Jim Cosgrove of Newcastle Square Realty: Small Business Blog Interview

Jim Cosgrove of Newcastle Square Realty responded to being featured yesterday. In his response, he let us in on some obstacles to getting other employees to participate in the blog. Jim is pretty smart in not taking on the total responsibility of the blog himself (if he can help it), but rather encourages his coworkers to write on the blog as well. So far, only one other employee has taken him up on the offer, but blogs are so straightforward, I'm convinced that when the others give it a try, they'll be hooked. Here's the email:

Brian,

Thank you very much for your interest and for choosing our blog! In the beginning I was pretty convinced that only my family was ever going to read the blog but we're starting to hear from quite a few people that they've seen this or that post. What has surprised us the most is that we intended this to be for an audience of out of staters ("from away" as it's said here). But I hear from local people all the time that they read it and just today the library called and asked us to mention an upcoming concert in our blog.

Our clients love having their property presented there and we've talked about the need to strike a balance between showing listings and providing content about our area.

I read a lot of real estate blogs before we started and quite frankly found most of them as dry as toast so we really strive to make ours enjoyable and interesting to read. I think if it were just strictly "real estate" it could get old quick.

The blog was created on typepad and flyte new media did the original set up for us when we had them overhaul our website. Those guys (and ladies) are terrific, I only understand about half of what they say but they are very patient and don't laugh (too much).

So far Tom is the only other broker here who will give me content, he's just a little younger than the others and I think the rest of them are somewhat intimidated. One of our brokers had a moose sleeping in his back yard for a couple days and I asked him to get a picture and we'd put it in the blog. I thought that was something folks would be interested in. Well the next day he told me that his wife had a terrific picture of him and the moose. Great, email the picture and we'll get it up. Well the film is still in the camera and we have to wait until his wife uses up the roll.

Some weeks ideas just seem to be there and posts just write themselves. Other times selling real estate and running an office gets in the way and that's why there are fewer posts. My goal was 2-3 per week and we haven't quite gotten to that consistently.

Thanks again. I've got to go get this on the blog!

Jim Cosgrove

Thanks Jim. I'll be looking forward to seeing how the blog develops.

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