What is a Blog? A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world. Your blog is whatever you want it to be. There are millions of them, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules. In simple terms, a blog is a web site, where you write stuff on an ongoing basis.

Blogging helps to recreate some of that small-town sense of community, by letting your clients and prospects in on your personality and human nature of the people who make up your company. Blogs let Realtors become people. I don't want to work with a national brand; I want to work with Jan Smith, my local agent.

People don't want to be talked at, which is often the way marketing messages come across - they want to be talked with. Blogs allow this to happen.

Blogging provides an additional way to touch prospective and existing customers on a regular basis. It gives your clients a reason to return to your website, informs them on the latest tools at your disposal, and gives them the knowledge they desire to become an informed consumer.

Corporations have figured out that tapping into the blogosphere is a great way to build relationships with customers. As the blog world has doubled in size every five months, companies are finding they can use its power to build communities around their brands.

Blogs enable you to establish your brand as the trusted source for local real estate. In addition, blogs let you "tell the story" of your brand over and over again, allowing your customers to become both familiar and comfortable with it, something static websites can't do. Manifesting your brand with a blog allows for personalization, which is something that static websites can't do.

Not only will consumers talk to you via your blog, they also will talk to one another. Your readers can become your best brand-building evangelists, helping you to spread your message and your presence throughout their networks.

Blogs are word of mouth-supercharged. The best marketing that ever was, is, or ever will be is word of mouth. There is no dollar value you can assign to having someone else talk positively about you, and your services.

Blogging provides yet another tool to help real estate agents maintain an open dialogue with their clients and provide them with valuable information by posting local current events.

What makes you or your brokerage different from your competitor down the street? How can you make a prospective customer understand that you have something better to offer? How can you sell the prospect on the benefits of choosing you over the competition? One way is to use a blog. Blogs enable you to "tell the story" of your business over and over and over again.

Your knowledge of your area or of the industry, your years of experience, your personality - these are what differentiate you. Blogs enable you to manifest these attributes and communicate them to your target market.

Maintaining a blog can transform an ordinary, everyday person into a local, national, or even international expert in their field.

Agents and brokers have specific knowledge about the community that can be used to demonstrate their value and expertise. Most people are not going to trust a home sale or purchase to data from a website. Realtors need to worry less about technology solutions and focus more on having a presence that proves their worth and their value.

Blogs give brokers and agents a platform for articulating their viewpoints, knowledge, expertise, and experience with clients and prospects. This expertise can be with local neighborhoods, industry trends, home values, or other information of interest. Because they are updated routinely, blogs give Realtors an opportunity to be very current regarding their activities and to tell their own stories over and over again.

The truth is that without a blog component, many company websites are impersonal and uninviting to prospective customers and clients. Most often there is simply no effective connection made between the company and the potential customer. In addition, most websites are static (unchanging) or updated infrequently. They give readers little reason to visit again and again.

Blogs also include the comment feature that allows interaction between you and readers. Better than this, any time a comment is posted to the blog, most blog platforms will also send it to you via e-mail. Then, simply by hitting Reply button, you will be conversing directly with the commenter. A blog delivering fresh new content on a regular basis results in "stickness" - the action of visitors coming back to the blog again and again. Just like any knowledgeable salesperson, as a Realtor, you know that it's easier and cheaper to keep a customer than it is to find a new one.