HomeGain rolled out its May/June issue of its “Agent Success Newsletter“.

The digital real estate newsletter included:

• Feature Story: Announcing results from HomeGain’s recent home prices survey. Special thanks to the Realtors who attended our May Press Call – Quotes from Realtors Calvin Holt and Greta Salinger appeared in two news stories in the Baltimore Sun! 
• Question of the Month: What are some recommended “Best Practices” for creating templates in AgentEvaluator?
• News: Announcing HomeGain’s Green Real Estate campaign; Adding Street View to AgentView maps; and Better Business Bureau (BBB) rating HomeGain an A+.
• Awards: We congratulated the newest AgentEvaluator Platinum Club, Gold Club and Silver Club members. 
• Customer Advocates: For March, Roy Abila in Client Services; and for April, Dennis Kang in the Project Management Team. 
  

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Questioning whether a real estate blog is worth your time?

Successful blogger, Andrew Duncan of Keller Williams Realty, explains how to utilize the AgentView Blog feature to generate more traffic to your website, increase efficiency within your business, and more!

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HomeGain, the first website to provide instant home prices, launched Google Street View on its instant home valuation tool this evening.

HomeGain’s instant home values tool is a part of our real estate marketing solution, AgentView.

Users can now “walk” the streets as they check home prices, or search comparative or recent home sales.

The street view maps are available in most major cities across the United States.

You can view the street view maps and connect with a local Realtor by clicking here.

Louis Cammarosano

homegain.com

Certain types of blog posts attract visitors and generate a lot of interest (clicks), increasing the likelihood they will be read and maybe spread across the Internet. The first type of blog post hitting the mark is the “List” post.

Five Tips For Better List Posts

1. The number 10 seems to be a popular list number  – Top 10 list. The same is apparently true for odd number lists.  Don’t ask me why.  Even a post of 1 will work – The Number 1 Reason Homes Don’t Sell.
2. Use these powerful buzzwords to further attract readers, such as: Top, Best, Easy, Fast, Cheap, Simple, Popular, Tips, Tricks, Secrets
3. Don’t neglect the negative list.  For example, 7 Big Mistakes to Avoid When Photographing a Home for Sale.
4. Appeal to curiosity.  Secrets. Tips. Tricks. People are curious to know what the experts know.
5. Bold your list items.  It helps the list items stand out.

Blogging Tip courtesy of the HomeGain Blog Professor, Joseph Ferrara. To read the full article and receive the weekly real estate blogging newsletters, sign up for AgentView and the HomeGain Blogging School.

I started working with AgentView, formerly known as Source4Sellers, mid November 2006.  Since then much has changed with my business model and with AgentView.

My business grew from a fledgling concept to a full team model.  I had started the month before with HomeGain’s BuyerLink.  The traffic from BuyerLink helped build my faith in Internet marketing and build my lead database.  Even then, I knew that HomeGain was very interested in my success and building a true business partnership.

The AgentView product suite continues to develop and is now a full service ad-free solution which highlights and promotes the participating real estate agent.  When I first started with the product, the Source4Sellers solution contained an agent profile and a full CRM with built-in email campaigns.  Now AgentView is so very much more.  Some of the features include:

• Agent Profile
• Homes For Sale
• Home Values
• Agent Centric Blog
• Local Information
• Home Seller Tools

Agent Profile

The AgentView blog offers so much opportunity to help promote the area real estate agent and my Denver real estate website in an ad-free environment. This page is about the agent and their credentials.  The “Have a Real Estate Question for Brian?” is to the right of your contact information as a call to action.

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The problem with any product sold or given to real estate agents is, what I call THE MISSING MANUAL. Unlike the bikes I had to assemble at Christmas which had instructions – and still were tough to put together—the tools you get from vendors do not come with a manual of how to effectively use them. At best, you get the basics.

Let’s take blogging, for example. You can get a free blog from WordPress or Blogger and strike out on your own. Or you can pay for a blog at any number of real estate websites. But there are 2 major problems.

1. The blog providers give you virtually no instructions on how to:

• Set up the blog
• Post content
• Add images, video, slideshows, listings widgets, etc. -– Do you know how to use an HTML editor -– Or know what the heck HTML is?
• Tag your posts (and images) -– did you know that images are indexed by Google?
• Categorize your posts -– did you know that choosing too many categories actually hurts you?

You have to learn by trial and error. That’s how I learned. It sucked. It took a long time and I made many mistakes, some of which I did not correct until years later — that’s right, years.

2. It takes time for Google to index new blogs.

You can write for months and months before folks can find your posts on Google, i.e. on the first page of Google. Let’s face it, no matter how great your content is, if no one can find it on Google, no one will read it. So you end of toiling without seeing real success and it’s discouraging. You’re likely to quit.

If only someone showed you how to write blog posts to effectively take advantage of SEO (search engine optimization)…………….

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