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Yesterday, we had the good fortune to have the always interesting and entertaining Jay Thompson (@phxREguy) on our #RTB on the Radio show. As many of you will know, Jay is:

• The winner of Inman News‘ 2009 “Most Innovative Blog.”
• The founder, owner and broker of Thompson’s Realty based in Phoenix, AZ.
• A totally unique figure within the real estate space.

You can listen to yesterday’s archived show here. Summarizing the highlights of our conversation with Jay, here are our “Top 10 Thompson takeaways” (in no particular order):

1. Jay’s blog is the central hub of all his business. He directs everything (his neighborhood websites, his Tweets, his Facebook posts, etc.) back to the blog.
2. Jay’s focus is on his blog (vs his traditional website) for the following reasons:
   • 
     
     It’s easier to update than his traditional website.
   • He enjoys writing very much, and the blog is the more natural place to do that.
   • Using the web to create business is “all about content” creation, and the blog is the easiest place to do that.
   • Blog posts have “legs” that other things – like Tweets and Facebook posts – do not. That is, he’s picked up clients from blog posts he wrote three or four years ago (he gave an example of a post he wrote about Canadians buying real estate in Phoenix, and another about various posts he’s written about local neighborhoods), and he doesn’t believe that this “longevity” aspect is applicable to Tweets or Facebook posts.
3. Jay gets approximately 80% of his business from his blog (although he admits that calculating ROI from any particular web source is very hard to do).
4. Jay’s goal for 2010 is to create 4,000 web leads for his agents from his various web activities (with about 90% of those leads coming from the blog).
5. Jay does no “traditional” marketing. Everything is web-based. As he said in an interview he did with Chris Smith (@TechSavvyAgent of TechSavvyAgent.com), “If the internet went away tomorrow, I’d have to find a new job.” When I asked him about this quote, he went on to say that he would literally have to re-work every aspect of his business if using the internet were no longer an option.
6. In terms of blog traffic (he now gets as many as 3,000 unique visitors per day), Jay built that up over the five years he’s been blogging. He said that the growth has been a “slow and steady climb.” He believes that consistency is crucial in creating a successful blog. He started off writing one post per week, but he said that he didn’t start seeing results until he focused on publishing posts with much greater frequency, which he did for two to three years to get his visitor traffic up to the level where it is today.
7. Jay doesn’t write blog posts with any specific plan in mind, and sometimes “Jay writes for Jay.” He simply writes what’s in his heart, and people relate to the “realness” of it. He said that “being genuine and being yourself” are two of the most important factors in successful blogging. By “being who you are,” you naturally attract other people who think like you (which means you’re probably attracting higher-quality clients from the perspective of having good relationships with them). He thinks that people “work with agents they like,” not the ones who talk about “being number 1” or how wonderful they are.
8. Blogging and Social Media are “not a magic pill” for agents to use to become successful. He quoted another person who said, “If you have a crappy business, a blog isn’t going to help.” He also said that “blogging absolutely works, but it’s very hard work.” Jay has a new business designed to help agents become better bloggers. You can check that out at RealEstateBlogPro.com.
9. Jay believes that one of the best aspects of real estate is that there are so many different ways that you can succeed within the business. He does believe, however, that blogging, technology and Social Media “are the future” and that these tools offer tremendous opportunities in terms of efficiency and economies of scale.
10. When Jay started his brokerage, he had no specific plan to grow the business. Thompson’s Realty was simply a vehicle through which he, his wife and a friend could conduct business in a financially responsible fashion (because they saw no value in their prior brand). Since that time, he’s grown to 23 agents in about two years. When I asked for details, Jay made the following comments:
    • He’s done no active recruiting of any kind.
    • He’s attracted these agents purely from his web activities (again, primarily his blog).
    • He’s attracted the RIGHT agents because they are connecting with his views/beliefs/philosophies. This process, for the most part, pre-screens out the wrong people (he has rejected a few who have approached him, but they are the exception rather than the rule).
    • He has no brick & mortar; his operations are entirely virtual.

We hope that you learned something from Jay – we know that we did!