The Secret to Blog Success: YEO, You Engaging Others
By NikNik · July 23, 2008
Yes, the title gives it away! The secret to your blog success is YEO. YEO, a now popular term used by bloggers (coined by Jeff Turner) to describe the process of building your network and facilitating blog success via YOU ENGAGING OTHERS. I’m not even going to mention the other term that makes us sweat, and also has an “e” and “o” in it. That aside, what have you done lately to reach outside your real estate blog? Have you employed tools or strategies to keep your readers enticed to come back for more great information? What about making your blog more than just a resource but a REAL community of readers who interact with each other via offline, as well as online?
Finding ways to connect offline can be more of a challenge with a larger audience, say nationwide. However, with a smaller niche blog connecting in person is great way to get involved and build relationships in the community you work in. And, of course it’s much easier. Check out Jeff’s Rules of Engagement.
One way to throw yourself into the community mix is by joining the conversations that are happening at your local Starbuck’s, grocery store, hair salon, restaurant, etc. Listen and gather information. And casually let people know that you are doing something great! You’re a real estate professional looking to support and connect the community via your blog. Be sure to have business cards with your blog address on hand or obtain their emails and send them a link. And let interested business leaders know that you’d like to interview them or involve them in some way on your blog.
Schools offer a great avenue for discussion and community connecting. Education conversation will be happening in most households forever. If you live near or have a student in the school that makes it even easier to get more involved. But you don’t have to have students to participate. There are plenty of ways to reach out to your community using school information and local insight. And schools make for a great topic both off and online. Parents who turn to the Internet to find school scores and profiles are probably looking for homes online as well. So why not combine the 2, and throw in some helpful hyperlocal content that your market cares about!
If you are looking to utilize school data, reports, scores, and the people behind it all to create community in and outside of your blog, here are a few tips to get you started.
Building Your Offline Community:
- Interview the school principal and find out their current “need”. Could be anything from needing more computers, musical instruments, or even hiring additional yard duty.
- Interview teachers and get grade level homework tips.
- Interview parents on school success stories or upcoming events/fundraisers.
- Create your own Education Committee or Foundation (EX: Realtors Getting Real About Schools)
- Volunteer for school food drives and walk-a-thons (take donations or help publicize).
- Start a School Garden Project (get help and donations from local businesses).
- Volunteer as a crossing guard and share safety tips both on and offline.
- Create and distribute a print marketing piece with a snippet of school tips and scores…allude to more on your blog.
Supporting Your Online Community:
- Write about the school budget, spending per student, and current needs.
- Write about teachers making a difference one student at a time.
- Write about parents and their educational concerns and expectations.
- Integrate school scores and reporting with your blog. GreatSchools offers a framable version for $250 a year. Use it for your blog, as well as post it next to property listings to provide an overview of the community. So, the fee covers multiple uses.
- Add an Educational Widget to your blog. Both GreatSchools and Education.com will be releasing widgets in the near future. Users will be able to search for schools, scores, stats and more.
- Add podcast advice to your blog on how to read and interpret school scores, as well as other school facts and resources.
- Write posts on school events (ex: School Walk-a-thon, Book Fair, Plays, etc.).
- Offer a free e-book for “Understanding School Scores and Your Child’s Achievement” via email sign-up.
Schools or not…involve yourself with a section of the community. Utilize your blog as your relationship builder and start getting to know the neighbors. YOUR RESULT: (1) further your expert status, (2 ) gain trust by supporting shared interests, and (3) expand your network of friends, colleagues, readers, members, and when the time is right…new clients.
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Tags: connecting education, conversations, business leaders, external factors, internal factors, insight
Nicole, this is great stuff. Obviously, Jeff Turner and all of you at MyTechOpinion know a thing or two about really reaching an audience. You did an great job in presenting this at Inman. This strategy can be used on many different levels and with a million different topics. Applied effectively, it can give a blog some serious legs to stand on.
Nicole - this is fantastic! Thank you.
GreatSchools can offer a school search widget currently at your local level for a real estate agents and we would be happy to talk in depth about the needs for local real estate agents individually.
As you mentioned, this search tool does offer school information, test scores, parent reviews, articles and a helpful parent community where a user can collaborate on helpful tips and advice.
Please feel free to visit http://www.greatschools.net for over 128,000 schools nationwide include public, private and charter.
Hope you enjoy Inman!
Marisa
Nik,
You’re absolutely right — adding school information to a real estate blog is an incredibly effective way to expand the “net” that you’re throwing out there to catch readers (to use a fishing analogy.) Education and real estate are joined at the hip, since people often choose the neighborhood they will settle in based on the school district it resides in.
The more you know about a particular school, the more effective the blog will be (hint: it REALLY helps if your kids are attending those schools!) But even if they’re not, teachers and administrators love the opportunity to get their needs and issues aired on a public forum. So go talk to them!
Best of all, you are perceived by potential homebuyers as a neighborhood expert, not just in real estate but in things that matter even more to them.
Chuck
[...] This concept and phrase was coined by one of the speakers today Jeff Turner, however I would recommend you reading the wisdom of another of today’s great speakers Nicole Nicolay who has written a great post - The secret to blog sucess: YEO, You engaging others [...]
Nick- Exactly! It’s all about choosing a section of the community for authentic engagement. I’m passionate about education….what’s YOUR passion?
Chuck- It does make it a whole lot easier if you have kids in the school community you are trying to connect with. If not, finding ways to connect offsite….like at parks, the grocery store, etc. Also, calling the school and asking to interview the principal or a teacher is a good route. Or asking when their next fundraiser is and getting the details to publicize on your blog. So many eays to interact….do whatever works for you and fits with your community.
Marisa- Great! Please keep me posted….and perhaps we could talk about a few more ideas I think both parents and real estate professionals could benefit from.
BTW- You have the right idea Chuck! http://whiteoaksblog.com/?p=795
Nicole- I didn’t get to meet you formally at re barcamp or bloggers connect, but I read MTO fairly often. I’ll be adding a link to this post in my tips for our agents who blog.. it’ll be in good company with a few other links to you all, thank you!
i loved that the panel “Taking your blog to the next level” went straight to the depth of it- passion, service to others, face to face relationships. Harder to quantify, but obvious when someone has done it.
Thanks again.
Hey Nicole, I enjoyed your panel at Inman!
I agree that agent blogs need to engage real live people in conversations about local real estate. And I’m talking about internet strangers who disagree with you, challenge you, and make you think.
In the past 30 days, our blog has received 375 comments on 18 posts primarily from strangers on the internet. (And yes, this is normal for us.) Often they are contentious, and yes, sometimes they fight, but they also provide valuable insight and truly engage in meaningful conversation about the local real estate market. We actually learn a lot from them, and I believe the exchange makes us all smarter.
So we aren’t just a blog, but a real community centered around the topic of local real estate. And this generates plenty of business for the team.
Great post Nicole! This is why this site rocks, and why you, Reggie, and Chad rock! The key to get local traffic is to have local content. The more specialized and localized your content is, the more valuable the traffic is.
Keep up the great work.
Stacey- Sorry I missed meeting you personally. And thanks for the the link love. Let me know if there is any topic in particular that would help your community.
Diane- That’s an amazing amount of comments….looks like you know a thing or 2 about cultivating community on your blog! U rock! (And Trudy too!)
Doug- You have a great community to work with so I’ll enjoy seeing more local posts from you! As for the school content, if you want to frame school scores and reports within your blog I would contact GreatSchools.net. They offer tthis kind of integration for $250 a year. However, you may want to wait until both GreatSchools and Education.com release their educational widgets. Just so you have all the options to choose from. Should be in the next few weeks…but I will keep you posted!
Hey Nik,
Along the same vein of keeping blog readers engaged and coming back for more, I found a great plug-in for the WordPress users out there. The Subscribe to Comments plug-in, like the name implies, is a very simple plug-in that allows anyone who comments on a particular post to get an email when someone else posts a comment to the same thread.
I believe the AgentGenius site uses the same (or similar) plug-in. It’s a simple check-box at the end of the comment area. What’s nice about it is that you’re only subscribing to the comments on that particular post, NOT all of the comments on the blog site (email overload!)
Why is this so cool? People who take the time to write a comment almost always want to know what someone said about their comment — it’s social engagement at the most basic level. So, in a roundabout way this little plug-in actually encourages people to voice their opinion… And that’s yet another way to “engage others,” is it not?
Here’s the site for the plug-in http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/
Keep up the great work!
CG
Thanks Chuck! We have been wary of these plugins in the past. Only because their updating has been neglected. Reggie contacted both creators of the 2 known plugins that we’ve run across in hopes new versions are in the works. “Subscribe to Comments” is currently supported through Wordpress 2.3.1,…but we are not sure about latest version 2.6.
Following comment threads is, in fact, a fantastic way to keep the interaction and dicussion flowing. You rock for making us take a 2nd look at this feature!
Great post Nik! Another option, for those of us without kids that may not know the goings on at the school system would be posting about the job market. Comment on layoffs, hirings, how the unemployment rate may affect local interest rates, maybe a local job postings widget?
Thanks for the reminder that we always need to get our readers involved.
Nice add Rich! I nosed around at Monster and didn’t see much in the way of widgets. But I did find this one on good old Widgetbox:
http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/helping-friends-hot-jobs-board-rss-feed