I published the 177th edition of the Carnival of Real Estate yesterday at the Virtual Results blog – head over and check out this month’s winners!

The September CoRE will be hosted by Kris Berg, at her San Diego Home Blog. Submit your best September article here before the submission deadline of September 26th Midnight Pacific time!

I’m really happy to say that the version 3 beta of the Local Market Explorer WordPress plugin is finally available for everyone to try out. For those who don’t know what Local Market Explorer is, it’s a way to embed local area info from Zillow, Education.com, Walk Score, Yelp, TeachStreet, and Nile Guide directly into your WordPress-powered site in order to benefit your visitors and give search engines more content. You can see a demo of Local Market Explorer v3 on Geek Estate, on BankVibe’s new real estate center, and on my dev blog. Screenshots of v2 and other info is available on the official plugin page.

While the development of this plugin was funded by Zillow, all the different components in the plugin are now completely independent from each other and can be used as individual modules if desired. Version 3 is a complete rewrite of the plugin that brings with it a ton of features that had been requested on the Local Market Explorer feedback page as well as many bug fixes. Following are the big things that have changed.

• Performance has been significantly increased by making all of the external data requests in parallel instead of in series. This means that the modules that have slower APIs won’t slow down the page as much as they did in the past.
• The modules can now be used on individual pages and posts instead of only on the Local Market Explorer virtual pages. This adds a great deal of flexibility for embedding this valuable data into your pages. Here’s an example of the market stats module for Los Angeles loaded into a random page. This functionality is implemented via WordPress shortcodes and includes a handy toolbar icon in the page / post editor for inserting these shortcodes.
• The HTML markup and CSS styling has been significantly pruned so that skinning is easier and so that the default styles work better with many more themes.
• It’s now easier to use a custom page template for all LME pages.
• A real-time IDX real estate module has been added to all city and zip pages to display the newest listings in those areas. This only works if you also have the dsIDXpress WordPress IDX plugin (disclaimer: I work for Diverse Solutions, the company that sells dsIDXpress).
• The admin UI has been significantly enhanced to make it easier to use. A help section has also been added in the admin.
• A neighborhood module has been added on city pages that links to all the neighborhoods within that city. These neighborhood names are provided by Zillow’s GetRegionChildren API.
• Support for canonical link tags has been added so that search engines will better index the true URL and won’t see duplicate content within your domain.
• This version works way better with some of the more obscure WordPress installs as well as with WordPress 3.x.
• Support for XML sitemaps has been added via the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
• Lots of bugs have been fixed relating to data not displaying when it should (ex. homes for sale in certain areas) and blank data displaying when it shouldn’t (ex. Zillow Home Value Index showing $0 when Zillow doesn’t have that data).
• More charts and data have been added to a few of the modules.

The Local Market Explorer v3 beta can be downloaded as a zip file from here. After you’ve downloaded it, simply install it in your blog by uploading it through the plugin installer. If you have v2 installed, you’ll probably need to delete it first. Deleting v2 won’t delete your settings or area descriptions though; installing v3 will then use these settings / descriptions. Additionally, you should be able to downgrade to v2 if you really want to for some reason.

While this release is considered to be an open beta and hasn’t encountered any major issues during testing on a number of other blogs, you may want to consider back up your site before installing this to make sure nothing happens with your descriptions and settings if you already have v2 installed. You may want to consider WordPress Backup or WP-DB-Backup; I’ve personally never tried either. You’ll probably be safe without doing this, but it just never really hurts to double-check your backup system.

Anyway, I’m sure this will have bugs, so please discuss in the comments. If you have feature requests from here on out or encounter other bugs after v3 is released, please use the feedback page. The final release will be out soon!

With the recent news of existing July home sales plunging (27.2%) to its lowest level in approximately 15 years. Some economists are predicting a double dip recession. A couple reasons are because a lot of the banks are holding foreclosures off the market along with weak employment numbers.

It would be great to hear your take on the market in your area. Where it is now and the direction you think it’s headed. It would also be great to hear what you think is going to help things get better in the future.

Good business people make adjustments depending on the market conditions. I would love to hear what you are doing to grow your business in these challenging times. Especially if it includes technology

Sharing is a great way to build friendships and help each other. I look forward to what you have to say!

Supra has been promising a version of eKey for the Apple iPhone for several months now.  I was starting to think it was vaporware until the application finally showed up on the iTunes store recently.  I personally don’t own an iPhone and I was a little concerned that I might be excluded because the iPhone was the only compatible device shown in Supra’s marketing material.  Thankfully, it turns out that my hunch was correct.  The iPod Touch works as an eKey flawlessly.  There is one caveat however…

Before you go to buy a dongle from your local MLS office, you should download the eKey app from the iTunes store.  It’s free and easy to install.  The problem you will run into is when you go to purchase the dongle from your local MLS.  During the process, they will probably ask you to enter an authorization code that they provide you with and then they will want you to sync your device.  At home, you have your wireless router so this is not a problem in the long term but at the MLS, I doubt they will give you their wifi encryption key to allow you to sync your device on their wireless network.

To solve this problem, I borrowed my wife’s Verizon Mifi.  This is a fantastic little device that acts as a wireless hotspot for up to 5 computers at once in any location that you can get 3g cellular service.  I went through the process, hit “sync now” and everything fired off without a hitch.  There are a few other solutions that I can think of, but most of them are a little clunkier than something like the Mifi.

Certain devices available from Clear might be able to serve the same function or if you have an air card for your laptop, you can take your laptop in and set it up to provide an adhoc wifi network connection to your iPod Touch however the details for that are a bit beyond the scope of this article.

If you are lucky enough to have an iPhone, the eKey setup process should work flawlessly without a hitch.  If you have an iPad, you may have to jump through some of these hoops to make it an eKey depending on which model you have.

Most of you  likely know I managed the Carnival of Real Estate from when it was founded back in 2006 up until sometime in 2008, and as a result, it will always hold a special place in my heart. The CoRE was started to be a means to discover great blog content from the RE.net. While at the time, there was no Twitter and feed readers hadn’t been adopted, so discovering great content on the web was much more of a challenge than it is today. The CoRE has certainly had its ups and downs over the past few years (and has been out of commission for the last few months) — but I’m excited it’s making a comeback as a monthly rather than weekly carnival under the direction of Jay Thompson. I’ve compiled a few carnivals in the past, and I’m honored to be hosting the first edition of the new and improved monthly CoRE at Virtual Results!

With that said, please please make sure to submit your best blog post from the past month by August 25th. You can submit HERE.

The 1st monthly CoRE will be published August 31st at the Virtual Results blog – make sure to tune in and check it out!

Absolutely amazing new map technology will soon be released from Microsoft. You must watch this video to understand how Street Slide could make you stop using Google Maps.

Think about it – you could make a street level tour of a neighborhood for a potential buyer and incorporate it into your listing for people who aren’t familiar with the area.

In the world of maps, this may be a game changer. Watch the video and consider the possibilities for selling real estate!

Microsoft Street Slide

High quality online media is an important aspect of real estate marketing that is often lacking from many real estate agents’ marketing plans. The majority of the industry’s use of media in online marketing consists of low quality photographs taken by the agent’s $200 consumer digital camera, or perhaps the all-too-familiar “fish bowl” experience while viewing the “virtual tour” with wavy walls and distorted room perspectives.  However, with the proliferation of low-cost, high-quality video technologies, combined with interesting new web applications that help present great content, a much more powerful and compelling viewing experience is within reach for tech-savvy agents.  Here are a few tips to help real estate agents like yourself create high quality online media in order to stand out from the crowd and better market yourself and your listings.

An Effective Tool for Building Great Media

One exceptional tool for creating production quality online media is Animoto.com.  Animoto is an amazing web application that allows you to easily integrate high quality still images with short segments of full-motion video to build compelling video-like content.  You can even set the photos/video to music and the playback adjusts to mesh well with the tone of the audio.  With the use of an Animoto Pro account, it’s a simple matter of investing 30 minutes to upload and organize your still images and short video segments, add titles, and make a background music selection.  Then, sit back and allow the “magic” to happen as Animoto creates a professional quality video presentation of the property that can be added to the your website, blog, or embedded in other sites.  The end result is a compelling, professionally produced video that attracts viewer attention and creates important differentiation from other properties and agents.

Here is an example (Click Here and scroll down – embedding is not working properly) of an Animoto-produced video that my parents, both of whom are real estate agents in Lafayette California, created for a local city guide on their website.

Effectively Leveraging This Content

1. Create Quality Local Content – The above video serves as a visual guide to the town where my parents’ business is focused.  For visitors to their website, many of whom are not local and may have never seen Lafayette before, the video is a great introduction to the town.  You can also create even more hyper-local content such as videos with dedicated webpages for the neighborhoods you specialize in, like this neighborhood page for Happy Valley, a small but popular neighborhood in the area.  This creates a highly targeted landing page with quality content that gets number of long-tail SEO referrals.  While the volume isn’t huge, the quality of that traffic is exceptional – several SEO referrals to my parents’ website for queries like this have translated to actual closed transactions just this year alone.
2. Marketing Listings – As a seller’s agent, creating and distributing high quality photos and videos of a client’s home that provide a compelling viewing experience for the prospective buyer is of paramount importance.  If you don’t have the time, skills, or equipment to shoot high quality images or video, for many listings, it’s worth hiring a professional to shoot high quality digital images of the home.  With those in hand, the agent can readily augment them with HD video shot from the newest generation of smart phones, such as the Apple iPhone 4.  Even a short segment of video showing a panoramic view or children playing in the neighborhood can add texture and interest to the video presentation.
3. Winning Listings Presentations – In a competitive market, every effort to stand out helps.  Why not go into a listing presentation with a pre-made video of the prospective client’s home?  Even a rough version using images and video from the outside of the home and neighborhood only will still give the seller a taste of what you can do to best position their home via media.

Creating and distributing compelling online media has never been easier, and can make a meaningful impact on your business.  Good luck!

Last week I attended Raincamp hosted by Active Rain in San Diego.  I thought it a good idea to step off of my own platform of what I know about online marketing for the real estate industry and simply see what others are doing to be successful so I could apply it to my web site.

While I picked up a lot of good information, there are a few useful websites that I’d like to quickly share with you that I discovered from Raincamp and even one that was launched today not discovered through Raincamp.

Xobni.com – Pretty simple reverse lookup website that’ll let you know if your clients are on social media platforms and other web services.  This tool uses your clients e-mail to locate them on these other websites.  This could be your opportunity to connect with potential buyers and sellers on a whole new front.

Hittail.com – Everyone these days can setup Google Analytics on a website however this website’s tracking code pays more specific attention to the long tail keywords your website is already getting traffic from and then breaks down the data into useful and easy to understand charts.  They offer a 60 day free trial and then the basic membership after that is $10 per month.

Slydial.com – Have you ever forgot about an appointment or for some other unforeseen circumstance have not been able to make a scheduled phone call? Slydial.com connects you directly with a person’s voice mail without even ringing their phone.  You can now leave messages without risking an awkward conversation with that person you were supposed to call but didn’t.

10Minutes.org – A quick and free way to save some time on your hyper local keyword discovery research.  No need to mess around with a spreadsheet application or text document to manually create a list of potential keywords.  Create dozens or hundreds of keywords to explore within minutes of using this really simple tool.

Well, I know it’s been awhile since Google’s May Day update that occurred somewhere between Aug 28 and May 3. But understanding Google’s algorithm changes takes testing, research, and more testing—which takes time.

Before I get started, it’s important to understand why the May Day update caused such an uproar in the SEO world. With Google pushing out 1+ algorithm changes a day, why spend so much time understanding the May Day update? Because this one update was responsible for traffic losses not seen since 2007.

How do you know if your website was effected by the May Day update? Go into your Google Analytics and see if you experienced a loss of Google organic traffic between April 28 and May 3. If you did, then this article concerns you. Read the rest of this entry »

Long-tail optimization is the process by which webmasters look for easy to rank for keywords that will send traffic. Usually “long-tail” keywords are multiple words that a googler may search for that have relatively little to no competition from other websites.  A good example of a long tail keyword might be “zillow mortgage marketplace help” or something of that nature.

The idea behind long tail optimization is very simple – if you’ve got a relatively high ranking website, simply writing a new post or new page on your website targeting the keyword should be enough to place you in the number 1 or number 2 spot, sending with it all of the traffic that google receives through that keyword.  Other great examples of “long tail” keywords are localized searches – e.g. “mortgage refinance rockville maryland”.

Its a known fact that lot’s of people ask Google questions – e.g. – they’ll search for “What time is the movie playing?” or “What is a reverse mortgage?”.  I recently found a pretty cool tool that can help you find long tail keywords to target – simply write a post, and increase your monthly visitors by 10 – 1,000!

The tool is by wordtracker labs and is called “Keyword Questions” – it’s free and you can find it here!

Just in case you’re not ranking #1 for your “long-tail” posts / pages, here’s a quick tip to build a couple of great backlinks quickly using Digg!

Question: Can you Digg It?  (Unlimited PR4+ Links)

Shh!  Keep this one quiet.  If any of you have an seo toolbar installed in your favorite browser that displays the Page Rank of a given page, and you’ve ever been to a Digg page that’s 365 + days old, you’ll notice the majority of them have insanely high PR!  Simply post a comment on the page and enter your url in this format: http://www.yourwebsite.com.  Voila!  Unlimited PR 4+ links.  As a word of caution, obviously do not abuse this – you do run the risk of being sandboxed.   Stick to 4-10 Digg links per month – a safe, wonderful way to naturally increase your rankings!

SignMyPad is a new iPad app that lets you sign and fill out pdfs right from your iPad. If you’re like me, you chafe every time you need to print out a form, fill it out and sign it, scan it, then discard the original printed version. While there are much larger and more established companies such as Docusign, SignMyPad takes a different approach. Instead of a computer generated signature, with SignMyPad you literally sign with your finger.

A promising start...

In terms of acceptance of this kind of digital signature, it’s an entirely open question due to how rapidly technology is changing. DocuSign, on the other hand, has years of experience and they’ve spent a great deal of resources to ensure the legitimacy of their solution. I’m not a lawyer, and in my opinion the onus is on the company to make it abundantly clear whether something is legally valid or not.  Personally, I might use a solution like SignMyPad for simple forms/ applications/ etc, but I’d stick with a more established system like DocuSign for important contracts until I learn more. Anyway, on to the review:

Getting Started:

The documentation is minimal with SignMyPad, which is great when something’s super intuitive, but made for a bumpier start in this case. The app opens to a empty list, where your saved pdf’s would go. Maybe I’m slow, but it took me a few seconds to figure out that I had to email myself a pdf, then in Mail click “Open In SignMyPad” for it to then appear. This could be made a lot more intuitive.

Usage:

The first time I tried opening a doc in SignMyPad from Mail, it crashed. It worked the second time, and I started by selecting the “add text” option to write in the address in my sample purchase contract. That worked fine, but then when I tried to delete the text, I simply couldn’t figure out how. I clicked and I dragged until it was time for the last resort: reading the instructions.

Finding the instructions wasn’t easy: I clicked menu, didn’t see it, then clicked “PDF list”, read the instructions, and came back to delete my text (you need to double tap the text to delete). Unfortunately, my text was already gone: it doesn’t save automatically, or warn you if you go back to your list of PDFs. The mystery of the disappearing text would haunt me throughout the entirety of my review. It was not clear at all how or when your input was saved, which in a seven page contract can get incredibly frustrating.

Where are my signatures and text!?!

I tried the “save” option, and the “save/email” option, but was unable to actually save my text. I emailed myself three blank contracts, then gave up.

Bottom Line:

I absolutely love this idea, and I commend the developer for focusing on this need, but the current implementation was unusable for me. If you are highly technically savvy and patient, give it a try. From the reviews on iTunes, some people have been able to make it work for them, though the consensus seems to be that it’s pretty buggy. Until we see improvements, I would save your $4. If anyone has had a better experience, by all means share in the comments.

Current iTunes Rating: 2.5 stars

My Rating: 2 stars

Price: $3.99

iTunes Link: SignMyPad

That’s the question I want to put out there for everyone. In the world of PPC, there are many players. For today’s discussion, I’m going to focus on Google since they own 80%+ of the market.

What’s remarketing you ask – great, glad you did. According to Wikipedia, Retargeting (or Remarketing as Google calls it inside Adwords) is…

is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is delivered to consumers based on previous Internet actions that did not in the past result in a conversion (in other words, the action intended by the site owner, typically making a purchase)

The reason I wanted to start a discussion on retargeting was to see..

1. Does it work?

and

2. Are you doing it? If so, with success?

Retargeting From the Consumer Side

Here’s my personal story with retargeting:

About a month ago, I was searching for a new car – specifically an Infiniti G37. I didn’t plan on buying one anytime soon, but I was just starting to research. I was on Google and since my search yielded a very targeted paid search ad right to the Infiniti site on the G37, I clicked it. I arrived on the Infiniti site to browse for a few minutes and research. Then, I left.

Well, since Infiniti wants to maximize all their paid clicks, they were able to leverage Google’s remarketing platform to notice that I had clicked the Infiniti PPC ad, but didn’t (in the eyes of whatever Infiniti wants me to do) convert.

Since then, for the past month, every site that I visit that’s showing Adsense, I see something like so:

Photo Credit: Google

You’ll notice that I was on a site about C++, nothing related to cars in this case at all. Typically, Adsense is site sensitive and will serve ads to visitors based on the site’s content, except in the case of remarketing.

You will see ads based on the premise that you previously visited a site from a PPC customer of Google (Infiniti in this case) that didn’t achieve their goal. They do this in hopes to get you (the customer) to convert. So will I convert and give Infiniti my information so they can sell me a new car?

If they keep this remarketing campaign up, I just might indeed. See how this applies to the customers you’re currently losing that don’t convert once they click your PPC ad?

Retargeting From the Advertiser Side

Google makes this super easy. Basically, you select your campaign and then tell the Adwords rule that you want target visitors on the Google Content network (ie. Adsense) that you want to see your ads that previously clicked your PPC ad but didn’t convert. It’s that simple.

Now it’s your turn to share… are you using Remarketing? Is it working? What types of conversion rates are you all seeing? I’d love to see what everyone thinks about remarketing/retargeting in general…

Cheers, Matthew