Metropolitan Financial Mortgage Company, a Minnesota mortgage company,  launched it's new web site today which is a real upgrade from what they had.  The previous site lacked good content for Minnesota home buyers or people looking to refinance.  The new site offers free reports including;

• 20 Ways to Sell Your Home Faster and for More Money

• Adding Up the Impact of Your Credit Score

• Credit Basics

• Glossary of mortgage terms

The companies new domain name is Minnesota mortgage company which should bode well for some of the keywords they are trying to get ranked for. 

Congratulations to Ron Wellbaum and the crew at Metropolitan Financial Mortgage!!

How many of us have ever sat down at our keyword wanting to put out some good content for our readers and been struck with writers block? I'd be surprised if everyone didn't suffer from at least one occurrence.  It's a tough challenge we bloggers face, how to blog frequently enough with quality content in order to build and maintain a relevant readership. 

Like many of you I too struggle with this challenge but recently I was re-introduced to a site that is starting to help me get past writers block and really enjoy blogging and tweeting again.  I'm guessing that many of you may already be familiar with it but if your like me, the last time you discovered it, you were to busy to really pay attention to the goldmine that lay before you.

The site I'm talking about is Guy Kowasaki's www.alltop.com and this is about the third time I came across it but this time was more timely and relevant because it happened at a time when I was suffering from Tweeters block and looking for some good sources of content. This site now boasts 700 categories of content and you can setup your own page which tracks those categories/topics that are important to you and your readers.

I hope you find this site as benficial as I have and you can use it to help stimulate some great blog posts and tweets in the days ahead.

Matt Cutts recorded this video at Wordcamp 2009. It's a great lesson in white hat seo strategies for real estate bloggers. I've been blogging for over 4 years and I found a lot of benefit in this presentation.

I thought this would be very relevant for AR members as many of us hope to generate new business through our real estate blogging activities. Enjoy!

Tweet Me Homes has launched 6 new cities in the past week;

• Oakland, California real estate and homes for sale tweets
  
• Sunnyvale, California real estate and homes for sale tweets
  
• Palo Alto, California real estate and homes for sale tweets

• Memphis, Tennessee real estate and homes for sale tweets
  
• Louisville, Kentucky real estate and homes for sale tweets
  
• Richmond, Virginia real estate and homes for sale tweets

It generally takes a few days to start seeing any volume of homes for sale so if you don't see what you want right away, simply sign up to follow the city where you are looking for a home and let Tweet Me Homes do the work of looking for you. 

As Tweet Me Homes does not tweet every home for sale in each area, it is still critical to be using a real estate agent and a local mls listings web site as well.  The volume of homes on Tweet Me Homes contiues to rise as we are adding more local and national brokers and their listings.

If you are a Realtor and would like your clients listings to be tweeted through Tweet Me Homes and your broker is not participating, you can take care of it yourself through www.Agentopolis.com

Agentopolis recently launched a large number of web pages designed to get Agentopolis real estate agents in front of more people who are looking for a Realtor online. According to Google, "real estate agent" is included in a search roughly 4,090,000 times each month.  The challenge for agents is how to get in front of the people looking for a real estate agent in their local area, especially considering that there are only 10 organic spots on the first page of Google search results. 

As a result of these findings and other keyword research we have done at Agentopolis, we have launched pages to help people find a real estate agent, find a real estate broker and/or find a Realtor.  We have made it even easier now for people to find a real estate agent in over 15,000 cities in the US covering close to 97% of the population.

In an effort to make internet marketing a little easier for real estate agents, Agentopolis allows up to 25 featured agents per city and also gives home buyers and home sellers a number of other ways to search for agents, giving each agent more chances to get found.  Of course family, friends and past clinets are always the best source for new business so Agentopolis also makes it easy for those groups to give their favorite Realtor a recommendation. Having a number of sincere recommendation attached to your profile makes new clients feel a little more safe and secure about you, even though they don't already know you.

To find out if you are already listed on Agentopolis or to add your name to our directory for free, click on this link Agentopolis real estate agent directory listing

Ever since my first day in the real estate and mortgage business 8 years ago I have struggled with my web presence.  I'm not a designer and don't know HTML so I can't build my own website.  Like many of you, I have checked out most of the template sites available for mortgage and real estate professionals but I've never been perfectly happy with what I'm getting for my money.

That all changed a couple of weeks ago when I met the principles at www.itsmyweb.com.  They currently only build mortgage websites but I'm trying to convince them to develop a line of agent real estate websites as well.  There are a number of reasons why I like these guys;

1. Great content
2. Multiple ways to capture leads
3. Easy integration of 1003 into popular LOS
4. Easy access to meta tags for SEO tweeking
5. Google analytics is already hooked up to your site
6. You can add personal Team Member pages if you own an office.

In all my searching and looking at template sites, I found this option to be the best value for the money and what also impressed me about these guys is that when I met with them, they showed me their list of all the improvements they will be making going forward, as if there mortgage marketing websites weren't already good enough.

If you are a mortgage pro and you've been looking for mortgage web sites that will work with your mortgage software and generate mortgage leads, you should at least take a look at what their doing at Its My Web.

TweetMeHomes is a new service that instantly delivers homes for sale and real estate to home shoppers using Twitter. We've currently set up 40 major metro areas and made it super easy to subscribe. You will get instant notification of any new homes for sale on your twitter account or as a text message on your cell phone. Each Tweet Me Homes city page also links to a corresponding page which provides access to MLS listings in the same area.

For the Home Buyer

It couldn't be easier! Create an account on Twitter, visit TweetMeHomes, find and subscribe to the desired city or metro area, and have new homes for sale automatically sent to your Twitter account or cell phone as a text message via Twitter.

For the Real Estate Agent & Realtor

While Tweet Me Homes is in beta, we are currently tweeting thousands of real estate listings and homes for sale across the top 40 metro areas and we are adding new cities and metro areas every day. Real estate agents will soon be able to submit their individual listings through Agentopolis and local, regional and national brokers can mass submit listings through RSS or XML feeds. 

The initial feedback we are getting is that this is a great new real estate marketing tool that makes it easy for Realtors to connect with home buyers where they live on the Internet.  A recent article show the tremendous growth in social media use and surprisingly, it's not just the younger generation.

Contact Ken Horst for more info at 612-251-8237.

Follow us on Twitter @tweetmehomes

I recently created a short video to show how to use Twitter to follow real estate listings in your local area.  Tweet Me Homes, a new real estate marketing site, is currently in beta and has home tweets available in the top 40 metro areas in the US.  Follow this link to watch video http://www.screencast.com/t/gfZpwteJ

Agents and brokers can submit RSS or XML feeds by location and their real estate listings will be tweeted to home shopping followers in their metro area.  By mid August, individual agents will be able to submit their listings to www.TweetMeHomes.com through the home listing feature on Agentopolis so their listings will be marketed both on Agentopolis and Tweet Me Homes at the same time.

Stay tuned for videos on how to get local real estate listings sent to your mobile device and how to use RSS feeds to send local listings to your IGoogle or My Yahoo page.

Follow Tweet Me Homes on Twitter

My wife is Honduran and I have been traveling to Honduras for the past 25 years.  It is an amazingly beautiful country with a great culture and people.  Unfortunately it is one of the poorest countries in the third world with roughly 70% of Hondurans living in poverty.

I've always wondered why real estate prices in Honduras have never really seen risen like in Coast Rica and I guess the answer comes down to a number of reasons including; foreigners cannot own beach property in Honduras and a concern about how stable the government is. The first reason has never been a concern for me as my wife and her family are Honduran citizens.  I never really put much concern into the second reason as it always appeared as though Hondurans and their government were pro democracy and liked Americans.  Maybe I was wrong about that one.

Recently, the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya's, who is being backed and supported by Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Cuba's retired dictator Fidel Castro, is pushing to rewrite the constitution so that he can remain in power indefinitely.  See "Honduras Lurches Toward Crisis Over Election" http://tinyurl.com/ns2h9n

I'm not sure how this is going to play out in the next few weeks but if I were a foreign land owner in Honduras today, I'd be a little concerned.  I hope it all works out because Honduras has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world!

I'll keep you posted!

Recently Agentopolis started a Twitter page which has become very popular and given us a strong second wind in this age of social media.  Agentopolis has added roughly 7500 followers in the past 60 days, a combination of Realtors and home buyers and sellers.  As a result, we have seen a nice lift in traffic and have been getting many emails asking how to get listed and take advantage of this free real estate agent marketing and real estate listings marketing.

To answer this question and help you get your free listing on Agentopolis, I have created this short (under 5 minute) video showing you step by step exactly how to add your agent profile to Agentopolis for free! 

Add your free listing to Agentopolis

Feel free to share this with other real estate agents and Realtors who are looking for new ways to get in front of home buyers and sellers.