Lead Generation 1.5 - Pay for leads and blog too!
I've been discussing how lead generation paradigm is shifting from 1.0 - paying for lame leads - to 2.0 blogging and 2.x syndicating blog content as currency to get leads. Then I read at Joel's FoREM that RISMedia has instituted a kind of Tom Sawyer "blogging" program where participants pay RISMedia $2,000/month for writing articles about their locale.
It's a collision of the old 1.0 "pay $2,000 for the leads" and 2.x syndicate blog content to get leads. RISMedia is not only selling expensive ad space but also getting bloggers to do the work of writing.
LOCAL BLOG NETWORK PARADIGM
RISMedia is in fact creating a local blog network on a national level, where each city is being sold as an exclusive for $24,000/year to one writer/agent. The financial hurdle imposes limits on the number of national contributors and actually makes the mapsite easier to use - if I'm a San Francisco consumer, I would just visit the San Francisco "blog".
(Homescopes map of bloggers)
Local blog networks like Homescopes use the same paradigm - consumers find the local blog network and are directed to the individual blogs via mapsite.
Finally, is there consumer traffic flowing through RISMedia, a more real estate business oriented online publication? Traffic stats at RISMedia are hard to find so if we resort to Alexa stats above, it seems RISMedia's traffic is similar to Joel's FoREM... maybe Joel can get bloggers to write for FoREM for $24k too.
Here's a simple comparison table:
| Factor | RISMedia Local | Local Blog Network |
| Cost of implementation | $2,000 / month | ~$200 for set up + $30/month per blogger |
| Traffic | Established, but about the same as blog FoREM | Starts from scratch |
| Quality of traffic | Do consumers know RISMedia, a real estate industry news service? | Develops organically |
| Content ownership | RISMedia-owned | Author-owned |
| At the end of 12 months | Need to resubscribe for $24,000/year again | Author has own blog property that develops throughout their career |
| Metaphor | Big budget ad campaign to develop brand name recognition quickly | Like a blog, relying on organic development |
Technorati Tags: RISMedia, FoREM, blogging, lead generation, advertising, real estate blog
Inman, RISmedia, Brokeragentnews and RealtyTimes these sites attract more real estate professionals than consumers. It might not be such a bad idea if your market is b2b.
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Your right. If an agent signs up for this believing they will reach their customer through RISMedia, they do not understand who their customer is.
On the other hand, RISMedia articles are indexed/included by many news aggregators including Google News. If all of my posts show up in Google News - it could be worth the $2k/mo.
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The local network Blog is a home run. It's informative, entertaining and drives business to a group of Realtors that have a strong local network.
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Sounds like a great deal for FoREM -- I certainly bet Joel would happily take $24k per contributor...
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I thought blogging was free for the most part. I think they have this backwards. RIS should be paying to have content added.
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I can only hope my competition embraces this misguided approach to reaching consumners of real estate information. ALL ABOARD THE CLUE-LESS TRAIN! Please, let them spend their entire marketing budget on the prequel to web 2.0. It's redines the meaning of the Long Tail--kinda like watching a re-run of Back to the Future. YIKES!
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