The seven stages of real estate weeniedumb

By: Todd Carpenter

Stage one: Contribute to your own, independent blog. Stage one, being more like stage zero. The is real estate steak compared to real estate weeniedumb. If you want to waste time, money, and effort on the Internet, you’re going to have to move beyond stage one.

Stage two: Contribute to someone else’s blog. If your name is Chris, Paul, Mike, or Gina… move along. No need for you to read this stage.  🙂 I’m a proud stage-two weenie myself, blogging for the Inman News Blog, and occasional here at the Weenie. Do I get as much out of it as I put into it? Probably not. But at least two people bought me a beer when I told them I blogged for Inman at the Blogger’s Connect parties this summer. So that’s something. Blogging for others can be good, just make sure it’s driving your own personal brand as well.

Stage three – Blog for Active Rain, and only Active Rain. Eventually, you want to drive your own customers to your blog. Do you really want to send them to a site with 50,000 other real estate agents?

Stage four – Blog for The Man. Who dominates in Google for real estate queries? Move.com. Who charges you to be a member of this merry club? Move.com. Who want’s to let you blog for "free", thus boosting their own search engine relevance of their network of real estate domain names? Yep. Move.com. I don’t know, it seems to me that bloggers who blog for The Man are helping Move to justify higher and higher membership/advertising rates. What does Move give you that WordPress.com does not? Stage-four weeniedumb is starting to not make sense to me.

Stage five: Blogging for Google Love. First off, have you seen the two guys who created Google? I don’t care how much money they have. The term "Google Love" grosses me out. Anyway, blogging for Google love is when you go type a bunch of words and stuff on a well ranked site like Active Rain for the sole purpose of creating some Google Juice (oh, wait, that sounds even worse) back to your blog. It’s one thing if you are using a site like Active Rain to advocate a cause among your peers. It’s one thing if you are writing good content for Localism. But if you are simply phoning it in, you are a stage-five weenie, and I’m officially starting to not like you.

Stage six – Leaving weak comments, or spam comments. "Great post man" is pure garbage. I know it, you know it, even Daisy knows it. At least try to add to the conversation. "Visit my site for more articles like yours" is pathetic. You’re one step away from a spammer. All you are going to do is irk the blogger who’s giving you the opportunity to comment in the first place. "Great investment opportunity in Costa Rica, costa rica real estate, real estate beach, costa rica condos. Visit us for more information at www.jaco-bay.com" is full fledged stage six weeniedumb. Leaving spam like that is liable to get you a serious case of Google Hate.

Stage seven – RIS Media ought to be ashamed of themselves for even putting this out there. If you are really willing to pay $2000 a month to commit stage two, three, four and five weeniedumb, then let me tell you about a well ranked mortgage industry blog with just as much Google love as RIS could ever give you. I also have a bridge in Brooklyn and some land in Florida that you might be interested in.

Thank You!

Todd Carpenter
mariah.com | bizomi.com | rembex.com | lenderama.com

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