Comments on: 7 Tips for Marketing Your Real Estate Blog

By: Steps to Hosting Your Own WordPress Blog | Rain City Guide | A Seattle Real Estate Blog...

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 08:49:53 +0000

[...] BTW, I feel compelled to mention that this blog post is LONG LONG LONG overdue as I promised it way back on December 15, 2005, but never could put together all the steps into a blog post and never had the need to build a new blog from scratch. [...]

By: Dustin

Dustin — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:23:10 +0000

Jim,

I use a plug-in called feedList to display the worth noting column…

feedList (http://rawlinson.us/blog/?p=212) does one thing and does one thing really well… It displays RSS feeds.

So the real trick to the “Worth Noting” column (as well as the “Latest Million Dollar Listings”, the “Latest Seattle Listings” and the “Local Seattle Events”) is to get a good RSS feed. For the listing information, I’m using the RSS feeds that get output from the real estate search tool that was developed by Robbie. For the Worth Noting column, I use an RSS feed that is generated by del.icio.us.

feedList includes instructions on how to show an RSS feed using their product. If you’re comfortable playing around with some basic html, it should be pretty straightforward.

By: Jim Duncan

Jim Duncan — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 20:42:08 +0000

Dustin -

If you don’t mind, is the “Worth Noting” a plugin for WP? I have had the idea for months for just that, but haven’t found the right tool.

–Jim

By: Robert Smith - CB Bain

Robert Smith - CB Bain — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 16:41:51 +0000

As a “competitor” I appreciate your approach. I came to real estate from high-tech consulting where most of the time we looked at each other as “co-opetition” — working together to improve the state of the industry and the customer experience. I hope to do the same in real estate. Thanks for the info.

By: Andy Kaufman

Andy Kaufman — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 18:26:23 +0000

Hey Dustin,

Another great post. I’m looking forward to the Wordpress tutorial.

LPLUPRL could almost be Plural.

Also, the listings feed is looking good.

By: Dustin

Dustin — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 21:09:12 +0000

Thanks for the great feedback…

By the way, the listings all show up thanks to the magic of RSS. (Remember: “LOVE RSS!”) I’ve been working with a developer to create an RSS listing of the Northwest MLS database, and while we have something that is functional (i.e. it updates MLS listings in near real-time), we still have some design kinks in terms of the search layout and the detail page layout before we “release” it.

With an RSS feed of MLS data, it is fairly straightforward to display the data on the sidepanel. (I use a very similar tool to display both the “Local Events” and the “Worth Noting” articles).

By: Ed

Ed — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 20:46:46 +0000

Hey Dustin and Anna!

Cheers for your resourcefulness and willingness to share, share, share!

Your site is great and alll the stuff you work on with this blog is pretty amazing.

Again, thanks for the Skype call too; I look forward to meeting you both some time soon in Seattle. Incidentally, how do you keep all the homes and other links on the right side of your blog? I’m guessing you implement all that through some sort of template/CSS programming?

BTW, got picked up on news.Google.com with the press release I released a day ago on PRWeb.com.

Thanks again for this blog of yours and the articles. Great stuff man!

By: Ron Ares

Ron Ares — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 16:30:48 +0000

Despite your concern for giving too much advice to potential competition, I find your approach to be a refreshing alternative in an industry where people are all too often hyper-protective of what they *think* they have control over (i.e. information).

Thanks for sharing the best practice tips. I think your work is among the gold standard in the real estate space.

Regards from Portland,

Ron