Zillow just unleashed a heap mo bling fo yo blog. Putting the slang aside, these mortgage rate widgets could add useful information for buyers visiting your blog. Remember buyers? Anyhow, click on the drop-down list to change the mortgage chart to 15-year fixed or 5/1 ARM or click a button to view rates over 3 months instead of the default 1 month. How cool is that?"Show quote volume" illustrates how activity in Zillow Mortgage Marketplace changes as rates change.

And here's a skinny version - there are 4 mortgage rate widgets in all. This one should fit snugly in your AR blog's sidebar. Just click across to Zillow to find the code for all four mortgage widgets.


Next up, badge bling! This badge links to your profile and you'll find it in the right sidebar when you visit your profile page on Zillow. In case you didn't know, Zillow recently revamped profiles to better showcase user contributions and profiles on Zillow offer RE bloggers huge potential to improve their sites' SEO - you can add an unlimited amount of (followed) links to your site into your profile's about me section. And if you're a Zillow All-Star, you'll see the All-Star badge in your profile together with code to embed it into your blog or website.



OK, co-branding - I've left the best bling for last. When someone clicks on your profile badge, their visit to Zillow is co-branded with your profile contact details and a button back to your website on every page on Zillow.com. To show you how this works, I'm going to quote Greg Swann from his review of co-branding;

"Click here.

This is new software from Zillow.com. ... What’s different? Look up in the upper left hand corner.

C’est moi! A photo of Odysseus. A link to my Zillow profile. A link to my email. My phone number. And a link to our brokerage’s weblog. Even cooler is that button in the upper right hand corner:

A quick-click button to take you back to BloodhoundRealty.com. So what’s going on here? As of tonight, Zillow.com is “co-branding” with anyone who links to it. “Co-branding” is the kind of wine-and-cheese-PR-event deal big companies make with other big companies, but Zillow is extending the idea down to the lowliest of grunts-in-the-trenches."

Ignoring the "grunts" piece; Greg is right; co-branding is really big news. And good news for real estate bloggers is that you can now co-brand any link to Zillow; not just links from widgets and badges. To co-brand a link, you just need to tell us what your Zillow screen-name is by attaching it to the link. For example, to co-brand a link to Zillow with my profile, I would use "www.zillow.com?scrnnm=DavidG". As you can see, I've added "?scrnnm=DavidG" to the link to ensure that it would be co-branded. You would use your Zillow user screen-name.

So, there you have it; a whole heap mo bling fo yo blog. Enjoy!