It has been just over a year since I first started to play with an idea of compiling a list of real estate blogs, and to sort them according to Alexa rank, Google PR and Technorati Rank. I have decided to revive the list and it is now live and well on Go Beyond MLS again, where it all started.

Why is the list back on this website?

Some of you may remember that I have dedicated a separate domain for the list (www.top100realestateblogs.com), which is no loger in my possession and you probably still can snatch it from Go Daddy if you so desire. Not sure what you can do with it though….

I have decided to abandon that domain simply because it is much easier to “pump some juice” into the list from this blog, as it is more recognizable, has more traffic and ranks much better than the other domain did. Truth has to be told that I did not promote www.top100realestateblogs.com with enough excitement and energy as this blog or my other blogs.

Either way I believe Go Beyond MLS is much better suited to be a home for the list of Top 100 Real Estate blogs.

Substantial Change- All Links Are SEO Friendly Now

One of the things I always wanted to accomplish with the list is that I want real estate bloggers to truly benefit from the list. To accomplish that instead of publishing the list via a javascript code, which was invisible to search engines, the list now published through a PHP code that in essence is plain old HTML. The list is now visible and indexable to search engines.

While only about top 20 blogs on the list will have some share of the traffic the list receives, I hope some juice along with page rank will be transfered to all the blogs on the list.

Is it just another link exchange farm?

Some may come to that conclusion while looking at the list. But since I do not ask for a link back to this blog in order to be featured on the list, it can hardly be viewed as link farm scheme. In fact it can serve as a good resource for advertisers looking to expend their brand into real estate blogging community.

How Often Is The List Updated?

At the very minimum, the list will be updated once a week, therefore if you just submitted an inclusion request your blog may not be yet on the list. Be sure to come back and visit the list a week from now.

Final Thought

If you ever come across this blog, I want you to know that it is never too late to submit your blog to be featured on the list. If you are a real estate agent but do not have your own blog, I hope the list will serve you as an encouragement. I am certain you can regonize at least few of the blogs on the list. There is also much we can learn by observing the blogs on the list. Some of them shine as great examples of blogging in real estate- more to come on the subject in the future. So stay tuned and happy blogging!

Back in October of 2008, I wrote a post in which I tried to compare two services that allow your readers to share the content of your blog on variety of social bookmarking websites- AddThis and ShareThis. At the time I was experimenting with both widgets across my blogs. While AddThis may have been a little more recognizable, I thought that ShareThis offered better reporting.

Over the last few weeks, AddThis managed to win my heart and today I would like to highlight few of the changes.

Button and The Way User May Interact With it

While I am still not that thrilled about button on “hover” behaviour- I would rather it to begin interaction on “click”. But considering AddThis popularity, I think it is safe to assume that majority of visitors expect AddThis button to behave a certain way. Besides there is a reason why AddThis button responds to both “on hover” and “on click”. When you however over the button with your moths a small widow is pulled down with several essential social bookmarking websites:

However if a visitor clicks on the button, a larger window pops up which allows you to choose between about 47 different social bookmarking websites:

In the past when a visitor clicked the button, it would take him or her to a page on AddThis website.

Reporting and Statistics

Not sure it was me (highly unlikely) AddThis listened to, but they did heck of a job with improving the reporting and statistics. First thing you may notice logging into your account is that AddThis now segregates data for each domain. If you happened to have AddThis button on multiple websites, you are likely to find this feature useful.

AddThis now also provides data on where your content is submitted to. You can find that under “Top Services”.

In addition AddThis also provides information about geographical location of users sharing your content- look for it under “Top Continents”.

While some of my friends are using Entrecard for networking, I am still very sceptical about the service…

The mechanics of the Entrecard are quiet simple. After your blog is approved, other blog owners can “drop” their card on you or purchase an ad on your blog with Entrecard credits.

I presume if you have plenty of time on your hands, you can drop your card on other blog owners all the day long. It may increase a chance that that a blog owner, on whom you dropped your card, may pay you a visit back, and this where Entrecard reminds me of a traffic exchange scheme.

You can however “purchase” advertising on blogs that use and Entrecard widget with the credits you and your blog earns, or the credits you can purchase from Entrecard.

Unfortunately, in the Real Estate category there are very few blogs that I would like to exchange traffic and/or banners. And so far the banners “bought” on my blog are from the blogs that are not quiet relevant to my own blog.

It is interesting to see that in order to advertise on my blog it will cost other Entrecard members 4 credits per day. If one was to buy the credits, he or she can advertise on my blog for 250 days for only $6.00. Quiet a difference from the rate I offer currently to my potential sponsors.

Of course these figures may change in the future, and I would like to know how does Entrecard determine their rates. But to be completely honest, I don’t see myself staying with Entrecard. I am taking it for a spin (no more than 3 months), so I can say I tried it. Let see if Entrecard will change my mind.

If you are using Entracard please share what do you think is the best practice when using that system.

Many of my readers have probably ran into Janet Meiners Thaeler aka NewspaperGirl. If you did not meet Janet on Twitter, you probably have read her articles on Marketing Pilgrim. If you know Janet, you know she is an expert as far as press releases go. If you did not know that, you know it now.

So why I am bringing up press releases and (re)introducing Janet to you? Simple. I believe that press releases will be on the rise this year, considering economic factors. Long time ago (about 2 or 3 years), Janet, while still blogging on WordPress.com blog, wrote about her experiment with press releases. Comparing to PPC advertising, press releases delivered visitors to her websites at a consistent rate of 5 cents per click or less. Even back then you really needed to “babysit” and “sweat” over your PPC campaigns to keep the cost per click under 20 cents.

Janet got me hooked on PRWeb. My first $40 press release brought a 300% return on my investment during the first day of the press release going live. To make the long story short, I have never felt like I wasted money on a press release. PPC??? Well that’s another story….

There are however a few challenges with press releases. Not being a good writer with added difficulty of English as my second or third language, I never felt comfortable writing press releases. I certainly never scored highly as far as editorial review goes, probably just barely passed the scrutiny of PRWeb to get my releases published. Writing for my blogs is different. Most of you are very forgiving as far as my grammar goes. But press releases are different…

Slowly I came to realize that press release is something I will have to outsource. So to my surprise, when visiting Janet’s blog, I discovered that she is now offering Press Release Writing Services. Knowing Janet’s background in blogging, marketing and social media – there can be no better person to write my press releases. I am planing to use Janet’s services for my Interpreting and Translating Business. If you need a solid press release, you should consider her services as well. Don’t take my word for it. Read what Jeremy Shoemaker (aka Shoemoney) wrote about Janet’s press releases- a very powerful testimony testimony if you asked. Not trying to be mean to Jeremy, but it is good to know we can compete on the level of grammar.

About over a week ago Go Beyond MLS was down for several days. In fact my entire hosting account was suspended. Evidently my websites were overloading the server and exhausting the server resources.

As attractive as shared hosting is, keeping low prices and all, every serious web master and/or blogger needs to look ahead and plan for a dedicated server solutions… eventually.

As much as I love WordPress as blogging platform, it uses good amount of server resources to evidently cause serious enough trouble for my web host to have my account suspended. So I had to do something. Optimize my sites so that they would not over load the server or move to dedicated web hosting solution (which would cost me about $1200 a year even with the least expensive solutions out there). So I opted for optimizing my websites (at least those powered by WordPress) with WP Super Cache plugin.

WP Super Cache along with it’s parental plugin WP Cache, where aimed primarily at allowing WordPress blogs to survive heavy loads of traffic resulting from websites like Digg or Slashdot. However, as it was in my case, you don’t have to hit the front page of Digg or Slashdot to cause some server issues.

So how does WP Super Cache do it? After you install and configure the plugin, it saves individual pages from your WordPress site and serves them to your visitors as plain old html as long as they do not leave comments. Statistically over 90% of your visitors are passing by without ever leaving a comment. Therefor it is save to presume that over 90% of your visitors will be shown the cached hml versions of your pages instead of heavy PHP scripts.

I know that down the road I will have to revisit the possibility of purchasing dedicated server. But if WP Super Cache can buy me a year, it will end up saving me about $1,200.00.

Side note: If you do not have your custom (“pretty”) permalinks configured on your blog, you will have to configure them- WP Super Cache requires that configuration. It is also good idea to backup your current .htaccess file before configuring WP Super Cache Plugin should things go wrong.