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Category: Blogging (page 71 of 84)

September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #79: Win customers with the power of convenience . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, Return Customer teaches us how to “Win Customers with the Power of Convenience”:

Identify barriers or obstacles that stand between your customer’s wallet and your business. This should be done from the customers’ perspective. You’re probably too biased to clearly identify all these barriers by yourself.

Eliminate unnecessary steps in the purchase process. For example, just because your computer system needs some data doesn’t mean your customer should have to jump through those hoops.

Reduce the customer effort needed to buy. Can the customer purchase from her office? Over the web? Can you deliver? How long will this whole process take?

Explain your product so everyone can understand. Tailor your marketing copy to your audience. If you’re using industry jargon you may just confuse and lose potential customers.

Give customers alternatives that all lead to a completed sale.

Sell a product that is so compelling that the reward of purchasing greatly outweighs any effort exerted by the customer.

I think this is excellent general advice for traditional, full-service real estate professionals.

We believe that convenience and off-loading of tasks are key products. We haven’t marketed this, but we plan to: The Drive-By Listing: Leave me a key and I will go in and do everything necessary to list your home while you’re at work. We’ll meet to sign the paperwork or do it by fax, and we’re ready to rock ‘n’ roll. That’s service, and service is worth money…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #77: Weblog Review: moco real estate news . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Todd Tarson’s moco real estate news is a great read, particularly for people who live and work in Arizona. Todd is right in the middle of the debate over what to do about Mohave County’s growing pains — as it becomes a de facto suburb of Las Vegas — so his weblog reports history as it is happening.

For a Blogger.com site, the look is very clean, but, as is to be expected, comments are a pain in the butt.

One of the things I enjoy about the site is that Todd uses a lot of good local photography. Mohave County is a different world from Greater Phoenix, and the photos are luscious…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #75: The power of an online tool . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From SEOmoz blog, a definitive resource, how to use a unique web-based tool or service to attract readers to your real estate weblog:

Ingredients: A service that you can code into a tool to save someone time, effort, money or, alternatively, provide entertainment (plus a solid developer, preferably skilled in AJAX).

Process: Tools aren’t always able to attract visitors independently, so much like mashups, you’ll need to do some promotion. Fortunately, there are dozens of online tool lists and plenty of folks blogging about their creation (like the aforementioned Ajaxian). The tool itself needs to serve a real purpose (or make people laugh) and it needs to be unique. If you’re in the retail industry, imagine a tool that could be used to help visitors custom create a product, or organize a set of products in a useful, humorous or fun way. For B2B, cost calculators for customers can be useful, but are often un-exciting. Imagine how you can expand the use of your services to fit a wide audience, then make it fun and interactive.

Results: Tools can generate traffic slowly over time, or they can have huge bursts. Often, they spread virally through email and social networks if they’re built right (and look great — so pay attention to #4, too).

I gave one of these to my dingleberry son, but he hasn’t done anything with it. It was an idea I had over the summer, and I didn’t have time to write it myself.

It’s not difficult: What I envisioned was a PHP utility that would take a marked-up text and return it without the mark-up, but with each marked-up term or phrase having been recoded as a Wikipedia look-up. For general webloggery, Wikipedia is fiercely useful, but coding a lot of links is a pain in the butt. This, by definition is what software is for.

If you want, you can bug the little booger to get busy on this project…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #74: Five ways to piss off an entrepreneur . . . ?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, blogtrepreneur brings us “5 Ways To Piss Off An Entrepreneur”:

1) Cut off the broadband: I can’t think of anything worse than not being able to access the internet. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to have any international networking and therefore I would have to start a proper offline business. And let’s face it, these can be irritating at the best of times, and can be costly. And don’t mention dial-up to any internet savvy person (just speaking about it sends shivers up my spine!)

2) Give ’em a 9 to 5: Oh no what will they do without their morning lie in? Unlike the majority of the working population, entrepreneurs are able to have a reasonably flexible working schedule. So when they have to set an alarm to wake up early, tempers will be lost!

3) The dreaded boss: One of the main entrepreneurial benefits is the BMOB (Be My Own Boss). Once you take that away, the entrepreneur is left working under a gruelling dictator who sets your own lunch breaks and gives you special doggy treat bonus packages if you work extra hard.

4) Cell phone destruction: The cell phone (that’s a mobile for those who speak proper English!) is used by an active entrepreneur nearly 24/7. Whether they’re involving themselves in a business deal, chatting to their designer about new prospects, or giving their mothers laundry instructions, without a mobile telecommunicator an entrepreneur becomes a standard Joe who has no communication with anyone but those within a 100 metre radius. And that can’t be too good if you’re wanting global recognition?

5) Noise, noise, noise: Finally, the surest way to piss me off is to continually talk around me or have noises in the background whenever Im trying to do an important piece of work. As a general rule of thumb, I never have music on when I work, and I try and close all doors to shield out the family. Blasting heavy beats in my face, sister-brother bickering and non-peace will be sure to drive me over the edge.

One of my clients Read more

September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #73: Using Web to buy home a bad idea . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is a sweet one from my Arizona Republic column:

“Save thousands buying surgery online!”

It may be a while before you see this headline. But you can’t open a magazine or a Web site lately without hearing that Realtors are about to be “disintermediated” by the Internet.

“Disintermediation” is a 50-cent word that means cutting out the middleman. It has happened at the low end of the travel agency and the stock brokerage businesses, among others. Some Internet start-ups plan to automate or streamline the functions performed by Realtors, in anticipation of the glorious day when you will sell one home and buy another online.

There are problems with this idea. For example, although the book-selling business allegedly has been disintermediated, you will have plenty of time to read about that as you bide your time in the checkout line at Borders or Barnes & Noble.

Then there are these considerations: Would you say that a Realtor is more like a sales clerk at Target or Wal-Mart or more like a surgeon?

Is your home, or the one you hope to buy, more like a DVD at Best Buy or Fry’s Electronics or more like a unique work of art?

I’m not sure this column is holding up that well. I can’t imagine buying a house as though it were buying a book at Amazon, but I have sold plenty of houses that the buyers have never seen.

In the first instance, we are taking note of the consultative expertise of Realtors, full-time professionals who know how to market homes and how to effect transactions against a sea of troubles. Surely some Realtors are better than others, but it would take a pretty lousy surgeon to be worse at surgery than an amateur.

In the second instance, we are talking about the idea of fungibility — substituting one item for another with no concern for differences in value. DVDs are highly fungible, as are books, items of apparel, travel arrangements or shares of stock.

I’ve read that radiological diagnostic work is being farmed out by broadband to India. This is a very interesting time to be in the real estate Read more

September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #72: Weblog Review: The Real Estate Bloggers . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I had a tough time wrapping my head around The Real Estate Bloggers weblog at first. It’s not an agent site. Not a vendor site. Not a lender or appraisal site. Not a bubble blog or a splog. What the heck is it?

What it will be if it’s not already is an advertising-supported information site that happens to cover real estate. Rich in content, drawn from diverse sources, it nicely fills a gap in my feed reader.

The quantity of posting is good, as you might expect where traffic is — or will be — someone’s dinner. Better still, the posts are bright, readable, and informative.

The site just moved to a new host, and acquired a new weblog template at the same time. WordPress, of course, and very nicely put together.

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #69: The language of differentiation . . . ?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, Kevin Price writes on “The language of differentiation”:

Only if we are correctly positioned can a difference have the desired effect. That is, a customer must perceive our position as being relevant to his or her needs, and different from that of our competitors. The desired effect of advertising is to bring our brand and a customer together and unite them; make a connection. This requires the twofold action of separating your customer from your competitor and separating you from your competitor. Says the good book: “one must separate things in order to unite them.”

Differentiation occurs in the attributes of a product or brand, not in the benefits. A difference is a character trait of the brand that is not applicable to a competitor’s brand. It occurs because you choose to do something different from your competitors, or to do the same things competitors do but do them differently. But there are a few catches.

The difference must to be able to be translated into a benefit that is desired by prospects. There’s not a lot of point in being different if no one wants what you’re offering and the difference is meaningless. The difference has to be able to be perceived so that it can be labelled. Correct positioning depends on this combination of perception and labelling. The difference has to have life, or at the very least the potential of life. The simple fact is you cannot have drama without life, and because customers expect your advertising to tell a story that is meaningful over a period of time. The difference has to be relative to competition, even if that competition is your own brand.

Good advertising comes from understanding exactly what forces drive your prospects; what the force of your differentiation is and exactly what the right positioning is. Positioning derives from the benefit that arises out of the differentiation. Differentiation is the effect of what it is you’re doing that is different. It is the effect because it results in an attribute that can be claimed or labelled. Positioning on the other Read more

September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #67: Weblog Review: Charlottesville Area Real Estate Blog . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have a great affection for Daniel Rothamel of the Charlottesville Area Real Estate Blog. He’s my kind of serious Realtor, devoted to doing the right thing no matter what the price.

Plus which, he writes a lot, which scores very highly with me. Local real estate, national real estate, basketball, linguam latinam, real estate reality-TV — nothing escapes his purview.

The site is Typepad with its goofy trackbacks, but you can’t have everything. The pages are clean and readable.

Here’s Daniel in action:

When I’m not practicing real estate, one of the things that I do is officiate basketball (I mentioned this once before). The letters from my officiating supervisors have been coming in, the rules clinics are coming up, and the season is on the horizon. All this got me thinking about the similarities between being a REALTOR and being a referee. Officiating has helped me tremendously when it comes to business, and vice versa. Here are some things I find similar about being a referee and being a REALTOR:

1) Referees adhere to a code of ethics, too.

2) For REALTORS, a well-managed transaction brings satisfaction. For the referee, it is the well-managed game.

3) REALTORS must build trust with their clients, referees must do the same with coaches and players.

4) Referees and REALTORS must possess and constantly improve upon their skills of interpersonal relations.

5) The technology of the Internet is changing the way REALTORS conduct business, Internet and video technology is changing the officiating landscape.

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #65: A good hot fire sheds light, too . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From SEOmoz blog, a definitive resource, how to use controversy to attract readers to your real estate weblog:

Ingredients: A passionate audience or community with strong (and hopefully misguided) feelings about a subject, person, company, etc.

Process: Create content through a blog, article, report or statistics that challenges commonly-held beliefs or assumptions or specifically challenges the views of a very popular person or organization. Be prepared to defend your positions, write about them in comments on blogs, in forums, chatrooms, online groups and wherever appropriate. Sometimes, you can even leverage the editorial section of a newspaper and re-print online.

Results: Heavy traffic levels come through multiple channels, but your biggest source is often the direct response of the disagreeing party. Be sure you’re handling the dispute in a professional and even-handed manner and you can earn a respectable following. It’s all dependent on industry and size, but a between a few hundred and a few thousand RSS subscriptions are usually on the table.

Note however, that you don’t have to do this as an SEO tactic. It could be that you just like taking a stand. I’ve heard about people like that…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #64: How to be a great public speaker . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, blargy treats us to “How to Be a Great Public Speaker, by a Former Nervous Wreck”:

Did you know that when surveyed about their greatest fear, people more often say public speaking than death? That’s right, apparently people would rather die than have to address a group of people.

Hm, must be bad.

I used to be one of those people. For me the mere thought of standing in front of a crowd made me feel like tossing my lunch. But the thing is I really wanted to be a good speaker. There’s power in it and it gives you the chance to really spread your word quickly. And let’s face it, it’s also downright cool to be able to command a whole audience.

So, how’s it done?

I’ve heard a lot of “solutions” in my time, mostly from the pop-psychology corner. Everything from “drink some alcohol right before you go on” to “curl your toes over and over as you speak.” And of course, we’ve all heard that it helps to picture the audience naked.

These are techniques for distraction, for putting your mind elsewhere.

And that’s exactly why they don’t work. They distract you at the very moment when you should be at your very best.

I think this is a great article — worth pursuing, worth printing out. If you work in sales and you can’t speak extemporaneously in front of any crowd, you need to change one or the other right away…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #62: Weblog Review: Hamptons Real Estate Blog . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you smell the salt in the air? Doesn’t it make you crave linguine in clam sauce? Welcome to the Hamptons Real Estate Blog, a place of salt, surf and sand — and huge, rambling, very expensive houses.

There’s little enough we have to go by, in reading a weblog. Style is a hard thing to develop. You write and write, and for the longest time, you write every which way. If you didn’t attach your name to your prose, no one would know it was yours.

This is not true of weblogger Michael Daly, who has a voice all his own. I’ll read just about anything he writes, simply to have read him.

Witness:

Confidence – Many of today’s agents come from other successful careers in finance, advertising, law, hospitality, and retail. But real estate is a product unto its own. I’ve seen successful bankers crumble at the rejection and lack of loyalty that a real estate agent sometimes has to swallow. I’ve seen grown women brought to tears because their best friends from childhood bought a house from someone else after they dragged them around for the past six months, looking at everything they said they wanted to see. If you don’t have the confidence to take the ups and downs, and if you can’t accept that fact that real estate agents are often held in the same regard as car salespeople (which encourages clients and customers to be less than completely truthful due to the intrinsic lack of respect for the industry in general), then you’re going to struggle. Don’t take it personally. It’s not about who you are (or who you were) – it’s about how you conduct yourself in the moment.

Commitment – Working as an independent contractor in the real estate business is different than working a 9-to-5 job on Lexington Avenue. If you don’t show up, you don’t have a chance to make a commission. Getting to know the market, attending brokers’ open houses (not just the ones with lunch), learning how to read tax maps, negotiating the web-based tools of the trade, and standing in line and begging Read more

September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #60: RSS for people who can’t think like Oprah . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From mezzoblue.com: “What is RSS/XML/Atom/Syndication?”:

RSS/XML/Atom are technologies, but syndication is a process. RSS and Atom are two flavours of what is more or less the same thing: a ‘feed’ which is a wrapper for pieces of regularly and sequentially-updated content, be they news articles, weblog posts, a series of photographs, and more. For the purposes of this article, consider the terms interchangable. XML is the base technology both are built on, but that’s almost totally irrelevant; the orange buttons are mislabelled, and should read ‘RSS’ or ‘Atom’ instead. Strange, but true.

Syndication is the process of using RSS/Atom for automated updates, another way of getting the information you want. You no doubt have a list of web sites you browse daily for updates, whether they’re stored in your bookmarks or your head. If you find yourself loading 20 or 30 sites a day, and you notice if a few stop updating as frequently, you’ll inevitably stop checking them.

What if there were instead some way to have your list of bookmarks notify you when the sites you read have been updated? You wouldn’t waste time checking those that haven’t. Instead of loading 30 sites a day, you might only need to load 13. Cutting your time in half would enable you to start monitoring more sites, so for the same amount of time you originally invested in checking each site manually, you may just end up end up following twice as many.

Syndication provides the tools to do this. A news reader, or aggregator as they’re also known, is a program or a web site that automatically checks your list of bookmarks (which you only have to set up once) and lets you know what’s new on each site in your list.

It goes beyond simple updates though — the news reader works by pulling in the feeds of your various bookmarks. As we covered above, a feed is a wrapper for content items, so on top of notification, a feed delivers the content that has been updated itself. You may choose to read the new content in the news reader, or you may choose Read more

September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #59: How to explain RSS the Oprah way . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, Back in Skinny Jeans teaches us “How to explain RSS the Oprah way”:

The technical acronym for RSS is “Really Simple Syndication”, an XML format that was created to syndicate news, and be a means to share content on the web. Now, to geeks and techies that means something special, but to everyday folks like you and me, what comes to mind is, “Uh, I don’t get it?”

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, in Oprah speak, RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite websites and blogs all in one place. How cool is that?

I don’t know if this is actually useful for anyone, but it’s a whale of a lot of fun.

The funniest part, really, is that a good RSS-feed reader takes away almost every need you might have for a web browser. Imagine how well that flies with people who have barely gotten a grip on their web browser in the first place. Now tell ’em about the semantic web…

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #57: Weblog Review: Altos Research Blog . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have nothing to say about the Altos Research Blog except, “Bring these folks to Arizona!”

They are utterly the apogee of analytical real estate weblogging. Without a perfectly telling chart, they’re completely tongue-tied. That’s not really true, but if you feel an urge to challenge their conclusions, sharpen your pencil first.

They’re running a Serendipity weblog, and their links are internally-shielded by software: You find what you clicked on without knowing what you had sought. That’s poetical, don’t you think? The trackbacks look like one of the three ways WordPress can do them, which makes me think they might be able to get rid of them altogether.

Clean, thoughtful, very detailed — with unnecessarily complicated weblogging software. Web geeks and complexity. Who’d put those two together…?

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September 26, 2006

Blogoff Post #55: Real estate weblogging? Get real . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

More from Seth Godin offers 56 tips on how to get traffic for your weblog. Here are four that I’ve had enough of:

Use lists.

Include polls, meters and other eye candy.

Do email interviews with the well-known.

Be anonymous.

Anonymity can be cool if there’s a reason for it. If you really are Deep Throat, I’ll cut you a break. If you’re hiding behind a mask to get away with being rude or vulgar — get real.

I have had it up to here with lists. It’s magazine writer crap, and they have already milked it to death. If you really have a reason to delineate something by list, I’ll go with you. If you’re trying to hook me with the top 15 ways to hook unsuspecting weblog readers — get real.

I’m not hugely crazy about graphics in weblog posts unless you’re illustrating something mere words cannot depict. If you’re throwing in a picture either because you can’t write or you think I can’t read — get real.

As for email interviews, that’s an oxymoron. If there is any reason for an interview — as against an essay or just plain email — it’s to hear the respondent under the pressure of time and circumstance. Bill Clinton’s melt-down on Fox News Sunday this week is a perfect example of why an interview must be done live. In other words — get real…

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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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