BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Blogging (page 6 of 84)

March 5, 2009

If you’re in the Phoenix area on April 22 and you want to learn a whole lot about how to use Web 2.0 to promote your real estate practice — I’m in the Yellow Pages under chopped liver

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m having an exceptional week.

On top of money work, I got the Universal Contact Form to the point where I can deploy new variations in seconds.

I’ve been playing Gooder games for fun — except the fun keeps turning into profit.

I worked out an algorithm for round-tripping data out of and back into Heap, making it possible to use rigorously self-populating forms to get existing databased prospects to scrub their own records. I did a small piece of this before Seattle, but I fleshed out the whole strategy this week.

That algorithm is general enough that it can be used to generate any kind of intelligent email: Any CSV file can become an email that uses a coded URL to self-populate a form that in turn produces other intelligent results: New database records, new CSV files, etc.

I hit upon — but have not yet implemented — a completely new way of organizing my sidebar at our Phoenix real estate weblog to make each WordPress Page its own quarterback in still more Gooder games — all of which, of course, are also Heap games.

I’ve been bugging Michael Wurzer at FBS Systems about making the FlexMLS IDX system responsive to coded URLs. If they will do this, I can build forms that can punch data into Flex just as I’m doing with Heap.

And today I worked out a way to take back the fattest third of the long tail from HomeZillTruGain at a cost in money and labor approaching zero dollars and zero cents. To the contrary, what I’m doing should actually pay us in added incremental SEO juice.

And the funny part is, I have two other long tail strategies that, so far, I’ve only implemented in pilot projects because those two do require a modicum of labor and I just don’t have the time to throw at them.

My thinking is that, by the time I’m done, I can plant three sloppy Bloodhound kisses on the first page of the SERPs for maybe 2,000 long tail keywords — maybe more.

And that’s just the stuff that I’m thinking about right now. The first quarter of 2009 Read more

March 4, 2009

Brief links: Todd Carpenter at REBarCamp Virginia, Active Rain versus Move and why the Kindle iPhone app is too-little, too-late

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Daniel Rothamel made a UStream video of Todd Carpenter’s appearance yesterday at REBarCamp Virginia. Todd acquitted himself fairly well, only now and then sounding like an oily, evasive politician. His mien was perfect: Middle-management nerd, which is his newly-assigned role.

His boss, Hillary Marsh, also spoke, and she was a lot less encouraging. She clearly sees social media — essentially Twitter to her — as yet another spam channel for NAR agitprop blather. Here’s how it is: People don’t respond to the NAR’s ActionSpams, but it’s not because they hate the NAR and despise its continual abuse of the political process. No, it’s because they’re not being spammed enough. Yeesh!

There was a long discussion about NAR responsiveness, but it boils down to this: You will become one with The Borg. The NAR will be happy to listen to your complaints as long as you don’t have any. Nothing new…

Matt Carter has a killer two-parter on Move’s failed attempt to acquire ActiveRain and AR’s subsequent lawsuit against Move:

By the time the deal fell through in May 2007, the window of opportunity for ActiveRain’s founders to cash in on their site’s success had closed, attorneys for the company claimed. In an August 2007 lawsuit ActiveRain sought $33 million in damages, alleging breach of contract, unjust enrichment, unfair competition, fraud and deceit.

Last month, attorneys for Move and ActiveRain said a settlement had been reached in which each side would bear its own costs and attorneys’ fees. They asked U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson to dismiss the case “with prejudice” — meaning ActiveRain would be barred from filing another suit making the same claim.

This was interesting to me: While he was employed by Move, Inc., Dustin Luther was casting about for ways to pimp the RE.net to Move:

Move had hired a prominent real estate blogger, Dustin Luther, and developed a set of company blogs. A team under Samuelson was working to develop more sophisticated blogging and social networking capabilities for Move.

Realtors are “probably our largest untapped resource,” Luther said in a Nov. 1, 2006, e-mail to Move’s then-CEO Mike Long. “There are hundreds (if not thousands) Read more

March 2, 2009

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

by

Retechulous...

Author website

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 26, 2009

We know sheep will follow a Judas goat to their slaughter, as will cattle. Now the NAR is testing the idea on lemmings…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Todd Carpenter becomes one with the Borg and the charming little lemmings elbow each other out of the way to dive off the cliff head first.

One of two things will happen: Todd will discover he’s made a terrible mistake and will quit this job with dispatch — I hope very loudly. Or: Todd will deliver us to our slaughter.

Anyone who expects anything other than evil from the National Association of Realtors has either not been paying attention, or, much worse, embraces that evil.

In any case, this is not something to be celebrated, not even to affect to be “nice” in chorus with the rest of the lemmings.

The NAR may want to infest our world in order to destroy it. More likely, they want to take it over.

What they certainly do not want is to approach the public as we do — openly, authentically, concealing nothing. The entire edifice of residential real estate is founded on secrets and lies, and, as long as it is, the NAR will be nothing but a cesspit of tyrannical motives and vendorslut con games.

And — more is the pity — Todd Carpenter cannot take their money without being their shill and their Judas goat — or worse.

I’m saddened by this, because of all the gutless big-name real estate webloggers, Todd has more guts than most. But nothing good for us will come of this, and the only good that can come of it for Todd is for him to escape with his scruples intact as quickly as he can.

February 26, 2009

engenu Epiphany #1: Folders become pages

by

Real Estate Broker, Investor

Author website

When I saw this a few days ago on BHB, I was not sure I could come up with anything “helpful”.

Like most folks, when I first looked at engenu last year, I just didn’t “get” it.  In fact, I didn’t “get”  it until just yesterday when I decided to take on this little challenge.

Understanding the power of engenu requires one fundamental paradigm shift.  And that shift is this:  Folders become pages.

When you build a standard-issue web site, you think in terms of pages. If you are creating a web site for, say,  a listed property, you most likely have a page for the property description, another page talking about the neighborhood, another page for your bio and contact information, etc.

In engenu, folders become pages.

In engenu, you add a folder for a particular topic, instead of creating a page for that topic. And when you process that folder through engenu, that folder becomes a page.  For example, to create a page for your bio information, you start with an empty folder named “about me.”

If the very first page you created in engenu was a slideshow from a folder full of images, that’s great, and engenu does that extremely well, but if that is all you did, you may have missed the necessary paradigm shift.

To experience the paradigm shift, try this instead:

The prerequisites are a). Have engenu installed and working on one of your sites, and b). Have an FTP program and an basic idea of how to use the FTP program.

Start your FTP program, and in the panel for your local computer create a new folder.  Name the folder “About Me”.  That’s it.  Leave it as an empty folder.

Still in the FTP program, connect to your server/host.

Upload the empty folder to your server/host.

Exit the FTP program and go to yoursite.com/engenu.  Click on the name of the folder (About Me) and engenu’s editor will open.  Paste a short bio into the “Body copy” text box.  Click “Save and Continue”  then click “Preview Saved Changes” Read more

February 23, 2009

Adding a new hound to the pound: Introducing Ryan Hartman

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ryan Hartman has been a fun and fascinating voice in our comments for a long time. My error was that I was too stupid to invite him to join us as a contributor. I corrected this defect yesterday, and Ryan joins us today.

His biographical sketch is simply incomparable, so I will quote it in its entirety:

Ryan dropped out of a Philly college and started selling real estate at age 19 in 1998.  He invested pretty much all of the GCI he earned in his early 20’s on beer, mushrooms, and florida. Then a wife and some kids showed up, so he figured out a way to “settle down” by replacing  7 day Realtor work weeks with lead-generation/blogging/tech-type gigs at a few local RE/MAX offices.

The man is wicked smart and a very fun read. We’re lucky to have him among us.

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February 19, 2009

Max vs. The 1000-Pound Gorilla

by

Free Market Cowgirl

Author website

Meet Max. He’s the cute little mascot for Homegain.com

Meet The 1000-Pound Gorilla (Hint: It ain’t really move.com Those are really fists, codename: Thunder and Lightning)

This is Max telling me about the advantages of Homegain.com over on my Active Rain blog.

(about the fourth comment down: Louis Cammarosano)

This is a link to the winner of the competition.

His account was suspended for violation of AR’s Terms of Service (advertising in the comments of another blogger).

Yeah right. Looks like somebody went a bit Ape Sh*t over a major competitor talking to a friend (me) about the value of their company on my blog.

February 16, 2009

The ActiveRain hokey pokey: You shoot your left foot off, you shoot your right foot off, you shoot your left hand off — and then you present the audience with an invoice…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

What costs $360 a year and puts you in touch with vast hordes of sweet people who cannot do business with you? Starting today, Active Rain will cost $30 a month for new members.

That’s a load of dough. If you want to host your own WordPress.org weblog, a perfectly adequate hosting account at HostGator.com will run you $4.95 a month. Toss in ten bucks a year for the domain and you’re still less than $70 a year. For $7.95 a month, you can host unlimited domains, which puts two domains at $116 a year, three at $126, ten at $196. For $360 a year, you could host 26 unique domains. Or you could get a BloodhoundBlog.net blog for free, aliasing it to your own domain name for free.

The demurrer from ActiveRain will be that they are delivering added value. But most of that added value comes from selling the membership to each other — all with advertising and extra-cost features piled on top.

I met many of the AR folks in Seattle last week. Very nice people, fun and enthusiastic. But if your idea of a productive use of your time is schmoozing with other Realtors, Twitter is (still) free…

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February 15, 2009

Making the Scene: How to create new public Scenius scenes

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written a ton about Scenius scenes, but, until lately, we’ve kept the scene creation praxis fairly close to our vests. I had documented the process very early for the folks who were involved in the original discussion of the Scenius idea, then shared that video how-to with other folks by email.

But we’re doing things differently than we were last November. And I took up the topic of scene creation in public in Seattle both Thursday and Friday. On Friday, I promised to cook up newer, better documentation by Monday.

I’m a day early. Click on this link to be swept off to a comprehensive site on how — and why — to create a public Scenius.net scene.

The site features three videos, including a link to the one made by Jim Reppond at Friday’s presentation.

There are also links to some of the pages mentioned in the first video, which is intended to be the canonical scene creation reference, as well as links to BloodhoundBlog posts on the how and why of Scenius scenes.

Let me know when you create a new public scene and I will add it to the index at Scenius.net.

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January 28, 2009

You want to get someone’s attention? Try ‘pardon me’. Even a shoe toss is more civil than spitting in one’s face.

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

It takes some chutzpah to have such an opinion about things and become as successful as Michael Arrington has with TechCrunch.  Yesterday he posted about how he’s going off the grid, after the abuse from his peers and critics becomes threatening to his family’s safety.

TechCrunch – ‘Some things need to change’

Luckily my tolerance level for verbal abuse has risen proportionately to our growth, so I can handle most of the verbal abuse thrown our way. I can even handle it when my so called friends decide it’s in their best interest to spread negative rumors about us privately. I believe that it has changed me as a person to the point where I generally don’t trust people until they’ve earned it. Before TechCrunch I assumed most people were essentially good, and assumed that an individual was trustworthy until proven otherwise. Today, its exactly the opposite.

But like I said, I draw the line at being spat on. It’s one step away from something far more violent.

Something very few people know: last year over the summer an off balance individual threatened to kill me and my family. He wasn’t very stealthy about it – he called our office number, sent me emails and even posted threats on his blog, so it wasn’t hard to determine who he was. The threats were, in the opinion of security experts we consulted, serious. The individual has a felony record and owns a gun. Police in three states became involved and we hired a personal security team to protect me, my family and TechCrunch employees.

At over $2,000 a day we couldn’t keep paying for security indefinitely. And the police were helpful but couldn’t do much based on the threats until he acted. We had the option of getting a restraining order but that just tells the person exactly where you are (the places they can’t go). So for a week I was literally in hiding with my parents at their home. The TechCrunch office was empty, and the police made regular checks to see if things were ok. One evening they almost arrested one of our Read more

January 21, 2009

Selling real estate the engenu way: Because I can make content-rich web sites so easily, I can make my points more convincingly

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Can premium rental homes in suburban Phoenix throw off positive cash-flow at 75% of market rents?

An investor asked me that question the other day. It’s an academic problem, really, a matter of costing out typical homes to see how they perform under that scenario.

I can do that much standing on my head, but answering a question like that with a spreadsheet is not terribly satisfying. We live in a data-rich world, and I wanted for my investor to understand exactly what we were talking about. So not just the spreadsheet, but also MLS listings of typical homes. And not just the listings, but also detailed photos of those homes, with descriptions of what might be wrong with each one.

In fact, I could have answered the question any way I wanted, from tap-dancing on the telephone to an attempt to set a showing appointment. But I know from experience that the more questions I can answer in a completely credible fashion, the greater my chances of forging a long-term client relationship.

And that’s a big “Duh!” — isn’t it? How would I want to be treated if I were thinking of dropping some substantial fraction of a million dollars on investment real estate?

And this is where engenu comes in. I can shoot the spreadsheet across immediately, as an appetizer. But I’m not selling spreadsheets, I’m selling houses, so I put together a list of houses that I thought might be financially impressive. I toured each one, taking photos of everything, then came home and built an engenu web site from my findings.

I’ve been talking about engenu for nearly a year, but I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten the point all the way across. We use engenu to build our single-property web sites and to provide supporting documentation when we blog about homes for sale. We use it as a way of previewing homes for out-of-town buyers and investors, and as a way of communicating staging advice to our sellers. The language of real estate is photography, and engenu enables us to build (and rebuild) large, photo-rich web sites with minimal effort.

So: I came Read more

January 18, 2009

From Blogs to Klogs: How Blogging Will Become Useful

by

CEO, PA Association of Realtors

Author website

Blogging is a fad and by definition, it will eventually run its course and fade away to a small niche. Blogs will be the bell-bottom pants of Web 2.0. The technology of Blogging will not go away, but the style of what we now do on Blogs will change significantly and will be renamed “Klogs” (more on that later).

How can I make such a claim in the face of overwhelming statistics documenting the growth and popularity of Blogs? That’s an easy question. My answer: because this is a Blog post and I can spew whatever opinion I wish and the only thing you can do is try to out-spew me with your own opinion. But spewing opinions is not what is going to undo Blogging – lack of civility will keep Blogs out of the mainstream.  Simply put, corporate leaders have not embraced the Blogosphere because many Blogs often spiral down into a pit of venom and character assassination while hiding behind a cloak of anonymity. Many Blogs revel in being snarky because it gets them quick exposure and generates lots of readers and comments. It is all in good fun until someone gets their eye poked out.

Corporate leaders are fearful of Blogs because these freeform formats of fun are too risky for the image of the Company.  Sure, many corporations have started a Blog, but most are tame, humorless, boring sites used for product promotion and press releases.  The NAR Blog is a good example of that.  These are not real Blogs because the writers are not free to say what they think; rather, they must say what the company wants to say/hear.

Because there is not widespread adoption of Blogging on the corporate level – and VERY few individuals are making money off their Blogs – I can only draw the conclusion that Blogging will fade away to the fashion status of bell-bottoms, or at least not reach a significant level in business communications.  Without adoption by the business community, Blogging will not have sustainable cache’ and, I believe, has almost peaked in popularity.

Currently there are about 4 Blog readers Read more

January 14, 2009

Shawna Ebersole’s iShopGreenwood.com is very rich in content — but it may be just a little bit too rich in color

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My apologies for my recent absence. I came down with a cold — a warning from god about going to Seattle in the Winter — then got bit in the ass by a long-standing Real Life Dilemma. I missed all of the vendorslut “news,” so I don’t even know how deeply inspired were the attendees by being yelled at by Gary Vaynerchuk. (“C’mon! People! It’s not customer service unless you emote from the throat!”)

Am I being hypercritical? I don’t think so. We’re all of us victims of bullshit now and then. The trick is to scrape it off your shoes before you track it all over everything.

Meanwhile, Brian Brady shot this to me by email:

Shawna Ebersole asked us to critique iShopGreenwood.com and give her some ideas for promoting her weblog.

Well. At the risk of seeming hypercritical, I will say that the site seems to me — a male specimen — to be girly and cluttered. The overarching them is High Concept — which means you have to figure it out. No, that’s not a collection of girly-colored boxes, it’s a mall, a big-city indoor shopping mall.

Even so, I don’t care. I don’t care for the colors and I didn’t like having to figure out what was going on, but I don’t think that hurts anything. I also don’t think it helps anything. There are a zillion much-less-clever real estate weblogs, and they probably do just about as well as this one.

But here’s something I really, really liked: The site is very rich in content. My take is that Shawna Ebersole predates real estate weblogging by quite a while, and she seems to have retained every bit of the content she had developed before she took the plunge with a blogsite from Jim Cronin’s RealEstateTomato.com.

Isn’t that a bad thing? I don’t think so. I’ve written before — and should write more extensively — about the idea of satisfaction — feeling full. When people are sampling any of your marketing, they need to be able to consume enough to “feel full.” No one acts before they’re ready to, and you have to hang Read more

January 13, 2009

More Arguments in Favor of Ma Bell.

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

Guess who woke up full of passion, piss and vinegar?

Shiver me timbers, it’s GenuineChris.   So, let’s talk 1.0, 2.0 and stuff.

NEVER did I say–or advocate–that it’s acceptable to burn through clients.  You can AFFORD to when you have 1.0 skills.  But it’s wasteful, stupid and inefficient.  So, get this: I said I’ve been wasteful stupid and inefficient in the past.  Who hasn’t?  Who admits it?  You find people to honor.  To help, to serve.

NEVER do I say that you list anything, work with anyone.  INITIATING a conversation doesn’t obligate you to take junk listings or work with mentally ill drama queens.  You’re looking for the BEST AND MOST PROFITABLE people to sell to.

NEVER did I–or will I–say that “cold calling was the ONLY way that I generate business.”   Fact is, I adovocate “deliberate connecting,” first, THEN cold calling.   Connect with, and build a Brian Brady proof fence around EVERYONE that you know.  EVERYONE that you interact with.  (By the way, a Brian Brady proof fence would be a magnificent thing).   Connect, DELIBERATELY.  A call to your top 400 people once a quarter.  That’s just: 133 calls/month.  Or ~40 calls a week.  Or ~8 calls a day.    And it’s unobtrusive, and if you do it serving them…

…you’ll never starve.

Most people won’t even do that.   I dig the drama, the tension, and that’s why I like honing myself as a “cold” caller.  I do it to build my ability to connect with people as much as anything else.  Fact is, I’m persistent, I’m Rocky Balboa.  I get my face beat in but I keep coming back for another round.  And the fact is, I call people, in roughly the order:

-People that know, like trust and seek me out: every 30 days.  There are 45 people on this list.  And I talk to them as often as I can, and I make it a point to honor all of them.  Never forget the people that have helped.  Be present and ready to give them a %%^& referral.

-People that know me and recognize me. Every 90 days, a CONVERSATION.   Today?  We’re at about Read more

January 5, 2009

Free “gifts” for real estate webloggers: “The need to deny influence is damaging to the soul”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

On Vendorslut Eve, here are a couple of quick notes on free “gifts” and their intended influence:

Richard Riccelli points out this New York Times article:

Starting Jan. 1, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on the kind of branded goodies — Viagra pens, Zoloft soap dispensers, Lipitor mugs — that were meant to foster good will and, some would say, encourage doctors to prescribe more of the drugs.

No longer will Merck furnish doctors with purplish adhesive bandages advertising Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus. Banished, too, are black T-shirts from Allergan adorned with rhinestones that spell out B-O-T-O-X. So are pens advertising the Sepracor sleep drug Lunesta, in whose barrel floats the brand’s mascot, a somnolent moth.

Some skeptics deride the voluntary ban as a superficial measure that does nothing to curb the far larger amounts drug companies spend each year on various other efforts to influence physicians. But proponents welcome it as a step toward ending the barrage of drug brands and logos that surround, and may subliminally influence, doctors and patients.

It’s not just a matter of subliminal influence. When every pen and pad you use comes from a vendor, the vendors are underwriting your office supplies budget. The “in-kind” gift translates directly to an “in-cash” benefit.

Here’s a very complete disclosure on this issue of “gifts” and affiliate marketing from the Mortgage Sales Blog:

While most of the information provided on this mortgage blog does not include product pitches or personal agendas, some of the authors may generate income by selling services to loan officers or real estate agents.

Personally approved mortgage vendors participate on this blog as a way to expand their online reach, develop relationships with our readers, and prove that their products are worth taking a look at.

In the instance where it is not obvious, I will make every attempt to be fully transparent with our readers about any affiliate agreements where the Mortgage Sales Blog receives financial compensation by promoting a product or service on this blog.

As of Jan 4th, 2009, the Mortgage Sales Blog (Mark Madsen) has not promoted any product or service where an 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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