One Year Real Estate Blogging Anniversary

March 25, 2006

On this day in 2005 (March 25th) at about 5:00 pm we posted our very first article: Real Estate and More. Our blog initially was called "Ask the Real Estate Experts." We posted 13 articles in the next 6 days to March 30th. Most of these were on subjects foremost on my mind including a couple on wine (we collect and enjoy)Over the next weeks the name changed a few times and we finally settled on the Northern Virginia Real Estate Guide. To date we posted 160 articles, averaging about 3 per week.

As I recall, growabrain found us first and gave some helpful hints on how to immediately improve the way we chronologically posted (as in newest at top...duh!) I didn't know what RSS was at the time but knew it must be important. We learned a tremendous amount of technical stuff in the first year including a lot of server side coding! More importantly, we also learned that blogging can be very powerful. People actually read what we have to say. As it turns out, more people come to our blog than to our website (although our website is pretty cool too). In fact, this blog is actually driving more visits to WWW.CHOICE3REALTY.COM. Hmmmm...we paid a lot of money for a unique, custom website and paid nothing for the blog. There's a conclusion to be drawn here I think.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to show the world what blogging can do. Here are two charts (as you can tell, I love doing charts) that tells the whole story without further comment:

 

[click the charts for a large pop-up or click here for actual charts]

This adventure has been most gratifying albeit hard work. It is gratifying to know that people appreciate good, candid information about this business because it seems it has always had some mystical aspect to it. Because of the internet and specifically the blogs, consumers are becoming a lot smarter; smarter than some agents I have dealt with (sad to say). The home run on our blog is the market data we extract and present in tables and graphs. You can see the almost "hockey stick" appearance of the trends above starting in January of this year. We posted our first market graphs on New Years Eve 2005. Another surprising data point is that over 60% of our visitors are bookmarking the blog! We still have a lot of work to do to make them user customizable but have not had the time. (What I need is a php/mySQL programmer to help us out! I have a ton of ideas and not much money to pay anyone but, it would be an awesome project.)

I'm not sure how to put the above graphs into perspective. All I do know is that going from 0 to over 25,000 page views per month is pretty darn cool. It certainly is motivating me to keep doing it!

Finally, thanks to all the bloggers I have come to know, commenters that participate, my broker for not telling me to stop and for all the thousands of internet people in blogospace for finding us and coming back for more.

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