Are you a real estate agent or broker new to the online marketing scene? Have you thought about starting a blog for real estate marketing purposes? If so, the following tip will give you an endless source of content ideas, while saving you time and energy in the process.

Blogs Need Quality Content By posting original, relevant content to your blog on a regular basis, you'll eventually increase your blog's traffic and search engine visibility. But your blog needs to be "fed" regularly with content that readers can use and search engines can find.

The challenge is coming up with quality content on a daily or weekly basis.

Here's a solution:

Get a Robotic Research Assistant Imagine having a robotic Web crawler working for you 24 hours a day, scouring the Internet for new content related to your local real estate scene (or any other topic of your choosing). Well, that's exactly what you get with Google Alerts.

Using Google Alerts, you can enter a key phrase (like "Texas real estate" or "Buying a home in Dallas") and then be notified whenever Google indexes a new page containing that phrase. In other words, when Google sees something added to the Web that's related to your topic, it will alert you via email.

Many of the alerts you get will come from press releases distributed online. That makes Google Alerts a great way to stay informed about news and developments relevant to your chosen topic.

What's the benefit of all this? You get a steady stream of content ideas and information for your real estate marketing blog. You can then summarize this information in the form of a blog posting. You can attract and educate readers while positioning your

Of course, it helps to have a lead-capturing system built into your blog or website, in order to capitalize on all that traffic. But that's another article entirely.

Make the Content Your Own Take the information you find and summarize it in your own words. Don't just copy and paste it directly into your blog. Put a personal touch on it. Filter it and explain it to your readers. Your readers will appreciate your efforts, and so will the search engines (they prefer original content). You'll also avoid any reprint or copyright issues by making the content your own.

There you have it, a robotic research assistant to help you with your real estate marketing efforts. Try it out for yourself. Just visit Google's website and click on the "more" link. Then click on "Alerts" and fill in the requested information. Now you've got your own Internet watchdog … and he never sleeps!