PropAdvisor Network - Home

Eric's Propopoly Webinar

2009-10-28T18:59:00Z

This webinar by Eric Bryn runs for about 50 minutes and is similar to the video below, but with some new ideas and reasons for blogging your way to real estate success!

Propopoly Motivational Webinar

2009-08-26T16:04:00Z

See our Propopoly 'Blog Motivation' webinar video capture below. This was our first of what is sure to be many webinar training calls, where our collective group of bloggers and staff collaborate and train on what it takes to bring your blogging abilities to the next level.

Blogging Sites Discussed:

We had some technical difficulties and did not record the introductions, so we start with the example of Copyblogger.com and what is said there regarding the 7 Deadly Sins of blogging. Approx. 70 Minutes Total.

Become a FAN on Facebook

2009-07-17T17:57:00Z

Propopoly® on Facebook

Running Out of Blogging Ideas?

2009-07-02T20:27:00Z

Remember that all you need is 10-20 minutes a week to send us a great blog post! Since the content needs to be original just write about what you know. No need to do extensive research or anything. Remember that the more you write the easier it will get and the better your search placement will become. Here are a couple of ideas to blog about:

Things to do in your community during the summer - this is a HUGE topic that gets searched since people are always looking for fun things to do during the summer months ñ tell them about whatís available in your area.

New listing or new sale? Either one is PERFECT for a blog putting up a new listing gets exposure for your sellers and talking about something that you sold proves your expertise and ability in this shaky market ñ both of which are musts to amp to your business!

Home buyer seminars - are you offering them? Get the word out. Charity event? Get the word out. Open House? Get the word out. Remember that Google takes a few days to index things so be sure to get your posts up on events at least a week in advance - a week and a half to two weeks is even better.

Your best bet is to write on a variety of topics - this gets your name in front of all kinds of different audiences. Because you'll be blogging about local real estate as well they'll remember you when it comes time for them to buy and/or sell.

You can view more blog writing topics here: PropAdvisor.net/wiki/Intro_To_Blogging.

July Newsletter

2009-07-01T20:23:00Z

See our latest newsletter Here

June Newsletter

2009-06-02T20:24:00Z

See our latest newsletter Here

Randee Simborg, Rubloff Residential Properties, Chicago, IL

2009-04-14T20:45:00Z

"I have been writing on our Propopoly blog for only a couple of months and have already gotten 2 leads from articles I wrote! This is such a great tool for me! I am not one who wants to maintain a daily blog on my own. Here I can write articles on my own schedule, send them in to the wizard at Propopoly who posts it for me, and I'm up and running! I wrote an article about a building that I love and got a great buyer who will also be selling his current condo. He lives in the neighborhood, found my article when using Google to search the address I had written about. Wonderful! The second lead was from an article I wrote about our local school. Another buyer who would like to move to my neighborhood in order to enroll her daughter in this school. Awesome! I am posting links to the blog on Facebook and other social networking sites. It is easy and it is bringing me business!"

Randee Simborg, Rubloff Residential Properties, Chicago, IL

New Propopoly Newsletter - Fresh Design

2009-03-02T17:42:00Z

See our latest newsletter here.

Blogging Best Practices

2009-02-27T21:16:00Z

Tell the truth. The whole truth. Nothing but the truth.
Use a human voice. Write what you know… avoid using “fancy” words that the average Joe wouldn’t understand.
Know where the data comes from. If you are writing about market statistics, site sources and provide links to where you obtained the information from.
If you have information that might get you in a lawsuit – STOP. Do not write negative comments about anything (i.e. restaurants, developers, other real estate companies, hotels, etc.).
Be the authority on your product/company. Showcase your real estate knowledge and provide information or testimonials from your clients. If there is a real estate icon you trust and like, link out to them.
Write about unique topics. All 2 million REALTORS® are writing about the current real state economy – the chances of your article showing up are slim to none… and Slim just left town.

Share With A Friend and Syndicate Your Work

2009-02-27T21:06:00Z

We have added an option to the bottom of all of your blog posts - Share With A Friend. This allows you to easily share your blog post writings with people over the Internet, in a more 'active marketing' way that supplements the Google search traffic. This gives your writing additional exposure and is an acceptable and highly encouraged way to distribute your content onto different sites and to your clients. For example, if you have a Facebook profile page, you will likely want to share your posts (all or only some) on your Facebook. This feature is very easy to use (a few clicks) and can create a link to your posts, with a short excerpt.

An example blog post summary and link appears in Facebook

Alternately, you can Twitter your post updates by clicking the 'Twitter' link off of the Share With A Friend popup box. By clicking the 'More' link in the lower right you can also add your post to LinkedIn and nearly every social networking site out there. Or, you can email the post directly using this link. One of our bloggers was using this feature to send blog updates to her sellers when she posted their properties, open house dates, and related neighborhood content to her blog. What a great idea!

Now, you should all know about our strong stance on duplicate content, which is when the same article is published in multiple places online. There is a penalty in doing this (read it straight from the horse's mouth here), but these sharing features are not affected by the Google Duplicate Content penalty. Why? Because besides the email option, which won't be seen by Google since it's going to someone's Inbox, all other 'share' features only share the link to the blog post content and in some cases a picture. No content is being duplicated, but you are creating powerful inbound links which should result in additional real traffic (when someone reads your Facebook page and discovers your blog that way) and also Google Points for inbound links - the more inbound links to any page, the better that page will rank.

Final Notes: If you don't see the Share With A Friend link on your blog, please let us know. There is one known issue pertaining to the use of apostrophe's in headlines that prevents this from working properly (because it confuses the software, which treat the apostrophes in a special way). We're working on that issue and should have a fix in shortly.

How to divine new, relevant topics from your readers - via your traffic reports

2009-02-11T23:21:00Z

People use web analytics, particularly keyword lists, to determine 'what worked?' last month in terms of blog topics resulting in traffic from organic longtail searches. Boring (but useful). A little more interesting is how to derive new topics that you haven't really thought of, and see the outer depths in the abyss of long-tail keyword territory.

Well, I've been seeing a bit of 'crossover' or 'crosstalk' between topics, resulting in entirely new ideas - mashups? - that are essentially presented by consumers (through Google queries resulting in an inbound click to the blog) and are intrinsically very, very long tail. How do we know that? Because no site came up covering the topic in question. My site did instead. Confused?

Here's an example:

A Manhattan Luxury Homes Blog we run has a writeup about the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade and owning a home on the route and how it's such a charming place to be. In a separate article they talk about renting. Well, there was a huge rush of traffic right before Thanksgiving - for people looking to rent homes on the parade route.

Now, I'm not from NY, but in my limited real estate experience hadn't thought that people would rent out properties for one week for people/companies to host parties in. But it makes a lot of sense. It's a new micro-market vertical I hadn't thought of yet. Well - if there's someone in that real estate office who has any access to anything like that, a half hour spent writing a blog about it next summer would surely get a ton of exposure; considering that the market was under-served with web sites.

This is also an example of how blogging can be great for micro-micro niches that you wouldn't want to set up a whole site for and maintain all year. That wouldn't be practical. But with blogging you can be strategic, feel out and plan for the timing of hitting certain verticals and topics.

How to Twitter Correctly

2009-02-10T23:15:00Z

Here's a great primer on the do's and don'ts of participating in Twitter, an interesting social networking and communication platform.

Finding your Blogging 'Voice'

2008-11-05T16:30:00Z

One of our friends from @Properties who attended our FutureTense 2008 agent technology training event in Chicago commented that the most important things to keep in mind when starting blogging is 'finding and using your own voice' when you write. We took that to heart because it's true. We had heard it but hadn't made it a point for our training, and it's a good point to keep in mind - especially when beginning blogging.

I stumbled upon this great article on blogflux.com while registering a Propopoly blog on their syndication system. Read the great article about finding your own 'blogging voice' here.

Weekly Newsletter Week 9 - Halloween

2008-11-04T20:59:00Z

This week is our first Halloween edition newsletter. This new Propopoly™ Weekly has been sent out along with the traffic reports for all blog web sites. See the latest newsletter here.

Cool new Propopoly Site Gallery

2008-10-22T19:31:00Z

We've been updating the public Propopoly.com site to aid in showing off the blogs created thus far, and used a cool Flash-based tool to make a neat gallery view of the sites. See these here!