This week I had the distinct pleasure of being asked to judge Project Blogger. For those who don’t know, Project Blogger is unique experiment in which 10 blogging coaches each training a real estate blogging apprentice for 4 months with the goal of creating a successful blog!

Each week, these blogs are critiqued by “blog gurus” and industry leaders like Matt Heaton (ActiveRain), Mike Simonsen (Altos Research), Keith Garner (NAR), David Gibbons (Zillow), and Jessica Swesy (Inman). You can find the Project Blogger Week 11 Round Up on the Project Blogger site.

In addition to providing Project Blogger apprentices with constructive feedback,
I also hope to provide an approach and set of criteria that all bloggers
can use to improve the marketing effectiveness of their blogs.

[Disclosure Statement - I borrowed this statement from Mike at Altos Research since it also applies to me - I know some of the team members personally. Some are friends, business partners, and users or subscribers of our service. That said, I have done my best to be impartial]

Judging Criteria – Guidelines for Marketing-Driven Blogging:
Everyone judges blogs differently! Many people get into blogging to indirectly make revenue (sales or advertising), make friends (social networking), or simply to make hay (fun hobby)! In the former case, your blog becomes a marketing vehicle for your business or yourself. When evaluating blog, I generally use a set of criteria that looks at the effectiveness of online media from a marketing perspective. Believe it or not, new media marketing has a number of similarities to old media marketing as you can see from my list:

• Originality of content: Nobody reads old news! If every newspaper carried the SAME stories, you would only read ONE newspaper. People don’t ready blogs that carry “old news” so originality and relevance is important.
• Freshness of content: This is also known as frequency. Newspaper come out everyday day! Not occasionally. If you want people to read your blog and visit with any frequency you have to post new content regularly!
• Use of Photo and Graphics: Pictures are perhaps the biggest pull for newspapers. Imagine newspapers without photos! Okay, imagine blogs without picture – hopefully you get the point. People like picture and they like moving picture (video) better !
• Site Utility and Design: Your site is the container in which your blog posts sit in! Make it look good and it’s a plus. In the newspaper world we called brand and print quality. No one likes a cheap flimsy black and white newspaper – the ones that leave ink smudges on your fingers.
• SEO Sensibility: These are things you can do or ways you can write that increase the likelihood that your blog will garnish organic traffic. Personally, I think some of these are important. If your newspaper is not available on the rack, no one will buy it. I could spend hours on this but to summarize here are a couple of pointers:
  • Links to other blog posts or sites (adds relevance, add trackbacks, and almost always gets the other blog author to visit)
  • Good descriptive titles for your posts and good use of keywords (gets them picked up by search engines)
  • Registering your site with Technorati and other blog search engines
  • Ability to translate your blog to other languages

Judging Results, Feedback and Tips
Based on this criteria I picked the top 5 teams and tried to provide feedback to all of the teams. I also gave some extra weight to the # of posts made during this judging period. From the winning entries I also provided 2 visual breakdowns to illustrate some of my points. Marketing people tend to be visual – so sometimes its easier to show people things than to write about them!

My picks for this week are:

1. Jackie Colson-Miller (with Jim Cronin)
2. Ines Hegedus-Garcia (with Paul Chaney)
3. Tisza Major-Posner (with Drew Meyers)
4. Julie Ferenzi (with Jeff Turner)
5. Kevin Tomlinson (with Ardell Della Loggia)