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That’s right, we all know about goal setting, realize the importance that setting goals can bring to measuring and assessing success and progress and yet many of us are not consistently setting and measuring our progress towards goals. I am guilty of this as well.

What are your goals / objectives for the day, week, month and year? Write them down, somewhere. Anywhere. Make that place the simplest place to access you can think of to achieve consistency in visiting your goals.

Once your goals are set, evaluate and assess your performance. Did you achieve your goal for the day, week or month? You can only know if you assess your progress. This means a short day end check and weekly and monthly checks….. it only takes a few minutes. Designate a consistent time slot for your reviews, this will help build the habit of reviewing.

If you don’t set a standard of performance or measure of performance, you will find yourself producing and achieving less…. you can’t hold yourself responsible for under performing if you aren’t aware that you aren’t where you should be! Many times we think we are performing at a higher level than we really are.

Most importantly, don’t be too hard on yourself if you are not progressing as fast as you would like. This is why it is important that your goals are realistic. The real goal here is to achieve an overall consistency in evaluating your progress…. not pushing yourself into depression because you didn’t nail your target goals. Not achieiving set goals is merely an opportunity to learn and evaluate so that you do achieve those  goals in the future.

When you are done, click here.

That’s right, their datacenter caught fire and they still smoked Realtor.com, pun intended. There is only one right way to handle such a situation: quickly, honestly and transparently. If Redfin gets this, why can’t Realtor.com?

Chris Neitzert Sorts Through Charred Rubble of Redfin Datacenter

There was a fire in the Seattle-based data center that Redfin uses to host our web servers, causing a loss of service between approximately 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. Pacific Time. The entire data center was shut down by the fire department, including universal power supplies. Thanks to Redfin’s Chris Neitzert and his team, the site is now up and running. Throughout the interruption, our agents have of course stayed at their posts working with clients. But as the data center installs new equipment, it is possible that we will experience much-briefer interruptions in our website service around midnight tonight. We will continue to be available by telephone at 877-973-3346 or through the direct number our clients have for their agents.
For now, we apologize for the interruption in our service.

Aftermath of Realtor.com Blog Hack

You can find the National Association of Realtors at Realtor.org.

If you are interested in Real Estate and Mortgage news, you’re in the right place, take a look around!

BrokerScience network blogs (WordPress based) are highly SEO optimized, utilize the latest bleeding edge plugins and can provide an optimal platform for insuring you get the best search engine coverage of your posts. We will obviously maintain the platform rigorously and will build out necessary features you find necessary. That’s right, if you have an idea or format you want us to build out for you, we will do it! Once we obtain a minimal level advertising we will gladly revenue share as well.

If you are interested or know somebody who is, let’s talk!

The truth is that we may be gone for two weeks or it may be eight…. I just don’t know at this point. If I feel like working, I will, if not I will be busy sipping coffee at the local coffee shop, hiking in the redwoods, white water rafting, exploring small coastal towns and everything else we can think of that is fun. The truth is that I am addicted to the internet and social media, so I will likely not be too far.

Please Stand By For Further Communication …………

More and more Realtors are realizing the benefits of creating a new website for each listing they have. The goal in creating a website that is dedicated to a specific listing is to create a powerful online marketing tool, increase search engine exposure, obtain top positions in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and provide an online presence for promoting the listing’s benefits through useful and informative content and beautiful images. We are going to discuss how to build and optimize your single property website and are throwing in a new twist on where your content should be located.

Benefits of Using Single Property Listing Websites:

1. They can be a powerful listing and marketing tool referenced online and offline in marketing materials to help increase listing exposure.
2. They increase listing owners’ confidence in you.
3. They can help you gain more listings and are one more selling point / benefit you can offer when trying to obtain listings or convert FSBO’s.

1) Choosing a Domain Name

The first decision to be made is choosing a domain name. The most common route is simply using the listing address as the domain name, for example, 123MainStreet.com. Many agents cite that they use the listing address as the domain because it provides a keyword rich URL which can be beneficial for SEO / ranking purposes. The truth is that having a keyword rich domain name for SEO purposes alone is becoming less and less important as time goes on (some would argue it is a non factor already), is only one SEO factor among many and as we will explain, there are more compelling reasons to use non-address based domain names.

Make It Easy to Remember. The primary reason you may not want to use the address as the domain name is marketability. Buyers are much more likely to remember “TatumRanchHome.com” as opposed to “1934ViaLindaWay.com”. This holds true whether they are glancing through a magazine and see your ad, are trying to remember the domain name from a flyer they have thrown away, or even more importantly, if they are trying to remember your domain name for the listing sign they happened to glance at as they drove by the listing.

Usability Trumps SEO. The bottom line is that you may not want to sacrifice the overall marketability and utility that an easy to remember domain name provides (this is true of any domain name in any vertical) for SEO purposes (keyword rich URL).

Jay Thompson also points out another strategy for choosing domain names, using generic or neighborhood / community based names such as “TatumEstates.com” or “IrvineEsplanade.com”. He points out that these names can be recycled over and over which can save the time and money invovled with registering a new address based domain for each new listing.

2. The Old Way: Placing Your Single Listing Content on a Brand New Domain Name

The Issue With Brand New Domain Names. All of the great content that is created on a new unseasoned domain is working from a position of weakness in competing against more established sites. Since your new domain is not seasoned and has established no history or trust with Google, does it make any sense that your site should perform better than more established sites that already rank well, have high PageRanks, have established incoming link profiles and have already built trust with Google? Of course not.

Even though your newly created single listing site may be more focused for your specific keywords and may rank easily for the listing address, it will not rank as well against seasoned sites for other keywords in your content relating to your topics you will likely discuss relating to features of the listing neighborhood, school district, shopping areas, etc. In short your unseasoned domain and site are at a great disadvantage in performing well for a broad range of keywords even though you may very well rank number one for the actual listing address, a keyword term with little to no competition.

To compound the issue, your single listing website is by nature, temporary, and will likely (hopefully) never be around long enough to achieve the baseline aging with Google (6 to 12 months) necessary to achieve consistent rankings and actively compete with more established sites. It is also very unlike that other sites will ever link to a single listing website and as we all know, inbound links are an important component of ranking well in search engines.

To those that say their brand new domains rank fine: Your brand new domain may rank for some keywords, it will not rank well for more competitive keywords. Just because your domain ranks for the listing address (a very non-competitive keyword) does not mean it is ranking for more competitive keywords. It is worth noting that the concept I am presenting here is not debated in the SEO community and is consistent with Google nomenclature on the subject.

3) The Solution: Host Your Single Listing Website on Your Primary Corporate Website and Forward Your New Domain Name To It

We are going to present a very simple and common sense concept that will improve your single property website search engine rankings, listing exposure and traffic. Traditionally, agents will place their new website content on their newly purchased single listing specific domain name. Why place each of your new listing websites and content on new unseasoned, untrusted domains when you can simply leverage your existing corporate website or blog that is seasoned (aged), has established rankings, has incoming links, has existing traffic and has already established trust with Google?

That’s right, we are proposing that you build out your single listing websites on your existing corporate website or blog domains and then use domain forwarding to forward your new listing specific domain name to the new content on your established corporate website or blog. Domain forwarding is handled by your domain name registrar and enables you to forward visitors to your domain name to any other domain name you choose.

When visitors navigate to “TatumEstatesHome.com”, they will arrive at your single listing website, hosted on your corporate site that looks and acts identically as if it were hosted as a standalone site at “TatumEstatesHome.com” except it is hosted on your trusted and seasoned corporate domain (example: ExampleRealty.com/1989-Via-Linda/). Domain forwarding even gives you the ability to make it so the URL users see in their browser does not change from “TatumEstatesHome.com” when they are actually on “ExapleRealty.com”, no matter where they navigate to, they will see TatumEstatesHome.com; using this features is simply a matter of preference.

4) How to Implement Using WordPress

1. You can use your existing corporate WordPress page theme by doing nothing and creating a new page and naming it your property address (ExampleRealty.com/1989-Via-Linda/), or you can use a different page layout and or look and feel by creating all new single listing centric pages using the WordPress “Page Themes” / “Page Template” feature. This feature allows you to create new WordPress pages using “Page Themes” that you create and import into WordPress with their own look and feel.
2. When you have created your Page Theme page layout it should include a new header, footer and sidebar it it uses them. You will want to make sure that these items have unique names so they do not conflict with the WordPress “header.php”, “footer.php” and “sidebar.php. Also be sure to change the calls for these items in your new page template itself. This will prevent the new page template from calling “header.php” (the header for your corporate / default site) when you really want to call “header_new.php” or whatever you have named it. If you using a new stylesheet, so be sure to change the call for this in your new page theme / header, otherwise you can simply add new CSS to your existing stylesheet. . You can hard code the entire page to taste with layout, content and links, but be sure to add the loop so that you can add content via the WordPress write page as well.
3. Unless you want to hard code links into your header, footer and sidebar, it is a good idea to install the NAVT Plugin. This plugin will enable you to add a link to any exsiting page, post, category or manually inserted link by simply dragging and dropping via the WordPress dashboard.
4. Finally, you will upload all items (don’t forget images and CSS) via FTP to your root WordPress theme folder. To designate the new Page Theme as a theme, add the following to the very top of the page before uploading:

<?php
/*
Template Name: New Listing Theme
*/
?>

5. Now that your new theme has been uploaded, you can create any new pages you want for your single listing website. Via WordPress Page write, create your new page for your listing and edit the URL to something like ExampleRealty.com/1989-Via-Linda/. Before saving navigate to the “Page Theme” option drop down and choose “New Listing Theme” or whatever you have called the new theme. Unless you have incorporated the WordPress loop into your page theme, you will not actually type any content into the “write” box.
6. Forward your new, easy to remember single listing domain name to the URL you have created as the home page for your new single listing site. When a visitor types in “TatumEstatesHome.com”, they will now be automatically taken to “ExampleRealty.com/1989-Via-Linda/”. Your new single listing site acts as an indepent site with its own look and feel, but leverages your existing corporate site’s age, links and authority.
7. Finally Link to your newly created single listing site, “CorporateSite.com/1989-Via-Linda/”, from your home page to expedite search engine spider crawling. You may also want to consider creating a category specific to this listing and adding the listing to it. This could be based on the neighborhood or another related theme.

5) WordPress - Create a Silo to Increase Keyword Focus and Improve Keyword Theming

1. To use this method, your WordPress site needs to use the following permalink structure: /%category%/%postname%/. If your site does not use this structure or you are starting a new site, I STRONGLY suggest you use this permalink structure.
2. Download and install the Page Category Plus plugin from by buddy Andy here. This plugin enables you to assign a newly created page to categories, the same way you do blog posts. Check out his other  WordPress plugins, they are excellent.
3. Follow steps 1 - 7 above and create a new category that is only going to be used for this specific listing and assign this page and any pages you create for this listing to this specific category. You might give it the name of the neighborhood, for example, “madison-meadows”.
   This would result in a home page of your single listing website of ExampleRealty.com/madison-meadows/1989-via-linda/. All content created as a page under this category will be in its own silo.

To create a true silo, you will want to link to this content from your home page and category pages, but will not interlink to this content from any pages in other categories and vice-versa. This helps

6) How to Implement on a Non WordPress Site

1. Create a sub-directory to hold your content / pages that are specific to the new listing. You might call this folder the name of the neighborhood, for example: madison-meadows. You now have a subdirectory of ExampleRealty.com/madison-meadows/.
2. Add the your new single listing home page to the previously created sub-directory. You can name it the listing address if you choose, resulting in a home page for your new single listing of ExampleRealty.com/madison-meadows/1989-Via-Linda.html. Alternatively, you can simply leave this home page titled as index.html if you choose and your home page URL for the listing will be ExampleRealty.com/madison-meadows/. My suggestion would be to use the listing address as the page name.
3. Link to your newly created page from your home page.

7) Rank Well for Local Neighborhood, Schools and Shopping

Are you using single listing websites to try and rank for the neighborhood, schools, shopping or other related amenities of a specific listing? Do most of your listings fall within the same neighborhoods? If so, a better approach to listing for specific listing centric amenities would be to list these as general categories and topics covered on your main corporate blog or site than list single listings you have on these pages.

Link from Local Amenities in WordPress.

1. If a neighborhood you would like to feature is Madison Meadows, you will create a category called Madison Meadows and create a new page that will be the home page for his neighborhood. Than add any new single listing centric sites that are in this neighborhood to this category.
2. Than create a “Listings in this Neighborhood” section and add the following code to the neighborhood home page. This code lists any other pages / posts in this category. You will add any new listing to this category and thus new listings will automatically show up in your “Listings in This Neighbood” section automatically! In this case, any new listings will automatically show up in your Madison Meadows neighborhood home page. The following code will be inserted at the end of your loop:

<?php
/* Check if there are posts */
if ( have_posts() ) {
/* Post index for semantic classes */
$post_index = 1;
?>

<div id=”category_more_resources”> Related Information:</div>

<?php // tr - the following 3 lines list only category posts and exclude sub-category posts

$cat = intval( get_query_var(’cat’) ); ?>

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php if ( in_category($cat) ) { ?>

There you have it! We will likely be refining these ideas and will certainly be adding more in the future.

ePerks.com: A Case Study in Greed and Self-Imposed Brand Destruction

2) Read the Blog Post / Comments That Started It All:

ePerks- A Scam or A Gem?

3) Read the Cease & Desist Letter, Threats and Lawsuit from ePerks CEO Ben Behrouzi:

Cease & Desist Letter: Chilling Effect: How A Behemoth Company Can Silence A Blogger

Threats from ePersk CEO Ben Behrouzi: Am I Being Sued By ePerks?

ePerks Lawsuit Against Vlad Zablotzkyy: ePerks Pulls the Trigger: I am being Sued

Read: BrokerScience Commentary on Suit

4) Read Vlad’s Response to Being Falsely Accused of Child Molestation:

How Far Do You Go To Silence A Blogger And When Does It Become Too Far?

5) Listen to the Shocking Ben Behrouzi Voice Mails:

ePerks CEO Ben Behrouzi Voicemails Exposed: Threatens to Blackball and Sue Employee

6) Learn about the ePerks Link to Vlad Zablotzkyy:

ePerks IP Address Link to Vlad Zablotzkyy: When the Hunter Becomes the Prey

7) Read about Behrouzi’s Threats Against BrokerScience

Ben Behrouzi Insinuates Legal Action Against BrokerScience, Cites “Damages” and his confirmation to take action against BrokerScience on Inman. Read BrokerScience commentary on Inman piece.

Take Action NOW:

Donate to the Vlad Zablotzkyy Legal Defense Fund

ePerks: A Case Study in Brand Destruction:

(These are the “minions” ePerk’s Attorney infamously referred to in this Inman Article.)

ePerks v Vlad: Strategies to Avoid a Viral World War

ePerks - I Am Not A Minion Mr Cook

Im Mad As Hell-You Will Be Too When You Read About Vlad Zablotskyy and ePerks

ePerks & Freedom of Speech?

An Open Letter to Ben Behrouzi

Real Estate Radio USA Interviews Mary McKnight

Zablotskyy the Scrivener

Vlad Zablotskyy V. ePerks The Cliffs Notes Version

Vlad Zablotskyy - A Martyr for Reputation Management

A Dark Day for Bloggers Everywhere

In Support of Vlad Zablotzkyy

Do I look Fat in This Lawsuit?

Nominee for PR Blunder of the Year - ePerks

Why Real Estate Agents Are Bailing on ePerks

5 Ways to Support Vlad Zablotzkyy

Suport Vlad Zablotskyy in his defense against ePerks.com frivolous suit

Some companies are stupid, and eperks may be the stupidest

ePerks: A brand going down in flames

ePerks vs Blogger Vlad Zablotskyy, Freedom of Speech in Cyberspace at Stake

Suport Vlad Zablotskyy in his defense against ePerks.com frivolous suit

ePerks Sues Real Estate Blogger

ePerks Using Questionable Tactics

Ben Behrouzi’s Fair Darts

Blogger Is Sued for Business Disparagement

Write a post supporting your fellow real estate blogger, Vlad Zablotskyy, in his battle with ePerks and I will give you a blog

ePerks Sues Real Estate Blogger, Blogosphere Unites to Destroy the ePerks Brand

RSS Pieces provides a rundown of how ePerks is destroying its own reputation

Want money back at closing?

ePerks Sues Blogger Vlad Zablotzkyy

Spreading the word about eJerks

Spreading the word about Vlad Zablotskyy and his battle with ePerks - Free Speech Issue For The Blogging Community

Is ePerks.com’s Ben Behrouzi, infamous for trying to censor a real estate weblogger, stealing content from Mervyns and Chevron?

Support the Vlad Zablotskyy Legal Defense Fund: A real estate weblogger is being throttled by corporate bully ePerks.com. The free speech rights you will be fighting for are your own…

Memo to ePerks.com: You idiots! Trying to censor a real estate weblogger is a poor way to defend your reputation — such as it is…

ePerks To Sue Blogger - Freedom Of Speech Threatened

Looking for lawyers…

Blogger is Sued for Business Disparagement

Sometimes everybody’s gotta take a side

ePerks: What Were They Thinking?

ePerks to Vlad: I’m Gonna Pound You

Blogging and Freedom of Speech

Blogger Get “Cease and Desist” from ePerks

iHype & ePerks - How To Kill A Startup

Memorial Day and the Plight of a Blogger

Open Letter to ePerks.com

ePerks Shafts Realtors

Are ePerks Spammers?

Real estate rebates and referrals with a twist

ePerks & iHype - Legal Kneejerk - Sues Blogger

Related BrokerScience ePerks / Ben Behrouzi Coverage:

ePerks.com: A Case Study in Greed and Self-Imposed Brand Destruction

ePerks CEO Ben Behrouzi Insinuates Legal Action Against BrokerScience, Cites “Damages”

Ben Behrouzi Updates Company “Values” and “Culture” Web Pages. Only One Problem: They’re Stolen

ePerks.com Link to Vlad Zablotzkyy

Ben Behrouzi / ePerks.com: A Case Study in Self Induced Search Engine Brand Destruction

BrokerScience Coverage of iHype.com Launch

BrokerScience Acquires BenBehrouzi.com

From the Interview:

In an Inman News interview, Richardson said, “There is a principle involved of the ability of the blogger to express an opinion. To write a critical piece. That affects us all.”

He said he has been contacted by ePerks officials about his writings at the site, and he offered, “If anything is printed that’s wrong, we’ll print a retraction — make corrections.”

Richardson said that if he, too, is hit with a lawsuit from ePerks, he expects to prevail. “If you have to do it, you have to do it. When we win, we will have that much more leverage in the future when people come to us,” he said.

ePerks CEO Ben Behrouzi on BrokerScience

Behrouzi said that the company does “seek to hold people accountable,” and named Trace Richardson, creator of the BrokerScience blog, as another blogger who is posting items about the company.

Our Response: The only person you need to hold responsible is yourself Ben. Your failure to assume responsibility for your actions is the cause of this ordeal and ultimately, the destruction of the ePerks brand. Make no mistake, not a single page about ePerks would have ever been written on BrokerScience had we not heard about a company named ePerks with a CEO named Ben Behrouzi that was bullying bloggers.

ePerks Attorney Ron Cook on the Lawsuit Against Vlad:

“The issue we’re trying to promote is responsible speech. If you’re going to take us on and criticize us, at least do it with some comments that have some validity to them,” he said.

“The free speech aspect of all of this is an important consideration. We don’t expect to live in a bubble where nobody can throw darts. We want to make sure the darts are fairly thrown.”

This above statement is stark contrast to the request he made in an earlier C & D letter to Vlad where he didn’t simply request that “darts were fairly thrown”, he requested removal of all current and future digital, print, internet or verbal reference of ePerks related content or ePerks related links.

“You are hereby instructed to promptly do the following: (1) shutter and prevent access to all blogs with any ePERKS reference or content; (2)remove any record of their existence; (3) terminate any links pointing to any blogs that reference ePERKS; and (4) cease and desist from any and all current and future digital, print, Internet or verbal reference to ePERKS.com or Barbus Venture Corporation. This includes closing down your January 28, 2008 lbog that continues to direct readers to your previous remarks and postings.” - ePerks Attorney Ron Cook in C & D letter to Vlad

ePerks Attorney Ron Cook on the Overwhelming Support Behind Vlad

“Clearly, his minions out there are rallying behind him.”

On that Note: A Special Treat for BrokerScience Readers!

If you are part of the Real Estate Community: Click Here

If you are Ben Behrouzi & Company: Click Here

Since BrokerScience first began covering ePerks and ePerks CEO Ben Behrouzi, we have received a lot of reader submitted information in the form of: stories of first hand experiences with ePerks / Ben Behrouzi (as employees and customers), emails, voice mails, and other miscellaneous information and data relating to Ben and company. We have published virtually none of it and do not plan on publishing it in the future unless it is pertinent to the facts involved in our coverage. The following voice mails are an exception. They help establish a pattern of legal harassment by Ben Behrouzi that goes all the way back to his days at Reply.com.

One common theme among all current and former employees we speak to that have worked under Ben Behrouzi at Reply.com or ePerks.com is that they fear the consequences involved with sharing their story. The legal harassment and worse that ePerks critics such as Vlad Zablotzkyy, Dennis Pease and BrokerScience have endured are a testament to those concerns.

One person that is not afraid of Ben Behrouzi is former Reply.com employee Scott Chestnut. Scott worked under Ben Behrouzi (who was the Chief Technology Officer despite the fact that he was still in school working on a philosophy degree) as a Senior Network Engineer. While building out what was to be a million dollar network, Scott realized that working for Ben was an unworkable situation, so he walked out in frustration. The following voice mail from Ben Behrouzi chronicles Ben’s threats to blackball Scott and insure he is unable to gain employment, insinuating this will affect him for life and have deep reaching effects.

“My new goal in life is going to become to ruin your name across this entire East Bay……..you can take that to the bank, you can put your future kids or your girlfriend or whoever you want to put on it.” - ePerks CEO, Ben Behrouzi to employee that left the company

Ben Behrouzi Threatening to Blackball and “Ruin the Name” of Former Employee

Download audio file (benscott.mp3)

Later, Ben left another message regarding a vendor, CDW. He again makes false allegations and threatens legal action. Even though he claims he is in the process of preparing legal action, no legal action ever took place, an experience similar to what others have faced.

Ben suggests “using dollars” to make up for the indiscretions he accuses Scott of, similar to the verbiage he used when he threatened BrokerScience and tried to set up a conference call to discuss “damages“.

At some point after Scott walked out, Ben and his team were reportedly let go from Reply.com and Scott was again offered his position back at Reply.com.

Ben Behrouzi Threatening Legal Action Against Former Employee / No Action Was Ever Filed

Download audio file (benscott2.mp3)

Conclusion. These voice mails are more evidence documenting a pattern of legal harassment and threats by Ben Behrouzi against anybody that gets in his way. While I am not familiar with the legality of of blackballing I am somewhat certain that “ruining someone’s name” for the purposes of insuring they cannot obtain employment is nothing short of defamation. Ben’s actions are consistent with the lack of ethics we have seen ePerks and iHype exhibit. There is now no question that in our opinion, Ben Behrouzi operates without an ethical or moral code.

Feedback: Do you have a negative or positive ePerks / Ben Behrouzi story you would like to share as an current or ex employee, colleague or customer? We can’t guarantee we will publish it, but appreciate your feedback and it may help bloggers like Vlad Zablotzky fight against Ben Behrouzi and company. Contact us here.

Related BrokerScience ePerks Coverage:

ePerks.com: A Case Study in Greed and Self-Imposed Brand Destruction

ePerks CEO Ben Behrouzi Insinuates Legal Action Against BrokerScience, Cites “Damages”

Ben Behrouzi Updates Company “Values” and “Culture” Web Pages. Only One Problem: They’re Stolen

ePerks.com Link to Vlad Zablotzkyy

Ben Behrouzi / ePerks.com: A Case Study in Self Induced Search Engine Brand Destruction

BrokerScience Coverage of iHype.com Launch

BrokerScience Acquires BenBehrouzi.com