Email notifications for new posts in WordPress January 8, 2006
John Vanhara
There are still too many users out there who do not know how RSS works. They might be very interested in your blog, but don’t know how to subscribe and get notifications when new articles is posted.
If you use WordPress for your real estate blog here is a plugin who will take care of email notification. I just installed on this blog. You can see in the right sidebar new form for subscribing for email notifications.
The email notification plugin is provided for free by Watershred Studio.
If you want help with installation for your blog let us know. We promise that price will be under $50.
Free advanced stats for your web January 7, 2006
John Vanhara
I think everybody already knows, but just in case. Google introduced great and free statistics program, you can you for your real estate website.
The program was formerly known as Urchin and cost about $500 per month. The company was acquired by Google and price dropped to about $200 per month and now the great statistics program is available for free.
Here is the main window showing you the trend in visits and unique page views. How many visitors are returning or first time visits. As you can see on our ILoveRealEstate.biz website we have currently 28.57% returning visitors. It shows the main sources of visitors. In our example we have 53.17% direct requests, which means people directly typing our domain name in their browser, 16.67% from Google, 4.67% from technorati.com (this is search engine for blogs and it is another example how blogs can bring traffic).
Just for knowing where is your traffic coming from is good reason why to install Google Analytics on your web. It takes about 15-45 minutes depending how many pages do you have (you have to copy and paste code to your page). If you need help we can hel you set up Google Analytics for your website. We like to keep things simple so work like that will be always for less than $50.
IDX for free - search homes tool for your web
John Vanhara
I got my agent license 2001. The first thing I was really curious about was to get the people search for homes on my website. I went and signed up and tried different service in the last couple of years. Then I got my broker license in 2004 and realized that I can get direct access for MLS data to use them in my own IDX solution.
And it doesn’t even cost any money! I checked with few other brokers I know in other states and I get the same information. To get the access to local MLS for IDX data feed doesn’t cost brokers any money! The hundreds of dollars in set up and monthly fees are paid to software company (third party providers) who use your FREE data feed to convert data to your website.
I just want to all brokers know that they have option to go and have their own IDX system in-house and don’t pay dime to outside developers. I did it myself and honestly it paid off several times in the last 2 years! You can see our IDX solution for Las Vegas Home Search and see for yourself. Here is the page showing functionality to customers.
If you want to learn how to do IDX home search yourself drop us a note.
Why write real estate blog
John Vanhara
Blog is currently the best marketing tool for real estate agents. I really stand behind this and will bring you many examples from real life. We all want to have more buyers and sellers. We all want to close more business and blog is a tool which can bring both with MINIMUM cost.
It takes 5 minutes to write one post. If you do it every day, you will build great foundation for traffic (visitors coming to your site) and that means potential buyers and sellers. There is a lot of theory everywhere so let me give you example from few days ago.
I am looking to buy office building for our other business (incorporation services). I am looking for about 10,000 sq. feet office building in Las Vegas, NV. I found great deal on office building which is 26,000 sq. feet big. That’s too big for our use, but it is really good deal. The price per sq. foot is $217, while market price might be anywhere between $250-300 per sq. foot. The reason is that major tenant is leaving in 6 months and current owner probably doesn’t want to deal with headaches of finding tenant for 19,000 sq. feet. Therefore such discount.
What I did I wrote short message on one of the commercial blog. You can check the posting here. It took me 5 minutes to write it. The result?
This the email which came in:
I’m in the market for an office space approx. 1600 Sq ft. Would like to buy and looking in the Henderson, NV area. Any suggestions?
Thanks for your reply.
The email had complete contact information, phone, cell phone, address, company and was sent by one of the executives of the company. Don’t you think this is a great lead?
You agents, who are out there working with buyers and sellers have great source of information you can share with the general public. You can talk about interesting deals, about market, about anything what relates to your everyday job. Spending just 5 minutes each day will build you substantial business at no additional cost. I know it, because I use the same tools and same ideas to build my real estate business!
If you are not sure how to set up blog software or how to put it together then let us know. We can help.
Will you real estate web go up or down in Google?
John Vanhara
Google.com is preparing new search infrastucture and it can be seen on two datacenters at this moment: 66.249.93.104 and 64.233.179.104
You can check if you real estate websites are doing better or worse and try to make some action ahead of time. The new search technology will be put in action within 1-2 months.
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