Doug Pretorius (ON) 9 Report post Posted July 21, 2008 Folks if you don't have a real estate blog you're missing out! I've always had hard time generating seller leads from my website so much so that I have considered now and then to just ditch the seller side of my site altogether. But after reading some interesting articles and success stories about real estate blogs I decided to give it a try as a good excuse to add new content to my site and maybe encourage a little interactivity between me and the community. Well, my blog went online yesterday and today I had my first seller contact me about a house she needs to sell fast. Coincedence? Maybe, I don't know for a fact that she found me through the blog, but it's been a rare enough event over the years that I've had my site that I'm willing to believe the blog is responsible. I've talked to several realtors who get all of their business from their blogs. It seems that if you enjoy writing about real estate it offers some great cross-promotional opportunities between your site, email newsletter and blog. According to what I've read the search engines love blogs too and it's a lot easier to push a blog up the organic search ladder than it is to get a website up there. Now I just gotta get into a few social networking sites and figure out how to use youtube for my virtual tours Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
BEV! 0 Report post Posted July 21, 2008 .. But after reading some interesting articles and success stories about real estate blogs I decided to give it a try as a good excuse to add new content to my site and maybe encourage a little interactivity between me and the community.That's my BOY!! Now I just gotta get into a few social networking sites and figure out how to use youtube for my virtual tours OMG.. THE SKY IS FALLING!!! What took you so long?One down, 10 Million to go In addition to blogging, (and if you haven't already done so) submit a sitemap to Yahoo and Google engines as this will index your pages within 24 hrs.Also create a "robots.txt" to suck the engines into your site to crawl every page in it.I've done both and my stats reports shows an Avalanche of crawls from YAHOO!, GOOGLE and a bunch of other bots to my sites. I wanna blog too but don't know what to write about BEV! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Doug Pretorius (ON) 9 Report post Posted July 21, 2008 For someone who has been into computers since I was 5 and online before the internet was open to the public you would think I'd be a bit more up on these things I did take another step forward today by beginning to offload my listings to a free fsbo site. This will give me a few extra hits, but the main objective is to save bandwidth and make managing my listings a little easier. I'm using www.banzza.com but I'm not 100% satisfied with their product, then again it is free so I guess I can't complain. Another nice resource that you might want to check out is www.wholinkstome.com which let's you see every single site that links to yours! I was shocked to see how few linkbacks my site has. I have no idea how I get as many visitors as I do. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
GetSmart 0 Report post Posted July 23, 2008 i didn't know google offers free websites. can you make a forms page that collects user information? like how much they want for their house, size, and things like that? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Doug Pretorius (ON) 9 Report post Posted July 24, 2008 GetSmart, neither did I but they have some nice features. After reading your post I looked at whether or not you can set up a custom form for collecting seller/buyer info, turns out you can. Here's how I did it: I created a spreadsheet form in Google Docs and embedded it into a page. It's not the prettiest form I've ever seen but it exports to the spreadsheet which I like more than forms that output to email. Other Google Docs, video and audio, photo albums etc. are all point-and-click integration too. The site creator software is pretty flexible, you have a decent amount of control over the layout and look of your site in WYSIWYG mode and you can drop into HTML for more complex stuff. The only downside is what you mentioned in another post about the limited space available in Google Docs (same goes for Picasa Web Albums). So for rich content you'll have to link out to a remote host. Other than that it looks pretty good, I'm thinking about ditching my old host if I can get my domain to point to my new google site properly. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
MichaelC 160 Report post Posted July 24, 2008 Doug, I may have to ban you from here if you continue to write in secret code like you're doing. Hell, I'm still trying to get my VCR to stop with the blinking 12:00. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Doug Pretorius (ON) 9 Report post Posted July 24, 2008 I may have to ban you from here if you continue to write in secret code like you're doing.Sorry MC, now that I re-read it I'm not even sure what I was talking about! I'm still trying to get my VCR to stop with the blinking 12:00.That's easy, just unplug it and throw it away Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Jason (AL) 1 Report post Posted July 24, 2008 Doug, I may have to ban you from here if you continue to write in secret code like you're doing. Hell, I'm still trying to get my VCR to stop with the blinking 12:00 Ah c'mon, Michael.Even us common folk here in Alabama havesince gotten those disc player thingies.What's the deal? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Doug Pretorius (ON) 9 Report post Posted July 24, 2008 To get somewhat back on topic... The redirect is complete for my site (if you can't access it yet, you should be able to in the next few hours). So check it out to see what I've done so far with free Google Sites: www.homeseveryday.com Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
MichaelC 160 Report post Posted July 25, 2008 Fast access from here, Doug. Looks nice. Easy layout to navigate. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
CS1977 0 Report post Posted July 25, 2008 Lol, I haven't been around here much because all my blogging, twittering, facebooking and web 2.0-ing have taken over my life!! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
GetSmart 0 Report post Posted July 26, 2008 doug your site looks really official now. i still haven't figured out how you are using a spreadsheet to create your forms page. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Doug Pretorius (ON) 9 Report post Posted July 26, 2008 GetSmart, PM me and I'll walk you through it. Thanks everyone for the kind comments about my site! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
hassansr 0 Report post Posted September 28, 2008 I use a program called formfields to create my online forms (example on my house buying site http://www.tbdhomes.com/page9/page9.php) . It works very well, sends me an email and will enter all of the data into a database file automatically. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
megabucks41 0 Report post Posted October 1, 2008 To get somewhat back on topic... The redirect is complete for my site (if you can't access it yet, you should be able to in the next few hours). So check it out to see what I've done so far with free Google Sites: www.homeseveryday.com Hey Doug that was great! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
