Looking Out From the Garage

This is the second in a series of posts on tools and technologies for real estate agents that want to compete in a Web 2.0 world. 

Let's get this out of the way at the top of the show...  There are two "brands" of WordPress to pick from.  The one I will be almost completely ignoring is WordPress.com.  That is the version that is NOT self-hosted.  Basically, unless you pay to upgrade your account, the URL will be WhatYouPick.WordPress.com.  That isn't the only thing, though... 

• Related posts from other people's blogs can show up on your post... and you don't have control over whose posts those may be.
• There is little control over the theming and plug-ins of the site.

So, the main event...

Some people refer to this as WordPress.org... that is where you can go to get it... But most of us just call it WordPress.  It is an Open Source Content Management System tuned especially for blogging.  And what that means to the non-UberGeeky is that we can install content, separately from the style of the site...  This allows the theme to be (fairly) easily changed, and the site to be optimized by the individual user. 

I should mention that I could write a LOT about WordPress.  It is VERY cool and VERY flexible.  In fact, I already have written a lot about WordPress on LaneBailey.info.  And that brings me to one of the coolest things...  The link I just gave you is a Landing Page.  Basically, instead of sending you to the front page of the website, or to an individual post, I gave a link to every post on that site that is tagged "WordPress".  Instead of having to wade through posts about other subjects, you get a site that is tuned to your expectations... Imagine sending buyers to a site that has just information for buyers, or a site just for sellers, or just local business reviews or even just posts about holiday decorations.  If you make a tag for it, the site can sift through all of your posts and present only the posts that have that tag.

Why Blog on WordPress?

Control...  Complete and total control.  For some, that is the scariest thing in the world... for others it is terribly exciting.  Plug-ins, design, function... everything.  You can get under the hood and tune it until it is optimal for you and your usage.  And that usage can be wide and varied... 

Some of the uses that can be applied are:

• Regular blog
• News magazine
• Property website
• Neighborhood news site
• Group blog
• Dynamic website

Unlike WordPress.com, Blogger, Active|Rain or most other hosted solutions, having a self-hosted WordPress blog allows almost an unlimited amount of creativity and flexibility.  And, after getting a hosting account set up, building blogs with WordPress is effectively free.  Many hosts allow you to have scores of sites hosted for under $100/year...  I have more than a dozen websites on my host, BlueHost.  They also have a service called Simple Scripts.  This allows one-click installs of WordPress, Joomla and other web applications. 

Whether you want to build out a website for each of your listings, a news site for neighborhood associations in your farm area or just a dynamic website for your business, WordPress allows that goal to be accomplished in a straight forward manner. 

Why Not Blog on WordPress?

Now, this is specifically about blogging for business, not about maintaining a business website, personal blog, property website or neighborhood site...  JUST about blogging for business, for the real estate business. 

Time.  Not the time it takes to blog, because I feel that is a worthwhile expenditure, but the time it takes to make the blog rank with search engines.  Also, sites like Active|Rain allow more community interaction. 

When building a property blog, the primary means of promotion will be direct linking and advertising the link.  Using an Active|Rain blog to promote property blogs (by blogging about them), or promoting a dynamic website (by deep-linking) to pages inside or building a neighborhood news site by giving out the link in neighborhood newsletters are all ways to use WordPress that avoid the shortcomings of a normal self-hosted blog. 

Also, allowing a business blog to take time building rank, while using a parallel platform like Active|Rain, is a solid strategy. 

When I started my primary self-hosted blog, LaneBailey.com, Active|Rain didn't yet offer "outside blogs" or RainMakers.  Had that choice been available, I might not have embarked on the WordPress journey.  I am glad that I did it, but there have been some tough times...  I have crashed my site more times than I can count.  I have made things disappear, re-appear, get changed around...  I have sat up all night trying to figure out why my site was inaccessible.  But I have also learned how to get past those challenges.  And I know that I can do almost anything I want with WordPress. 

Obviously...

I can't say everything about WordPress in one post.  Just like Active|Rain, it is a versatile and multi-faceted tool.  But, it is a tool that is worth learning about.  Hopefully the links above will help deliver a little more insight into ways to use WordPressto build a better real estate business.

Ok, I talked about where to find themes, Footer Links to be wary of and the basic types of layouts for WordPress themes.  Now I want to talk about some of the details of themes...  Kind of a glossary of terms that one might run across while looking at themes for their self-hosted WordPress blog. 

Just a note here.  There are tthings to consider when looking at themes for WordPress.org.  This is the version where you load WordPress onto your own hosting account, not WordPress.com... the hosted type. 

Fixed Width - As the name implies, the width of the theme is fixed.  The good side of this is that the blog owner knows how the site will display... it is the same regardless of the viewers computer.  The bad side is that if they have a wide screen, it will be a band down the middle.  If they have a narrow screen, they might have to scroll to the side to see everything. 

Fluid Width - Instead of a fixed width, the theme expands or contracts to fit the monitor of the viewer.  On the good side, the display generally looks good... it fits where it sits.  But... that also means that different people will see different presentations.  Pictures may move around a bit.  Things might not fit the alloted area. 

Widget Ready - This means that the sidebars are able to be modified.  The blog owner can add widgets to their blog... Even if a theme isn't widget ready, it might be modifiable to accept widgets. 

Plug-ins Required (or not) - Some themes need other plug-ins to be installed in order to function.  Others don't.  I would select a theme based on that criteria... plug-ins are easy to deal with. 

Picture Menu - Instead of having a post represented with text, the posts are represented with an uploaded image.  I am working on one here.  Each post will have a descriptive picture.  Of course, I won't be posting every day...  These might also be called Graphic Menu or Image Posts... or a variation.

Boy, with Inman Blogger's Connect, RE Bar Camp and the change over to Diamond Dwelling, the VERY last thing I need is to take on projects. 

So, I'm taking on projects...

Because of the information from the events above, as well as just knowing that i needed to do it in order to clean up my SEO and make my blog more user friendly, I have decided that I need to get these things done. 

And no matter how busy I am right now, I will get busier if I am doing the right things...

So, there is no time like the present.  I have WAY too much to do, but at least I can check this off the list and not have it hanging over me while I am buried in even more goo. 

So, what are the projects...

Building the Jeepster?

I wish.  But, no, that isn't what is getting done.  What I have to do is this...

• Go through all of my posts on LaneBailey.com and tag the posts.  I was REALLY lax about doing it as i posted, and while i have had the tag cloud there, I haven't really had accurate tags populating the cloud.  So, there are 396 posts there and the vast majority (like 390) aren't well tagged.  Even the ones that are tagged often have pointless tags on them, like "atlanta" when the post really isn't about Atlanta.  Gotta fix it!
• Go through all of my Active|Rain posts and make sure that any links pointing back to my site point back to LaneBailey.com.  When I first launched my "other" blog, it was on Blogger.  I had links back to it, and so now those are pointing somewhere that isn't helpful to my SEO.  I still own that platform, but would rather have the link juice feeding my LaneBailey.com blog.  
• Go through all of my old Blogger posts and make sure that all references point back to LaneBailey.com instead of posts within Blogger.  Same issue as above. 
  
• Go through all of my LaneBailey.com posts, A|R posts and Blogger posts to change any A|R references to my "outside" blog, GwinnettGarageGuy.com.  Sure, I want A|R to have good juice, but I want MY domains to have the power. 
  

While doing this I hope that LaneBailey.com picks up a little bit of page rank.  I have some goals I am trying to meet for that site, including building a little more traffic and ranking better for some search terms. 

I think this is something that needs to be done regularly...

Just like that deep cleaning of the house... we need to get in and shampoo the tags and categories.  I use a septic treatment in my septic system to keep the poo flowing... and I need to make sure that links are going to the best place. 

Yippee...

This is not hard core real estate talk... it is not real estate talk AT ALL...

My wife has been an avid scrapbooker.  In fact, she was a Creative Memories Consultant (dealer) for a few years.  It is quite fair to say that she really enjoys scrapbooking.  And it has been a marvelous hobby for her. 

But I just gave her a new hobby... not replacing scrapbooking, but as a wonderful companion.  It is virtual scrapbooking of sorts.  

My wife is now a blogger...

She doesn't write about real estate, law (her field), politics or any other "external" subject.  She is blogging about the family.  The intended audience is our family and friends.  My Mother is in Virginia.  My cousins are in Ohio and Maryland.  My wife's parents are here in Atlanta, but other family is in Ohio and Indiana.  We have friends all over the country.  Some of them like to follow the adventures of HockeyBoy and his sidekick BubbleMonster... and so using the blog, they can...

I'm not going to give away the address...  It is a private site.  We don't have it indexed by Google... so you have to know where it is to find it.  If we were a little more paranoid, we would password protect it, but we wanted to be able to tell people that they could look. 

And we want those that are close to us to be able to see what we are up to whenever they want. 

And the tech doesn't stop...

I am trying to teach my Mother about RSS feeds.  We set up one for my Mother-in-Law... ok, my wife did.  My Mom just made it her home page.  But, at some point when I get up to Hampton, VA, I'll set up an RSS for her.  But, we have made the feed available so that those friends that want to know what is going on can see the posts right away.  We also have open comments so that we can share with them, and they can share with us.  In fact, we have "Author" accounts set up fro a few family members... they just haven't figured out how to take advantage of them yet. 

I'm not trolling for friends here...

I'm just offering up an option for those that might want to take advantage of it.  And, if really pressed, it is also a good way to play and learn about a CMS (Content Management System).  We are using WordPress2.5, but could have done it in any blog software.  We even could have done it in Joomla or Drupal... but chose WP because it is easier and suits my wife's style more.  There was another (very minor) consideration.  My wife wanted to learn WordPress for work.  And I was pretty familiar with it. 

So, if you are wondering about running a blog outside of the A|R platform, and have far flung family to share something with... or even another type of purpose, this might be an option for you. I have always enjoyed finding better ways to motivate myself to learn about new applications.

The most importnat thing is to have fun... and share it.  In this day of digital still and video (we have LOADS of both on the site), it is an easy, cheap and effective way to share the big and little events.  And honestly, the little events seem to be the most popular with the Moms. 

I just had a thoughts... Localism to the extreme...

Final note, unrelated to the rest of the post.  I recently got a contact from a friend from High School that I hadn't seen in 25 years (yes, I am THAT old).  So, just to give Google a little to talk about, Phoebus High School, Kecoughtan High School, Menchville High School, Hampton, Newport News, VA, Virginia.  I have friends in and from all of those places.

Mr. Bailey, you did a pretty fair job creating a listing blog for a listing that was almost $1m.

So now we have a challenge for you...

Your mission, should you decide to accepti it is to take a more normal priced property... priced under $200k, and create a similar type of marketing product.  No big budget. No Jack Nicklaus designed Golf Course and Country Club.  No tennis courts...

So, follow along while we build a WordPress2.5 blog for a 1BR with a Den condo unit in the Tuscany Condos in mid-town Atlanta.  Instead of a $969,000 executive home, we will look for a way to bring excitement for a condo priced at $198,888.  

It is going to take several posts, and several days to get it all together. 

The first step will be to settle on a domain name.  As soon as I have the domain set up, I'll give the address here in a member's only post (the only reason it will be member's only is that I don't want it indexed by Google until it has some of the content loaded).

Of course, through it all, I would love to have suggestions, critiques, and impressions.  The goal is to create a marketing tool for clients that is a step above. 

Why share?

There are a couple of reasons...

• Even though there are over 51,000 real estate agents on A|R, and even though there are over 2300 of them right here in GA... there are really only a few that I am actually going to ever compete with. 
  
• There is plenty of business for those of us that are motivated.
• Despite the numbers I quoted above, there are really only about 300 agents in the entire state that are actually active on A|R... and as a team we can dominate the market.  
• I have learned SO much on A|R, that passing this along (almost all of which was gleaned or born here) is barely scratching the surface. 
  
• I know that the interaction with other agents AND consumers while building this property blog will raise my game.
• Finally, only a few agents will ever go to these lengths to promote a listing.  

Let's do this...

***Added***

Also of interest:

• Mission Impossible? 2 Getting started...
  
• Mission Impossible? 3 Starting to populate the content...
• Mission Impossible? 4 Let the tweaking begin...
• Mission Impossible? 5 It's never done...

Many of the active bloggers here on Active|Rain seem to have outside blogs as well... or they have A|R blogs in addition to their outside effort... whatever...

But, one question I hear a lot is...

What should it LOOK like?

Well heck...  It should look cool, not take a month to load, and not detract from your content.  Easy, right?

But, since I am certainly not an expert in design or iumplementation, I can only comment on cool.  Because I AM cool.  (I can see your eyes rolling... stop it!).  Seriously, I just know what I like.  But, more importantly, I know where you might find good design, even if it isn't what I like. 

Show me the money blog design...

I just happened to run across this post.  It highlights 82 designs of what is supposed to be hot for 2008.  It seems that "less than slick" is what is becoming hot.  Retro/Vintage and handwriting are looking to be cool.  In looking over these, I see some pretty cool designs, and they look TOUGH to make. 

I have the tablet, and I could handwrite all of my posts... but then nobody would be able to read them.  I am not Sumocat.  Of course... I actually do have a handwritten font...  hhmmm...