With the decimated housing market fueling the Great Recession, savvy realtors have realized they needed to “up their game” with their online marketing in order to keep food on the table for their families. Where did they turn? Why, blogging of course, among other things.

I had an opportunity recently to sit down with one such forward-thinking realtor-blogger, Jamie Miller. She’s actually a former employee of my former company Netconcepts, and she’s the agent for this beautiful property in Madison Wisconsin (yes, it’s my home). I asked her to share some pointers for realtors who want to get into blogging. Here are Jamie’s tips:

• Use your blog’s name to target geographic locations. I named my blog Madison Wisconsin Living.
• Also consider optimizing your blog around condo communities, like Miami Condo Lifestyle does, to target Google searchers. Individual posts can be condos for sale within their respective communities.
• Post all your property listings to your blog, and have a separate property listings category. This provides an excellent source of regular content for readers and the search engines.
• Don’t remove properties once they’ve sold. Simply update the listings with the word “Sold” — it’s a great way to communicate to prospective clients how many properties you’ve sold.
• Develop an authoritative voice in your local market for all things home sales. For instance, The Boston Real Estate Blog publishes local real estate news and stats.
• Leverage your blogging content into Social Media sites, such as your Facebook pages or Twitter profiles. It takes time to source and author content for blogging, this content should be shared across additional marketing channels in order to get the most bang for the buck and maintain message consistency.
• Don’t forget to also incorporate typical Real Estate Website features and functionality into your blog, such as Featured properties to highlight the agents own properties for sale, a Property Search that pulls from a MLS (multiple listing service), and informational pages on buying and selling homes. For example, My Westside LA has great posting categories that feature content targeted to buyers and sellers.
• If you’re a blogging newbie, it’s really easy to get started. Simply purchase a domain or use an existing domain you own (don’t just use a subdomain of wordpress.com or blogspot.com), purchase a hosting package (Ed. note: Bluehost is the one I use), and perform the famous “5 minute WordPress install” (actually it’s more like 5 seconds!)
• There are some great, cost-effective real estate-specific themes for WordPress you can choose from, including RealEstateThemes.com, Agent Press, and Villa Grande. Or, just Google for “wordpress real estate themes“.
• Install the following WordPress plugins: SEO Title Tag, Breadcrumb navigation, Google Analytics, and WPtouch iPhone Theme.
• Before you start writing, first outline your content plan for the blog. The plan can include things like new listings, local real estate news, tips on home selling, etc.

Henry Copeland of Blogads has a pretty compelling contrarian review of the recent Business Week article Blogs Will Change Your Business.  In short, BW is "often jumps on the bandwagon just as it goes off the cliff", or so says Henry.  I tend to agree, and do have some issues with the short shrift techno babble cursory manner in which they dealt with blogs.  They usually do this on any number of topics, so no real surprises here.

At the end of the day, I guess I’m thankful that they’re raising the level of blog awareness among the BW audience.  (mid to upper level managers in almost every company in the US)  On the other hand, I’m already being asked by my corporate friends about some of the facts, figures and examples that were handily glossed over in their cutesy blog-like format of the article.  More work on my part, but at least were having the conversation on blogs.

So, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been posting to this blog a lot less lately. Regular readers may know that I took a full-time job six months ago (at DoubleClick) and a few months after that, I ended up taking over my department (Director of Research), as a result of which, I am very busy these days.

Sadly, evangelizing the marketing value of blogs is not tightly aligned with my job or DoubleClick’s business interests, so this site has been a labor of love. More to the point, however, I think the mission of the blog has to a certain extent been accomplished. When I began it, I felt there was a need for a voice on the web articulating this business value and highlighting the many new business blogs as examples for others to follow. In the just over a year since I started the blog, however, stories like the recent one in BusinessWeek have been making the case very well in the mainstream media, and there are many other blogs talking about the same issues, including those I link to on the left of this page under "From Whom We Steal." The best of those, IMHO, is Steve Rubel’s MicropPersuasion, in whose shadow I think this blog has been living for some time.

Therefore, with mixed feelings I am going to make formal what has been de facto the case for a few months: I don’t plan to update this blog very often going foward. Perhaps I’ll find something on-topic to say from time to time, and I welcome the other contributors to this site to feel free to remain as active as they want (which past performance suggests not especially active).

Meanwhile, if you need a fix of Bruner postings, I do still post a few times a month about general Internet marketing topics at ExecutiveSummary.com and more often about general nonsense at my personal site, Bruner Blog. I also do have plans to launch some new topical resources in the coming months, so stay tuned. Until then, thanks for your attention and I wish you all productive business blogging!

In case you haven’t seen it yet, BusinessWeek came out with a great story last week aptly titled Blogs Will Change Your Business. Here’s a taste:

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours.

I also refers to Steve Rubel as "an all-knowing Thumper in a forest of clueless Bambis," which is probably one of the weirder things they guy has ever been called. Anyway, required reading for followers of this trend.

BusinessWeek: Blogs Will Change Your Business

Man, I am a bad blogger. I spent much of the evening last night spamming marketing bloggers about a new report I’ve just finished writing. What was striking is how much more frequently they all blog than I do.

Ah well. Here’s what I’ve been busy with lately, anyway: The Decade in Online Advertising (PDF | landing page), a wide-ranging retrospective of the development of the web marketing industry. Needless to say there is a section on blogs. It’s free to download.

For a sample chart (my favorite), click here.