Daisy Unchained part 1

You can tell by the title of this post that I am being bad.  Some days I just can’t help myself. 

Daisy, my dog, the pup on the sidebar has never been chained but she does have a leash and when she is outside she does have to be tied up.  Beagles are smart dogs but they have the tendency to wonder away from home.  They are tracking dogs and will pick up a sent and follow it until they are hopelessly lost.

She is also very friendly and I know that she found a person or a dog person to talk too she would be out of here in a heart beat.

She would make a great blogger becasue she is so friendly and she doesn’t quit once she picks up a sent.  She is like a machine in her relentless pursuit of people, dogs and small furry critters.

Daisy does not have opposable digits so she really can’t have a blog of her own. She can’t handle a camera either. Photos are such an important part of a real estate blog and so is having a kind of conversational tone.  Real estate blogs need to be friendly, yet they also need to have some solid information in them.  People like to look at pictures of property, and see neighborhoods, street scenes, public buildings and sunsets too.  Readers see the pictures and get a sense that they have traveled to a new place.

My real estate blog is "hyper local"  If you look at it you will notice that it really does cover a variety of topics, but the idea is to create a kind of atmosphere where the reader just knows that they are visiting St. Paul, and they are reading a kind of letter from some one who lives, and works in St. Paul.  It is highly focused on what I do for a living . . . but that is becasue it is a business blog. 

There are many different styles of blog that work.  The writer should chose a style that is natural and easy for them so that they can post on a consistent basis.  The consistency is a huge part of what makes a blog work.  It helps to write about something that you have a passion for.  Like historic homes, architecture, golf, fishing, there are a wide range of topics that can be integrated into a real estate blog and bloggers are only limited by their imagination.

I don’t get why people think of blogs as being technical.  A ton of technology goes into producing the local newspaper, yet no one talks about having to be "techie" to publish a newspaper. The amount of technology used to create and maintain a blog is so little that I don’t understand why we talk about it at all.

Blogs are about user generated content.  Users who can generate content can have a blog.  They are also social in nature, not anti-social.  To have a great blog there are only four things needed:
1.  Content
2. The desire to be social, or socialize.
3. Commitment.
4. An imagination.

When it comes to technical the best investment a blogger can make is to learn how to take photos and post them.  The most important skills for any blogger are communication skills.  Without them nothing else really matters.

When looking for educational opportunities think in terms of ideas, broad concepts, marketing, writing, photography and how to develop an online persona that is friendly, welcoming and social. . . . I guess bloggers don’t have to be all that friendly, weird seems to work for me. . . . but in a nice way . . I hope.

This is part 1 of a series, a kind of intro.  If anyone would like to contribute a post they would be most welcome. I could use some more daisy’s too, it will be months before it is warm enough to have flowers to photograph.   Future segments will include topic ideas, how to take pictures with a point and shoot camera and upload them, blog plat forms, mobile blogs, photo blogs, what is a wiki? social networks, property marketing, tools, tricks and widgets.

If you stumbled on this  and are not sure what a blog is, here is an excellent overview: "Blogs in Plain English".