BTW I dumped my website a few months ago.

(by the way, I won’t play the who’s smarter than whom game, but between your list of bloggers, toolbars, RE.net search engines, etc. I’ve been inspired by you so many times, I feel very comfortable saying you’re one of the people whose contributions to the RE.net could never be overstated!)

I get asked that question a lot, and it’s very difficult to answer. Mainly because my blog isn’t my only “web presence”. Often when I ask a client where/how they found me the response is, “On the Internet”, or “Your website” (many can’t tell/don’t know/don’t care about the difference between our static website and our blog). So “on the internet” makes it hard to determine how they initially found us, or what it was on the internet that made them decide to come to us.

Measuring closed transactions isn’t the only measure of a blog (or static sites) “success”. I have over 2,000 “contacts” in a database that were gathered from the blog and static site. They are all on drip mails, auto-listings, newsletters, etc. That “pipeline” is incredibly valuable and will no doubt lead to closed transactions sometime in the future. How many of that 2000 will lead to a closed transaction? Beats me. Nor do I know when they might. My personal record is setting someone up on auto-listings and not hearing a peep from them for 29 months. Then one day they came forward and we were under contract in a week.

I agree completely that agents need to see tangible results from blogging (or any marketing effort). But a blog is pretty unique in that much of what it does is intangible and often difficult to measure.

Let’s say someone calls me from a yard sign. They live in the area, saw the sign and want to talk about listing their home. So I say, “Sure, let’s get together tomorrow afternoon. In the mean time if you get a chance, read through my blog. It’ll give you an idea of who we are and how we work.” When we arrive at the listing appointment, the seller says in a nutshell, “Skip the presentation, where do I sign?” They read the blog and made up their mind.

Is this a client gained from the blog? Or do they fall under the “saw a yard sign” category? I could argue that they might have turned into a client without the blog. But who knows. Maybe not.

So the blog is often a compliment to the marketing effort. How do you measure that?

You could argue that in a lot of ways, that map, and much of what RCG was not so much about reaching out to tech blogs as it was about reaching out to local blogs. There’s just a lot of local tech blogs in Seattle.

Instead of paying or begging, often just asking nicely works.

Doing something incredibly interesting is a much better way, IMO, to create incoming links and to engage other Realtors with you online. Every Realtor I meet who wants to blog has something interesting and unique to blog about.

Yes, outbound links will work as well.

The bottom line is that Realtors need closed transactions to justify the time spent on blogging, like any marketing activity.

I am ready for real estate agents to come clean with exactly how many closed transations they are netting from their blog alone.

Ardell is an anomaly. Not all agents can write like Ardell. Agents are asking for raw numbers: Leads v. closed transactions. What do we have to show them?