Trulia went old skool…
No press release. No big announcement. On the DL and using only word-of-mouth marketing, Trulia rolled out “Trulia Blogs” (beta) last week.
Does it remind you of anything?
Trulia Blogs definitely some similarities to Active Rain such as the “headline” feel of the real estate blogs home page. And the posts are all on Trulia’s platform, not a live RSS feed from participating bloggers and their own outside blogs. This may seem very attractive to those who just want to write posts and not worry about setting up their own blog on WordPress, Typepad, etc. But you may want to check out this post and this post (especially the comments) for a discussion relating to some of the pros and cons of this type of blog platform.
I noticed that you can’t tag your blog post with your own tags – they’re preset in a drop down menu labeled “Categories”. Therefore, you can’t search posts by keywords. Nor can you search posts by location (only “Trulia Voices” has that ability). This is a concern for me as a Realtor blogger because it doesn’t allow consumers to find my blog by searching keywords or by location. (It’s still in beta so maybe these things are in the works…?)
SEO and ROI…
As for SEO, I have no idea how it’ll do. Others such as Active Rain have some good SEO due to tags and keywords, which Trulia Blogs doesn’t have. If you’re a Realtor and blogging to get your name out there in front of potential clients, you may not find Tulia Blogs attractive if there’s no SEO.
It seems that the way it’s currently set up, your blog will be visible mainly to those who come across you on Tulia Voices. If they like one of your answers and click on your profile, they may also click on your blog. Other than that, the only way to run across your blog is by looking through a specific category.
Problem with that is that even if a consumer likes your post/blog, they may be buying or selling in Seattle, Washington while you’re in Loudoun County, Virginia. That doesn’t translate into a client nor ROI and even the most passionate Realtor bloggers are in it to make money to pay the bills.
Currently, the blogs are only visible to registered members who are logged in. Wonder if Trulia will open it up for people to read as a teaser to make registering more attractive…
Tip of the iceberg?
Trulia has usually done things well and intuitively so that leads me to think (and hope) that this beta version is only the tip of the iceberg. But they’d better roll out the new and improved version soon…
