Archive for April, 2007

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Ok. So, by now you should have a blogging platform picked out, a web address for your blog, a title, and a short “About me” page. If not, read through the last 3 posts in the series for instructions.

Now, we will focus on some pre-launch items. These are the types of things that you’ll probably want to have done before the official launch of your local real estate blog.

1. Add your “About me” page. Most templated blogs will have a place for this. If not, you can simply write an actual blog post about yourself, and link to it from the home page. This should include a picture, and basic info. Make sure to list plenty of contact information as this will be one of the primary ways that people can contact you.
2. I recommend purchasing your own domain for the blog. Better yet, if you already have a real estate website, try to incorporate the blog into the website. My favorite way to do this is to create a directory off of your domain name like: www.mywebsite.com/blog I don’t recommend setting up a blog on a subdomain for SEO reasons that I won’t get into here. One of the reasons you want to have your own domain for you blog is because if you decide to change platforms down the road, you can still keep the same website.
3. Ask yourself, does your blog have all the features you want it to? Maybe after visiting some other blogs, it’s given you ideas on some of the things you want on your blog. Maybe it’s a button at the bottom of each post that lets you submit it to social bookmarking websites. Or maybe it’s a special subscriber counter. Whatever it may be, now is the time to look into those extra features. There is such a wide variety of extra features, that I will have to review them at a later date. **Many of these may only be for more advanced users, so don’t worry if you don’t know how to add features like these yet… they are simply bells and whistles.
4. Whether you know it or not, your blog has an RSS feed. If you don’t know what RSS is, check out our guide to rss before you read on. Most blog platforms will already have easy to use built in RSS feeds that you won’t need to alter in any way. Make sure that your feed is easily accessible on your website so people can easily subscribe. I also suggest signing up to a service like FeedBurner. Among other things, FeedBurner gives you a special URL like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/hismove that allows people to subscribe across many different platforms and offers a great way to keep track of your subscribers. Another thing you will find useful with feedburner is the ability to add an email subscription form to your blog. Just get the small piece of code from the Feedburner website, paste it into your blog, and you’re ready to go. A good alternative for email subscriptions is FeedBlitz. One more note on FeedBurner… if you are using wordpress, you might want to consider this plugin.
5. Does the blog have any kind of call to action? This is extremely important. After all, you’re trying to create new customers right? Your blog should have some kind of hook (besides good content). My favorite is the free property search tool. Offer a link to a tool that lets the customer search for properties right in your area. If you already have a real estate website, chances are good that you already have some kind of IDX MLS search tool. Simply link to it from your blog. My one suggestion with this is that you DON’T require the customer to give any contact information before they view the listings. Set yourself apart. I promise that this will add a huge level of stickiness to your blog and website. Here is a great example of a property search “hook” on a blog: St. Paul Real Estate, and as you can see, I’ve added a link on our example blog to search for listings: “THE ROCK” Castle Rock Real Estate Blog
6. Go to Technorati.com and sign up for a free account. Then “claim” your blog. This will allow technorati to start tracking links to your blog, and lets other Technorati users find you.
7. Add your blog to some of the different blog directories out there: DMOZ, Bloghub.com, StumbleUpon.com, Linkwith.us, GetBlogs.com, BlogFlux.com, BlogTopSites.com, BlogTopList.com, TopBlogArea.com, BlogCatalog.com, BlogHub.com, BlogRankings.com, Bloggernity.com, BlogExplosion.com, Blogarama.com, , bloggeries.com —— Real Estate Related Directories: Zillow Local Real Estate Blogs, Rembex, Real Estate Blog Directory. You can also try some of the paid directories.
8. MyBlogLog is also a great service that you should sign up for. It turns your blog into a kind of community center. You can visually see who has been visiting your blog, and you can interact with them easily. This is also a feature that is really nice to have on your site, so when you sign up your blog with their free service, you might want to consider getting the code to paste into your blog.
9. Sign up for ActiveRain.com it is an invaluable resource for real estate bloggers. It will also give you access to post community information on their other website: Localism.com We will talk about the benefits of both these sites in a later article.
10. Don’t get sucked into placing advertisements on your blog. I know the potential adsense revenue is tempting, but it will just clog up your site, and the $12 extra dollars a month just isn’t worth it. If you can rack up 500 readers, then you might want to re-evaluate it… but placing ads on a new blog is a very bad idea.
11. An optional step you may want to consider… Sign up with Flickr. It’s a great way to take all the pictures you use for the blog of your local area, and allow all your visitors to view them. You can create an entire album and let your visitors see what your market area looks like. I signed up for an account for my Castle Rock Blog, and put a link to the public picture viewing page from my blog home page.

There is a host of other things you can do to get your blog ready, but the best thing you can do is to simply start writing. So, in the next article, we will discuss what you should be writing about, and how to launch your new blog with a big splash.

I’m just about ready to launch my blog: “THE ROCK” Castle Rock Real Estate — I’ve added it to all the directories, set up an email subscription tool, opened up a flicker account, added a property search tool to the site, written an “About me” page, added a MyBlogLog tool, and added all the features that I want…. I think we’re about ready to launch!!

Resources:

• RSS Feed to subscribe to this series

• Subscribe by email to this series

• Get Full Coverage on our Blog

• View the Blog we use as an example in this series

**If you are following along, and and have started your own blog, I’d love to hear about it! I will even add it to my blogroll so that I can follow along with your progress.

Thanks for joining me in this series on how to start a local real estate blog. I wlll take you through step by step instructions on how to set everything up from start to finish.

Follow along with me as I give you hands on examples as I start my own local real estate blog from scratch: “THE ROCK” - Castle Rock Real Estate Blog

If you need help at any time with your new real estate blog, please let me know and I would be happy to assist you.

Sincerely,

Justin Smith justin(at)hismove.com

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This is probably one of the most important decisions you will make about your new blog. Who, What & Where do you want to target?

Since this is a series on how to start a “Local” real estate blog, we should probably go over some strategies concerning that.

WHERE are you going to target?? This may be a simple question for you to answer. Where do you currently farm?

Let me make a few suggestions… Think Niche. What I mean by that is don’t try to target “Los Angeles Real Estate”, or “Chicago Real Estate”. There is far to much competition, and you will simply get lost in the crowd. Here are a few examples:

• Instead of Phoenix, use Avondale, Goodyear, Paradise Valley, or Glendale

• Instead of Seattle, use Auburn, Kent, Bellevue, Kirkland, or Renton

• Instead of Dallas, use Carrollton, Garland, Mesquite, Desoto, or Richardson

• Instead of Chicago, use Oak Park, Oak Lawn, Elmhurst, Park Ridge, or Evanston

See what I mean? Depending on your area, there is a pretty good chance that you will be able to choose a market that has little to no real estate blogging competition.

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This brings us to the next step, which is deciding how to title your blog. This is another extremely important step that shouldn’t be overlooked. Your title not only draws people into want to read your posts, but it also tells the search engines what your blog is all about, and plays a significant role in your ranking.

I HIGHLY suggest that you use your target keywords in your title. You can see from our example blog how we incorporated our target market keywords right into the title:

“THE ROCK” - Castle Rock Real Estate Blog

So… be creative, choose your target carefully. There are alot of factors that go into choosing your target and titles. Here are a few:

1. The market you choose for your blog should be one that you have intimate knowledge of. You want to be able to have plenty of things to write about.

2. Once you’ve narrowed down a few markets, do some searches on Google and pay close attention to the results. Is there alot of competition in your area? Are there alot of sites that use the exact same keyword phrases you are searching for? This is very important as it will come in to play later down the road as you try to go for a high search engine ranking for your keywords. If you can’t decide which market to target, choose the one with the least amount of competition.

On the market I chose: “Castle Rock”. There is very little competition for the keywords: “Castle Rock Real Estate”, and since those exact keywords are in my title, it should take no time flat to rank well for that keyword.

As you can see from these search results, there are virtually no local real estate agent websites that rank on the first page. That tells me that no one is taking any time to optimize for those specific keywords.

3. Choose a title that is catchy. You don’t want a boring title like: “Glendale real estate blog”. Yes, those keywords should probably appear somewhere in your title, but that shouldn’t stop you from being creative. Here are a few blogs that have great titles to give you an example:

The Silver Bee

Phoenix Real Estate Guy

miOaklandCounty

SoundBiteBlog

Charlotte Real Estate Voice

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Choose Carefully!! This decision will likely have large implications in the near future as you start your new blog.

One piece of homework for the weekend… try to work on a short description for your blog: something about 1 sentence long that gives an accurate description of what your blog is about. Don’t be afraid to include your market keywords. You may also want to consider writing 2-3 paragraphs of bio information about yourself… you’ll want to have an “about me” page later on, and you should really have something to put in there… and try to throw a few testimonials in there as well if you have them.

The next post in this series will talk about getting ready to launch your new blog!

Resources:

• RSS Feed to subscribe to this series

• Subscribe by email to this series

• Get Full Coverage on our Blog

• View the Blog we use as an example in this series

**If you are following along, and and have started your own blog, I’d love to hear about it! I will even add it to my blogroll so that I can follow along with your progress.

Thanks for joining me in this series on how to start a local real estate blog. I wlll take you through step by step instructions on how to set everything up from start to finish.

Follow along with me as I give you hands on examples as I start my own local real estate blog from scratch: “THE ROCK” - Castle Rock Real Estate Blog

If you need help at any time with your new real estate blog, please let me know and I would be happy to assist you.

Sincerely,

Justin Smith justin(at)hismove.com

Ok… time to get started. I’m going to lay out a few basic options for you here:

You definitely have a few choices, but we will lay out few of the most common. If you are planning on following along with this series to learn how to start a successful real estate blog, I highly suggest that you choose either blogger, wordpress, or a CREN Blog…

• Blogger.com Hands down the easiest platform to use. I highly suggest this option for real estate agents that have little to no experience with html or web design. It will allow you to set up a blog in a very short amount of time, and customize it. No prior experience necessary. The most popular real estate blog on the internet uses blogger, and does just fine. If you think blogger.com is for you, sign up and start getting familiar with the interface. I will talk about how to title, and how to choose a URL for your blog in my next post.

• Wordpress.com Wordpress is a great platform that gives you thousands of “add ins” to choose from, and can accommodate basic all the way to advanced user levels. We use wordpress for the blog you are currently reading. Even though Wordpress is fairly easy to use for the beginner, I still tend to label it as an intermediate platform. It really helps if you know basic html, and know how to use a basic html editor. Otherwise, you may not be able to know how to implement many of the downloadable plugins that make wordpress so unique.

• Typepad.com I don’t have much experience with typepad. I do know that for their full featured service, there is a small monthly fee. Some people swear by it. From what I know, it is highly customizable, and does have many outside plugins of which some allow an easy one click installation. I think typepad is a decent platform, but if you are following along with this series on how to start a real estate blog, I won’t be able to give you any support or advice if you choose to use typepad.

There are a few other smaller blogging platforms that you may want to consider, but just keep in mind that most of them will charge you a set up fee and a monthly fee. Here are a few:

Tomato Blogs

RSS Pieces Blog

Realty Blogging Blog (free)

Ubertor (website + blog)

BlogStream (free)

Last but not least: The CREN Blog Platform (this is a free benefit of being a CREN member)… it has a very basic design, but is highly customizable, and has all the features you’d want to start.

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Here is the blog that we have chosen to use for this series: “THE ROCK” - Castle Rock Real Estate Blog

For our example, I have chosen the CREN Blog Platform. It’s easy to use, and can be customized any way I want. For those of you that aren’t members of CREN, don’t worry, there are plenty of great platforms out there. May I suggest trying blogger.com

Stay tuned, as next we will be discussing how to title your blog, how to customize it, and how to get ready to unveil it to the public!

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Resources:

• RSS Feed to subscribe to this series

• Subscribe by email to this series

• Get Full Coverage on our Blog

• View the Blog we use as an example in this series

**If you are following along, and and have started your own blog, I’d love to hear about it! I will even add it to my blogroll so that I can follow along with your progress.

Thanks for joining me in this series on how to start a local real estate blog. I wlll take you through step by step instructions on how to set everything up from start to finish.

Follow along with me as I give you hands on examples as I start my own local real estate blog from scratch: “THE ROCK” - Castle Rock Real Estate Blog

If you need help at any time with your new real estate blog, please let me know and I would be happy to assist you.

Sincerely,

Justin Smith justin(at)hismove.com

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This is something that’s been on my mind for a long time… For the real estate professional that wants to gain an online presence, but doesn’t know where to start… blogging is the vehicle. I’m going to give you a crash course on how to start your own localized real estate blog.

It is becoming a well known fact that blogging is one of the quickest and most effective ways to create new customers online. Real estate professionals have a unique opportunity to write about their communities, and drive traffic with content driven posts that people are really interested in.

So follow along with me as I walk you through a step by step process to show you how to drive traffic, create new customers, and have a lot of fun in the process.

The only thing that is required of you is dedication, a willingness to learn, and a small time commitment of 30-45 minutes per day - 5 days a week. That’s all it takes.

I also thought this would be a great opportunity to roll out our new blogging platform. This is a new benefit that we are offering for free to CREN members. It basically allows you to create your own blog with all the benefits of other platforms like blogger, wordpress, typepad, etc.

But, even if you aren’t a member of the Christian Real Estate Network, and want to know how to get started with blogging, don’t worry, we will cover all the different platforms and methods used to start a new blog.

Here is the link to the blog I will be using as an example: “THE ROCK” - Castle Rock Real Estate Blog I will be writing about my home town of Castle Rock, CO. I will show you from start to finish how to be successful at blogging about a local real estate market.

As a side note, there is a competition going on at the moment called “Project Blogger“. It is a blog coaching competition that features some of the brightest blogging minds in the real estate industry. Just to be upfront about my intentions… we aren’t going to try to compete on the side with Project Blogger. Our goal is purely educational.

Whereas many of the coaches in Project Blogger may not reveal some of their secrets, we are going to disclose everything!!! You will get all the raw nuts and bolts of how to start your own successful real estate blog.

So, I guess the only question is… are you going to come along for the ride???

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Resources:

• RSS Feed to subscribe to this series

• Subscribe by email to this series

• Get Full Coverage on our Blog

• View the Blog we use as an example in this series

**If you are following along, and and have started your own blog, I’d love to hear about it! I will even add it to my blogroll so that I can follow along with your progress.

Thanks for joining me in this series on how to start a local real estate blog. I wlll take you through step by step instructions on how to set everything up from start to finish.

Follow along with me as I give you hands on examples as I start my own local real estate blog from scratch: “THE ROCK” - Castle Rock Real Estate Blog

If you need help at any time with your new real estate blog, please let me know and I would be happy to assist you.

Sincerely,

Justin Smith justin(at)hismove.com

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Is your website visible to the search engines?  This is an obvious question, but you’d be surprised at how many people I’ve seen make this mistake.  It’s a shame…  they hire someone, or spend alot of time themselves on a website only to get on the phone with me and discover that all their work was in vain.

Search engines can only read text.  They can’t look at a picture and see the text that is on the picture, or even in a flash file.

Granted, your site might look really good with those spiffy flash graphics, but how much of your site is actually visible to the search engine.  Content (text) is a huge factor in your search engine ranking…  so try to use as little flash, javascript and photos as possible.  There is nothing wrong with those things, but don’t let it replace the text on your site.

There is a very simply tool that will let you see how much of your site has visible text to the search engines:

Search Engine Spider Simulator

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Despite all of the controversy surrounding Digg, it can still be a great way to drive some traffic. Case in point: we recently had a story perform pretty well on Digg, and it drove quite alot of traffic to the site. I realize that 25 diggs is really nothing compared to many of the popular stories, but it actually shows what is possible when people like the content.

I don’t spend much time on Digg anymore… I used to submit all of my posts there, but gave up eventually when I could never get more than 5-10 diggs. It seemed that the story would get buried since people saw that I was the author.

From all the articles I’ve read on the subject, there seems to be an elite group of top members of the site that dominate the entire community. But for all the bad press, the site still seems to work to a certain extent… It drove traffic to my site from another user that found my article interesting enough to digg.

One other thing I’d like to briefly go over is how much life Digg actually has left. The community is dominated by certain users, and it tends to favor the topics that those users like. Here is a hilarious article by QuadZilla that lists some of the easiest ways to get on Digg. The sad thing is that he’s right… Your story will not rate well if the topic relates to any of the following:

1. Liking George Bush
2. Liking Microsoft
3. Liking Fox News
4. Not believing in global warming
5. Any kind of press against liberals
6. bad press about Digg itself

But… there is still some life there I think, even despite all the problems. The biggest issue Digg is going to have in the very near future are sites like User/Submitter and Digg communities that team up to digg each other’s stories. This completely undercuts the whole system, and could bring it down eventually to a mere spammy portal.

Here is a status update on U/S… If they ever get off the ground, they will wreck havoc on Digg.

So… I don’t plan on spending more than 5 minutes a week on Digg, but there is still some value to it’s service and I haven’t completely written it off yet.

I’d better go… I need get to work on my anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-Microsoft, and pro-environmentalist/Clinton/Kevin Rose post…

I don’t usually like to write posts like this that paint other companies in a negative light, but sometimes it’s necessary to point things out for the safety of others, and for good conscience sake. There is a website called christianrealestateagents.com that has been around for a while now. They are a site that charges real estate agents to be listed on a directory type of service.

First of all, I have to say that I have nothing to gain by writing about their company. They operate under a completely different model than we do. We are membership and referral fee based, and they are simply a directory.

Here is some background… At one point they owned a website called ChristianRealtors.net (which we now own). Within a matter of months of this 2nd site being launched, we started receiving phone calls (about 25 in all), from people that were outraged at the owners of the site. Apparently, all of the members that had paid a large upfront annual fee were charged a 2nd time only 3-4 months after their initial membership fee. Within a few days, the ChristianRealtors.net website was down, and the Christianrealestateagents.com website stopped showing all of it’s members. The phone was disconnected, and I suspect the owners skipped town.

Anyway… a few months ago, Christianrealestateagents.com popped up again under the same Whois info, and is starting to sell annual memberships again and unfortunately already has about 75 members.

Another thing that kind of irked me was the fact that they lie on their website about their search engine positioning and hits. The funny thing is that these search terms aren’t even competitive… we are in such a niche market that basically anyone can rank on the first page for these keywords if they knew what they were doing.

Something else interesting that I found on their site was that they claim to have 37,000 hits/month. They either don’t really know what a “hit” is, or they are intentionally misleading the uninformed to believe that a “hit” means a unique visitor. The truth is that one unique visitor can create hundreds of hits.

I also happen to know that none of these terms get very many searches, so their claim that most of their traffic comes from the 2 search engines totally makes sense… and there is always the alexa ranking that also disproves the traffic claim.

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So… just in the way of a warning… I’m seeing a pattern emerge here. I truly hope they don’t charge everyone’s cards again. If you get burned by them, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I just hope and pray that this company is in business for real this time, and not just around to rip people off… AGAIN.