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Author: Ryan Hartman (page 4 of 4)

Retechulous...

April 17, 2009

Loading Up A Twitterfunky Theme + “Hey…this aint no Localism!..If I Ditch The Ad Revenue Angle and Build My Own Darn Team Will You Believe Me?” (HeyCentralPa.Com: 3 of 365)

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A Screencast on HeyCentralPa.Com’s theme choice and a bonus cast on ditching BHB style ugly permalinks are up over at HouseYourMom….

I’m going to go ahead and give the very young and probably buggy P2 WordPress theme a shot I think. It touts a twitter like interface that will allow visitors to interact with eachother, or hopefully the agent contributors on the site. In the coming days I’ll tweak it up so that the “Hey Watcha Up To” reads something more target keyword and audience appropriate, but otherwise, I think this might have been a great find.

Why? Well I mentioned in the comments of my post yesterday that I plan to do a lot of belly to belly promotion of this thing all around the Central Pa area. So my conversation with local business owners might go something like this:

“Hi I’m wondering if you wouldn’t mind me taking a quick video of your establishment and posting it on HeyCentralPa.Com, the new web magazine I’ve created. I’ll also be happy to post a link back to your website alongside the video. Oh yeah…and if you’d like to freely plug yourself or your business on the site, I’ll be happy to email you login info so that you can freely self plug on our home page.”

What’s everyone think?

Blammo Right! Will I need to cold call expireds or sit open houses with a networking hook like that?

And going back again to yesterday’s post….

Teri helped me realize in the comments of that post that the ad revenue generating, get-agents-to-blog-for-greed’s-sake approach could be flawed. This thing is pretty much meant to be a “take the juicy agent content back from localism” play, so I’ve happily begun to rethink agent involvement piece of the puzzle. But I’m still Redfinning my gameplan to a certain extent…

Any suggestions out there other than:

“Ryan…Suck it up! Ditch the mom jokes and the freelancing real estate tech guy charade and build this MMBB thing for YoSelf!” Stop trying to find an enlightened broker so far from a major metro! Quit dreaming about building an selling a Read more

April 16, 2009

Introducing HeyCentralPa.Com (MMBB Part 2 of 365)

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Ok…In my last post I set today as my personal deadline for posting part 2 of 365 in my Mega Monster Broker Blog Experiment….

So here we go.

But first things first.

Nobody reached out and volunteered to pay me the big bucks….

Ruby Clementine Hartman

  

Bummer. But don’t cry for me. Rejection has forced the establishment of a model for this thing that might actually allow for the accomplishment of the holy grail in Real Estate blogging.

Yep. I think I may have actually figured out a way to get a large group of agents consistently blogging! And of course, the local broker pimp is nowhere to be found in this wicked little piece of innovation… 

Fun Digression

I realize that my warnings that this would be a costly venture probably scared a lot of BHB readers from getting in touch with me, but I was surprised that none of these York Pa Area brokerages even responded to my emailed offers to talk to them about proceeding with this project locally.  Even those recruiting fiends at KW didn’t respond to try to land me as an agent. (Ouch!)

My response? A Well Meaning “You Still Check Your Email Guys?”

And a…

(Self-Censored, Click At Your Own Risk)

if you didn’t respond because you don’t see the value in the idea…

🙂

 

Proceeding Without A Broker…

Here’s the thinking: Since I haven’t been picked up by one brokerage, I’m free to recruit agent contributor’s from amongst any of the thousands currently practicing in the CentralPa region, right?  And with no interloping brokers there will be more left on the table for the agent contributor’s, right? I think so…

So HeyCentralPa.Com will be exactly what I said it would be a few days ago – A monster online publication written and sustained by a cooperative group of real estate agents looking to farm individual neighborhoods or niches by blowing the local chunks. The only difference – these agents won’t all come from the same office, and no one broker will benefit from the blood sweat and tears of their content contributions.  Instead, HeyCentralPa.Com will run as a cooperative, with all agent partners receiving their fair share Read more

April 11, 2009

The Traffic Magnet Mega Monster Multi Agent Niche Focused Broker Blog Recruiting & Retention Market Domination Tool = A Huge Company Asset [Part 1 of 365]

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Dear Large Broker/Owners,

Are you ready to enter the web publishing business?  You should be.  Because the required investment is relatively low, the potential returns are staggering, and you’ve got a huge team of columnists who will help build your asset, pretty much free of charge, if you play it right.

Huh?

In other words – If you build yourself a company blog and properly incentivise contribution from your agent partners, you will  slash advertising expenses, recruit cream o’ the crop  producers, –(even would be Mom & Pop Publishers) — and quite possibly dominate your marketplace … all while substantially increasing the resale value of your business. 

Or, maybe this is a better way to put it:  If you start viewing your company website as an online newspaper whose potential subscriber base is as large as your entire service area, a lot of good things will follow.

Grab Those Orphaned Newspaper Subscribers!

We all know the newspapers are dying–especially the small local rags providing info about local events, trash pickup schedules, and the obituary of ole Mr. Babbit.  And I think that large Real Estate Brokerages and their agents are in a unique position to pick up where these joints are leaving off.  Whether they already live in the neighborhood or they’re relocating from accross the country, people really do care that there’s an easter egg hunt at the local park tomorrow.  They always will!

So why Real Estate Agents? Well, to put it simply, real estate agents are everywhere, sorta like roaches. Take exception to this if you want, but really, we’re like walking talking RAID evaders  and though we’re being forced to evolve, we’re never going to go away.  Why? Because we existentially gather, digest, and verbal diarrhea hyper local info. We just can’t help busy body-ing around and opening our mouths whenever possible, because our very livelihood depends on it..

And love us or hate us, we exist because people really do want the nitty gritty local info (real estate related and otherwise)  that’s in our heads.   So…for you Dead Dinosaurs Walking out there…think about it. Your fear of that 25 year old Read more

March 10, 2009

FART

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FART Realtor designation

I’m not going to buy a CSM from SSMI. I’m already a FART.

  • Fracking
  • Awesome
  • Realtor
  • Technologist

Ok, you got me. FART’s not a real designation.
You can’t go to any classes and pick up a FART- I cooked this one up in my living room a few minutes ago after overdosing on some grapes and apricots.

But if you’re hip, I’m not going to charge you for the right to add some flatulant flare to your business card.

For a limited time only, I’m willing to let you use the FART designation if you can prove any 3 of the following.

  • You’ve generated more than 50 Idx signups from your web efforts in one month. (This is really an easy one , many “FARTists” consistently hit 800-2000/ month.)
  • You landed you blog or website on the first goog page for your most competitive area keywords. i.e. “Bumbl&%^$ Real Estate.” Small markets count too, but if you’ve done this for a major metro area in under a year, then whoever you’re working for just isn’t paying you enough.
  • You’ve helped another agent create and run a niche blog, free of charge, because you love spreading the RE Tech gospel.
  • You’re “auto incubating” a large group of prospects using rss based newsletters or some geeky universal contact form you’ve hacked up to work with some obscure crm.
  • You can tell me in under 30 seconds which 3 long tail search strings your most proud to be ranking organically number 1 for at the moment.
  • You’re “autoblogging” your company listings out of the mls and into your site using some wp plugin that should probably be illegal.
  • You’ve got Ping associated with 10 or more accounts and you update regularly via IM
  • You’ve created at least 1 or 2 lead capture pages that regularly spew off registrations.
  • You’ve started and run a photo or video
    niche blog     from the palm of your hand. And you update it almost every day.
  • You’ve written a blog post in the dark, after midnight, using the Iphone’s native notes app, from the guest bedroom, so your wife wouldn’t have to suffer your Read more
March 2, 2009

Can a Little Mr. Roboto & Some Video Kill The SEO Star?

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Chris Johnson reached out to me last week by sending over a custom css file he had laying around for the totally uncustomized Thesis theme I had rolling on my personal site. I thanked him for the hand and did a little tweaking. Then he busted on me again a few days later for ignoring some really basic SEO rules o’ thumb. This time figured I’d save my reaction for BHB…

Why didn’t I waste any effort makin’ pretty or SEO ing PropertunityKnocks.Com?

The answer is really pretty simple: I’d spent the previous year or so working to generate leads via the web on another site by writing like crazy, looking for links, and doing crazy stuff with rss based plugins, but now I had a few secret weapons that were making lead generation a lot simpler.

Here’s what they were.

One of these. (A Pink One..Don’t Ask)
And this.
And of course…this and this.
And most most importantly, This!. (Credit where credit is due.)

And I used them twice a week, without fail, for a month or so. Consistently. Mondays and Thursday’s @ 9am, Mr. Roboto style.

The result? Leads. Lots of em. Warm inbound phone calls with questions about the “Propertunities” I’d featured. Plenty to sustain me with a comfortable income and eventual repeat investor business for years to come. (The videos were all of REO listings.)

But as is my usual MO I eventually got distracted, took another job, and gave up the Roboto video routine. And something weird but not totally unexpected happened. Even though I’d stopped taking videos and hijacking craigs list traffic, I was still getting phone calls weeks and now months later…”

So when Chris reached out with some friendly criticism it seemed like the right time to stop ignoring PKnocks and get it going again.

But do you think I went a little overboard?

Could it be that PropertunityKnocks.Com is now a national real estate video blog?

Take a look and tell me what you think. If you wanna join the fun, let me know and I’ll set you up with a page for your area and maybe give you access to feature Read more

February 24, 2009

LeadStreet Beeflaboration…

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In my post yesterday I mentioned

“how badly the super well intentioned but grossly unusable “Lead Street” back-end has been ignored over the past few years…”

RE/MAX hasn’t responded to the post  but a few guys from Eneighborhoods took the time to ask me for some elaboration on my beefs with LeadStreet. It was really cool of them to reach out, and I was going to email them back privately, but  figured it’d be nice to post a response here since some other RE/MAX folks might like to include items I’m missing from the list below. (Plus, I think this may help continue the intention Greg’s recent CRM posts.)

A Starter LeadStreet Wish List:

  • Gimme Firefox! Come on guys, really? Internet Exploder only?
  • The Activity Plan and Drip Email Campaign features are actually pretty solid functionally, but if they’re hard for me to access and figure out, you’ll likely never get most agents to adopt. And it seems that creating campaigns and activity series still need to be controlled from the broker level?  Why not give agents the power to customize these features so they can stop paying vendors like Top Producer and Rainmaker for their services?  Plus it’d be great if Drip Email and Activity Plans could all be created under one template like in Heap.
  • Where’s the pop/imap email? Yep I said it. GTD Gimme one container for everything!  I wanna be able to check my pop/imap gmail from directly within an email client provided by my IDXCRM suite.  And when I open my email, I want to be able to turn the sender into a contact and/or log the interaction in the sender’s contact record. (Oprius and a host of others (even TP) do this well if you’d like inspiration..)
  • Need Web Forms:  A lot of us are nichy bloggers who like to generate targeted lead capture articles and pages on the fly. Why not allow us create customizable web forms that feed our LeadStreet database. And while you’re at it, please make sure that when the database is fed, we can set the forms to trigger activity plan or drip email Read more
February 23, 2009

Tweet Us Better Mr. Liniger! — When In The World Is RE/MAX International?

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Woe is me. I’m feeling rejected, ignored, and well, sorta “LOST.” Where and “When” the heck In the World  is RE/MAX International?….

Denver?

1977?

Here’s the thing. I’ve controlled “Twitter.Com/remax” for over a year now and I still haven’t received one email from somebody at International asking me to forfeit the identity. I expected they’d shut me down due to a corporate policy that stipulates I’m not allowed to use the RE/MAX name online.

I remember that when I grabbed the handle on a lark I was thinking, “well with the popularity of this Twitter thing (whatever it is) I’m sure mother RE/MAX will be in touch soon to snag or perhaps even buy it away by grandfathering me in as a 100 percenter or something”.  Wishful thinking. Nothing happened and I forgot I even owned the identity.

So when I recently noticed I’d been picking up “followers” out of the blue, I decided to lob a few tweets as an experiment of sorts to see what the reaction might be.  I posted mostly recruiting and company website plugs for the RE/MAX I’m currently at, and picked up 70 or so more followers over the span of a few weeks.  But still, no response from the Big Balloon.

The only thanks I got for my effort was my new broker calling a few weeks ago to ask why I had porn on the site.  I guess I’d accidentally followed or reciprocated on a follow request from a Philly area escort service, and a colleague of ours pointed it out to him. I apologized and zapped the pretty lady off of the profile, and that was that.  (At least I think…)

Anyway, I don’t know why, but this Twitter.com/remax thing has really been on my mind a lot lately for some reason. Isn’t Twitter a big enough deal that someone at RE/MAX, maybe even one of my recent RE/MAX colleague followers would have dimed me out to the appropriate department in Denver?  I mean, I think I sorta deserve something for my efforts. Maybe at least rebuke from International for using the corporate name in vain?

You see, I  want Read more

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