Entries Tagged 'Real Estate Blogs' ↓

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Congratulations Zillow and Trulia for their victories in the Webby Awards For 2008. Both companies are leaders not just in the online real estate space but also showing other industries how to harness the web to change the playing field.

Press Release:

Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, online film and video, interactive advertising, and mobile Websites. The Academy unveiled winners today in over 100 categories from over 60 countries and a full list of winners can be found at http://www.webbyawards.com. < ?xml:namespace prefix ="" o ns ="" "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 Reflecting the incredible caliber of Real Estate sites on the web, the winner in the category is:

•  Zillow.com                                                                   

http://www.zillow.com

In addition, nearly 500,000 votes were cast by people around the world for their favorite sites, videos, and ads in The Webby People’s Voice Awards presented by Nokia. A full list of both Webby Awards and People’s Voice Awards winners can be found at www.webbyawards.com

 The Webby People’s Voice Award for Best Real Estate Site is:

• Trulia                                                                           

http://www.trulia.com

“Blogging is a great fit for real estate since agents can do it all on their own and give people a feel for the area, you can be a resource for people who want to read info on the town,” said Lexi Cerretti, a Realtor with Chase International. via the North Lake Tahoe Bonanza

An interesting article on real estate blogging from a local paper. Very often bloggers get caught in the fish bowl and fail to see how the outside world see’s us. It is good to see this perspective.

Also, if you are a blogger why not contact your local paper and see if they are interested doing an article on blogging in real estate. This is the slow season for them too.

Face it, as bloggers we all like to get new traffic. There is a new widget out there that can help drive some traffic from the guys over at Income.com called BlogRush.

What BlogRush does is use a widget on your site to put links to other blog stories in your vertical. We are always talking about the RE.Net and it seems like this is a great way to get exposure to new stories. Sites will be vetted by humans so the possibility for splogs to enter should be kept to a dull roar, and if we who are active in the Real Estate Blogosphere get a head start using this tool, it could work out to everyones benefit.

If you are looking for more information, check out this video of people talking about BlogRush and watch the widget on the sidebar of this site.

One of the biggest problem we see in the RE.net world is content theft. It makes sense as real estate and mortgage Google Ads are one of the most lucrative marketing opportunities out there. Steal the content, SEO it a little bit and you can have a site that will make you a few dollars a day.

Well, Search Engine Round Table has a great post that leads you step by step on how to file a DCMA report on the offending splogs and potentially have them lose their adsense accounts, cutting off part of the motivation to steal your content. 

Maybe we should have a clean up the RE.net day. Everyone scope out the content thieves and we work to file DCMA takedown notices on them. That would clean things up in a hurry.

Every Google Adsense ad — including ads on splogs — can be reported to Google if it is in violation of any particular AdSense guideline.
How is this done? Let’s walk through an example from a splog.
First, you click on “Ads by Google” (in some instances, you will see “Feedback - Ads by Google”). via Search Engine Roundtable.

Realtors.com has come out with a new blogging tools for their membership called Featured Blog and Let’s Talk Real Estate. The new blogging tool will be linked to at the top of their Realtor.com page that gets 6 million visitors a month. If I was a Realtor I probably would create a blog on the site because it would be another avenue to marketing my farm.

I also will be curious to see where the direction of the project will end up. Will it keep it’s focus on the consumer or will it morph into a professional discussion for Realtors like Active Rain has. Something I have watched as an outsider writing about real estate and reading the blogs out there is that real estate agents have a hard time focusing their writing on the consumer. Conversations and posts that start discussing splits, marketing, and other inside real estate sales topics will make this site a one and out for consumers. And this is not to disparage Active Rain, it has become the water cooler for the real estate industry.

Likewise, if the agents keep themselves from selling constantly on the site, there could be some success. But to be honest I have a hard time seeing this. Very few of those who start blogging continue and are successful, mainly because most fail to write what the readers want. Instead, I expect to see a plethora of hard selling, inside the industry discussions, and sabotogue in the comment sections if someone starts doing well. All things that will turn off the consumer. 

I wish much luck to the conversation that can be held on the new sites, but in all reality I expect this site to bring out the worst stereotypes of real estate agents and leave a blemish on the industry before it helps.

“Featured Blog and Let’s Talk Real Estate! give REALTORS another way to have direct dialogue with consumers that have questions about market trends, a neighborhood, or even local community events,” said REALTOR.com President, Errol Samuelson. “Through these no cost real estate blogs, REALTORS can share their knowledge, build relationships, and expand their overall referral network while talking about their favorite subject — real estate.”
REALTORS will find it easy to jump into the blogosphere on REALTOR.com. Click to http://www.featuredblogsignup.com, register for a Featured Blog and post an initial article, comment or message that can be visible as a stand-alone website page or within a personal web site. Elevating the dialogue to a national forum, the REALTOR.com editorial staff will select the freshest and most interesting Featured Blog posts and spotlight them in the “Let’s Talk Real Estate!” section on the site’s home page visited by approximately 6 million consumers each month.
“Another great benefit of Featured Blog is that we’ve engineered search engine optimization (SEO) features into the platform to increase the odds that a post will get picked up by major search engines and receive a higher placement,” says Samuelson. “This means REALTORS that keep their posts fresh, relevant and interesting have a better chance of attracting interest and driving traffic to their sites without the marketing costs associated with key word purchases or pay-per-click.” PR

There is a wonderful commercial that Holiday Inn put out last March about blogging. Dave Winer referenced it yesterday and as I tend to do, I put it in a real estate agents perspective.

Blogging is a wonderful tool to get your name and face out in the world as an expert. And the speed that you will go from being one of the guys (or gals) to an industry expert can at times be amazingly fast. But this success for your peers can be disconcerting.

They will still think of you “as you” while the world will perceive that you are so much more. And they will be confused on how by writing “your blog” you have leapfrogged over them to be an industry leader. This commercial by Holiday Inn captures it perfectly.

click here or the image to watch the video

Now my question to you is, are you ready to be an industry leader?

After spending the weekend reading real estate blogs while working on a new project I found that this post definately caught my attention. It is the tale of the 3 little pigs by Bloggrrl and how people approach blogging.

I have spent the last 2 years on The Real Estate Blogger building up the content to the point that I am pretty proud of the site. Going forward we have some cool things that are going to roll out for you aimed at the RE-Net.

Because if there is one thing, trying to stay ahead of the Big Bad Wolf is a big job. Very few of us can do it, but when we can stare down that son of a bitch it sure does feel good.

Once upon a time there were three little blogs. They collectively decided that it was time to leave blogspot.com and move on to their very own domains.

Read the whole saga of the 3 little pigs at Bloggrrl

Greg Swann at the Bloodhound Blog is one of the great innovative thinkers when it comes to the interaction of the internet and real estate. He is working on a new project that is trying to develop a taxonomy of real estate blogs. Here is how he describes it.

This is a first strike at a taxonomy of real estate weblogs. Taxonomy is the science of categorizing things. Of course, not everything can be neatly categorized, but the elucidation of categories can focus the mind, helping us to understand where certain weblogs might fit, which are hybrids of two or more categories, and which can only be described by the creation of new categories.

So if you are interested in helping head on over to the BloodhoundBlog post on Real Estate Taxonomy to read the list and give Greg your two cents.

For me the list was illustrative. He used The Real Estate Bloggers as an example of a  National Interest blog on real estate focusing on consumers. What is amazing is that is the best description of my site that I have read, and it is helping me focus our goals and objectives for the site.

Thanks Greg.

The site that will symbolize the excesses of the last housing boom and the excesses it can breed, iamfacingforeclosure.com, has shut it’s doors.

I have not written much about the travail of Casey Serin and his very public entry into the depths of mortgage fraud, foreclosure, and most likely a long and painful process of legal and financial distress. He has done all this very publicly and anything I would do would have just fed his ego and led him further down the path of shame and ruin.

And I am not gloating as at that age I also thought that I was smarter than the rest of the world and made some dumb business decisions. But I am glad that Casey decided to shut down the site and focus on his family and life and not lead it in the public eye.

So tonight, if it is your style, say a small prayer for the guy and hope that all ends up okay for him and his family. My guess is they will need every bit of it.

I get that question fairly often. Mainly I am an information junkie and this allows me to feed my habit while making a little bit of money. Hopefully I can share the information I find in such a way that you enjoy it, find it useful, and come back on occasion.

I did see an interesting interview Guy Kawasaki did with Marketing Voices Jennifer Jones on his entry and success with blogging that I would like to share with you. He gives his impressions on blogging and they align very closely with mine.

 He also is a big hockey fan and the analogy with keeping score is something that I can well relate to. The video, which in itself is a great example of adding quality video to a blog, is about 15 minutes and while it will not change your world, it may answer some of the questions on “Why The Heck Do You Want To Blog?”