Blogger vs. WordPress vs. Blogsite...?

[Ryan Ward]

I just looked into moveable type. Looks like a very strong platform but their free end user license makes me think it would be hard to use it for real estate blogging. it really does look like a strong solution though.

Whagt about typepad?

[bfrench]

Smuck:

:-) I've been mistaken for a lot of things - spam included. I just get carried away with deep explanations - it drives my wife nuts.

Bigtoe:

"A static website can contain the same good content."

Sure - no disagreement here, but if you put your good stuff there, how will it find it's way into 150 syndication engines that are constantly churning on RSS feeds? How can it be picked up bu other publishers and syndicated? How will it be discovered by bots that only read XML formats? I don't see much benefit in putting your best content on cinderblocks - giving it legs will likely return far more traffic, won't it?

"Your business is selling franchises to us so your outlook is completely different."

To be clear, I'm not in real estate at all - Real Living is a client. I'm just a tech geek that created Blogsite, LapLink and a dozen other tools that stretch back to the early 1980's. ;-) Many real estate companies use our platform, but the bulk of our sales are in other industry segments - I know almost nothing about real estate except, I bought a house once.

"...having a workhorse website that performs by it's self without constant maintenance is important ..."

Totally agree - (shameful promotion here) this is why we created the idea of automated content briefings - they keep a blogsite fresh (and on-message)when the business owner is unable to post frequently. In my view, if you have little time to be a "blogger", you need to embrace the idea of automated content so you can compete with other businesses that want to spend a bunch of time trying to out-blog you. "A" is for automation - we don't do it enough.

"realliving" does better than the blog but is still only on page 5"

Hmmm - my google output shows both the website and the blogsite on page 1 dominating 7 of the top ten spots.

"...apt to disclose "secrets" on a MySpace site that they won't disclose on a formal website."

True, but how will that translate to real business or real brand equity?

"It may be that Facebook profiles will become the blogs of tomorrow."

Indeed, that could happen, but not likely. There are many things that social platforms tend to frown upon - commercialism is a big one. If the activity doesn't translate into money for the network provider, they typically don't allow it. This is not to say that they won't offer some services that are brand and commercially intensive, but they have a vested interest in keeping the social network pristine so that it doesn't devolve into a marketing free-for-all which would, in turn, cause members to go elsewere. Consider that the switching costs in social networks is almost zero especially with the emergence of interchangable micro-formats.

And actually, you can syndicate 100% of yor blog to your FaceBook profile anyway, so why not do both with one solution?

BTW - this is a great site.