Widgets are a great way to add valuable content, increase your credibility, foster engagement and “share-a-bility” of your content, and make your site more interactive with your customers.Widgets are available for use on most WordPress.com and WordPress.org sites.

I am very excited to be giving a special presentation today in Vancouver, BC at Agent Reboot. My presentation is: “Widget Check: Pump Up Your WordPress Website.”

Here are my 9 favorite widgets for WordPress sites:

• Local News: Twitter.com/About/Resources/Widgets
• Lifestyle: WalkScore.com/Services
• Weather: Weather.com/Services/Weather-Gadgets/
• Social Media: ShareThis.com
• Subscribing to Updates: FeedBurner.com
• Facebook: Facebook.com/Badges
• One Phone Number: Google.com/Voice
• Email Newsletters: MailChimp.com
• Entertainment: Frontdoor.com/Buy/HGTV-Frontdoor-Widgets/55667

The best part – these widgets will work on Canadian or U.S. WordPress websites!

In addition, in the U.S., there are some fantastic widgets available from Zillow.com, Trulia.com and AltosResearch.com – all of which have widget options such as: mapping,  IDX feeds, data charts, testimonials, featured homes, and more.

What are your favorite widgets? I’d love to hear from you and add to this list. Post your favorites below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Social Media Director, Inman News, @katielance

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Are you working smart with social media?

As a real estate agent or broker – you have to ask yourself: “Am I spending my time wisely or is social media a ‘time suck’?”

Can you track views, clicks, likes, and conversations? Can you track when your name or company name is mentioned across all platforms? If not, keep reading!

It’s one thing to have a Facebook page or Twitter account, but it quite the other to be able to make intelligent choices about content, time of day of posting, what works and what doesn’t and so much more…. AND not consume all of your time!

Recently, there are two companies that have caught my eye:

1. TwentyFeet

TwentyFeet provides detailed analytics AND aggregates all your stats into one place. It gives you an overview of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, bit.ly, Google Analytics and more. The key here is “all in one place! The other thing I really like is that they “nudge you” via email when your metrics change significantly – brilliant!

They offer a free 30-day trial and them you can order their services which start at $2.49/year. It is a simple, straightforward program that could help a lot of real estate agents and brokers track their social media success.

Here is a quick video that highlights some of the features:

2. Postling

I started using Postling about a month or so ago and I think it is an extremely useful tool.

One of the nice things about Postling is you can use it to publish to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wordpress, Tumblr and Flickr. You can also schedule your posts out which is nice for real estate agents – you can “drip” their posts out over the course of a few days – just like drip marketing. Also, Postling brings all of the comments your readers leave on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr into one place. Every morning Postling will send you a daily digest email recapping the recent activity for all of your social media accounts.

With Postling Tracking, they dig through Twitter, blogs, mainstream media, RSS feeds and more to find every time your name comes up.  Are there certain phrases that you know lead to potential new customers?  Save those phrases within Postling Tracking and they’ll notify you when you’ve got a match – very cool!

What do you think? Have you used either one of these tools? Are their other tools that you are using that you love? Leave me a comment below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Senior Marketing Manager, Inman News @katielance

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It seems like just about every day there are new updates to Facebook pages!

Just yesterday there were 3 new changes that were announced that I am super excited about:

1. You can navigate and interact with other areas of Facebook as your Page. This means you can choose to receive notifications about fan activity, Like and comment on other Pages as your Page, and get your own News Feed where you can engage with the latest and most important news from other Pages you like.
2. There are new opportunities for Pages to share. You can feature photos of your Page’s most recent experiences at the top of your Page. You can highlight other Pages you are connected with as well as the people who are managing your Page.
3. Make your Page even more engaging for users. The “Everyone” filter on the Wall provides a new way for people to see the most interesting posts first. There is also a place for people to discover the friends and interests they have common with your Page.

You can read about the announcement here and view the new Page Manual here!

I upgraded all of our our pages yesterday and was very pleased with how easy it was. I really like the new features – especially the option to interact with other pages as YOUR page. I love this new feature – because I use Social Mention to monitor when people are mentioning our brand name or sharing our content (excellent tool – it’s similar to Google Alerts, but for social media.)

Previously, if I wanted to communicate with them or thank them – I would have to do so on their page with my personal profile – now I can do it as a page admin (i.e. I can leave a comment as “Inman News” or as “The Future of Real Estate Marketing Blog.”)

ALSO… and this is HUGE – you can NOW change the category of your page – WHOOO HOO!!! So if you prefer to not have a real estate page but more of a community page you can now do this with your page.

Last thoughts…

Every time Facebook has a change there is always the “scary” factor – the simple fact that they can change or edit anything at any given time. My advice has and always will be – don’t let ALL your content live on Facebook – if Facebook were to go away tomorrow where would your content live? This is why I highly recommend posting most or all of your content on your blog – preferably a WordPress blog.

Would love your thoughts on these new changes – leave me your feedback below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Senior Marketing Manager, Inman News @katielance

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If you are a real estate agent or broker, have you ever wondered how you can back up all the data that you put onto Facebook, Twitter, and your blog? There are tons of quick and easy ways to back up your social media data.

First of all….why backup your data? You may be asking why you’d want to back up your data. As a real estate agent, there are three reasons I would back up my social media data:

1. To preserve communication exchanged with clients. It is imperative that a real estate agent be able to have an accurate communication record, and in this day and age, that means more than just saving emails. Studies show that the Gen Y and the Millennial generation use email less and less and rely even more on their social networks to communicate.
2. To preserve testimonials or compliments received about your service or business. Once someone leaves you a nice comment or testimonial on your page – it can disappear pretty fast, as new comments and posts trickle in. But, by having a back up of your Facebook and Tweets, you can easily screen capture those posts and incorportate them into your listing presentation and/or add them to blog or Web site. This “social proof” is very powerful!
3. To preserve all your data “just in case.” You never know what could happen to Facebook, Twitter or your blog. By backing up your accounts on a fairly regular basis you are less likely to lose any important info that keeps your business running.

Here are 3 simple steps to backup your social media data:

STEP ONE – Facebook : Facebook recently allowed all users the ability to download all of their content – the info on their wall, photos, videos etc. This is how you do it:

• Go to Facebook and log in
• Go to Account Settings
• Click on “Download Your Information” and allow Facebook to download your info
• Wait for an e-mail that will let you know your info is ready
• Go through the security test that allows you to download your info onto your desktop
• Once it’s downloaded, double click it to unzip. From there you can open it and view all your information.

STEP 2 – Twitter : There are many ways to back up your tweets – even the Library of Congress is categorizing and storing tweets. So how can you store yours?

Here are my two favorite services:

1. TweetStreamApp.com: This site has a free version which allows you to sync up to 3 Twitter accounts and provides detailed analytics, or you upgrade to the paid version which allows an unlimited amount of accounts for only $5 a year! The only downside is I found it takes quite a while to sync your data, but I really love the look of the site – easy to navigate
2. TweetBackup.com: This site is free and super easy to use. No bells and whistles but I think it is super easy to navigate and I love being able to sync and save specific hashtags.

STEP 3 – Your Blog:

• WordPress Blog: If you have a WordPress blog, download the plugin WP-DB Manager, this plugin gives you the option to optimize, backup and restore your entire database. If you want to just backup specific parts of your WordPress blog, in your Dashboard, click ‘Tools,’ then click ‘Export’ and you can then choose which posts you’d like to backup
• Non WordPress Blog: If you don’t have a WordPress blog you can use BlogBackupr.com. This service works for all other blog formats, provides a daily backup, runs over the internet, and there is no need to install anything!

So now that you have the tools, I highly recommend before the month is over to go backup your data. Start the new year right!

I’d love your comments or feedback on this subject, please leave me a comment below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Senior Marketing Manager, Inman News @katielance

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Seth Siegler is the cofounder of Simplistate, an eco-friendly, virtual real estate brokerage. He is also the owner and founder of Robot Workshop – a real estate technology solutions company specializing in IDX and PPC based lead generation. You can find his real estate industry blog at www.sethsiegler.com. We are also pleased to announce that Seth will be speaking at Real Estate Connect NYC 2011 in January!

Most readers of this blog would probably consider themselves more tech savvy than the average real estate agent.  (But, that’s like saying you’re smarter than an average chunk of concrete …)

The truth is though, that most of you reading this actually are pretty tech-tastic but there may be a few small ways that you’re online presence make you look otherwise. 

Here are some critical mistakes that make you look tech illiterate.

1.  Your Site is Not at a Dedicated Domain

What’s the difference between jim.com and jim.wordpress.com?  The second choice makes you look like you probably write emails in all capital letters.  Losing the “.wordpress.com” part means that you’ll need to setup a Wordpress.org framework site on your own hosting package or server.  If you go with a hosting provider like Media Temple, and choose their bottom tier Grid-Service plan, you can set one up with one click.  Then you have an internet-universe full of themes that can make you look professional.  Plus your URL will give you the street cred that you think you already have… (And no, redirecting a URL to your .wordpress.com site isn’t the same thing)

2.  Your Logo is Ridiculous/Non Existent

You shouldn’t make it yourself, and you shouldn’t let your young relative make it (unless that young relative is an advanced design student).  Your logo is important and you should spend some money/effort on it.  If you have the budget, you should go with an experienced design team to brand your consumer experience.  If you don’t have the cash, it may be worth trying a crowd-sourcing site like 48hourslogo.com.  You can get freelance designers to compete for your business, offering logos for your brand and can award a prize as low as $79 to the winning designer.

3.  You Have an Email Address That isn’t on Your Domain

Do you think you’d get an email from someone who works at Ford from their Gmail address?  Or worse, an AOL or Yahoo address?  Your email address should match your website URL.  mike@mikerealestate.com  Don’t disconnect your old email address though.  Forward it to your new one and answer all emails from that new email address.

4.  Too Many Nav Options

The best sites are the ones that are simple to navigate.  Do you really need 15+ options on your nav menu?  Options should be simple for your visitors and all signs should eventually point to your contact info, your IDX or your blog.  Everything else is just an obstacle to lead conversion.  Plus it makes your site look crowded, messy and amateur. 

5.  Non-Existent or Bad HTML Title Tags

Take a look at the title bars of your website pages.  Do they simply say “home” or “index”?  Or worse, are they 50 words long, grasping for every last drop of SEO benefit?  Either way they make you look bad.  If you haven’t taken the time to add real, descriptive title tags to your pages, people assume you don’t know how.  (If you don’t know how, just Google it.)And by the way, Google doesn’t like artificially inflated title tags. 

6.  Auto-Starting Video on Home Page

If you have a video on your home page, make sure it doesn’t start automatically.  People often browse at work or with other people in the room.  If their volume is up, they could be startled and even embarrassed by the unexpected noise, and immediately leave your site.  Not good.

7.  Dramatic Brand Descriptions That Include Cheesy Buzz Words Like “leverage” or “revolutionizing.” OR Attempts at Words That Seem Big Like “Cloud Computing”

The word “leveraging” is so vague and overused that I force myself to imagine a kitten being killed each time I almost use it.  Also, remember that you want to relate to people.  If you are trying to blow them away with techy sounding words, it won’t end well for your bottom line.  And besides, when I see someone taking pride in using cloud technology for their CRM or email system, I know that they just learned the term within the last couple of weeks. 

8.  Your Facebook Profile Is Unlocked

Having a completely unlocked Facebook profile is most like being that weird 45 year old who hangs out at college bars with the top four buttons of his shirt open.  You can make it much worse by using a professional glamour photo as your profile pic and making your entire Facebook presence about your real estate business. 

Have I missed anything?  I’ll be the first one to admit that I have a few items I need to address in my own web presence.  How about you?  Did anything on your site make my list?

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Guest Blogger, Mike Bowler, Sr. has been in the real estate business (Lansing, MI) for the past 32 years. During that time he’s educated and consulted with hundreds of REALTORS. Mike is a former owner/broker of Coldwell Banker Bowler Real Estate and is currently an Associate Broker for Coldwell Banker Hubbell Briarwood in Lansing Michigan, who bought his company in 2001. He also owns his own company PRETEC (Professional Resources, E-Business, Technology, Education, & Consulting) and is an avid fan of social media in the workplace. Mike was named in 2009’s Top 25 Most Connected Real Estate Professionals by PROXIO and selected by Inman News as one of the 50 Most Influential Online.

This may appear to be basic for some who read this Blog, however my experience has been that most real estate agents have not yet designed a plan to make sure they are being found online. Some real estate agents have good intentions, set up a few sites and forget them. This is worse than not having any profiles at all.

The guidelines below can be expanded over time; however, it’s just a plan to get you started in the right direction. Remember that your goal is to drive traffic to your listings, your services, and develop relationships that will result into a face-to-face contact. This is still a “people business.”

Nearly everything below is free or very affordable, however you must be willing to invest the time for setup and a certain amount of time every day to work your plan. If you’re not willing to do that, then hire someone to set you up and assist you to get started or don’t do it at all. This is by no means an overnight success for getting found online. If you don’t think you need it, just go “Google yourself” (Google search your name inside quotation marks) and do some soul searching about your future.

So, here’s my proposed plan:

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AgentPress is a brand new Wordpress theme released today, designed specifically for use by the real estate industry. The theme is a collaboration between Wordpress designers StudioPress and the real estate blog MyTechOpinion.com.

You can see a live demo here.

It’s a sharp looking design that really pushes Wordpress beyond its blogging basics. For just shy of a hundred bones (a pretty small investment really) you get a great looking web site with a lot of baked in functionality.

But more than just a good looking site — with a choice of four color schemes — you get the benefit of Wordpress’ fantastic SEO optimization, an integrated blog and all the great plugins and hacks available to Wordpress site owners.

I particularly liked the way Agentpress gives you customizable listing templates for individual properties which incorporate some nice design elements like the Lightbox-esque popups and embedded Google Maps. Plus, because each listing is stored as a separate post in the Wordpress database, Agentpress gives you a modest property search tool right off the home page to index your individual listings/posts.

Marry these property pages with a vanity URL and you’ve got yourself a pretty snazzy single-property website.

After a bit of a lull, there’s been a slew of real estate-related activity on Wordpress recently, starting with the Local Market Explorer plugin released by Zillow (see New Local Market Explorer plugin for Wordpress).

Now, with premium theme options like Agentpress (the iReal Estate Theme is another premium theme available for purchase) and an embeddable IDX solutions like that from Diverse Solutions, you’ve got the makings of pretty kick-ass website – right off the shelf.

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Great news for those of you who are building your web sites in Wordpress. Zillow has announced the release of the new Local Market Explorer WP Plugin.

The LME plugin, which was built by Jonathan Mabe and Andrew Mattie, developers with Diverse Solutions, automatically creates rich pages on your blog that incorporate data from Zillow, Education.com, Flickr, Walk Score and Yelp.

Zillow has set up some test pages here:

• Los Angeles
• San Diego
• Seattle

You can download the plugin immediately from WordPress plugin directory.

A couple of key notes; you’ll need separate API keys for each of the data sources but you can turn on or off which sources you want to incorporate. Also, the plugin does not let create hyperlocal pages (at either a neighborhood or ZIP code level) so you must keep all of your pages at the city level, for now.

Zillow promises future versions that will address these issues. But regardless, this is an instant, dead simple way to instantly create compelling content that your web visitors are looking for. Organized correctly, you could create a powerfully relevant local resource.

wordpress, zillow, local market explorer, plugin

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Wordpress is a remarkable piece of software that only grows more powerful every day. Case in point – Premium Wordpress Themes can take a blog and transform it into a online magazine. Choose an even more specialized theme and Wordpress can become a Contact Manager too.

Many agents I talk to are starting to use Wordpress to build single property web sites for their listings (see Do Single Property Websites Sell Homes?). This is especially powerful when it’s done with a one-click install and 100 site (unique URL) hosting limit with a MediaTemple Grid Service account. Only $20 a month! And companies like Realivent have even designed plugins and templates to help make this easy to do (see Using Wordpress to sell Real Estate).

AgentPoint is a web development company based in Australia, that’s taken the idea to a whole new level though.

They’ve built a series of complete custom web sites for broker Fruit Property in Wordpress. And, while not a radically new idea; I think you’ll agree, the results are pretty impressive.

Check out the branch office sites for Fruit Property Geelong or Fruit Property Applecross.

On the whole, the site doesn’t look much different from any other broker website, but as you start diving into property searches and viewing individual listings, your realize the enormous amount of customization that went into transforming these sites from a typical Wordpress install.

In order to accomplish this; they built a number of custom plugins. From the email sent to me:

• Real Estate Plug-in: This is the main plug-in and works without our Agentlog System and displays all of the agents property listings. It also controls search results, pagination, property pages, print pages, email listings, email to self, mortgage calculator and many more features. Also includes Lightbox image gallery for individual photo galleries. The plug-in uses many settings such as company id’s and office id’s from our agentlog system. (we can have thousands of offices added), it also includes how many listings in search results, google analytics code, google maps codes and other basic settings.
• Featured properties: Allows user to create featured listings or have this automatically load from database.
• Latest Listings: Brings in latest listings (6 of each). The plug-in has a number of controls such as whether to display sales, lease or both types.
• Property clouds: Brings from database all suburbs, and suburbs grow in size if they have more and more listings within a particular suburb.
• Email subscriptions: A site user can subscribe to sales or lease email subscriptions, this sends them latest listings added to system. The plugin has a number of settings such as back days, html, text formats and send times and dates.
• RSS feeds: for sales and lease listings.
• Team Pages: We also developed a plug-in that allows all team members to have an individual page complete with all of their own for sale lease, under offer, sold and leased listings.

Now, these installs still rely on AgentPoint’s proprietary Agentlog listings management software to manage the properties on the backend, but as you can see, all the display on the front end is done through Wordpress. Pretty cool stuff.

The upsides to the building your broker site in Wordpress are numerous; for the same reasons it’s caught on as the blog platform of choice for most bloggers. You have a vibrant, active community of developers constantly creating new features, and a codebase that generates standards compliant web copy which is naturally optimized for Search Engines.

I’d love to see AgentPoint release (or even sell) some of these plugins to brokers in North America. Or, at the very least, for more brokers (or enterprising developer) to pick up the torch and try and duplicate what they have accomplished.

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In a past life, I used to do a ton of analysis on website visitors and usage. Well, I still do actually, but for my own purposes. You see, if you run any website, this is something you need to pay attention to.

It doesn’t matter if you’re running a local real estate blog, a large multi-broker website or a massive real estate information portal – knowing what people are doing, where they come from and why they visit is extremely important. Using an analytics tool for your website is vital for growth and for increasing your business.

So, you know you need to do something, but the tool you use might vary depending up on the need. After all, there’s no reason to nail that picture to the wall with a sledgehammer. If you’re running a large site, and need to ensure that you get the best ROI, a tool that can do the heavy lifting for you is important. However, if you’re running a blog or small site, some basic information is all you need.

Many of us used to use server-side stat tools to parse our log files, however in this case I’m going to cover just the tools that use a piece of embedded Javascript.

Tools for Serious Analysis
Google Analytics
I use this for a number of websites due to it being a comprehensive tool that allows me to run multiple sites through the same control panel. It’s a free tool that gives you a great amount of detailed information about what users are doing and where they came from. You have the ability to create funnels and track usage down specific tracks. If you run Google AdWords, there is tight integration with your campaigns. One thing that I don’t like is that it’s not real time, it is updated once every 24 hours.

GetClicky (pMetrics is a white label)
A tool that was designed for people who make money through their websites. I added it here because I wanted to show a tool that had real time statistics and that also gives an incredible amount of detail on each user that visits the site. For small sites it’s free, but large sites can cost up to $5.99 month.

Specialized Tools
CrazyEgg
If you want to see a heatmap of where your visitors are hovering on your site and what they do, this is a good tool.

103Bees
Offers a much more detailed analysis of the SEO value on your site. What keywords are driving them and where you rank in the search engines for those keywords.

Mint
Only if you use a Mac. Personally, I like using Mint a lot for my blog. It gives me a quick overview of what’s happening.

FeedBurner
This is a good tool for monitoring your RSS feeds if you have a blog. They also provide some very useful tools that help syndicate your content. Their web statistics package is very strange though – the numbers just don’t add up. Stick with their feed tools.

WordPress Stats Plugins
If you run a WordPress blog, and you want to install a simple plugin to do this for you, try WordPress.com Stats, WP-Stats, or Open Web Analytics . If you would like tighter integration between FeedBurner and Google Analytics that generates WordPress reports, try the Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports Plugin.

[Updated: pMetrics is just a white label of GetClicky, a much more reliable alternative.]

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