Over the past few months I have been slowly falling in love with ActiveRain. The first time I have ever came across this real estate network, I did not know what to make of it. I did not join ActiveRain right away because I did not feel there was a place for me. I had no interest renewing my real estate license and was under impression the network is reserved to real estate professionals exclusively. I am not sure why I had this perception, but after joining ActiveRain I quickly realized that this community is very open minded and most importantly not limited to real estate agents exclusively.

However in this article I would like to point out that real estate professionals can probably benefit the most from ActiveRain. And here are just few points why.

• Blogging. Every member upon joining the community is given their own blog. If you were thinking to start blogging yet was not sure you were ready to invest resources and time into it, ActiveRain blogs is a place where you can try to “wet your feet” as far as blogging is concerned. While their blogs may not offer all the bells and whistles that you can normally get when hosting a blog on your own domain. It does offer the basics and can get you started.
• Instant Audience. One of the best part about blogging on ActiveRain is that you have an instant audience for your blog. Even a newbie to ActiveRain like myself can often get 10+ comments on their initial posts. To me the most rewarding part of blogging is an audience that is engaged.
• Networking. As I am writing this post there are 108,851 members on ActiveRain. My guess that majority of the members are real estate professionals or working in the field closely related to real estate. If you ask me that is an impressive number of members!
• ActiveRain’s Popularity. Before joining any online community or forum, I am always trying to look at the “popularity factor”. The more popular certain website is, the better chance to gain some extra visitors to my own websites. According to statistics from Alexa and Compete (see the charts below) ActiveRain is outranking Inman by quite a margin:
  
  Click on the image below to see detailed statistics on Alexa:
  
  
  Click on the image below to see detailed statistics on Compete:
  
• ActiveRain Referrals- a place to share and find referrals posted by other ActiveRain members. If you are on a “hunt” for leads, why not to browse referrals by other agents rater than spending money on lead generating schemes?

To conclude, I simply would like to repeat my earlier statement- I am slowly falling in love with ActiveRain. I am also confident you will appreciate ActiveRain as well. If you are already a member, visit my profile page and add me to your associates, I would love to connect with you on ActiveRain.

The RealBird Blog just announced new feature called RealBird Virtual Tour. I have written in the pas about RealBirds nifty widget that allows real estate agents create a “mini-showcase” of their listings while offering an opportunity for viral marketing, and allowing bloggers or any webmasters to grab the code and feature the listings on their websites or blogs.

The new feature ads Google Maps Street view to the lower par of the widget and comes at $9.99 per listing or $14.99 when purchased with a property domain name:

The Google Maps of this version is unique in itself as it offers map view, satellite view, hybrid view, terrain view as well as Google Earth.

Just taking a look at few of the featured listings, they need to be more optimized. The images are downloading rather slow even though I have a cable connection. The slow load may be caused by the scripts as well.

Overall it is a nice addition to their product. The “branded virtual tours” offer users an opportunity to share the tours on variety of social networking websites as well as easy way to publish information to their blogs. Personally I would prefer to grab the code via “copy and paste” as it was the case with their former widget, since I do not like to give away the user name and the password to my blog.

Hope to hear from some of my readers what they think about this new feature.

photo credit: psdOver the period of last few months I was a recipient of incredible support and generosity for the bloggers around the world and real estate bloggers in particular. While I have no words to describe my gratitude, there was one question constantly on my mind: “What can I do to show my gratitude to all these wonderful people?”

I am a firm believer in saying “what does around, comes around”. In other words I should not be expecting other people to be supportive and generous to me, if I am not supportive and generous to other people. However at the end of the day, no matter how much I give it always seems that I receive back hundredfolds. And so is true about last few months.

As a token of my gratitude to many bloggers and real estate professionals, I am working on few projects that hopefully will benefit you in some way.

Blogroll
While I am not in favor of site wide blogrolls, I have decided to implement on on my blog. The exception of course is that it is not a side wide but a dedicated page which will show the blogs on my blogroll. With the help of the Live Blogroll plugin, I have added a little twist to my blog roll. If you navigate to the blogroll page and hover with your mouse over the links a need ajax pop-up will appear with the latest articles from your blog. This blogroll is the work in progress, so if you did not see your blog there yet it will probably appear in next few days. I will also look into the way to paginate that page so it can redistribute the “link juice” to the bookmarks there in equal measure. I will also try to play around with the plugin and instead of serving the “latest post” through the ajax widget I will attempt to embed them in the page itself. I think that would add more value to the blogroll itself besides it being just collection of links.

Free Consulting: Blogging and Internet Marketing.
As many of your may gather I know a thing or two about blogging and internet marketing. If you do not have a blog yet, I encourage you to start one immediately. If you have one already, feel free to ask my advise on how you can improve your blog performance.

Free Translating And Interpreting.
If you ever decide to market your real estate business in other languages, I will be happy to help you out. While I do not speak Spanish, I can translate and interpret for you in Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Italian. Due to my schedule I will be offering this only to the blog owners listed in my blogroll, again the Blogroll is a word in progress and I am anticipating to have more than 100 blogs on the list. So please stop again in the future.

If you have any questions about the above offers feel free to contact me.

Trying to bring myself up to speed with things around real estate blogosphere I have came across across the RSSPieces announcement that Mary McNight, the founder and (now former) Chief Marketing Officer of RSSPieces “is no longer part of the day to day operations of RSS Pieces”.

During last week I have e-mailed Mary once or twice and never received a reply. Very unusual of her, since in the past Mary would respond to my e-mails rather promptly- at times within minutes.

On her Active Rain blog Mary wrote briefly that her relationship with RSSPieces went south. Evidently many of the Mary’s social medial accounts where hijacked, but she is on they way to recover them.

So will the pieces at RSSPieces stick together now that Mary is gone? From the comments on RSSPieces appears that they might already be falling apart.

I personally never was Mary’s client and our paths would not have crossed if I was not interested in Internet Marketing and Blogging. Needless to say Mary has my respect and support. Mary had build a strong and respectable profile for RSSPieces. She is well known and respected in various circles of this wonderful new media we call blogging. It is hard to know what really happened and what Mary is planing for the future. Real Estate Radio USA is interviewing Mary today, so I am looking forward to that interview.

I am certain though that Mary will have no problem to be successful no matter which direction she decides to take. RSSPieces on the other hand will have to struggle and really step up a bit, especially now that many of the clients are disappointed and confused.

If you write a blog, it is safe to presume that you want other people to read it. Unless of course you have blocked the search engines and are allowing only certain people to see your blog. From what I can gather when it comes to the real estate blogs, most of us would like our blogs to be read. In fact some of us have set a goal to turn first time visitor to our blogs into regular one or even a subscriber. In fact in some other niches, the value and the influence of a blog is determined by the number of subscribers.

In real estate, blog can also be responsible for the growth of your business. In fact, many real estate blogs are highly monetized digital “properties” on the internet, while others contribute to the successful real estate transactions outside of the Internet. In either case the subscribers to your blog may have something to do with the dollars in your pocket at the end of the day.

In this tutorial, I will show you one way you can track a specific goal (lets call it “subscriber goal” for the sake of the argument) using Google Analytics. If you are not familiar with Google Analytics but are serious about your online marketing efforts I strongly suggest opening an account. Learn as much as you can about what Google Analytics has to offer, it will only benefit you in the long run.

Before I get into technical part, which will require some minimal knowledge of HTML, I would like you to sit down a determine following. Think about the past month. How much income (preferably net income) can you contribute directly to your blog? Now divide that amount by the number of subscribers- the result will be used in Google Analytics as “goal value”. For example if your net income was $1000 and your blog has 265 subscribers, dividing $1000 by 265 will give you $3.77- when setting your gaol at Google Analytics you will use this amount to indicate your “subscriber goal”.

Setting The (Subscriber) Goal In Google Analytics.

If do not have an account with Google Analytics, you might want to register first and implement the tracking codes in the template of your website.

In order to track your subscriber you need to know who many people had actually clicked the subscription button or link. However, I highly discourage against placing Google Analytics tracking code int the feed of your blog. Also, if you are directing your visitors to your blogs feed at FeedBurner, you may not be able to implement the tracking code even if you advanced in programing.

In order to capture these statistics you will need to implement what is known as a jump page. You can do that by using a simple text editor such ad Notepad. Create a file a name in subscribe.html. Then copy and paste the code below, but make sure to replace few lines of that code with your own info (explained below the code):

Make sure to replace YOURFEEDSURL with actual URL of your blog’s feed and the line that says to replace it with Google Analytics Code.

Upload the file (subscribe.html) into the root directory of your blog. The meta refresh in the “head” of this HTML file will redirect users to your blog’s feed wile Google Analytics will capture necessary data.

Login into your Google Analytics account. In the dashboard area you will see the list of your websites in the table called “Website Profiles”. Then click “Edit” link for the blog you are about to implement a “conversion goal”. You can set up up to 4 different goal for each website. If you followed my instructions in creating the jump page and uploading it to your server, your conversion gaol configuration should look like this:

Note that 3.77 is the result of calculation we did dividing your net income by the number of your existing subscribers.

I know that it sounds some what complicated. But it is not as hard as it looks and the benefit of having these statistics measured should supersede any fear of tackling Google Analytics and a little bit of HTML coding.

Depending on the popularity and traffic to your blog you can see results within day or two. However to have more accurate statistics, you might need to wait longer than just one day.

Here is an example of how this is working for my website:

The figures in “Per Visit Goal Value” column offer me clear idea how much I can pay per each visitor and still profit if I were to strike advertising deals with the referring websites and blogs.

Warning: The above describe method should only be used in conjunction with other statistics. It maybe that some visitors may not actually subscribe eve after clicking the subscription button or link. You will also need to factor in unsubscribe rate and never ever use the gross income in calculating the goal value. Being very conservative when assigning the goal value will shorten the range of the error margin. You should also be conservative with your subscribers numbers, it’s better to err on the side of lower number of subscribers.