Web Site Design and Development

Peter Thompson, author of Illinois Mortgage Rates and News, was kind enough to write testimonial below and send it along over the weekend. Wow, this is really nice. I appreciate you putting this together, Pete. It was a pleasure working with you!

If you are even thinking about starting your own blog site, you need to talk with John Lockwood. John helped me with my blog, Illinois Mortgage Rates and News. When I started blogging on Active Rain a couple of months back, I felt I was really on to something. I was new to blogging, but I knew the mortgage market and writing was both a hobby and a compulsion. This seemed like the right fit.

One of the best things about Active Rain is that it is a great resource for information about anything related to real estate, including real estate marketing. I knew nothing about blogging or search engine optimization but I found several experts in the community and read everything I could find to get me up to speed on the ways to make my blog a success. The posts on John’s blog, Elite Properties Sacramento were a real help and he was one of my first subscriptions.

As I learned more, it seemed that starting my own stand-alone blog was the best way to gain an audience and increase my exposure in my target market. I made a couple of calls to experts I found on Active Rain. One of the calls was to a leading name in the industry. A representative called back and we had a nice conversation. He emphasized how their company trained bloggers by teaching them to blog from the ground up with a several month long course with a set lesson plan. It sounded interesting, but my impression was that they had a one size fits all program, and I wasn’t sure it fit my needs. My other concern was the price. He quoted a number high enough to make me gasp.

As luck would have it, I came across a post on Active Rain from a Realtor who was thinking of starting her own blog but had no clue on how to start. In the comments section, John said that he was expanding his business into this area. I knew John from reading his blog and I respected his expertise, so I decided to give him a call. We hit it off and I knew right away that he was the right choice.

My first goal was to get the blog site set up and running, but he offered much more. By researching key words he was able to give me some targets where I had a chance to dominate in my competitive market. He listened to my goals and helped me to devise a strategy for long term success. We talked about ways to promote my blog and build traffic as well as what I needed to do to get ranked higher with the search engines. It was a lot of information, but it was focused on my specific needs.

John had the technical knowledge to make the most of setting up the site. He helped me pick a Wordpress template that was easy to use and easy to read. He customized the template with my personal info, added widgets, set up contact boxes and a navigation bar that integrated my blog with my web site and optimized the site for search engine traffic. The site looks great, better than I imagined.

John got me off to a great start. Long term success is up to me, but I don’t know where I would be if I tried to do this on my own. If you are even thinking of starting a new blog you really should give him a call.

On a business level, I’m so passionate about Internet marketing because it works so well. But underneath it all, what really drives me is that I get such a boyish geek kick out of watching new web sites start to take off and start to be able to make their owners money.

So naturally it gives me great pleasure to see how successful Pete Thompson’s Illinois Mortgage Rates and News is in after only a short time. We’ve been having a phone conference every other day or so to get his new blog established, and it’s really fun to see the creativity and humor he brings to bear. For example, in a recent post, Pete dispelled the myth that mortgage brokers have packed it in and no one’s getting loans any more. (This point is less obvious than it appears. Listening to some of my clients, I’m beginning to think that tales of people not qualifying for loans have taken on the status of urban legends!)

Pete’s already had a few people stop by and comment, and he’s indexed by some of the more important blog search engines and social networking services, and Google’s started picking up his content as well.

What really gets me excited as well is that he’s well on his way (we’ll do a few more tweaks over the next few days), and he was able to accomplish this for about 1/6th the cost of one of my competitors. So in the first year, he’ll save some $2,800 for the same results, and he’ll continue to save year after year on his web hosting bill.

The last few days I’ve been getting a steady flow of traffic to the site. There haven’t been as many subscribers as I’d like to have yet, but in general I’ve been hearing from a lot of people and getting a few nice “keep up the good work emails.”

Even more encouraging, especially as I’m starting to talk about possible service offerings like my is the number of calls I’ve been getting from people who already have a real estate blog that they’ve purchased from another vendor and who’ve been picking my brain for solutions to problems the other vendor doesn’t provide.

A few things have become obvious in the course of these discussions:

• People are paying more than they should for separate web sites and blogging solutions. Given that I run several sites that successfully integrate IDX and Wordpress blogs, and given that I’m an IHomefinder reseller, I can compete on cost and still provide an excellent product.
• People are also paying a huge amount just to learn how to blog. Now granted, if you’re non-technical, there are some skills that need to be mastered, but I believe you can do a lot of this online with some combination of 1) the right tutorials and 2) online teleconferencing courses.

The other thing that’s also helping me sharpen up my service offerings has been thinking through some of the parts of my outline of a Real Estate Webmaster Training Course. As I was doing this, it became pretty apparent that I was probably getting into far too much depth on certain issues in my zeal to create a sort of “Help-U-Sell (Online)” discount model.

I probably had this “Every-Agent-A-Webmaster” zeal as an overreaction to that nagging question that I keep thinking about: You paid HOW MUCH AGAIN to learn how to use Wordpress ? ! ?

Probably there’s a way to cook this porridge so that it’s neither too hot nor to cold.

PS: It turns out I have had porridge. It’s just oatmeal. Who knew?