Real Estate Agent, Brokerage and Mortgage Blogs

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

Read also: White Hat, Gray Hat and Black Hat SEO Explained

Read more »

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

1. Blogrolls

Read also: Real Estate Blogs and Reciprocal Linking Penalties: Does Google hate your Link Love?

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

Read also: Why commenting for traffic and backlinks to your real estate blog is a waste of time

Read more »

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

Read more »

Want an affordable way to start blogging now? Custom blog design can take weeks to get just right, so RSS Pieces came up with an automated system for building semi-custom template blogs. These high impact real estate blog templates come in a variety of colors can be live in as little as 1 hour form the time we receive your full order and assets and offer you the greatest level of flexibility. You upload all your own images, including headers and logos, add your lead generators and customize all the text (even in static areas) through the back end of the RSS Pieces proprietary Diachronics blogging platform. It's easy, fast and affordable.

This product does not officially launch until mid July, but we are offering a pre release offering with 4 selected templates now. After the official launch you will be able to choose from tons of templates, each in a variety of colors with new templates added to our library weekly and set your blog up yourself online in less than 1 hour. These templates make it easy to switch between them, so when you are tired of your blog, you can change it yourself! Flip layouts, colors, call to action buttons, etc in minutes.

Pricing: $999 setup, $69/mo

Timeframe to live for pre-launch product: 1-3 hours

(Once all assets received, name servers are set and if no manual changes are required to the template itself)

Template Features:

• Fully SEOed templates for real estate
• Fully optimized landing pages for greater lead conversion
• Read also: Real Estate Site Landing Page Optimization: how to get your visitors to contact you
• Highly customizable layouts
• Graphically intense designs

Platform features:

• Running on the most stable, versatile and feature rich, automatically SEOing blogging platform available for real estate, Diachronics. (Our platform is written in PHP5, the only open source scripting language to pass LEVEL2 security tests - WordPress is written in PHP4)
• Read also: Learn more about Diachronics
• Custom form building features allow you to create custom lead capture forms that will automatically email you new leads and house them in your private backend database
• Read also: Generate More Real Estate Leads from your Blog with RSS Pieces Custom Form Builder
• Automatically SEOs all content to 100% search engine relevancy by selecting all keywords for you while allowing you to inject additional SEO information in category and custom pages and reconfigure your SEO settings to the recommendation of SEO experts like Michael Gray, Rand Fishkin, Aaron Wall and Stephan Spencer.
• Full backend, integrated server side statistics allow you to accurately measure your traffic and search patterns from a single point of entry
• Geolocation tools enabled so you can geocode listing posts for better search placement
• Form relationships with other RSS Pieces bloggers and cross post from your blog(s) over to a friend's blog through a single interface or aggregate all your content automatically over to other RSS Pieces agent, brokerage or community blogs.

Jamey, Prezzi, Miami Rentals and Sales Blog

Read more »

OK, I've had it.  The more I learn about this whole sordid tale, the less I like it.  So, here: let's show ePerks what the blogosphere can really do.  If you care about your fellow real estate blogger, Vlad Zablotskyy or if you just want a blog, write a post in support of Vlad Zablotskyy.  The post must be supportive of Vlad and use both his name and the ePerks name in the title.  Please refrain from slandering ePerks, just publish the information as it is understood.  Feel free to reference this post or any other post listed in this article.  It seems that with every new post, we learn more about the inner workings of ePerks.  Many former customers and employees have come forward to provide additional information which will help Vlad and provide real estate professionals with iinformation they may need to make an informed decision when deciding whether or not to do business with ePerks.

Why will I do this?  Because the more positive info we push up the engines about Vlad, the less likely the negative info that is out there can harm him.  These posts will also

This offer is good for the next 5 days (June 13 - Jun 18, 2008) - no strings - you buy the domain - we will give you a semi-custom Template blog and hosting (hosting free for 1 year)

To see the templates available for this offer go to this post and scroll to the bottom.

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

Read also: Eperks: How to kill a startup

Read also: ePerks & iHype - Legal Kneejerk - Sues Blogger

Once you have written your post, click on the link below to order your free blog:

See who supports Vlad and gets a free blog:

Ruthann Macklin: Im Mad As Hell-You Will Be Too When You Read About Vlad Zablotskyy and ePerks

Kevin Wilhelm: Spreading the word about Vlad Zablotskyy and his battle with ePerks - Free Speech Issue For The Blogging Community

Susan Goulding: ePerks & Freedom of Speech?

Sean Giorgianni: Zablotskyy the Scrivener

Aaron Mallo: Suport Vlad Zablotskyy in his defense against ePerks.com frivolous suit

Hunter Jackson: E Perks Sues Blogger Vlad Zablotskyy

Mitch Argon: ePerks Sues Real Estate Blogger

Dennis Blackmore: Why Real estate Agents are Bailing out of ePerks

Barry Cunningham: Real Estate Radio

Aaron hoffman: Nominee for PR Blunder

Felipe Cook: ePerks and Freedom of Speech

Don Reedy: Stop ePerks and get sued

Debra Davis: Atlanta Homes and Condos

 Colleeen Kulikowski: How ePerks, Wake Up

Gregg and Denise Tomlinson: Eperks using questionable tactics

Benjamin Ficker: Spreading the word about e-jerks

Ginger Sala: ePerks vs Blogger: Is free speech at stake?

Scott Schang: Vlad Zablotskyy - A Martyr for Reputation Management