The New Localism.com

After a lengthy wait, the new Localism.com has finally arrived…

After some of the launch day bugs were worked out late last night, the site seems to be running pretty smoothly all things considered.  The new face of Localism (a sister site to Activerain.com), is at first look very impressive.  In the older site, the information was organized in a very sterile manner that simply corresponded directly with blog posts on Activerain.

In my opinion, the most valuable change has to do with aesthetics, but also with the way the blog posts actually render on the location pages.

Each major city, with a population over 40,000 will now have a sponsorship opportunity, that allows one agent to pay for a special picture, location description, and contact information like this sample city:

Sponsorship opportunities will open officially  on July 31st at 12pm.  You can read more about it on Rich’s Activerain blog.

Another significant change is the article review process.  According to Jonathan Washburn (one of Activerain’s founders), each article and picture submited to Localism will now have to pass a human review process.  The quality of posts was really becoming a problem on the old site, and this is a great addition although it will slow down the publishing process.

One obvious feature that is missing in the release are the Localism categories from the earlier version.  I don’t see any section to look at posts about individual listings, or market reports.  This is a very important feature that I hope they implement eventually.  It’s nice to have community information, but it would be such a waste if they threw out all that content.

Great job guys!  I look forward to the evolution of the new site, and hope you listen to the members of Activerain to make adjustments and improvements.  The loyal AR community members are still the number one reason for AR’s success…

Posted in Real Estate News | 2 Comments »

Christian Advertising - Geared Towards Consumers & Real Estate Agents

The Christian Real Estate Network has been around for over 6 1/2 years now… But during that time we never opened up our websites or customer base for Christian advertising. That is now changing with our release of a new advertising product for businesses looking to market to an extremely niche group of people: Christian consumers, and real estate professionals.

We will have many traditional ad methods to advertise on the site including banner ads and text link ads, but will also include some unique opportunities like advertisements on our member website, special article advertisements to our large email list and blog, and ads on our highly targeted niche websites like christianappraisers.com & christianpropertymanagers.com

You can view our full Rate Card, and get more information here: CREN Advertising Rate Card

Marketing to a Christian Audience

• Banner ads on Hismove.com
• Text link ads on Hismove.com
• Targeted email sponsorships or articles to our 6,700 opt-in subscribers

Marketing to a Real Estate Audience

• Text link ads on the CREN member website
• Email newsletter email sponsorships or articles to our 1,600 opt-in members

Marketing to Niche Audiences

• The CREN Christian business directory
• Ads on special niche sites for appraisers, property managers, and home inspectors
• Banner and text link ads on the CREN Blog
• Article sponsorships and guest article opportunities delivered to over 500 opt-in subscribers.

You can view our full Rate Card, and get more information here: CREN Marketing Rate Card

Posted in RE News | 2 Comments »

I Wish My Bank Was Like This…

Posted in Fun and Interesting | No Comments »

Back to Our Roots…

Ok, Ok… I know what you’re going to say: “Justin, why can’t you just decide on a title for your blog and stick with it?”

As you can see… we are back to using the Christian Real Estate Network title for the blog. I have always had a hard time trying to decide what to write about, and how to use the blog most effectively. Especially now, that I’m working for 3 different companies, it’s hard to choose which one to promote. What I do know is that I like to write about marketing, seo, and real estate industry news. Beyond that… I don’t have a clue.

So, instead of using some vague title, and totally refacing the blog again, I’m go back to my roots, and plan on writing primarily for the Christian Real Estate Network. After all, this blog is on the hismove.com domain. Writing for the Tomato here, or for Searching Solutions simply wouldn’t make sense.

Please continue visiting, as the content will likely stay the same.

If you do enjoy this blog, you might also enjoy the other blogs I write for:

Searching Solutions Blog

Focus on Castle Rock Blog

So again, I apologize for the blog identity crisis. We have come home, and are here to stay.

Posted in Real Estate Community | 7 Comments »

Daily Junk Email in the Life of a Blogger

I wanted to give people that may be new to blogging an idea of what their inbox may look like after a year of blogging. So I compiled a short list of some of the junk emails I receive on nearly a daily basis because of all the social networks, comments, subscriptions, etc… Not all of these are “junk” necessarily. Some are blogs I have subscribed to, and I’m not calling them junk per se.

I’m just pointing out that your inbox will definitely feel the pressure when you start blogging on a regular basis. I delete around 150 emails related to blogging like these per day on all my email accounts.

So here is a sample of 40 or so that you may recognize…

Click to Expand

Posted in Blogging | 11 Comments »

“spam fest” - Greatest Real Estate Agent In The World

Many of you may have seen this seo “competition” for who can rank for the phrase: “greatest real estate agent in the world”.  I’m officially dropping out. It was short lived.

I’m just really sick of people giving me a hard time and claiming that I’m using spamming to get the results I’m getting.

One of my so called “spam” techniques was to include the keyword: “greatest real estate agent in the world” in some anchor text on comments I left at a few blogs. I immediately got an ear full from other commenters that I was spamming. But the ironic thing is that 24 hours later, I started seeing about 10 other competitors doing the exact same thing. It just cracks me up… I even saw 2 people in particular that did it after telling me it was spam!

Sometimes these competitions just bring out the worst in people… so, instead of creating a bad name for myself because of people’s misconceptions, I’m simply going to bow out of this one.

I went ahead and removed many of the incoming links to this post, and made significant changes to the page itself… so I assume that my ranking will drop in the next 24 hours. It’s just not worth it to me to tarnish my reputation simply because some people have an extremely loose definition of spam. I have been open and honest about the techniques I use, and the people that know me know that I only use and teach white hat seo. The people that are crying spam and black hat have simply never been exposed to what REAL black hat seo is.

The whole contest is really kind of silly anyway. Once I thought it over, I should have realized the kind of techniques that would be brought out. With such a short time frame, you almost have to use some short term “run and gun” seo in order to get ahead. I highly doubt that we’re going to see any revolutionary new seo methods being used by the participants anyway. One of the purposes of the contest was to share ideas, but I have a really hard time believing that is going to happen. My prediction is that it’s going to turn into a “spam fest” and only lend further to the growing opinion in the real estate blogosphere that all seo is spam. This could have been a really great contest… but I just can’t see it benefiting the real estate community. It is however a great link bait idea (wish I would have thought of it), even if that wasn’t the original intention.

This is what I propose for a future contest:

1. Lengthen the time frame (at least 4-6 months). This will weed out the competitors that aren’t serious, and give people time to use some regular long term seo techniques. This will also make it more fair to the website that doesn’t already carry a high trust rank.
2. Don’t just choose 1 keyword to compete on, but 5-10. This makes it more realistic if you’re trying to use the contest as a teaching tool for other agents trying to get better rankings.
3. Create a more comprehensive rule list. What is, and isn’t allowed?
4. Document the success of the leaders on a regular basis (once a month), and reverse engineer their techniques and publish at the end of the contest in order to help other real estate agents learn about real life successful seo techniques.

======

In regards to “spam”, I can at least respect the position that Ardell has taken. She has come out openly to say that SEO in general is spam. And I can understand how she feels to an extent. There are so many snake oil salesmen out there, and so much false and misleading information. I see real estate agents fall victim to it everyday. Even though I don’t agree with her on her definition of spam, I can respect it. And believe it or not, Ardell: if you’re reading this, your comments have had an impact on me and I’m going to be very careful from now on with some techniques I use. Namely, respecting the blog authors out there and not over using keywords in my comment anchor text.

So, even though Ardell isn’t even in the race, I’d like to see her come out on top of the results. She is a very opinionated lady, and we don’t see eye to eye on alot of things, but I respect her honesty. Here is my vote for you Ardell: Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World

Good luck to the rest of the participants…

Posted in SEO | 46 Comments »

Ahhhh… Active Rain MeMe’s Are Back!

======

Just got Meme’d by Margaret Woda.

If you don’t know what a MeMe is, try this link.

Here are a few things you may have not known about me… and I’m including some pics at the bottom of this post too.

• I am 27, and have a beautiful wife named Lori. I have two girls: Caley: 22 mos. & Abby: 6 mos.
• I am a full time worship leader at my church. I play guitar and attempt to sing…
• My favorite hobby is surfing, but since I live in Colorado now… that has become… difficult
• My dirty little secret: I coach real estate agents on how to blog and market themselves, and I run a national real estate referral network with over 1,400 members, but am not personally licensed.

In order to keep this going, I’m going to tag another 3 people…

Here we go, I’m tagging:

• Scott Saghirian – TheTopTechAgent.com

• Sarah Bandy – TylerTalkAlot.com

• Chad Lariscy – ChadLariscy.com

My wife and I…

My Daughters…

Posted in Real Estate Community | 18 Comments »

How to Blog About Your Real Estate Listings … Effectively.

======

I’ve found that this is a hot button topic among many real estate agents and brokers. Maybe someone can enlighten me, but I just can’t seem to understand why more agents don’t blog about their listings. You have a free opportunity to let the world know about one of your properties… what are you waiting for?

My only conclusion is that most real estate agents just don’t know how to do it. Maybe you are an agent but just don’t want to include a property listing post right in the middle of your other blog posts… whatever the reason, I want to show you 4 reasons you would be crazy not to start blogging your listings

Crazy Myth #1: Blogging about my real estate listing takes too long

Nonsense. You don’t have to be a photoshop pro in this day and age. There are plenty of tools out there that will allow you to create an online flyer that you can easily post on your blog. My favorite, and probably the easiest is VFlyer.com - It is super fast, and it even submits your flyer to GoogleBase, Trulia, Craiglist, and more… sort of a double whammy. And there are plenty of other sites out there there let you create an online flyer… just make sure that you can export it in an html format so you can copy and paste it as a blog post.

If you don’t want to use a property flyer on your blog, or you can’t get it to work, you can still just write a quick description of the property and include a picture slide show using flickr, slide, or Real Estate Shows. You can even post a video tour right on the blog using youtube or Wellcomemat.

Crazy Myth #2: My blog gets no traffic, what’s the point?

There are plenty of other places you can post that listing. Just because you may be new to blogging doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in blogging about your listings. Think outside the box… try using Localism.com. Just go to ActiveRain, paste in your flyer, or listing as a new post. Then choose “for consumers”, and “advertising a listing”. This will also increase your AR points with little to no work!

But don’t just stop there, almost every single social networking site out there has a mini-blog feature that will let you paste in an html flyer, or even add a slideshow. Try: Facebook, wannanetwork, xanga, plaxo, cre8buzz, Myspace. Go crazy… there are hundreds of sites like these to choose from.

Crazy Myth #3: The chances are slim that an individual listing will be seen online.

Even if posting your listing online doesn’t bring a direct buyer, there are still plenty of other benefits to be had.

• Blow your potential clients away during listings presentations by showing them a huge list of places where their property will appear online. Most people are floored when you tell that you will be blogging specifically about their property. It’s impressive!
• If you spend the the time posting your listings in places besides your primary blog, you have the opportunity to create a call to action within the post itself. Direct people to click a link to view all the available MLS listings in their area. Ask them to sign up for your IDX email delivery system notifying them of new properties on the market in their area. The possibilities are endless here.
• Each time you post a listing, you’re creating a link back to your website or blog. This will improve your search engine ranking… but make sure you use good anchor text.
• Branding. Your face, logo, name, comapny… etc. are all branding tools. The more places you leave them online, the more branding will come into play.

Crazy Myth #4: Posting listings on my blog will water down the rest of my content

This myth actually isn’t so crazy. It’s a real concern that many real estate bloggers have, and I don’t recommend that anyone write a post about an individual listing and include it with their regular blog content.

So, here is how you get around that… The solution I’m sharing can be done on any platform, but I’m going to show you how with wordpress.

The best solution for this problem is to create a specialized category just for your listings. Then, you want to tell wordpress (or your platform of choice) not to include that category on the home page. You are essentially just excluding that particular category.

You will want to place this code in your index.php file to tell your home page not to include the category you choose.

Here is the code: <?php query_posts(’cat=-13?); ?>

If that doesn’t work, you can also try this:

<?php  if (is_home()) {query_posts(”cat=-13″); }?>

You will need to change the category number to make it work (where it says: “13″). To find the category number, go to >Manage>Categories, then view the category number you want to exclude. For more detailed instructions on this try this wordpress tutorial.

I hope that was helpful. It doesn’t take much work to blog about your listings. Just go out and do it!

======

If you are looking for a customized blog, or in depth coaching to kick start your blogging or internet marketing campaign, please email or call me.

Posted in Blogging, RE Blogs, Real Estate Marketing | 26 Comments »