Are you using your blog as means to reach homeowners at risk of foreclosure? Here is a step-by-step plan to create a Public Service Announcement (PSA) to reach your market and help those homeowners:

1. Get a list of non-profit agencies who can help. The key word here is nonprofit. Nonprofit government agencies and private agencies have trained, HUD-certified counselors who can help homeowners facing foreclosure. Example: Arizona has a very active Foreclosure Coalition with members who support distressed homeowners. Don't Borrow Trouble is a Web site and group founded by Freddie Mac to support distressed homeowners.
2. Create a video and keep it simple! Use your webcam or Flip camera to create a very simple, one-minute long message. Don't worry if you don't know how to use fancy editing software. Use simple sheets of paper and print Web sites and telephone numbers and hold them up to the camera to illustrate your point as shown below.
3. Insert the PSA on your web site(s) and blog(s). Let help some people save their homes!
   

INSPIRATION: Bernice Ross

In her excellent book, Real Estate Dough, Bernice Ross, Ph.D. reprints an article I wrote last year in Realtown, Let's Learn How to Help Americans KEEP Their Homes. She titles that section: "Recipes for Success, A Crisis of Conscience." She says:

"Frances Flynn Thorsen, in an articled entitled, "Short Sales are Not the Route to Financial Redemption for Homeowners," (Realtown, March 3, 2008) raised an issue that almost no one in the real estate industry has addressed. In our rush to become foreclosure experts and to close more short sales, we have neglected the most important role that we could play in resolving the heartbreaking tragedy of this situation -- assisting homeowners in restoring their hope and providing them with a path to staying in their homes ... she makes an impassioned plea to put our energy first in helping people stay in their homes rather than helping to boot them out. "

INSPIRATION: Brad Inman

Brad Inman, industry visionary and founder of Inman News, HomeGain, and TurnHere video, posed the following challenge to the real estate industry last year at an Inman Connect Conference in New York City: " How can you use Web 2.0 to help our neighbors who need us more than ever?"