CNN has a news show that comes on every Sunday morning called Reliable Sources. The show is hosted by Howard Kurtz and reports on and analyzes developments in the media. This Sunday Reliable Sources reported on, among other things, Hugh Heffner and his desire to buy back a controlling interest in Playboy.

There was another story, however, that I found more interesting than Hef. It was about a blogger based in Los Angeles named Eric Richardson. According to Richardson, downtown LA has gone through a revival and the area now features cutting-edge fashion, shops, bars and restaurants. Richardson writes a blog about the LA revival called Blogdowntown.com.

Richardson has been writing online about the goings on in LA for the past five and a half years, apparently with great success. Guess how Richardson now plans to extend his blog? That’s right, PRINT. Richardson is starting a newspaper. The key to Richardson’s decision is that his newspaper, like his blog, is extremely focused. I thought that Richardson, who looks to be in his late twenties, did a great job on Reliable Sources of articulating why print is important to his advertisers. Here’s an excerpt from the interview between Kurtz and Richardson:

KURTZ: OK. And now you’ve gone to paper. You just handed this to me… the “Blog Downtown Weekly.” I thought everything was going digital these days. You seem to be going backwards. Why start a newspaper?

RICHARDSON: You know, it’s amazing, the power that you can get out of just having something sitting in a shop, somebody walks in, they’re grabbing their coffee, they don’t know what they’re looking for, and you catch their eye and they pick it up. And that’s something that we’re never going to be able to reach online. And so for us, the ability to reach people who don’t know they’re looking for us is something that print can do that we can’t do any other way.

KURTZ: Well, I love print. You write in your publisher’s letter, “There’s something uniquely powerful about a newspaper that’s sitting at the cafe just waiting to catch your eye” I guess you just kind of told me that. And “This is an effort to reach people who might not find you online.”

RICHARDSON: Yes.

KURTZ: But now you have costs. You have to publish this, you have to distribute it.

RICHARDSON: Oh, exactly.

KURTZ: That sounds like a pretty tall order these days.

RICHARDSON: You know, at the same time, it’s amazing, the value that people place on the print medium in terms of our advertisers. As we go out to businesses around downtown, they love that same idea. They want to be in the cafe. And so the value that we’re able to offer them is really an upgrade over what we’re able to do.

As Richardson states, it’s hard to get found online. I think that Richardson’s newspaper will be successful because it is focused on a specific subject: downtown LA. I also think that because of enhanced exposure to his brand, the traffic to his blog will escalate.

I recently talked to my old friend Bill Scott about the Homes & Land offering. Bill and I go way back, having worked together at the CENTURY 21 Regional Office in Miami where Bill was the Executive Director. Bill is still active in real estate as a Senior Vice President with a major franchise

Bill reiterated to me that one of the problems agents are having today is meeting the expectations of sellers. The market is tough and sometimes home sellers feel like their agent is not doing enough to promote the listed property.

This can be a perception issue. There’s nothing really exciting to report or the agent is embarrassed about the lack of traffic to the listing, so the agent fails to communicate with the seller. Lack of communication implies to the seller that the agent is not trying hard enough to sell the home.

Bill especially liked a couple of the programs Homes & Land uses to help our advertisers stay in touch with sellers. With our Client Contact program, Homes & Land magazine is mailed to the home sellers, illustrating that the listed property is being advertised in a quality publication. We also include a personalized letter from the President of Homes & Land endorsing the marketing efforts of the agent.

Something else that works well in communicating with sellers is our Wall Street Journal Spotlight program. For only $20, advertisers can buy a geo-targeted featured listing that appears at the top of searches on WSJ.com. This is way under the list price, and sellers really appreciate that their home is promoted through a great brand like the Wall Street Journal.

Your local Homes & Land Publisher can give you complete details on both of these programs.

While it is technically possible to directly copy/paste content, it isn’t technically legal to do so. There are however a few solutions to help you share content from a website – even your own website or blog with all of your internet friends.

First – there is a Facebook Toolbar that bolts onto Mozilla Firefox, the free Open Source web browser. This handy Firefox add-on allows you to search Facebook from anywhere, receive notifications, connect with friends, upload photos and share content that you find on any other web page.

For those of you who use Internet Explorer, there is even a version of the Facebook Toolbar for IE that is also available.

Google also has a similar solution called the Google Toolbar that provides content sharing capabilities. Additional services such as Gmail, YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Bookmarks and even a Facebook gadget are integrated into the toolbar, giving you easy access to your digital world from a single location.

If you prefer for things to be a bit more automated and use your free time for writing great content of your own, hop on over to RSS Graffiti, install this little gem, point it to an RSS/Atom feed, set your configuration preferences and your Facebook wall is populated automatically.

In fact – if you are my Facebook friend – you’re probably reading this on my wall as we speak – and you probably thought I spent a lot of time making Facebook posts…

What you may find surprising though is that “69% said they pay more attention to print ads than those online.” This says a lot about where you should advertise, especially if you have luxury listings. To reach your target audience, you need high-quality print advertising like Homes & Land.

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