Jennifer's Blog

Blog­ging for me hasn’t always been about pass­ing on help­ful tid­bits. Like many using blogs for mar­ket­ing pur­poses, my first blog was an online vehi­cle to sell our home in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. Our real­tor thought it was a great idea and put the link on the flyer that home shop­pers grabbed to learn more about our home. I found the expe­ri­ence insight­ful. I wrote my first blog from the per­spec­tive of our home. One day it was all about all the roses in the front yard. Another day it fea­tured our hot tub. And yet another the pre­mium hard­wood floors that we installed through­out the upstairs and down­stairs.  To my husband’s lik­ing, even the bar­beque got in on the action.

The list became end­less; upgraded mar­ble, curb appeal, enter­tain­ment cen­ter, din­ing room, front yard curb appeal, our patio – you get the point. Our home sold within two weeks. It didn’t hurt that the mar­ket – espe­cially in our neigh­bor­hood ­– had increased nearly 50 per­cent. 

But besides that, nume rous peo­ple told our real­tor that they became so engaged with the daily blogs that they found them­selves com­ing back just to see what our house was talk­ing about next. 

It was so fun that my hus­band and I couldn’t resist giv­ing our hot tub a vaca­tion. It vis­ited the White House, Stone­henge, the Great Wall, the Red Sea, the union of Camilla Parker Boyles & HRH Prince Charles and so on. Some­one that fol­lowed the blog ended up buy­ing it.

What­ever you do, HAVE FUN WITH IT! 

And blog­ging from your home’s POV is great if you want to offload your cur­rent fur­ni­ture with updated stuff for your new digs. The new own­ers bought three rooms of our fur­ni­ture (even two cribs) and an 8x10 rug. Why? Hon­estly, after see­ing the images of our fur­ni­ture in my blog, they had a hard time imag­in­ing any­thing else. 

I also blogged when we sold our last home in San Diego. The tool was use­ful, and we had great com­ments but the mar­ket took a dive and even my blog couldn’t res­cue it imme­di­ately. So we patiently waited while our Feng Shui home blogged about its dual lily ponds and its moon­gate and its detached casita and the over-water bridge that wel­comed vis­i­tors from the moon­gate to the front door.

I set the stage every­day by upload­ing images our home – two mas­ter bed­rooms,  a green onyx floor, Mer­bau hard­wood floors, built-in stain­less steel fridge, built-in bar­beque and the list goes on. I even uploaded some pics of hot air bal­loons float­ing across our nearby canyon, know­ing that soon a fam­ily would fall in love with it the way we did. And it hap­pened. It always does. Some­times you have to work a lit­tle harder depend­ing on the cir­cum­stance in your par­tic­u­lar market.

So here’s another tip: Always account for vari­able change, and be flex­i­ble.  If you’re using your blog as a mar­ket­ing tool to drive traf­fic and ulti­mately sales – even if it’s WOM (word-of-mouth), which is pow­er­ful and deserves it’s own blog – that my friend is the power of blog­ging. 

Once peo­ple hear that I have a pub­lished book they imme­di­ately share the one that stirs in their head. The one they just can’t get out. Trapped for eter­nity. Shack­led to their Black­berry, email, mobile or social cal­en­dar because there just isn’t enough time or they just can’t make it work. Pages keep spit­ting from their mouth twenty min­utes later. I inter­ject that it’s help­ful to put it on paper to no avail when more of the plot pours out. What they may not know is that there is an unof­fi­cial rule to ever see your work pub­lished:

WRITE, DON’T TELL

The rea­son is sim­ple. As long as you tell the story there’s no urgency to write it. Chances are the more you tell the less you’re apt to ever see it grace your mon­i­tor much less any­thing else. One of two things occur at this point: either you fool your­self into think­ing you’ve already writ­ten it and you for­get about until you’re too old to care or one of your endur­ing pals has taken the lib­erty to use your great tale as the basis for his or her best-selling novel. Either way, where does that get you?

If your ambi­tion is fic­tion, maybe you’re wor­ried about descrip­tive lan­guage. In this case, you’ll need to describe the scene in such graphic detail that any­one hold­ing your read is mes­mer­ized. This brings up another impor­tant admo­ni­tion which I learned from a bril­liant writ­ing coach years ago:

SHOW, DON’T TELL

Both have merit. While not all writ­ing coaches agree on “Show, Don’t Tell,” you can’t escape the fact that the words you put on every page ARE your read­ers eyes. There are still rea­sons why you might want to tell your read­ers per­ti­nent infor­ma­tion like back­ground his­tory or a back­story of a char­ac­ter, but when you want read­ers to visu­al­ize a scene, then show­ing is the only way to do it.