Every real estate agent who has flirted with blogging needs to pick up a copy of Hugh Hewitt's book Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World. Better yet, read it, and see how it impacts your strategies for real estate marketing. I'm adding the book to my homeschooled kids' required reading list. It's that important.

Why would I recommend a book by a nationally known political commentator to a readership of real estate agents across the political spectrum? That could be dangerous, as I certainly don't want to lose readers over politics.

But Blog is not chiefly about politics. If you read my thoughts on real estate marketing, I don't care whether you're left, right, or middle of the road, politically. If you want to capture viewership on your website (as in "more leads and more sales"), then you must first capture readership. You must learn the value of text. You must learn to blog.

Hugh's gem of a book provides a captivating synopsis of the history of information dissemination, from the earliest days of human writing thousands of years ago, to the modern proliferation of electronic mass media into the hands of the common man.

Make no mistake, Hugh's short book is not a dry read: it can be digested in a day if you're so inclined. Though an accomplished lawyer and professor of constitutional law, he is also a skillful orator, writer, and radio commentator. He'll keep you informed, entertained, and inspired.

Best of all, he explains the society-altering impact of blogging on the political, business, and societal landscape. What real estate agent out there hasn't heard about blogging, and the impact it has made on the real estate business? I rest my case.

With Gutenberg's invention of the printing press came the ability of a publisher to communicate to the masses, and this makes a great analogy to the modern blog. While the printing press put information into the hands of publishers, there were still few publishers in the world. As publishing technology got cheaper, the world saw more publishers. Now with the rise of blogs as a communication platform, anyone with ten minutes of free time can start a blog and communicate with the world.

Of course, Hugh doesn't get into real estate SEO (search engine optimization) and real estate lead conversion. That's my job here at TSS. But he does convey in no uncertain terms the enormity of the blogging phenomenon, and why leaders in business need to get ahead of the information-dissemination curve. Blogging is not for quaint personal journaling anymore. It's for leaders in real estate, including commercial, leasing, and residential.

As a real estate blogger, you are now editor, publisher, and reporter, all at once. When you sell a property, you can write about it immediately. When you have an opinion on local property values, you can post it in a heartbeat. When you get the scoop on the latest development in the city council meeting, you can be the first to blog about it. When interest rates hit the headlines, you can provide practical commentary from the trenches of the real estate business.

As a real estate agent, you are part of the new media in the sense that you have the ability to bring specialized information directly to the masses. You don't need to be a credentialed member of the press to talk about interest rates and the real-life affect on the local housing market. You don't need a degree from an Ivy league school of journalism to report on local development plans in your city.

Solomon wrote "Of making many books there is no end." If that was true of books, it's even more true of blogs. There is no shortage of subjects to blog about. Are you taking advantage of your ability to reach online readers via your blog?

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