Did you know that our medical Doctors get most of their ongoing education from the pharmaceutical Industry? Isn't that the "tail wagging the dog"?
However, similarly most of the "leaders" in real estate marketing online has been the vendors. It has always been this way even pre-internet when I was cold calling expireds.
The bulk of the content flow is coming out of the vendors. It is a natural. However, it is this dynamic that has made it difficult for a natural "conversation" to occur in the real estate blogosphere. This is the opposite of what we see practiced amongst the blogging icons outside of the real estate industry.
As the niche gets tighter it seems the intra-conversational posting goes dry. Each vendor blog seems to be full of their own fans (often clients), but get little cross talk amongst other, often similar vendors or traffic. The community created cuts deep but not very wide.
This makes sense in some ways. When I launched the http://www.positiveonrealestate.com/member/join.html series. I offered open access to as many vendors as I could approach. Very few took me up on it. Some organizationally could just not get their arms around a cooperative arrangement like this. While others no doubt saw cooperation as counterintuitive.
Either way this may be another reason to be careful at looking at vendor models as the one you wish to mimic for your blogging. Remember that I and many of the national real estate blogs are in fact vendors that sell business to business. And as such are skewed to benefit each one's respective business.
Some of the large iconic blogs often mentioned in blogs, often sell either very widely or they sell tightly but on very small unit prices. None, are looking to encumber someone with a $100,000 + mortgage note.
However, your conversation should occur locally anyway. And in most cases that opportunity for a local conversation has not yet come to a town near you. So this alone could influence the tone of your writing and blogging.
