BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Blogging (page 3 of 84)

November 1, 2010

Developing The Perfect Content Map For Your Real Estate Blog

by

Las Vegas Mortgage Blogger

Author website

Regardless of the recent debates about whether or not a real estate blog should be considered a solid foundation for a single agent to develop a realistic business model on, there are still many benefits of publishing content on a site you own… provided everything is organized properly.

I follow the CopyBlogger school of thought for designing strategic landing pages to ensure my target audience gets the exact information they’re looking for when they hit my sites for the first time.

While I do feature categories and tags in non-prominent areas of the footer or custom sidebars, I try to keep my main informational points of interest flowing from the top down in order to respect the time my readers have to spend online.

Homeowners and new buyers can easily get overwhelmed with the hundreds of details they may need to be aware of when it comes to the mortgage or real estate process.

One simple answer can easily lead them to five other questions that they didn’t know they needed to be asking.

Designed with the big picture in mind, your blog can effectively lead someone through their fact-finding mission in a painless and strategic manner.

Obviously, articulating this complex home buying thing in a manner that non-industry people can understand is great way to build trust with your potential clients.

Agents are obsessively consumed with “Personal Branding” to the point where buyers have to invest valuable seconds of their life on a site sifting through awards, testimonials, twitter feeds and media interviews before they can find a page that actually addresses their real needs and concerns.

However, I feel industry blogs have come a long way in the past five years.

But, we need to get better at focusing on homeownership education if we’re truly going to impact a positive change in our local real estate markets.

Here’s an example of my Mortgage 101 section, which has significantly increased in stickiness since I took out the sidebars and customized the page layout to serve as more of a site index with a purpose.

My ultimate goal is to be able to send borrowers and agents to my mortgage blog without Read more

October 7, 2010

I had a hugely productive day yesterday, despite everything, so I got to give all that time back today.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’re back, after some travails.

Yesterday, I showed with two different clients, wrote five contracts, opened one escrow and moved 39 domains. I finished the day in South Phoenix, just as the mother of all storms was rolling across the Valley of the (cloud enshrouded) Sun. Y’all think you have weather where you are, but you ain’t seen a storm until you’ve lived through one of ours.

Witness:

That’s hail, forty-five minutes after it pummeled everything, followed by heavy rainfall, followed by still fairly warm temperatures. In other words, that’s some hardy hail. There are more photos here.

I left my clients soon after that photo was taken. The streets were paved with rushing rivers, and the trip home, which should have taken 20 minutes, lasted a full two hours.

Even so, the server swap was grinding on without me. We had a little trouble getting the (very big) BHB database back on line, but all else was pretty smooth. Scenius.net is down, and I have to make a host of minor fixes to some of my PHP files, but everything else seems to be normal.

Was all this worth it? We’re faster than a raped ape, and i haven’t done anything to supercharge our performance yet. It sucks when things don’t work just as you planned, but this — at last — was the right move.

September 28, 2010

We’re gonna move: BloodhoundRealty.com and all of its subfolders and subdomains is moving to a new server.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m sure you’ve noticed the pain we’ve been going through. I made a big mistake a couple of weeks ago, and, in the process of fixing that, I uncovered systemic problems in our current file server arrangement that are most easily addressed with a match.

Which is to say, we’re going to burn this playhouse down. Last week, I moved FreePheonixMLSSearch.com and Scenius.net. Yesterday I moved 31 of our lower-traffic domains. Starting today, I’m going to begin the process of moving BloodhoundRealty.com itself to a new server.

This is no small task. We have a huge quantity of content, along with four weblogs associated with this one domain. It will be a while before I do the DNS change — and I’ll tell you when I’ve done it — and it will be a while after that before you land on the new server. As with every DNS swap we’ve done before, there may be some lost comments, if you land on the old server after the new server has gone live. But: We’re fairly slow right now, so this should not be a huge obstacle.

I’m sorry for the hassle — and I’m sorry for all the hassle you’ve been enduring. By isolating our big time-sucks, I hope to make everything perform better. I’ve got some cool ideas I want to play with, but I need to wait for a more stable BloodhoundBlog to show off that stuff.

More news as details emerge. Meanwhile, here’s Loudon Wainwright III on the subject of moving:

August 19, 2010

A weblogging strategy for non-writerly Realtors. Or: How you can learn to stop worrying and love your blog.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was on the phone yesterday with Chris Johnson, talking with him about Realtor weblogs. He mentioned that some of the buyers of his real estate weblogs are having trouble coming up with regular content.

I have a solution for them.

What should they do? Stop worrying about it — and solve the real marketing problem instead.

Instead of building a blogsite around a regularly-updated weblog, it would make more sense to me for reluctant writers to build the blogsite around the mission-critical content instead.

Here’s the deal: There are a finite number of topics that you absolutely, positively need to cover. Whatever target-marketed niche the blog is concerned with, you need to document that niche in a fairly comprehensive way.

How many articles would that take? Five? Ten? Surely not twenty. If you’ve done what you need to do, you can ignore the blog except when you’re burning up with something to say.

A WordPress theme like Equilibrium would give your weblog a magazine-like look and feel. The “featured” section could highlight the three or six or nine posts that are mission-critical for your niche. And the “latest post” section can document your more-recent musings. If you write something crucial later on, you can rotate it into the “featured” section.

Here’s the thing: Everything so-called weblogging experts (including me) have told you about real estate weblogging is probably wrong.

You are not trying to build long-term relationships with regular visitors who will wait for your latest pronouncements with bated breath. Instead, the objective of your blogsite should be to provide mission-critical information to people who will find you by Google when they need you and who will be happy to forget you just as soon as they no longer need you. The magazine-style blogsite fits that approach perfectly.

The purpose of your weblog is not to be available for lonely people looking for friends. It is not to make you one of the cool kids, so that Realtors from all over the world can show up at your place to grouse about how awful the real estate market is. The purpose of your blog is certainly not to make Read more

July 10, 2010

Are Old Blog Posts Useless?

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

“How much traffic could you reasonably expect from blog posts that are a couple of years old?” asked Kaiholo Hale, a Maui vacation rental expert.

My answer?  A bunch of good traffic if the blog post is relevant.  I’ll show you two of my little workhorses:

  • Google “Apartment Loans San Diego” and you’ll see that my post from December, 2006 is ranking second or third.  I’ve funded about ten loans, most of them second mortgages, in the past 3 years from that blog post.  I only make about $1,000 from each loan but they’re really easy to do.  Few mortgage brokers have access to the capital I have to make these loans.
  • Google “Short Sales and PMI” to find that I rank first for that term.  The information on that post is some 10-12 years old so I need to update it.  Still, this post generates about a dozen inquiries every month.  I had to figure out how to make this post pay me so I built an opt-in email list for people who sold their homes via short sale.  That led to another list for people who lost the home through foreclosure.  Last fall, I stratified the lists by sale date so that I can “tickle” them as we approach their qualification date.  Over 200 people have signed up for these newsletters but only s few dozen are still reading them.  I add about five each month and expect that only one of those five will be “with me” in 2-3 years.

Two little work horses should produce $50,000 annual GCI for me in 2011. I can do much better than that. Greg Swann once remarked that you can return to old blog posts and “polish them up”.  You can update them, double check your grammar and spelling, and try to add some conversion tools or calls to action so that they can turn into GCI for you.  Let’s see what I might do with my two:

The apartment loans post is a quick conversion.  People landing on that page want a loan and they want it quickly.  I think I can add some Read more

July 9, 2010

Active Rain Says TANSTAAFL To Founding Members’ Uproar

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

The Active Rain Real Estate Network is charging a fee.  I’m not surprised.  The network has been trying to find ways to monetize its business since inception.  It tried a referral network and advertising and now it’s faced with the hard decision of pay-for-play.

Lani, at Agent Genius reported that one founding member deleted all of his content in protest:

This week, Active Rain inadvertently makes for heated conversation again by going back on their promise to founding members (the first users of the service) that they would never have to pay to participate because they evangelized for free and promoted the service making it what it is today.

Real estate blogger Jay Thompson, one of Active Rain’s original users and long time advocate of the brand noticed along with many other bloggers today that despite ActiveRain’s promise to grandfather in “founding members,” he was asked to pay an annual fee before he would be allowed to continue participating.

ActiveRain allegedly fudged notifying founding members and moved forward by only allowing active members to be grandfathered in. Thompson’s argument is not only one that he and others did not receive proper notification, but he and others comment frequently and despite being on a points based system tied to each user’s account, it is not considered to be “participation.”

Thompson’s response? He deleted all of the content he had ever written and I suspect he and others will no longer refer to ActiveRain in their frequent seminars, courses and speaking engagements.

I don’t know if I would have chosen to delete my content there.  Like any advertising model, it might have been useful to really analyze the costs and benefits.  I can think of three benefits to paying for membership in the network:

  • Back links to my home site– I can’t quantify what that benefit is but I know it helps my SEO
  • Traffic- I get some 200 visitors monthly from Active Rain URLs
  • Conversion- I receive 1-2 GOOD inquiries monthly, directly from the Active Rain contact forms.

This isn’t too hard to quantify.  The Read more

June 29, 2010

Four years of the dog: Happy Birthday to all the hounds…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I want to challenge everything.

After four years of hammering away at this thing, the other night I finally came up with a mission-statement that best describes my own involvement here — and everywhere:

I want to challenge everything.

I love classical ideas, but not because they’re old, and I love new ideas, but not simply because they’re new. I don’t love the sound of breaking glass, but I definitely understand the appeal of iconoclasm — image-breaking. I’m pretty sure that anything I might think about is oriented 178 degrees out of true, but I also know I am at odds with the hideous sameness of everything no matter how badly it is twisted out of reason. I want things to be better — I can’t look at anything without seeing how it could be better — but even before that, I just want for things to be different. We have this incredible gift — this reasoning, recollecting, choosing, daring, defying mind — and yet all we can think of to do is the stupid, the small, the vicious and the banal.

I want to challenge all of that.

And this has been a very good home for me, for that reason among many others. Four years ago today I posted the first entry in BloodhoundBlog. The post was about disintermediation, a very common theme in my writing, and it still holds up pretty well. More than 60 people have written with us over the years, producing almost 4,400 posts as I write this. Just short of 2,300 of those posts are mine, to give you an idea of the kind of howling I’ve done, but everyone who has worked here has done exemplary work. For some of them, the best writing they’ve done anywhere has appeared under Odysseus’ nose.

I’m very proud of this thing, and it matters to me a great deal that I am able to find pride in the things I do, the things I’m involved in. I’ve always been very good at making enemies, and BloodhoundBlog has proved to be an excellent resource for making new enemies. But I’ve forged some irreplaceable Read more

June 4, 2010

Is exposing your own weakness a good power play?

by

Mortgage Systems Samurai

Author website

lessons learned from a difficult home buying experienceI’m am not entirely sure what made me think that this would be a good idea, but now that i’ve taken the leap I received exactly the response that I anticipated by telling this unflattering story to my database of over 9,000 consumers.

Let me back up for just a second here and shape the battlefield for you.

Business has been absolutely crazy this past month with a surge of files from buyers trying to get in under the wire for the $8,000 federal tax credit.

Our staff is pushing maximum capacity and to top it all off, the rates have significantly dipped in the past couple of weeks.

Now, let me set up this particular situation, share with you how I dealt with it (publicly), then I would like to get your feedback.

Close of escrow is scheduled for May 29th.  The borrower is using a CalSTR 80/17 purchase money loan which allows for a free float down if the rates drop during first 45 days of the lock.

Rates dropped and we combed through our pipeline looking for opportunities to “knock the socks off” buyers by making the “I know we’re closing next week and I can lower your rate today” phone call that everyone loves to make.

We had a mix-up, a miscommunication between the loan officer and the processor (processor processess float down) – the result was that we accidentally floated down the rate of a buyer before we called them to communicate the option and the opportunity.

As it turns out – that was a fatal error in the buyer’s mind.  The $27 a month savings paled to his concerns about closing his escrow early or on time.

This miscommunication compounded by a plethora of other miscommunications and mistakes by escrow quickly snow balled into a series of emails from the buyer, expressing exactly how he felt about the situation he was thrust into.

These emails were directed to me as the branch manager and “homeownership educator” of the office.  I thought long and hard about how to make this a positive experience because it got kind of ugly, which you will see for yourself.

I decided to Read more

May 27, 2010

Ubiquitous Bloodhound finally makes his break

by

Realtor, Peripatetic Iconoclast

Author website

All of us, proprietors of this kennel included, have known that Odysseus was destined for the big time. Well, he finally got his break! Look for our pal anywhere a gorgeous face is needed.

It's midnight. Do you know where your Bloodhound is?

True confession: I was hiding in the bushes at a webinar (name withheld to protect the perps) and discovered PhotoFunia while waiting for the inevitable “buy today! Special deal just for our attendees! Super special deal if you get your broker to bring more lambs agents  to the slaughter!”  Well anyway, I found PhotoFunia at this webinar.  It is free and it is fun. There really was a pony in there!  I hope you enjoy.

May 11, 2010

WP Cache plugin creating firesavez7 Virus Zombie?!

by

Mortgage Systems Samurai

Author website

If you have no idea what i’m talking about, you’re one of the lucky few!

This weekend my sites were attacked by a virus trying to install maleware and redirecting visitors to URL that started with firesavez7.com/ and then a long line of characters that led straight down a path to virus hell.

I have enough computer prophylactic mechanisms in place that I did not download anything but the job of cleanup is just beginning.

I was out of town at a conference this weekend and was unable to be in front of my computer, but while frequently checking my analytics with my iPhone app I noticed my daily traffic, bounce rate and time on site were WAY down.  Like almost non-existent!

My sites are hosted at Bluehost, and with a little research discovered that they were indeed a victim of this attack along with many other providers.

The Solution was not that bad

To initially resolve the problem, I had to restore my entire public_html directory to a previously backed up version from about a week ago, this was Sunday night.  That seemed to solve the problem.

I went the entire day yesterday with no occurrence of the dreaded redirect notice and anti-virus alarm.  Site traffic, time on site and bounce rate (vitals) were normal….whew, that was close.

But the dead rose to feed again

Tuesday is my marketing day.  The day that I send an update to my entire consumer and agent database (9,100 recipients of this email update) to notify them of the articles I wrote this week about claiming California’s tax credit.

Initially, there were no issues….and then it started.  One, then two, then three emails came rolling in warning me that I was sending out a virus!  HOLY S%&T!  This isn’t happening.  I saw my reputation being flushed before my eyes.

I screamed through my site with absolutely no challenges, no virus, no warnings, no redirects….what the hell was going on?!

I jumped on the phone with the smartest and nerdiest guy I know, Ryan Hartman.  He mentions that it’s common for viruses to attack your .htmaccess file in WordPress – so we look at it.

Ryan saw some stuff in there 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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