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Category: Marketing (page 82 of 191)

March 17, 2008

How to use engenu to reinforce your blog posts about listed homes you would like to sell, to build single-property web sites, and to achieve total global hyper-local long-tail search domination

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my response to a comment that Jennifer Castillo left on my post about the benefits of blogging about real estate listings you would like to sell.

Jennifer said:

My questions to you arise from this quote of yours, “For each house you preview, build an engenu page. That way you can show all the photos, captioned as needed, if someone wants to see everything. You can also link to appropriate offsite resources. This engenu page will be a permanent asset in your inventory of on-line content.”

Being a total n00b in this business I am very excited about what you have written in this particular post. My question to you is how do I build an engenu page? I have a blog at wordpress so can this even be done with my existing blog? Do I need any particular software?

Hi, Jennifer. I like your weblog. You have en eye for striking images.

engenu is software written by me. It runs on Apache web servers, or it will once I release it. It’s all but finished, but I keep finding small things I want to change. I’ll be releasing it as a public beta shortly.

I’ve written about engenu on BloodhoundBlog. In that post, I talk about a house we know and love. Cathy blogged about that house, and her weblog post linked back to the engenu site I built for 101 West Seminole Drive.

That’s an illustration of how you can use engenu to support a weblog post about a house. The post can highlight the features and photos you are interested in talking about, then you can link back to you engenu site for the folks who want to see everything. The post and the engenu site are mutually-reinforcing, both in terms of immediate marketing and in future long-tail search results.

The point of all this is that engenu permits ordinary people to build rich, elaborate, highly searchable web sites very quickly and without knowing any HTML or other coding languages. If you do know how to code, you can build almost anything you want, but the kind of sites we build every day to Read more

March 16, 2008

Unraveled by Unchained, or: Why I put a leash on my Spring Break plans.

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

So I was chatting with Brad Coy the other day, (On the phone!? Get out of town) and he asked me why, after participating in the hoopla of the Project Blogger competition, did I not go to Inman Connect.

Me: “Well, uh, um, well, uh, you know, um…”

I must come clean: I really hate conferences. I have the patience of Job with a lot of things, BS ain’t one of them.

I simply can’t sit in a crowded room listening to someone drone on and on, particularly if they are droning about something they are selling. And with a conference I’m supposed to pay for that unique pleasure? Especially when there is a big beautiful city calling my name? No way, not me.

When I heard that Bloodhound was planning a conference, I cringed. Then I immediately made plans to go- not because I thought that this conference would be different- the truth is I didn’t think it would be different, oh me of little faith. I made plans to go because I love Arizona and haven’t been in years, and thought it would be fun to finally meet a bunch of Bloodhounds. That was it. My double secret plan was to show up, say Hello!, put in a minimal amount of face time, then quietly bug out and head for the desert. And let me add something I’m not entirely proud of, but it’s important to this story: That was still my plan up until yesterday.

Greg says: “We’re nobody’s fan boy, nobody’s water boy, nobody’s pony boy.” Amen, brother! I might be a contributor here, but the way I see it, BHB Unchained is going to have to prove to me that it’s worth something before I’m sticking around for the show. I love this from Kelley Koehler in a comment on Agent Genius

“Remember me? I bought a ticket. Me. My money bought me the right to demand your attention on me, the right to only care about what I can get out of you. Anyone wearing a vendor hat and doing anything other than helping me becomes merely an irritant with no value. Your focus is on me. Your goal is within me. Anything – Read more

March 16, 2008

The Future of Marketing: Intent and Content

by

Real Estate Broker

Author website

John Battelle wrote a book a while back called The Search which is basically about Google. In this book he discusses, among many other topics, the mountain of information being gathered by search engine companies and gives a few scenarios of how this might affect adverising and marketing. One particular scenario is something I think is not too far away from being a reality.

He uses a couple gathering information about the expected birth of their first child, how the husband is badgered into taking a part and learning about child-birth, parenting and such, so he begins searching — searching for articles, searching Amazon for books, etc. Battelle’s point is the merging of intent-based and content-based advertising. The husband then gets with his wife to use the TV search capabilities to find the programs related to child-care and parenting.

He goes on with the scenario describing the behind-the scenes computer gyrations that trigger connected sites to form the “intent” and begin the auctioning for advertising — all this taking seconds, from TiVo to Amazon to BabyWorld.com to whatever other connection he’s made.

When they start the child-care programing, in the corner of the screen is a message that three advertisers have information packages. The agreement with the cable program services is that he will access the ads every so often in order to get an incredibly low cost for the program services. He really doesn’t mind this because he’s found the ads very useful and pertinent to his needs.

The auctioning process behind the scenes was preset by advertisers with a maximum bid they will go, or they set to always bid the highest for top placement. The bids are in and three advertisers have won the top spots.

When the husband clicks on the ads, he not only gets a textual ad saying “We’re the greatest”, he gets links to information sites, discount offers, a whole package of useful content.

Now, plug in a home searcher and real estate and we get a glimpse of what the future might hold. I won’t even go into the predictions of barcoding technology, but imagine scanning your smartphone over a barcode on a for sale sign and uploading Read more

March 16, 2008

BloodhoundBlog is the number one real estate weblog? Technically true for a brief moment, but we still have some growing to do

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A tiny trophy, a huge victory — to come.

Biggest, most comprehensive and most popular real estate industry technology and marketing blog

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?

Biggest, most comprehensive and most popular real estate industry technology and marketing blog

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

March 15, 2008

Paradigm Shift? Not Quite Yet

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

In just the past couple weeks alone I’ve read over a dozen blog posts declaring a paradigm shift in real estate — specifically in what it takes to succeed as an agent. Before I continue, it’s not my intention to offend anyone in any way whatsoever. Seems about 2-3 times a year I manage to step in it big time, causing some sorta perfect $#%storm of wounded egos and/or encroached empires of ideology. This should be filed under, ‘Hey, I’m just sayin” and leave it at that.

Look at the history of the car, beginning at the turn of the 20th century. Going out on a limb, I’d say far less than 1% of the population had seen one, much less owned one. Now look at today’s car. A paradigm shift? Not in my thinking. They still require gas, a driver, a drive train, and brakes. A 1908 Ford got you from point A to point B faster and more comfortably than a horse — and so does the 2008 model. Yet many would say due to the myriad improvements over the last 100 years there’s been some sort of paradigm shift from 1908 to now.

Show me. Where is it? Does the ’08 version fly? Does it drive itself? Does it make its own fuel? No, it gets us from A to B faster and more comfortably than a horse. A paradigm shift was when the car replaced the horse.

Segue to real estate brokerage.

It was Saturday in the middle of a cloudy October in 1969 when I first stepped into a real estate office as a licensed agent. Not much has changed in the ‘paradigm shift’ kinda way.

Before you start your enraged fingers racing over your keyboard, read on.

Sure, there were no computers, no internet, no 2.0, not even 1.0 — hell we were barely 0.0 back then. Still, we did then what we do today. We seek opportunities to get in front of qualified prospects in order to make our living. We took listings, represented buyers, used the MLS, had to deal with contracts, dealt with lenders, Read more

March 14, 2008

What could be dumber than sticking a Flash widget on your real estate weblog? How about sicking two Flash gadgets there instead?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

March 14, 2008

BloodhoundBlog is the most popular real estate industry blog, but for now we’re the fourth most popular real estate weblog overall

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Biggest, most comprehensive and most popular real estate industry technology and marketing blog

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…

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March 14, 2008

Ashley Alexandra Dupree on AmieStreet.com: How To Profit When The Long Tail Search Is YOU

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Ashley Dupree turned into a media target, in 36 hours, and AmieStreet.com immediately started selling her tracks. In the tradition of making hay while the sun shines, Ash uploaded a new single, Move Ya Body and compiled an album, “Unspoken Words“, both offered on AmieStreet.com.

Look at the world we live in; social media marketing. Ashley Dupree was “outed” through her MySpace profile (which promptly drew over 2 million hits in 18 hours- after she took my advice) and started profiting off the exposure.

AmieStreet.com is an online music download site where the community determines the price of the downloads by “bidding” the price from FREE to 98 cents. Ash is maxed out at the top bid- for BOTH of her songs. While her Myspace profile has 6 million hits, her “page views” on Amie Street are over 264,000. Here’s the cool part; her “listens” are over a quarter of a million. Virtually everyone who clicks through to Ashley Dupree’s AmieStreet.com store is listening to her music.

Would we even be talking about this in 2004?

Of course not. Social media marketing was buying advertising links on MySpace or “cold-calling” people you met on LinkedIn. I tried it a few times and was confused about the ROI so I abandoned it. I focused on building communities on both sites, instead.

I’m fascinated by this whole Ashley Dupree story because the mainstream media came into OUR world, the Web 2.0 world, to break the story. Equally as fascinating is the fact that OUR world, the Web 2.0 world, allows Ash to immediately profit from her art. Ashley Dupree disintermediated the onerous process of a recording contract, studio time, and pre-release marketing and got her product to market in less than 36 hours!

We all talk about the “long tail search” and how we can profit immensely off the consumer niches exposed to us by the internet. What I’m learning from the Ashley Dupree story is that it’s no longer the big who eats the small, it’s the fast that eats the slow…which begets this Read more

March 14, 2008

If you thought the iPhone rocked, just wait for the iPhone 2.0

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

March 13, 2008

Where’s Ashley Dupree’s MySpace? With A Few Lessons From Martha Stewart, She Could Have Been America’s Sweetheart

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Memo to Ashley Alexandra Dupree: America is the land of “reinventing yourself”. Ask Sidney Biddle Barrows, Vanessa Williams, Donald Trump, or even Daryl Strawberry how forgiving the American public is. Americans crave drama, revere celebrity, and have a sense of justice about them.

Mac Daddy El abused the public trust, as did Pete Rose; that’s a tough obstacle to overcome. Martha Stewart did the same but carefully atoned and controlled her public image to turn the greatest of haters around; that’s what we’ll discuss today.

How can Martha Stewart’s case study teach Ashley Dupree how to become America’s Next Sweetheart? More importantly, what can you learn from Martha’s PR/Marketing strategy to boost your online marketing efforts?

Who is Ashley Dupree and why do we care about her? Ashley is a budding songwriter and singer with a compelling story. She was cast into the limelight as Eliot Spitzer’s paramour; taking a few large a month for companionship. Now I don’t want to comment on the morality of prostitution; in 49 states, it’s illegal. Whether you’re an Emporer’s Club “provider” or a sex worker trolling Grand Central, the State of New York considers prostitution a crime. The allegations against Ashley have not been proven in a court of law and frankly, I don’t care if she did it or not. Why?

Most Americans view her actions as a private matter; one look at her MySpace profile shows that 5 million people have shown an interest in her. Many well-wishers have sent messages of support. Ash is getting some eyeballs. Let’s look at Martha Stewart’s case study to see how Ash can go from being just another R&B wannabe to America’s Sweetheart.

Martha Stewart built an empire selling crafts and lifestyle. The “ultimate homemaker” lifestyle turned into OmniMedia Corporation, selling magazines, producing television shows, and creating her own “lines” of products. That almost came crashing down some 4 years ago when she was convicted of insider trading.

I was in Las Vegas, with my securities trader friends, when the decision Read more

March 13, 2008

Wow… Life stinks when you’ve got your head up your… community…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Notice anything missing?

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.

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March 12, 2008

Practical dual agency in real life: It is possible to have a fiduciary duty to your sellers — that you cannot get away from — that feels like a complete betrayal of your buyers. What then?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

March 12, 2008

Four photographs from a day spent looking at houses: Two of them are tragic — but the other two are infuriating

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

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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