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.

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.

Find Ways to Use These Groaning Resources

It’s time for the Week In Review, so I’ll publish Part III of Twenty-One Easy Real Estate Blog Posts on Monday. 

This week I found a new tool to help me gather my Week In Review links, Awasu (Gesundheit!).  Awasu is a very slick — if, at times, somewhat buggy — RSS feed reader for Windows.  I’ll probably have an in depth review in a future post. 

Pet peeve time:  People who use "Blog" to mean a single post on a Blog.  These are no doubt the same people who say Real-a-tor.

This week’s Web 2.0 "There Must Be Something We Can Do With All These Web Sites" award goes to John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing for his brief Let’s Get More Social article.  Sometimes I think Social Networks should be the butt of the joke we used to tell in college about sociology — that it’s a subject in search of a subject matter.  As John says, "You’ve got to get in there and find ways to use these growing resources." (Right — because it sure ain’t obvious).

On the other extreme, the winner of this week’s "The Heck With That, I’m Growing My Own Resources" award is Elite Properties’ own Sacramento Real Estate Gal, Purva Brown, who graciously calls me a mentor even though most of her success is just from getting in there and learning and making things happen.  Purva just escaped the Google sandbox yesterday and is now appearing on page 2 of Google for a keyword combination with 725,000 competitors.  Not bad for six months!  Go Purva!

In other Web 2.0 news, Bruce Clay’s web site scared the tar out of me when I glanced at an article Why Social Media.  Bruce is a very renowned SEO expert, so if he’s telling you to yank your YouTube [I can’t believe he said that], part time luddites like me are in a heap of trouble.  It turns out the article was by a guest author, so it looks like I dodged a bullet for this week.

New reader and fellow Real Estate Marketing author Tim O’Keefe throws a much needed wet blanket on the often lightless fire of ActiveRain. 

Back in the heady world of experimentation, this week social networking for Realtors super-trailblazers Ashley Drake Gephart and Bill Gassett invited me to a new business social network, Konnect.com.  Social network #1,327, please fix your search engine if you want to be taken seriously before the Internet moves on to the next big thing.

You should be reading this guy, if you’re not already.

Do you need a free ratings widget for your blog?  Chances are good that you don’t.  No link for you, Outbrain.  (Doh!)

Meantime for those of you who are not content with these mere seven-day retrospectives, Tamar Weinberg has prepared a list of 2007’s Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts, hat tip to Andy Beard.  Those of you who feel compelled to take on John Jantsch’s challenge to "find ways to use these growing resources", please work your way through the list and report back.  Hey, come to think of it, Ashley and Bill should be guest authors here…

Recently I announced a new guest author series entitled "What’s Your Internet Real Estate Marketing Strategy?"  The point of that series is to hear from Realtors® who are successful in their online marketing efforts but who have a view of Internet marketing that’s different from mine.

One of the ways it’s possible to be successful online that’s about as different as it can be from the way I do it is to use online lead reseller companies like HomeGain.com.  On Monday I’ll have an article that talks about how my own Internet marketing evolution is a response against a "lead reseller" agent in my office, and how I swung to the other extreme to become highly focused on Search Engine Optimization and content development.

With this in mind, this week I started looking into information about these companies and looking for Realtors® with an opinion on them one way or another.  Minnesota’s Josyln Panka sparked an excellent discussion, the comments of which serve as a sort of introduction to Realtor® opinions about HomeGain.  One commenter there, Nevada Broker, Sue Nelson, had some very positive things to say about her HomeGain results, so I stopped by and invited her to talk about her marketing strategy in our forthcoming series. Another person weighing in on this thread was Louis Cammarosano, HomeGain’s general manager.  Googling his name will bring you to all sorts of other interesting links about HomeGain versus Zillow.

Former HomeGain Sales Director Chris Hendricks defended HomeGain’s switch to a monthly-subscription model for its AgentEvaulator product by discussing an absolutely crucial element to successful online marketing — successful follow-up. 

Perhaps the best single source for discussion of HomeGain and other lead generation companies that I found was on Realtown.com’s Lead Generation Blog.  An excellent guide to who the players are is the "View by Vendor" blogroll on the left hand side, and the articles here are a good mix of criticisms of the Lead Generation companies and success stories.

This week I finally published the video Windows Live Writer Tutorial that I’ve been meaning to do for some time. This tutorial goes through getting up and running, but I didn’t yet get into some of the really neat Live Writer features that would make you want to get up and running. As a supplement to my tutorial in the meantime you might check out some of the other reviews and articles out there. Phil Waineright’s Writer is Microsoft’s first Live Killer App has an older (but still good) overview of the features — and Live Writer now supports tags, which was missing when he wrote that post. Paul Stamatiou also wrote an excellent Live Writer Review with several screen shots based on the beta. Paul also mentions a few of the drawbacks of the software that I hadn’t noticed. Finally, Michael Pick has produced an excellent Windows Live Writer Video Review — which shows among other things that I need to work on my Camtasia to Youtube skills (no, I don’t think I will link to my Youtube video — that’s the point).

Aside from Live Writer goodies, the other news is that it is almost Christmas, which means it’s also almost New Years, so it’s time to start thinking about things like business planning and goal setting. There are only about two shopping days left to participate in DailyBlogTips’s Group Writing Project, 2008 Blogging Goals.

Finally, I installed a new theme for this site earlier this week, ParticleWave_01, a custom theme I designed recently. One of the items on what’s getting to be a rather long ParticleWave “to do list” is to make a version of that theme available.

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.

This week we look at some of the resources that can help make you a better blogger. 

Lately I’ve been finding that a lot of the best tips can be found on the general blogging sites, rather than on the sites about real estate blogging and the usual real estate social networks.

An excellent starting point for example is Darren Rowse’s series Blogging Tips for Beginners.

Another excellent resource for blogging advice is the Daily Blog Tips site, which has a very high ratio of posts that actually are, go figure, daily blog tips.

My favorite resource from the point of view of improving your blog writing is the CopyBlogger blog, which focuses on blogging as a special case of ad copy writing.

We’ve written about landing page optimization before.  Traditionally, folks running a pay per click campaign were very interested in making sure they’re converting as many visitors as possible.  However, even if you’re blogging, you should not ignore the fact that you are, at the end of the day, working to make a sale, not just to have your head appear on as many social networks as possible (though we’ll get to that in a minute, too).  This week we uncovered the article, Ten Tips for Lead Generation Landing Pages, which is especially relevant to real estate marketing.

With the recent changes in the Google page rank of many major web sites, many people are wondering if there are other indicators of a web site’s importance that are somehow “better” than PR.  One of the tools I came across this week in this context was Solo SEO’s IndexRank tool.  IndexRank is a measure of how fast a site is growing, based on how many pages are indexed over a period of time.

I wrote about Ning earlier in the week, taking a bit of a critical view of the idea of a social network for everything, everyone.  Later in the week however I had to hurry up and head over to Cre8Buzz after getting a nice invitation from Metrowest’s Bill Gassett, one of our first active readers here on ParticleWave.  Let me pass that invitation along to all you real estate professionals, come sign up at Cre8Buzz.

Now that you’re done buzzing, get ready to learn about Web Analytics and SEO.  Analytics is the subject of Justin Cutroni’s excellent blog focusing on Google Web Analytics, Analytics Talk.  On the SEO front, Original Signal has put together the RSS feeds for several outstanding SEO sites into a single resource, Broadcasting SEO.

And finally, you may need some pretty pictures for your blog.  I personally like the big selection of photos that are more or less a buck at IStockphoto.com, but when it absolutely positively has to be free, check out these public domain photos and this list of free / cheap photo web sites.

The Good Learning Stuff:

Last week I started running my blogging platforms material by a few folks at ActiveRain, and several people who are building their ActiveRain points using content from their other blog asked me about duplicate content. In the course of writing my reply to that I came across the closest thing I’ve found to the official Google Position on duplicate content.

This week I was beginning preliminary work on some posts about A/B Testing, which is one of the ways you can test how different changes to a web page improve or detract from your conversion rate. In the course of looking into how you might use Google Analytics to do A/B testing, I found that Google now has yet another free webmaster tool, the Website Optimizer, which helps you do conversion testing on your site. You can check out the video here.

This week I also taught Purva how to use LiveWriter. Well, John, how come you’re not putting together a nice Camtasia Studio tutorial about LiveWriter and posting it here? How come indeed. Stay tuned. Meantime I saw this post to whet your Live Writer appetite.

The Politics and Opinion Stuff:

SEO, it seems to me, is getting a bad rap from a lot of people, including my good friend, Dave Smith, in his article SEO De-programmers Needed for RE Bloggers. I don’t know if I really want to rebut this or just move on to more “teaching” posts.

One thing that can be said about SEO is that it is a fickle beast in many respects. My own favorite search position is in the toilet this week, so I’m resisting the urge to tailspin into a depression and sit around eating Snickers bars, and instead writing this post.

Your welcome.

In a result that may be completely unrelated, the big news on everyone’s lips is the Great Google Slap of 2007. After documenting the problem fairly well, I thought, Andy Beard went on to point out this amusing Surrender Letter from a Webmaster.

Real Estate Internet Marketing Week In Review is a new weekly feature where I highlight either the authors and blogs and posts that I found interesting in my reading from the week past or that I thought Realtors® and real estate webmasters should know about.

My series on Comparing Real Estate Blog Platforms was a fairly general overview of real estate blogging options. A more in depth review of specific blogging software is available in Problogger.net’s Choosing a Blog Platform.

Thomas McMahon, writing for Toprank’s Online Marketing Blog, prepared a handy introduction and review of Google’s Webmaster Tools, which is a free set of tools that helps you see your site as Google does.

Whether you’re looking to extend your reach online, get free exposure for a listing, network with your peers, or what have you, an outstanding starting point is Oliver Muoto’s list of Web 2.0 Companies Realtors® Should Care About.

My own marketing philosophy is summed up neatly in the equation SEO + IDX = $$$. For those of you who think you have an online image that needs to be nurtured, however, Bobby Carroll has an interesting article on Digital Brand Management. Again, I offer this position not because I agree with it, but in spite of that. PT Barnum is reported to have said “I don’t care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right.” I might paraphrase: “I don’t care what they say about me as long as my marketing is successful enough that you’re reading what I say about me.”

And now for something that I do agree with, Brad Carroll recently posted this outstanding article on why you should not force your users to register before allowing them access to your IDX web site listings. I’ve agreed with this opinion for years because of the money I’ve made specifically from people who told me not having to register was why they chose me. Brad takes this a step further and explains the psychology and reasoning behind this.

Finally, my friends at Sellsius Real Estate posted this worthwhile blogging tip:

If you are a real estate broker or agent, do a post on closing costs, with a breakdown of real estate transfer taxes, and estimated costs, and put it permanently in the sidebar. Every serious buyer or seller will click it. You betcha. It’s a good way to market your real estate expertise.

Readers, did you happen across a site or blog that should be included in our Real Estate Internet Marketing Week In Review series? If so, please let us know!