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Here is a tutorial about getting started with Windows Live Writer. It takes you through the process of downloading and installing the software and configuring it for your Wordpress Blog. Enjoy!

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.

When I first got into Real Estate, I came from a background in software development (including, most recently, web site development). Because of this background, as soon as I learned that people were meeting real estate clients on-line, it became my goal to create a profitable web site. Soon afterwards, I set out to create and maintain several profitable web sites.

When I first heard about blogging in 2003, I thought of blogging software as a way to do help me do just that. They say if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see everything as a nail. In my case I saw my task as content development, so every type of software I looked to me like a content management system.

With the rise of social networking, I began noticing a shift away from creating your own content on your own site to hanging around with your friends. In the last year or so, I’ve been repeatedly surprised by the extent to which people — including my colleagues, other Realtors® — are content to rent instead of own their online properties. This was driven home today by an outstanding article by CopyBlogger’s Brian Clark, Are You Someone’s User Generated Content? Clark points to many articles by leading bloggers discussing the regrets people have felt when they neglected their own Internet properties — their blogs — to explore social networking.

Clark sums up my own feelings about frittering one’s time on Facebook, (or mismanaging it on MySpace, if you prefer):

For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating “user-generated” content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.

This metaphor should be especially apt to Realtors®, who know first hand the benefits our clients can derive from their own sweat equity.

Is your sweat equity being invested in your own online real estate, or are you remodeling someone else’s kitchen for free?

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I don’t usually like blogs with a lot of Adsense ads staring you in the face.  However, I did enjoy Brandon Cornett’s article on How to Write a Real Estate Ad - Magazine Ad Writing 101.  Too often we speak in generalities like “excellent customer service”, and Brandon talks about how to get down to specific real estate stories of interest and calls to action. 

Brandon’s example of an online real estate forum is an interesting idea and might be useful as a lead incubation strategy.  One reason I’ve never launched such a forum myself, however, is the issue of size.  I wonder if one can run a successful forum when the number of people buying or selling a home is fairly small.  Even in a great month in my area, for example, there are only a couple of thousand homes changing hands.  I guess on the one hand you don’t care how many people are there, as long as some of them turn into customers, but to me the most interesting forums are the ones with lots of members.

Speaking of interesting forums, RealEstateWebmasters.com just announced a fairly major upgrade to their free real estate blogs.  Real Estate Webmasters blogs provide an excellent opportunity to showcase your content, and they have very good search engine authority as well so you might link back to your other site from your Real Estate Webmaster blog.  Don’t overdo it, though — remember the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

At the same time, ActiveRain recently announced a sneak preview of their new outside blogs.  I’m sure they’ll sell a lot of them if they price them right, because they have the ideal audience for such an upsell, but I do admit I take issue with two items on their feature list.  First is the idea of not learning a new blogging platform.  Well, that’d be ok if their platform was the superior one, but I imagine I might get Pete Thompson to vouch for how much easier the Livewriter / Wordpress combination is to use, and the latest (finally not beta) version of Live Writer makes it really easy to set up for your Wordpress blog. 

Secondly, the outside blog announcement said, “You will be able to benefit from the SEO knowledge and power of ActiveRain.”   The myth of ActiveRain’s SEO mojo is an oft-repeated one — Mike Jones boasts that “Active Rain works (brings Google to your door) regardless of your ability to write or your desire to blog”.  Wow, that’s not only incredible, it’s not credible.   Mike cites his Tucson area colleagues, including Marsee Wilhems, “one of Tucson’s most successful REALTORS”.  OK, I’ll bite, let’s see where the first ActiveRain blog is for the key words “Tucson real estate”, shall we?  I tried “Tucson Real Estate” on Google, and got to page 10 without finding ActiveRain anywhere.  (And yes, I tried “localism”, too.  If any true believers wants to begin the hunt for ActiveRain results starting at page 11, let me know).  I’m sure Marsee Williams is successful, but I suspect her success is minimally related to ActiveRain’s content-free Google fairy dust.

There is no silver bullet, folks, sorry.  The alternatives are:  open wallet, pay Google or Yahoo, or massive content published over a long period of time combined with sensible link building.

And that’s the week in review.  Have a great weekend.

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.

I’m pleased to announce that I’m currently beginning work on a blog installation and training program for for Peter Thompson, a Chicago Loan Officer.  Peter and I met through a comment I made on ActiveRain and we hit it off right away, because I was able to provide him with a low cost and personalized set of services to:

• Improve the Search Engine Optimization of his existing web site.
• Research effective key words to use for his web site and blog.
• Install a Wordpress blog based on a standard template, with some customization to the template.
• Suggest strategies for blogging topics, attracting more visitors (both customers and colleagues that can contribute to the blog’s success), etc.

Based on some of the writing I’ve seen from him both on his newly launched site and his Active Rain blog and his “in it for the long haul” attitude, I expect that it won’t be long before his new blog will ultimately serve as a major resource for Illinois home finance information.