I had a conversation earlier today via email with another AR member and it reminded me that I should probably let people know about the looming early bird deadline for Connect.

April 4th, the prices for admission all go up. I wanted everyone who's planning on coming to San Francisco to take advantage of these savings before they're gone! 

Register now you'll save $50 on you Bloggers Connect admission or $150 on a full conference pass (which includes admission to Bloggers Connect).

Click here to Register

And if you're an Inman Member, you'll save even more too. Membership is only $149 a year and you save an additional $100 off every Connect as a member. Definitely worth it if you plan on going to multiple events, plus you get all the other great benefits of membership as well.

Click here for more on becoming an Inman Member

We should have some big announcements of speakers and keynotes, as well as the full conference program, up on our web site very shortly. Rest assured however, this summer's Connect is going to be better than ever! Even though I can't spill the beans on who we've got lined just yet, I'm already pretty excited about it and I think you will be too.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Reposted from Future of Real Estate Marketing but I wanted to let everyone in the AR community know about this too...

Portland RE Meetup - 6pm March 28,2008

We blog, we Twitter, we IM, we Facebook and ActiveRain with each other - so why not meet in person? Let’s have a few beers and talk Internet and Web 2.0, markets and marketing, Zillow and Trulia, Roost and Frontdoor, blogging and social media.

Ron Ares and I have been talking for a while about organizing a gathering of tech savvy or tech interested Oregon/SW Washington based Realtors, lending, title and technology professionals.

So I’ve tentatively scheduled one for 6pm on Friday, March 28, 2008.

Tell your friends, co-workers, business contacts, everyone. Any folks from Seattle want to make it down for a fun weekend in the Rose City?

Sign up at Upcoming.org and let me know if you make it. Or drop your names in the comments and I’ll add them to the list.

One more thing. This is strictly a social gathering; no demos, prezzos, or promos. Just good beer and good conversation.

Not sure where we’ll hold it yet (I’m thinking a McMenamin’s)  but I’ll let you know as things develop.

I’m a big fan of Formula One racing. As a kid, my grandfather worked for Mobil Oil and one of my proudest possession was a scale model of “King Nigel” Nigel Mansell’s Williams race car that he’d given me. It still sits proudly on my desk today.

So ActiveRain and Inman News‘ Project Blogger competion kicks off today - and I thought the F1 analogy was kind of appropriate. The green flag has just been waved and each team’s drivers have just set off on the big race.

Team ORCA

Just to refresh your memories; my apprentice (or driver, as it were) is Kelly Kilpatrick, a REALTOR® with Gold Coast Realty in Ranch Santa Margarita (for more see Go Team Orca).

Her personality and enthusiam for the project was what made me pick her out of the field and I’m confident she’ll do extremely well; but the key to any winning F1 team is not just having the best driver or car, but also having the best team there to support them. I’m happy to say I’ve pulled together an incredible team to support Kelly.

Loren Nason, of the Future of Real Estate Technology blog and Your Local Tech Consulting, stepped up to be my Crew Chief and has been Kelly’s goto guy for all questions relating to email, hosting, Wordpress etc. As per the Project Blogger rules, the participant must be responsible for all costs; but Loren was very kind and provided the hosting space to Team Orca for free.

Between the two of us, we’ve spent the last few weeks getting Kelly up to speed on blogging; familiarizing her with the Wordpress platform, helping her out with any technical questions and just letting her concentrate on honing her writing skills while we took care of the all the preparations.

To that end, we set her up with a test car to take out before giving her the keys to the race car. She put together a hosted blog at Wordpress.com where she could spin her tires a little - Rancho Santa Margarita - Key to the City.

But now that we’re ready to roll, please check out Kelly’s new blog - Rancho Santa Margarita Lifestyles.

The Strategy

Our Race Day strategy likely echoes many of the other teams - that is, we are pursuing a “hyper local” approach and focusing specifically on Rancho Santa Margarita (known as RSM to residents).

We’ve specifically downplayed a hard sell real estate angle and decided to focus on building the site as a valuable community resource. This will ultimately allow Kelly to broaden the scope of what she can write about in her blog and position herself as a resident, mother, citizen as well a respected neighborhood expert.

The Sponsors

Of course, the end goal is ultimately to drive business so I also broadened the scope of this project a bit. To me blogging is only one component of a successful online marketing strategy and is really just the front door to your business. And so, just like an F1 team, I found some sponsors that could help bring ALL of Kelly’s Internet marketing efforts to a whole new level.

We built in an IDX search into the blog itself as a way to build some stickyness to the site and keep readers around and interested. They’ll be able to search for homes in the RSM area and bypass the unfriendly ‘lead capture’ tools of other real estate sites.

Diverse Solutions gave Kelly a free subscription to their dsSearchAgent product (for more see New Real Estate Search Mashups), an IDX search interface ‘mashup’ which we have placed on a separate page on the blog.

The result is the Real Estate Search at Rancho Santa Margarita Lifestyles. Read Loren’s post on how he implemented this.

Of course, if we’ve got interested clients, we need to send them somewhere and Kelly asked me early on about upgrading her existing web site.

Ubertor kindly gave Kelly a free 1-year subscription to their real estate website software (for more see Get on the Net: Ubertor) which you can see at www.kellykilpatrick.myubertor.com - our goal will be to push clients to Kelly’s site from the RSM blog.

Net cost - less than $20 for a few domain names from GoDaddy.

Promotion

Getting to the starting line doesn’t mean much unless people know you’re competing - so a couple of things I did right out the gates was create a Real Estate Blog entry on the InmanWiki Real Estate Blog Directory and add it to Zillow’s Directory of Local Real Estate Blogs.

There are many more ideas we have for promoting the blog which I will be sharing in upcoming posts.

Race Day

So now that the day is finally here and the flag has dropped, I’m reasonably comfortable that Kelly stands as good a chance as any for a podium finish once the checkered flag is waved this summer.

I’ll see you all at Blogger’s Connect, August 1st in San Francisco, when the winners are announced.

[This post was cross posted on the Future of Real Estate Marketing]

For the last week or so I've been posting my blog posts both on my regular domain (www.futureofrealestatemarketing.com) and here on AR. I really enjoy the sense of community that has developed on this site. Over the weekend a serious debate arose on Rain City Guide as to whether "dual-posting" here and on my own blog was a wise idea, which has resulted in me removing all my active posts from this blog.

More here:

http://www.raincityguide.com/2006/08/27/i-believe-that-real-estate-agents-are-either-in-marketing-or/

http://activerain.com/blogsview/Death-By-Google?5564

I'll  be giving some more thought as to deal with this situation over the next few days.

In the meantime you can still catch me back over on my site.

Thanks.

Joel