BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 156 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

March 22, 2007

Peering into the future of The Future of Real Estate Marketing

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What’s the future of The Future of Real Estate Marketing? Last Friday, Joel Burslem announced that he is taking a job as a marketing wizard for Inman News:

I’m happy to announce I will be joining the nice folks over at Inman News, as of March 26. I will be joining them to help steer some of their social media projects as well as drive marketing to their popular semiannual Connect Conferences.

So will The Future of Real Estate Marketing be a thing of the past? Not so, says Burslem:

I prefer to keep it simple. I’m just going to keep checking out new real estate web sites and technologies and writing about them. That’s what’s fun for me.

FoREM was never really built as a business in mind. It was always just my corner of the web where I could post my thoughts on technology and real estate. It’s fun for me, it’s my hobby, a passion I guess – I’d rather spend my evening checking out some new web site than watching TV, that’s for sure. And, I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon!

Honestly, I can’t say where it’ll be in a year, two years etc. but then again who can? I plan on more of the same for the foreseeable future.

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March 22, 2007

Neighborhood-level real estate weblogging: Traffic is not about traffic, traffic is about conversions

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I’m quoting from comments to BloodhoundBlog posts, so I’m not going to show the links.

Brian Brady to Teri Lussier: “Soon she’ll be winning carnivals.”

Not to put any pressure on the girl, but I think this is a fine idea. Won’t win us the contest, but it’s a testament of excellence that’s kind of difficult to dispute. I like stuff like that.

John L. Wake: “Have you ever noticed that a common strategy used by many successful Realtors is to become an area specialist?”

But exactly! I don’t know how large or small an area Teri wants to work (or you want to work, for that matter), but it pays to think small. For now, Cathy and I target a very small region of Downtown Phoenix, but the neighborhood names that pop out of that are legion: F.Q. Story, Willo, Encanto, Palmcroft, Del Norte, Alvarado, Campus Vista, Ashland Place, Fairview Place, Woodlea, Yaple Park. Believe it or not, that’s only about half.

But we can get even smaller. If you search for Culver Street, the first two hits should be us. There are other streets down there for which we will pull very strong results, and, in the long run, we will tend to be category-killers for the names of the streets we list on.

Isn’t that the opposite of what I said the other night? Yes and no. We are looking for Long Tail search results on very arcane search terms, but our objective is not to capture random leads but to attract, enchant, delight, enlist and convert people who have a very strong interest in those same arcane search terms. How do we know they have a very strong interest? Because they’re searching for terms no one with a casual interest would ever use.

“Phoenix real estate” or “Dayton real estate” are difficult keywords to dominate, but neither would be all that useful, anyway. The Greater Metropolitan Phoenix-area is bigger than Rhode Island, maybe bigger than Vermont. I have to drive to make money, but I don’t get paid by the mile.

There’s more: By focusing Read more

March 22, 2007

We’re buying a new dog house — not a moment too soon

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From appearances — I haven’t called — why bother? — GoDaddy swapped servers on us last night at around midnight. I know this conjecturally because we lost around five hours of posts and comments. Only one post, which I replaced this morning, but six comments that I know of, possibly more.

If you posted a comment last night between 7:18 pm and midnight, MST, it’s gone with my regrets. Jason Benesch, Jillayne Schlicke, Jeff Brown and Loren Nason I know for sure were affected, because those four came to my email for one reason or another. I’m not sure what else was lost.

Again, please accept my apologies for these hiccoughs. Cross your fingers, they’ll be over for good very soon.

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March 21, 2007

Server issues: A quarter-gator to go . . .

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I ended up buy a fourth of a file server at HostGator.com. I spent some time this afternoon looking at our disk space and bandwidth needs, and this is more than adequate for now. At some point we may have to move up to a true dedicated file server (which is what I was planning to do at GoDaddy), but this suits me better for now, if only because I won’t have to be my own sysadmin.

I’m waiting for the booger to be set up now. Once it is, I’m going to move one or two hosted accounts over to see how things go. We control 66 domains right now, but only about half of those are hosted. The rest, like BloodhoundBlog.net, are redirected to hosted accounts. In any case, in addition to BloodhoundBlog, we have four hosted accounts with WordPress weblogs on them, so I’ll be able to practice moving WordPress installations before I have to move the big dog.

Right now, I’m aiming for late Saturday night. Things could change, but I’ll give plenty of advance warning. We’ll certainly be down for some amount of time as Domain Name Servers around the globe take note of our new IP address. With luck, it won’t be a very long time.

And: This little problem sucked the marrow right out of my day. On the plus side, as soon I am able to play with the new host, I can start moving sites. The GoDaddy-hosted sites are all pre-paid, but a bunch of them are coming due shortly, with eggs hatching in succession thereafter. Smaller, low-bandwidth sites have never been a problem, so I’ll move them as I can.

But think about new sites. I control a quarter-server with unlimited domain hosting. Every new site we build will be hosted “for free,” as a part of our overhead costs. Moreover, Teri Lussier just saved a bunch of money: We can host her to-be-built weblog “for free.” Right now, we spend about $43 a year for a new single-property weblog. As of tonight, that cost is around $7.50 a year, the discounted cost of the Read more

March 21, 2007

Want to do something to raise standards among Realtors? Charity begins at home . . .

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Daniel Rothamel:

More extensive barriers to entry do not automatically create better agents.  As just about anyone with a real estate license will tell you, the education that you get prior to being licensed does very little to ensure your success in business, other than informing you of the legal requirements and obligations that, when followed, will allow you to keep your license.  The things that make for good agents are not covered in any licensing class.  They are learned after the agent begins working.  They are learned through broker training classes, or through mentoring, or through the time-tested technique of trail and error.  The idea that making it harder to earn a license will increase the quality of the agents is preposterous because it ignores this fact.

I like the idea of getting rid of licensing and making agents compete on the basis of reputation, but that ain’t gonna happen. Daniel has a good alternative:

If the goal of those who advocate the increasing of licensing standards is truly the reputation of the profession, then they should turn to themselves and seek out the new agents around them and act as a mentor or at least a positive example of the real estate professional.  That will have a far greater impact on the profession than any increase in education requirements.

Indeed. As I argued years ago, in a different context, if you really want to “do something!” about The Homeless — take one home…

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March 21, 2007

Something’s still amiss in GoDaddyland . . .

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Jim Gatos in email:

Just letting you know I’ve been trying for the past 45 minutes.

Check. We seemed pretty robust earlier, but now I’m getting a legacy side-bar — changed last November when we became a group blog. I’ll look into it. My guess is that the retards are restoring from antique back-ups, which is something I can fix on my end. Of course, I have nothing better to do…

 
Further notice: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.” I had thought all the MySQL stuff was working properly, but Jim also reports that reading comments also does not work. Akismet seems to be letting some spam comments through — we get thousands a day — but that may be unrelated. In any case, I apologize for the difficulties. We’ll get them worked out shortly — and permanently.

Whoa! Back to normal before I got off hold. Doesn’t matter. We’re movin’.

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March 20, 2007

GoDaddy? Please, go . . .

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Ouch.

We were on pace for a huge day (the luck of Prince Hal) when GoDaddy.com clobbered us for three hours. This is the third outage in about a week, and nothing we have done on GoDaddy’s end addresses the glacial slowness of the site when we’re busy — which is only about 18 hours a day.

Drew Nichols has offered to host us for free, which I cannot permit. But I sure can pay the man for hosting. I’ll research this on my own, but if anyone has experience migrating a WordPress weblog (specifically the MySQL databases), I’d love to hear from you.

My apologies if you were trying and failing to get here between around 4pm and 7pm MST.

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March 20, 2007

The silencing of the lambs . . .

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Exhibit one

Romeo: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.

Romeo: Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.

Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

Romeo: Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.

Juliet: You kiss by the book.

Exhibit two

For young ladies too, it has been the intention chiefly to write; because boys being generally permitted the use of their fathers’ libraries at a much earlier age than girls are, they frequently have the best scenes of Shakespeare by heart, before their sisters are permitted to look into this manly book; and, therefore, instead of recommending these Tales to the perusal of young gentlemen who can read them so much better in the originals, their kind assistance is rather requested in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand: and when they have helped them to get over the difficulties, then perhaps they will read to them (carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister’s ear) some passage which has pleased them in one of these stories, in the very words of the scene from which it is taken; and it is hoped they will find that the beautiful extracts, the select passages, they may choose to give their sisters in this way will be much better relished and understood from their having some notion of the general story from one of these imperfect abridgments; which if they be fortunately so done as to prove delightful Read more

March 19, 2007

Can yet another easy-blogging local-content solution beat community-building local real estate weblogs?

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Jim Kimmons at RealEstateBusinessSuccess.com Blog has come up with yet another simple solution to the issue of using local real estate weblogging content as bait for leads. That makes four of these, by now, I think.

Okayfine. Jim may have the better mousetrap for two reasons: He’s linking directly to the blogging Realtor’s IDX search page. And he’s teaching his wanna-bloggers how to scour Google News for local content.

Do we want to declare static-content real estate websites dead? We just might. Do we want to declare real estate weblogs ascendant? If we do, can we take a moment to count how many Realtors we expect to be local-blogging (in some form) in any particular locale? How many spots are there on the first Google page again? Is it plausible that, a year from now, local-blogging Realtors will have traded static-content Google-obscurity for blogged (or pseudo-blogged) Google-obscurity? Have I made a mistake in my arithmetic?

I do not like the trolling-for-leads model of real estate weblogging. Local real estate weblogs that deliver real value are treasured resources. But the more people focus on SEO tricks or copywriting tricks or quid pro quo tricks, the more real estate weblogs start to look to me like just another form of advertising.

This is not the end of the world. It’s just the end of weblogging. It’s arguable to me that commercial weblogging, in se, is abhorrent. BloodhoundBlog doesn’t take advertising because I never want for anyone working here to feel that they might need to temper what they have to say for a pecuniary reason. I have no objection to real estate weblogging that is presented in such a way that readers ought to choose to become clients. But when roping up and tying down clients becomes the overarching objective, I don’t see the difference between that and an Adwords campaign.

At a certain level, it doesn’t even make sense to me. As with an Adwords campaign, the people attracted are a random mass, mostly buyers, often relos-without-relo-packages or people who are sublimely under-qualified financially. Certainly that’s what’s going to emerge from Jim’s new venture: It’s target assumption Read more

March 19, 2007

Rain City Guide at the dawn of its third year: “Enjoy the journey because the destination is unknown!”

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Dustin Luther on Rain City Guide’s second birthday:

The power of self-publishing (and the part that is easily overlooked) is that you do not have to create the news… You just have to report it (preferably in an interesting way!).

I see so many agents get stuck on their blogging because they are trying to say something novel, unique and/or brilliant with every post. Very few people are that talented and it is not a necessary skill to either selling real estate or successful blogging. As a publisher of content, it is much more important to add a little personal insight into the aggregated knowledge of others.

This is truly profound advice. As a reflection, this — this very post — is the archetype of a minimalist weblog post: Citation, quotation, commentary. Done.

So, what is the big picture? Enjoy the journey because the destination is unknown!

And here is my own extended commentary on that point.

I have thoughts on what might be the destination of real estate weblogging that I’ll get to in due course.
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March 19, 2007

The Carnival of Real Estate . . .

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…is up at Mike’s Corner. Mike Price expresses this week’s winners in win-place-show format. Our own Brian Brady came in second, with BAD LOANS: Buried In The Back Of The BreadBox, his excellent explication of the practical, long-term consequences of the sub-prime lending implosion.

The Carnival of Real Estate Investing is at the new homes weblog. Brian took first prize there.

Why did I enter Brian’s post in both competitions? Because it’s that good. See so for yourself, then go take a look at all the other great posts…

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March 19, 2007

Jeff Turner bids farewell to BloodhoundBlog

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Jeff Turner has decided to resign as a contributor to BloodhoundBlog. In mail to me, he said his departure is “a personal decision and tied to where and how my energy and focus need to be spent.” I probed a little and determined that the proximate cause is this weenie brouhaha. This is unfortunate, but I had foreseen that it might happen. There are no content restrictions on BloodhoundBlog contributors — nor any rules of any kind, which sometimes leaves people’s heads swimming — so I would prefer to see disagreements settled by reasoned discourse. But, at the same time, I recognize that my priorities are not the same as everyone else’s. In any case, Jeff takes his leave as a valued friend, promising to participate as he can in our discussions here. From what I have seen of him here and elsewhere, I think he has a beautiful spirit. I wish him every good thing life can bring him.

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