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