The Catch 22 of Blogging for Business

Call it The Feverish Fall of Oh! Nine. Buyers, eager to drive their chest through the tax credit deadline ribbon, are calling non-stop. Ready, motivated and preapproved. Some we represent while others buy our listing inventory filling our pipeline to the crest. Five out of seven days in the last two months, we’re doing double, even triple sets of showings to different clients. In the remaining two out of seven paper is being pushed, transactions managed and fires extinguished. Which brings us to the point of this post. I’m no advanced mathematician, but simple arithmetic shockingly reveals that in the scenario above there’s very little time for sleeping, let alone blogging. Call it a coincidence but during this latest “swelling” my status updates on Facebook, tweets, blog comments and posts have been rare if any. Last week, I didn’t even find time to post here (apologies are definitely in order). So What? – I hear some saying – you are taking care of business and that should come first. A statement with which I agree to a point. But the age old question still lingers: Which came first? The egg or the chicken? The business or the efforts that generate it?

Catch Twenty Two

When done right, blogging for business works like a well oiled Maranello. Hell, when done consistently enough, it works even if you are clueless as I was in the Paleolithic Active Rain period. And when you start, the goal is crystal clear: Share your expertise and get business. The rest is a bridge you cross when you get there. But before you’re finished blinking the bridge is already here in all its majesty. The phone is ringing, email is buzzing, and business is here. But now there’s no time to blog anymore. If you do continue to blog, prospects are going unattended, phone calls unreturned. What’s the point of generating it if you won’t do anything with it? Result: Immense Guilt. You decide to get real, remember what business you are actually in and remind yourself that you’re no Thomas Friedman. Sixty days later all generated business closed, you find yourself with no new prospects starting from scratch. Again. And Again. Result: Frustration. And it’s easy to pontificate and blurt some shallow cliche about needing some balance in your professional life but this is real.

What to do about it?

For starters, I am at Barnes and Noble nine minutes before 9pm writing a post that was due this morning. So, I’m not exactly in a position to lecture you all on how to solve a problem I don’t have a silver bullet solution to. But I have ideas, and I’m hoping to get some from you all as well

1. Costco your way out of it

When business is down or slow, avoid the moping watercooler and write posts like a chipmunk on crack. Don’t publish yet – Keep a stash of posts you can then slowly release to your readers (like banks are doing with REO inventory). All major blogging platforms offer a scheduling feature of some sort.

2. Partner your way out of it

Hook up with non competing on complementing colleagues and help a brother out in times of need. When they’re busy, you guest post for them and vice versa. If you both get busy, hit the watercooler and you’re sure to find a healthy supply of folks with nothing but time on their hands.

3. Hire your way out of it

I’ve previously made the argument that the brokerage  of the future will require the agent to be a content producer in addition to being a sales person. So why not start now? Start a brokerage blog, have all agents contribute to it and share the load and leads. (Careful, that may be a slippery slope as the last thing some agents need to be doing is blogging). Or hire specialist agents and make it part of their duties to create content that generates business.

Thoughts?