I’ve been upgrading some of my blogs to WordPress 2.5, and the results have not been pretty.  The mistakes I’ve been making along the way are pretty amateurish ones, but I’m professional enough to make my amateurish mistakes first on low priority blogs of my own rather than on one of my important blogs or on a client’s blog.

Mainly what I’ve been bumping into is deleting my backups prematurely.  Don’t do that.  Backup everything, and keep everything for a week until you find out what the upgrade broke.  That way you’ll keep your old “wp-content” directory, and the “upload” directory off of that, which (unless you changed the setting for this) contains all the images that Windows Live Writer uploaded automatically for you over the course of the months, ever since you went through my Windows Live Writer tutorial video — for example.  (Ironically, the image link to that tutorial was one of the images I lost, so I just had to re-create it.  Live by the sword, die by the sword, etc.).

So if you’re going to do an upgrade, I recommend you start by reading Lorelle van Fossen’s Upgrade Preparation Checklist.  And then where Lorelle says Backup Everything, you might substitute: “Backup everything, and then don’t be an idiot and delete it right away once things are up and running — do extensive testing over several weeks and then delete the backups.”

This week it is an honor and a treat to welcome another outstanding guest author in our “What’s Your Real Estate Internet Marketing Streategy” series. Maureen Francis is the author of miOaklandCounty.com, which (among other distinctions) is Google’s #1 blog for “Oakland County Real Estate”. Her guest post is below.

The Internet has been at the center of our real estate business almost since we got our licenses a few days before September 11, 2001. I recently wrote the full story about how we began and where our Internet marketing has gotten us as a response to a question about return on investment. I won’t bore you with repeating it, but let’s just say that if you were laying odds on who had NO CHANCE of succeeding in real estate, you might have picked me and my husband, Dmitry.

We’ve built much of our business through technology. We work in one of the wealthiest areas in the State of Michigan. Many of our peers in our Sotheby’s International Realty office have built wildly successful careers through their country club memberships and their social connections. I envy them. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to get her clients while sitting by a pool or drinking cocktails after golf? And I don’t even like golf. These are good agents who work hard and know their market. Their clients just come to them differently than mine tend to come to me.

Marketing us

• Our first web site, Oakland-County-Homes.com is a template site provided by homes.com. I’m not happy with it and it is probably on the chopping block from my marketing budget.
• Our next site was a blog, on Blogger.com. That I began 3 years ago. We converted over to wordpress about 18 months ago, and our traffic exploded with better SEO. miOaklandCounty.com is our main site now, and the center of our Internet marketing plan.
• About 6 months ago, we started miBirmingham.com, which was a free Point2Agent site that I quickly upgrade. I am very happy with it, other than the fact that I think it is “ugly.” I should pay to have it customized. Oakland-County-Homes.com gets much more traffic, primarily because it is an old site and Google knows about it. miBirmingham.com gets more leads. I’ll take leads over traffic any day.
• I’ve had an ActiveRain blog almost since the beginning. I’ve gotten very few leads from it, but I’ve done some great networking. I really have not blogged much there in almost a year.
• I’ve just started contributing to AgentGenius. I like the industry talk and that does not belong on miOaklandCounty.com.
• Social Networking. I think I am everywhere. LinkedIn and Twitter are my favorites.

Our business was built on Internet marketing. We no longer snail mail much at all. We don’t cold call. I don’t do open houses. We have a good referral base and we get lots of opportunities from our sites.

Marketing Our Listings

In terms of marketing our listings a few of our favorite tech tools are:

• Vflyer.com
• MrLetter.com
• Our Point2Agent site because it syndicates our listings, easily creates free virtual tours, and we use it to create free pseudo single property sites with their free subdomains. We then buy vinyl letters from MrLetter.com and put up a sign rider, like 284Tilbury.com. We get lots of bang for our buck with this. Total cost on our single property sites, including sign rider and godaddy domain is under $30.00.

The Internet has done right by us. We know no other way. I hope it’s not going away soon.

Related Posts:

Dave Smith on His Internet Marketing Strategy

Real Estate Internet Marketing Strategy Author’s Guide

This has been a busy week.  I was very gratified to get Dave Smith to come by and take part in our new series, What’s Your Internet Marketing Strategy, and Dave was a big enough draw that subscriptions went up quite a bit after his article.  I’ve started making inquiries of some exciting new authors.  If you have people you’d like to see, drop me a comment.

Over on Sacramento-Home.com, I had to play fix-the-code-that-Metrolist-broke after our local MLS changed its database structure.  I’ve been able to put together quite a few interesting web site features using a combination of MLS exports, a MySQL database, and some PHP programming.  The neat thing about such work is that you can offer your users some really custom content and search options, and I’ve found this goes over really well.  In spite of all the hype about blogging, home shoppers aren’t looking for a pundit — they’re looking for a house.  The down side is that every year or so you need to spend a day or two fixing code, but for the benefit, it’s certainly worth the time.

Everyone is hanging around on Twitter this week.  A few weeks ago everyone was hanging out on FaceBook.  As social networks go, you have to like Twitter, because once you’ve set up TwitterFeed to blab at your friends for you, you don’t actually have to spend any time blabbing at them yourself.  Well, there I go being a Luddite again.  If you want to try your hand at using Twitter to promote your blog, check out Chris Brogan’s guest post on ProBlogger.  That’s much better.  I’ll have to do resource post on Chris over at Inklit — he’s got some great stuff going on over there.

New Social Network alert.   Come play over at FriendFeed.

Many of our readers will recognize Dave Smith as the author of The Real Estate Blog Lab, a very popular blog about Dave’s experiments with using Wordpress. Dave also runs several blogs for his wife, Barbara Lasky, including the Tucson AZ Real Estate Blog and Tucson Real Estate In the News. Tucson Real Estate In the News has propelled BarbarLasky.com into a first page position on Google, while his other blog ranks equally well on MSN. Answering my call for guest authors to write about their Internet Marketing Strategy, Dave emailed me details on his real estate business. These included some production statistics that Dave later asked me to delete; I hope Dave will forgive me if I let you in on the secret that they were excellent.

Dave writes:

About 85% of our business for 2007 came from our Internet marketing. This is what I’m in charge of doing (you probably already had that one figured out).

2007 was our best year yet. Barbara has been in the business full time now for six years. I’m a newbie at just over two years, but was the database administrator for Long Realty Co. with more than 1500 agents in fifteen offices. They have expanded since I left.

I don’t know how many prospect/clients we are working with currently. I know it is quite a few. We have two sources of business.

1. Past clients and referrals from them.
2. The Internet marketing.

We have done more referrals this year than ever before. We have two commercial deals closing this month with a 20% referral which will be somewhere around $2.3 million between the two of them. These came from Internet leads from our blogs.

We do almost no print advertising except on our Sunday insert a few times a year. No magazine or other media. No mailings, nothing else except a small drip campaign: once a month a post card goes out with a tip of some kind from Barbara’s sharper agent account.

More Guest Authors Wanted

Do you have experience marketing your real estate business online? Has your web site rescued your business from the gloom of oblivion? If so, our readers want to hear your voice as part of our ongoing series, “What’s Your Real Estate Internet Marketing Strategy?” Please contact John Lockwood if you’re interested.

Related Posts:

What’s Your Internet Marketing Strategy: Author’s Guide

Well, you can sure give it a try!

I’ve been having great fun working on my 101 Subscribers in 30 Days promotion on my new Inklit Writing Blog.

A lot of people have stopped by and have helped me out tremendously as I work on the program.  Wasilla Realtor®, Marty Van Diest came by and lit a fire under me that I know needed lighting, to allow email subscribers as well as RSS subscribers.

In a matter not so much related to getting 101 new subscribers in 30 days as it is to overall gratitude, Authentic Real Estate Engagement expert, Dustin Luther, stopped by a couple of weeks ago to help me out on another issue that I needed some help with.  I appreciated his visit and the support.  You should check out Dustin’s blog if you’re a real estate agent / broker interested in taking full advantage of Web 2.0.

Win a Six Month Ad on a New Blog

I realize you’d rather have a six month ad on Problogger, but I didn’t write that one!  Those of you who like contests and who don’t mind taking a bit of a risk (your time only, not your gold) on a brand new venture may want to try pitching in to see if you can win a 6-month or 2-year ad at InkLit.com. 

Here are the Rules for the Ad Contest.

Santa Clarita Real Estate Blogger, Linda Slocum, went above and beyond the call first by being the only commenter on this cleverly re-titled post.

Following up on this, she promoted the contest for me on FaceBook.  I’m hoping to do well there.  People with their face in a book are a natural for a writing blog!

There’s been a lot of hype around real estate blogging, and a lot of it is well deserved.  Real estate blogging is a great way to promote yourself online, and it helps both human beings and the search engines come to know you over time.  Do it often enough, consistently enough, and you almost can’t go wrong.

If you read that last sentence carefully, however, you’ll see that therein lies the problem with real estate blogging.  "Often enough".  "Consistently enough".  Real estate blogging needs to be done repeatedly — ideally once per day or more for a new blog especially, day in and day out — to be successful.  That’s a pretty big investment in your own time.  For those of us who are prone to writing addictions, we certainly don’t mind the time invested — that’s what we do. 

For those traditionalists who believe in do-it-yourself content, you may enjoy our series on Twenty-One Easy Posts for your Real Estate Blog.

Who Uses Real Estate Blog Ghostwriters?

For others, there may be good reasons to occasionally or regularly seek the services of a ghostwriter to help in their real estate blogging efforts.  A real estate blog ghost writer may be a viable solution in a number of different cases:

• The real estate top producer looking to have a blog as one marketing piece among many, for whom blogging is a less productive use of time than being in front of clients.
• The brokers or team leader who wishes to use blogging as part of a larger strategy to drive traffic and leads to their web sites, but who prefer an investment of money over an investment of time to get this done.
• Real estate bloggers who want to have more content to use than they can reasonably produce themselves, in order to attract more readers than they could gather alone.
• Real estate agents or brokers who have a number of marketing ideas but who dislike writing or being "chained to their computer."

Weighing the Pros and Cons

The main advantage to using a ghostwriter is that you free up your time for other tasks.  The main disadvantage, of course, is that you’re negating one of the aspects of blogging that made it so cool to begin with:  the ability to create real estate leads through a combination of sweat equity and verbosity. 

Another thing to consider before hiring a ghostwriter is that in the short term, you’ll probably get more "bang-for-the-buck" from a pay-per-click advertising campaign.  Whether you write it yourself or hire someone to write it, the beauty of content is that it will be indexed for a long time, so although it may provide results more slowly and unreliably than a pay per click campaign, the results it does provide are more persistent.

Occasional Internet real estate marketing blogger, John Lockwood, who had been missing from his blog for several weeks, was found today at his keyboard.  Doctors commented that for someone suffering from exposure, he looked surprisingly well fed.

The rescue team that was sent out to find Lockwood had little comment on the discovery.  Rescue dog handler, Norbert Dimwhistle, had this to say about his dogs’ discovery:  "I don’t know.  Usually when the dogs sniff someone out, they get all excited and bark their heads off.  With Lockwood they just curled up nearby and went to sleep.  I don’t think he’s all that exciting."

Hi There, John Lockwood Here

Well, it looks like "The Onion" won’t be hiring any new writers soon.

January and February were somewhat busy months in real estate, with me working with several buyers of my own — sometimes productively and sometimes not.  So part of the answer to the question of where I’ve been has been that I’ve been selling a house and driving around a lot.

As soon as things wound down a bit at the end of February, naturally I couldn’t just show up here and work on business interest #2.  No, dumb time-management school dropout that I am, at that point I had to stick another iron in the fire, a brand new blog about writing, Inklit.com.

Oh yes, and I almost forgot:  while I was missing I also invented the Real Estate Johnosphere.

As Warren Buffet remarked famously:  Diversification is for the ignorant.  I plead guilty.

Now you know why he’s a billionaire and I put search and rescue dogs to sleep.

One of the elusive goals that I’ve had for my business for many years is to improve our customer service and our follow-up on leads while centralizing my company’s database of clients.

That’s why I was very excited this week when I took a second look at 37signal’s product HighRise.  The first time I looked at HighRise it struck me as a bit simplistic, but this time around it dawned on me that I may have found a solution that does about 99% of what I expect and need it to do, and does it elegantly and affordably.

Tracking IHomeFinder Leads

One of the core features of HighRise is its ability to work superbly well with email.   Elite Properties has several real estate web sites that I’ve developed over the years, and all the most productive ones are running IHomefinder IDX.  For some time now the workflow has looked like:  leads come in to my computer, and I either handle them myself or have my email software (Eudora) forward them to the agent on duty.  This works tolerably well, but as a broker needless to say I’m always looking out for a way to increase our conversion rate, and I also want to know that the leads my company has spent lots of time developing (through hard earned blogging / SEO sweat equity) are followed up efficiently.  Moreover, the system falls down somewhat if an agent is out on a listing appointment or showing property, since when that happens the leads tend to just sit in their inbox all day.

This problem brings us to a core feature of HighRise, the "dropbox", which is a kind of intelligent mailbox that can read incoming email that’s forwarded to it, figure out who it was forwarded from, and either create a new record for that contact or add the email information to the existing contact.  So now instead of forwarding to the agents, which I was already doing, I can simply tell Eudora to forward them to HighRise, and Highrise will instantly create a contact record for the lead, or add it to the contact history that already exists.  It doesn’t get every field in the right place (such as phone numbers in the lead), but since the email text is sent along with it, it’s easy to just paste things into the right place.

In addition to email tracking, HighRise allows you to very easily keep notes on conversations and calls, and track tasks you might want to schedule such as follow up calls or emails or property showings.  The UI design is mostly elegantly simple and uncluttered, with the tools right where you need them to be.

Tag, You’re It!

HighriseHQ you can "tag" a contact with pretty much any keyword you want, and the tags are pretty much like the blog tags that many of my readers here will be familiar with from "Tag Clouds".  One of the uses I like for Tags is that it allows me to assign a lead to an individual using their name, or to mark it as "Open" so the first agent to be available can claim it.  No doubt once you get in to the software you’ll find lots of uses for tags.

The Down Side

HighRise lives and dies by simplicity.  The fact that it does a few things extremely well and poses a practically non-existent learning curve is a core feature.  On the other hand, once in awhile you find yourself wishing it would do some things better or be a bit more configurable.  Although there’s an API available for developers, if you’re a non-programming power user you’ll find that you either like what it does, or you don’t, because you aren’t going to be changing it much.  I’m sure a lot of this comes from its developers being a Ruby on Rails shop.  Ruby on Rails is a web development tradition noted for an extreme minimalism.  This can be great on a tools level, but one might argue that minimalism outlives its usefulness when it seeps into the product.

One feature I would like, for example, relates to upcoming tasks.  When you create tasks, they show up in a view that tells you what’s scheduled today, next week, later, etc., and the dates are displayed (without days of the week!) but as soon as you have four or five tasks in there, you find yourself wishing for a calendar view so you can see them graphically.  Another feature that would be nice is to display times along with dates for notes and contact creation.  Also, HighRise’s dropboxes work fine with plain text emails, but they strip links out of HTML emails.  As a result, those easy-to-use links that IHomefinder provides to log in and see what homes a potential client is looking at go away.  A workaround for that is to also forward the lead to a separate shared email account, but naturally that’s a bit of a hack.

Overall Impressions

On balance, for me the simplicity and ease of use of HighRise and its ability to "do the right thing" with a new lead far outweigh the features it lacks.  Add to that the fact that getting a team of a half dozen agents up and running will set you back only about $24 per month compared to $210 per month for Top Producer, and HighRise’s minimalism becomes if anything even more exciting.  We’re in the middle of rolling it out and I will let you know how it goes!

This week I found lots of lists of more reading to do.  It’s amazing how a few hours with populating a good feed reader with great feeds can quickly pile up to more reading than you can possibly keep up with. 

Build Quality Links
You may have heard that along with great content, good quality incoming links are essential to a successful search engine optimization campaign.  There are dozens of ways to go about this, and Sergey Rusak, an SEO specialist in Boston, has published an excellent list to get you started in his article, 52 Ways to Get Quality Links.  (I think English is Sergey’s second language — nevertheless the resources collected there are awesome).  For that article, we have a hat tip to Lorelle on Wordpress (and by the way, though we may not be attending SOBCon — I’ve found Lorelle’s blog to be always worth a trip).  Remember when embarking on a link building strategy to always keep in mind Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and their page on Link Schemes.

Brushing Up Your SEO
Writing for the Online Marketing Blog, Lee Odden covered the winners in Search Engine Journal’s Search Engine Marketing Blog Awards.

Social Networking Software
Those of you who found my critique of Ning.com to be a bit over the top and who are looking for a serious review of some social networking software solutions may want to check out this review of Ning, Kickapps and other social networking software.  After John Jantsch stopped by last week I saw he was running a social network on Kickapps, so I stopped by there to give it a spin.  So far I’ve found Ning to be a bit more robust.

Real Estate FAQ
As he always does, Phoenix Real Estate guy Jay Thompson has done a good job implementing a real estate marketing idea that you sometimes see surfacing on other sites, the Real Estate FAQ.  Such in depth real estate coverage may help you with "long tail" search results, and help to establish your expertise to your clients and your site’s relevance to the search engines.

Have you been successful in your real estate or lending career largely (or partially) because of your Internet marketing? Our “What’s Your Internet Marketing Strategy” series (see our announcement) highlights authors who are using the Internet to close more business. You don’t have to have an “Internet-only” marketing strategy or be a super top producer, but in general we’ll try to focus on authors who are either so active now that their future success seems assured, or those who have a history of at least three or more closed escrows per year from their Internet marketing efforts. Mainly what we’re looking for in the series is a variety of different viewpoints.

Guest authors of course will have their own byline and appropriate links in their article.  (I recommend no more than five self-serving links, and no more than eight links overall).  If you’re interested in contributing, please contact me and let’s discuss it.

This article goes into some questions and guidelines that may be helpful to you as a guest author in our “What’s Your Internet Marketing Strategy” series. You don’t have to answer any particular questions an certainly not all of them, but you may find that going over the list will help you to come up with ideas to round out your article:

• How important is the Internet to your overall marketing plan? Is it the only kind of marketing you do, or is it just one of many strategies?
• What percentage of your business can you trace to Internet marketing?
• What companies have helped you with your Internet marketing?
• What role if any does your personal web site(s) play in your marketing strategy?
• What role if any does your blog (s) in your marketing strategy?
• Which of the following (if any) have been important to you?
  • Organic search engine optimization.
  • Link building or reciprocal linking.
  • Pay per click advertising.
  • Other traffic generation (banner ads, directories, etc).
  • Pay for lead services.
• How do you use social networking services (if at all)? Social networking services include ActiveRain, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, etc., etc.
• How many closed transactions can you trace back directly to social networking services?
• How important are having online listings to your strategy?
• Do you have visitors register for listings?
• What types of leads does your web site generate? Which of these have you had the most success at closing?
• What do you consider the strengths of your online marketing program? What do you think could be improved?
• What do you do in the way of short-term follow-up? How fast do you respond to your leads on average?
• What types of long-term follow-up systems do you have? Do you do any drip marketing other than sending listings (a newsletter, etc.).
• How cost effective is Internet marketing compared to other forms of marketing you’ve done?