Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Blogs are one of the key resources used by Internet Marketers to sustain their campaigns, but they often are just a container for sales pitches or pages that are uniquely aimed at capturing leads. Real bloggers on the other end have substantial valuable content which attracts lots of traffic, but they don’t monetize this traffic property.

Many of top bloggers rated on Technorati rarely make more than $ 15K per year, which is well below the survival threshold of any business. Probably only the top 1% make a really sizable income out of their blogging activity and it is often income that doesn’t come directly from the blog per se but from consultancy and other engagements, or simply from selling products that they have developed themselves in addition to the blog (44% of the bloggers do so according to a poll done by Problogger.net).

This is the scenario that I have come to know today while listening to a very informative video by David Risley one of the top bloggers on the market and one of the few that is actually making serious money by blogging full time. So what can we learn from this? Is bad blogging more remunerative than good blogging?

Apparently yes, to a certain degree and in the early stages. Blogging is the evolution of the printed media and TV (as far as video blogging is concerned) and if you think at what happens in traditional media, you can easily find many gossip magazines that make a good amount of money and many TV commercials that have nothing but sales pitches and that are quite successful. They are more succesful than poor quality printed or TV media, but they can’t compete with a good quality magazine or TV show that has unique content.

Naturally you can’t be the best in your filed just overnight and it is therefore a matter of bringing the ingredients together. In traditional publishing, the writing side (the journalists and editors) are pretty much separate from the commercial side (advertising salesmen and marketing people), therefore who writes content usually doesn’t have to worry about bringing home money; he has to focus only in gaining in new readers and keeping them. Only at the publisher lever these two elements come together and there you have the entrepreneur and his managers that need to make sure that contents and sales go together.

When you become a blogger, you are your own publisher, your own editor and your own salesman. If you come from a journalistic background like me, it will be more difficult to actually merge these elements together, in fact you will have the tendency to focus only on content. You will feel that your job is done once you have created your article and your video and you have published it, but this is when your real work actually begins. You cannot survive unless you also take care of the marketing side of it; and you don’t need to “sell your soul” in order to do it.

There are many ways to “monetize” your blog. You don’t have make money directly from your blog, with advertising for example, but you must have a plan on how your blog will be contributing to your business. Maybe it is only for branding, maybe it is collecting leads for your main business, maybe it is generating traffic that you can then redirect somewhere else. Yet you must know where you want to go and you should be aware that blogging is an art by itself and if you have an hard time monetizing your work, you are definitely not alone.

But there is lot of potential growth and space ahead and your blog is going to be your main asset on the Web and in social media. So if you decide to have one, stick with it and look at the following possible avenues of monetization:

Consultancy (in any field).

Coaching and mentoring.

Speaking and training engagements.

Selling of e-books and reports.

Selling a membership site.

Selling an actual product.

Showing paid advertising.

Redirecting traffic to other sites (affiliate marketing).

Customer service (keeping your customers informed and confident about your activities).

And there could be more. Pick any of these topics and see if they fit in what you are doing and then examine your public and see what they would like or need most.

Roberto Mazzoni