Of course not. Don't you just love Link Bait titles?
Blogging is Dead Again?

I have long been a proponent of blogging. But you have to blog smart, and you need to combine several elements into your marketing plan, not just one or two. I remember a couple years ago there was a know-all agent on this forum named Joey Bagadonuts who told me over and over "blogging is dead. It does not help sell real estate."

Well I'm still selling and his license is in escrow. I'm still blogging and...well...I don't know what he's doing now.

You can't just blog for the sake of blogging. You have to blog with a purpose and blogging for real estate is different than blogging for followers and millions of comments and links.

And to spring board further, you need to choose a blogging platform that will gain you strong SEO to reach your target markey.
There's quite a few FREE blogging platforms for real estate like Active Rain, Real Town and others and each have their positives and negatives.
Talk to people that use them (via email text etc) and see what they like and don't like about each.
Then make an informed decision rather than just rushing in.

ActiveRain is no longer free, BTW, except for grandfathered in "rainmakers." The "free" portion gets you NO SEO benefit whatever.

In the long run it is probably better to have a blog platform running on your own website/server, such as Wordpress or Joomla. You will have to pay someone to set it up if you are not tech savvy and it is a pain to get started but the long term benefits are worth it.

I wish I had done that. My ActiveRain posts still give me good search engine juice, but what happens if AR goes belly up and all my posts disappear? (I can't believe they will have many people willing to pay their ridiculous monthly fee for such a limited platform. They have frequent server issues and are down a LOT.)

Lesson learned: it is always best to be 100% in control of your content.

I've kind of stepped back from blogging the past 18 months or so and spent more time just enjoying life. I post on FB once in a while and have a semi-active twitter account too.
AR turned me off when such a large % of the posts became whiners about things that happened and so many of the "Featured" posts became about "Success in the Rain".
AR started out as an independent platform, but I know the principals sold it for a good chunk of cash a couple of years ago. It took them about 30 months to monetize it. And they were able to use other people's work (their blog posts and property listings) to add value and cash out.

To me it's no different than House Values or some other lead seller using listing data to capture visitors and then reselling the lead. Maybe that's why I like the Real Town programs run by Internet Crusade so much. While the corporation was just sold last week, the three people that started it all are still there and almost everything is free for real estate folks. They do sell things like web hosting and email forwarding, but I know people that have been with them since the 1990's that have never spent a cent with that company,

I don't pay attention to the "social" aspect of ActiveRain very much. There are a few bloggers I follow and read their blogs cause they're usually useful (Lenn Harley and Broker Bryant, as well as our own Jennifer Allan). I blog strictly for local reasons - Google juice. One of my AR blogs ranks #1 in google for a particular search term. That's why I do it.

I hate that email "The Daily drip" or whatever it is. They just keep featuring the same bloggers over and over and the featured posts are a joke. I gave up on it as a "social networking gathering place" and just poke around to find my favorite bloggers and blog when I feel like it. I comment when I feel like it, and I reply to and reciprocate comments when I feel like it. LOL I don't give a rat's patoot about their points or their "network."

I have to agree with Perky about AR good and negative points. I have used it for quite some time so I am a grandfathered rainmaker. I use it to drive traffic to my website mainly now.

I have to say get your own website or blog that you 100% own and control. Research and take your time to find what will work and give you the best ROI and googlejuice.

I totally agree with this. I like the idea and control you get with having your own blog. Once you get into the routine of keeping it fresh and working in SEO content, it can actually be a fun part of marketing.

I am new to AR as of the last few months have barely have 3,000 points. They have tried to get me to buy in a few times, but I'm not going to. I like reading the blogs but you're right Perky, some of the featured ones are so ridiculous. To rank high in my city and county, I don't need much over 5000 points, so I have been working slowly to get there by commenting on blogs. I figure that it's easy enough to get there, so why not? Other people think that they will get business from ranking high on AR. But many of my colleagues have never heard of AR.

Title reminded me on yahoo's catchy article titles.

Yes and you have to manage your blog for your entire career. If you quit blogging, your potential clients will read your old dead blog and they'll wonder why you petered out on it. Now you've got one more hurdle to overcome and you put it there.

Obviously, I don't blog. I'm busy reading and learning. The market and the rules are changing so fast that keeping up with it and my career is a full-time job plus I'm trying to have a life, too.

When you have questions about the market, neighborhoods, schools, whatever - just call me or email me and I'll tell you the answer or do the research for you and get back to ya. It's quicker the 'old fashioned' way than making you get to a computer, find my blog and start searching for past posts, don't you agree?

Attracts different kinds of customers. Almost all of my customers read my blog and have complimented me on them. I rarely blog more than once a week. Sometimes I've only blogged 2 times a month when I've been really busy.

I am blogging instead of the "old fashioned" farming postcards/letters/calling expireds because I enjoy blogging, it's something I do well, and as a brand new agent in 2007 while the market was doing its nosedive, I loved the price (free.)

It has worked well for me and takes me about an hour to write, proof, find pictures for, and publish a blog. My 2nd year in the business I outsold many agents who'd been in the business longer than me. My 3rd year I did the same, only more so.

Other agents in my market spend $20,000 - $30,000 a year on marketing. I blog - for free - and am very happy with the results. I can blog from home while the kids and I watch TV, I can blog while on vacation and am up early in the morning enjoying coffee in the hotel cafeteria, I can blog from the office on floor time while the phone isn't ringing...I can blog from an open house even if I dont' have an internet connection - I can write the draft and save it in Word.

What's so cool about this business is this - a lot of methods work if you use them wisely and ENJOY them.

I don't see it as a hurdle at all. I see it as guaranteeing my freedom. I won't be held hostage to advertising, postage, or printing(postcards) rates, I will always have fresh content to offer my customers, I will always appear to be the local expert - it's not a burden, it's free advertising that I have 100% control over.

A lot of customers who are "thinking" about buying don't want to call or send an email and become someone's lead and next participant in their drip campaign.

What I'm afraid of and the only hurdle I see is the government screwing up the free world that is the internet....then if I stop blogging everyone will know why...lol

I have to agree with you on that. When I first started blogging (and had no idea how everything works), I was just blogging for the sake of blogging. It was really frustrating since no one was taking notice. But, when I learned to blog about what I am interested in, it made a huge difference. More readers followed since I had more quality "content" in my articles and not just blahs.

I first read about Active Rain here and knowing nothing about it I just jumped right into it. I fairly quickly ended up in the #2 featured position for my market.

Of course I jumped in to late the be grandfathered into a free account and the paid service is far to expensive in my mind.

At this point I don't put any effort into it since I'm not getting any SEO juice, I just want to keep my #2 position to prevent my local competitiion from having it.

I have since found another real estate advice service which I'm using to publish content that would have other wise gone to the rain.

I maintain my activerain account but I don't publish much there. You can do better on your own platform - AR has good google juice but they aren't google god. lol

the value in AR to me now is just reading all the good business info (tips, ideas, etc) you can find once you sift past the market reports and the nonsense...

I totally love my new blog. Wish I'd had time to get it out sooner today but my dang phone just kept ringing with this, that and the other thing....

http://pikewaynepablog.com/2011/03/17/an-irish-greeting-from-pike-county/

Notice how I got some important keywords in there but the blog wasn't really about real estate? I actually think I laid it on a little too thick, but hey - it's a Blarney Day anyway. I love blogging. Wish I had more time to mess with it.

bloggimg is not dead but though it's kind of a long term process, when you are talking about serp. To be a good blogger, you don't need to be a master of all the markets in your area, you just have to have a little knowledge about your area of specialisation or location in real estate and start even if it's a few sentence you are able to write. Blogging helps to increase your online presence and widen your reach on the net. Ant realtor or broker who is not combining blogging with his website is missing out on a large chunk of the market.

I blog regularly on my web site. I installed wordpress for my blogging platform. Google loves to index the blogs from wordpress and my blogs appear on google within couple hours if not less.

Nice thing about blogs is when people search for terms that you cant even think of, your blog will show up as a result which driver people to your web site.

I might blog about a flower show and there are people searching for a flower show in my area which in turn end up reading my blog entry.

It is another tool to driver people to your site. You just have to have a nice web site to keep them there and hope they see something they like.

I love the Link Bait Perky! Blogging is one of the best tools you can have in your arsenal if used properly and on the other hand if misused can waste a ton of time. I remember when I started out I was a total SPAMMER and it did absolutely nothing for me and since I actually became a valuable part of the blog community and do great posts I see consistent business from my efforts.

Conversion is not rocket science, but it's more than just "hoping" your audience sees something they like. It's about making your calls to action obvious and well placed, and making sure that the consumer gets exactly what they expect on the other side of that click. And getting rid of unnecessary information that no one is looking at. For instance, analytics show that no one looks at buyers and sellers tabs -- yet almost every agent site on the planet has them.

No blogging isn't dead! Email is dead, print is dead...but not blogging!

You need to know which ones are good to use. WP is the best of course! If you're not too familiar, use .com/training wheels til you are able to consistently deevote yourself to it. Once you are able to come up with content consistently, move to .org

The good google juice is in WP, other than that, you can probably use a blogspot and get the same results, just know you need to submit your blog to the search engines, set up your meta tags and put the right content on and you're good! If your content is the same as so many other agents, you're simply on a treadmill going nowhere! Consumers don't need yet another article on how to choose and agent!

I don't think blogging is dead, I just think a lot of people became disillusioned with it. There was a time when blogging exploded and everyone thought they were going to be the next big thing. After a couple of months that didn't happen for a lot of people and they put it on the back burner. Keeping a blog requires commitment and time, both valuable commodities.