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Category: Weblogging 101 (page 4 of 7)

July 28, 2007

Making the connection: The objective of real estate weblogging is visceral and viral, not rape and run

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This will have to be brief, because I’m crushed for time, but we’re promoting Real Estate Weblogging 101 at the StarPower Conference this morning, so it’s a topical topic.

The premise: The commercial value of real estate weblogging comes from making a visceral connection with future clients, ideally leading to viral results, not spam-trolling for short-term leads. In other words, where keyword-packed tapioca content may score well for now on search engines, and may bring in filled-out web forms, it will not create the kinds of enduring connections that result in repeat and referral business for generations. Certainly none of the people brought in by search engines will become loyal readers or subscribers to the weblog: There’s no there there. Even worse, spamvertising in weblogs surely repels at least as many people as it seems to attract, and the people repelled are very probably the ones most likely to yield significant viral results over the years. You’re not only not building bridges, you’re blasting the bridgeheads.

There’s more: What happens when Google changes the rules? When a vendor crows, “Ha, Ha! We tricked Google!” the demise of that particular trick is foreseeable. When Google discovers that favoritism towards weblogs is bringing spam to the top of its results, it will change the way it weights weblogs. Locally-focused webloggers like Jay Thompson who have made the effort to build a following will chug on unabated. Keyword-packing spamvertising weblogs will dry up and blow away.

This morning’s post from Jay is good example of how to do this job: The keywords are there, but they’re there because the post wouldn’t makes sense without them. Jay is providing real value to his readership, practical, relevant advice. Even so, the post should search very well. But here’s the interesting part: Even though Jay is writing about the news of the day, if someone should happen upon this post by search a year or two from now, it will still be serving the visceral, viral function: Jay Thompson cares about his clients, and he is working to provide meaningful benefit to them with his weblog. That’s a very powerful Read more

July 26, 2007

When you’re not busy searching for Maricopa County real estate, you can have yourself a great Maricopa County picnic: Just whip up some tasty Maricopa County sandwiches and pack some frosty Maricopa County beverages, but remember to keep an eye out for those nasty Maricopa County scorpions

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Comes news today that a keyword-packed fake weblog is every bit as attractive and satisfying as an inflatable spouse. I don’t doubt it for a minute, but if the objective is to snare random morons by deception, I think a “stealth” web site is a better-yielding joy-doll.

I swear to god it’s Groundhog Day in the real estate industry — 1974 every damn day, over and over again. Does real estate weblogging offer a path to transparency? Not if it’s just another sleazy gimmick.

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July 17, 2007

Project Blogger: An objective post-mortem analysis — I hope

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Project Blogger is over — I think. Truly the fun never starts, but the drama never stops. I mostly ignored everything except the work Teri Lussier and I did here, at TheBrickRanch.com and at RealEstateWeblogging101.com. The contest pretty much ignored me, too, an unexpected delight.

We didn’t win — as nearly as I can tell. We developed a full-blown viral marketing strategy for locally-focused real estate weblogs, then codified the frolicking thing in a blogbook — itself something new under the sun. Teri understood what we were aiming for, but she understood it in her bones before we got down to business. To my knowledge, none of the other contestants paid the slightest bit of attention to what we were doing, even though we did it all in public.

All that’s as may be. I personally have been less than enthralled by the writing on the contestants’ blogs, but I confess to not having much tolerance for local blogs. To write about things of small importance, you really have to be able to write. I picked Teri to suffer through this with me because she writes so engagingly.

Pat Kitano was the judge for the last week of the competition, and he got to bathe in all that Project Blogger drama. One of the things he did that I thought was very smart was running Technorati rankings on each of the contestant’s weblogs.

This just by itself elicited complaints, which I thought were kind of funny. We said for months that the important thing is viral networking, with SEO factors taking a back seat. So the folks who listened not a word when we were demonstrating how to make a family of your farm were quick to pump their fists and shout, “Linking doesn’t matter.”

That’s not quite true. I wrote this in email to Teri tonight:

Technorati Authority is not vital to your purposes, since the users you want will find you by other means — local blogrolls, comments you make on local blogs, face-to-face contact, your local advertising, etc. But significant linkage from other websites will help your Google PageRank, which will help potential clients Read more

July 10, 2007

Ignore the so-called experts: Blogrolls are good, m’kay?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

No one is better suited for a discussion of the value of blogrolls in viral weblogging than South Park’s Mr. Mackey. (“Drugs are bad, m’kay?”)

Some supposed experts have done extensive research by reading other weblogs and they have come up with (and reiterated) this startling conclusion: “Blogrolls are bad, m’kay?”

I would link to the source, but that might turn out to hurt their SEO prospects. I have, out of thoughtful consideration, removed them from BloodhoundBlog’s blogroll. Not, mind you, because, “Blogrolls are bad, m’kay?” but because I don’t want to promote pernicious nonsense.

Why are blogrolls thought to be bad? Because they might look like a link exchange, and they might get brand new weblogs temporarily sandboxed by Google.

What are we talking about? SEO results, yes?

What should be your objective in producing a real estate weblog? Viral marketing, yes?

If we stipulate Mr. Mackey’s case without contest, would blogrolling being bad for SEO imply that blogrolling is bad for viral marketing?

Take it apart. The masque of Mackey is bullshit: Brand new blogrolls don’t have extensive blogrolls, and, even if they did, there is no reason to suppose that Google is penalizing them. More likely the contrary. Google likes links.

But even arguing to the contrary, would a hypothetical Google-that-doesn’t-like-links make any difference in your viral marketing strategy?

First, lightning can strike with an over-the-transom lead from Google, but it’s not very likely.

Second, the objective of your viral marketing strategy should be to nurture a substantial community of people who are predisposed to use you when they have a real estate need. This has almost nothing to do with SEO results.

Ergo, everything you do with your real estate weblog — and with other viral marketing tools — should be focused on nurturing relationships with people who can and will do business with you, not with attracting random hits from all over the world. In other words, if your primary concern is SEO, you’re spinning your wheels.

So what does this imply about blogrolls? In a community-focused real estate weblog, a blogroll of other weblogs and web sites focused on that community is an immensely powerful viral marketing Read more

July 3, 2007

The secret to building an audience? Weblogging is half news, half opinion and half show business

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote this nearly four years ago:

Anyone who has ever been to Las Vegas has seen Showbiz Weekly and What’s On magazines. One or the other was waiting for you in your hotel room, but there were racks of them at the airport and at the car rental counter, plus single issues in the rental car itself. They’re slick and polished, but they’re free like a TV-Shopper, albeit a lot better distributed.

Functionally, they work like controlled-circulation trade magazines: Elaborate advertising and puff-piece promotional articles inform you of your buying opportunities in Las Vegas at the point where you have become a ready, willing and able buyer. That’s why they’re free: The advertisers are more than willing to comp you for as many copies as you might want, confident that your spending will more than compensate them for their investment.

What’s interesting about these magazines is that you cannot subscribe to them from back home. There are a couple of general interest magazines you can subscribe to: Greenspun’s Las Vegas Life is a city magazine, like New York or Los Angeles; it’s a fun read, but not terribly useful for tourists. Vegas Magazine, also Greenspun, is a confused fashion rag that is doomed to a very costly demise. Neither of these do the kind of job Showbiz Weekly and What’s On do, advising tourists on where and how to get the most Vegas from their Vegas-money.

And that is a market niche, a magazine that promotes Las Vegas tourism all year round, when the tourists are back home.

The Strip is a monthly; more frequent would be annoying. Show news, upcoming concerts, gambling tournaments, Vegas trivia and history, etc., all surrounded by advertising, since, in important respects, the advertising is the editorial product. Very slick, very polished, with a critical edge lacking from Showbiz Weekly and What’s On.

The loosely-focused target market is the frequent Las Vegas visitor, two or more trips a year of three or more days in length. The more tightly-focused target market is the high-roller, people who spend a lot of money when they come to Las Vegas, and who come to Read more

June 27, 2007

Seven Days of the Dog: The regal, indomitable arrogance of a healthy, normal Bloodhound

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This came in as a comment last night.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be competitive and wanting to win, but, reading your posts the last few weeks, you ego is a little bit too big at times. Yes, you are a heck of a writer and you have one heck of a blog and you have assembled a heck of a team of contributors, but your ego is getting a bit cocky.

This is ad hominem, so it violates our comments policy, but I’m not averse to discussing the issue it raises in a general way.

Just not yet.

First, let’s address some general beefs I have with the world of real estate weblogging. You can regard this as an impromptu staff meeting of the RE.net, or, if you’d rather, as a Pompeii-like graffito.

Here’s one: I’m seeing more and more truncated feeds, and I am unthrilled about it. My entire purpose in using a feed reader is to aggregate everything I might want to see in one place. If I’m interested in what you have to say, I might click through to your site, but I don’t appreciate being forced to do so. I understand that you may be trying to boost your hard clicks, possibly to placate your advertisers, or you might be trying to frustrate sploggers. I don’t care. If you don’t capture my attention completely in the forty or fifty words you deign to show me, there is zero chance that I will click through to see if I might be missing something good. I can’t be that different from your target reader. You got ’em to subscribe. Now deliver the goods. Hoarding — for whatever reason — is the economics of the past.

(Near the subject, I had mentioned a long time ago (in a comment or somewhere) that I almost never do trackbacks. If for no other reason than that it offers automatic trackbacks and pingbacks, WordPress should be your CMS of choice for any weblogs you build (or migrate to) in the future.)

Here’s another beef: This came in as a comment to Real Estate Weblogging 101:

I think you Read more

June 25, 2007

Building an audience: Using blogging, social networks, email newsletters and viral marketing instead of SEO

by

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

Author website

“Brian Brady is that mortgage guy in the suspenders on the internet.”

bbGood or bad, that’s my brand on the internet. That goofy picture was taken at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on a free Kodak machine. I emailed myself the picture and have been using it for the past two years in all of my online marketing efforts. And while I’m not necessarily the best user of photoshop, I’m a pretty damned good viral marketer.

I met Rudy of Sellsius earlier this year and he said “You’re all over the internet.” I dropped my daughter off at school last month and one of her schoolmate’s parents said “I saw you on Zillow.” My neighbors have told me that they read my articles on MySpace. I organized a coup to take over the Trulia Voices section.

I guest author on BloodhoundBlog, NELA Live, Long Beach Real Estate Home, Sacramento’s Real Estate Voice and maintain an active profile and weblog on the Active Rain Real Estate Network. Lately, I’ve started experimenting on Gather.com.

To the untrained observer, I appear to be on an ego trip. To bloggers, I’m eschewing SEO for a viral marketing approach. I’m not going to wait for a customer to find me on the long tail search. I’m going to insert my goofy little suspenders picture in every imaginable place they might search for real estate related advice.

Does it work?

Well, I’ve received over 1,000 inquiries in the past 12 months from my efforts. Many are from borrowers, so my answer is, “Damn, Skippy, it works!” I’m slowly building up a database of people who have connected with me on the internet. My long-term goal is to have over 10,000 people in my permission-based email marketing database, receiving a newsletter each month. I’m at 1,012 today and I think I’ll be there in about 3-5 years.

Here are five tips to help you build an audience for your budding real estate weblog:

  1. Start an email newsletter. I use Constant Contact because I can send a newsletter which has a teaser for my blog articles. It costs about $40/month. You must be very careful to Read more
June 14, 2007

An RE.net taxonomy: Identifying types of real estate weblogs

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a first strike at a taxonomy of real estate weblogs. Taxonomy is the science of categorizing things. Of course, not everything can be neatly categorized, but the elucidation of categories can focus the mind, helping us to understand where certain weblogs might fit, which are hybrids of two or more categories, and which can only be described by the creation of new categories.

Again: This is a first strike. I may not have created enough categories, or I may have created some in error. I may have certain weblogs — offered here as examples — miscatalogued. If you think I’ve got something wrong, say so. If we can whip this into a decent shape, I may built it as a separate page, something we can lay by for an enterprising newspaper reporter — or the nonesuch, whichever comes along first.

In any case, here’s my first swing at the ball:

June 7, 2007

The question: How do you write so much? The answer: I don’t . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Lani Anglin asked me in email about my “blogging regimen.” That would almost seem to imply a plan or a schedule, and I don’t do things that way. So I ignored that idea and responded to her second remark: “I’m curious to know how you crank out so many freakin’ blogs.”

Here’s my short answer: I don’t write very much here. I could write quite a bit more. I don’t think the quality would suffer, but I think your patience might. This is what I wrote back to Lani:

I can write 2,000 words an hour if I need to. I can dictate good-enough text at 150 words a minute for as long as necessary. It’s not any sign of genius, it’s more like running: Do it enough and you get good at it. When I was a younger man, I used to write at least 8,000 words every day, seven days a week. The Grand Opera stuff takes more time, but not as much as you’d think.

If you watch the fifth to the tenth minute in Video Verité, you’ll see me deliver a lecture, ex tempore, on the aesthetics of discursive prose. It’s not perfectly-drafted text, but I could whip a transcript into shape in no time. But it would be a lot better — more informative, more memorable, and probably longer — if it were written as an essay rather than spoken.

As it happens, I wrote about writing, among other things, when BloodhoundBlog was just short of a month old. We were just starting to get some attention, and I wanted to memorialize the blog’s beginnings:

 
Word-slinging in the Rain — or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the blog…

None of this is new to me — except for the parts that are.

I’ve been writing on the nets since before there were nets. Since BBS systems — I ran two of them at different times of my life. Since CompuServe was a time-share system called MicroNet that charged $3.00 an hour for half-duplex transmission at 300 baud.

(Think about that! “Baud” is Bits of Audio Data. My first modem had an acoustic Read more

June 6, 2007

The style of your soul: The fundamental virtue of conscientious real estate weblogging

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.” –Victor Hugo

The Russell Shaw entry What’s wrong with Zip Realty?, written in February, was the most clicked-upon post on BloodhoundBlog on Tuesday. Debunking Zillow.com, which was written last July and which often comes in first, took second place.

I’m making note of this because there is a celebration of mental indolence going on just now, reflexively offered up as the rationale and justification for mental indolence. This by itself is meaningless: Erg for erg, laziness is the hardest job there is.

But it occurred to me that the RE.net has undertaken efforts, formal and informal, to instruct novices in the art of real estate weblogging — and laziness is very bad weblogging advice.

The job is what it is. It takes what it takes. If you don’t feel up to taking on the world, that’s fine. But don’t affect to pretend to believe that goofy pictures and bold subheads can take the place of rational discourse. It is actually possible to destroy a specious pose with one onomatopoeical word, but, most often, the work of the mind requires a greater effort.

This matters because you are not writing solely for the day and the visitors thereof. If there is any importance at all to the work that you do, it will be linked and searched. The post that gets only nine hard clicks today may someday get ninety clicks every day — if it deserves them.

What you do is your business, and most of weblogging is ephemeral — of moment for substantially less than a moment. We work the way we do here because we don’t affect to admire the half-assed. If you choose instead to indulge your worst appetites, arguing that that this is the path to popularity among people seeking to indulge their own worst appetites — rave on. It means less than nothing. The work of the mind in real estate will go on — in links, in searches, in perpetuity — without you.

But: If you actually care about improving your own mind Read more

June 3, 2007

Do you want your real estate weblog content to be highly searchable on Google? It helps to let things go to your head

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Tom Royce of The Real Estate Bloggers has always been a good friend to BloodhoundBlog. We talked earlier today about the New York Times article I cited this morning. Out of that conversation came an email I shared with all the BloodhoundBlog contributors. Not to hold out on you, I’ll post a version of it here.

Headlines make a huge difference in how weblogs entries are indexed. Many times I will write a long headline just because it amuses me, but something like this:

Could anything be sleazier than Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman? How about the Tennessee Association of Realtors?

does this — just like that.

The post is insanely short and it doesn’t even mention Redfin in the body copy.

We don’t rank well where we don’t compete, but the single most important Googlegredient in weblogging is a relevant, noun-rich headline.

This holds true for static web pages, too, although they won’t be indexed as often. Expressed as a formula:

relevance ~= (title ~= headline ~= text)

If the title of the page corresponds to the headline, and both correspond to the body text, especially the text near the headline, then the page is going to index well for the keywords in the title. At that point PageRank, etc., are going to matter, but you can completely dominate long tail searches by wisely invoking the formula above in your local market. Like this:

What makes a Scripps Ranch home sell? Price, preparation, presentation — and a buyer

That should slay dragons on “sell a home in Scripps Ranch”. More of the same is better, and the right mix of content can completely kill the category. In other words, write enough about Scripps Ranch and you will score in the first three searches on anything Scripps Ranch-related.

I’m emphasizing headlines here, but my presumption is that the title tag will duplicate the headline. In some — but not all — WordPress templates, it’s done that way by default. If your theme is among the exceptions, I wrote a post in March that tells you how to fix the problem. When you write static web pages, copy the headline into the title tag. Read more

June 3, 2007

Blogwisdom: Be found, be relevant, don’t be spam-tossed and don’t even think about being evil in the Church of Google

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Lorelle on WordPress has advice on using the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress.

Invisible Inkling has good news for newspapers: Weblogs won’t make you irrelevant if you breathe deep and catch a clue.

From my own mailbox there’s this: Along with millions of other people, I whitelist emails composed entirely of images or with images in the signature area as spam. I’ve been doing this since the financial and sex-drug spammers switched to image-based emails. What this means is that if you have a logo or a head shot attachment in your email, many, many people are throwing away your email without seeing it. Interestingly, lately my SMTP server (cox.net), is not accepting emails with images attached in the sig. In other words, if I fish your email out of my spam folder and reply to it, I have to cut your pix out of the sig in order to get my own email server not to regard it as spam. Verbum sapienti sat est.

Seth on The New York Times on Google’s top-secret search algorithm lab:

Being first in the Google rankings is more important than it ever was. And getting there is now more straightforward (but not easier) than ever.

It seems to me that in the SEO arms race, shortcuts have a shorter shelf-life than ever before. Building 43 is obsessed with them, and they outnumber whoever you might hire to beat the system. Organic success, on the other hand, is a clear path. If you want to be on the front page of matches for “White Plains Lawyer”, then the best choice is to build a series of pages (on your site, on social sites, etc.) that give people really useful information. Not just boilerplate information you stole from a legal website, but really useful stuff about you, the local courts, the forms people need… the things you’d want to find if you were doing that search.

The Times article is fascinating.

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May 30, 2007

Teri Lussier: There are no do-overs in weblogging

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Derek Sterling Burress has an in-depth interview with Teri Lussier, owner of TheBrickRanch.com real estate weblog, Project Blogger contestant, and BloodhoundBlog contributor:

Derek Sterling Burress: Since you are fairly new to the world of blogging, what has been some of the most difficult things you have had to learn as a blogger?

Teri Lussier: The hardest thing is that what you write is potentially there forever. Once it’s there, you don’t really get a do-over, as someone could copy and paste it elsewhere. That’s intimidating in some respects, but it makes you think about what you are saying and choose words very carefully.

It’s a nice long interview, a lot of fun to read. Go see for yourself.

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May 9, 2007

A ProjectBlogger challenge: The ProBlogger Top 5 contest

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m swamped, probably not all that hard to figure out. As with the Tomato Gang, I’m kinda bored with ProjectBlowhard. I still have work to do, and and I have a couple of big ideas still to cover, but — without intending to insult the proteges — it’s kind of like a rose-growing contest: Activity at the start, activity at the end, a lot of waiting in between.

In true reality TV fashion we might have a snake-eating contest or a nude tug of war in a tar pit — but that might not be dignified. Here’s something contestants can do though: Darren Rowse at ProBlogger is having one of his semi-annual blogging competitions. The challenge is to write a Top 5 list of whatevers, with the prize — selected at random — being $1,001.

Hundreds will enter, one will win, so buy a lottery ticket if you need money and can’t do math. But the big prize from these competitions is getting involved in the great big blogging world — learning, laughing, linking and being linked to. I think every RE.net weblogger should do this, not just the contestants. Deadline is midnight Thursday, so get cracking.

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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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