Okay, this isn't a success story, per se, but for all I know, it could be.

As regulars here know I am a big proponent of blogging. Some folks think I'm saying you'll get instant success if you blog but I never said that. Blogging is much like farming. You plant seeds. Some seeds grow faster and are ready to harvest while some take longer.

Unlike traditional real estate farming, such as with a postcard or mailing, the blog post never goes away (most people throw out postcards as junk mail, though some may keep calendars and stuff...). It is online, able to be found, as long as you leave it up there.

Ok back on point. A couple years ago some friends of mine were trying to sell their business. I was not their agent but I went to their establishment (a commercial place being run by a tenant). I had a nice time and wrote a blog about it, hoping to bring more business to the BUSINESS - though I had it in the back of my mind that it was for sale as well and may help with that as well. My point in the blog wasn't to get leads but to help my friends in any way I could.

The business has not sold. It's a couple years later and it's vacant. For some reason it is listed with an out of the area brokerage and not on any of our local IDX feeds.

Someone who drove by and saw the for sale sign called me about it today... he found my blog on it after he could find no other info on it whatsoever...and he wants me to get more info for him. That blog was written two years ago.

This is the power of blogging. You sow the seeds. You never know when they will come to fruition.

And before anyone asks why I haven't listed it...lol..my friends no longer own it, I guess an investor bought it to then turn around and sell.

The long tail search pays off over time. It amazes me how people find old post or obscure pages and call or email about them and it turns into a sale. The power of having real content.

Yup. And if you "never" do it because it doesn't reap immediate benefits, then you'll never get anything from it...(duh). Takes me a short time to write a blog - usually while I'm watching TV...but the benefits could be thousands of dollars in my pocket one day.

And if you do blog, it has to be meaningful stuff that people might be interested, not just continual adverts for yourself...

I have had a blog going since 2007 but have just converted my hole site onto blog format from a site that had pages. With good tags and categories I think it is a win win and would never go back to a site with static pages. When blogs first came out they were add on to the site now a site is a blog with listings and all being post. Over the next month or two I have to covert, with edited text(no duplicate content), all the old pages into new blog post.

Some of them have really paid out over the years. I had one on Limited Dual Agency and it racks up at the top for Dual Agency Google searches and I have had a few sales from people who did not trust the listing agents. Even thought I was not in area I provided the buyers with more info in just a few minutes. That page has probably made me 20k.

Salt you may want to increase the width of your slider to I believe 900. Doesn't quite fit properly at the moment.

Thanks bfisher88 not too terribly thrilled with slider. It has jammed up a few times. Will look at it now. It is set at 870 do you think it would be worth going smaller? 750 or so?

Mine has been working fine at 900 and hasn't caused any issues. Problem with going smaller is you can still see the box created for the quick search and unless you know some decent CSS it will be harder to make look good. I don't know any, so I just filled the entire width.

I'm not very knowledgeable on css but found a nice template that has a css editor suite in it. It is called weaver. Went to a demo at wordcamp on Saturday. Basically you can edit css. I'm going to use the free Weaver on another site I have and play with it. It basically gives you all the css codes you want.

Thanks for that will change it to 900. I see you have Genesis on your foreclosure site.

Ahh, haven't changed my sig link. I run it here mainly, www.deervalleyhomesforsale.com

That is a nice looking site bfisher88 you could grab some creative common photos for you blog post from flickr just did a search and there are hundreds of super photos you can use if you post attributes and owners name. Here is a good link on how to do attributes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTioClzr0Jc

Personally if I see a page of text I usually skip it I don't have time to read it but if there are photos and text in the page it will keep me engaged.

The site looks nice they are clean looking sites.

Thanks Salt. That site is just up for development purposes later so I'm not using it to convert anyone right now, hence no IDX or other photos. Just aging and gaining some authority for now. Thanks for the kind words.