  I did it while waiting for a client to arrive at a showing.  I used my tablet (a smart phone would also work).

Video.  Last week I popped up a video up on this blog that I shot in just a few minutes.  I think it took about 15 minutes to shoot it… twice.

The point is that I hear from a lot of agents that say they don’t have time to blog.  There is almost always time.  Of course the quality would be a bit better if it was done in a studio… but they would have a different feel.  A lot of viewers actually like the video to me more “raw and real”.

One of the nice things is that you can actually have an idea and shoot it right then… which can be even better than making notes about what to write about later.

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• Is Your Blog Brain-Storm More Like a Fog? (lanebailey.info)

We have those times… it seems like even though we know there are a thousand things we can write about, NOTHING comes to mind.  We stare at the computer like the whole concept of writing something is completely foreign.  I know that I have been there.

Brain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But there are a few things you can do to get you through…

• Keep a “Post Idea Notebook” at hand.  Write down those cool ideas as you get them.  They will be gone in a few minutes…
• Along the same lines, leave yourself a voice mail with your idea.  This is a MUCH better solution while driving, and I get a lot of ideas while driving.
• Subscribe to a variety of RSS feeds, both inside your industry and in general news.  Often, the items in the news will be of interest to your readers, but they might want it brought to their level, or translated to how it affects them.

We’ve all seen the list above.  I think that every post on blog ideas came from the same source.  But there are more things that you can do to fill that bank…

1. Brainstorm.  Sit down with a piece of paper, a tablet, your phone… whatever… and write as many ideas as you can.  Don’t worry about the quality… just write them down.
2. Build an “Idea Council”.  Put together, or join, a group of bloggers with different niches.  If you blog about real estate, find people that blog about ANYTHING else.  What they blog about is not important, and what you blog about shouldn’t be important to them.  In fact, it isn’t even important that they blog…  What is important is that they are creative and willing to speak up.  What you are going to do is listen to THEIR ideas about what they want to know about your blogging niche.

About an hour after this post goes live, I will be taking part in exactly that kind of group as part of Social Media Breakfast – Atlanta.  The topic for this month’s breakfast will be “Crowd-Sourcing Blog Topics” and we will be using a round-table format to help each person come up with topics for their own blogs.  We’ll see if we can kick out at least 5 actionable post ideas for each person…

BTW, Social Media Breakfast – Atlanta meets on the 3rd Thursday of the month in Cobb/Marietta and on the 4th Thursday in Gwinnett/Suwanee.  Check out our FaceBook page for details.

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• 5 Types of Multimedia Content You Should Be Adding to Your Blog (bloggingtips.com)

Many beginning bloggers have trouble narrowing down their blog to just one thing.  This is especially true of those of us in the real estate blogging world.  We write about local and national market conditions, seller and buyer issues, staging and renovating homes for sale,  improvements and financing.  But then many of us also add local “flavor” posts with information about local events, restaurants celebrities and more.  To top it off, some even write about niche specific things like local equestrian issues, tennis matches and car culture.

But there is a problem with that strategy… and the result is that many readers do exactly the opposite of what we think they will do.  The strategy is that readers surfing for niche info, local event info, restaurant info or any of the other things we are writing about, will be drawn in by our incredible prose… and feel compelled to buy a house, using us as their agent.

Image via Wikipedia

Instead, what often happens is that readers stumble onto the blog from a search, hopefully finding a post that meets the criteria of their search.  And then… a bunch of unrelated posts.  Maybe they are searching for information about 4th of July Fireworks shows in the area.  The chance that they are also looking for a home is pretty slim.  Or, if they ARE in  the housing market, they find your most brilliant market report EVER, and then while looking for more of that real estate information they are craving… all they can find is fluff about the new Smashburger that opened up.  Away they go.

The goal here isn’t to trash the strategy… on the contrary, we real estate professionals have a unique position in the community as its cheerleaders.  We meet a lot of people, and we generally work hard to be involved in the community.  It benefits our business, the community and ourselves as people.

The idea is to turn the strategy on its head.

Maybe instead of trying to make all of that into one “super blog”, instead we should split the effort out into a few different blogs.  Those multiple blogs can do something that the “super blog” can’t do… it can focus.  And several focused blogs will likely retain more readership than one over-reaching blog that completely lacks focus.

BLOG IDEAS (Photo credit: owenwbrown)

A few years ago I made a decision to split off all of my tech/social media writing from my real estate blog.  There was no discernible drop off in readership… and the tech blog picked up a few readers.  Last year, I split off all of my car posts from my real estate blog (my niche is car hobbyist properties… one could argue that the posts were relevant).  The result has actually been an increase in readership, along with a dramatic drop in the bounce rate.  At the same time, the car blog has built up a modest base of readership on its own.  Pushing it a step further, one of the biggest referral sources for my real estate site is the car blog.  And that is through a discreet ad in one corner of the car blog.

So, maybe a better way to incorporate the strategy is to have multiple blogs, each with its own focus, but each promoting the others, as appropriate.  In  short, give each reader exactly what they are looking for… and trim out the weeds distracting them from what they really want.  Also, give them a clear opportunity to make their way back to your “money-maker”.

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