Blogger Spotlight: Aaron Wall

If you don’t read SEO Book, you really should. It’s a read and repeat blog. Bloggers read Aaron’s post, and then repeat these concepts as their own all over the blogosphere. Why not get this advice straight from the horses mouth?

Aaron speaks largely on search engine optimization, but my favorite posts are the one where he talks about viral marketing and the new media in general. When he offered up the chance for his readers to interview him, I knew this was a perfect opportunity to bring in an outside the RE.net perspective.

Hi Aaron, thank you so much for participating. As you may know, the real estate blogging community (we call it RE.net) is by far, one of the largest, and still fastest growing small business verticals for social media. It’s a close knit group, but with differing opinions as to what makes the best real estate blog strategies. Here’s three hot topics that I’d like to get an outsider’s opinion on.

Blog Rolls- Many RE.neters maintain a blogroll on their real estate blogs. Sometimes the links are local, other times, they’re other real estate blogs from around the country. From the standpoint of SEO, how important do you think it is for real estate bloggers to maintain or avoid a blogroll?

Well when you create a blogroll if you link to it sitewide you are passing out PageRank sitewide. What I do if I use blogrolls is either just link to the blogroll from the homepage OR link to a page I call blogroll where I list blogs I read often. The nice things about making the blogroll an actual blog post are that more people will end up seeing it when they do link searches on sites like Technorati, and you are passing out less link equity while still getting all the benefits of a traditional blogroll.

You still want to link to some of your core sales pages sitewide though such that they get maximum benefit from your site’s link authority.

Listings - Unlike ad driven revenue model blogs, real estate bloggers are generally trying to generate business for their own company. A popular school of thought is to avoid “selling” on the blog. This means that writing about a new listing is frowned upon. However, other bloggers report great success in blogging about their listings. What are the pro’s and cons with regard to search engines when blogging about your own product? In addition, as a consumer how would you react to a real estate blog that wrote about it’s listings?

If you want to write a blatant advertisement but do not want your core audience to suffer through reading it, consider backdating the post a week or month.

People buy auto trader and it is nothing but ads. And few people would want to go to the million dollar homepage everyday because aesthetically it looks like crap. The key is to editorialize any sales information as well. Do you offer me tips on why I should stay in neighborhood x or the type of people who should avoid neighborhood y? Do you offer any unique ratings of areas? Have you visited the house you are pitching? Can you talk about your experience from an informing standpoint rather than using hard sales tactics? Those are the types of questions to ask. If you are teaching and informing it doesn’t feel like a sales pitch, even though Teaching Sells .

Keywords - Real estate bloggers are always striveing to own localized keyword search results. We all know it’s important to include these words in our posts, but at what point (from the perspective of SEO, or the blog’s readers) does keyword rich turn into keyword stuffing?

If you were your prospective client or prospective reader is the content you are writing something you would want to read or subscribe to? If not, then you need to fix it. Nobody is going to buy from or be impressed by poor reading content even if they do stumble upon it from a search.

Some people who keep adding keywords to try to match an arbitrary keyword density level end up stripping out important modifiers. Use a keyword tool to find modifiers that you can sprinkle in the copy… concentrate on fitting them in the page copy in a logical way more than concentrating on repeating the core keywords. Also it may make sense to use a few core keywords in your site template to help the pages be relevant for related queries.

Some Wordpress plugins allow you to make your h1 headings different than your page titles. Using these sorts of tools allows you to get added keyword diversity without making the content sound bad.

Also in many cases if your site is structured well you have sales pages ranking for the most important target queries. Make sure to link to the pages you want to rank where it makes sense.

Besides SEO Book, what resources would you recommend for small business bloggers?

Study and learn your own industry inside out. Become the person reporters call when legal changes change your field.

Read Don’t Make Me Think to learn usability. And read the Cluetrain Manifesto and The Purple Cow to get a grasp of online marketing.

Finally, do you have any parting advice for real estate or small business professionals who are interested in starting a blog?

Sooner is better than later. Get launched. No big deal if you are not perfect off the start…it takes a lot of time and effort to become a good writer. Subscribe to a lot of other blogs you find useful and learn from them while you develop your own unique style. Plus tracking your industry and seeing what ideas spread and why they spread teaches you how to create and launch similar ideas.

And this will seem a bit self promotional, but I would also read the Blogger’s Guide to SEO. It is probably the best blog marketing guide on the web…and it is available in more than a dozen languages.

Thanks Aaron, I really appreciate your perspectives here on our corner of the blogosphere.

Time for some more interviews.

I have time to do a new batch of blogger interviews. I’ll be sending out some invitations today, but some of the best interviews have come from people who volunteer themselves. If you’re a blogger in the real estate, mortgage, or title industry, that would like to share their experience and perspective, I would like to hear from you.

The interview process is very flexible. I email you a set of questions, you simply email the answers back. I do the rest. I just ask that you to get them back to me withing a couple weeks (some get it done in a matter of hours). To get a better idea of the format, refer to the long list of interviews running down the near left column.

If you’re interested, leave a comment here, or email me at todd@mariah.com.

That said, Mary McKnight is still worth listening to. Even if she is a “vendor”

I was pretty hard on Mary McKnight in my last post. That said, I still think she’s a important source for real estate bloggers to learn about improving their craft. I’ve spent almost a year collecting great articles about real estate blogging. In that list, Mary is as well represented as any other. I get annoyed by the hype, but she knows her stuff. The same can be said for Jim Cronin, Dustin Luther, Joel Burslem, and Pat Kitano.

What each of these people have in common is that they aren’t actual real estate agents or mortgage originators. They’re… vendors.

The term vendor has become somewhat of an RE.net slur lately. My friend Greg Swann uses it with increasing regularity. It’s his argument that a vendor is under-qualified to advise authentic real estate and mortgage professionals because they lack the experience of walking the walk, so to speak. I most respectfully disagree. In fact, I often think the worst advice of all comes from other professionals in our vertical.

There’s no shortage of “experts” with real estate and mortgage industry day jobs. They employed a few tactics, had some success, and decried their way as the holy grail. They’re missing the big picture. The reality is, blogging is still so uncommon in most cities that even a terrible blogger can do pretty well if they just apply themselves. The mistake many of them make is assuming that just because their advice worked for them, that it’s the best advice, or the only advice.

Vendors on the other hand, have a client base to give them the big picture. They watch their clients succeed, but they also watch them fail. They have a unique perspective as to what works, what works better and what doesn’t work at all. To ignore these voices simply makes no sense to me. Yes, they won’t always be right, but who is?

Blogger Spotlight: Daniel Rothamel

I think the thing I love most about today’s Internet is that all the tools are their to let pure talent rise to the top. Daniel Rothamel generates live audio, video, and the written word on the Real Estate Zebra. Maybe as few as five years ago, a talent like Daniel might never be seen, heard, or maybe even read.

Hi Daniel, what made you decide to start the Real Estate Zebra?

My wife, Kari. When I first began blogging, the title of the url was CvilleAreaRealEstate.com. I had really intended it to be a blog focusing on the Charlottesville area real estate market. A few months in, I started writing posts about my experiences as a basketball official and how they related to the practice of real estate. People responded very positively to the posts, and I did more and more of them. I realized that being a basketball official gives me a unique perspective, and I wanted to highlight that. I struggled with a way of effectively doing it and promoting it. As I usually do, I discussed the issue with my wife, being that she is the smartest, most insightful person I know. As usual, she had the answer– RealEstateZebra.com.

Looking back at your posts from 2006, and then comparing them to today, your blog seems to be evolving from focusing on content for consumers, to focusing on content of interest from other real estate professionals. How did you get to where you are today?

Similar to my migration from CvilleAreaRealEstate.com to RealEstateZebra.com, the change came about as a result of actively blogging. I enjoyed doing the coverage of local real estate news and consumer issues, but I also wanted to talk about bigger, industry issues that really don’t interest most consumers. For a long time, I tried to do both, and I think that the schizophrenic nature of that endeavor caused me to hold back some things from both sides. After being active in the real estate blogging community for a time, I realized that agents are very hungry for knowledge, much more so than I had ever experienced before. If you look at most real estate blogs, be they consumer-focused or not, most of the comments are from industry professionals. As I looked around the blogosphere, I saw plenty of blogs claiming to talk to consumers, when most of the content was actually indirectly focused on professionals. Heck, I had created some of that content myself. I decided that I wanted to remove all the pretense and talk to an audience made up primarily of professionals. I tend to be a guy attracted to big ideas and the need to spread those ideas as a means of inspiring change and achievement by others. Having an industry-focused blog allows me to satisfy that attraction.

I am lucky in that my brokerage is made up of only myself, my wife, and my Mother-in-Law. They decided that we should start a blog for the brokerage that would be exclusively consumer/community focused. This gave me the flexibility that I wanted to turn RealEstateZebra.com into an industry resource.

Has this shift changed, increased, or hurt your ability to attract clients through your blog?

Very honestly, I have no idea. I do know that it has increased my ability to serve my clients, regardless of how they find me. Creating content for RealEstateZebra.com has forced me to think about things in new ways, and consider issues I might have otherwise dismissed. Blogging creates an opportunity for unsurpassed knowledge just by the sheer amount of research that is required to create good content. This makes me a better agent, even if I never get another client via the blog.

Will I attract less clients via RealEstateZebra.com? Probably. But I’m fine with that. The purpose of RealEstateZebra.com is not to attract clients, that is what my personal site and our brokerage site/blog are for. RealEstateZebra.com is meant to attract professionals. In fact, it is designed to attract a specific type of professional. A professional completely dedicated to improving the practice of real estate and delivering to the consumer a level of commitment, service, and expertise that has been heretofore unknown. This purpose was set forth early in the birth of the current RealEstateZebra.com through the “Zebra Manifesto” that I made available on the site.

You’ve been avidly engaged in both video and audio blogging. For RE agents who are considering multi-media, what’s your advice concerning the pros and con’s of video, audio, and the written word.

Each of these forms of content creation poses incredible challenges. The best advice that I can give is to pick what works for you. I am the type of person that likes all of this stuff. As an English Major in college, I was trained and conditioned to write. Writing comes naturally to me. That isn’t true for everyone.

The video and audio is something that I thought might be interesting, so I have given it a try. While I love doing that type of content creation, and I think that it has tremendous power and potential, I also know that it isn’t for everyone, either. Each person has strengths and weaknesses. Play to your strengths. If you love to write, WRITE. If you are good at taking photos, incorporate that into your content. If you are handy with a video camera, maybe vlogging is right up your alley. Think that you stink at all of them? Not true. You probably just haven’t tried. No matter what you do, realize that it takes effort and continued practice to make it work. It might be easy at first, but at some point, it is going to get difficult. How you respond when content creation gets difficult will determine your success. Above all, trust yourself and be genuine. Regardless of what you do, make sure that it conveys your true voice. In the the internet age, their can be no disconnect between the voice and personality that you convey online and reality. People are too smart for the bait-and-switch.

Recently, you changed your blog to more of what I’d call a magazine layout. By this, I mean your home page isn’t a reverse chronological list of blog posts. Why the change?

In my experience, the people that have never been exposed to blogs sometimes have a hard time interpreting the sites. To those of us who read blogs, it seems second nature. I wanted a site that would allow for both. The front page has a more traditional website look and feel to it, but the blog itself is still prominent and available to people. It also allowed me a format to highlight some of the content that I would like to emphasize to people. Sidebars can get cluttered, and info can get lost, so this provides a good alternative. Plus, the theme is Revolution, designed by Brian Gardner. His work is great, and the theme is still pretty easy to use and customize.

What are some of your favorite blogs?

If we are talking Real Estate blogs, there are a lot of them. Just check out my blog roll. As of writing this, I have been without RSS for about 21 days (self-imposed embargo). During that time, I have found that the blogs I seek out the most are AgentGenius, VARBuzz, RealCentralVA, BloodhoundBlog, and anyone who is on Twitter. Does Twitter count? As far as non-RE blogs go, I always check out Chris Brogan, CoppyBlogger, and TechCrunch. That covers the social media geek, the writing geek, and the gadget geek in me.

What advice do you have for agents who are just starting a new blog?

The best advice I can give is to stick with it. A good blog is not created over night. It will take a while for you to find your content-creation stride. Whether you are doing writing, video, pictures, or a mix, just stick with it. The other thing I tell people is don’t worry about it sucking in the beginning. Everyone thinks that their blog sucks in the beginning. I know mine did. The good news is this: no one will find your blog if it sucks. People only start following and reading when it gets good.

Sacrificing dead goats to improve blog SEO

Who knew? Sacrifice dead goats for your blog. I always heard the best way to get a PR6 was to accidentally step on horse dung while blogging. Haven’t figured out how to do it yet.