4 Years Later, RCG is still Rock’n the Real Estate World

Today is Rain City Guide’s 4th Birthday!

When I hit submit on our Hello World post 4 years ago, I had no idea what I was embarking on… but what a fun journey it’s been. You’ll have given me so many chance to test out different tools, meet so many interesting people and take part in so many fabulous discussions. Thank you!

Seattle park

By the time we were 1 year old, I was savvy enough in the ways of linking to get the site ranked for having the sexiest real estate agents. Since then, I’ve tried to remain thankful to the RCG community and my family

This year, I want to continue the tradition by saying thanks to all of you that make RCG possible! You’all rock! 😉

And just to give you an idea of how RCG continues to rock the real estate world, I’ll end this post with a chart showing RCG’s growth since Feb ’06 (when I first started using Google Analytics). While the growth is no longer “exponential”, I don’t feel like I’m going out on a limb when I say there is no other local blog written by real estate professionals that generates nearly this much traffic! Interesting, traffic to the site continues to grow and last month we broke the broke the 100K PV benchmark for the first time! Obviously, none of this would be possible without so many awesome contributors and such an active real estate community in Seattle!

rcg-traffic-pv

Thank you all!

Two Years and Still Learning…

Mind if I reminisce a bit?

When I started Rain City Guide two years ago today, I honestly didn’t see the big picture.

I built the site because I *knew* I had to market my wife’s budding real estate business and I didn’t want to spend any money… (Even if I wasn’t a cheapskate at heart, my job as a transportation planner didn’t provide a lot extra money to begin with). Blogging was cheap and interesting (and I’ll admit it helped that I was familiar with the technology having hand-coded travel blogs going back as far back as 2000), but most importantly it would allow me to focus my wife’s marketing energy on something that wouldn’t siphon money from my family’s bank account.

But then I started doing some research and I realized that I could probably still make an impact because of my first-mover status. There were a few Seattle agents blogging at the time (Jim Reppond and Beau Betts come to mind…), but I could tell that neither of them were really harnessing the power of blogs to function as a local newspaper on a very niche topic.

It has become cliché to mention that in this latest incarnation of the internet (web2.0 for lack of a better world), the user has become the content creator. One of the lessons I try to drive home in my seminars is that this same “user” is you. Thanks to the power of blogs, you can now become the publisher of your own newspaper (What would Abbie do with wifi?).

The power of self-publishing (and the part that is easily overlooked) is that you do not have to create the news… You just have to report it (preferably in an interesting way!).

I see so many agents get stuck on their blogging because they are trying to say something novel, unique and/or brilliant with every post. Very few people are that talented and it is not a skill necessary skill to either selling real estate or successful blogging. As a publisher of content, it is much more important to add a little personal insight into the aggregated knowledge of others.

So, what is the big picture? Enjoy the journey because the destination is unknown!

My advice? Enjoy yourself, make friends, get an education, invoke change in yourself, ask questions, play hard, experiment, and, most importantly, be prepared to fail.

But I’d be doing myself and everyone else a big disservice if the best I could do after two years of blogging was pontificate for a few paragraphs. The reality is that the thing I most value in RCG is the community. Through 1,010 posts (1,011 when I hit publish!) and 9970 comments, I’d like to think that we’ve not only created one hell of an interesting conversation, but that we’ve managed to learn a few things along the way. Thank you for participating!