Video Tutorial: How to Create a Free Real Estate Blog in 25 minutes

The word Blog is short for the word “web log”.  Blogs first started in the late 1990’s but really became popular around the year 2000 and today there are hundreds of millions of blogs around the world. You are even  reading a blog right now.

Social Networking followed blogs by about 5 years and started gaining momentum soon after the millennium. Websites like Facebook and Twitter have gained hugely in popularity and proactive agents have been early adopters of social networking.

The problem with social networking from a marketing perspective is that their instantaneous nature means that they are very much like throwing handfulls of snow in a snowball fight and hoping some of them hit home. Stop throwing and you will stop hitting people. This means that to get great results you have to be constantly posting which can be very time consuming for many agents.

Tweets on Twitter have a lifespan measured in minutes and will normally be most effective within 10 to 15 minutes of posting. Facebook posts are a little longer lasting but their effectiveness is still measured in days. Blogs posts on the other hand keeps on giving days, weeks, months and even years later.

At Nerang First National we have had our blog going for a little over a year now and during that time we have posted up 57 articles which equates to around 1 article per week. Posts that I made in the first month are still being read and attracting visitors over a year later.

In the context of our snowball fight think of blog posts like rolling your snowballs down the hill at the opposition. You write an article just once and every day it’s readership is just getting bigger and bigger with no further work from yourself.

To illustrate  this here is the statistics for two o four posts.

Funny Real Estate Photos was posted in July 2009 and has been one of our more popular articles.

---

Thinking About a career in Real Estate? was written in late August and even with a limited audience that this subject would appeal to the views have been very good.

---

Then you get more time sensitive posts like “Local Christmas Lights on Display” which attracted about 400 views in just the few weeks before Christmas.

---

The first two articles were written when the readership was only a fraction of what it is today. If they were written today they would have much bigger peak in the first few weeks.

Every month the readership of our blog increases and in the past year we have had close to 10,000 views on the website. If the month on month growth continues we should see well over double that traffic over the next 12 months. But blog readership is not all about web visitors as articles can be read a few other ways including an RSS reader like Google Reader, and through email subscription. Unfortunately tracking those views is far more difficult.

In addition to our own readership we have also been lucky enough for about 7 or 8 of our blog articles to be picked up and republished in the Gold Coast Bulletins Lifestyle Guide with full credit back to our agency. We also use many of the blog articles on our facebook page and in our email and printed newsletters.

I talk with other agents all the time who want a start a blog but are often put off because they believe that it costs a lot or is beyond their technical skills to setup. So to show people just how easy it is I decided to take setup a blog another First National member and use screen capture software to capture the process and offer it up as a video tutorial.

The Blog I set up was for Bushby First National in Tasmania.

I asked them to provide me with just three things

1. Create an account on Wordpress.com. I could have done this as part of the process but this way they get to select their username, password and email that they want.
2. A header image  to suit the theme I was going to use which was 770 pixels x 140 pixels
3. Copy of a first article with matching pictures.

Using just those resources I was able to setup a blog on Wordpress.com and post the first article in around 25 minutes and it was all absolutely free. I took a couple of calls in between so you may see the video jump around where I stopped and started a few times.

Now what you will not see is an amazing professional Propvid style special effects, professional voice overs or mind blowing editing. What you (hopefully) will see is a quick and easy way to get your first blog up and running today. So be kind with my video skills… even you Brett!! :)

Wordpress.com is not the only free blogging service around but it is the one I recommend. The services uses the Wordpress blogging platform albeit a very locked down version to provide a free blogging service.

Wordpress is the underlying blogging platform that runs the Business2 blog and in a followup article I will cover options of how to upgrade your blog. This will cover domain mapping and even upgrading to a self hosted wordpress solution just like Business2 or my personal blog at glennbatten.com. A self hosted version of Wordpress allows you to install your own plugins and themes and provides greater functionality but you need to crawl before you walk and so a Wordpress.com blog is the perfect start that provides you with access to a powerful upgrade path for the future.

Anyway on with the show. The whole tutorial covers three separate videos thanks to Youtubes 10 minute limitation.

You will notice that the address of the blog in the video is bushbyfn.wordpress.com. Since creating the site Bushby First National has since purchased their own domain bushbyblog.com.au and used the Domain mapping upgrade on Wordpress.com (about $US10 per year) to map this new domain to their wordpress blog.

If you follow the tutorial and use it to setup your own blog please share it’s address with everyone in the comments section. Also, if  you are a real estate agent and already operate a blog for your agency then please share its address and your experiences to date so those considering setting up a blog can be inspired and learn from your experiences.

I would highly recommend any agency who wants to interact with their community, increase their brand profile and leverage more visitors to their main website consider starting up a blog. You don’t have  to go into as much detail in your articles as I have  on some of them.  Keeping it topical, opinionated and up to date is far more important.

Anybody who has been reading my articles on this site will notice the occasional cross over articles on our blog where I have written on the same subject but just from different angles. The article titled “Google Real Estate and Nerang, Highland Park, Carrara and Worongary” is the perfect example. Just write whatever comes into your head that you want to share. At first it may seem a bit foreign but you will soon be knocking out articles with ease.

7 Comments »

Agents: Remove Old Systems That Are Driving Your Customers Crazy

We now live in such a fast paced world with customers expecting faster response times, more information & almost immediate accessibility to a real estate agent via mobile phone, email which all creates an expectation that agents are available to respond quickly to all enquiries at almost any time of the day.

Yet with all this accessibility, the most common complaint from real estate customers is that agents don’t contact them back.

And unfortunately, the way some agents approach their online marketing & enquiry response systems only helps to exacerbate the problem.

1. Providing limited information can hurt your reputation

Many agents still believe that it’s best to provide limited information about a property over the internet & only upload the minimum information they can.

Read the rest of this article »

16 Comments »

Window Display Screens

Notice anything different about the shop fronts of your competitors lately? Let’s hope not as you could be missing out on valuable leads as your competitors take advantage of interactive window displays.

Although window display screens have been around the real estate industry for a few years only recently the touch screen style display has become popular amongst agents, vendors and property seekers. The recent edition of the Australia Real Estate Bulletin has a lot on replacing traditional Window Display Cards with interactive window display screens.

There are basically two varieties you can install. The first is the window display screen which allows an agent to choose a number of properties to display and the screen rotates through this selection. The other type is an interactive display screen which allows a vendor or property seeker to browse ALL of an agency’s listings and even make an enquiry. From out the front of a real estate agency users can pretty much do what they would normally perform at their desk with their computer browsing an agent’s website.

Is this a benefit? Well, I’m never hanging around out the front of my local real estate agency so I would never use such a device. However, I can see a use for this particularly in tourist areas as people on holidays always have a tendency to look for real estate. Read the rest of this article »

12 Comments »

The Ultimate Phone System for Real Estate?

Phone systems are getting smarter and smarter every year and VoIP has become the standard for office based phone systems. Because VoIP is just a communications protocol it even has Microsoft and others joining the fray with software only phone pbx systems that run just on computer hardware. You still need some sort of handset, but the PBX is run on a computer.  To date all of these iterations seem to be just incremental advances on the versions before them and continue the same line of thought. Not so a new service launched just recently.

Here is something totally out of the box, and right out of left field. Something that could revolutionise how end users use their phones every day and it seems to an ideal inclusion in a real estate agents communications arsnel.. This new system allows you to run your own personal phone network on top of your current connections. It does not replace your current hardware phones systems like mobile phon, office phone or your home phone, but it leverages them to a whole new level. 

Normally I would give you the name of the product or company now along with a web link, but this time it will be at the end of the article so you don’t get distracted!. Imagine this sort of phone system if you will.

One Phone Number

• You get a new local number which you now use for all your calls as well as a web based interface for your new personal phone system  
• Send and receive sms messages from any one of your mobiles from the web based interface.  
• Place calls to anywhere in the country for free. You have to use your web interface or alternativly you dial a specific number on your handset, then dial the number you want.  
• Each of your existing numbers now become a “handset” on your own private phone network. Your mobile, home phone and direct office phone numbers all join the network so when somebody calls your new number all of your handsets will ring allowing you to pick the call up wherever you are.  
• Add or remove individual phone numbers as handsets to your network quickly and easily.  
• Screen all your calls, even on your mobile. One advantage of a standalone answering machine is that you can listen in on the call as someone leaves you a message. This is now available on all your phone lines allowing you to listen in as someone leaves you a message so you can pick up the call if its warranted.  
• Block calls from unwanted callers and apply specialised routing instructions allowing specific phones to ring any callers you nominate.  
• Organise conference calls quickly and easily.  
• Record any call at the press of a button and archive those calls for later.  
• Transfer any call between your registered handsets. Running out the door, just transfer the call from your home phone to your mobile and continue with the conversation without missing a beat.  
• That’s not the end of it either with a stack of other features and more to come like the ability for someone to fax to your new number which will automatically answer and email you the fax .
• You can even insert a “Call Me” button your your website, web profile or email which will connect you both automatically and for free. 

Voicemail

• One voicemail box for the whole phone system that provides you access to all your messages from the internet or from any handset.  
• You can be notified of your voicemail by SMS or email.  
• Your voicemail can even be turned into text allowing you to “Read” a transcript of what somebody has spoken into your voicemail.  
• Customised Voicemail greetings depending upon who calls. You can setup a special voicemail greeting for that special someone but nobody else gets to hear it.  
• Forward voicemail to any other user on the system or download messages for storage.

Applications in Real Estate.

For a real estate salesperson this all sounds far too good to be true and the possibilities seem to be only limited by your imagination. From salespeople and PA’s to be on the one phone number, customised voicemail for each seller client. Recording and storing verbal instructions given to you from sellers or buyers. Use just one number in your adverts that finds you no matter where you are and integrating your single phone number and embeded Call Me” buttons into your emarketing, emails, website and personal profiles with “Call Me” buttons.

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

It is available right now and the “good” part is the ….. it is FREE!

The bad part is that its only available to a limited number of users as they finish testing although they are taking registrations now for wider releases due shortly.

The ugly part is that for now it is US only and although they have acknowledged they are looking for a wider distribution internationally no specific countries have yet been identified.

If you have not guessed already, the name of the system… Google Voice of course!

Other companies come up with innovative ideas but only Google has the economies of scale and the systems to pull it off on a free subscription service. Google purchased GrandCentral back in 2007 and has been quietly redeveloping the system into the newly launched Google Voice.

You can bet that Google Android phones which will flood the Australian market later this year will soon be positioned to really tap into this new Google Voice system.

1 Comment »

FREE Adobe Air Applications

Adobe AIR applications can operate offline, and then activate further functionality or upload data when an active Internet connection becomes available. One example is eBay Desktop, which allows sellers to complete a listing offline and then upload it to eBay when they are connected to the Internet. Other companies using AIR include AOL, NASDAQ, The New York Times and Yahoo! Over 470 applications are available on the Adobe AIR marketplace. (from Wikipedia)

Over the past few months I have seen many AIR tools come onto the market that are both free and highly effective. I use a number of these everyday. Maybe, just maybe you may find a few of these useful yourselves.

Image Sizer
ImageSizer allows you to resize, optimise and rename a batch of jpg images producing a zip file containing the images. You can also crop images with its built-in crop tool. This will allow you to resize images to upload to servers if their are file size limits. It also saves on time uploading.

WebKut
WebKut is an AIR application that allows you to capture web pages, or parts of them in a very simple way. It provides you threee capture options that can be the entire page, the current view, or only a selection and save this locally. Great for taking bits and peices of a website and saving for referencing.

MiniTask
MiniTask is a FREE, fast and simple task management application that helps you with organising your daily todos more efficiently. It supports features like drag ‘n’ drop reorder, alarm timers, printing of task sheets, copying tasks from and to other applications and much more. I use this little application everyday.

Splashuplight
Splashup Light is an image editor tailored for those that want to enhance, beautify, or merely play with their photographs. Effects include Levels, Contrast/Brightness, Hue Saturation, Text Editing and Shapes and much more. Perfect if you want to give some dull photos some life.

Klok
Klok is another task reminder tool. You can keep track of anything with Klok’s simple work timer and see visual display of how your days “fill up”. You can see Monthly and Weekly timesheet export with comments.

Other useful free applications

Senduit
Senduit is one of the great file hosting service. This is a free service that allows you to upload up to 100MB files and then send a link to your friends or relative to have them download it.

Solve360
Solve360 is a collaborative workspace application tailored to work out universal team challenges – contacts, projects, plans, activities, tasks, schedules, organize them in no time and track them during the work flow.

Filedropper
FileDropper’s beauty is in its simplicity. It has one click file hosting where you simply click on the upload button and select your file. After the file is uploaded you are taken to the page where the file is hosted. If the file is an image, it shows the image directly on the page for easier sharing. Upload size is an impressive 5 GB.

1 Comment »

Revamped HubOnline launched

HubOnline launched their revamped system aiming to clean up the interface to make it easier for their clients to manage their online listings and contact management system (CRM).

HubOnline is a wholly owned subsidiary of realestate.com.au and therefore have the unenviable task of trying to combine all of their offerings into one system. For the most part this new overhaul makes for a cleaner interface, although under the hood it looks pretty much the same as the old system. ( I may be wrong)

That being said, there have been some nice additions, particularly in the reporting and navigation. Help and Support seems to have been better placed throughout the site. Overall the new system looks feels alot better, and hopefully for HubOnline this will lead to a growth in the use of their systems as they face stiff competition from MyDesktop, Portplus and other systems.

The biggest problem HubOnline will have in the future is convincing REA to reinvest in this company as they have apparently cut back on staff in the past months at a time when they were starting to publish some nice work.

You can download the full release here [PDF File 870 kb]

9 Comments »

Inter-Office Instant Messaging

We recently upgraded our internal IM (Instant Messaging) Server from the outdated ICQ Groupware to a modern Jabber server called Openfire.  Instant messenging is the ability to send short “chat” messages “instantly” to the computer of another person. The message recpient is given a visual indicator that message has arrived which is most cases is combined with a sound alert of some sort. 

Unlike email, chat happens in real time and is typically short messages that need to be delivered and viewed immediately. It is a medium for quick communication that often begs a near-immediate response.

Typical examples of instant messaging that you may have used or heard of are Microsoft Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AIM and ICQ. In fact even applications like Facebook and Skype include an instant messaging ability so users can chat with their friends via text messages. 

Its not unusual to see agents using public instant messaging services or email for this sort of solution, neither of which is ideal.  Using a public instant messaging service for an internal business communication has two main problems. Besides the inherent security risk of exposing your business conversations to the Internet you also enable your staff to chat with their friends on the Internet which can result in lost productivity.

Most instant messaging clients also have the ability to conduct file transfers between users and giving all your staff the ability to transfer files out of your office cannot be very wise in any body’s book. Also public instant messaging is not really designed to send messages to multiple users inside the same network and many clients will have problems especially transferring files to each other. 

Instant messaging only really started to get going in the late 90’s but the take-up since then has been phenomenal. The two leaders of traditional IM clients that you might have come across are Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger which have 300 million and 248 million users respectively.  Then you have the Chinese Tencent QQ which has over 350 million users and can have up to 50 million users online at anyone time during the day chatting with each other. Instant messaging has just about been as popular as the Internet itself.

We installed an internal instant messaging solution in our office around 2000. We use Instant Messaging for virtually all communications between staff but one of the primary uses is for phone messages. In fact in our office we have not had a telephone message pads and scraps of paper dropped on desks for nearly a decade. 

 

The market leader at that time was ICQ (currently only 15 million active users) and they released a free ICQ groupware edition allowing companies with up to 200 employees to operate their own internal IM solution. The major downside to using the program is that ICQ provided no support or updates for the software.

 

When we upgraded our office servers recently we found that ICQ Groupware would no longer run on modern operating systems so we were forced to upgrade our IM solution.

IM for business has evolved so much over the past 9 years with large corporate solutions like Microsoft Office Live Communications Server and Lotus Sametime. These are expensive options and really suited to large corporate solutions, not your typical real estate office. 

Next in the firing line was the Jabber Protocol. As its an open source  communications protocol rather than a proprietary program anybody is able to build their own software using the protocol and they are all able to talk to each other, at least in theory. The most recognised Jabber solution that most people would have come across is Google Talk but there is a stack of other Jabber software including paid and free versions. Jabber is extremely popular in corporations and has an estimated 90 million plus users. 

After some research and reading online reviews I settled on using a Jabber server called Openfire. Its free to use and has some fantastic features. Its scalable to 200,000 users or it can just as happily run in a small office. It will run on any windows XP or later machine and there is even versions for other operating systems.  You can run multiple servers and have them talk to each other and all communications between client and server, and server to server can be secured. This means if you have a few offices each can run their own server with each office connecting to the other allowing your staff to securely and privatley chat with other staff members. 

Openfire has a great online community providing support for technical issues as well as the option for paid support should it be required, but for a simple installation that would be unlikely. The server also has the ability to connect with other public im networks including google talk, AIM and others.

Openfire comes with a matching client called Spark which would suit most typical real estate applications but because it uses the open source Jabber protocol you can use a range of different clients. We chose to use the Miranda client which besides being far more advanced and flexible allowed us to import the history from their old ICQ clients so each users retained their history which includes up to 9 years worth of messages.

I would highly recommend anybody looking to improve their inter office communications to install their own IM server and Openfire is a perfect choice.  With a bit of technical experience you can install the server component in under 10 minutes.  Then its just a matter of installing the IM client on each of your computers. If you are unsure of anything get your it people to get invovled.

9 Comments »

Help Property Seekers Walk into a Property.

Real estate portals and agent websites In Australia do a great job at providing property seekers with useful information about relevant property they are looking for. However, most of these websites limit their services there at providing only property information. This is in contrast to the leading real estate portals in US who provide property seekers with a plethora of helpful information about the local area.

Imagine searching for a property in Torquay and next to the property information being able to see how many restaurants, shops, schools , parks and what public transport is located around that property. Sounds great doesn’t it and almost too good to be true!

This is now possible through an application called WalkScore which allows this information to be displayed on any website. WalkScore has been around for a few years but has recently become popular due to an expansion in its database resulting in it becoming an extremely powerful and informative tool.

What is WalkScore “Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking.”

This is a great little application which can be easily inserted into a property listing page on all portals and agent websites. I haven’t seen this application added to any portals in Australia or agent websites, I wonder who will be first!

11 Comments »

Twitter – Social

Twitter promotes itself as a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

However, ingenious people are finding a mass of different uses for Twitter. We are even building this into our new property platform Zoo Property, so that agents can automatically notify followers of new listings, price changes etc.

I am sure other platforms will do similar things and that’s the beauty of technology, there are a million uses for even what at first seems like a pointless tool and sometimes the company that makes these tools, do not even know what they will be uses for.

Even Google Maps did not even think about what people may do with mashing up the data and now there are millions of websites using mapping in so many unique ways.

Here is an other excellent Ted Talk from Evan Williams

7 Comments »

Internet Explorer 8

Microsoft has released its latest version of Internet Explorer (8) and anyone upgrading from IE7 will see immediate improvements. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6 in 2000 and basically shunned the W3C and started its own set of standards with possibly the worst peice of software released since

Now that Internet Explorer is rapidly losing market share to tFirefox Browser, Safari, Opera and now the blisteringly fast Google Chrome, it has decided to play nice again and come back to W3C web standards.

This makes it better for web developers/cheaper for clients because not as much work is needed to make web pages render in all browsers, previously, hours and sometimes days were spent just getting the latest websites to work in IE6 and there are all sorts of workarounds needed for this. Put simply IE6 was and still is a complete and utter pain in the X%&#!

So does IE8 change anything? Herein lies the problem, IE8 may be a huge step in the right direction for Microsoft, but it still hasn’t even caught up with the other browsers, even with all of these features. And it is still slower to render pages than all of its competitors.

So, check it out for yourself, I would suggest an upgrade as it is so much better than IE7, and if you are still using IE6 (Go to Help/About in your browser) , well then you MUST upgrade as IE6 is a death trap for people snooping in on your PC.

Check it out:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

Check out other browsers:
Firefox 3
Apple Safari
Opera
Google Chrome

1 Comment »