From the Online Real Estate Marketing Ten Commandments: Technology replaces itself and thusly 
cheapens over time.
Eventually it gets so good that it becomes free. Of course in order to make a buck, marketers enhance the basic model with higher perceived items real or imagined. It is the imagined part that can border on unethical. The Internet has certainly changed things as new becomes old at lighting speed. But old also gets repackaged fairly quickly as marketers make the old sexier. Eventually the imagined value makes the marketplace fuzzy and difficult to navigate.
How About Your Web Presence: Real or Imagined?
Real Value: Website vendors have added IDX, RSS, Blogs, Drip systems and much more to keep 1 step ahead of the pack. The devil is in the details. As an example you get a cool drip system with great pre written letters. Is it possible that your autoresponder is getting blocked by email filters? Is it compliant with email CANSpam laws? How many others are getting the same letters? Are the letters any good?Often you buy the goods for the possible and perceived value. But a blog requires that you write. A drip system requires that you replace the crappy pre-written letters rehashed from 1974 and put it into a real sequential direct response drip.
Is your IDX framed in or a real page on your site? Because one can help you do well in the engines, the other more than likely can hurt your search presence. So what seems like real value can easily be....
Imagined Value: This is value that is perceived for its sexy, but is like eating potato chips. Yummy, but just full of empty calories. Examples are most of the promises of Web 2.0 and the Social web. I have always thought of for example a Facebook or Linked-In as a muscled up forum.
Blogs are free all over the place. They have in fact resurrected the old Web 1.0 theme of "build it and they will come". Of course that is plain ole B.S.
Case in point and the promise of the Blog"
The blog has been sold as a cheap alternative to a website. The promise of long tail keywords that easily rank in the engines was enough to get DIY's (Do it Yourselfers) and low budget marketers to bite.
The perceived value is imagined. Without quality writing, the blog is hollow and fails to engage the reader. Without links to the blog the engines don't care about it anyway. So many play in the land of make believe or hopefully they may realize they have been had...again.
Blog Friendly
It seems like every time I have been interviewed about blogs even the interviewers are enamored by the promise of the search engine friendly design of a blog. They always ask me about the friendly aspects of a blog. Well here is a news flash!
Contrary to popular marketing, blogs in many ways are not search engine friendly. (However, like anything web, it is nothing that a bunch of links won't fix. )
And oh what about those those longtail keywords? If you don't have links into your site the engine won't know that that long tail word you have even exists. And even if it doesn't need links how will you do with a word that gets so little traffic, that it won't even show up on the commercially available keyword research tools?
So should you blog? Absolutely. The future of real estate is that you must be a content producer if you are to survive online. Your industry has already given away the only mass produced content that for awhile you could repurpose as your own. The Listings.
In my industry, many companies will sell to Realtors with a promise of high positions in the search engines. The perceived value implies that this will equate to money earned. When in fact, the value can be imaginary if all the other elements are not in place.
But just like a higher position does not automatically equate to traffic, neither does high traffic always equate to a sale. And nor does a bunch of leads automatically equate to a sale. A high SERP (search engine results page) means that you have 1 chance to get traffic. Thats it. It may be untargeted traffic or it may be targeted.
And last but not least your website may not be "lead optimized" to capture targeted traffic. And does it have a properly set up incubation system to turn that lead into a sale? What I describe here is a huge puzzle. To discuss just one piece makes for a nice clean presentation. But it starts from a thin premise. An imagined value.
