BY KATERINA GASSET

Yes, you read it right. We get at least two listings per week from our Active Rain blog and so can you. Would knowing you can add another $100,000 to your gross income just from your Active Rain blog be of any interest to you?

If you get two listings per week, that is eight new listings per month, which means 96 new listings in a year. If only one of those sells each month for an average price of 300,000, then do the math and see how much that will change your bottom line.

Now look at your expense column. How much money are you spending on fishing for listings? Compare that to how much money you spend when you blog on Active Rain. The investment is time. The catch is that it has to be you, not a paid assistant who does your blogging for you. You must be the one to walk the walk and talk the talk. As for me, I would much rather be spending my time blogging and networking on Active Rain than any other form of marketing for listings. We do not have an outside blog. Active Rain is our main source of listings from online marketing. How would you like to turn your Active Rain blog into a listing machine?

Here are some tips to help you get listings from your Active Rain blog:

Know Your Target Market
You must speak with your audience not at your audience. Hold a conversation with your sellers. Even before that you must know who your audience is. If you want to get listings, stop writing to attract the buyers. That is the biggest mistake I see from those that e-mail me or call me and ask me why they are not getting listings from their blog. Most members are writing localism posts that attract buyers not sellers. What does a seller want to know about?

Be Ahead of The Curve
Blogging for listings on Active Rain is a very underserved market. Agents who are online are usually targeting buyers and trying to capture those prospects who are looking at properties on line. So that means you are ahead of the curve since few, under 2 percent, of real estate bloggers are really focusing on blogging in order to get listings.

Find The Pain and Offer the Relief
Write posts that address the “pain” the seller is going through. Is your market full of short sales, foreclosures, overpriced homes? Address the pain, write posts about these issues and then given some options for relief.

Build the Relationship First Online
Sellers who are looking for an agent to list their property will typically read more than one post before they call the agent. Ninety-nine percent of all the listings that we get from our Active Rain blog call us. They do not e-mail us, they are calling us and it is like they are a long lost friend because they already know us. People do business with people they know, like and trust. This is built over time as they read your blog. So you better have content on your blog that will engage the seller and make him/her connect with you. Remember always that even though members on Active Rain comment on your blog, consumers rarely do. That does not mean they are not reading. To find out more about who is reading your blog, use mybloglog stats.

Show Some Transparency
If your blog if filled with Vflyers, Postlets and market reports, you may end up getting a couple of buyers but most certainly you won’t be getting sellers to call you to list their properties. Where’s the beef in these posts? Sellers don’t care about your other listings and although market reports are relative to their situation they are not going to build a relationship. But testimonials from other sellers and endorsements from other agents will make a difference. Testimonials are powerful and documentation beats conversation. Show your personality on your blog. Talk about your family and your hobbies. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Share real life examples of your work in your community.

Here are some real life examples of how a few sellers connected with us:

• A mother was searching for information about homeschooling her children online and my Active Rain blog came up on her Google search. She started reading my posts about homeschool and noticed I was an agent. After reading our blog for two weeks, she called us to list her house because she connected with us through homeschool. This is just like going to a chamber of commerce meeting or some other networking event and you start conversing with people in hopes to get some business one day.

• Ninety-eight percent of our calls are for short sale listings. We come up first on Google for short sale information in our area. But I also wrote a series of posts on what you need to know about short sales. This is a great niche for us because we have experience and great success with short sales. Most of these sellers were told by their attorney or financial advisor to do a short sale and then they google the terms that cause our blog to come up. We address their pain and give them hope.

• A woman was searching on the Internet for an agent to list her house. Our Active Rain blog came up in her search. She began reading our blog every day. She noticed that I wrote posts not just about selling houses and listing houses, but that I was writing posts to help my fellow real estate agents and mortgage brokers in their businesses. The woman was very impressed. Her comment to me was that she chose to work with us because of the fact that I was helping other agents. She said that spoke volumes of the kind of person that I am and that is why she chose us to be her agents even before she called us.

These are just a few examples of how property owners have connected with us. When you want the phone to ring with sellers on the other end of the line, follow these tips and see what happens.

Katerina Gasset, CIPS, is a Realtor with International Properties and Investments Inc., a source for luxury homes in Wellington, Fla., and Palm Beach County real estate. Gasset is also a professional speaker, coach and consultant. Visit her blog at ActiveRain.com/WellingtonHomes for more information.