It was so much fun to stop off in Seattle last week to give the seminar in downtown. Meeting up with Rhonda and Jillyane (and potentially a new contributor I’ll introduce soon!) was awesome!

One of the tidbits I share with the real estate professionals in the audience that seems to resonate well (at least based on the feedback I’m getting) is when I explain to them that even the non-bloggers in the audience are already writing blog posts, but they are not getting credit for it. Here’s my logic in a nutshell…

Assumption #1: Writing a blog post is just like sending a webmail (via Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, etc), except that it is one step easier. With a webmail you need to (1) click on “write” or “compose” message, (2) fill in the email address of recipient, (3) fill in the title of email, (4) write your message, and (5) click “send”. Blogging is one step simpler because you do not need for step 2, i.e. fill in the email address of the recipient since a blog post is essentially an “email to the world.” Otherwise, all the steps are essentially the same with the final step being “publish” instead of “send”.

Assumption #2: The sent-items folder for most real estate professionals is already filled with good stuff that they are already experts on… For most real estate agents, the sent-items folder of their email program is likely to find information on neighborhoods, mortgage and closing process, local events, etc..

Because most agents are already sharing lots of their knowledge via email and because a blog post is nothing more than an email to the world, hopefully, you’ll start to see how I can say that most agents are already blogging… The idea that they are not getting credit for their knowledge stems from the fact that if a professional has a lot of stored up information in their “sent items” folder, then the search engines and other bloggers can’t give them credit for this knowledge. The last bit is critical to the seminar, but not necessarily to this blog post… 😉

Interestingly, both Steve Rubel (Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center) and Greg Swann (Feed guarding: Protecting your weblog content from theft — or worse fates . . .) wrote articles today that either demonstrate the blurring of email and blogging (i.e. blogging via email) or take it for granted (i.e. RSS syndication).

By the way, I’ve been taking my own advice about unleashing the “knowledge” from my sent-items folder over on the seminar blog by publishing answers to many of the questions that I’ve been getting from seminar participants. I’ve been inundated with email questions lately which is great for providing me blog content, but not so good in terms of providing me time to answer everyone quickly! 🙂