Dustin Luther

Karen: So sorry for not being more responsive!!! Around the time you posted, I switched my focus to my 4RealzEd seminar and didn't return in time to catch your question until now!

In terms of getting started, engaging on existing community websites can be a great place to start. I set things up with my wife's site so that her "website" is simply a blog... and from my perspective, and especially if you're just starting out, there's no good reason to focus on promoting both a blog and a website. In your shoes I'd be inclined to create a blog and then add the features that you want like MLS search, "About me" pages, and contact forms as desired.

If you do decide to go the blog platform route, check out the web reference I listed below. I put this page together the other day that describes the blog platform options for real estate professionals. I wasn't planning to show the page off to anyone yet because I want to add more detail first, but for your case, it could be quite helpful.

(By the way, I ut the page together using a wiki, so anyone is free to edit and improve the page!) - Fri Apr 18 2008, 01:53

Both Marian and Crystal give some great answers! Getting online continues to be more critical than ever for agents... and I'll add one more reason.

When you use online marketing opportunities, you make it much easier on yourself to optimize how you spend your marketing time and dollar. With just a little bit of pre-planning, it's quite possible to track just about every lead that hits your site allowing you to get some great insight into which part of your marketing is most effective.

In addition, when you look at where agents are spending their advertising money vs where consumers are, it becomes obvious that the print market is saturated and that the most cost-effective marketing opportunities are online. - Wed Apr 16 2008, 09:51

Great question! It didn't take long at all, but I was REALLY proactive. I went to Technorati early on in my blogging and did a bunch of searches for people moving to the Seattle area. When I found a potential relevant blogger, I would write something relevant to that person's home search and then follow up with a blog comment on their post to let them know about the great resource specific to them we had on my blog!

For example, one couple was looking to move to Ballard, so we (my wife and I co-wrote most of our early posts) wrote a post on the history of ballard: http://www.raincityguide.com/2005/10/10/ballard-history/ - Wed Apr 16 2008, 09:35

There's nothing like engaging your community with interesting content to generate inbound links. The website (Rain City Guide) has generated almost 100K inbound links over the past three years by consistently creating content that is relevant to our local market as well as the real estate community in general. It's more work than many "quick" fix solutions, but also generates an obscene amount of free search engine traffic. - Mon Apr 14 2008, 01:52

Jo: Here's a great list of all the assessor's offices in CA. Some of them offer the property owner name when you search by address. - Mon Apr 14 2008, 01:41