"Questions about buying a blog"

Real Estate Blogs

More from the Questions and Answers Archive:

Tim,

I'm real interested in using your services.

I am teamed up with my wife (a realtor) in the Las Vegas market...

We are struggling right now as most agents are, and could really use some help creating a blog and submitting the keywords to the search engines.

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The Answer:
A blog is either cheap and easy, or can be very expensive.

Keywords don't get submitted to engines unless you are doing pay per click. The way to get traffic is thru an optimized page with content and mostly by bringing in one way links into those pages.

The cheap is going to run you nothing (except your time). the cheap ones typically run on a multiple user/community platform. Examples are:

• Blogger.com (Googles free service)
• Wordpress.com
• Mytypes.com
• ActveRain.com
• And our new -still getting the bugs out version: Real Estate Bloggers

These are just a few examples as the free thing is hot right now. Even NAR is offering its members a blog.
Why would these companies do such a thing? Well, I have always said the inevitability is you get what you pay for. Problems that I see:

• Who owns the content?
• What happens if the company goes belly up? Chances are better with that happening when there are no revenue streams.
• You are operating on their domain. All free blogs are listed as YourUrl.TheirUrl.com as a subdomain, or as a subfolder like TheirURL.com/YourFolder/
• Eventually they have to pay for your parasitic hosting. Once they grow large enough many start advertising either directly or indirectly, all off the strength of yours and the other writers content.
• Deletions. Blogger has completely deleted blogs off their network. They even made a mistake and deleted their own Google blog once! But they can paste back their database of blog posts. They won't do that for you.

You can always go host your own. GoDaddy has a blog for real cheap, and many love to get their URL's registered there. I personally do not like their blog or their hosting at all. I use TypePad on this HouseBlogger blog.

For larger outlays you can get Blog Coaching from us and a blog that is SEO'd and with links pointing at it.In other words you get traffic. Because just the act of writing a blog does not cause traffic.

Cheers,

Tim