My take: You cannot successfully push-market into that cacophony. You must pull, because there is already way too much push. I’m thinking Eric Blackwell’s archives warrant your attention.
Category: Bloodhound SEO (page 1 of 2)
Hunting down the best ways to be found
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
I caught up on some much needed sleep yesterday, after the fifth BloodhoundBlog Unchained Conference, held in Anaheim, CA. It is my hope that my partner Greg Swann celebrates his birthday, in relaxation and Splendor, before pondering the future of these conferences. As the Godfather of the Unchained movement, Greg argued that the title of these conferences be “Unchained” rather than the “Unleashed” title I offered. What Greg knew, and I understand now, is that Unchained suggests that the Bloodhound was never enslaved while unleashed suggests prior submission.
If you missed our show in Anaheim, you missed the proof in the pudding. I’ll give you an overview:
Greg Swann led us off with a demonstration of his Chinese army; software which creates tens of thousands of unique webpages, with granular listing data. Greg showed us how he can close the publishing gap, in less than an hour each week. Greg continually invents new and exciting software, to stay one step ahead of the market competitors, who would try tho chain him.
Scott Schang came to Unchained 2008 on, how he has described it, “his final few bucks”. He took the ideas offered there, implemented them here, and created a business which employs a half-dozen people. He shared his online business plan, his accomplishments and mistakes, and how he overcame market changes to stay relevant in the consumers’ eyes. From borrowed bus fare to accomplished entrepreneur, in 40 months, Scott has a database of willing home buyers, numbering in the five figures—Scott is Unchained.
Brian Summerfield, of the National Association of Realtors, came to take some body blows from the crew. It was his motivation which impressed me; he transparently announced that he came to address us because he wants content for Realtor.org . Mr. Summerfield invites constructive criticism of NAR on its forum. Contact him if you have an opinion to offer.
Bill Lyons, a serial entrepreneur, shared his latest creation for consumers, Revestor.com . Revestor.com offers investors an IDX search with rental data. Home buyers can search listings by net cash flow or capitalization rate. Revestor.com is expected to be released right before Thanksgiving.
Mark Madsen Read more
it was (theoretically) possible for you to “nuke” all of your competitors and remove them from Google’s index. For all of you who thought that your site was awesome and the other guys’ site was crap. You had your chance. Hat tip to the folks at Search Engine Land.
The time has now passed and the security breach has now been fixed. Grin. And NO I did not harm ANY websites’ standing in Google in the making of this post. Nor do I encourage it. It may be illegal and is certainly immoral.
That said, I defy anyone to truthfully say that my job is not interesting. (grin) I was on a coaching call with an SEO client when I read the post. Very hard to keep my mind focused. grin.
But this begs the question…if you could vaporize your competitors from Google would you? and why?
I haven’t been posting much at Bloodhound lately, or really for awhile. Professionally, I did not make the progress last year I usually do. I went backwards and was simply distracted by other things. By this time last year, I was a very sick boy and it took until nearly Christmas to be back to having much energy or vitality. But, it wasn’t time wasted. From a personal standpoint, it confirmed what I already know, and that’s to just do the things that I want to do. Since that’s pretty much how I’ve always lived, I looked at my life and decided it was perfect.
So, about January, I had the energy to get back to speed on business. My brokerage wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do. It wasn’t doing much at all. So, I decided to fix it. I did some Ryan Hartman type of web marketing and got the leads flowing again. In my market, a market that hasn’t seen over 150 homes sold annually since 2007, I was getting 2 to 5 real buyers per week asking to do business and sending me their contact information. That was a good start.
But, that wasn’t enough. I’m the rural hound in this crowd. We have a group of brokers really happy with their own little MLS system that doesn’t track much data. It would look pretty 1992 to the rest of you. So, by digging into it and looking at what was actually selling, I noticed that foreclosure sales, bank owned and short sales, had gone from a handful of percentage of the market to at least 20%. Even more instructive, the number was growing quickly.
While I had a bunch of buyers calling, I was having issues getting folks who could get loans and get deals done. By dipping my toe in marketing foreclosures I found that most all of them were looking to spend cash. And, in this resort market, most were wanting premium properties. Awesome! That solves the qualification problem
So, I found out that lakechelanforeclosures.com and chelanforeclosures.com were available. In a matter of a few days I Read more
Note to Zillow: You have, in my opinion, been scraping traffic and (either accidentally or on purpose- I cannot know) in the process getting tons of irrelevant traffic via SEO. You have also been APPARENTLY been charging your advertisers for those same views. (For those who wonder what I am talking about, go to their home page and scroll to the bottom. They currently are featuring the largest home in the US and something about one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey. Or you can Google “largest house in US Ira Rennert”.
I have long had the thought that some of us bloggers ought to do a similar thing and drive you from the front page and ease my annoyance at your apparent practice. It has been bugging me for months. Clever? Maybe, but not something that I’d want a “partner” doing. (grin) Of course, I don’t “partner” with you, but you get the idea.
The home in the beginning of the movie Rainman is actually located in Cincinnati. The East Walnut Hills home on Burnett Avenue was featured at the beginning of the movie and the owners are now facing foreclosure. It was once valued at $1.5 million.
Let’s learn from the principle. It is one that Brian Brady taught us with Elliot Spitzers hired lover. These types of terms build TONS of irrelevant traffic because they are carried on the current media. It is a tactic that many SEO types use currently as well.
We all see foreclosures all the time in this business. I wish the current owners as well as the bank who will apparently soon own the home a speedy dispatch and sale of the property to a new owner.
To Zillow. Guys I hope you are not “milking” traffic to aid your profitability by billing CPM to unsuspecting advertisers who are losing because they are not getting relevant eyeballs in exchange for their dough. That is THEIR call and not mine. I wish you guys well and would be happy for you to join this conversation and set me straight. As I said above, I cannot judge intent. I Read more
Brian and I gave a three-hour presentation last Friday to a small group of top-producers at the Phoenix Association of Realtors. We asked Bloodhound Terry Melcher to help us set it up, and she packed the room with some of the most successful Realtors in Metropolitan Phoenix.
Brian was in town to help me shoot promotional videos for BloodhoundRealty.com, and we made a video of the speaking event as well. Don’t pester Ryan for a BHB.TV channel: It’s our usual garage-band quality production.
We cover a lot of ground in the 2.5 hours of video linked below, but there’s not a lot of cutting-edge stuff in there. If you’re new to our schtick, though, this might be a good short introduction to the BloodhoundBlog Unchained way of thinking.
It’s official, Yahoo, the original search brand, is outsourcing its search function to Microsoft. I don’t think either Microsoft or Yahoo had a choice. It’s a shotgun marriage.
Those work out all the time, right?
Coming out with something that is noticeably better than Google’s Search experience is the only way anyone will take significant search audience share from them, because despite all the hype around Tweets and FB, Search is still the fundamental App that makes the Web useful and people need a real reason to switch from what they like and are used to.
Failing that (as Microsoft has with every incremental redesign of their search offering, including Bing), Redmond probably figured why not buy a solid, if distant, second place?
Yahoo knows how this works: A combination of loyalty and laziness is the only reason they still have enough users that Microsoft is even interested in this deal.
So what does this mean for your SEM efforts?
As Wired points out in a good take on this deal, “…by capturing one opposing army, (Microsoft) dramatically simplifies the battle lines and creates a two-sided conflict.”
Google knows how to hit Microsoft where it hurts, most recently by forcing Microsoft to sacrifice its cash cow, Office, by making it available on line next year to counter Google Docs. So far, Microsoft has not been able to land an equally solid punch on Google.
That has to make Steve Ballmer’s forehead all purple with the veins popping out, like the evil aliens in the original Star Trek pilot. I don’t think I could work for Ballmer. I first saw those aliens when I was like 6, and I still have nightmares about them.
….but I digress…
One way Steve could finally get some would be to introduce serious competition in contextual text ads, the Web advertising form that Google invented and the only ad model that works on the Web (Exhibit A: They made Google $5.5 Billion last Qtr.).
Real competition from Microsoft in the form of lower costs per click could drive Adword prices down, which all by itself does nothing to take overall search audience share from Google, but Read more
I’ve been sitting on this idea for probably about a year now, and figured Unchained was the appropriate place to let it rip. So for those of you that were there, you know where I’m going with this.
If you weren’t in Phoenix, please take a minute to visit Centralpaliving.Com/NoOneElseInYourMarketWillDoThisSoDontWorryAboutSharingItWithTheWorld
What you’ll see is basically one of the better real estate marketing ideas I’ve ever had and the latest addition to the CentralPaLiving project.
Once you get to the page, you might get the urge to thank me? Maybe you can do so by hitting CentralPaLiving.Com up with a juicy link from your own 404? Maybe do something like http://centralpaliving.com/(insertyournameorurlhere) so that you pop up when I do a google “links:” query?
Thanks in advance for your thanks 🙂 And thanks also to all the folks on the Scenius in Phoenix who helped turn a pretty good idea into the turbocharged video based squeeze page monster that it is now!
Bonus! — A Screencast Demonstrating This Thing In Action!
Three days later and my head’s still not right. Have you ever returned home from a few days away and felt like you needed another vacation in order to recover from your vacation? You might say the Unchained Conference was like that… but you’d be off by a factor of 10. Unchained was roughly 32 hours of fast-paced information downloaded without filter or pause in a two and a half day schedule. Vacation? I need an I.V. drip.
You might also think, based on what I just wrote, it would be difficult to name the #1 highlight of the entire three days. But you’d be wrong again. (You’re really not very good at this game. 🙂 ) There were hundreds of moments to choose from and I’m gonna list a few, but there was a definite highlight – an apogee if you will. It was during that moment I realized I was experiencing everything it means when we say the bloodhound way.
In the kick-off class of the conference, yours truly was the instructor and I didn’t know what to expect. The feel of this conference – the expectation – was very high-tech. Yet I’m using terms like “old school” marketing and making a point of saying that all the shiny gizmos and gadgets handed out over the next three days were just so much dust gatherers without a framework rooted in old fashioned sales and marketing. To say I was a little anxious about kicking off an online conference with my offline message is like saying the Christians felt a little concerned about entering the lion’s den wearing nothing but butter-flavored bikinis. I’ve never been so glad to be wrong. Highlight of the class: we had two attendees benefit from the scenius of the group and nail down their niche, then go online to PURCHASE THEIR DOMAIN NAME AND LAUNCH THEMSELVES right there in class. God bless people of action.
Once the moments began to roll, they just never let up for three days:
- Mark Green and his brilliant CRM class experienced one technical difficulty after another due to hotel bandwidth limitations, yet they Read more
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
In May of last year, Eric Bramlett shined the light on an apparent link building scheme that Trulia and Number1Expert had **apparently** **allegedly** been doing, having 3 links to Trulia via a little map widget installed on thousands of unsuspecting REALTORS’ sites created by N1E… Here’s the post that started the fun.
I got the honor of creating the graphic for that post. (read: enjoyed it and would do it again) Despite our efforts to educate REALTORS, many / most of the links remained. Most REALTORS were too busy with their own lives to realize that N1E was using them to help the competition after charging the REALTOR to build their web presence.
Fast forward to this morning. Now it’s my buddy Jon Karlen’s (insert hat tip) turn with the flashlight. He sends me an email, noting that a Florida REALTOR’s site now has a Homes.com map widget instead of Trulia. I do a little digging using the same technique that Eric Bramlett used… and VIOLA!, it appears to me that they have done this to many of the same Number1Expertsites…again. Yes it (Homes.com) is a sister company of N1E. (Dominion…appropriate parent company name, methinks) Yes, they only have 1 link. The rest is the same,no?. Am I missing something here? If you are a N1E customer, you are **likely** **apparently** feeding your competitors…yet again.
(Inlookers: Yes, this is the same Trulia who insisted that they made no changes after dropping in the search engines…and they magically reappeared) TO BE CLEAR: I am NOT saying that this is cause and effect, but the timing? Interesting coincidence. My target here is Number1Expert, but no matter. I could have sworn that Trulia widgets were on those sites up until recently…(I will check).
Note to Number1Expert customers: Yet again, link love from your site is apparently being used to feed your competitors. The first time “could” have been an accident….now? Ummm…OK…maybe it is an accident too.Your call. I am just here to point out where the links are going…not to draw conclusions as to WHY.
Owning your own web presence also means defending your self against Read more
…and switch Cascading Style Sheets intelligently. What it needs are more shared scenes.
Making a shared Scenius scene is work. Not a lot, but some. What do you get in return:
- Added-value content for your blog and for any blog that echoes your scene
- A quick way to promote news or ideas you think are important without writing full blog posts
- By your links, you draw attention to your blog from other blogs in your content sphere
- Your scene links back to your blog, so the more it echoes, the better for your SEO posture
- When other blogs echo your shared scene, they are exposing your blog to their readers, which can lead to new readers — or new business
Your weblog put you into the narrowcasting business, and that’s a great thing. Building a shared Scenius scene will put you into the broadcasting business, a boon that gains in benefits — for everyone — the more it echoes.
What’s in it for me? With each scene, I’m taking a link back to BloodhoundBlog — a non-monetized weblog. In other words, I’m working for free, which is not at all unusual. You live in a world infested with sleazoid vendors, each one of whom wants to nick you for monthly fees for work you can easily do yourself. I will show you — for free — how to build yourself a broadcast platform that will benefit everyone involved, yourself the most.
There are a few people working (behind the scenes as it were) on shared Scenes that will debut in the next few days. This is a bandwagon worth jumping on. Good for your readers. Good for the writers you feature. Good for the blogs echoing your shared scenes — and good for their readers. And good for you.
Review the terms and conditions and let me know when you’re ready to get started on your own shared Scenius scene.
This came in by email, but I’m answering it publicly because I expect the question is fairly common:
I am a member of the Cyberprofessionals group. I was unable to attend the session in Orlando and therefore missed your presentation. I have read the materials about the upcoming event in Phoenix and I’m not entirely sure what it’s all about. From what I can see it’s going to be about blogging, and that’s great, but I have perhaps a more broad interest in social networking as well. I know some of the people involved may be experts in that. Could you give me some idea as to the time that is going to be devoted to each of the subject matters.
For a start, let me say that everything I’m saying right now is subject to change. We have some of this ironed out in detail, but much is still to be determined. Moreover, we’re pretty flexible in the way we think. The world we live in upends itself entirely every 15 months or so, and we’re always prepared to turn on a dime. Even so, BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix is going to break out something like this:
First, as I’ve said, the event is going to be a hands-on, step-by-step, learn-by-doing guerrilla marketing boot camp. Our students will be with us for 72 hours total, and out of that time, we could end up working 54 or more hours. We are going to take on every aspect of your marketing praxis, and we’re going to rebuild as much of it as we can in our time together. If you do the prep work your instructors are going to recommend, and if you come to Phoenix prepared to work, you’ll fly home exhausted but with a completely overhauled marketing profile — online, in the social graph, in print and face-to-face.
That’s ambitious, but we can pull it off because we intend to work like no other marketing conference you’ve ever been to or heard about. You are literally going to do the actual work you are learning about — as you learn about it. It Read more
We’ve got the dates for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix: April 28th to May 1st, 2009.
We’ve got the location: The Radisson Phoenix Airport Hotel North, 427 North 44th St, Phoenix, AZ 85008.
And we’ve got the game plan: A three-day Guerilla Marketing Boot Camp during which you’re going to completely revise your marketing profile — in class. We’re not going to tell you how we work. We’re not going to show you how we work. We’re going to work with you, hands-on, step-by-step as we overhaul your marketing strategy from the ground up.
What are we missing? You. Skip ahead if you’re ready to register for the most intense real estate marketing conference you will ever attend.
Got questions? Here are some BloodhoundBlog posts discussing Unchained in Orlando and anticipating the scenius to come in Phoenix:
- From an undisclosed location in Georgia…notes from BHB Unchained
- The scenius on Swallow Hill Road: A brief gloss on BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando, November 7th, 2008
- Unchained Notes: An Outsider’s View From Inside the Hound Pound
- Thinking out loud about BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix
- How I spent my Orlando vacation, or; The exquisite feeling of an exploding brain
- Social Media Marketing Conversion: You Are Permitted To Get Paid
- Passion play: A working plan for working our brains until they explode at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix
Want to know even more? Why not. We’re in the marketing business, after all.
Who should come to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix? If it’s part of your job to attract and convert new business, we have what you need. On BloodhoundBlog, we talk a lot about Social Media Marketing, but in our own businesses, we work with Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Direct Marketing and good old-fashioned belly-to-belly sales. We also work directly with internet-based tools from PHP to RSS to CSS — acronym soup.
Why should you come? We’ll be going through every bit of this at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. Not lecturing as you race to keep up in your notes, but actually doing the work, hands-on, on your own marketing materials.
How will you benefit? Not only will you completely overhaul your existing marketing profile, you’ll learn how Read more
All right, let’s play a little, shall we?
One of the things that came out of our little scenius on Thanksgiving (which continues through today) was a better way of handling the job I used to do with The Long List of Odysseus Medal nominees. I’ve been ignoring that chore since last Spring, a plausible clue that I just might end up ignoring it forevermore. Even so, it was a good idea, and I learned a lot of cool stuff from the code I wrote to manage The Long List scroller that used to live in our sidebar.
What I want to do for now is to implement another kind of sidebar scroller, this one more like a micro-blog of useful and informative posts — mostly marketing, but other matters of importance as well. There were people who used The Long List as their feed reader, and this should work even better in that regard.
You can see it in our sidebar right now. It’s the scroller box headed “SCENIUS: SWITCHED-ON MARKETING” — with links to 50 highly-relevant weblog posts.
If you want to play along with the development process, you can be a big help.
How?
Break this software:
<!-- BEGIN Scenius --> <p><div style="display:block; width:95%; height:320px; overflow:auto; padding-left:6px; padding-right:6px; padding-top:3px; border:1px solid #a9a9a9; "> <?PHP $ch = curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://scenius.bloodhoundblog.net/"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?></div></p> <!-- END Scenius -->
I’m serious. I want you to install that code in your sidebar and see if you can break it.
There are two ways we know of that you might be able to break it.
First, the PHP may not want to work for you. If that happens, I would love to see a screen shot in your email to me about what happened. So you know: I do not believe this will happen. We broke it every which way yesterday, and I think I have code that should work on any true Apache web server.
The second way that this code could fail is that it might not look right. It should come into your sidebar as a well-behaved citizen. It should inherit your sidebar’s style sheets, and it should scroll top to bottom but not left to Read more