Somewhere on earth
Searching
Sometimes when I go surfing on the internet I get lost. I get lost walking down the street and driving too but that isn’t relevant to this post.
I click and go from real estate blog to real estate blog and hit a few web sites, and they all have a similar look and feel. Real estate web sites and blogs kind of stand out that way.
Pictures Rule
Posting photos of local places and of real estate can give an agents blogs an edge and really make it stand out from the competition. Photos help create a sense of place. My goal with my blog has always been to make it look like St. Paul so that when people stop by they know where they are and can see that I know my way around the place. They just know they are not in Kansas any more, they have entered my world.
Here on agent genius every post has a photo. We have created a world here too. Filled with pictures of the latest gadgets, and ideas. Our pictures communicate to the readers that a bunch of us got together and started sharing information and ideas with our peers. The blog is bright, colorful, and friendly. I can glance at a page of it and absorb ideas just by looking at the images.
A sense of place . . makes sense
At a recent conference I talked with a couple of the companies that make the big national real estate sites. I told them that they are missing the boat because each of their pages looks the same. The sites have no sense of place. They really don’t have any personality either, each page just has a different set of real estate agent photos on it. Alabama looks pretty much the same as Hawaii.
The internet is just packed full of advertising and it all looks pretty much the same. I mostly tune it out and I am sure others do too. The advantage in having local photos on a real estate blog is that they make the site look less commercial.
Kill the competition
When it comes to competing on the web I think our blogs have an advantage over the national sites. We can create a friendly environment and that sense of place, that attracts home buyers and sellers. Corporations and real estate brokerages just don’t seem to be able to make it look anything but commercial and impersonal. I will even suggest that a marginal photo is better than no photo or clip art.
For bloggers who write for Google it doesn’t much matter how the site looks but for those of us who like to have the readers come back and linger awhile and interact with us, it is a big deal. The internet is for more than words. We can use it to create an experience or environment by using images.
