Don’t be a secret agent
July 10, 2008 by Steve Belt
Filed under Blogging Tips
I use Google alerts to alert me to things that might possibly be related to Phoenix Real Estate. Often, the alert will clue me into any new blog post by nearly everyone in the Phoenix RE.NET, whether I’m subscribed to their blog or not. Today, a Phoenix area blogger wrote about purchasing foreclosure properties. I hadn’t seen this blog before, so I clicked on through from the alert to check it out. Once there, I was flabbergasted that this blogger had a Wordpress powered blog, had been blogging since January 2008, and I had yet to StumbleUpon him in one way or another.
For the rest of this article, I’ll call this previously undiscovered blogger our Hero. I don’t mean to embarrass anyone, and if you have a blog that this feels eerily similar to, hopefully I can provide a few tips that will help you get discovered.
I looked at our Hero’s Archives more closely, and in early January he had a post with his 2008 New Year’s Resolutions. Sitting at #6 was “Don’t be a secret agent”. You probably know that this means if no one knows you’re in the business as a real estate agent, then you are in fact, a secret agent. We must market ourselves and our properties to the public, if we are to have any hope of being successful. The same is true of our blog.
Now, just because I hadn’t heard about our Hero’s blog, didn’t mean he was a secret agent. It could simply mean I’m ignorant to someone that the rest of the world knows about. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I looked for comments left by other people. Since January, our Hero has 37 posts, with a total of 3 comments. One was by our Hero, leaving 2 comments from the outside world. There were NO trackback links. Personally, I don’t know if I would have been able to stick with blogging as long as our Hero, if that was all the feedback I had received in 6 months. If nothing else, our Hero has demonstrated some very good stick-with-it-ness.
In my opinion, if you want to be a successful blogger, and not a secret agent blogger, you must do 3 things, and do them fairly well. You must write a quality blog yourself. You must comment on other blogs. And you must link to other blogs. If you don’t do all 3, you will probably end up being a secret agent blogger.
Scanning through our Hero’s blog, I found only a couple of posts that ever linked away from his site, and they were to AZCentral.com articles. It’s not a bad idea to link to AZCentral, but it’s not going to get you noticed by anyone there. And although I’m not going to profess to be an authority on every commenter in the blogosphere, I don’t recall ever seeing our Hero comment on anyone else’s blog.
I’m not going to critique the content of our Hero’s blog, but it’s certainly seems good enough. What our Hero needs to start doing, is to let the world know that he’s there. To do so, he needs link out. Link, link, and link again. My 2nd post on my blog I made the best accidental act of goodness I possibly could have, and linked to Jay Thompson’s blog (among others). Jay immediately stopped by and commented. He’s very friendly like that. I didn’t know at the time just how powerful linking out was, but the positive experience encouraged me to do it more. If you are starting a new blog, you probably cannot link out too often.
And then of course, you need to comment. Not everyone uses Wordpress, and thus not everyone is alerted to being linked to, like a Wordpress blogger will be. Leaving a comment is a sure fire way to let someone else know that you are there, and that you read what they are writing. Almost assuredly, if you leave a comment on someone’s blog, they are going to track you down to see who you are. A good percentage of the time, they are going to subscribe or bookmark your blog, and eventually they’ll comment back and/or link back. At least, they might. It’s a numbers game, like all prospecting, but if you are persistant, even mildly so, you’ll find the results will indeed follow. Just be sure to comment on topic, and respectfully, as Jay suggested in his session at June’s Blogging Meet-up. You will be rewarded for your effort.
Tweet This Post!
Comments
Add New Comment
Viewing 6 Comments
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Add New Comment