An update on Rancho Santa Margarita Lifestyles.

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I had a chance to chat with my apprentice Kelly Kilpatrick from Rancho Santa Margarita Lifestyles this afternoon – we spent quite a while talking about the competition and our strategy for the contest. I’m really impressed with the quality of her posts and she’s definitely shown a real passion for blogging. Please have a look at her site if you haven’t already.

Reading tonight that Automattic has released a new Stats plugin for WordPress, reminded me I had been meaning to add some more plugins to Kelly’s blog, so I got to work.

Here’s a quick rundown of what I added tonight:

Statistics

*NEW* Automattic Stats – I’m interested to see how well this works out of this… currently using Clicky to track visitors.
Popularity Contest – keeps a count of what pages and posts are most popular.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO Title Tag – optimizes RSMLifestyles’ title tags.
Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress v2 Fina – create a Google Sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of RSMLifestyles.
Wordpress WWW Redirect Plugin » Justin Shattuck – redirects rsmlifestyles.com to www.rsmlifestyles.com.
Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin | FuCoder.com – ensures there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.
Head Meta Description – adds dynamic meta descriptions to each post.

More here WordPress Plugins needed to Optimize your Blog for Search Engines

Functionality

WP-Polls – Nice AJAX poll for Kelly’s site so she can add some “Sticky” features.
Kramer – adds inbound links to a post as pingbacks by checking Technorati and monitoring incoming referrers.
WP-PostRatings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
WordPress Contact Form with Spam Protection- drop in form for users to contact Kelly.
Subscribe to Comments – allows commenters to subscribe to e-mail notifications of subsequent comments.
Related Entries – displays related posts on single pages, based on keywords.
Brians Latest Comments 1.5.5 – displays threaded and weighted comments in the sidebar.

More later as we begin to modify Kelly’s template.

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Week 2 update of the Project Blogger competition is up on the Connect SF 2007 Blog. I’ve been traveling a lot the past week and so I’ve seriously lax in my updates. My apprentice Kelly has been doing a fantastic job on her blog Rancho Santa Margarita Lifestyles, and has been very forgiving of my absences. Thanks again Kelly!

If you haven’t been over to visit yet, go check her out. She’s done a bang up job developing a great local blog. Stop by and say hi, and better yet – add her to your blog roll and subscribe to her feed in your newsreaders.

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I’m a big fan of Formula One racing. As a kid, my grandfather worked for Mobil Oil and one of my proudest possession was a scale model of “King Nigel” Nigel Mansell’s Williams race car that he’d given me. It still sits proudly on my desk today.

So ActiveRain and Inman News‘ Project Blogger competion kicks off today – and I thought the F1 analogy was kind of appropriate. The green flag has just been waved and each team’s drivers have just set off on the big race.

Team ORCA

Just to refresh your memories; my apprentice (or driver, as it were) is Kelly Kilpatrick, a REALTOR® with Gold Coast Realty in Ranch Santa Margarita (for more see Go Team Orca).

Her personality and enthusiam for the project was what made me pick her out of the field and I’m confident she’ll do extremely well; but the key to any winning F1 team is not just having the best driver or car, but also having the best team there to support them. I’m happy to say I’ve pulled together an incredible team to support Kelly.

Loren Nason, of the Future of Real Estate Technology blog and Your Local Tech Consulting, stepped up to be my Crew Chief and has been Kelly’s goto guy for all questions relating to email, hosting, Wordpress etc. As per the Project Blogger rules, the participant must be responsible for all costs; but Loren was very kind and provided the hosting space to Team Orca for free.

Between the two of us, we’ve spent the last few weeks getting Kelly up to speed on blogging; familiarizing her with the Wordpress platform, helping her out with any technical questions and just letting her concentrate on honing her writing skills while we took care of the all the preparations.

To that end, we set her up with a test car to take out before giving her the keys to the race car. She put together a hosted blog at Wordpress.com where she could spin her tires a little – Rancho Santa Margarita – Key to the City.

But now that we’re ready to roll, please check out Kelly’s new blog – Rancho Santa Margarita Lifestyles.

The Strategy

Our Race Day strategy likely echoes many of the other teams – that is, we are pursuing a “hyper local” approach and focusing specifically on Rancho Santa Margarita (known as RSM to residents).

We’ve specifically downplayed a hard sell real estate angle and decided to focus on building the site as a valuable community resource. This will ultimately allow Kelly to broaden the scope of what she can write about in her blog and position herself as a resident, mother, citizen as well a respected neighborhood expert.

The Sponsors

Of course, the end goal is ultimately to drive business so I also broadened the scope of this project a bit. To me blogging is only one component of a successful online marketing strategy and is really just the front door to your business. And so, just like an F1 team, I found some sponsors that could help bring ALL of Kelly’s Internet marketing efforts to a whole new level.

We wanted readers to be able to search for homes in the RSM area so we built an IDX search into the blog itself as a way to build some stickyness to the site and keep readers around and keep them interested.

Diverse Solutions gave Kelly a free subscription to their dsSearchAgent product (for more see New Real Estate Search Mashups), an IDX search interface ‘mashup’ which we have placed on a separate page on the blog.

The result is the Real Estate Search at Rancho Santa Margarita Lifestyles. Read Loren’s post on how he implemented this.

Of course, if we’ve got interested clients, we need to send them somewhere and Kelly asked me early on about upgrading her existing web site.

Ubertor kindly gave Kelly a free 1-year subscription to their real estate website software (for more see Get on the Net: Ubertor) which you can see at www.kellykilpatrick.myubertor.com – our goal will be to push clients to Kelly’s site from the RSM blog.

Net cost – less than $20 for a few domain names from GoDaddy.

Promotion

Getting to the starting line doesn’t mean much unless people know you’re competing – so a couple of things I did right out the gates was create a Real Estate Blog entry on the InmanWiki Real Estate Blog Directory and add it to Zillow’s Directory of Local Real Estate Blogs.

There are many more ideas we have for promoting the blog which I will be sharing in upcoming posts.

Race Day

So now that the day is finally here and the flag has dropped, I’m reasonably comfortable that Kelly stands as good a chance as any for a podium finish once the checkered flag is waved this summer.

I’ll see you all at Blogger’s Connect, August 1st in San Francisco, when the winners are announced.

[This post was cross posted on the ActiveRain Project Blogger group]

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Project Blogger is the brainchild of Jonathan Washburn of ActiveRain and will chronicle the development of a handful of new REbloggers, leading up to the Inman’s Bloggers Connect conference in San Francisco, this summer.

I was asked, along with a number of other bloggers, to choose a blogging apprentice, help them get up and running and crank up their online marketing efforts.

Dustin’s still looking; the Bloodhound has already unveiled the latest pup in his litter and Sellsius, Jim, Ardell and The Rainmaker have all picked their running mates.

So, not to get left behind, today I’d like to introduce my blogging apprentice.

Kelly Kilpatrick (exclusiveOChomes.com)

Kelly is an agent with Gold Coast Realty in Rancho Santa Margarita, California (which, apparently, is the longest town name in California). She’s been in the business for over 15 years, and before that was in the mortgage industry.

Kelly is very new to blogging, having recently joined the Active Rain network and is definitely excited to be part of this contest. (Who could say no to an application like this?)

I’m looking forward to working with Kelly and seeing what we can come up with. I’ll be detailing our efforts on this blog and on the Active Rain discussion group as well.

Oh yeah. I figured we needed a team name.

So we’ll be known as Team ORCA – shorthand for our respective States; plus a wicked cool, sleek, highly tuned killing machine. (Bonus points for being the part of the logo of my favorite hockey team).

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