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Don't make all statistics an email delivery; give them some in your open content to illustrate that you are the place to come to keep up with market information and trends. Give up valuable statistical information in the open part of posts on your blog, but reserve detailed reports for your Premium Content Subscribers.
An example would be taking the hotsheet report for the last two weeks and telling them how many properties sold in that time frame, plus possibly the average and median prices. Then, for your premium subscribers, a detailed report by property type and area with any of your personal comments on area trends and what it means to have your expertise in this dynamic market.
Also use restrictive MLS rules to your advantage. It is not allowed to advertise the listed properties of another broker without their consent. When one agent I deal with started offering special detailed reports about specific properties not thier listings, the competition consulted the state association's attorney to see if they could stop them. The ruling was that, as long as that agent prospect/customer/client requested the information, they could serve them by providing it. So, they used this to produce "Value Alerts" for properties they identify as such. And, they state that they can only provide this information to those who request it, thus they sign up for the alerts.
There are a number of ways to offer this content, but for regular websites or free blog services, you can just ask for an email address and then send it to them. If you're offering a lot of the information in various places on the site, you can create email addresses that will trigger automatic delivery from your email system.
If you're blogging with WordPress, you can password protect whole posts, providing the password to those who subscribe so that they can view those posts in the future. That workes well for many until I found the MemberWing plugin. It costs $79 for a license, but it's well worth it to me. This plugin allows you to give up free and open statistical information at the top of a post, and have the premium content at the bottom hidden from view. There is a box announcing the content and offering free subscription to view it.
Some of this content is embedded reporting from the MLS, using Docstoc* to easily get it into the blog post. Other is just more in-depth statistics broken out in price ranges or by area. Either way, you will get a great response, with MemberWing handling their sign-up, setting them up in WordPress as a subscriber, and emailing them their login information. Here is to better serving our clients and seeing your business grow!
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