Part Three - How to Read, Subscribe and Comment on Blogs

 

Read Blogs - The easiest way to get started is to start reading blogs. There are websites specifically set up to search blogs, such as technorati.com.  Some search engines give you the ability to chose to search for blogs that meet your search criteria, such as Google's Blogsearch.  A great place for real estate agents to start is ActiveRain.com - it's a website just for real estate blogs.

 

Subscribe to Blogs - Once you find a blog you like, you can subscribe to the blog two different ways.  The first way is to have an email sent to you from the blog.  You can do this by signing up to the email subscription.  This is located at or near the top of most well designed blogs.  Every time there is a new post published, your will receive an email.  The second way is to set up a reader.  A reader is an interface that reads a feed that comes from the blog called an RSS feed.  RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  The reader will go out and read the feeds that you tell it to read and then organize them for you.  When you go to your reader it will pull the most recent posts from those blogs.  Google has a reader, Google Reader, as do most major portals.  If you register with google you can customize your google landing page into what they call iGoogle.  This page acts as a reader for RSS feeds just like their reader but it also lets you put tools on the page such as an email reader, calendar, weather, news, photos, etc.  And you can drag and drop each tool to where ever you want it on your page. This might sound complicated, but it's actually pretty simple. Check out this three-minute video for an overview.

 

Comment on Blogs - Once you feel comfortable enough with the blogging world from a passive standpoint, you can become a participant by commenting on what other people write.  You can also comment about the comments submitted to the blog.  This will create a comment thread, a group of comments that sometimes take on a life of their own.  Once you read one of these threads, you'll know what I mean.  Comments are the main reason blogs are so popular.  Comments allow readers to directly participate while at the same time allowing the writer to receive instantaneous feedback on their posts.  Comments are the life blood of blogs.

 

 

Part Four - Set Up, Publish and Promote Your Real Estate Blog

 

Go back to Part One - Introduction and Definitions

 

Go back to Part Two - Why Write a Real Estate Blog

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