Should I Start a Real Estate Blog?

Land Development Realities - A Blog:

I mentioned in a previous post that my son encouraged me to start a land development blog about 2 years ago. I wasn’t too busy at the time and his thought was that I should pass along my observations and opinions on the subject. My son has a finance blog with thousands of followers and he has been making decent money on it too, so I figured what the heck! So, Land Development Realities (LDR) was born on November 23, 2018.

Besides having little else to do at the time, a key motivation for me was my own “less than fast” start in land development. When I started I had zero mentoring or training - absolutely none. I thought my posts might help folks that were either thinking about getting into land development, or just starting out.

I would write about my actual experiences with projects, but because every piece of land is different it would not be a “how to” land development blog. I knew right away it could be a challenge to build readership because everyone is looking for a “how to” recipe in real estate. There’s no shortage of money grabbers out there to “help”, as described in this article on real estate “experts”: https://www.landdevelopmentrealities.com/home/2019/5/15/real-estate-experts .

Some folks consider blogging as a potential side gig, so I took a look. I did some Google searching and if you look at ideas for generating side income you see “Starting a Blog” almost every time. I get a lot of satisfaction out of writing the blog, but if you are looking to build a ton of followers and making meaningful income quickly, that is not my experience as you’ll see.

Let’s look at my experience as a apprentice blogger, while understanding that folks with more social media literacy and those with existing social media followers might have much faster and better results. My only social media exposure when I started was a personal LinkedIn page.

Squarespace:

The LDR Blog was set up on Squarespace and once you get to know the basics it’s pretty easy to use. I am fairly computer literate, but not always that fast. I have never been good at the help or instruction pages, so I learn by trial and error mostly. I am sure many potential bloggers would be much faster than I.

All-in-all I would give Squarespace a 4 out of 5 on a review. The thing I don’t like is the counter-intuitive way of editing image and text blocks around a draft post and when you get it wrong it’s hard to undo.

Google search engine:

Search engines are the #1 way to get viewership, but you have to crawl up the food chain to consistently place higher which took me a lot of time. I think the LDR Blog has benefitted in some ways because I sometimes write about obscure segments of land development, which in turn, minimizes the search competition. I mean how many people are posting articles on Testamentary Division of Land?

The title of the post and the paragraph headings are crucial. There are subscription tools (some with 30 day free access) that can help with the search terms people are using for a given topic. I have not used them, but if I were more driven to accelerate my posts to the top I would. It was suggested that I frame my post titles in the form of a question and wouldn’t you know it, those are the ones with the most page views. How much time the post is out there also dictates search ranking. My 5th post has been out there for almost 2 years and is the most read.

My goal (again suggested by my son) was to get 1,000 pageviews over the prior 30 days and it took me 23 months to do it. I have several posts that now show up as #1 on Google, but it takes time and patience. In my experience, traffic builds slowly, as can be seen below…

Actual LDR Traffic metrics:

Average 30 day traffic: 9/20/2020 - 10/19/2020

Total traffic since inception 11/23/18 - Present

Time spent on page:

What I did understand up-front is that the content has to be good, hopefully great. What I didn’t understand is that it has to be presented in an engaging way for readers to stay on the page. Images, graphs, different fonts and anything to spice up the layout is important to readers. There’s a well-respected blogger that wrote about his process. He estimates that he spends 20% of his time actually writing the content, the rest making it “pretty”. I am just about the opposite of that.

Consistency:

Whether you post daily, weekly or monthly you have to be consistent. My goal is to post weekly.

AdSense income:

Just over a month ago I finally hit 1,000 page views per 30 day running average. That was the trigger point for me to sign up for Google AdSense. The dollars you see in the photo show my whopping gross income for the first 60 days on AdSense with an average of 1,000 page views in each of the prior 2 months.

2 Months on AdSense: Gross Income - 8/16/20 - 10/19/20

Adding photos to the post:

About 2/3’s of my posts have one image at the top which is a mistake. The images relate to the topic, but sometimes more to me than to the readership according to feedback. Just like on this post, where I show an image of a tortoise on top. Why? Well, because in my experience building a following has taken more time than I thought, especially compared to my son. I am the tortoise and he is the hare. If I was starting over I would add more relevant image blocks, graphs and workbooks in different sections of the post, which I am doing more of now as seen above.

Links to outside content:

I guess it’s kosher in the blogging world to add links to different people’s sites and articles but I have rarely done it. One reason why is that 99.9% of real estate blogs, posts and articles are plain junk to me. It’s always a pep talk and a lot of them want you to buy something along the way, plus they make it sound way too easy.

There are a few authors that I have routinely followed over time, but I have still hesitated to provide their links because I like one article, but completely disagree with another. I don’t want links from my site to be considered an endorsement of an outside source who’s current content I agree with, but who’s future content I might disagree with. Who knows what they are going to say next?

There is one guy, however:

John T. Reed - https://johntreed.com/collections/real-estate-investment . He authors on several topics and the link provided is to his real estate content. I have bought many of his real estate books and my firm opinion is this: - John T. Reed is an educated, experienced, honorable and truthful real estate author. If you want to have a real estate babysitter, save your time. If you want straight-talk, and you are serious about real estate without the hype and B.S. - well that’s a guy to check out in my opinion.

Internal links to my own content:

After jamming 85 posts down the collective throats of my readership, I am adding internal links to some of my new and previous posts that have to do with the subject at hand. I notice that on the analytics site in Squarespace that this has increased readers’ going from the blog article they start on, to other posts via the internal link embed within the article.

I should have done this way earlier but you have to have additional internal content to link if you are just starting out. Just so you know, I can see the reader’s city, state and country along with what articles were viewed, but nothing about the reader - your privacy is safe!

Social Media - The Internet Cathouse:

Twitter:

My son set up a Twitter account for my blog - OMG!! Up until about 2 months ago I did nothing with it and I wish I would have kept it that way. First, I found some relevant land developers and real estate folks, then over a couple of nights laying in bed I started in and posted some past blog articles. I suppose if you have a huge Twitter presence you’re good to go, but I found and followed just over 300 people in the land business and I have 42 people following me.

What kills me about what I see on Twitter is just how stupid the Tweets are and in fact, most of the real estate people are Tweeting about their grandma’s chili recipe or some other dopey thing! From my experience Twitter is not for the serious land development blogger. It’s a split second glimpse of some otherwise normal (?) person’s random and irrelevant thought, not long after a trip to the ‘fridge for a 4th beer. Plus, nothing has a shelf life.

Facebook:

Let’s make this fast and easy…re-read my comments on Twitter, above…

LinkedIn:

I started a separate LinkedIn page for Land Development Realties this month and I wish I would have done it sooner. I am only connected to 151 people in real estate, but every time I post I get about 60 views within a day or two and they just keep chugging along.

I am selective about who I invite or accept, so maybe that is the reason why the conversion rate is good. I like controlling the connections and since I can limit them to real estate it gives me a more targeted audience. Keep in mind that a view of a LinkedIn post does not mean a click-through to the blog page.

Other Social Media:

I have an Instagram account for the LDR Blog, but I haven’t figured out the best way to use it for my goals, so it’s pretty much dormant. I would think that it could be useful for posting videos or galleries that would, in turn, drive viewers to the Blog website. I don’t know anything about Pinterest except I am going to check out how to create pins and promote the blog posts on group boards.

Outbound emails / texts:

I don’t promote or sell to subscribers, but if I was selling something I probably would. I knew someone that sold HIPPA approved patient outreach and contact software to medical offices. She told me something very enlightening that I had never thought of before. The pearl of wisdom is that email outreach is pretty much useless unless requested. Even then it’s not often read in a timely way, if at all. The future in her business was texting vs email. I forget the statistic she told me, but it was something close to - text messages are read 6 times faster and the likelihood of a response was something like 3 times greater than with emails. Made sense to me.

Every jerk with an axe to grind makes you put in your email address to sign up for something and then you get 5 emails a day from them! I resent it when there is not an opt out box clearly visible up front, or when an unsubscribe link isn’t clearly visible .. and then half the time after you unsubscribe, you keep getting emails anyway.

Would you start a blog if you had it to do over?

Absolutely! My greatest reward is when I get emails from readers. I don’t want to jinx myself, but I have never received a nasty one. I especially enjoy readers that are either new to residential land development, or have it in their mind to start. The blogosphere is kind of a one way form of communication until you hear back from a reader and it is by far my greatest reward.

I have a soft spot for Newbies. Every Newbie that asks a question tends to remind me of my own start in the business. Having said that, the blog is not advisory in nature, so I frequently have to remind folks that every piece of land is different and that the appropriate licensed professional is who to seek advice from.

At some point the LDR Blog could earn money worth mentioning but I am not too worried about it. Blogging LDR is a form of eternal presence, so if I get run over by the laundry truck, at least I am leaving some permanent thoughts behind that are important to me. Hopefully to you too and by the way, thank you for your readership!