Renaming My Blog. Can You Help Me?


I have decided to make a major change on this blog. As you can see I am going about it in an usual manner, but I would also like the regular readers to help me out.

A little background….

I owned this domain from the time I have been active real estate agent. The headline “Real Estate Review Blog” sounded like a good idea at the time. However it does not reflect accurately what this blog is all about. There are plenty of outstanding real estate bloggers who at the same time are also great Realtors. I think it is not my place to even address this aspect on my blog, since I do not have hands on experience in the real estate industry.

It is also reflected in that 90% of what I have written here are only remotely related to real estate as my targeted audience is real estate agents.

The traffic to this website and keywords by which users find my blog speak laud and clear. Many of visitors have come to look for subject related to blogging, internet marketing and social media marketing. I am not sure I have ever planed for this, but I think I am ready to start making lemonade out of free lemons.

I have an idea as to what the new headline will read, however I would like to hear your suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

Give Your RSS Feed A Huge Hug!

RSS HuggerThanks to an outstanding blogger and a super geek, Dane Morgan, I have discovered a new nifty website today called rssHugger.

Dane is one of those guys whose recommendations I tend to follow without scrutiny. So here I am rushing to review the website in order to have my blog approved.

RSSHugger claims to help you to promote your blog. As of registering my own blog there were 2538 other blogs in the system already. You can find my page here. Although my page is still empty, as soon as my blog is approved it should have the links to the latest posts from the RSS Feed of my blog.

Considering the fact that the rssHugger already enjoys a PR 5 and decent Alexa Rank I believe it can potentially bring extra visitors to my blog.

If you decide to join rssHugger you have an option to write a review of their website on your blog or pay $20 (approximately $2 per year) for your blog to be approved.

Once your blog is in the system it can be featured on Top 100 list. I will be sure to follow up with an update when my blog is approved and I collect more statistics.

What To Do With Unverified Email Subscribers On FeedBurner?

Unverified SubcribersIf you are using FeedBurner to manage and promote your blog’s feed and allow e-mail subscriptions, chances are that you have number of “unverified” subscribers in your list. It is probably due to unfamiliarity with “signing up” process in place, or that those who have subscribed to your feed with e-mail have forgotten to confirm their subscription, a step required to activate their subscription.

Darren at Problogger wrote how to handle the unverified email subscribers– I used his tips on several occasions on few of my blogs, with one exception. I have never send more than one e-mails to advise unverified subscribers to complete the subscription process. If my first reminder went unanswered I would just delete the unverified e-mails from the list.

How do you handle the unverified e-mail subscriptions on FeedBurner?

LinkedIn. How Realistic Are Your Newtwork Statistics?

As you may already know LinkedIn has a “signature” way to visualize your network statistics. I have never paid any attention to those until recently. According to LinkedIn, I can reach out to well over one million professionals:
LinkedIn Network Statistics

Realistically only 52 professionals I can contact directly. I can see potential of reaching out to 10,500 people through your immediate connections. But not over one million. Still even reaching out to 5,000 for a particular cause can be extremely valuable. Are the network statistics there to show the potential of your immediate connections? In the past I have never used LinkedIn actively besides just having an account there. With most of my contacts on LinkeIn I am connected in other ways.

How are you using your LinkedIn connections? This is not a rhetorical question. I am contemplating upgrading my free account and your feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Real Bird Introduces New Feature: RealBird Virtual Tour

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:

RealBird Virtual Tour

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.