In the previous article in this series I spoke about a “hands on” method of getting great content for your real estate blog. Now I’ll speak about some “hands off” ways of getting great content where the content comes to your blog with minimal effort on your part.
RSS Feeds
To be really “hands off” you need to find neighborhood blogs that can be delivered via RSS feed. An RSS Feed is basically a mini news wire like the Associated Press or Reuters but with much more specific content. For instance, you may find a blog that writes about nothing but local politics in your given area. You can arrange to have new articles from that blog automatically sent to your email account. If the article is relevant to your farm neighborhood you can have the article feed directly into your website in the “What’s New” or “Community Happenings” section or have it appear on your blog. To do this you will need a website and blog that is compatible with receiving RSS feeds. Ask your website provider if your website can do this.
Established Neighborhood Blogs
If you look around on the web you’ll find plenty of blogs written for specific cities and neighborhoods on a wide variety of local topics. One comprehensive blog site is Outside.In. This site is a neighborhood blog aggregator. It gathers blog articles for a vast number of neighborhood blogs mostly located in and around major American cities. With Outside.In you can have articles concerning your farm neighborhood sent to you almost on a daily basis, depending on the neighborhood, so you can afford to be choosy about which ones to include.
A great example of a thriving city based blog is Curbed. So far it has separate sites for New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It’s been around since 2004 and gets updated at least a dozen times per day with news articles focusing on local real estate. Curbed has several sub blog sites including Eater which covers the New York City restaurant and bar scene, Racked which covers New York’s shopping, neighborhood stores and retail scene, and a seasonal sub blog called The Beach which covers the very upscale summer season in the Hamptons region of New York State. Curbed claims to be the most visited neighborhood and real estate blog on the web.
