Content is King and Worth Fighting For

Blog content written by real estate professionals is so desirable, that companies are fighting for it.  They can make money from it.

I am watching the blog posts and commentary on the Active Rain Vs. Move.com.  I read with fascination as Techcruch talks about Realtors suing Realtors. They don’t seem to understand that several entities are fighting to be thee destination for home buyers and home sellers and they are trying to accomplish this, at least in part, with free content generated by Realtors. They are not themselves Realtors, just companies trying to make a buck or two off of the real estate industry.  Techcrunch was dead on with their comments about how screwed up our industry is.

Of all  the posts I read,  I think I enjoyed Jonathan Dalton’s the most “Some day my princess will come“, because he seems to get that the fight is over content and who gets it, from real estate professionals for free so they can make money off of it.  I also enjoyed the sock puppets “Still thinking about the Active Rain Thing”.

Real estate is local, do we need national web sites to promote local real estate? Or is the idea a carry over from the pre-web 2.0 era ?  One stop shopping would be great if folks were looking for property in several states.  The power of the blog is the individual voice.   Problogger says, that the best way to build page rank, is to build a better blog. I recently read a great post on the Performancing, blog about how good bloggers have an advantage in SEO. The post talks about writing content that people want to read and achieving page rank through non-real estate related social networks like Digg, Myspace, Facebook and stumble.

I rarely contribute to the “localism” section on Active Rain that is supposed to bring me business becasue I write the same type of content every day for my own blog. Why would I compete with my own blog, and brand by providing local content for Active Rain?  The goal is to have consumers visit my blog first.  Google is on my side on this one.  My St. Paul Real Estate Blog comes up number one in several searches for information about St. Paul real estate, and Active Rain can not be found.  How can that be?  I am just one person? Doesn’t it take a huge powerful network to propel a blogger to number 1?  My friend Alex Stenback of  Behind The Mortgage, does just fine with out Active Rain, joining a large network would have little impact on his successful blog.

Some beleive that without Active Rain they can not be successful.  Active Rain may help them but I have seen their blogs and know that Active Rain needs them worse than they need Active Rain.  We as individuals are the people that consumers work with and as individuals we have a tremendous amount of power on the internet, perhaps more than thousands of voices all talking at the same time.

Active Rain does a fantastic job and they have a great idea. They grew to 50,000 members in less than 18 months, a most impressive accomplishment and I hope they make a ton of money when they do sell it.  They have earned it through innovation and hard work.  I do enjoy my blog on active rain,  I get to meet others in my profession and share ideas. There are several companies, and friends of mine too, who sell products and services to real estate agents.  They love Active Rain and have gotten new clients because of it. I also take advantage of the networking opportunities, but I don’t see my Active Rain blog as a viable option for a business blog.

Content really is king, hence the struggle between companies and web sites to get it. If we all hung onto our own content and built our own blogs what would Active Rain, or Move.com do?   If no one answered questions on Trulia voices, what would become of it?  Maybe consumers would come directly to us and skip the middle man. Who needs who?  More importantly what does the consumer want to read?  Are they in love with the huge commercial sites plastered with the pictures of real estate agents?  Is real estate the center of their social world?  Do they want to chat online with total strangers, who don’t even use their real names on line,  about houses?

(Notice that I gave myself a gold star for this post?  I can because it is my blog)