Making the Scenius scene: I’m prepared to share an entirely new style of blogging with you — but you have to hold up your end

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote last week about the Scenius blogs we’ve been playing with. The concepts we’ve developed constitute a new style of blogging, a hybrid of the best features of link-blogging and RSS feeds with much better control and with none of the defects.

A Scenius blog called “Switched-On Marketing” is riding in our sidebar, along with some other real estate blogs. I have another one called “Phoenix Area Headlines” running on our client-focused real estate weblogs.

That last sentence is important: I maintain one Scenius blog for “Phoenix Area Headlines”, but I can echo it wherever I want it to appear. And it comes in like a blog, not like a feed or a widget, with full control over the appearance and with all the links behaving as expected.

Why is that important? Because I now have a reliable source of keyword-rich dynamic content that I can share with other Phoenix-area weblogs. Other Phoenix real estate webloggers are free to use it, but I’m much more interested in hanging around the sidebars of weblogs run by my clients or future clients.

The “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog is composed of content that will be interesting to readers of any weblog in the Phoenix area. It’s a regularly-updated supply of new content for any weblog that hosts it.

The “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog is rich in keywords that will cause the blogs that host it to score well with search engines. I’m giving my neighbors content and also boosting their SEO.

The “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog consists of highly dynamic content. There are new posts every day, and old posts scroll off the bottom every day. What this means is that search engines will see new unique content on every page they spider, every time they spider, if those pages are echoing my Scenius blog.

And the “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog links back to BloodhoundRealty.com. I’m using sweat equity to buy a place on your sidebar. Your readers win, you win, I win — everybody wins.

The “Switched-On Marketing” Scenius blog does the same sorts of jobs for real estate and marketing weblogs: I give you interesting keyword-rich dynamic content and you give me a sidebar link.

That’s just a piece of the Scenius technology, and I’ll be teaching everything — including everything we come up with between now and then — at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. But I’m prepared to teach some of it now — for a price.

What’s my price?

Here’s a way of looking at this aspect of the Scenius technology: Open-source weblogging.

I’m accumulating and editing a great host of real estate marketing information for “Switched-On Marketing” — which I then share with anyone for free. You can echo it on your blog. You can subscribe to its RSS feed. You can even read it on your iPhone.

If you want to share in the ability to create this kind of content — and I can show you a lot of cool ways to deploy it to create dynamic, auto-maintaining content for your own weblogs — I want for you to share at least one Scenius blog with the world.

I want for my list of Scenius scenes on that iPhone reader to be rich with fascinating content. I will show you how to build Scenius blogs for any purpose you can think of — if you will build at least one to share with your larger weblogging community.

That’s not too much to ask, is it? After all, as I discussed above, a Scenius blog can be a very smart way to forge relationships with other webloggers who may be able to bring you new business. It’s not exactly sack cloth and ashes.

And here’s the other end of things, just one small demo of what Scenius blogs can do in the everyday life of a real estate weblog:

If you go to our Phoenix real estate weblog, you will see “Our Current Listings” running on a WordPress.org Page. In the sidebar of every post and Page of that weblog, you’ll find “Our Current Listings” echoed again, only this time at a much narrower width. And if you go to the About page for our single-property website for 56 West Willetta Street, you’ll find “Our Current Listings” echoed again, this time at a much wider width. Every echo you are seeing is the same one Scenius blog, and it is echoing simultaneously on dozens of pages on many, many domains, inheriting the local CSS appearance everywhere it appears. I can promote “Our Current Listings” anywhere I want from one Scenius blog — and the content is always up-to-date.

Scenius blogs are leveraged weblogs, and there is a lot more you can do with them.

If you want to echo “Switched-On Marketing” on your WordPress.org weblog’s sidebar, use this code and follow the instructions we posted last week.

<!-- BEGIN Scenius -->
<?PHP $scene = "scenius"; ?>
<p><div style="display:block; width:95%;
height:320px; overflow:auto; padding-left:6px;
padding-right:6px; padding-top:3px;
border:1px solid #a9a9a9; ">
<?PHP $ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 
"http://$scene.bloodhoundblog.net/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?></div></p>
<!-- END Scenius -->

Here’s the feed, if you want it for your feed reader:

http://scenius.bloodhoundblog.net/?feed=rss2

If you want to echo “Phoenix Area Headlines”, here’s the code:

<!-- BEGIN Scenius -->
<?PHP $scene = "phoenixnews"; ?>
<p><div style="display:block; width:95%;
height:320px; overflow:auto; padding-left:6px;
padding-right:6px; padding-top:3px;
border:1px solid #a9a9a9; ">
<?PHP $ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 
"http://$scene.bloodhoundblog.net/");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?></div></p>
<!-- END Scenius -->

And here’s the feed:

http://phoenixnews.bloodhoundblog.net/?feed=rss2

Scenius.net will get more interesting, going forward, both as a Scenius blog reader for the iPhone and as a clearinghouse of information about Scenius blogs. But the way for it to get most interesting is for you to get involved. If you want to learn how to do this, I’ll teach you — for the price discussed — and I’ll promote your shared efforts here and on Scenius.net.

So: Speak up and let’s get started.

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