The 47th edition, titled “The Top Ten Says of the Week aka The Carnival of Real Estate” of the Carnival of Real Estate is now live at RE Agent in CT. Head on over and take a look!

The next carnival will be held on Monday, June 25 at Altos Research. Please submit your best post by Sunday, June 24, to be considered.

Are you a real estate blogger and would you like to host a future edition or take a more active role in carnival administration? If so, get instructions on how to do so here. Please check the complete FAQ list if you have other questions as to how to participate.

I’ve had a busy week, but I finally caught up with Craig Schiller for this week’s podcast. Craig hosted the 46th edition of the carnival at Home Staging, Rants & Ravings. I really enjoyed the chat, which ran about 18 minutes in length. Among the many topics discussed, Craig had some great thoughts about blogging, colors, and marketing.

Thanks Craig - truly, a carnival and podcast well done!

I use a free pinging service called Pingoat.com after each post to my blog. For those unfamiliar with the concept, pinging is a method of notifying different websites and directories that your RSS feed has been updated with new content. In some cases you can configure your blog to do this automtically, but with so many places it’s sometimes easier just to use a pinging a service. Today when I went to do a ping I was greeted with a notice that Pingoat is working on new product for blog promotion, along with an invitation to join their beta program. It might be worth checking out.

There are numerous multi-author blogs around the internet, and several very successful ones within the real estate category (RE.net). In my mind, there are several primary benefits to multi-author blogs:

• Distributed Workload — No doubt about it, writing takes a lot of time, meaning blogging also takes a lot of time. A multi-author blog allows numerous writers to share the workload.
• Collaboration Among Contributors — Sure, some people don’t need others to review their writing, but some writers love the collaboration that comes with several people working on a particular piece of writing (hence, why so many books are co-authored). It’s great to have others to bounce ideas off of and to help generate interesting topics for blog posts.
• Varied Personalities for Readers to Relate to — I’m becoming a firm believer that the success of a blog is largely dependent on the PERSONALITIES behind the blog. Believe it or not, not everyone will relate to your writing. However, if there are numerous authors, your audience will have others to relate to when reading a blog.

I wanted to get some more insights into the world of multi-author blogs and what makes them successful, so I asked the masterminds behind three of the most well known multi-author real estate blogs on the net — Rain City Guide, BloodHoundBlog, and InmanBlog — several questions about their experiences in the trenches. I’m sure the majority of the CoRE’s audience is aware of the masterminds that I’m talking about — Greg Swann from BloodHoundBlog, Jessica Swesey from InmanBlog, and Dustin Luther from Rain City Guide. I asked them to all answer 3 questions — here’s their answers:

Q: What are the top three things that lead to a successful multi-author blog?

• Greg Swann - I’m tempted to answer talent, talent and talent. There’s more to it than that, though. BloodhoundBlog is blessed to have very talented writers, but we’re twice blessed that they’re such thoughtful, thoroughgoing people. Add to that they are so easy to get along with, and we have a killer line-up.
• Jessica Swesey - 1) Keeping the voices organized so readers know who is writing each post; 2) Getting the right voices together: points of view or insights from people that readers will care about; 3) Keeping on contributors who often fall by the wayside so they are staying active.
• Dustin Luther - You’d really have to ask the contributing authors why they got involved to find out why RCG was successful. I tried so many different things to get people involved that I’m not always sure why they stick around! Nonetheless, I’ll throw some ideas out there. (1) Trust: The contributing authors have to trust you won’t abuse their information (2) Benefits: The benefits of contributing have to be immediately obvious and able to be articulated in a simple sentence. (3) Interesting: (is that too self-evident?).

Q: If you had chance to go through the process of building & managing your multi-author blog again, what would you do differently?

• Greg Swann - I can’t think of a thing. I might have started earlier, but ideas come when they come. Had I seen where BloodhoundBlog was going, I would have built it in its own domain, but there’s nothing I can do about that now. In any case, I’m delighted with where we’ve gotten so far, and I’m eager to see where we’ll get to next.
• Jessica Swesey - Always make all the guest authors write in draft mode before publishing. It’s not that we want to censor our writers, it’s just that as a news company we have certain liabilities with content and want to be sure that readers don’t mistake a guest author’s opinion as the view of our editorial team.
• Dustin Luther - Learn PHP… There are lots of technical improvements I could make to the site that would make it easier (better?) for the contributors if I had some better coding skills! Only ignorance on my part can explain my willingness to get other people involved in a real estate website when I had no idea how to read/write code or configure server settings (let alone understand the real estate transaction!)

Q: What were the biggest surprises that you experienced while managing your blog?

• Greg Swann - Subject to contradiction from my co-bloggers, I don’t actually manage anything. I do the maintenance stuff, and I’m happy to confer about posts if someone asks. But there are no rules for contributors to BloodhoundBlog. The closest we get to a rule is when we are breaking news. Then I’ll ask for a four or six-hour window, so the news will stay at the top of the page for that span of time. I’m astounded every day at the great ideas people bring to their posts, but I can’t say I’ve had any big surprises.
• Jessica Swesey - For me, it’s been the length of the discussions that often continue long after a post has been published. Sometimes the same two or three readers will continue to discuss an issue for weeks. It’s really interesting to watch these discussions unfold.
• Dustin Luther - That it worked! No kidding… While I’ll admit that I was persistent in trying to get RE Professionals to sign up as contributors right from the get-go, to get people like Ardell DellaLoggia and Russ Cofano after being in operation less than a year was a gift that has never stopped giving!

Though Rain City Guide’s contributors write mostly Seattle real estate content, most multi-author blogs are definitely industry focused right now. However, building a locally focused multi-author blog is certainly an interesting option for real estate professionals who are interested in building a solid reputation in their local community. Should you choose to go down the path of creating a multi-author blog, hopefully, you learned something from the experts in this brief Q&A.

I have to extend a huge thanks to Greg, Dustin, and Jessica for their time!

Greg Swann has an interesting post over at BloodHoundBlog titled “An RE.net taxonomy: Identifying types of real estate weblogs.” Take a look and see what category your real estate blog falls under!

I ran across an interesting way to promote a blog yesterday. Zimbio.Com. From their web site:

“We enable our contributors to build wikizines - interactive magazines that anyone can create or edit - with coverage of current events, cultural reference points, and niche areas of interest. We make it simple for people to compile the web’s most relevant and dynamic content into easily-searched topics, so readers can find and react to the full story from multiple perspectives.”

After submitting your blog for inclusion in Zimbio, you are given an opportunity to create or subscribe to “Wikizines”, a clever mash up of a wiki, social news and blogging. “Subscription Packs” offer you the ability to subscribe to combination of Wikizines. A blog widget allows you to place a button on your site for others to give “kudos” to your blog, improving your exposure in the Zimbio network. In theory, this should be a good way to increase readership to your posts. I’ll keep playing around with it and let you know what I’ve find out.

You are invited to attend the First Southwest Real Estate Blogging Conference and Active Rain Members Gathering on June 21, 2007. The two bloggers presenting:

1. Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy. the best Real Estate blog in the Valley.

2. Greg Swann, blogger extraordinaire of BloundhoundBlog. A must read for agents.

Venue: The Ranch House Restaurant
2155 S. Dobson Road, Mesa, 85202

Start time: 3pm Sharp
June 21st, 2007 (Thursday)

This event is hosted by the Arizona Mortgage Guru.

More details here.

Blogging is certainly a great way to establish relationships, but there’s still nothing like actually meeting someone face-to-face. To help the RE.net connect with each other in person, I’ve made another addition to this blog that I think bloggers will find useful — a RE.net Event Calendar (near the top of the right sidebar)!

To help seed the content, I’ve added the next Active Rain meet-up, which is in Chicago next Saturday, and Bloggers Connect, which takes place in San Francisco at the end of July.

Since this is a “blog for real estate bloggers,” I’m going to ask for your help in adding events of interest to the RE.net. If you have an event you’d like to add, such as a sales seminar or local meet-up, please e-mail me & I’ll set you up an account on this blog so that you can add them to the RE.net Event Calendar.

Connect with Bloggers Around the World
Real estate bloggers from around the globe are gathering in San Francisco for a two-day real estate blogging networking event. Enjoy face time with your colleagues in the real estate blogosphere including ample party and networking time along with sessions that will help you gather insights into best practices and the biggest rewards of real estate blogging.

More info: http://www.realestateconnect.com/sf07/bloggersconnect.aspx

The 46th edition of the Carnival of Real Estate is now live at Home Staging, Rants & Raves. Being the stager that he is, Craig Schiller did a fantastic job using colors to highlight this week’s winners, the “6 R-O-Y-G-B-V Color Finalists”. Take a look!

The next carnival will be held on Monday, June 18 at RE Agent in CT. Please submit your best post by Sunday, June 17, to be considered.

Are you a real estate blogger and would you like to host a future edition or take a more active role in carnival administration? If so, get instructions on how to do so here. Please check the complete FAQ list if you have other questions as to how to participate.