Blog, Blog, Black Sheep.

Blog, Blog, Black Sheep, Have you any skill?

Today is one of those days. I’ve been busy all day, trying to do what we do best. I have an article due on AgentGenius, my personal blog needs updated, and I haven’t commented back to some things on ActiveRain. I need to get down to business. I sat down this evening, like normal, to write my weekly blog post here and wasn’t feeling it. I didn’t have anything to say (yeah, right…). I’m sure I had things to say, but I just couldn’t really come up with much that excited me, made me want to write, or I thought might be interesting to the rest of you. I was in a funk I guess. Nothing seemed to strike me as “the one” as I rolled through some ideas I’ve been tossing around in my head. I was adrift in a sea of blankness.

When I’ve got nothing, I need inspiration.

I jumped onto the interwebs and started reading. Some Twitter posts, some ActiveRain posts, some bloggers I admire…the usual. Just reading, hoping that something would jog my brain and fire up the neurons to make me a literary genius. Its not easy, but sometimes it works. Instead, I felt frustrated that I just seemed to have nothing to offer today. I read Ginny Cain McMurtrie’s first post, I read Kim Wood’s most recent post, I read Bill Lublin’s latest after he tweeted about it – and there it was. The answer was clear. And depressing. Here I am surrounded by these Geniuses and I’m stuck with nothing to write. I’m supposed to be a Genius too, right? Instead, I felt like the Black Sheep of the family.

Black Sheep or not, I still have wool.

When I started blogging, I felt more like a turtle amidst a flock of sheep. I was really different. I didn’t know what to write or how to write it. I had no idea. I was new to real estate without much “expertise” or “insight.” I was lost, lonely, and felt like everyone was better than me. I thought guys like Bill Lublin would laugh at me for my naive nature and mock me for not knowing what a BPO was. I thought Kim Wood would ask me a question that I wouldn’t know the answer to. Even with Ginny’s appearance today, I felt like she might chuckle if I sent her a question that was deemed “stupid.” In talking with new agents since The Stigliano Chronicles began, I have found many similar sentiments amongst them. We don’t know how the experts got to their lofty position and since writing isn’t always the focus of most people’s lives, its a Brave New World for us new agents. We do what most people do when they feel out of place…we put it off. We say we’ll look into blogging. We say we don’t have time for it. We make excuses. We do everything in order not to put ourselves out there and test the waters.

Come on in the water’s warm.

Instead of having the Geniuses laugh me out of town, they welcomed me. They encouraged me. They taught me. Sure, I’m lucky as can be to have the opportunity to be a colleague of theirs, but it doesn’t matter if you write here, there, or anywhere. Real estate bloggers are an encouraging bunch. They don’t just want to succeed, they want to change the face of real estate. The more the merrier. They know that their competition might be doing what it takes to push them out of the market, but the fact is, a blogger brings their own personal touch to real estate and what works for you, probably won’t work for me. And if we’re that different as bloggers, we’ll attract different people. My readers aren’t necessarily going to think you’re better, because they like my style. They came to me on a whim, but stayed because they connected with me. Don’t be afraid to take that first step, just being here, you already know the power of the real estate blog – now its your turn. Blog. Write. Post. Whatever you call it, you won’t be the Black Sheep of the blog world – trust me.

photo courtesy of pasotraspaso