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Category: Weblogging 101 (page 5 of 7)

May 2, 2007

A picture of The Third Career: If we’re not blogging for business, what are we blogging for?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

By way of ProBlogger, this image is from 901am. It nicely illustrates the idea I called The Third Career when the BloodhoundBloggers were interviewed by Dustin Luther of Rain City Guide:

Q: How does blogging fit into the overall marketing of your business?

A: [….] Greg Swann: Practically speaking, it doesn’t, but I don’t think that way. What we’re really up to is an idea I call The Third Career. Most of us came to real estate from something else, and, as we are wise, we know this is not our last stop in the world of work. My immediate goal for BloodhoundBlog is to make it the best-read, most-rewarding real estate weblog in the RE.net. Further out, I want for our contributors to be so well known that they can pursue other opportunities: Public speaking, freelance writing, books, seminars, television shows, etc. I don’t know that we will attain this, necessarily, but the goal itself is definitely attainable: Witness Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit.

None of this is of immediate importance. Right now, we are dancing as fast as we can to do the jobs we get paid to do — even as we build this weblog, becoming better and more widely known with each passing day. Witness: BloodhoundBlog contributor Brian Brady will be speaking at Inman Connect. That’s two of us — so far. The chart illustrates the opportunities we can hope to exploit as we become better and more widely known.

Muestrame el dinero? It can wait. I’ve mentioned that I’m interested in repurposing the Weblogging 101 content as an ebook. I expect that, once I’ve done it, that will turn into speaking opportunities. Whether or not those are worth any money is less interesting to me than the opportunities themselves. If I can do a job often enough to get good at it, I can find a way to make it pay.

Here’s another, similar example: Steve Leung, whom I have praised in the past, has released a free 69-page “Silicon Valley Home Buyers Book”. The book is in PDF form, hot-linked throughout, so it’s actually more practical as a net.wired document, rather Read more

April 21, 2007

BloodhoundBlog round-up: Kenneling the last of the dogs, a new way to follow the trail and podcasting our way to fame and fortune

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

All the dogs are in the kennel at last. When I built BloodhoundBlog last Summer, I set it up as a subdirectory of BloodhoundRealty.com. Had I known where we were headed, I would have bought a separate domain for the weblog. And had I thought that far ahead, BloodhoundBlog would have been called something else.

Why? Because BloodhoundBlog.com was already owned by a software company in Texas. I discovered this when I finally thought to tie down the domains last Fall. I was able to buy BloodhoundBlog.net and BloodhoundBlog.org, but all I could do was back-order BloodhoundBlog.com.

It’s a problem I’ve been nursing on and off ever since. But as of today, BloodhoundBlog.com is finally ours. Like the two other domains, it is redirecting to the subdirectory I set up in the first place. A small enough thing, I suppose, but most big things are made up of little things.

And here’s another little thing: As of this week, it’s possible to subscribe to BloodhoundBlog by email. It’s not something I’m apt to think of. RSS is too easy, too fast, too wonderful. But if people don’t have access to feed readers, or if they don’t want to use them, they can get email updates when new posts hit the weblog. As it happens, Seth Godin added email subscription the same day we did. Great minds think alike? Can’t be. Great minds Think Different.

But here’s a big thing: Starting Monday, we’ll be rolling out audio and video podcasts from the Russell Shaw Sales Success Seminars. I have five audio and two video podcasts set up for this week, and we’ll do another five of each next week. This is all about building a curriculum for a real estate sales training course in podcast form, so, if you have questions for Russell, don’t be shy.

Linked below is a short video segment of me extolling the benefits of real estate weblogging with the help of Jay Thompson and Tony Marriott.

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April 15, 2007

Better, faster and cheaper in time and effort: Software for managing the weblogging workflow

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Robbie Paplin has a new weblog and he writes there and at Rain City Guide about the Deep Geek thinking underlying his decision-making process in selecting his new blogging platform. Very interesting reading.

I spent my junk time yesterday doing fussy CSS tweaks on Teri Lussier’s weblog, TheBrickRanch.com. This is a hugely frustrating iterative process: Make one minor edit, FTP it to the file server, refresh the page, discover that the change was a mistake, undo, redo, repeat, express frustration in a way that does not exacerbate male pattern baldness.

HTML is hugely forgiving, which is not really a good thing. Web developers have worked for years with multiple computing platforms, each one home to multiple versions of multiple web browsers, all so they could see how their code would be interpreted in an array of hardware and software environments. Not cool.

But: CSS is hugely unforgiving, as crotchety and irascible as a compiled computer language — without the error messages. I was starting with a style sheet created by someone else and trying to torque it into doing what I wanted done. The worst part about making a change in CSS is not seeing that the change you made is wrong, but that the change you made changed nothing. If the original CSS was improperly formatted, the results you’re seeing on the screen are actually inherited from somewhere else. Nice.

I don’t do this for a living, not alone because there are laws against homicide. But I do have good tools, and it’s worthwhile to talk about what good tools can do to make work like this work easier if not actually easy. I live in the Mac world, so, if you’re stuck with Windows, you’ll have to translate. We’re talking about categories of tools, so this stuff exists on both platforms.

For editing, I use TextWrangler, a free programmer’s editor from BareBones Software. I use this for everything, writing, editing, coding — everything. I’ve been using BareBones editors since 1991 or so. Someday I’ll pop for the for-pay product. There is so little HTML in a weblog post, you might as well learn to Read more

April 13, 2007

Customizing your weblog with CSS and PHP: Navigating from post to post

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

If you click on an individual post in BloodhoundBlog, you’ll see something like this above the headline:

The code for doing this is built into some themes, but not in the theme we’re using. The PHP code for making it happen is actually pretty simple, you just have to plug it in in the right place. And all of this presumes you are working on a WordPress.org weblog on a host you can access by FTP. I know nothing about WordPress.com-hosted weblogs or other weblogging systems.

Where is the right place to insert the code? In the folder for the theme you are using (inside the wp-content/themes folder), you may find a file named “single.php”. If so, that’s the file you want to edit. If “single.php” is not there, you want to edit “index.php”.

Before you change anything, save a back-up copy of the file you are going to edit. That way, you can back out and try again if things don’t work out.

You are looking for this line of code:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Immediately after that line, paste in this code:

<div class="navigation">
<div align="center"><?php previous_post_link('&laquo; %link') ?></div>
<div align="center"><?php next_post_link('%link &raquo;') ?></div><br>
</div>

Once you have edited the file, FTP it back up to the host and see what happens. If it worked, you should be able to navigate your weblog post-by-post. If it didn’t, go back and try to figure out what went wrong.

I’m going to do some more of this stuff over the weekend, but not too much. The truth is, if your mind runs this way, you’re probably better at it than I am. And if not, your eyes are already glazed over. If you’re somewhere in the middle, a little bit of simple PHP can give you a whole lot of custom control over your weblog’s behavior. To that extent, it’s worth talking about.

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April 13, 2007

Exploding Heads

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

Our homework was to write. I did my homework here, and I wrote a few posts on Active Rain (only because I think it would be fab if we could do the best job and win!) and I wrote on my home blog. I’ve written more this week than I thought possible. Confession: I figured I’d have about one week’s worth of posts in me, then my brain cells would dry up and I’d be done (and if you were wondering how new I am- that’s how new I am). I did not completely fully truly madly deeply understand that ideas spark ideas. Now I wake up at 5:00 a.m. without the alarm clock, regardless of how much sleep I got that night, with several ideas bouncing around my brain.

I’m also beginning to understand about the care and feeding of a blog. I’m putting thoughts in a notebook I’ve started to schlep around, or I park them in draft mode because either they are not fully incubated, or they are ideas I can quickly whip into shape if I’m short on time. My biggest concern now is that I should probably write a complete post and sit on it for awhile. I’m usually writing first thing in the morning, often in a pre-caffeinated state and after I post I look back and see the spelling and grammar and other errors of my ways. I need to learn patience.

And here’s something else I have learned this week: when I post on the BHB I’m essentially talking to strangers. Nothing personal, but we’ve only just met. When I post on AR I’m talking to colleagues. But when I write at the home blog, I’m home. I’m talking to my family and my friends, and until Greg pointed it out I didn’t realize that I do in fact visualize them sitting around the kitchen table with me. Kinda cool.

Now the insanely great idea has been revealed. More ideas sparking ideas (Stand clear- my head is going to explode!). I was thrilled to hear about this. It’s something I was vaguely working towards, but Read more

April 13, 2007

Real Estate Weblogging 101: Our story so far

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a true fact of weblogging: Sometimes you decide you want to do something that requires you to go back and edit 30 or 40 posts. As an example, imagine that you decided you wanted to add a new category. You would have to go back and re-categorize all the posts that should be shoved into that mental drawer.

I did something like this when I created the Weblogging 101 category. I went back and added that category designation where it was appropriate.

Tonight I decided to go that one better, by highlighting the more important posts in that category in such a way that I could reference them repeatedly from other posts. You’ll see me do this from time to time, where we have multiple posts on one important topic. I’ll link back to all the others from each post so that no one misses anything.

There are two ways of doing this. One is manual coding, pasted in to the affected posts again and again. The other is to use PHP, the web-based programming language WordPress itself is written in. I can write my links into a separate file, then include that file when I want to reference the links. The advantage is that I have one canonical version of the links. Moreover, the list of links is dynamic; every time I edit the list, all the posts referencing that file of links are changed accordingly.

WordPress will run PHP unaided in many places on a weblog, and BloodhoundBlog runs on a lot of PHP. But within what WordPress calls “The Loop,” the software that displays weblog entries, running PHP requires a plug-in. I use the runPHP WordPress plug-in by James Van Lommel.

So, what happens? At the end of a post like this one, I append this code inside angle brackets:

?php include ("REWL101.php"); ?

The file named REWL101.php, my file full of links, is opened and inserted at that point. When I make a change in that file, the change is instantly reflected in every post that “includes” it. I can add my set of links to dozens of posts — even making them Read more

April 12, 2007

An insanely great hyper-local real estate weblogging strategy: Be the community

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In January, I told y’all that I have an insanely great idea for making a local real estate weblog successful. I actually had the idea last Summer, and I worked out all the details and software then. But we have been busy with other things, so I’ve just been sitting on this tactic for nine months.

Just lately I promised to reveal three ideas, one good, one great, one insanely great. If I were more of a showman — or an extractor of torment — I would disclose my stratagems in that order. But: I’m not going to do that. I want to talk about the big idea today, not alone because it’s time for us to implement this on Teri’s weblog.

But I do want for you to take a moment to reflect upon what a natural Teri Lussier is as a real estate weblogger. I think the post I linked to betrays a pitch-perfect understanding of the kind of writing I was talking about the other night: Here is something we share, and here is how I am involved with this shared value. Here are some of our neighbors, and here is why I feel honored to know them. The post isn’t about real estate or radio, it’s about “us.” Us? What us? Teri’s writing creates an us, creates a tiny community of two who each see themselves in the context of the larger community.

People do business with people they like. Experience? Great. Expertise? Bring it on. Integrity? I believe it. Obnoxious? Abrasive? Condescending? Overbearing? Get the hell out of my house! By design or by accident, I think Teri has landed on the intersection between cat blogs and viral blogs, and I think this is the perfect place for a hyper-local real estate weblogger to be: Personable but professional, eliciting affection while earning trust.

She delivers one hell of an introduction to everyone she meets through her weblog. The big job is to attract more people for her to meet. We’ll be talking about simpler, more mechanical means of achieving that goal as we go along. For now we’re going to Read more

April 10, 2007

Profitable real estate weblogging: Burning the midnight oil to make family out of your farm

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Project Blogger is officially under weigh, so I thought now would be a good time to go read the rules. I had read an earlier version and hated them, but, at a certain point, I decided it wasn’t worthwhile to stand on principle. There is an extent to which this is what I would characterize as a Goofy Drive-Time Radio Stunt, and we have to assume that that extent extends at least as far as $5,000 worth of value to Our Sponsors.

If the new rules are actually less nebulous than the old rules, they are still nebulous enough that I cannot for the life of me determine what would qualify as a laudable achievement, much less the stroke of genius that denotes a decisive win. Fully fifteen percent of perfection consists courting good opinions at Active Rain, which will probably work out well for competitors who are actually active on Active Rain.

But: I don’t care. I decided to do this not because I expect Our Team to win, but because I wanted to talk about real estate weblogging. I have a lot of ideas, as we’ve seen so far, and we haven’t even gotten to the good stuff yet.

That changes now. Here is a vitally important idea about real estate weblogging that you should read, learn, mark and inwardly digest:

Real estate weblogging is very likely to be a very low-yielding prospecting activity, especially at first.

Say what? Almost any sort of real world, voice to voice, face to face, flesh to flesh prospecting will return more, better, faster, more-predictable and more-profitable results, at least in the short-run, than real estate weblogging.

Say what?!?

What’s the point of all this, if the fishing is better elsewhere?

There are two points that I can see. The second is that, if you’re doing it right, your yields should improve in the long-run. But the first is much more important, I think: Real estate weblogging is work you can do when you can’t do voice to voice, face to face, flesh to flesh prospecting.

What are the implications? The first is that if you let weblogging come between you and Read more

April 9, 2007

Advances, none remarkable.

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

The blog is coming together. Our homework was to find a theme and artwork that represent our markets. Sounds like fun, huh? Well it was and it wasn’t.

I love to paint, but I work differently than many artisits. I work with 6 colors maximum: red, yellow, blue, black, white, and brown. From that limited palette, I can create any color I want. This means I create nearly every color that is put on the canvas as I rarely use paint straight from the tube. Much of my time is spent creating color and mixing paints, but I love the process and it gives my work color like no other artist. The only reason I bring this up is to confess that when I went searching for a theme, I kept finding the “feel” of computer generated color and art entirely too flat and cold and sterile and unnatural for my taste. Oh well, sorry about your luck, Lussier. It is 2007, so time to buck up and deal with it. There are thousands of themes available, and while I found them oddly similar due to the medium, I did find one that I could live with.

I had nothing whatsoever to do with the downloading and uploading and whatever else is involved in getting a theme up and running. I picked a theme, gave Greg the url, and he took care of the rest. Why? Because he can do that stuff in 15 minutes and I cannot. Greg is a great coach and I’m not only learning about blogging, I’m also learning about real estate, and here’s what I’m learning: if your time is put to better use elsewhere, then farm out the stuff you can’t/ won’t/ don’t do and let yourself do the voodoo that you do so well. So, thanks to Greg the theme is up.

But the default banner wasn’t up to snuff. Hmm. I thought this was going to be even more difficult than finding a theme. I spent a good bit of time looking at other successful real estate blogs. There are skylines or archtecture or buildings or Read more

April 7, 2007

TheBrickRanch.com: As warm and fuzzy as an Easter Bunny

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We finally settled on the WordPress theme and look-and-feel for TheBrickRanch.com. There’s more work to come, particularly the sidebar, but the site is ready for Monday’s official start of the Project Blogger competition.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a reasonable example of what I’ve been talking about. We’re selling real estate, yes. But we’re selling to people, and I think it is important to connect with people immediately on an emotional — even visceral — level. Not: I am a good Realtor. Rather: I am like you. I share your values. I want for you what you want. Yes, I want for your family to be safe, protected from the weather, financially secure. But much more than that, I want for all of you to live the life of quiet, undoubted serenity you see in that child’s face. I want your children to feel that safe in our chaotic and sometimes hostile world. And I want to communicate every bit of that in a glance, without saying a word. I’m not selling houses. I’m selling the idea of a better life — because that is what you’re buying.

Can we do all that with warm colors and one photograph? Probably not. But the first close is to keep them from clicking away, and I think our theme can do that job. If we can keep them for ten seconds, we can keep them for ten minutes. If we can get them to come back once, we can get them to come back twenty times. If we can get them to agree that Teri Lussier is the Realtor to help them find that better life, we’re done. The playing field is cleared of competitors.

Can we do all that? Sufficient unto the day. For now we have a visual theme. Take a look at what we’ve done so far. The weblog is as warm and inviting as a dozen pastel Easter eggs — without all the indigestible hard-boiled chicken embryos inside…
< ?php include ("REWL101.php"); ?>

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March 31, 2007

Want to make sure you can defend yourself from internet bad guys? Aim for the body, not the head . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is Tim O’Reilly on the Kathy Sierra persecution:

There’s an attitude among many bloggers that deleting inflammatory comments is censorship. I think that needs to change. I’m not suggesting that every blog will want to delete such comments, but I am suggesting that blogs that do want to keep the level of dialog at a higher level not be censured for doing so.

I’m not crazy about some kind of quasi-official clean comments pledge, presumably accompanied by a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. The more webloggers look like Babbitts, the less I like them.

However: Policing comments in your own weblog is not censorship.

With the bogus legal standard, “Shouting fire in a crowded theater,” Oliver Wendell Holmes did incredible violence to two fundamental American liberties — the right of free speech and the right to private property.

You have every right to free speech at your own expense on your own property or on public property. Holmes invented his specious standard to outlaw activities that should have been — and since have been — upheld as constitutionally protected speech. Not surprisingly, the perverse standard he proposed is used ubiquitously by thoughtless people to justify all manner of suppression of private property rights.

The owner of a theater has every right to shout, “Fire!” on his own property. He has every right to host a “Shout Fire!” party on his own property. If someone is injured in consequence, he’s subject to lawsuit — but none of this has anything to do with free speech. It would make no difference if the exhortation had been, “Excelsior!”

But: You do not have the right to free speech at someone else’s expense or on someone else’s property. The issue in that circumstance is not the speaker’s right to self-expression but the property owner’s right to condition his hospitality on the behavior of his guests. You do not have the right to shout, “Fire!” in the theater because you are a guest of the owner, not because your right to free speech is being suppressed.

In other words, if someone is acting like a jackass in your living room — or in Read more

March 28, 2007

Resource recourse: For the budding real estate weblogger, opportunities for self-improvement are everywhere — and every where is right here

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seth says to write an ebook, and I think this is a fine idea. When we start to look like we’re done with the Weblogging 101 curriculum, I’ll go back and whip together something that can work on dead-tree media. This would not be the ideal way to work with it, though, since an ebook can be rich in links — including a “check for the latest edition link.”

One thing I would want to do with something like this is make it link out to richer resources. I can gloss topics, but there’s a lot of deep-think stuff that is much better handled by other people. At the ante-penultimate stage of revision, I’ll put it out for link suggestions. Real Estate Weblogging 101 could end up being an iterative resource, the half-way point between a legacy-style book and a piece of software: Work through the big print first, then pursue the links, then work through the arcane but massively edifying sidebar links. That could be very cool.

On the subject of resources, or perhaps the unexpected serendipity ensuing from web-based resources: Two nights ago before bedtime, I wrote How to make Google your weblog’s best friend. It was a small idea that I had been wanting to hit. I had the time to take care of it, and I wanted for there to be something new on the weblog. I don’t ever do anything half-way, but if ever there was a just-knock-it-out post, that was it. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and it took me no time to to compose and post it.

Serendipity came in the form of Mike Levin of HitTail.com. HitTail is a web site/weblog stats service that will monitor your incoming traffic and tell you what keywords are bringing people in. You can use this information to SEO optimize your site, to plan AdWords campaigns, etc. Anyway, Mike Levin coming here was cool, but what was even cooler was that he cited my post and its comments thread on StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site similar to Digg or Del.icio.us.

Hundreds of people came to read that post. Read more

March 27, 2007

Going local? Why not go hyper-local?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Todd Carpenter at Inman News Blog:

A real estate agent’s idea of local my not be local enough. I mean really local. Not a state, not a metro area, not even a single city. Go hyper-local. Every real estate agent should have a prospect farm. You mail out newsletters to just these people. You focus much of your market analysis on the neighborhood. You might even walk each block, introducing yourself door to door. But hardly any agents bother to put that commitment online. Why? Doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve personally reviewed over 400 real estate blogs over the last couple months. Only a handful of them attempt to do this. I look at most real estate sites and see an all inclusive catch all net for Internet fishing. Thats a strategy that works for now, but why not take advantage of the unused Web hosting bandwidth you are renting to build a separate, hyper-local Web site or blog for your marketing area? The alternative is to let people from out of town, who know more about html code than real estate, set up as your competition.

I have at least three more killer ideas to explore on this subject, one good, one great and one insanely great. If you’re not playing along at home, there’s still plenty of time to get in the game.
< ?php include ("REWL101.php"); ?>

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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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