BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Eric Blackwell (page 6 of 8)

The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

August 5, 2008

My next journey…a personal note.

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

I just wanted to drop in a personal note on the blog if you will indulge me.

The last couple of weeks have been a busy time at the Blackwell house and there have been a lot of things going on! A while back, I introduced you to the real Team Eric, my family. Many of you got a chance to read about my two sons’ efforts to help others who have autism. While I have always been behind them and supported their efforts, that is about to go to a whole new level.

Yesterday, I signed a book deal with the major Autism / Asperger Syndrome book publisher to author a book that will serve as a simple and practical guide for Dad’s of kids “on the Spectrum”. I have published essays and whitepapers in the past, but have never authored a book. This is a challenge like none I have ever faced before, but I would not have it any other way. It is going to be fun.

Rest assured that this will not affect anything more than slightly altering the frequency of my posts…and then not for long. You can read into that that the Realtor.com stuff is coming. (grin) I care too much for this industry to do anything less. This is just a personal side-trip to support my boys and family in their efforts…and hopefully brighten the world a bit in the process. And I wanted to share in the excitement (read: terror) of the moment with you. (grin)

Have a great day!

July 29, 2008

LA Times…the 1st of many?

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

My buddy Jon Karlen writes on one of my blogs, RealEstateIndustryWatch. Today, he beat me to the punch and posted this.

Yes it is true. The LA Times Sunday Real Estate Section is now gone. Due to space constraints and budget cutbacks, it has printed it’s last issue.

One has to wonder if this will not be the first of many to face a new reality (for them). The online real estate marketplace IS the real estate marketplace. How many more will go? How soon? How many will consolidate into other sections of the paper? Who knows.

Thoughts?

July 22, 2008

Gulp… I AM a VENDOR!

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

I had one of those REALLY UGLY commutes to work today. You know the ones…when your mind won’t stop ruminating on the scary thoughts of the hours before you left. I mean…you are trying to focus on the business of the day, but it just won’t happen…

After Hunter’s post about vendors…and Greg’s… It was time for me to do some serious soul searching about what I thought was right. I mean…I hate all these vendors pestering the heck out of me…and lying to me…and doing ANYTHING to get business…And then it hit me.

Gulp… I AM a VENDOR!

My blog over at EricOnSearch is my business. While I limit (severely) the number of clients that I take on to only those that TRULY fit with me, and while the real estate side is limited to SEO. ( I refer out website development to those I trust -see site) I AM indeed a vendor to the real estate market.

I spent my entire 35 minute drive to the office thinking….”I have NEVER solicited business from anyone on BHB. Ever.”
“I have always TRIED to be helpful and spent time and offered FREE advice to many who have asked.”
“I have never paid for an ad or paid a (insert chokepoint Charlie here) for exposure.”
“It has all been Earned Media.”

And yet I AM indeed a VENDOR. I feel dirty. Tainted by the company of people who CALL themselves vendors but who in reality are confidence men (and women). The problem is that con men and women and shysters seem to make up a vast majority of the RE vendor market.

Russell Shaw made a great point in a recent post about the Enemy Line. Maybe this is one of the items on my list that I need to get over.

So I started thinking about distinctions that I believe separate the ME’s from many of the rest. I actually made a pretty good sized list of things that I do differently as a vendor to make SURE that I am firmly putting distance between myself and THEM. But once I looked at the list it all boiled down Read more

July 18, 2008

My Mind Share Mis-management Manifesto

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Eric Bramlett and I have been playing with Google’s upgraded adwords tool quite a bit lately. Not surprisingly here’s one of the first things that crossed my mind…

And while the numbers would indicate that Trulia CLEARLY has not created much in the way of brand awareness in the consumer ranks (think about it 60,500 searches in June and how many of those were REALTORS?). And while I could make SEVERAL valid points to their VC’s about how that is not a great reason to throw another $15MM log on the fire, that is not the subject of my manifesto. This is:

NAR: WAKE THE HECK UP!

You currently have the REALTOR brand. It is strong. You can see that people are clearly searching for REALTORS. (See MLS to see how you mangled the last one) You are mismanaging the online use of that REALTOR brand in a MAJOR way. Homestore is squandering the brand by using the quality of the online presence to extort money from the REALTORS themselves.

Look at the figures that Bramlett posted. Read them Lawrence. (please) What do they say? IMO they say that people are looking for REALTORS. They say that if we FIRED Homestore and made the national listing site a NON PROFIT center for NAR, we could do better. Much better. Yes that would mean some staff cutbacks in the bureaucracy. High time that happened anyway.

The main reason that we have REALTORS giving listings to third party sites with so little consumer mind share as Trulia is because REALTOR has mangled them and is holding the REALTOR hostage. I cannot blame Trulia for trying to move into a space where Homestore has abdicated it’s position…a monopoly position granted by a fiat of well intentioned (but IMO highly misguided) leaders at NAR.

Our listings were not yours to sell IMO. And if somehow we granted you that right, unless you dump Homestore or get them to start taking our online presence seriously, you have proven IMHO beyond all doubt that we the REALTORS should now take that right back from you. You have mismanaged it.

What do I Read more

July 17, 2008

Project Bloodhound: Passion, Authenticity & Connecting with Others

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

OK, I will confess.

Up until we started Project Blogger, I had NO idea EXACTLY what being a green REALTOR was all about. I mean, I understood the general concept, in a promote conservation and sell the benefits of green housing sort of way… But I really did not understand HOW a green real estate blogger would connect with a GREEN customer, until I was faced with the challenge of helping a NEW green blogger in Louisville–here in our office. It is a new challenge for me.

One of our agents approached me. She already was a beginner in our blogging group and she asked if I would help her get a DIFFERENT blog up and running. “What’s your niche or hyperlocal?” “That’s just it,” she said. “I want to blog about environmentally friendly housing. I want to be a GREEN blogger.” I instantly knew that this was a MUCH better fit for her than the niche she was in.

This was something that she IS passionate about. Her other niche was more because she found it to simply be attractive business wise. We have a saying in our little blogging group in our office: “Blog about baseball if that is what you are passionate about. You will sell more real estate that way.” The point is, by being passionate and authentic, you will ATTRACT more people to you. You will connect with others in a meaningful way. And Dawn, the agent in our office will connect and sell and enjoy the process more because her voice will be authentic.

When you CARE, your writing emits an almost magical quality that it doesn’t have when you are writing for money alone. Stephanie, I don’t have her blog up and running yet. She is on vacation with her family for a week or two, but if you don’t mind, I’d love to get the two of you together via email or whatever. I have already sent her to your blog and she came back going.”..wow….”. (That’s a quote.)

I guess every day here at the office just reinforces the point to me that authenticity and passion Read more

July 17, 2008

Todd Kaufman: More bad news.

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

Google your name. The dogs are still barking and their favorite mic is back ON. (It was ON all the time, but now we can turn up the volume a bit more!) And we like it LOUD.

Congrats Greg! Looks like things are back on track! I hope you did not post this earlier and I did not notice…been on vacation and been buried with work this week once I got back.

Note to onlookers…this is kind of an “inside baseball” way of saying that Google is now back in love with BHB the same way that Technorati is…

Eric

June 29, 2008

Project Bloodhound: URL Structure

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

When you start browsing through blogs and as you click from post to post and page to page, watch the address bar. Here are some examples:
http://www.ericonsearch.com/greatest-real-estate-agent-in-the-world-your-name-here/
This is the one from the post that we chose for the SEO contest.

WordPress Security – More important these days.


Here is one of my posts on BHB

Why the difference?
First off, Greg uses what is known as the default permalink structure. The one that comes out of the box. He did this because when he fired up BHB, it made referencing the posts easier for him. There is NOTHING wrong with this. Optimization is about making choices and trade offs, not about good and evil.

I chose a more keyword based structure that has become pretty popular these days. Here’s how you do it:
In WP go to Settings: and then Permalinks. You will see this:

Here’s a closer look:

These are your choices and you can see that I went to “Custom” and typed in /%postname%/ and hit save changes. Simple as that. IMPORTANT NOTE: On a few hosts this will barf up an error saying that the Permalink structure cannot be changed. If you are on GoDaddy or 1and1, feel free to email me and I will tell you how to solve this.

The effect of this is that any posts you write will include the title of the post in the url. For me, it makes it easier for the reader AND for the search engines. Doing something SOLELY for the sake of search engines is rarely if ever wise. Ideally, what enhances user experience and adds relevance will help you rank (having a site made of FLASH would be a BIG exception to that…)

Why you should NOT just arbitrarily go and change this with an established blog. Simply put, the search engines already knows where all of Greg’s posts are. He is right IMO to NOT change things and move their “cheese”. You can and redirect the old posts’ URLs to the new ones with a 301 redirect, but that can be WORK. I wanted to keep this simple. And while they figured out where everything was / is, he would lose some Read more

June 28, 2008

Just wanted to drop this off….

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

One of the newer agents in our office, Judy Stockton stopped me in the hallway the other day. New is probably a misnomer…she is a savvy veteran REALTOR, just new to our 120. She always seems to have a pleasant smile and an upbeat demeanor, even when things are not easy.

This day her smile seemed especially intense…and I figured it was safe to ask her how things were going. “Great.” she said.

“You are carrying a contract, looks like things are good…” I mused.
“Yep. Actually we just got the inspection report and what the buyers want done and I just dropped it off to the sellers. ”

She then went on to explain her strategy for dealing with difficult inspection reports, low offers, and other such downers that agents often have to deal with. I was impressed enough with her strategy that I want to pass it along.

When she has particularly bad news for a client that could be a deal bender or maybe even breaker, she calls the client and explains that she is on the way to ( insert IMPORTANT MUST DO THING HERE) but just got the inspection report and wanted to drop this off first thing.

Then she explains that she will not EVEN have time to talk about it, but will return in two hours or so right after (insert IMPORTANT MUST DO THING HERE) and then she will be happy to go over the details and ANY questions that they have.

Her words: “The first couple of hours, they get the anger out and the frustration. If I was there, it would be VERY difficult to not get emotionally involved. This way, I come back when they have thought it through a bit and I am not the focal point of their feelings and we can all see it more clearly.”

Why was she smiling? Because (an hour after dropping off the inspection and heading out to do her “task”) her client had just left her a voice mail and said,”I know you were going to come back in a couple of hours, but this thing REALLY Read more

June 27, 2008

Cloaking is Against Google’s TOS, Trulia. (And other SE’s as well)

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

What is CLOAKING?

Here is Wikipedia’s Definition.

Simply put, it is the practice of showing one thing to a user and another thing to the search engine spiders. It violates the BASIC trust that MUST exist IMO between the search engines and webmasters in order for there to be umm…order. They need to know that you are not doing a sleight of hand.

In Search Engine Optimization, there are few things that almost all of the search engines treat alike. Even things like no follow links are handled differently (at this point in time) depending on which search engine is involved. But they all cry “foul” when it comes to purposely sending their spiders one thing and users another.

Why do I bring this up? Because Eric Bramlett just dropped a video bombshell on Trulia. (Fair warning, the video takes a while to load and may not explain easily to the typical viewer what is happening, so I will do some play by play…).

UPDATE: Bramlett has now added a post with STILL photos as well to explain.

Scene 1: Trulia has “partners” at the Seattle Weekly and Parade Magazine. Bramlett visits them as a normal viewer online would. The link takes him to a subdomain shared between the “partners” (just using the Seattle Weekly example here).

Scene 2: Bramlett then switches over to a tool we SEO types use to look at the same link AS IF WE WERE A GOOGLE SPIDER. When he does this and clicks the same link…

Scene 3: He goes to a completely DIFFERENT page, one that gives links DIRECTLY to Trulia and NOT to their “partners”. Yes, folks that IS the page that they are promoting to the TOP of Google for the keyword Seattle Real Estate! (My guess is that they are doing this to THESE partners the same way they do it to their REALTOR partners? That is the only explanation that I can come up with….)

Eric Bramlett’s video evidence has what they are doing. They are caught red-handed. Plain and simple in my opinion.

A word of advice to Trulia:

1) As you rise to try and compete with REALTORS nationwide Read more

June 25, 2008

As a personal favor…

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

When I was putting together TEAM ERIC for the Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World Contest, I was pretty specific in how I built the team. There was a reason that Greg Swann was on the team. There was a reason for EACH member. Many of the team members did not talk to each other much in the emails that went flying everywhere, but individually they all talked with me. Everyone who was on that team was VITAL to its success. One of the things that united our whole team was that they are all “givers” and “doers”. There were (and are) no “show dogs”. The team was comprised of dogs who know how to hunt or pull a sled.

One of the members of our team is Charles Richey and his wife Jacqui. Charles does the webmastering and marketing support while his wife does the selling in Las Vegas. Charles is a giving, caring soul who is now faced with battling Guillaume Barre Disease and has been in the ICU for the past few days. The good news is that the outlook is positive. Many make a full recovery (after an extended stay in the hospital and physical therapy). This will be a long battle. One that ANY of us here could find ourselves in. But, like many REALTORS, Charles and Jacqui are battling without health insurance.

I am capitalist through and through, but that comes also with the fact that I am a loyal friend to a teammate and believe in helping fellow travelers and paying it forward. One does not truly work without the other. And as REALTORS we are all teammates to a large extent.

A fund has been set up here. If you can spare some, it is greatly needed and would be appreciated big time. Many REALTORS and more than a couple of vendors have offered support. I will chronicle their efforts down the road a bit.

Thanks a bunch for whatever you can do. I know times are tough right now and purse strings are tight. Even a small donation from a large number of folks would Read more

June 22, 2008

WordPress Security – More important these days.

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

As in most things…the guy who throws up WP blogs by the dozen is the last guy to check his own. (the cobblers kids have no shoes, et al).

Confession Time:
EricOnSearch is my blog. It also is my business site. My site disappeared from Google’s radar about a week ago. Still indexed, but did not rank. How do you know it is a penalty? Typically, it won’t even rank for search terms like ericonsearch …not many people going for that one! (grin)

While search engine traffic is not the be all and end all for my blog, (most people who come there come from a post I have written or a comment on another site), since search engine work is a big part of what I do, getting no Google love is not cool.

Time to Investigate:
What I found was that my site had been hacked. And neatly inserted into my footer file were about 300 links to meds, poker and porn! How do you find it? In your blog, you can go to either “presentation” or “design” and then click on “Theme Editor”. If you look at BOTH the “header.php” and the “footer.php”, but there is a SIMPLER method. Here is a link to an “outbound link checker”. The reason that spammers spam is to get hidden links from your site to theirs. Go to this link checker and enter your url into it and run it… (Note: Eric Bramlett is working on a NEAT little plugin that will monitor OBLs and let you know via email before it becomes a search engine issue.)

If you see a bunch of links to bad neighborhoods, then you have an immediate issue.

Even if you don’t have an immediate issue, you still need to take action.

One of the best posts that I have found with an actionable list of what to for Word Press security is this one. I recommend taking the steps indicated here and in following the needed links from this page to find more info. As it says in the comments, step #9 can cause some grief.

An easier way for those not Read more

June 12, 2008

Why National Real Estate Listing Sites Suck….Reason #1

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

They don’t ALWAYS provide national level exposure to our listings, (and that is above and beyond the fact that most will not disclose the actual traffic figures of their local property searches so we can see ACTUALLY how much exposure we are getting for the listings that we are GIVING.

For this example, I am going to use REALTOR.com, but the example is by no means limited to them. Same scenario applies across many of the bots.

Let’s say you are looking on our site for a home around $500,000 in Louisville. One of the current active listings is this one. Great right? and exactly what you were looking for on the east side of Louisville in one of the MANY quiet suburbs…

Fast forward a day or so…

So now you go to LIST a similar property (same suburb) for a potential client. PROUDLY, you proclaim that you provide ENHANCED Listings via REALTOR.com. (At a cost of hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year to you, the REALTOR). The client thinks, “GREAT. My REALTOR is getting me EXPOSURE…” Isn’t that SWELL…

HERE’S the rub:

Type in REALTOR.com (as a typical relocation person or anyone else would…).

Type in LOUISVILLE, then choose Kentucky and then search for $500,000 homes…

ALL you see are homes with the CITY field in IDX that says LOUISVILLE!!! This means that ANY listing that does not have the city LOUISVILLE in its address is getting little to NO exposure in REALTOR.com and HAS NOT BEEN. Nice job guys…REALTORS pay for enhanced listings that are seen by NOONE (err…except the very few who a) understand this and b) are prescient enough to know that La Grange is a city in Kentucky and not just a cool song by ZZ Top. and c) type that individual city in the advanced search.) How many do you think THAT is…ummm…Next to NONE, in my opinion.

And before any of the other National sites (bots, franchise chain sites, scrapers or others) start bragging about how much better THEIR presentation of listing data is than REALTOR.com, be forewarned – This is the FIRST of multiple posts on the subject… Read more

June 5, 2008

Real Estate Marketing Channel Dominance Theory – my truth.

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

MIke Farmer got me to mention the thought of Navy Seal Teams as a basis for real estate marketing. He got me thinking on that…and my mind turned towards my Market Channel Dominance Theory(s).

istock_000000792680xsmall.jpg

Or…let’s just call it B-I-N-G-O. In the game of BINGO, you can win by being the first to dominate one row, either across, down or diagonally. Let’s throw out the diagonal option for a second. (and the free space in the middle-there’s NO free lunch).

First off, real estate marketing channels, (local radio, newspaper, TV, Organic Search, Paid Search, Blogging (and you have to break this out for EACH niche and hyperlocal) can take the place of letters BINGO making each column represent dominance of a marketing channel and each row represent exposure generating ability across ALL marketing channels.

My theory #1: If you are a listings focused REALTOR, you need to get exposure across as many channels as possible. Why? Because you want to WIN listings presentations and to do that, you need to answer the $64 question..”What are you gonna do differently to market my home?”. You want excellence for your clients and nothing less.

My theory #2: If you are focused on buyers, you do NOT need to be all things to all people, but to be effective, you need dominance of a marketing channel. This gives you excellence in attracting buyers by having top of mind presence and does not require dominance of other marketing channels.

My theory #3: The ULTIMATE Guerilla marketing group (whether brokerage, team or lone agent with employees-franchise or not) is a highly skilled group of folks who can EACH dominate a vertical (read: marketing channel) and they work UNSELFISHLY to defend each others’ turf. This gives you excellence in attracting buyers and in sellers by having top of mind presence for your merry little band…errr…brand. Like Greg’s recent point here about BHB. None would get orders from headquarters. They would not need to have excellence defined for them. They ARE it. Each would be a specialist and yet communication of threats and opportunities would be immediate and instant. Read more

May 27, 2008

Building Content for Others …when is it right?

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

First off, I’d like to thank Eric Bramlett for a great post explaining the BASICS of links and linking to other sites. What he was doing was setting a good foundational understanding based on known facts and avoid much of the speculation that exists out there in the world today about Search Engine Optimization. What he did not go into of that basic foundation, I’d now like to explore a bit further.

Here are some facts that we know about Building Content on other peoples’ sites:

Fact 1: Adding content on another person’s site builds opportunities for them to build internal links. Internal links (read: pages) have value

Item #1 that he did not go into was internal links vs external links. Internal links are the links to and from pages within your site. Let’s (for now) avoid the temptation to go into page rank sculpting, internal link sculpting, or the details of internal page structure. Please note that I have linked to a couple of resources there on the subject for your further reading if desired. Do we KNOW exactly how Google values internal vs external links. NO. Is there much speculation and testing on the concept. YES. True search engine professionals TEST these concepts as they change over time and they RARELY comment on them publicly. They often compare notes with other search engine professionals who are testing similar concepts. What we do know is that experienced webmasters can made GOOD use of hundreds or thousands of indexed pages to internally link and support pages that they want to rank for a given term. They would not be SCULPTING it if it did not have VALUE.

Fact 2: Adding Content on another person’s site provides opportunities for more people to EXTERNALLY link to their site.

Whether I write here on the Bloodhound Blog, on Real Estate Webmasters, or as a columnist on RE/MAX Times Online, people who read that can link to it externally. This is also true of comments on blogs and forums, LISTINGS and really, on ANY online community that you choose to participate and spend time in. This not Read more

May 17, 2008

Number 1 Expert and Opt Out Web Template Widgets – Why put your website clients at risk?

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The Real Estate Group, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake VA

Author website

I have been trying to think of a way to explain what has been going through my mind in plain english. Here’s my attempt:

When Galen first posted about Trulia’s aggressive no-following of listings links, it was a bit technical for many folks to follow, but it set off alarm bells everywhere. Then Eric Bramlett pointed out the SYSTEMIC, SECRETIVE, USE OF OPT OUT TRULIA WIDGETS ON NUMBER 1 EXPERT SITES.. (Also here.) Let me break it down so that it is more easy to grasp:

SYSTEMIC: Number One Expert applied them all at once (or very quickly) to a number of their templated real estate websites.

SECRETIVE: They put the widgets at the BOTTOM of an internal page (in most cases) BUT on one that usually gets GOOD authority from the front page of the site. This is secretive, because they will attract VERY little traffic and attention. Without checking their backlinks, we would not have known they were there. They are placed IMO where they will do VERY little good in keeping traffic and NO good in attracting traffic.

Also, they were secretive in that they did not let their clients know that they did this! They just took the prerogative and popped them on the templates. How do I know? I have asked several real estate agents who are their clients and NOT ONE of them knew that the widgets were there. PERIOD>

OPT OUT WIDGETS: This means that if you want to take these widgets off of your site you MUST call them and ask them to take them off of your site. This is the FIRST time (that I am aware of) of having a website provider slap THOUSANDS of widget links to another competiting site for the same LOCAL terms and MAKE YOU CALL TO GET IT REMOVED.

Why are MANY people saying that it looks like a paid link? It is because that is the ONLY thing we can think of why Number 1 Expert would do this! It puts their clients sites (In my opinon) at unneeded risk! They put TENS of THOUSANDS of links on their Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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