Archive for April, 2008
Create Your Own Real Estate Listings RSS Feed
RSS (really simple syndication) is a feed that allows your subscribers to receive your "feed" automatically through a feed reader or email. RSS feeds can also be displayed as dynamic content in web pages. A feed will generally consist of a short summary which when clicked will bring you to the full article or detail page.
You can use an RSS feed for any area of your web site that you would update frequently: new real estate listings, price changes, open house schedule, mortgage rates, community news, real estate market statistics and so forth. The feed will allow people to subscribe to your latest updates and can also keep your latest updates posted on your web site and perhaps even posted on other web sites and blogs.
To easily create and publish your RSS feed use a desktop application that provides a wizard to help guide you through the process. I recommend FeedForAll:
Now that you have your RSS feed published (uploaded to your web server) you will want to include links so visitors can subscribe to your feed. You may also want to display your feed content as HTML on a web page or blog and of course you will want to submit your feed to RSS directories and search engines.
A very simple way to get started with displaying, publishing and promoting your feed is to sign-up for a free FeedBurner account.
Free Virtual Tours
Free do-it-yourself virtual tour. No third party ads and 100% branded to you. You can include your photo, name and logo. The beauty of this virtual tour in addition to the price (did I mention it's free?!) is the built-in lead capture, activity tracking and lead management features.
Here's how it works; Create an account by choosing a user name and password. Choose an attractive template. Upload your pictures and write your descriptions. You can use unlimited photos and create unlimited tours. The tours are hosted free for as long as you want.
You can track the activity for each tour and the tours have built-in forms for visitors who are interested in the property. All the contact information and tour leads are stored for you. What's the catch? You pay $1.00 for each each lead that you generate through this service. $1.00 for a qualified lead. This is someone who has viewed your tour and is interested enough to fill in the form to ask you a question, send it to a friend or request an appointment. You only pay if they fill out the form.
Give it a try: flyinside.com
Are AOL Email Addresses for Losers?
Andy Wibbels thinks so and I bet many people would agree with him. I won’t be so rude here as to call some of the top producing Realtors in the country “losers” but I will say; Realtors using AOL, free mail accounts and email addresses with their ISP domain name are definitely “losing out”.
Let’s discuss some of the reasons you should not be using your AOL, Yahoo or other ISP email accounts. Yes, there is more than one reason, in fact there are many. The first and most obvious is that it is simply unprofessional. I know the dangers of “assuming” anything but let’s please just assume that we all know and agree that lulu69@hotmail.com is not an appropriate email address for your business image.
What else is wrong with this address? Well, it kind of looks like SPAM so there is a more than high possibility that this email would be deleted, blocked or even blacklisted. What else? As if your email not being received isn’t enough to deter you from this bad practice. Well then…
How about branding? You all know branding. You have spent money on logos, business cards, direct mail campaigns, just listed and sold cards. You have a website. You have a full page ad in a glossy magazine and listings in all the local newspapers. I don’t have to tell you about branding. Then why are you branding your ISP domain name every time you send an email?
Still, that email address seems like such a small thing compared to your other marketing efforts. And yet, think about it. How many emails will you send and reply to today? Compare that to how many other marketing/branding impressions you made today. How does it compare? How does the cost compare? Can you see how your biggest return on investment (ROI) could actually be coming from your own branded email?
CMS Pros, Cons and Reviews
The first and one of the best content management systems I've used for client web sites is Content Seed. The system is available in both ASP and PHP versions. The license is very reasonably priced at $149.00 Unlike most software, the license is for unlimited domains and updates are free for life. So if you are looking to add CMS to more than one site this is an excellent value.
Installing and "seeding" a page is a fairly simple operation which involves uploading your files, setting folder permissions and placing a bit of code "the seed" on your page to indicate where the editable text will appear. I should mention here that if you do have any difficulties or question about your installation you will be more than pleasantly surprised with the customer support. Chris Leeds, the developer and owner of Content Seed answers his emails and phone calls personally!
The pros are obvious. Your client can edit the content on the pages you set-up to work with Content Seed. The editor is easy to use, looks like MS Word, has all the editing and formatting features you would expect, including the ability to upload images and supporting files like PDF documents. This system even comes with comprehensive help videos so your clients can see a demonstration of the feature in question. Additioanl features include the ability for cliens to back-up their content and assign user log-ins to edit specific pages.
Really, I can't say enough about this product - it pretty much has it all. And, there is where the Pro and the Con of CMS reside together; In the fact that your client now has a full text editor and the ability to upload images to their web pages.
Cons:
- Clients will overwrite CSS rules by changing fonts, text size, colors, alignment, case, underline & bold everything (because everything is that important!)
- Clients will upload enormous image files. This will result not only in page load time issues but also in page display by exceeding the container size in divs and tables.
- Clients that don't update their site regularly will always forget how to do it and call you for instructions, passwords etc.
- Clients will copy and paste from other web sites and documents picking up code and formatting and inadvertantly drop it into their own site. There is a paste text only function but no matter how often you remind them to use it, they will not.
- You will be contacted to fix these issues on a regular basis.
It has been my experience that unless a client uses the tools regularly and correctly (rare) then I actually spend more time fixing and instructing then I would if I simply updated the site myself. In these cases the CMS is not as cost effective to clients as it could be.
