Here’s some quick advice for AgentView real estate agents to manage that new blog you may not know what to do with:

1. Blog articles are great but they do take time to write. Generally, the first ideas new bloggers have for topics - how-to’s, hyperlocal news - have been done before by other bloggers. It’s hard to differentiate yourself starting up a blog.
2. So do something different. Think like a journalist; watch out for real-time housing market news and be the first to report it.
3. Take notes at the tour marketing meetings, subscribe to the feeds of local online news and real estate publications.
4. Think in sound bites. Whenever you hear something interesting, write a sentence or two in the blog. Be efficient, don’t take more than 3 minutes per idea. Use a cellphone to write it if you’re in a tour meeting or open house.
5. When you see an interesting article online, cut and paste the article title and create a link to it.
6. If you write down several ideas per day, you soon accumulate a whole portfolio of ideas and facts that will be displayed on the blog. This content is just as revealing about how you develop business and help clients as blog articles.
7. You become a go-to source for your market. Prospects will come back again and again to see your new “sound bites”. After all, you’re the only one reporting on a daily basis… this is compelling to a committed home buyer or seller. Analogy - if I’m doing a stock purchase, I’d much rather analyze it in real time on Marketwatch.com than pick up the current Business Week magazine.
8. You’ll soon realize you can expand on the sound bites to construct more detailed blog articles. You’ll lose your writer’s block.
9. Finally, it’s easier to automate the whole process of “reporting” using a variety of micro-blogging and bookmarking applications like Twitter , Friendfeed, Tumblr, Delicious and Diigo. This is another story.

To learn more about HomeGain’s AgentView product, click here.

Without further adieu, here’s my list of preferred plugins for Wordpress blogs:

Akismet - There’s a reason this plugin comes standard with every WP install.  It’s the only spam plugin you need.

Continue reading this post

The number one thing that has helped my real estate career has been reading blogs. 

Through my years in real estate, I have gotten almost no help from my colleagues or brokers. The philosophy was that we were in direct competition with each other so we could not share our ideas or expertise because it might hurt our career. Almost no agents would divulge any of their so called “secrets”. If a real estate agent would give up any of their knowledge, it was at a price.

I am so glad I discovered Web 2.0. What I learned was it is ok to share knowledge and ideas. It will not hurt me. It will help build a supportive community and it will help the real estate industry as a whole.

Here are some things I have learned by reading blogs:

• Social media, especially Twitter
• About blogging and blogging ideas
• All about video
• Virtual tour options
• Moo cards
• Marketing techniques
• Advertising
• Real estate news
• What to put on my website
• How to treat clients

 And much, much more.

My favorite real estate blogs are:

Continue reading this post

We are pleased to announce the launch of the HomeGain Real Estate Blog iPhone application.

The platform enables readers with iPhones to access and view HomeGain Blog articles in a customized format.

The HomeGain Blog automatically recognizes that it is being accessed by an iPhone, and delivers the iPhone interface.

No software downloads are required.

If you have an iPhone, please take a look.

AgentView exclusively features agent listings, profiles and blogs as well as HomeGain’s Home Sale Maximizer and instant home valuation tools all in an advertising-free environment.

HomeGain understands that blogging can be a challenge. That’s why when we started the HomeGain Agent Blogging Network, we soon added free blogging training at the HomeGain Blogging School.

Classes are conducted weekly by HomeGain Blogging School Professor, Joseph Ferrara. Each lesson provides useful blogging tips and a critique of some of the blogs that appear on the HomeGain Agent Blogging Network.

Check out a sample HomeGain Blogging School lesson.

Sign up for AgentView and the HomeGain Blogging School.

Louis Cammarosano Continue reading this post

I have 120 agents in my office. Which means that there are at LEAST that many business plans going on all around me every day. When you throw in the Search Engine Optimization clients that I do work for at EricOnSearch (many outside of the real estate industry), that is a tremendous number of folks I meet whose livelihood depends on marketing and leads. Many of these good businesspeople have had it tough in the past year. Many have had less business than they would have liked. This past weekend, I went through my rolodex of clients, friends and agents in our office. I found something interesting and want to share it with you.

Of the people who were doing TRULY poorly this year, ALL of them had relied on a single source of leads and/or a single marketing channel to drive leads to their business. Seriously.
Many of these good folks had become complacent in getting a lot of leads from a single source, month after month and then it went away and their livelihood was jeopardized. For the record, this included folks who had not continued to invest in their SEO efforts, which is a high risk, high reward sort of thing. I often hear so many people on the web say “Don’t do that, it is a waste of time.” …”Don’t use these guys, they don’t work.” I have heard that…even about HomeGain quite a bit. (Confession time: Used to say it myself…grin). No matter where your business is or how you market, if you are not diverse, you are one market shift away from having a bad year (or even a bad couple of months). Continue reading this post