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I hope this 8th part of our series on how to start a local real estate blog finds you being inundated with new customers from your blog. If not, don’t worry. If you have been following along in this series, your blog in only about 1 month old.

Our example blog: The Rock is doing fairly well. I’ve been trying to network with some of the other bloggers in my area as best I can. I had breakfast with Larry Russell from the Parker Real Estate Agent blog a few weeks ago. And I have been thinking seriously about organizing a meetup with the guys from Sellsius real estate when they come to Denver in July for Blog Tour USA.

Other than that, I have just been trying to be as consistent as possible with my posts. I’m currently working on a large list of community events that will be happening this summer in Castle Rock and the surrounding areas. I’m also planning to take some time to photographing some of the local communities, along with some of the new developments around town.

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Ok. In this part of the series, I want to discuss some of the many tools that bloggers have available to them. It seems that every time I turn around there is a new tool out there for bloggers. But I will do my best to catalog all of the most popular, and give you live examples of bloggers that are using the tool.

>> General Blog Tools

These are tools that just about every blogger should have, and any good blogging platform will provide:

• Tagging: Tagging your posts can have multiple uses. Primarily, it is for identifying with keywords what your post is about. You can go with the tag cloud which may be out of style, but can still be useful. Or you could try something similar to this. The Rain City Guide actually replaces their categories with a tagging system. The most common tagging technique uses keywords for Technorati. This works well because you are actually pinging Technorati, and telling them what your post is about; you can see an example on Teresa’s blog . I’ve also seen it done for del.icio.us the way Seth does it. Here are some tools from wordpress that might help.

• Categories: Categories are vital on any blog. Breaking down your information into manageable sections will help users find the information they are looking for. As I mentioned above, some people are now replacing their categories with tags. But in my opinion, the categories are still very useful on a human level for finding information. Here is an example of a very well thought out category section where they actually transformed the useless archives into helpful categories.

• Search Tool: Uhhh… yeah, this is a no brainer. Allow people to search your entire blog.

>> Important Add ons:

• Email Subscriptions: You’ve gotta have this. It’s easy to add, and it will improve your readership dramatically. I like using Feedburner’s email delivery service because it counts each email subscriber towards my overall subscription numbers. Actually most of my readers subscribe by email. You can also use a tool like Feedblitz.

• Social bookmarking tools: These come in thousands of shapes and sizes. Personally, I usually ignore them because there are so many options, and it just makes my brain hurt to think about it. As you can see on our blog, we’ve chosen to go simple with Alex King’s “Share This” Plugin. It works really well, and doesn’t clutter up your posts with annoying bookmark icons. If you really want to use some kind of bookmarking tool, my advice is to only use the ones that are important to you. I love the way Seth does his. He only includes the ones the matter to him: Stumble, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati.

• I wanted to take a second to catalog the plugins that we use on our blog. Audio Player for podcasts, Bunny’s Technorati Tags for… tagging stuff, Dofollow which removes all nofollow tags on the blog, Feedburner Replacement which takes all of our RSS feeds and forwards them to feedburner, Popularity Contest ranks all of the posts by popularity, Posts by author creates a link at the bottom each post with the author’s info, Sphere creates a link at the bottom of each post to related articles. We use alot more, but they aren’t worth mentioning here as they are pretty basic. For thousands more… try these sites for Wordpress and Typepad.

• MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, AutoRoll by Criteo: Are all great tools to have on your blog. Mybloglog and BlogCatalog are pretty similar tools that are used mostly as blog communities. Autoroll lists blogs that have similar content on your own blog and vice versa. It has actually brought quite a bit of traffic since we started it last month… around 500 unique visitors. The reason I like these tools is because they add flavor to any blog. It’s fun with myblog to be able to visually see who has recently visited your site.

>> Optional Tools:

This list includes a few items that I have seen used on other blogs that you might want to consider adding:

• The Good Blogs: This lets you add a tool to your blog that lists articles that are generally related to your content. To me, it seems like a cross between Autoroll and Shere. You can see it in action on the Phoenix real estate guy blog.

• Meebo: This has been a popular one of late. Meebo became famous for their cross platform chat tool, but now they offer a chat that you can incorporate right into your blog. On our blog, we use a tool called provide support. It’s a web based chat tool that is geared towards helping customers. We feature it on all our sites under the hismove.com domain.

• Bumpzee: I really like this tool. It shows my most popular posts, recent visitors, and when I’m logged in, gives me private stats on the traffic to the blog.

• FilmLoop: I haven’t used this tool yet personally, but I really like what I’ve seen. I first saw it used with success on Kristal’s Denver real estate blog

• Wellcomemat: Is a really awesome tool that lets you embed videos directly into your posts similar to YouTube, but it also allows you to create chapters to skip ahead on your video. And it’s built for the real estate industry, so it works well for real estate websites.

• There are a host of other tools you can use… here are just a few: Linkedin, Spicypage, Twitter, Clustr Maps, Technorati Buttons, Flickr, Site Neighbors, Grzr, Skype, Blog Surfer, the list goes on and on…
  

>> Real Estate Related Tools:

There aren’t as many real estate blogging tools out there as I’d like to see, but progress is being made. Two of the tools on the list I only just discovered this past week.

• VFlyer Widget: I really like this new tool from Vflyer. It creates a widget that will scroll through all your listings. You can see an example on the Charlotte Real Estate Voice.

• Trulia Widget: This allows you to create a graph with data about your area, plot your current listings, search Trulia listings, and more.

• Rembex: is a webring and portal for real estate blogs. The Rembex search engine is the first ever search engine for real estate and mortgage websites. Both services have tools that you can add right into your blog.

• Zillow: Has a ton of different tools that can be used for blogs. The one’s I’ve found most helpful are the heat maps, and market information including graphs and charts that plot all kinds of data.

• Property Search Tool: If there was one great service that allowed you to integrate an MLS search into your site, I’d be linking to it here. But, alas, until the MLS becomes one unit, this will never happen. There are alot of services out there that will do this for you. My suggestions: don’t make people register, let them search easily without jumping through hoops, make sure there is a way for people to contact you on every results page.

That just about does it. I know I left out a ton of tools, so if you have one that you use regularly, feel free to share.

Thanks for reading, and happy blogging!

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Resources:

• RSS Feed to subscribe to this series

• Subscribe by email to this series

• Get Full Coverage on our Blog

• View the Blog we use as an example in this series

**If you are following along, and and have started your own blog, I’d love to hear about it! I will even add it to my blogroll so that I can follow along with your progress.

Thanks for joining me in this series on how to start a local real estate blog. I wlll take you through step by step instructions on how to set everything up from start to finish.

Follow along with me as I give you hands on examples as I start my own local real estate blog from scratch: THE ROCK - Castle Rock Real Estate Blog

If you need help at any time with your new real estate blog, please let me know and I would be happy to assist you.

Sincerely,

Justin Smith

justin(at)hismove.com

Related posts:

• 5 Reasons to Start Blogging Today
• THE Ultimate Guide to TOP ranking in Local Real Estate Searches
• Interesting Search Engine & Blogging Statistics
• THE Ultimate Guide To Blogging (Updated Weekly)
• How to Avoid Suffering From Blogging & Social Media Overload

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