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.

Business Blog Consulting’s founder, Rick Bruner, hasn’t been seen or heard from lately, at least not here. I was beginning to wonder if he still existed. Lo and behold, I found he does. His name is attached to a new report released this month by DoubleClick, where he serves as Director of Research.

The report, titled Influencing the Influencers: How Online Advertising and Media Impact Word of Mouth (PDF), talks about how marketers can make use of word-of-mouth marketing by “influencing the influencers,” those whose buying decisions tend to have greater impact on friends, family, and associates than others.

AdTech is the leading conference for Internet advertising and marketing professionals, with some 3,000+ attendees expected for the next three days in San Francisco. I am one of the co-creators of the AdTechBlog, along with the other folks from MarketingVox and a team of volunteer bloggers. We pioneered it in November at the NY show, and the folks who run AdTech liked it enough they agreed to let us partner with them again.

It’s an interesting partnership whereby they retain “ownership” of the product, at least in as much as the domain name, yet they cede to our team total editorial independence. They make a handful of free passes to the three-day show available to our team (which otherwise sell for $1,500 each), and we agree to write something (as we see it) about many of the show sessions, as well as the after-hours party scene, the buzz at the exhibit hall, etc. Promised to be fun.

Frankly, I think it’s a model that would make sense for a lot of industry conferences.

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BizNetTravel is one of the business blogs I created and do much of the writing for on behalf of a client. The company is a travel agency, and the blog offers links to a mix of travel destination features, travel news for travelers, quirky travel items and more. We also maintain a Special Offers blog page for this client, featuring original travel packages for customers.

The main purpose of the blog is as a service to the agency’s existing customers, but it also does serve to attract lots of new prospective customers to the site.

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Debbie Weil published this article in her WordBiz newsletter as advice for business bloggers. Best of all, the main expert source for the article is…me!

WordBiz: 5 Tips for a ‘Useful Resource’ Blog

Debbie Weil’s WordBiz organized a teleseminar on the topic of Business Blogs a few months ago, in which I partook as one of the “experts.” She’s done a nice job packaging the audio of that seminar with a companion PDF report. Some of the points she promises you’ll learn from the report:

• Why blogging is better (and easier) than updating a regular Web site

• How blogging is different than sending an e-newsletter
• The best technology for publishing – and subscribing – to blogs
• How a blog fits into an overall marketing and communications strategy
• Plus, the tools you need to start your own blog right now!

Price: $59.

WordBiz: Blogging for Business

CEO Henry Copeland launched this do-it-yourself ad network for blogs nearly two years ago, and at that time there was a fair bit of skepticism that the business would ever pan out. Well, it has. The service now has more than 200 blogs using the system, each of which has at least 3,000 ad impressions each week. Some, such as InstaPundit and DailyKos, have millions of readers per month. The service has proven particularly popular with political advertisers — more than two dozen candidates in the presidental and other races have used it to reach political junkies through blogs. But many smaller and medium-sized companies are also find blogs a great way to advertise niche products. Blogs are ideal “for products that have a sensibility, not commodities, those looking to find audiences with a particular mindset,” Copeland said. Some of the biggest bloggers using the system are now earning thousands of dollars a month in advertising.

I have counseled BlogAds about its overall business strategy.

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MarketingVox (formerly named MarketingWonk, Up2Speed and MarketingFix) is a new aggregation blog focused on Internet marketing trends. The site is funded by Andy Bourland, who pays a salary to the site’s full-time editor Tig Tillinghast. The site accepts advertiser and aims to be a commercially viable nano-publishing media property focused on an industry niche.

I am one of this site’s co-founders, and I remain a shareholder, contributor and strategic consultant to the business, although I am no longer involved in its day-to-day operations.

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Nick Denton

Curiously, the blog publishing company Gawker Media does not have its own web site, so we link here to the personal blog of its CEO and founder, Nick Denton, who blogs there mostly about his business, anymore. A former staff reporter for the Financial Times and later founder of headline syndication service Moreover and co-founder of the social networking service First Tuesday, Denton was a pioneer in gambling that blogs could become a viable commercial publishing medium. To date, he has contracted freelance writers to write four successful blogs:

• Gawker – gossip about media personalities and other NYC goings on
• Gizmodo – a digest of new gadgets for tech junkies
• Fleshbot – a tongue-in-cheek (so to speak) review of online pornography
• Wonkette – political trash talk

UPDATE: Since this original post, Gawker Media has released Defamer, an LA gossip blog.

Denton has announced plans for more blogs on various topics including interior design and travel. He says he draws his inspiration for topics for the companys’ blogs according to popularity of search topics on Google.

I have counseled Gawker Media periodically, primarily about advertising revenue strategies.

In March this year, Denton’s strongest rival among commercial blog publishers, Weblogs, Inc‘s Jason Calacanis, poached the original writer of Gizmodo, Pete Rojas, and launched a knock-off site, Engadget. After a month (as of this posting), a review of both sites on Alexa, suggests that Gizmodo has maintained its audience’s loyalty and Engadget has some catching up to do.

In April, Denton also launched Kinja, a kind of blog portal designed to make blog surfing easier for the masses.

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I’m delighted to see MarketingSherpa is reselling this report. I am its co-author and primary analyst, written originally for MarketingWonk, which did not do the greatest job of promoting the report. Leave it to MarketingSherpa, though, to market it right, as they are experts at report sales.

MarketingSherpa’s sales copy includes this:

Business Blogs sidesteps gee whiz hype to focus on practical realities. You’ll learn:

• How 45 companies in a wide array of industries (including both B-to-B and B-to-C) are using Blogs today for marketing, customer relationship building, PR, and corporate communications.

• Specific tactics to get readers for your Blog (with more than one million blogs out there, getting attention is your biggest challenge.) Includes 17-best online resources, and quick tips on syndication.
• How and where to advertise on third party Blogs if you want to take advantage of the Blog phenomenon without building your own. (Note: Response rates are currently more than double the average online ad click rate.)
• Basics on creating a Blog – including writing-style, best updating frequency, recommended technology, and legal advice. (Who owns copyright on comments visitors post to your Blog? Find out.)

The report costs $99 and is worth every penny, if I do say so myself!

MarketingSherpa: Business Blogs: How Successful Companies Get Real Results With Weblogs

My first column today on research topics at iMedia Connection. Not surprisingly, I kick things off with a blog theme. Includes original research about the characteristics of blog readers from Quris.

iMedia: Blogging Is Booming