Mary's Blog

5 tools that will make your real estate blog posts better

Mary McKnight (NOT RSS Pieces) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:59:30 -0500

We all like things that make making posts easier and giving them a little more life. SO, here are my top 5 pics on how you can spice up your blog posts quickly, easily and without much tech savvy.

1. Slide.com

Slide.com is a free online slide show creator that allows you to upload photos and automatically create cool slideshows with various transition effects. I created this slideshow in less than 3 minutes. Yes, I timed myself. It then allows you to share the slideshow, upload it to yoru MySpace account or use widget code to post it to your persoanl blog!

Check out how Laurie Manny used this tool on her new real estate blog: Spinnaker Bay Real Estate Side Show

2. CommunityWalk.com

This tool makes it super simple to build interactive custom maps you can embed on your blog. Maps take about less than 6 minutes to build.

Check out how Mary pope Handy placed similar community maps on her site. San Jose Real Estate Map

3. The Real Estate Dictionary

This is a cool little widget you can embed in yoru sidebar. It allows you to users to find common real estate terms. I would have embedded it here but it is a purse JavaScript widget whcih we only allow in sidebars as JavaScript in posts can pose a security risk. So, follow the link to see what it looks like.

4. Altos Research Widget

See how Alex and Lenore Wilkas of Foster City Real Estate Blog use this widget to give real time market data to their readers.

5. EyeJot.com

I love eyejoty- it allows me to record video and audio right through my coputer and post it to my blog or shoot my friends a vmail. It took me less than 1 minute to record and post this video!

Reputation Management: Using the best tools to build and monitor your online identity

Mary McKnight (NOT RSS Pieces) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:55:44 -0500

Real Estate Bloggers are online to do business. We build our identity and reputation through our blogs, our online profiles and all of the networks we belong and contribute to. Some of us enterprising (especially me because I do not have a filter between my brain and keyboard) bloggers realized a while ago we need to monitor ourselves, our companies, our brands and even other bloggers and started using Google Alerts which notified us when specific terms are mentioned.

What is online reputation management?

Online reputation management is a developing field that encompasses public relations and search engine optimization to ensure that positive information about you, your company and or brands filters to the top of the search engines while negative information is pushed backwards in search results.

Why is reputation management important to real estate bloggers?

What would happen to your business if one of your competitors started bashing you online and their posts started showing up above yours? What would happen if a disgruntled consumer started attacking your skill set or a home you were selling on a blog or other site? It could seriously affect your ability to sell a house. Needless to say, you can see the value of monitoring you online reputation and building more positive touch points on the internet.

Top 10 things you can do to improve your online reputation:

1. Monitor your online reputation with Trackur. Trackur is an online reputation management tool that monitors your entire online presence for you. Where Google Alerts fail, Trackur picks up. An easy to use AJAX dashboard allows you to monitor all forms of media for you and your brand, receive RSS and email alerts of new mentions and even share, bookmark, filter and sort content. Sign up for the 14 day free trial and I guarantee you will be hooked.

2. Build more positive information about yourself, product and brands by creating profiles on various social networks like MyBlogLog, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, etc. The more profiles you have online with positive information on them the more opportunities you give people searching on the web to find good information about you out there.

3. Contribute regularly to article syndication sites like Buzzle and EZineArticles,etc.

4. Contribute to forums and social networks like Yahoo Answers, Trulia Voices, RealEstateVoices, Wanna Network, ActiveRain, Real Estate Webmasters, etc.

5. Build alliances with popular/vocal bloggers both in your local area and within the industry itself. People are less likely to attack you if they know you personally.

6. Use multiple blogs to improve your ability to rank on the first page and push more positive information about yourself and services up the engines. Make it easy- start a second video or picture blog that you can post to regularly.

7. If someone attacks you, research the blog, the author and their audience reach before responding.

Tool: PubSub.com and Compete.com give you the ability to determine a blog's popularity

Tool: Bloginfluence.net allows you to determine the audience reach

Tool: DomainTools.com to find out who owns the blog.

8. When responding to an attack, first try emailing the blog owner and making your case, offer to speak to them directly and to resolve problems if necessary. If you don't get a response you can always try responding in the comments.

9. In the case of a large scale attack, rally your friends, co-workers and clients as allies to support your position.

10. Monitor your competition: this means you need to watch for changes to their websites

Tool: Website Watcher, their positioning on search engines for specific key terms

Tool: SEO Digger allows you to type in a domain and gives you what search terms it ranks for

Tool: Monitor This allows you to monitor a single keyword across 22 different search engine feeds at the same time.) and press releases.

BONUS TIP: Turn comments off on all listing and about pages. It is one thing to get a negative commnet on a story it another thing entirely to have a property or your person attacked! Don't open up a doorway for it, so do yourself a favor and ALWAYS turn comments off on your listings and about pages. The worst thing that can happen is a person that saw the property in an open house comes in and comments negatively about it.

Recommended Reputation Management Reading:

Radically Transparent: a must read for those of you serious about your online reputation. I just finished this book over the weekend and it was well worth the read. I highly recommend it.

Overview: Radically Transparent is a complete guide to monitoring, managing, building, and repairing online reputations. This comprehensive guide provides a full-featured reputation monitoring and management system. It includes practical, step-by-step instruction in four skills for personal reputation construction: public relations, search engine optimization, research, and online content creation. It explains how to apply these skills to create online content for blogs, social networking sites, and text communication (e-mail, text messaging, and so forth). The book provides background information, research results, anecdotal evidence, case studies, and practical strategies. It also emphasizes Internet research techniques for identifying and monitoring online identities and features exercises that reinforce key discussions.

About the Author: Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim Blog has long been a staple in my feed reader! Andy is wise, witty and incredibly adorable (alright, I am just saying this because I know he monitor's his every mention... and I am hoping that a bit of brown nosing will win me an interview with him). The Marketing Pilgrim is a great resource for practical SEO and online marketing. Where a lot of other SEO/Online Marketing blogs focus on the technology, Andy specializes in the practical application of technologies to build a business. He also recently took on a hidden jem on the Marketing Pilgrim Blog (Ben Fremer) who is also worth reading.

"The service is like Google Alerts on steroids." Larry Chase, Web Digest for Marketers

Order Radically Transparent Now

Follow Andy on Twitter

Reputation Management Articles:

Online reputation management is hot -- but is it ethical? Computerworld, 19 Feb 2008

How to make neighborhood maps for your real estate blog

Mary McKnight (NOT RSS Pieces) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:50:39 -0500

Alright, Ines has finally agreed to come back and post on RSS Pieces (we all recall the Great Trackback Debacle of 2008). And this time, she is giving up the goods on how she creates those fabulous Maps on her category pages! I get asked how she does them about 20 times every week... and the worst part is... I had no idea until now! So, without further ado...

See a map in action: Miami Beach Neighborhood Map

How to make Ines' famous Miamism Maps

So Mary likes my neighborhood maps and I have gotten bombarded by calls and e-mails asking me how to make them. I don't know whether to thank Mary for the compliment or have her treat me to mojitos the next time she visits Miami. (hmmm....not a bad idea)

So a tutorial was in place - it really is pretty simple and I don't mind at all if you contact me if you still have questions. Here are the step-by-step instructions:

Go to Google Maps at http://maps.google.com/ and if you don't already have a Google account, create one.

For this tutorial's sake, I will use Sunset Islands, Florida as an example, but it will help you to have a map of the areas you farm with the exact neighborhood boundaries.

Type in an address or city name in the search box next to Google maps and press "search maps". Zoom in and pan the map so it sits exactly where you want it once the map is created.

1. Click on "my maps" tab on the left hand side

2. Click on "create new map" right under it.

3. Give your map a title and description keep in mind your keywords

4. Keep the privacy settings as "public" you want your maps to be "searchable"

5. To create the shaded region, select the "draw a shape" tool on the upper left corner of the map and click to start drawing a shape.

6. You will be able to delineate any boundary, point by point - finish by clicking the point where you started.

7. After you are done creating a shaded region, you will be able to edit the shape style by clicking anywhere on the shaded region and then selecting the square on the upper right corner of the bubble containing new title and description.

You will be able to change the line color, line width, line opacity, fill color and fill opacity - make sure you click "OK" when you are done - select colors that are consistent with your blog colors.

8. Once you click OK - you will be able to modify the title and description of the neighborhood you just created - you can use html and get creative with the information you include. You can even include image URL's from your own blog by selecting the rich text option. Click OK again.

9. Make sure you click "done" when you have finished the boundary and description (you will be able to go back to your maps to edit them as needed).

Now its time to edit the actual map image to be included within the static areas of your blog categories (Im sure Mary will tell you how to do that).

You will see a "link to this page" on the upper right hand corner of the Google map make sure you DO NOT USE that embed link in your blog its better to create a pdf image and then link to your Google maps.

You can use any editing software to pimp your map I use a web based program called Picnik.com. Once the map is created, I do a screen shop of the map; I turn it into a .pdf file, and then upload it to picknic.com. Once uploaded, I crop it, resize it, give it a drop shadow, label it and save it to my hard drive. This is what my Sunset Islands Map would look like before inserting to Miamism.

Once you insert the map to your blog (blog settings - categories) you can then select the image and "insert/edit link" to include the actual Google map link. If you are really ambitious, you can add place marks on the Google map with all your listings and places of interest within your neighborhoods or communities, so when people click on your map, they will find a treasure of information.

So there you have it - step-by-step instructions that should answer all your questions. If you have any questions please e-mail me at ines@idontcare.com (just kidding....e-mail me if you need help).

High PR sites, EDUs, Directories, still a link builders best friend according to leading SEOs at SMX

Mary McKnight (NOT RSS Pieces) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:48:09 -0500

So, I recently got called a black hatter for encouraging people to start their link building efforts out at directories, high PR sites and .edu sites instead of what many other industry pundits recommend. Well, surprise, surprise... a whole panel of SEOs at one of the biggest SEM conferences out there (SMX) are on my side of the fence (could it be because I stay up to date on what SEO/SEM industry people say?). So, imagine my shock when I found out my advice was well researched and not, indeed, black hat... That was what sarcasm looks like on the web, for those of you playing along at home.

SMX is one of the biggest Search Engine Marketing conferences with events in many major cities across the world. This event particular is SMX Advanced (Advanced means this info is from Big Boys for Big Boys) and is being held in Seattle as I type... OK, right now all the leading SEOs are out buying each other beer and laughing about how the little people (like me) hang on their every linkbaitable morsel of Google wisdom.

Today's most interesting panel: Blow your mind link building techniques

The usual suspects: Moderator: Greg Boser, President/CEO, 3 Dog Media, Q&A Moderator: Matt McGee, SEO For Hire (a personal fav since he has graced our blog with his illustrious presence), Roger Montti, Founder & Owner, MartiniBuster.com, Jay Young, Owner, Link Fish Media, Inc., and Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts.

Things to take away from the link building panel

1. EDU links are the "whitest hat" links you can get. No one gets banned for having EDU links.

That being said, they may also not be the magic bullet to your site's success. You need to look for links from EDU pages that have some authority and some valuable content. To find these pages you use common operators in Yahoo:

linkdomain:example.com site:.edu sponsors
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu donors
linkdomain:example.com site:.org sponsors
linkdomain:example.com site:.org benefactors
inkdomain:example.com site:.edu hotlinks
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu bookmarks
linkdomain:example.com site:.org directory
linkdomain:example.com site:.org resources

2. Trusted directories still pass lots of link juice and authority.

Jay Young recommended that you start every link building campaign with directories and try becoming a DMOZ editor. Recommended directories to start with are:

3. Social networks you must have profiles with include

4. Buying some relevant links that will still look natural by having varying anchor text is still acceptable (although this is considered a gray behavior).

The speaker that using Text Link Brokers can still work but I (Mary) don't recommend it in the real estate industry. The farthest I will go is saying that you can buy some directory or article submission posts from Best Web Directories.

5. Totally going to avoid this one because it is gray/black hat and I prefer to steer clear of mentioning these tactics in this industry.

But if you want the totally shady stuff, just ask my dear friend over at Slightly Shady SEO. (Shady... I got your back no matter how black you get)

6. Do the stuff that costs money and makes you think out of the box.

This includes setting aside a few thousand in programming funds for the creation of truly unique and useful widgets, template sponsorships, and valuable contests like iPhone giveaways or content trades.

7. Go after high value link targets, don't waste your time on the little fish (i.e. low PR sites)

One of my all time favorite brains in the industry, Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts made some great points:

Go after high PR sites
Look for sites that are one click away from Google
Put some money into sponsoring high PR sites or donating something to them so you can leach some link love from them
Link build from the existing sites that already link to you
Comment on do follow blogs
Submit to blog carnivals
Contribute to a blog group
Guest blog on another high PR blog
Build rapport with other bloggers with high PR then ask for a link
Sculpt PageRank: this means turn no follows on useless links out to form/conversion pages or commenters that are not members of your blog or pagination links and create more links from high PR pages on your site to other pages you want to improve the PR of. For example, I could boost the PR of an internal page by linking with a PR 3 by linking to it from my home page (a PR5).

8. Ask people that are linking to you to use better quality anchor text

So I would ask those that link to me that instead of using our company name, RSS Pieces, to use a more keyword rich term like: Real Estate Blog Provider

9. Contribute to wikis like

10. Use link bait.

Create a quiz, a poll, a video, a widget or plain old cool content to get other people to link to your site naturally.

Check out the linkbait posts Steve Hundley of the Real Estate Lead Generation Blog is giving all Realtors for free.

June 3rd, 2008 - SMX Secrets Revealed

ePerks Sues Real Estate Blogger, Blogosphere Unites to Destroy the ePerks Brand

Mary McKnight (NOT RSS Pieces) — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:24:53 -0500

Karma's a Bitch, especially when you get the blogosphere involved. So, here is a beautiful little story about a company, ePerks, that didn't quite like what one blogger did (Vlad Zablotskyy), so they are suspected of having attacked him personally all over the Internet (some NASTY stuff detailed below) and then sued him when he started talking about it and saying he suspected as much (IP addresses from ePerks and employee names have been linked to certian attacks as detailed below). Well, this is a blogger we are talking about and he would not take it laying down. So, he wrote all about it on his blog and next thing you know you have:

My favorite blogroll hating SEO devil, Andy Beard chronicling the story
The silver tongued wordsmith himself, Greg Swann starting up a fund to help the blogger (Vlad)
That ever so handsome Phoenix Real Estate Guy, Jay Thompson calling them out as EJerks
And many many more bloggers standing up to ePerks in blog posts, including Inman News which covered Vlad's legal problems in March.

The funniest thing about this is that ePerks is suspected of having set out to damage Vlad's reputation, but in the end it is theirs that is getting destroyed. They are one, we are many and we are indignant that a large corporation thinks it can wield it's weight to censor or personally destroyany of us. The more posts out there about this situation, the more negative information filters up the engines and the more information we are able to learn from people that also had dealings with them. So, while this singular post may not help with the legal matter- the collective of all these posts just may quicken the fall from Google, investor, consumer, etc grace for ePerks and finally land them in what Hoovers so kindly terms, "the Business Boneyard."

Please note: this post is not meant to be slanderous, I am reposting information gathered from other sources about this case and adding my own commentary. Becasue of so many posts about this case, many former employees of Reply.com and ePerks have come forward to speak about how they were treated by Ben B (ePerks CEO) confirming he has a long history of online and legal bullying. Many former customers and real estate professionals that had contact with ePerks have also stepped up and posted nasty emails they received from ePerks employees. (Dennis Pease is called an idiot by an ePerks employee in an email).

Snapshot of the ePerks vs Real Estate Blogger Tale

The following is the torrid tale of eParks and how they solicited editorial advertising from real estate bloggers and when they didn't like the result of one blogger's pieces they attacked him personally and are now suing him. It's disgraceful. For those of you not yet in the know, ePerks, a service that allows Realtors to offer incentives back to consumers, has recently taken legal action against a fellow real estate blogger, Vlad Zablotskyy.

These are the facts, as reported by Andy Beard and Greg Swann

1. ePerks solicited editorial advertising (blog posts recommending their service) on real estate blogs

2. Vlad wrote such a post and was complimentary

3. Commenters on the post came in and talked about how bad the ePerks service was and how they felt they were swindled

4. Vlad writes a response piece to acknowledge reader comments: Is ePerks a gem or a Scam?

5. Comment frenzy ensues on this post. At some point the comments turn into a battle between a number of anonymous commenters plus one person who claims to be an employee of Eperks. The suspicious part is that all these commenters seem to come from the same block of IP addresses (76.206.0.161 - do a trace route on this ip) that when traced lead you back to the San Jose area (where ePerks lives). This IP block has been verified as coming from ePerks in many posts where people published images of emails with header details from ePerks and this is this same IP was used in stalth marketing tactics where employees of ePerks would comment on various forums positively about the company with multiple identities (image of ePerks stealth marketing below).

If you want to learn why it is highly suspected an ePerks employee is the one who created the negative campaign against Vlad, please read the following:

The following screenshot is from Any Beard's post showing the same ips coming in commenting as various people:

Just in case you don't know how I feel about anonymous commenters from the same ip:

Read also: Is Mary McKnight a Black Hat SEO?

6. ePerks slaps Vlad with cease and desist letters and legal threats

7. Now, it gets NASTY. This same IP block has been traced to personal attacks on Vlad himself in various comments and blogs. When I say personal, I mean they have created blogs about how bad Vlad is, and someone related to ePerks is suspected of posting a Yahoo Answer questions asking about alleged sexual felonies, etc. The following screenshot again is from Andy's post showing how Vlad has been maligned across the Internet:

EXAMPLE: affar Sadighi maligning Vlad's character has been linked to the ePerks IP range

Read also: ePerks makes voicemail threats (you have to hear these- this Ben guy is off his rocker - It's like Dr. Evil in real life - please note)

8. ePerks sues Vlad and is looking for punitive damages and claiming malice, and they have confined the case to the way Vlad defended his family name when he was attacked quite viciously on multiple websites suggesting he is/was a paedophile. Even though there is pretty incriminating evidence that

Help Vlad Out by contributing to the donation fund

Support Vlad Zablotskyy's Defense Fund
Defend your own right to free speech!

For a complete chronicle of the whole story:

For the ever irreverent Greg Swan's take on the issue:

From Vlad (the blogger being sued's) own blog:

Get more real estate leads with killer call to actions on your blog and website

Mary McKnight (NOT RSS Pieces) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:38:53 -0500

A real estate blog or website without well crafted and placed calls to action will simply fail. A call to action is simply that single offer on your page that gets your visitors to convert from a casual reader into a contact by clicking on and filling out one of your lead generation forms.

BONUS: RSS Pieces and 1ParkPlace have teamed up to provide you with complete sets of high quality, graphically relevant and SEOed call to action buttons you can use for free on your real estate blog or website. Each button is already SEOed with high quality, universal, real estate related "alt" and "title" descriptive text- all you do is copy and paste these buttons to your site and add the link to your lead gens!

See our real estate button sets here.

Sample:

What makes a good real estate call to action?

1. Invaluable Offer. The call to action HAS to offer some value to the visitor. That means that you must have lead generators connected to tools that truly have some function that is critical to the user experience. So what types of tools are critical to your real estate visitors?

Visitor Class	Conversion Task	Conversion Forms
Home buyers	Looking for a home	1. Search for homes 2. Contact 3. 3. Special offers
Home sellers	looking for Realtor to represent their home and successfully sell it	1. CMA 2. Contac 3. Special Offers 4. Market Snapshot
Investors	looking for a guide to the area's investment properties	1. Search for homes 2. Special Offers 3. Market Snapshot 4. Contact
Realtors	they are looking to refer out business or a job with your company	1. Agent Listings 2. Contact

2. Compelling Copy. Just like in a headline, be explicit in your offer not implicit. This means you need to explicitly spell out what the benefit will be and answer the question "WIFM" (What's In It For Me?). Below are compelling ways to improve your call to action copy to more explicitly state the purpose of clicking the button.

Tool	Good Copy	Better Copy
Search MLS Button	Search Homes	Search all Phoenix Homes Search 78,000 Phoenix Homes
CMA Button	Home Value	What's my home worth? Instant home valuation Accurate home valuation
Featured Listings Button	Featured Listings	The Best Phoenix Homes Top 10 best homes for sale Best investment picks Best luxury homes for sale Best Condo Buys
Contact Button	Contact Me	Ask the Agent Ask the Broker

3. Image association. One of the most overlooked web design rules for consumer conversion is that graphical links are 10 times more likely to be clicked than textual links, so your calls to action MUST use images and preferably look like clickable buttons with some related imagery on them.

4. Location. You need to make sure that the call to action is obvious and easy to find on every single page of your site. Typically, your call to actions ought to be placed towards the top of your site and visible on EVERY single page on your site. Try to avoid placing them in the sidebar.

Sample: See how Kaye Thomas of the Manhattan Beach Real Estate Blog has all her lead generators placed visibly at the top of her blog?

5. Order: Your calls to action should not only be grouped together but also placed in order of importance so you can pull through the most clicks and people's eyes are immediately directed to your most valuable tool. Act as a guide to your visitors by designing your site in the more intuitive and easy way. Making a site "Google" simple is the key to creating a comfortable and effortless user experience. And when the experinece is good for the user, it ill be good for you in terms of leads and business.

Example:

If you get 100 leads this month and

50 are through your search form - 50% of all contacts use the search conversion form
25 are through your CMA form - 25% of all contacts use the CMA form
10 are through your contact form - 10% of all contacts use the contact form
10 are through your market report form - 10% of all contacts use the market report form
5 are through a special offer form - 5% of all contacts use the special offer form

This should tell you that your call to action buttons should be placed in the following order: search, CMA, contact, market report, special offer.

TIP: You can track this metric by using VisiStat's Touch Mapping heat map tool which will show you what area of your site get clicked the most. VisiStat's Touch Mapping overlay report is one of the fastest, most accurate ways to see exactly what links, products and information your visitors are interested in.

How to generate more buyer, investor and foreclosure leads from your real estate blog

Mary McKnight (NOT RSS Pieces) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:12:10 -0500

One of the things that drives me craziest on the Internet is there is a lot of GOOD advice out there- but there is a distinct lack of explicit practical advice. Meaning, everyone wants to tell you that you need to generate leads from your real estate blog but they don't tell you how to specifically capture each type of lead. So, let's hit it. This post will show you how to use two conversion psychologies called "the cult of me" and "self qualification" to generate highly qualified investor and foreclosure property leads.

Goal: To attract more investors contacts

Strategy: Create a list of Top 10 Best Buy, REO, Foreclosure or Investment properties that you require users to register to receive. This will require 3 steps:

1. Create the list

2. Create a call to action button and lead conversion form

3. Create a blog post announcing your offering

Real Estate Investor Profile: The average investor that will find you online fins you because they are looking for information on investing in real estate. That means they probably are not a professional investor and are most likely a first time or part time investor that recognizes they need the help of a real estate professional to identify savvy investment properties.

Real Estate Investor Psychographics: A first time or part time investor is typically "new money" meaning they are self made and proud of what they have become. They feel good about their accomplishments and want to use what they have to make more money. They can be shrewd can like to be appreciated for their accomplishments. They often also like o feel like they are masters of their destiny's and like to have hand in making decisions that affect their future.

Implementation:

1. Create the list of best properties

The list MUST have value, so put some time into this. Cull through the MLS for foreclosure, investment, first time buyer, fixer upper, etc best buys. Put together a list in Microsoft Word where you take some of the MLS data like images, MLS#, Street Address, Description and your remarks on why you consider that particular property a best buy. Also, make sure that you fully brand the document with your logos, phone numbers, address and websites. Then save the document into a PDF and save to your drive in an easy to find location. You do not want to immediately publish this to your blog, because you want to create implied value and make people register so they can receive it.

Read akso: Top 5 Easy and Effective Listing Posts You Can Write for Your Real Estate Blog

2. Call Investors to Action with a button and a blog post

We will use the tried and true "fear of loss" psychology to get an investor contact.

A. Create a button or (steal the one below) that reads "Top 10 Investment Buys of the Month." Publish this button either at the top of your blog above your blog posts or in the side bar. Typically you can put this button inside a widget area so you have complete control over it now and in the future.

Steal these buttons:

Feel free to copy and paste these buttons into your blog and simply add a link to your conversion form for investors, foreclosures or other special offers

B. Write a post that publishes a couple of lesser but still interesting properties (as time goes by, you publish the previous month's list) talks about how you have compiled a list of the best foreclosure, short sale, tenant building investments, etc of the month that either have cash flow from day X, $X equity or are more than $X undervalued. Talk up how great these properties are how everyone needs to get this "exclusive list." Say something about how only the first 25 people to sign up for this list will get it (that doesn't mean you have to actually adhere to it - it is just a way to get people to act quickly). See, how that creates the need to act- the fear that they if they do not act, they will lose out on this great list of properties and someone else might scoop them up before they have the chance?

3. Create a conversion form using The "Cult of Me" psychology

*Note: If you don't have ability to create custom conversion forms like RSS Pieces, then simply link your buttons back to your contact form and you can skip this part as it does not apply to your blog platform.

The number one thing you learn about people is THEY LIKE TO TALK ABOUT THEMSELVES. Hey, it's true- number uno is always ME! So, when you start thinking about conversion you need to think about it from the perspective of the "cult of me." This means, get people to answer questions about themselves that make them feel good about themselves!

What kinds of questions could make someone that feels good about their accomplishments and their status feel even better about themselves? Ask them things that directly relate to their accomplishments. Forget about whether or not you NEED this information for the form. That's not really important. Make them think you need it. (The only things you really need are their name, email and phone number - but you want to make sure they provide you with good contact info= so ask them things they WANT you to know about them). Starting to make sense yet?

Psychological Question Examples:

Please note: The following questions are simply examples of what you might want to ask. I explained the psychology behind each question so you can model other more relevant questions for your conversion forms.

Question	Psychology
How much money are you able to put down?	This let's them tell you how much money they have made that they are willing to put toward making more - it let's them show their success and show you they are savvy enough to understand they need to use that money to make other money.
How much money do you want to invest in total?	This let's them tell you how much money they could lose without impacting their lifestyle
How much return on the investment do you expect?	This let's them tell you their expectations for the investment and their overall self worth. It also let's them tell you how demanding they are.
How much time are you willing to wait until ROI?	This let's them feel as though they are making a decision that impacts their future and that they have a perceived control over how their money will work for them

Preface the form with text makes the reader self qualify.

So, create text that tells people who is most qualified to receive the information you are providing. For example:

Please note that those investors most qualified to receive this information would be:

Investors that can provide a down payment of 20% or more
Investors that expect to more than 90 days before ROI
Investors that expect to devote more than $X/mo towards their investment

There may be other or more relevant criteria you want to include here but these are a few examples. The more qualifying the criteria you include, the better your results will be.

4. At the end of the month or the beginning of the next month, publicly publish you list on your blog as a post

Show the properties that sold with big "sold signs" across them. This shows readers for the next month what they will be getting and what they could be missing out on. It is a good idea to publiuhs the call to action button for the next month's list at the bottom of this post.

To see an examples of sites using this technique, please visit:

Buffalo Niagara Falls Real Estate & Home Sales in WNY

(NOTE: within 1 day of using this call to action method, Colleen received 3 leads from it and a request for her best properties list)

Advanced SEO tactics: What is PageRank sculpting and does my blog need it?

Mary McKnight (NOT RSS Pieces) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:06:27 -0500

Alright, I've been reluctant to post anything about PageRank sculpting but since I have received a bunch of questions about it recently, here goes: This is a three part series in how to sculpt PageRank so you have greater authority in Google and can increase your search engine position. The first lesson simply explores what PR sculpting is, the various methods you can use to achieve it and how to determine if you even need it.

What is PageRank Leak/Bleed?

PageRank bleed/leak is the theory that Page A will lose some of its Page Rank when it links to Page B. This happens whether the links are internal or external as far as concept and effects. Even when there is a direct link back there still is Page Rank bleed.

The theory is that any single page can only pass up to 85% of its total PR value to any page it is linking to. The total value of the page given to any site it links to is calculated by dividing it's total value by the number of links on the page itself (links, meaning anything you can click that do not have the nofollow tag on them). Yes, that means the combined value of internal and external links.

RESOURCE: Sculpting Your PageRank For Maximum SEO Impact

RESOURCE: The PageRank Formula

FOR EXAMPLE: If you received a link from a PR5 page that linked out to 100 other pages, you would calculate the total value of that one link to your site as:

(PR5 * .085)/100

RESOURCE: The original Bob Wakfer PageRank Calculation Table (while now quite old now this document is well worth a read)

Comment Smart: 5 simple rules to commenting for backlinks to increase PageRank and SERP

Mary McKnight (NOT RSS Pieces) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:05:16 -0500

NOTE: TO THE FEW PEOPLE THAT USED THIS POST AS AN EXCUSE TO SPAM DOFOLLOW BLOGS, SHAME ON YOU! MY ADVICE IS TO COMMENT WHERE YOU WOULD COMMENT NATURALLY- JUST LOOK FOR NEW PLACES AND COMMENT STATEGICALLY SO YOU DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME. THE DOFOLLOW BLOG MOVEMENT IS IMPORTANT AND YOU SHOULD NOT ABUSE IT.

For those of you that know me- you must know by now there are two things I hate.

1. Blogrolls

2. Commenting for backlinks (That being said, since many of you do this, here are some tips)

Backlinks are important. We all know by now that they play a part in PageRank calculations and search engine positioning. And while you can't rely on commenting alone, you certainly can use it as one of your many techniques for building backlinks. The key to commenting is to do it smart and effectively. This way you get the best bang for the time you spend doing it. By designing a clear strategy and spending time researching a list of places to comment, you can avoid wasting your time commenting on a page with no PageRank or a bog that uses the nofollow attribute on comments.

Planning a Commenting Strategy

1. Comment only on blogs that do not have the nofollow tag.

By making sure the blogs you comment on are do follow you ensure you are getting a backlink and not wasting your time.

2. Comment only on pages that have PageRank so you can pass good link juice back to your site.

Research which pages on any given do follow blog that have the highest PageRank (PR3+) and comment on those pages. That is truly what will give you the juice to boost your PR and SERP. It takes many times the number of PR1-3 sites to get to the top of the engine than it does PR4+ sites, you concentrate your efforts on higher PR pages with a site.

RESOURCE: The PageRank Formula

3. Comment with varied anchor text and keywords.

This means that you want to mix up what you place in the Name field of the comment as that is typically the anchor text used n the link back to you. Try not to always use the same anchor text. You also don't want to appear spammy so these are my recommendations for how to craft keyword rich anchor text in the Name field:

Palm Beach Real Estate Girl

Mary M: Palm Beach, FL

Palm Beach House Chick

Mary, Palm Beach Realtor

Anchor Text. Anchor text is the textual content in a link. The more descriptive and keyword rich the anchor text, the more relevancy and value that backlink. For example, a link that reads: real estate blogs and real estate training to RSS Pieces is actually more valuable than a link that reads RSS Pieces or Click Here.

4. Never put links to your site in the comment itself -that is just spammy and you may get flagged as a spammer.

5. Comment consistently.

Google likes to see steady increasing and consistent growth in backlinks (let's call this link velocity)- that shows that your site is building authority naturally over time at a steady and increasing pace. So, if you are going to build backlinks, you have to make a conscious effort to continue to build backlinks at a steady pace over time so you do not tip your hand to Google that you are actively link building. Basically, don't go nuts and build 4,000 backlinks in 24 hours if you can't keep that pace up over the long haul. Building 5-10 backlinks per day is a more reasonable goal. Over time your site should be able to grow links naturally as more people find your content usefull and link worthy.

Commenting smart by following these simple rules

If you are going to go out there and comment for backlinks follow these rules:

1. Use the Do Follow Blog Directory to find other blogs you can comment on where you will get a backlink.

Don't worry if the blog is not a real estate blog. Plenty of business and technology or home décor/gardening sites would work just as well if not better. Just look for well trusted higher PageRank sites. The other reason you want to start READING and commenting on these blog is that you will learn something new. You might want to start out with business, financial, computer, blogging and SEO blogs.

Other resources for do follow blogs:

Do Follow Directory (www.dofollowdirectory.com)

Blogs That Follow (www.blogsthatfollow.com)

Do Follow US (www.dofollow.us)

Do Follow Blog Directory (www.wp-blog.net)

2. Find high PageRank pages within a do follow blog and comment on those pages.

To find high PR pages, use: SEO Chat's PageRank Checker Tool

Change the Order by drop down to PageRank and the Results per page to 100. Then, find the high PR pages with this tool by using the site query operator which looks like this:

Site:http://www.domainname.com

See the image below to see how I performed this task for RSS Pieces. Please note this tool does not always check the whole site so it may not return many good links, but it is good enough for this purpose.

RSS PIECES CLIENTS: WE ARE A STRATEGIC FOLLOW BLOG- SO BY COMMENTING ON OLD HIGH PR POSTS ON RSS PIECES, YOU WILL GET A BACKLINK. MAKE SURE YOU ARE LOGGED IN TO THE SYSTEM AND HAVE FILLED OUT YOUR FULL PROFILE PAGE (INCLUDING ADDING YOUR DOMAIN) SO YOU WILL GET CREDIT FOR THE LINK.

Try to find pages that have at least a PR2 with special attention given to anything above a PR3. The results will be ordered by PageRank so start following the links and commenting on the highest PR pages first

3. Verify that the blog you are about to comment on is a do follow blog

ALWAYS run SEO for Firefox (for those of you that don't know- all no follow tagged links have a red background when running SEO for Firefox)

4. Verify that the page you are about to comment on has PageRank

ALWAYS using RankQuest or the Google Toolbar so you can see PageRank easily for each page you visit

5. Comment insightfully

These are dofollow blogs- they will weed out the spammy comments so never comment with "good post." Read the article and add to the conversation. Remember these people are giving you a good link- treat them with respect by reading their post and commenting astutely. Also, do not place links in your comments. You may use the Name field as a place to put keywords but do it strategically. The best way to do this is to place your name and your city, state in that field. Be sure to vary you're your anchor text from comment to comment as shown above.

Real Estate Net Gossip: Is Trulia black hatting and Overstock.com scraping listings from Vflyer?

Mary McKnight (NOT RSS Pieces) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:02:00 -0500

Because I love TMZ and The Superficial and because I just thought it would be fun to have an occasional real estate technology gossip piece - so, here are a couple of SEO related real estate rumors making their ways across the blogosphere.

Is Trulia cloaking pages?

Trulia Caught Cloaking Red Handed

Eric Bramlett catches Trulia in what appears by all accounts to be a serious case of cloaking. Cloaking is an age old shady technique that based on user agent (i.e. GoogleBot, YahooSlurp, (robots) IE, Firefox (people)) serves one set of content to the search engine and another set of content to people visiting the site through regular browsers. In this case, Eric shows how Trulia is using a redirect and cloaking to direct Google to Trulia's own Seattle Real Estate landing pages when it crawls Seattle Weekly's real estate section. This could be one of the possible cataysts to Trulia's recent jump on the engines in many major markets. Basically, Trulia is boosting pageviews through partner sites and the techniques they are using while not necessarily evil it may be against Google's TOS.

Conspiracy Theories on Trulia's SEO

Is trulia cloaking? Interesting Sphin story

YouTube Video of Trulia Cloaking

Trulia.com Uses Hidden Text

Trulia's Web-ranking strategies catch heat | Inman News

What is cloaking? A more detailed explaination.

Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the users' browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines so they display the page when it would not otherwise be displayed. Read more from wkipedia.

How to fake a higer PageRank or How to steal PageRank

Is Overstock.com scraping listings from Vflyer and other real estate sites?

Overstock.com seems to be scraping listings from the web and redisplaying them on their site without permission

Long Beach Listings on Overstock

Click on the first one (there is an inactive link at the bottom to Vflyer- likely where they scraped the listing from). Now click on each of the other listings - some go to Vflyer pages, some go to LiveDeal, some go to actual agent pages and others go to virtual tour pages. There are rumblings from unhappy Realtors that see their listings scraped and placed on Overstock without permission and without a link back to the agent's originating site or page.

Overstock.com Listing Page: Downtown Long Beach Short Sale

Vflyer Page: Downtown Long Beach Short Sale

See how this listing pulls all the text from a Vflyer but does not offer a live link back to the VFlyer source or the listing agent? I'm going to call this one a bit fishy.

*NOTE: it looks like Overstock are pullig legit data from Vast.com and possibly Google Base (which is fine), but where it gets shady are the pulls from VFlyer and scrapes from Realtor sites (even when they offer a link back), it ought to be opt in not "hey, I'm going to scrape your listings, advertising them on my site, maybe link back to and just wait for you to catch me and slap me on the wrist.

What is scraping?

A typical example application for web scraping is a web crawler that copies content from one or more existing websites in order to generate a scraper site. The result can range from fair use excerpts or reproduction of text and content, to plagiarized content. In some instances, plagiarized content may be used as an illicit means to increase traffic and advertising revenue. The typical scraper website generates revenue using Google AdSense, hence the term 'Made for AdSense' or MFA website. Read more from wikipedia

How to Slow Trulia and Zillow's Climb in Search Results

If you are concerned about Trulia, Zillow or any other number of monster sites ranking above you in your area, DON'T LINK TO THEM. If you have to link to them, use the nofollow tag. Also, go back through your posts and see if you ever linked to them in past and either remove the link or place a nofollow on it.

What is the nofollow tag?

The nofollow tag instructs Google to not follow the link when crawling your site and removes any link juice you may have otherwise been giving these competitors. And yes, I have placed nofollows on links to them from my blog. That said, I don't have a problem with Trulia or Zillow- in fact, I think their technologies are cool and genuinely useful to consumers. However, I'm here to help real estate professionals, not your mega-site competitors. So, my best advice s to you go back through your posts and clean up any and all links you may have placed to them so as not be a catalyst of your own search engine demise. These companies may be bigger, with a greater volume of content, and professional SEOs working on their behalf 24/7, but you are agile and more relevant, so you do have the power to take back the SERPs with a few quick tricks like this one.