Bloggers beware

This subject is kind of a hot potato, hence the graphic.  Besides for nutritional reasons I feel the need to have more food groups represented on this bad blog cleverly disguised as a hot dog stand, I am going to start including green vegetables too.

My weenie today is feed aggregation sites, and free blog sites.  The sites that are for groups of real estate professionals.  I recently signed up for a free blog that looked like fun.  As I was setting up my profile I was instructed to put in a link to my blog, if I already had a blog.  Being the good little blogger that I am I followed the instructions.  I love to follow instructions it makes me happy to be compliant once in awhile.

Then I discovered that the entire contents of my blog was being publised on the free blog.  I went back to the site and removed the link.  A few days later I noticed that the site was still publishing my blog content every day.  It was at that point that I discovered I could not remove the link from the site and that I could not delete my profile.  After a few emails and phone calls I was able to talk to the owner of the site.  The site has no online help and there is no contact information on it.

The problem was solved and I was thanked for my content and told how much the sites owners were enjoying my photos and posts, they said they would miss it and that it had helped their site.  I told them that it is published everyday and they can read it on the St. Paul Real estate blog.  My blog did not get any traffic as a result of the feed. Why would anyone go to my blog when they could just read it on another blog?  I checked and found a few other agents who made the same mistake and sent them emails.  They had the same experience as I did, they were unable to remove the link or delete their profile.

Now bear with me, this is an opinion that is not shared by many:

On the internet content is king.  The biggest obstacle to most for starting a blog is the fear that they will not be able to come up with content.  Writing original content every day is difficult for most.  There are some pretty big web sites out there that get all of their content from real estate bloggers, for free of course.   They use the content to sell ads or make money off of it some other way.  None would exist without our content.  They need us, do we need them?  Are they adding value? 

So many are willing to give away their content or to share it because they believe that in doing so they will generate more traffic to their blogs, or get inquiries from readers that might result in business opportunities.    I am here to tell you that it doesn’t always work that way and bloggers should protect their content.  If other sites can make money off of your content so can you, I know I do.  The largest most successful blogs in the real estate industry did not become successful by giving their content to other sites.  They got where they are today by providing excellent content

I have not embraced the idea that my unique local content, for my local business is better if it is on a national blog web site where thousands of agents are spewing out massive quantities of content and  together are achieving a whole new level of mediocrity never before achieved by such a large group of people.

Sounds harsh but I see it happening.  We all have choices about what to do with our content.  I have made mine.  I am keeping my content on my own blog.  People will find my content, because Google knows where it is.

All of the web sites not mentioned in this post are hypothetical.  An amalgam of the zillions of web sites for the real estate industry.  Any resemblance to actual web sites living or dead is purely coincidental.