Future of Real Estate Marketing » real estate bloggers

Friday Morning Linkfest

Joel Burslem — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:45:00 +0000

Blogging Fog by nj dodge

The real estate community has been busy this week:

Dustin Luther launches 4Realz Internet Marketing Education.
Jay Thompson breaks away from the mothership and starts Thompsons Realty.
Daniel Rothamel posts a new episode of ZebraTalk.
Loren Nason of Future of Real Estate Technology brings on a new contributor.
Paul Chaney, now with Bizzuka, launches a new Content Management System.
Nicole Nicolay of MyTechOpinion introduces new single property web site solution at MyMarketWare.
Oliver Muoto shows us vFlyer’s new and improved home page.

Oh and…

It looks like Rudy Bachraty of Trulia has been pretty busy too.

New blogs that are keeping me busy:

The Notorious R.O.B. – A blog by Rob Hahn, VP of Marketing at OnBoard. Good perspective coming from Rob.

Busy, busy, busy.

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ActiveRain Launches Outside Blogs

Joel Burslem — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 02:31:42 +0000

ActiveRain, the popular real estate social networking platform, has launched what it’s calling “Outside Blogs” – a new feature that lets AR members take their content outside of the walled-garden of the ActiveRain ecosystem.

From their blog post announcing the sneak preview:

A few of the highlights of our outside blog platform:
* You will be able to host your blog on your own domain. For example, you can have your posts feed to bobisgreat.com if you own that domain.
* You will be able to customize the look and feel of your blog.
* It’s easy to set up your outside blog. You can be up and running in less than 15 minutes.
* You will be able to build your posts in ActiveRain. You won’t have to learn a new platform.
* You will be able to decide where you want your posts to publish. Do you just want your outside blog to be about local content pertinent to your local market? You will be able to decide which posts go where. Send your local market reports to your outside blog. Send your real estate industry related posts to ActiveRain. The choice is yours.
* You will be able to benefit from the SEO knowledge and power of ActiveRain.
* You will be able to brand your own blog while at the same time staying connected with the ActiveRain community. Your comments will be syndicated between your ActiveRain blog and your outside blog.

This makes a lot of sense, as it lets bloggers move beyond the sandbox that ActiveRain currently provides. Until now, many budding real estate bloggers cut their chops on ActiveRain before seeking other alternatives (Wordpress, Typepad etc.) that allow them to move their blogging onto their own domain. Outside Blogs (needs a new name) allows them set out on their own yet retain their pre-existing content and still leverage the feel-good aspects of the ActiveRain community.

ActiveRain has slowly been rolling out features that begin to answer the lingering question of how they intend to monetize their flourishing community. ActiveRain Ads were the first step; Outside Blogs are, presumably, the next step.

Costs for this new feature, as yet, are un-announced.

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Analyzing Your RSS Subscriber Statistics

Joel Burslem — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:44:04 +0000

Monitoring your web site statistics is an important part of maintaining an online presence and there are many excellent tools you can use to keep track of your raw traffic numbers (see Statistics and Analytics: Tools).

But traffic isn’t everything however. For content producers in niche verticals (like real estate) – numbers alone can’t and don’t tell the whole story. Basically it reduces to the old quantity versus quality argument – does have a lot readers mean more than having the right reader?

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around one for the last couple of weeks. What are the measures of success for a blog and what metrics can be used to keep track of them?

Technorati authority, Alexa rank, Google PageRank (see Signaling A Retreat From Multi-Author Blogs), inbound links, indexed pages are all metrics one can consider – but none offer the definitive answer. For more on this, SEOMoz has a get breakdown on How to Use Search Engines & Web Data to Conduct Competitive Brand Analysis.

One stat I’m personally paying more and more attention to is the number of RSS subscribers a site has. Why? Because it signals the audience’s engagement/loyalty to the blog.

As a publisher, RSS stats are hard to come by, but If you use Feedburner to manage your RSS subscriptions, here’s a great tool from Feedperfume (Feed Analysis v1.0) that will give you some in depth reporting on your numbers.

You need to output your Feedburner stats in CSV format (instructions are on the site) and then upload them to FeedPerfume and it will churn out some graphs and do some of the heavy number crunching automatically for you.

By way of example, I’ve embedded the results from FOREM. As a blogger, I find this fantastic information to measure my site’s growth.