Help with upgrade to Wordpress 2.0 January 20, 2006
John Vanhara
We have upgraded our real estate marketing blog to Wordpress 2.0. What’s new? Wordpress 2.0 has nice new build-in WYSIWYG editor (you don’t have to know html and type like in MS Word). There is not a lot major changes clearly visible. Most of the changes are under the hood and you should see new and interesting plugins appear soon!
If you need help with upgrading your blog to Wordpress 2.0 let us know. We can also help you transfer blog from different system like Blogger to Wordpress.
Link Building for real estate blogs January 10, 2006
John Vanhara
Blogs creates great opportunities for link building strategies. You know about networking. You know that you want other people that you are involved in real estate business. So one day such people can recommend you or use you for real estate transactions.
It works the similar way on the internet. You should network too. You can read other real estate people blogs, write intelligent comments on their blogs, which will link back to you. These links are like networking, which will bring you traffic from other blogs and search engines. Internet networking int he forms of links will work for you 24 hours a day without any extra effort. That’s why it is much more easier than in real life!
Chris Garret in Networking for Blog Success suggest following:
“Other bloggers
Get to know other bloggers. Comment (intelligently) on their own blogs. Link to your favorites regularly. Find out where bloggers hang out. There are conventions for real world rubbing shoulders and there are forums for virtual hob nobbing.
Forums
Forums often allow you to use signatures that contain a line of text and possibly a URL. Just by taking part then you are getting your blog address out there. Better though is to really take part and answer questions, put forward interesting thoughts and get known as someone to turn to for information and interesting dialog. If you do this before you launch, and you are well known and liked you might even have a chance to drop your URL more prominently.
Discussion Lists
Like forums, with discussion lists you can include your URL in your email signature and just like forums it’s even better if you make yourself known and heard.
To really drive traffic link through to posts that might be useful in the discussion. Often frowned upon in forums, dropping links in email discussions is more often allowed or even encouraged.”
Display author picture in your WordPress blog
John Vanhara
Putting you picture next to article you write in your blog will help you create of image of expert in the real estate area. I really like WordPress as blog software because of all the free plugins you can use to customize your blog software. Let’s say you work with few other agents and have a team blog about real estate in your city. One of you is doing commercial and other agents residential. You want to have your name and picture next to your articles. Each time potential clients will read your articles they will see your photo and your name next to them. It is more efficient then regular advertising. And it doesn’t cost anything extra!
The plugin I used for displaying pictures is free. You can download it here or let us help you to set it up. This is another service we can provide.
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.
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