How We Use Active Rain Blogging to Enhance Relationships, both Old and New, with folks in Vancouver Washington

Back in 2007 we started putting the local Vancouver WA real estate market statistics into our Active Rain Blog.  Early on we found that subscribers to our e-mail newsletters liked to get our view of the current real estate market conditions for the areas in Vancouver and Clark County that we've covered.   Thus, either within the body of the e-mail or, as a foot-note we'll put the links to our Active Rain posts such as these:

Clark County WA Real Estate Market Snapshot for the month of July 2009
Vancouver WA Real Estate Market Snapshot for the month of July 2009
...

After a few months of life these market report posts typically see from 1,500 hundred to several thousand views, depending on the time of the year -- which is not too shabby for our small town.  We get a lot of positive feedback from the folks we e-mail to that they love the detail our reports provide.

John is a graduate from Western Washington University with a degree in Economics/Mathematics with a strong statistics emphasis and thus, our reports are put together with a slightly different perspective than the standard Vancouver MLS public market statistics.  What we like to add are the activity items related to short-sales and bank owned listings (Active, Pending and Sold).  The relevant data is there but just not reported by the MLS.

One of the inoocuous errors made early on was to copy and past the Excel tables right into the blog post.  The extra HTML code that comes with this process makes the data in the table look good but foils the RSS reader to push our blog out to the world using RSS.  (Thus, John's spare time project is to clean up old posts!).  However, now we use images of the data tables, and our new Facebook Fan Pages read in all of our Active Rain blog posts quite nicely.

The new avenue we are now using, in addition to e-mails,  to expose our AR blog to folks is to promote our Facebook Fan Pagers.  Thanks to the Real Estate Tomato and Heather Elias and their Facebook Webinar,  found here on AR, we were able to get our Facebook Fan pages and AR feed to work without much trouble.  We are liking this approach more and more as a way to enhance "permission marketing."

We've also like to use the link-buttons that look good with our existing on-line collateral, and thanks to Brad Andersohn (aka the Magician: Social Media Buttons and Icons - Is Someone Pushing Your Buttons?) we were able to explore a ton of free social media buttons to copy and use in our e-mail signature lines and on-line ads.  Here's an example of John's current e-mail signature:

John Slocum

888-525-5597 (toll free)




RE/MAX equity group, inc.
7700 NE Greenwood Dr, Suite 100
Vancouver, WA 98662

We are continuing to look at ways to improve the utility of our Active Rain Blog, and have enjoyed reading the other AR member's post on this topic to date.  Thanks!

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The above information was provided by John Slocum and Kathryn Alexander, recognized as one of the top teams at REMAX Vancouver WA.  We hope you enjoy the  information in our posts, including videos on real estate and Living in Vancouver Washington and the rest of Clark County.

Thinking of selling your home in this market?  We have the insight and passion for selling homes to get you moving!

For Southwest Washington homes and Real Estate in Vancouver WA visit Vancouver Washington Real Estate.  If you have an immediate need to search the MLS for Vancouver WA please visit  Vancouver WA Homes For Sale 

If your interest is in foreclosures, pre-foreclosures (short-sale homes) and Bank Owned Homes in Vancouver WA we have a special search set up for you at Foreclosures Vancouver WA.

Current MLS Market Report for Vancouver WA and Clark County