Author Archives: Dustin Luther

About Dustin Luther

Founder and original blogger on Rain City Guide, Dustin has since started #InterestedIn Marketing where his team provides content and social media services that helps industry experts earn recognition as thought leaders. You can find me on Twitter (@tyr) and LinkedIn (/DustinLuther)

Because it was a Wacky Wednesday…

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Will Hicks lets us know that there are plenty of US embassies still on the market…

Ron Ares leads us to the ultimate real estate ethics guru: Ted Truitt

[photopress:wacky_wednesday.jpg,thumb,alignright]Because Flipping should only be practiced by professionals…

How not to show a home…

It’s the little things that get so darn messy…

If you’re willing to follow, Marlow leads us toward a worldly journey of kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms, etc where there is no normal: Normal Room

And, of course, the original: Wacky Wednesday

What's in the best interests of agents?

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Jan at the logical dog has set up a petition that requests the NWMLS board to reverse it’s decision and continue sending listings to Realtor.com.

This got me thinking about the often-interesting dynamic between the “best interests” of brokers vs the “best interest” of agents, which is something I’ve heard Russ Cofano talk to quite eloquently. However, I really don’t have a feel for how agents feel about this issue. Is the decision to stop sending listings scene as something that was “thrust” upon agents, or is it something they advocated for? Because of the NWMLS unusual status of a “broker-owned” MLS, I’m assuming the former, but I’ve been wrong before so I’d be interested in hearing from agents in the audience…

Riding the OC Wave…

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I took a drive last night to meet up with the fine folks at Sellsius and more than a few others at the Rooftop Bar of La Casa del Camino in Laguna Beach. What an awesome spot with an amazing view (unfortunately, I arrived at the bar a little late for getting good photos from the deck and instead you’ll have to suffice with this photo taken directly below the bar to get an idea:

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I captured some of the people who showed up in this photo:
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(Back row: Laurie Manny of Long Beach, Kaye Thomas of Beach City, Heather, Rory Siems of Laguna Niguel, Joe Ferrara of Sellsius, and myself. Front row: Brian Brady of Amarica’s Most Opinionated Mortgage Broker and Rudy Bachraty of Sellsius)

Some others who showed up (but didn’t make the above photo) included Sarah Washburn of ActiveRain, Tisza Major-Posner of Route66, Loren Nason of Real Estate Technology, Kelly Kilpatricks of Rancho Santa Margarita and Morgan Brown of Blown Mortgage.

I’m a bit late to the game in that most everyone else has covered the event… Suffice to say, I had a blast and heard a ton of great stories! So many of the people in attendance have been living in breathing the RE.net for a while now that they were able to get me back up to speed with all kinds of juicy stories.

Thanks again to the Sellsius boys for organizing the event.

BTW, I’ve added a few more photos from this event on Flickr . 🙂

How about those SEO tweaks?

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I thought about labeling this post “Does SEO work?” or something similar until I realized that is just stupid. SEO stands for search engine optimization and not only does it work, but in many ways, it is the basis for why blogs work so extremely well for promoting yourself as an expert within a niche topic (as Rhonda has done… Or even a nationally recognized expert!)

So where am I going? I recently had another meetup with my project blogger and I realized I hadn’t made some simple SEO-related tweaks to his wordpress blog that I made to RCG last December. The tweaks I made were to:

  • edit the title tag of all my posts
  • add keywords to the blog

I gave one update to this post, but essentially failed to follow through, so I’m hoping to remedy that right now. 🙂

First, I’m a bit surprised that many of my one week observations held steady. For example, RCG is still the #1 result for [Agent Recommendations]. Also, RCG has essentially dropped off of Google’s radar for a search that used to be our #1 organic traffic generator: [Seattle Real Estate]. My expectation was that Google’s algorithms might be temporarily confused by my changes to the site, but that they would pick up our new configuration after a while and continue to drive us traffic on this key search term. No such luck after four months.

As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that Google is still somewhat confused. My logic stems from the fact the page Google has decided is most relevant (using this search term) from RCG changes on a weekly basis. This week it is the link to Robbie’s articles which shows up somewhere down the middle of the page (if you show 100 results per page on Google as I do)

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However, the real genesis of my SEO tweaks were to see if I could get the “other” search engines to send RCG a higher percent of our organic traffic. The idea is that Google was sending about 92% of the organic traffic to RCG and I wanted to see if I could get MSN and/or Yahoo to send more. As you can see from this Google Analytics chart for stats from the month of March, 2007, I failed:

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Google sent 91.73%, or approximately 92% of all organic traffic to the site in March of 2007, which means there was essentially no change at all! In other words, the SEO-related changes I made did not have the intended effect of increasing the percent of organic traffic that RCG received from non-Google sources.

However, I’d be ending too soon if I made it sound like the SEO changes were not beneficial. Here is the marketing summary from Google Analytics for the month of March 2007 compared to the month of November 2006 (i.e. well after the changes to before the changes!).

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What you see is that our visitors from organic sources is up 138% between those months and the visitors from organic Google searches is up 139%. This is almost double the increase from “referral” sources which makes me think that the changes I made to the site were effective and not just background growth!

(Of course, it can’t go unnoticed that the Seattle Bubble sent us over 2000 visitors in March. Wow! That’s well worth a juicy link to the most bubblicious real estate site in Seattle. 😉 )

Also of note… Google really seems to like our article on moving to Seattle. I love that my “little bit of serendipity” has turned out to be so helpful. You can never tell what post is going to kick start an interesting conversation.

Finally, as a treat, I thought I would present the chart that never fails to impress at my seminars. In March 2007, there were almost 25K people who came to RCG once and never returned. 🙁 (that is NOT the impressive part…). On the flip side, there are over 1,800 people who have visited the site more than 200 times.

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For the RCG contributors (and commenters!) who wonder how widely that your stuff gets read, realize that there are a HUGE number of people who read without ever letting their presence be known. If you fall into that category (at least 95% of the regular readers do), feel free to introduce yourself in the comments any time! (The first comment is free.) 🙂

So, to wrap this up as a “project blogger” post… I’d highly recommend that anyone starting their own blog get Google Analytics. It’s free, easy to use, and provides a wealth of information about how people use your site! 🙂

Am I watching the end of cable TV as we know it?

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No surprise that I don’t watch much TV (and take the time away from reading blogs???), which makes it all the more surprising that I’ve become addicted to Joost.

Joost is a free TV service/technology from the wickedly-smart guys who brought you both distributed music sharing (Kazaa) and distributed telephone service (Skype). It is “cable-style” in the sense there are a bunch of channels dedicated to specific themes from groups like MTV, National Geographic and Comedy Central.

Just based on their reputations, if I was a Comcast executive, I’d be thinking how can we buy these guys out before I have to pay a Skype-like price for a service that Niklas and Janus have made (essentially) free… again. Any resemblance to dis-intermediation efforts in real estate is completely circumstantial! 🙂

My guess (although I’ve not read this anywhere) is that the backbone of this technology is similar their earlier products in that users are sharing the data with each other as oppose to having any one set of servers stream the information. The beauty of this set-up is that after seeding the correct data, it scales extremely well and service actually improves with more users. The idea being that with more users, there is more likely to be someone local to you who is able to stream you the necessarily data bits.

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Niklas and Janus fascinate me in that they continue to pump out products that can only exist in the world of internet technology and allow them to avoid all the pesky hardware issues that follow their competition. Consequently, they build stuff that consumers can (and do) love.

Nonetheless, I agree with the folks from Lifehacker that the quality is not up to cable standards (yet), but I happily overlook this issue thanks to the extreme usability (i.e. fast-forward, multiple programs on any given channel, etc.) as well as the social-networking aspects (i.e. movie chat!). If you’re interested in peeking into the future of TV, I still have two invites to give out! 🙂

Living Room vs. Family Room?

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Being a person always willing to highlight my real estate ignorance, this interesting article (and associated slideshow) from Slate on a town being built in a former cornfield outside of Philadelphia made me realize I don’t know the difference between a family room and a living room. Wikipedia says the difference is one of formality and highlights the fact that the differences are blurred for those of us who grew up in homes with only one such room. To confuse matters more, we always called our room the den, which (according to a wikipedia redirect) is the same thing as a study.

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Starting with Community Outreach

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Even before we were done building out the InsideBu website, I recommended that Madison start doing some research. And I started by advising him to fill up his sidepanel with links. My logic is that the process of building up a blogroll forces a new blogger to read other bloggers. The fact that it also also has the benefit of building up some good will with prominent local bloggers is just icing on the cake!

Here is the advice I gave him:

In the first week, there is no need for any blogging (although you should be writing a few posts just to get the blogging muscles exercised!). My recommendation is to spend a few hours this week researching the online competition for your area. At the end of Week 1, I would expect for your sidepanel to be filled with a bunch of links! (For background, see this blog post on Linkation!).

To give you an idea of where I’m going, I recently revived a bit of the neighborhood focus on RCG, which resulted in these Neighborhood Roundup posts. You simply will not find as many neighborhood blogs in Malibu (any?), but that doesn’t mean you should slack on the links… In terms of where to start, here is where my gut says should be the order of importance:

  • Local Bloggers
  • Celebrity Bloggers
  • Project Blogger Participants
  • Local News sites
  • Local Real Estate Professionals
  • Los Angeles bloggers

Some places to start looking for bloggers and other sidepanel links:

To see how Madison has implemented these recommendations of Project Blogger, check out the sidepanel of InsideBu!

Steps to Hosting Your Own WordPress Blog

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It has been so long since I initially set up a blog on a new server that I had to pretty much re-learn everything in order to build InsideBu. The process isn’t all that hard if you’re comfortable with terms like FTP and database. If not, there are many great blogging options for people who will host your blog for you (The Top Producer team I work with will happily host a WordPress blog under your URL as part of their real estate website product!) and both WordPress.com and Blogger offer good, free blogs (hosted under their URL).

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.

Here are my running notes taken directly from a Google Doc I used to document the process (but cleaned up to add links and delete out usernames/passwords)…

We choose to use Yahoo Hosting because I’ve heard good things from other bloggers about the service. I was less concerned about the price (good hosting options for a blog differ by at most $5/month), and really focused on ease-of-use. I’d heard that Yahoo has a really easy install for WordPress (WP) blogs and that definitely appealed to me!

However, I was immediately disappointed that the blog they install was an old version of WP and not in the root directory. This would mean that I would need to do a manual upgrade before even blogging! OUCH! Anyway, I ended up bypassing Yahoo’s “easy install” option and instead, I installed the latest version of WP from scratch.

The manual install required three extra steps:

  1. I needed to create an ftp user using Yahoo’s admin panel (easy!)
  2. I needed to created an “empty” MySQL database (which also required me to install PHPMyAdmin) and note the name of this database (again, all of this was done through Yahoo’s admin panel)
  3. I needed to install use an FTP client (I used the free and open source FileZilla)

None of these were particularly hard and I noticed that Yahoo provided help files for all three of these tasks should you need that kind of thing.

With the back-end ready, I simply followed the instructions for the 5 minute install of WordPress…

This required me to create an admin profile for the blog (again, pretty straightforward).

At this point, InsideBu.com was live and functional, but with a generic theme and no plugins…

Here are some of the steps I took to spice up the blog and get it ready for launch!

  1. I installed and activated some basic plugins.
    • To install I simply used FileZilla to drag and drop the files from my hard-drive to Yahoo’s servers. Once configured for a server, FileZilla operates somewhat like the Explorer tool on Windows.
    • To activate, I simply clicked the “activate” button within the “Plugins” tab of InsideBu’s Admin panel.
  2. The plugins were:
  3. I tried to update and optimze the permalink structure, but this screwed up something on the new version of WordPress and I couldn’t find the .htaccess file to update (long story!), so I gave up on this one for the time being and used the generic linking structure (i.e. “?p=33”)
  4. Installed and activated the appropriate theme! In our case, Madison choose Orange Sunrise. This required me to
    1. download the theme
    2. unzipp it
    3. ftp the files to the “themes” folder on Yahoo’s servers
    4. activate it on the wp-admin panel
  5. Create a tagline
    • For SEO reasons, I included the words “Real Estate” and “Malibu” but my phrasing could easily be improved!
  6. Unselect “comment author must have previously approved comment!”
    • Want to do everything possible to encourage comments early and often! 🙂
  7. Organize sidebar items via the widget feature (very slick!)
    • I’ve put links at the very top for now closely followed by comments. As the site gets more comments, I’d flip this order in order to encourage community participation!

Those were my steps to creating a brand-new blog using the free and open-source tools available from WordPress. It is probably too complicated for most agents, but probably not too complicated for many of agents that are reading this blog.