I should have mentioned when I originally posted this that someone using Google used this search and landed on my blog, I took a screen shot of it. Some bloggers like to test search phrases on Google and I do a little of that but I like to see how people actually search and learn from it.
Sad to say but the weenie has gone from a page rank 4 to a 3. I hang my head in shame and worry that my peers on the re-net will think less of me than they already do. I will understand if no one wants to read this blog any more. St. Paul Real Estate is still a PR5, no one really knows why. I see evidence that people read it. One late night reader has been leaving cracker crumbs.
Have a great day, and remember if your PR dropped it is because you are a loser.
I was surprised to learn this morning that BoingBoing, currently number 5 on the list of the top 100 blogs, has decided that they want to be in the number one spot. They have some choices on how to get there but it will take some work. They are considering using an Active Rain outside blogs. They have been reading about the power of Active Rain and believe they can move up faster with an outside blog.
If you are reading this and have never heard of the blog, the blog has been in the number one spot as ranked by Techorati, has an authority of 17,280, which is about 16,700 more than than the highest ranking real estate blog.
"Boing Boing is a weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies. It's the most popular blog in the world, as ranked by Technorati.com, and won the Lifetime Achievement and Best Group Blog awards at the 2006 Bloggies ceremony."
They know that there are millions of Realtors who have never heard of their blog even though they are one of the most popular blogs in the world. An anonymous source said that Boing Boing knows that there are more than a million Realtors and that blogging and social networking are built around Realtors and real estate, and that Boing Boing should be participating in the conversation. The same source said that he regrets that they did not start out on Active Rain to begin with, but had no idea that Real Estate is the center of the web 2.0 universe.
They are also interested in writing local content and look forward to having their content judged by Active Rain. An anonymous source told me that he has no idea how they got as far as they did without active rain and that they look forward to the gold stars and networking with all of those Realtors.
I gave them some tips for how to have their content featured, by mentioning Active Rain in the post. I was unable to tell them how to write outstanding local content because I really don't get localism or hyper local content. I recognize the need for another real estate portal with content donated by Realtors, but I am not sure what to write about. I have read up on it on Active Rain but it doesn't make sense and I am still confused over the inside outside thing. Is it like a belly button?
This is kind of a follow up from Todd's post, back in the day. I love the way Todd writes and am always happy to have him on the weenie, he says that I have a sense of humor, maybe but his quick wit gets me every time.
Todd got me thinking about what back in the day means to me.
The first time I touched a computer keyboard was in 1982. I was a mainframe that my college shared with another school. The thing looked like a giant typewriter, and had no screen. We would dial a number on an analogue phone and put the phone in a special cradle to connect to the computer. The user would type commands and the results would be printed on green bar paper.
The first time I used a PC was also in 1982. They were given to the school by IBM, through a grant from 3M. No one really knew what to do with them, they were toys in our computer lab that we would play with. Did you know that the personal computer was an invention that no one had any use for? They were novel because they had screens, and were so small, compared to the huge mainframe computers. I think it was visicalc or lotus123 that made the PC useful for businesses, they were early spreadsheet programs. The only class I ever took to learn a software application was a class on Lotus123, when MS Excel came out, I immediately switched to it and have been using it ever since.
I had a computer in my home in 1989, it was an Apple 2E clone. It had a screen, black with amber writing, no graphics of course. No hard drive, the programs were on floppy disks and I saved my work on the same disk. A couple of years later, 1991, or maybe 92, I bought an Apple Perfoma. It had a 40 megabyte hard drive, and a color screen and a 1200 baud modem. I went on the internet and have been there ever since. I kind of got lost in it and started a whole new life for myself. :) I had an email account but no one to send email too. I was one of the early member of this new on-line community called AOL. We used to get updates every week about new web sites on the internet.
One day in 1992 my six year old son brought home a floppy disk that hat a new beta program on it called Netscape navigator, 1.0, I loaded it on my performa and never used AOL again. I discovered I could use a local ISP and just go anywhere on the internet that I wanted to without having to download a ton of graphics. AOL made me "update" every time I signed on and with a 1200 Baud modem that was very time consuming as the update included numerous icons and graphics. I think Netscape mail may have been the first or second on-line, use anywhere kind of email, I was invited to do some beta testing of the product and was most impressed.
I developed my first web site in 1995 for a non-profit. I used a new program called Netscape navigator gold 3.0 and free programs I found on the internet. The project took me almost two weeks, The site consisted on four pages.
When I think about back in the day, I remember that first PC without a hard drive and how long it took on my Macintosh Performa to "dial up" and get on the internet. It was so slow, and there were few websites. Email was fairly useless but seemed pretty cool. Most people were not too sure that the internet was worth the trouble, but we played on it just the same.
I like to say that in internet years I am 300 years old. I have seen the progression and advancement almost since day one. I remember using "Gopher" through the university of Minnesota and using an email program called "pine". When the spell checker came out it changed my life. I know it is hard to tell from my posts but it is true. The spell checker and the keyboard made it possible for me to write, and opened up a whole new world that I never imagined I would be a part of.
There wasn't any new technology to learn when I started my blog in 2005. Instead I had to learn how to write and take pictures, and am still working on perfecting both.
Today, I extended an Facebook group invitation to my buddy Jay Thompson. Not
just any invitation mind you. One of such exclusivity that the Skull & Bones crowd
would find themselves on the outside, looking in. In fact, even the queen weenie
master herself, and host of this blog of mass destruction (cleverly disguised as
a hot dog stand) is not yet eligible for invitation to the Back'n Tha Day
Facebook group.
What is Back'n Tha Day?
Well, unlike Skull & Bones, we can talk about Back'n The Day. In fact, that's the only point of the group. To gloat. Back'n Tha Day is reserved for real estate bloggers with three years or more of blogging experience. Today, Jay joins the likes of Dustin Luther, Maureen Francis, Kristal Kraft, Jim Duncan and myself. Today Jay can start saying stuff like:
Back'n Tha Day, we didn't need no fancy RSS reader to read all our favorite real estate blogs.
Back'n Tha Day, we thought Active Rain had something to do with seeding clouds.
Back'n Tha Day, Brad Inman actually blogged on the Inman Blog.
Back'n Tha Day, making Hanan Levin's bloggers list was the gold standard... It still is.
Back'n Tha Day, we didn't have blog wars.
Back'n Tha Day, the Blog Squad was the bomb.
Back'n Tha Day, we didn't need blog coaches, or SEO experts to make it work.
Back'n Tha Day, we just jumped in.
Welcome Jay. As Jim Duncan would say, you're old school now. When other bloggers try to give you advice, or tell you you're wrong, just tell them, "Dude, I'm Back'n Tha Day". Argument over. When a blog coach pitches their services to you, just ask them, "Are YOU Back'n Tha Day? I didn't think so... bye bye." Best of all, when you're downing a pint of beer at Inman Connect this summer, a simple nod to your fellow Back'n Tha Day members will be all it takes to confer the obvious. Original RE Blogger in da house yo.
In the past couple of days I have read a few hundred blog posts. My interests are pretty eclectic.
The blogs I read cover real estate, local blogs, national news, science, photography, art, marketing, humor, writing, blogs and technology. There is more . . .there are 90 million blogs . . .
I am not sure how to say this. This post has been in draft format for a week now and keeps getting changed.
There is an echo in the re-bloggoshere. I small group of people who all interact with each. There is a kind of common wisdom that we all write about and talk about concerning blogs and various web 2.0 tools. It is nice to share a brain with so many others but I sometimes wonder if we would not be better off it we connected to people outside of the real estate industry.
I enjoy interacting with my peers, and plan to continue, but I need to interact more with people who live in St. Paul if I want my business to grow. If I want to expand my mind I need to interact with people in other industries and those who offer fresh perspective, or better yet a different point of view. As I read blog posts I hear my own thoughts being echoed back to me, and I crave a new conversation.
When it comes to educational opportunities I face a kind of dilemma. I greatly enjoy the interaction with others in the industry but I end up listening to a presenter echoing the same ideas I have had and tried. I sometimes pick up a new idea or thought but usually gain more from talking to others and asking them questions than I do from the seminars or panel discussions.
One of the people I share a brain with apologized for sounding arrogant and then went on to tell me that he is not finding much value in some of the educational offerings because they echo what he has already learned. He did not sound arrogant and I was relieved to hear that there are others on the planet who share my desire for education and new information.
My point with this is that I think it is good that we learn so much from each other, and it is nice to share a brain, as a friend of mine said recently "my best ideas come from other peoples brains", But the world is much bigger than the collective and we should not limit ourselves. We need to branch out a bit and learn more from other industries and from consumers and share our brain and collective knowledge with them.
Please see a related post by Todd Carpenter: I Fear you're underestimate my geekiness sir Since Todd confessed on his blog I can say that he is the friend who apologized for sounding arrogant. Todd is not arrogant by any stretch of the imagination. He is a geek though . . and I am not. :) LOL
Blog content written by real estate professionals is so desirable, that companies are fighting for it. They can make money from it.
I am watching the blog posts and commentary on the Active Rain Vs. Move.com. I read with fascination as Techcruch talks about Realtors suing Realtors. They don't seem to understand that several entities are fighting to be thee destination for home buyers and home sellers and they are trying to accomplish this, at least in part, with free content generated by Realtors. They are not themselves Realtors, just companies trying to make a buck or two off of the real estate industry. Techcrunch was dead on with their comments about how screwed up our industry is.
Of all the posts I read, I think I enjoyed Jonathan Dalton's the most "Some day my princess will come", because he seems to get that the fight is over content and who gets it, from real estate professionals for free so they can make money off of it. I also enjoyed the sock puppets "Still thinking about the Active Rain Thing".
Real estate is local, do we need national web sites to promote local real estate? Or is the idea a carry over from the pre-web 2.0 era ? One stop shopping would be great if folks were looking for property in several states. The power of the blog is the individual voice. Problogger says, that the best way to build page rank, is to build a better blog. I recently read a great post on the Performancing, blog about how good bloggers have an advantage in SEO. The post talks about writing content that people want to read and achieving page rank through non-real estate related social networks like Digg, Myspace, Facebook and stumble. Personally I like Outsidein, and Flickr too.
I rarely contribute to the "localism" section on Active Rain that is supposed to bring me business becasue I write the same type of content every day for my own blog. Why would I compete with my own blog, and brand by providing local content for Active Rain? The goal is to have consumers visit my blog first. Google is on my side on this one. My St. Paul Real Estate Blog comes up number one in several searches for information about St. Paul real estate, and Active Rain can not be found. How can that be? I am just one person? Doesn't it take a huge powerful network to propel a blogger to number 1? My friend Alex Stenback of Behind The Mortgage, does just fine with out Active Rain, joining a large network would have little impact on his successful blog.
Some beleive that without Active Rain they can not be successful. Active Rain may help them but I have seen their blogs and know that Active Rain needs them worse than they need Active Rain. We as individuals are the people that consumers work with and as individuals we have a tremendous amount of power on the internet, perhaps more than thousands of voices all talking at the same time.
Active Rain does a fantastic job and they have a great idea. They grew to 50,000 members in less than 18 months, a most impressive accomplishment and I hope they make a ton of money when they do sell it. They have earned it through innovation and hard work. I do enjoy my blog on active rain, I get to meet others in my
profession and share ideas. There are several companies, and friends of
mine too, who sell products and services to real estate agents. They
love Active Rain and have gotten new clients because of it. I also take advantage of the networking opportunities,
but I don't see my Active Rain blog as a viable option for a business blog.
Content really is king, hence the struggle between companies and web sites to get it. If we all hung onto our own content and built our own blogs what would Active Rain, or Move.com do? If no one answered questions on Trulia voices, what would become of it? Maybe consumers would come directly to us and skip the middle man. Who needs who? More importantly what does the consumer want to read? Are they in love with the huge commercial sites plastered with the pictures of real estate agents? Is real estate the center of their social world? Do they want to chat online with total strangers, who don't even use their real names on line, about houses?
(Notice that I gave myself a gold star for this post? I can because it is my blog)
The photo is of a t-shirt we found in San Fransisco in the Haight-Ashbury district, when we were in town for the Inman Connect Conference.
I must say the conference was quite an experience, and I highly recommend it for real estate professionals. There are not a lot of training courses or seminars for agents like me who work and live on the internet.
In the real estate blogosphere I think this has been the summer of blog love and of social networks, and I found that they were emphasized at the conference, as we explored web 2.0 and the idea of interacting and socializing through the internet.
There were a couple of sessions at the conference where companies like Zillow and Trulia talked about social networking between home buyers, home sellers and neighbors. Homes and neighborhoods are what both sites are about and both give visitors the opportunity to interact with one another.
My question is do neighbors want to interact with each other on line?
A brief visit to my own nieghborhood on Zillow revealed a bunch of heads with question marks on them next to nonsensical names. The discussion boards are new, who knows maybe people will start talking about houses and neighborhoods.
I belong to a few social networks. The groups I belong to are not geographic, instead they are centered around my occupation and my interests.
As a long time resident of St. Paul who has lived in the same home for 18 years, I really know my neighbors and the neighborhood. I am also active in my community. Yet I can't see myself going on the internet and talking to my neighbors about houses if I were not a Realtor. We have some online social networks here in St. Paul but they are centered around hobbies, politics, businesses and causes, not around neighborhoods or houses.
It will be interesting to see if homes and neighborhoods really do become the center of social networks as some of the web site developers beleive. When I go to the Zillow site or the Trulia site I don't find them very friendly or inviting and am having a hard time warming up to the question mark heads on Zillow. On the Trulia site there is no sense of place. I go online and am confronted with lenders from California. It is hard to warm up to even though I know some of those lenders personally.
The recent experiences of my 20 something daughter are a prime example of how to use a social network and find housing. She was able to get connected to someone who rented her an apartment in a foreign country through an online network that she already belonged to. She asked people that she knows and trusts for advice rather than joining a new network. She was directly connected through friends to someone they had rented from. Based on what her friends told her she was comfortable wiring money to a total stranger and is confident that the apartment will be to her liking.
I think buyers and sellers are more likely to network with their friends on other social networks like Myspace or Facebook when want to talk about real estate. They will share what they are doing with their friends instead of talking to strangers with funny names on Zillow or Trulia.
Most people don't know this but SPAM was invented, and is produced right here in Minnesota. Thanks to Hormel in Austin, MN. A processed meat product unrelated to weenie's may seem inappropriate for this blog disguised as a hot dog stand. I get it but as both of my readers know it like to be creative. At least this time the graphic is related to the post.
I got an unsolicited email today and thought I would share some of the details of it because I am thinking every agent in North America got the same email.
A blogging coach sent out a note about a free training session. Nice, I guess the price is right. He included a kind of testimonial from a blogger who claims that after 6 weeks of blogging he generated 3 sales. Blogs mostly don't work that way, but I guess they can.
The coaching is free because they want you to try their blog platform, which I can't find any examples of or links to in the email. A business blog is a business blog, Real estate professionals need the same tools as any other small business owner. Try Wordpress, typepad or blogger, they have been around for awhile and have large groups of users who complain if something doesn't work right and constantly ask for new features. They want to keep ahead of the competition so they keep it all running nice and smooth and add features, often before anyone asks. My blogs are on typepad, which means they are not free. I am worth every penny of the $149.00 a year subscription I pay and more.
Please think before buying a special product for Realtors, in most cases they are dumbed down attempts at blog platforms that don't work very well. If you need a blog and can't set it up yourself there are people who will do it for you. Don't buy into the idea that real estate blogs are different and that it takes a community. It takes a committed blogger who has something to say.
Writing a business blog is not one of those get rich quick ideas where a person can just do it right and get business as a result. The email was like all of the other magical seminars, tapes, books and systems that are the secret to success with links to the typical gaudy, cheesy web site, that serves to remind us all of what poor web design and 1980's style marketing looks like, and leads agents to believe that they can be as rich as Bill Gates in a short period of time by buying a product. Bill had to work for his dough, and it took time and persistence and a few failures.
There was only one thing that bothered me about the email. (hard to tell by reading this) I could not find a blog for the coach or the agent who is having phenomenal success after six weeks. I asked Google for help and found some blogs, they have short posts on Active Rain that don't seem to be getting any traffic or comments. Active Rain which is a free social network for real estate professionals, is a great place to meet people, practice and learn, but not a substitute for a business blog unless real estate professionals are your target market.
If the coach is so good why is he sending me spam? He would get my attention and respect much more quickly with a blog, using the product he is trying to sell rather than an email. Does he understand web 2.0 or did someone get him excited about "dripping on leads"?
I would suggest that persons who are looking for coaching do a little checking up on the coach.
Do a little research. The group of people in the real estate industry who have had success with real estate blogs as far as making money, as opposed to getting traffic, high technorati ratings, winning carnivals and awards is very small, so small that I think I know most of them. Of that small group of successful real estate bloggers I would suspect that even a smaller number would have the ability or the desire to coach other agents. A successful coach does not have to be in the real estate industry but it helps if they understand the business, what it takes to attract buyers and sellers and how we work.
Sales do not come from blogs, appointments come from blogs. There are many steps between the time someone contacts the real estate blogger and the time a sale is made. Even the best agent does not get a closed sale from each appointment. Blogs take hard work, persistence, consistency, imagination and maybe even a little talent which is exactly why most agents give up or never start because there is no get rich quick by writing blog posts.
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