….early marketing material suggest that one of their big selling points is that they are going to start with tons of users because they’ve bought a list from another real estate site (presumably with tons of users).  This has me scratching my head on a number of levels.
So who is going to build a site with users built in.
Number 5 - Alf is Back and he is bringing his friends
Number 4 - New Century Mortgage is now becoming a Lead Generating Social Network
Number 3 - Rupert Murdoch is Starting MyRealEstateSpace.com
Number 2 - Dustin is Starting the New Social Network after buying the customer list from Move Inc.
And the Number 1 Speculation is….
REALOGY
They don’t need to buy the list to build the initial membership. THEY OWN THE LIST!
One suggestion to whomever is starting it up should give each and every person the opportunity to have their membership deleted if they don’t want to participate.
Do you think you should have video comments on your blog? I think they are kind of neat. I also think that video comments remove the anonymousness of the internet comment. Now, not only are you leaving your name and info you also have your face. I think this is great as a troll would not leave a video comment.
One thing I don’t like about the Seesmic plugin is that when you make your video you can’t add text along with it.
Riffly does allow this and their video comment plugin has been around for a little bit and I think it might be better at this time.
One thing the Riffly plugin does not do is allow you to create a video post DIRECTLY from the ‘write post’ screen within wordpress.
Which is better? Depends on how you are creating your video and what kind of comments you are looking for on your blog.
a very important notice to anyone using Sprint and Supra E-Key
Every Realtor using Sprint PCS that signed up during the initial phase of the E-Key launch that were offered freebies to change their plans should immediately be aware that Sprint is expiring those freebies.
If you have a Sprint phone and you are using the Supra E-Key check your bill and talk with Sprint before having any problems as Lani did.
We’ve spent the better part of 4 hours on the phone with customer retention as well as several hours in the Sprint store over the past month resolving these issues to the tune of nearly $1,000.00
Do you take video testimonials of your clients? If you don’t and you want something easy, pick up a Flip Video camera.
If you do here is a neat little plugin for adding them to your Blog’s Side Bar.
If you are reading this by email or a feed reader click on over to my blogs main page Future of Real Estate Technology and take a look at the top right to see the plugin in action. Currently I have four video testimonials loaded but I will add more later.
To make this work I actually modified the theme to create a third sidebar that is a combination of the widths of the two smaller side bars.
The plugin I used is Daiko’s YouTube Widget and after installing the plugin all I had to was drag the two widgets that are part of the plugin to the new sidebar I created. The plugin is very easy to configure and the player part of the video can be made to any size you want.
Would video testimonials help potential customers choose you to be there Real Estate Agent? I can’t guarantee it will but it wouldn’t hurt to put them up on the front page or maybe create a category and have a special menu of Testimonials.
If you would like me to modify your theme to do something similar, contact me at 866-987-8324.
The main reason to subscribe to your own blog is to see how your formatting on your blog posts looks in a Feed Reader. This way you can see what others are seeing and adjust your posting techniques to fix any formatting issues.
Another important reason is to watch for anything that shouldn’t be in your feed. A few weeks ago I had a customer call me up who was getting porn links in their blog posts. When you would look at the site and posts they were not there. This was caused by a bug in older versions of Wordpress that allowed these links to be injected with out their knowledge.
A quick cleanup of the affected posts and upgrading Wordpress to the newest version fixed the problem for now but it can happen again. So when the next update comes around do it within a reasonable amount of time. I would venture to say a weeks wait would be fine to find if any others had problems with the update.
Now that blogging is taking the world by storm and Real Estate agents are using them to grow their business you now have another program to keep updated.
If you are running Wordpress Self Hosted (not using wordpress.com) then you need to make sure your Wordpress installation is up to date.
A landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. Think of a sales pitch. On a Landing Page the point is to make your sales pitch and make it good and the end result should be a sale.
I have seen many REALTOR landing pages that they pay for PPC ads to bring people to these pages and these pages are horrible and give the visitor no reason to fill out the form or do whatever it is you want them to do.
I will not admit to being good a creating Landing Pages for Real Estate or any other field for that matter. But, I did find this great list of articles from Copy Blogger that has tons of great info that REALTORS could apply to their Landing Pages.
If you are running PPC campaigns for Email Campaigns you should read the articles listed in the linked article and see how yours compare.
Last night was the TechCrunch / PopSugar Party in Hollywood. It was definitely a fun evening. A good assumption is to say there was a whole bunch of NERDS in attendance, myself included.
For dinner my wife Sondra Life in Yorba Linda and I joined Jeff Corbett, Aaron Thomas, Robert Luna and Sharon for dinner at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. Definitely some good food and a combination that is very unique.
The party itself was fun, lots of companies pitching their web products, but nothing really stood out for me.
Dustin Luther of 4realz.net caught a picture of yours truly being interviewed by Christine Perkett of Perkett PR. I’ll link to the video when it is posted so you can see my geekyness on video.
Remember also this April 17th is the 4realz Education Seminar in Irvine at the Irvine Marriott by Dustin Luther and Jim Marks about how to become better at Internet Marketing for your Real Estate Business. I will be there and there might even be a blogger meetup after the show.
Is your domain name and website hosted by Network Solutions? If so you REALLY need to pay attention here. There are two main reasons why you should IMMEDIATELY move your domain name registration and web hosting services to another host.
Reason 1 - This is an economical reason. Network Solutions charges $32.oo dollars PER YEAR to register a domain name. It’s a no brainer to move your domains to someone like GoDaddy who charges only 9.99 per year per domain name.
Reason 2 -Â This reason now puts Network Solution into the slimiest web-hosting company category and should be banned from the internet because of what they are doing.
The explanation - Example you own the domain name www.gotgame.com and this domain name is hosted by Network Solutions and everything appears fine. Now since Network Solutions is hosting the DNS (system that maps domain names to IP address of your webserver and more) for this domain they can do anything they want when someone makes a DNS request for your domain name. What Network Solutions is now doing is when you make a request to a non-existent sub-domain network solutions sends that request to a page hosted by them FILLED WITH ADS.
Here is an example using a sub-domain of the above domain name networksolutionssucks.gotgame.com If you click on that link you will go to that link and see that it is a page filled with ads that Network Solutions gets paid if you click on any of the ads.
Why is this so horrible. The main reason is that they are taking possible advantage any possible traffic that might land on a sub-domain and making money off YOUR website. Now how many people will go to a sub-domain of your site? Probably ZERO, but why this is SO bad is that they are taking advantage of how the internet works to make some extra cash.
If a large company like this can mess around with how things work and even mess with your own domain name then Network Solutions should be shut down for this crap they are pulling on the internet.
