Making the Scenius scene: I’m prepared to share an entirely new style of blogging with you — but you have to hold up your end
By: Greg Swann,
Phoenix Real Estate,
Post Archive,
RSS FeedPosted: Saturday, December 6th, 2008, 9:15 pm MST
Category: Blogging,Marketing,Real Estate,Technology
I wrote last week about the Scenius blogs we’ve been playing with. The concepts we’ve developed constitute a new style of blogging, a hybrid of the best features of link-blogging and RSS feeds with much better control and with none of the defects.
A Scenius blog called “Switched-On Marketing” is riding in our sidebar, along with some other real estate blogs. I have another one called “Phoenix Area Headlines” running on our client-focused real estate weblogs.
That last sentence is important: I maintain one Scenius blog for “Phoenix Area Headlines”, but I can echo it wherever I want it to appear. And it comes in like a blog, not like a feed or a widget, with full control over the appearance and with all the links behaving as expected.
Why is that important? Because I now have a reliable source of keyword-rich dynamic content that I can share with other Phoenix-area weblogs. Other Phoenix real estate webloggers are free to use it, but I’m much more interested in hanging around the sidebars of weblogs run by my clients or future clients.
The “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog is composed of content that will be interesting to readers of any weblog in the Phoenix area. It’s a regularly-updated supply of new content for any weblog that hosts it.
The “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog is rich in keywords that will cause the blogs that host it to score well with search engines. I’m giving my neighbors content and also boosting their SEO.
The “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog consists of highly dynamic content. There are new posts every day, and old posts scroll off the bottom every day. What this means is that search engines will see new unique content on every page they spider, every time they spider, if those pages are echoing my Scenius blog.
And the “Phoenix Area Headlines” Scenius blog links back to BloodhoundRealty.com. I’m using sweat equity to buy a place on your sidebar. Your readers win, you win, I win — everybody wins.
The “Switched-On Marketing” Scenius blog does the same sorts of jobs for real estate and marketing weblogs: I give you interesting keyword-rich dynamic content and you give me a sidebar link.
That’s just a piece of the Scenius technology, and I’ll be teaching everything — including everything we come up with between now and then — at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. But I’m prepared to teach some of it now — for a price.
What’s my price?
Here’s a way of looking at this aspect of the Scenius technology: Open-source weblogging.
I’m accumulating and editing a great host of real estate marketing information for “Switched-On Marketing” — which I then share with anyone for free. You can echo it on your blog. You can subscribe to its RSS feed. You can even read it on your iPhone.
If you want to share in the ability to create this kind of content — and I can show you a lot of cool ways to deploy it to create dynamic, auto-maintaining content for your own weblogs — I want for you to share at least one Scenius blog with the world.
I want for my list of Scenius scenes on that iPhone reader to be rich with fascinating content. I will show you how to build Scenius blogs for any purpose you can think of — if you will build at least one to share with your larger weblogging community.
That’s not too much to ask, is it? After all, as I discussed above, a Scenius blog can be a very smart way to forge relationships with other webloggers who may be able to bring you new business. It’s not exactly sack cloth and ashes.
And here’s the other end of things, just one small demo of what Scenius blogs can do in the everyday life of a real estate weblog:
If you go to our Phoenix real estate weblog, you will see “Our Current Listings” running on a WordPress.org Page. In the sidebar of every post and Page of that weblog, you’ll find “Our Current Listings” echoed again, only this time at a much narrower width. And if you go to the About page for our single-property website for 56 West Willetta Street, you’ll find “Our Current Listings” echoed again, this time at a much wider width. Every echo you are seeing is the same one Scenius blog, and it is echoing simultaneously on dozens of pages on many, many domains, inheriting the local CSS appearance everywhere it appears. I can promote “Our Current Listings” anywhere I want from one Scenius blog — and the content is always up-to-date.
Scenius blogs are leveraged weblogs, and there is a lot more you can do with them.
If you want to echo “Switched-On Marketing” on your WordPress.org weblog’s sidebar, use this code and follow the instructions we posted last week.
<!-- BEGIN Scenius --> <?PHP $scene = "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://$scene.bloodhoundblog.net/"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?></div></p> <!-- END Scenius -->
Here’s the feed, if you want it for your feed reader:
http://scenius.bloodhoundblog.net/?feed=rss2
If you want to echo “Phoenix Area Headlines”, here’s the code:
<!-- BEGIN Scenius --> <?PHP $scene = "phoenixnews"; ?> <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://$scene.bloodhoundblog.net/"); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); ?></div></p> <!-- END Scenius -->
And here’s the feed:
http://phoenixnews.bloodhoundblog.net/?feed=rss2
Scenius.net will get more interesting, going forward, both as a Scenius blog reader for the iPhone and as a clearinghouse of information about Scenius blogs. But the way for it to get most interesting is for you to get involved. If you want to learn how to do this, I’ll teach you — for the price discussed — and I’ll promote your shared efforts here and on Scenius.net.
So: Speak up and let’s get started.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Related posts:19 comments
19 Comments so far
Wow. That sounds like it could really help out with search engine optimization. I am wondering though how you get the information to be area specific? I am in Ann Arbor Michigan, so how would I go about finding information for my area to put in the sidebar?
Can you explain how I win? What I see is duplicate content for a link. What am i missing?
> I am in Ann Arbor Michigan, so how would I go about finding information for my area to put in the sidebar?
I would start by Googling for Ann Arbor news or Ann Arbor weblogs. There’s also this blog, documenting the local SMM scene. You would have to look at those blogs one by one to figure out which works best for your needs.
Vide licet. All but the first baker’s dozen come from the Switched-On Marketing Scenius scene. The original post — now four days old — will have gotten a significant boost from this, also. For something like the Phoenix Area Headlines scene, the keywords are more generic, so the broadbased benefit to the hosting weblog will be better. And that ignores the benefits of both reader interest and dynamic content.
> What am i missing?
I’m guessing a lot, but I don’t feel like quarreling about it. It is sufficient to say that fair use is not duplicate content.
Inlookers, watch this. The max number of hits depends on the data center you reach, and you might have to refresh one or more times to get to a stable number. The biggest count I’ve seen so far — with the Switched-On Marketing Scenius scene having been available for fewer than eight days as I write, and with it appearing on very few weblogs so far — is 1,260. I’ve been playing with these ideas for a year. I watch this stuff all the time. The short-term amplification that results from tools like these is astounding. Come play with me and I’ll show you how you can win by helping your readers and your fellow webloggers win.
While I’m a big fan of everything bloodhound – I have to speak up and say that Bob is correct. This will be seen as duplicate content by search engines and dealt with accordingly.
The value of scenius lies in the enhanced user experience – and that is enough…but there is no seo value for the blogger who adds this content to his/her blog…and if it is done for the purpose of seo enhancement – it could actually cause an adverse effect.
This is what Google has to say on the subject: http://tinyurl.com/5ykatw
> The value of scenius lies in the enhanced user experience
Check. Also in the ability to forge relationships with other bloggers who can send you readers you mostly likely would like to get to know. And ignoring the duplicate content issue — which I think may have taken on the same kind of hysteria we associate with fair housing law — the optional link back to the source blog — as seen at the bottom of the Phoenix Area Headlines scene — is an undisputed SEO advantage.
G-
If I wanted to make this sort of thing for a cadre of blogs that had all agreed to form a blog network, it doesn’t seem hard, does it?
You’d mash ‘em all up in a feed somewhere, enforce some titling conventions, and make it all work, right?
-CJ
> If I wanted to make this sort of thing for a cadre of blogs that had all agreed to form a blog network, it doesn’t seem hard, does it?
Precisely. Easy to manage and completely transparent to both end users and spiders.
Drop me a note and I’ll send you instrux for how to build these.
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Pretty neat. I’ve given your bloodhound scenius code a whirl on my site.
From an seo perspective, this at least seems like a pretty quick way to get some solid outbound linkage going? Thinking along those lines, is there a scenius yet with the latest post from each bloodhound contributor’s personal site?
Or maybe one with the latest comments from bloodhound? I know that if I thought any comment I placed on this or any other scenius participant’s site could end up providing a backlink from any number of other scenius participants I’d be pretty excited about speaking up more often…
Heck, if it hasn’t been created already, can I take a stab at making the “comment” scenius?
> Thinking along those lines, is there a scenius yet with the latest post from each bloodhound contributor’s personal site?
> Or maybe one with the latest comments from bloodhound?
There are such great ideas that I’m going to steal them. There is a BHB scene. Right now it features the best posts, but adding the best posts from contributors’ blogs and from our comments is brilliant.
So for that, I owe you one. You’re well-situated to do a scene for investors, or perhaps one documenting the Philly blog world. You’re tuned right into how this works, so I know you’ll come up with something great. Drop me a note and I’ll show you how to get started.
Amending this. The comments don’t work the way you expect, Ryan, so I’ve left them off for now. I like the idea, though, so I’ll see what else I can come up with.
Greg – thanks so much. This scenius thing is blowing my brain! I don’t think I fully comprehend the linking bennies. I know you’re not in the SEO biz… but we’re all looking for more exposure.
Can you give me your “lowdown” on how the links will benefit me and those whose RSS feeds I incorporate?
Also, how do I best select RSS feeds – based on content quality, I assume… but should I also consider the traffic each site gets?
Thanks -
Kevin
> Can you give me your “lowdown” on how the links will benefit me and those whose RSS feeds I incorporate?
There’s a lot more on that here.
> Also, how do I best select RSS feeds – based on content quality, I assume… but should I also consider the traffic each site gets?
Think in terms of the benefits you want to deliver to the sites that echo your feed. If you give them good content for their readers, they’ll echo your feed, which is what you want.
So if you as a lender want to be echoed on Realtors’ weblogs, you might link to a lot of real estate news with a financial bent. That plus influences on mortgage rates should make you catnip to Realtors.
Greg – Got it. And thanks for the info link about the ‘bennies’ of scenius!
Will report back with my findings/ experiences!
Kevin
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