Tom Royce tipped us yesterday. More from VOIP Watch. Requiescat in pacem.
Author: Greg Swann (page 107 of 209)
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
A tiny trophy, a huge victory — to come.
We had a helluva week last week, our best ever — until now. So what did we do this week to top last week’s numbers? How about almost double?
The real estate category on BlogTopSites is the home of truly competitive real estate webloggers. We’ve always held our own there — the respectable low teens until lately, in the higher single digits so far for 2008. The top of the list has almost always been dominated by bubble blogs, but BloodhoundBlog has been among the top RE.net blogs — and almost always first among real estate industry weblogs — for quite some while.
But we’ve never been first overall before, and the chances are good that we won’t be again, not for a while. But first place on that list is ours to earn and ours to keep — eventually. We deliver so much more content — so much better content — that we will own the top of that list in due course. Just not yet.
So what gives? How did we get to be number one at the start of this brand new week?
Earlier this week, Brian Brady gave us all a practical demonstration in how to dominate a Google search. On Thursday, he wrote a post about Ashley Alexandra Dupree that was first, fastest and best — from Google’s point of view. He’s spent the past three days on the first page of Google for a number of Ashley Dupree-related search terms — sitting squarely atop major news organizations and A-list webloggers. As I write this, Brian’s post is second for ashley dupree — and first place is off-topic.
So what happened? With that first Ashley Dupree post and a follow-up about Ashley’s singing career, Brian by himself brought over 14,000 unique souls as hard clicks into BloodhoundBlog this week. He beat all of last week by himself. Yesterday we had over 8,132 unique visitors, of which at last 6,000 were brought here by Brian Brady alone.
Yeah, but, but, but– It’s just an SEO trick. No, it’s not. It’s an SEO demonstration. Brian Brady Read more
…that’s why.
More tonight.
Technorati Tags: blogging, BloodhoundBlog Unchained, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate photography, technology
I could make Barack Obama jokes all day. Like this: “Bill Clinton might have been the America’s first black president, but Barack Obama is the nation’s first black Kennedy.” From this you should not surmise that I am for John McCain. I find all three of our current maladies to be just about equally repellent.
But: I did hit upon an idea for a universal Barack Obama bumper sticker.
Writing a workable bumper sticker is the hardest copywriting job there is. Writing at my voluminous length is easy. All you need are ideas and a vocabulary. Writing poetry is hard, because that economy of words is hard. Writing a matchbook or a billboard is even harder.
Here is my best-ever matchbook:
“Save the world from home in your spare time!”
But a bumper sticker… That’s a real writing challenge…
It’s almost typographic iconography: The message has to be brief enough to be big, short enough to be readable in a glance, and yet it must convey a virtual book’s worth of message. Very rare to see it done well.
And I make no claim for this bumper sticker except that it is universal. Whether you are for Barack Obama or against him, you can display this bumper sticker with pride:
If someone wants to pony up the dough for printing — heavy vinyl and UV inks, please — I’ll provide a PDF file. ObamaNation.com is already owned, alas.
I don’t know what to do. Friedrich Nietzsche said, “It is not my function to be a fly swatter.” And yet every time I turn around I find myself reading abject nonsense from technology vendors who have never in their lives sold real estate — who have never sold much of anything but hot air.
Should I just wince and move on to the next article in my feed reader? Or do I have a duty to point out obvious, bone-headed errors, so that y’all don’t repeat them, not knowing they are errors?
I sat on this one earlier today, but it just keeps bugging me. If you think I’m being mean for calling the author out, all I can think of to say is, “Dang!” I myself never, ever forget the ninety-and-nine. If I can spare just one person one dumb mistake, I’ll call that a win and ignore everything else.
So: Joel Burslem’s advice to build single-property widgets is truly bad counsel. The future of real estate weblogging is not widgets, and widgets are not valuable replacements for single-property websites.
First: Off-site resources are bad, m’kaaaay? If you watch where your pages drag when they are loading, you will see that your problems are almost always the result of calls you are making to other servers. In this context, it doesn’t matter if you are calling Flash, Javascript, PHP, PERL or plain vanilla HTML. What matters most is that the other servers you are calling often will not work as quickly as your server. Even if those servers are very sprightly, there are still going to be delays from hand-shaking. Flash and Javascript can madly exacerbate these problems, since they require processing power in the client computer also. As cool as the free stuff you can get from vendors can seem to you, much of it is white noise, at best, of absolutely no benefit to advancing your marketing message. And if those widgets, gizmos and gadgets are slowing down your pages, they are acting against your marketing objectives — by coming between you and your clients.
Second: Flash and Javascript do not search. Read more
The last time BloodhoundBlog scored this high on BlogTopSites was May of 2007. At the time, I said: “It may not happen again for a while…”
What’s going on? Brian Brady is showing you why you will reap huge benefits by attending BloodhoundBlog Unchained. This is just the beginning…
Technorati Tags: blogging, BloodhoundBlog Unchained, disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing, real estate training, technology
David Pogue in the New York Times:
Before you start reading this, a word of warning: this column is about the iPhone. If you’re one of those people who are sick and tired of hearing about the iPhone, then scroll on while you still can.
Then again, if you’re one of those people, you’ve got much bigger problems than this column. Maybe you’d better take six months off to explore the Serengeti.
That’s because last week, Apple announced iPhone 2.0. It’s not a new phone model (although that will be coming this year, too)—it’s new software for the existing phone [update: and for the iPod Touch!]. And in my considered opinion, it will be an even bigger deal than the iPhone itself.
The new software, slated for the end of June, will have two parts. First, it will tap into Microsoft Exchange, the e-mail distribution system used by hundreds of thousands of corporations. You’ll get “push” e-mail, meaning that messages appear in real time on your iPhone. And when anybody changes your calendar or address book on your computer at work, your iPhone will be automatically, wirelessly updated, wherever you happen to be.
All of this is already on the BlackBerry, which is Apple’s obvious target here. Without an actual keyboard, the iPhone won’t kill off the BlackBerry entirely (although I do like the way the on-screen keyboard forces iPhone people to be super-concise). But it will carve away a certain chunk of the BlackBerry’s market.
The big knife is Part 2 of iPhone 2.0. That’s the SDK—the Software Development Kit—which Apple has released in beta-test form. The idea here is that any programmer can now write software for the iPhone. Not illicit, hacky apps like people have been writing so far, but authorized, tested, legitimate software, much of it free, that can tap into all the features of the iPhone.
More:
I can’t tell you how huge this is going to be. There will be thousands of iPhone programs, covering every possible interest. The iPhone will be valuable for far more than simple communications tasks; it will be the first widespread pocket desktop computer. You’re witnessing the birth Read more
In a world without middlemen, no one can prevent you from discovering anything you want to know. That’s a freedom more complete than humanity has ever known, until now.
The counter-proposition is that no one can protect you from derision, if you insist on trying to communicate with your head up your “community.”
All of the dinosaurs are extinct.
Update: Todd Carpenter has a hammer:
This is beside my point, but now the whole of our little world is watching.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
There is a debate on dual agency going on at VARbuzz. This is my contribution to the conversation.
I abhor dual agency — notoriously so. I make no distinction between one licensee or two in the same brokerage, and I am more than prepared to be suspicious if there is any relationship that might seem more important to the practitioners than the fiduciary relationship to the client.
Even so, Russell Shaw convinced me in person that there could be circumstances in which I might have to do a dual agency, like it or not.
What circumstances?
Like this: I’m at open house at my listing, some buyers come in, fall in love with the house and insist they have to put it under contract right away. I would prefer they got their own representation, but my fiduciary duty to my sellers is clear: I owe them the best possible chance at these buyers.
The question is, what duty do I owe to the buyers? The state and federal governments have so gummed up the process of transferring real property that ordinary people cannot competently represent themselves. Moreover, the due diligence process demands expert oversight and advice.
In short, if both parties are unwilling to countenance the idea of separate representation, I’m stuck. I cannot betray the seller’s interests, and I cannot in good conscience permit the buyers to betray their own interests. (And it is plausible to me that I have created an Implied Agency with the buyers in any case.)
This has nothing to do with compensation, and, if we ever have to do this, we will probably split the buyer’s agent’s commission three ways — a point each to the buyer and the seller, in consideration for suffering with limited representation, and a point to us for the extra work. But even that would be at Close of Escrow. My Buyer-Broker Agreement would specify that the buyers could obtain separate representation at any time, even down to the last minute, and I would joyfully pay the buyer’s agent’s commission.
But wait. There’s more. We had a multi-party debate about dual agency at BloodhoundBlog, and, while I would Read more
We owe David Mamet for Glengarry Glen Ross (and, therefore for Glen and Gary and Glen and Ross NSFW!). This essay, extracted from The Village Voice (and tipped by The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid), is a fine job of work. I knew Mamet was reading Thomas Sowell when he got to the tragic versus perfectionist world-view, which was further confirmed by the idea of lifelong class mobility, but, that aside, he manages to surprise throughout. This is off-topic, in a sense, but it is dead-centered on the topics we have been addressing lately, here and elsewhere. A thoughtful man thinks about his own thoughts. What could be more human than that?
I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the “writing process,” as I believe it’s called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is not actually as jejune as it might seem. Porgy and Bess is a buncha good songs but has nothing to do with race relations, which is the flag of convenience under which it sailed.
But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.
The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it’s at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.
These cherished Read more
I’m working this weekend with an out-of-state investor. I don’t know that Phoenix has hit the bottom in what is the ninth quarter of declining home prices, but we’ve shed enough value that newer suburban tract homes can once again throw off positive cash flow as rental properties.
That’s the happy news. The sad news is that many of the houses that seem to be attractively priced to investors are in some stage of the foreclosure process, from negative equity to short sales to lender-owned properties.
If you do this job long enough, you see just about everything. If you’re good at drawing inferences from artifacts, you can figure out the story of the home life in just about any house — family structure, recent financial history, reason for moving — whether or not the survival machine that is a home is functioning properly.
But in a normal market, in a normal time, in a normal neighborhood, the tragic stories don’t come so thick and fast. Who hasn’t seen a skip? Who hasn’t seen an eviction? Who hasn’t seen the sad tell-tales of divorce? But it’s a rare thing to see these awful signs twelve or fifteen times in a single day.
Look at this:
I saw kids’ bikes left behind in several garages today. Not enough room on the pick-up truck, the truck packed to bursting with everything the family could carry. Children are so easy to hustle. I can hear the fake enthusiasm behind the lie: “We’ll get new bikes! Better bikes! You’ll see!”
That’s sad, but it was those ceiling valences that got me, those fabric clouds in a girl kid’s sky. That’s a mother-daughter thing — “What can we do to make this your room?” Not too much money to spend, but just the right touch, just the right expression of a budding young lady’s individuality. Abandoned in the rush to get gone. Will that little girl ever be able to look at a ceiling and not miss those fabric clouds?
I see this all the time, and I never get over it. That’s a man trying to kick down a door so he Read more
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
How do you get visitors to come to your home’s custom weblog? Shoe leather works well. Search engines? Not so much…
Okay, so you’ve built a custom weblog to help sell your home, and you’ve dressed it up with photos, a map, a floorplan — every bit of content you could think of. Now what?
Your home now has a twenty-four-hour salesperson on the internet. How do you go about getting potential buyers to visit your blog?
Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is not search engines. For one thing, your site is brand new. The search engines don’t even know it exists. Even if you manage to get indexed, you won’t have the kind of popularity to bring you to the top of search results for your keywords.
But there is an even more compelling reason why search engines won’t be much help to you: Visitors brought in by search engines are very loosely motivated. Many will have been looking for something else entirely, so they will bounce right back off your site in seconds flat.
Your objective in promoting your weblog is to target people who are motivated to buy your home — or who know someone who is motivated to buy your home. Your job is not to broadcast your appeal to everyone but to narrowcast to just those people who can do you the most good.
You’ll put notices about your weblog anywhere online that you can — Zillow.com, Trulia.com, CraigsList.com, local weblogs supporting nearby schools, little league teams, etc. But your primary promotional strategy is going to be offline — person to person.
We print business card-sized promotional pieces to advertise our open houses. These are distributed to every house in the neighborhood, since the neighbors may know someone who wants to live nearby.
During the school day, there will be more than 100 cars in the school parking lot, most of them driven there from out of the neighborhood. Some of those folks are sick of commuting.
Most local retailers will have some kind of bulletin board. Your cards belong there.
Your buyers probably won’t Read more
FWIW, the only thing I might actually buy from that list is That ’70s Show.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, technology
I was talking to Teri Lussier in email last week about Desert Daisies, an annual wildflower you find in the Sonoran Desert. People harvest the seeds and bring them home, and the flowers will eventually take over the whole yard — for the few weeks they’re around.
Beautiful little clarions of Spring, announcing in advance the blossoming of the citrus trees — when Phoenix is at its ultimate perfect best and god himself is green with envy.
When I picked Teri to be my partner in last Spring’s ProjectBlogger competition, I chose better than I knew. I admired her spark, her spunkiness — what the Irish might call the soul of a poet. But I could not have foreseen her depths — although I have been more than delighted to discover them over the last year. I hope BloodhoundBlog has been good for her. I know she has been very good for BloodhoundBlog. Working here and at TheBrickRanch.com, she has blossomed into a powerhouse weblogger.
So it’s a delight for me to announce that Teri Lussier is the first person to win The Odysseus Medal, The Black Pearl Award and The People’s Choice Award all in the same week.
The winning entry? Zillow creates the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine, of course.
I know some poor benighted soul will have to go digging for evidence of corruption, so I will tell you now that the fact that Teri and I happen to be on the same side of the issue of real estate licensing had nothing to do with my choice. She hit not just a home run but a grand slam with her essay, and the position she took says nothing at all about the quality of her work — except insofar as writing the heartfelt truth puts the writer at one with the gods.
I normally quote from winning entries, but, in this case, I want you to go and read Teri’s whole post. Print it out and tape it to your monitor. Inscribe it into your mind as a particularly worthy example of the truth Read more
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology