The Cliffs Notes version of REtech South

Thursday, March 27, I attended the first, and hopefully not the last, REtech South conference, which was created to help real estate professionals learn the ins and outs of Web 2.0 and how to create a strong presence online. Here is a brief synopsis of a few of the things that I thought to be interesting and important:

• Blogging is the new form of journalism – Many daily print publications have suffered from diminishing subscriptions, which will inevitably result in many newspapers going belly up. The reason for this is that everyone is getting their news online: at the online version of the newspaper and through various blogs. Publishing a blog is a great way to spread news to the public that is relevant and important, and, many times, you are able to publish news that no one else is publishing.
• To make a blog successful, find a niche and stick to it. The more specific, the better, as you will probably be the only one covering that topic.
• Make sure you focus on quality content of quantity.
• Widgets are a great way to make a blog more interactive. These little pieces of code can perform any kind of function on a blog, all you have to do is search the vendor sites for one that interests you. A great place to find widgets that relate to real estate and the housing market, visit www.housingwidgets.com.
• Social networking is an essential tool to build relationships and develop new contacts in the industry. Real estate is an industry entirely devoted to referrals and relationships, and the more Internet meeting forums you are a member of, the better your chances are of increasing business.

Many topics pertaining to blogs, SEO, widgets, videos, social networking and listing syndication were all discussed. For anyone involved in Atlanta real estate, this conference was extremely beneficial. These few topics that I discussed are only five of numerous facts that I took home with me. It’s so important to be online when working in real estate because 90% of homebuyers began their home search online.