Tweet Up, Meet Up, Geek Up..

Steve Belt and I are planning a meetup at Depot Cantina 8/5 ~5pm in Tempe. All Tweeps, Twealtors, Rainer’s, bloggers, geeks and heck, everyone is invited!

At AZREBN, we didn’t get to meet this month. This is a perfect excuse opportunity to get together! There is always a lot to talk about. :-)

Hope you can make it!

Nick

** Update** You can RSVP on our MeetUp page as well..

TypePad Explained - Part 3 of Many

First Things First:

Before you jump right into your first post, there are some housekeeping things you will probably want to take care of first.  So let’s do that…

Before we get any further, lets look one more time at the layered menu tabs TypePad uses.  Below you see the “Account Menu” in green. Then in blue you have what I call the “Tabs.”  If you look even more closely, below that you have different pages within that tab.

In the “Account Menu” click on “Control Panel” and you will be presented with an overview page.  The first thing probably want to do is fill out your Profile.  So from the Control Panel, click on the Profile Tab.  Do a good job about this.  It is (another one of) your online identity and, at least in my opinion, provides useful information to your readers about who you are, if they want to know.  Once you fill out the “Author Profile Page” click over to the “About” page to set up, well, the “About” page.  This page let you check mark what information you want on your public profile page available to everyone.

One more thing on the “About” page.  There is only one for all your Blogs in this account.  It resides outside any individual blog.  So if you have a “professional blog” and then a “rant blog” in which you claim some alias, beware - they are linked through your About page.

The last thing on the Profile Tab is the “Mobile Settings” page.  If you are so inclined, you can email TypePad a post.  Why?  I don’t know.  My guess is that this is a hang up from slower than broadband speed internet access, but set it up anyway…just in case.

The next blue tab is Site Access.  Here you can do a couple of different, important things.  Ban spammer IP addresses and words (they are referring to comments you receive).  You can password protect all, none, or some of your site, so if you are also writing a family blog, you can keep it out of the public view.  The last area is the Domain Mapping Page.  This is where you assign your Domain Name to your blog.  We’re going to come back to this a little later, after we’ve posted a few times, and walk you through that step by step.

The next blue tab is the Stats Tab. It’s a little limited, but if you don’t have time to mess with Google Analytics or Google Webmaster Tools right now, it is adequate.  You can see the number of hits, where they went to and what the referring website was.

Next is the Files tab.  These are documents and images you want to store to reference in your site.  Not to be confused with the ability to put pictures in your post.  That is handled in the actual post window (and then stored here if not referenced off somewhere else.)  This would be how you would upload a custom banner or document you created that doesn’t reside somewhere else on the internet.  It uses a simple upload protocol much like anything else.

The last two tabs are “Account Info” and “Help.”  Account info is where you tell them your billing information, upgrade or downgrade your account and can see the last 6 times they billed you.

The “Help” tab is actually pretty good.  While you do get email tech support with the Pro package, most of the time you can find the answer to what you are looking for in their extensive online library of information.  By the way, when you need it, tech support is really good too.

Next time, configuring your blog…

3hrs CE Credit - “Blogging for REALTORS”

Next offering of this class is on the 6th of August at the Phoenix Association of REALTORS.  Visit their website to sign up!

3 hrs of General CE Credit for a FUN topic!

Rob

Blog Info Bonanza

TypepPad Explained - Part 2 of many

So you took the leap…whipped out the Credit Card and signed up.  CONGRATULATIONS!  Now what!!??!!!

Now the fun begins…  :-)

First things first…lets look at how to navigate the TypePad Menu System.  Here is the homepage you get once you log in.

There are several different things going on here…at the top you have what I’ll call your “Account Menu” because this controls things across many different Weblogs (because you can create more than one.)

The Home page is where you can select from the different weblog manage.  As you can see, I have two here…”Rob Gibbs, CRS, GRI - Finding Homes, Building Relationships” and “Bleeding Edge Tech”

There is also usually new info from TypePad located on this page…like the iPhone App announcement (above) and the ability to search the knowledge base and the latest from the TypePad company blog.

So, sticking with the “Account Menu” the next thing is the “Weblogs” tab.  This looks pretty much the same as the home page with a couple of IMPORTANT Exceptions…

There are two important buttons on this page…the first is the “Create New Weblog” button in the green header.  USE THIS WITH RESTRAINT!  ;-)  The other is a nifty little tool in the blue box - “Set Up QuickPost Bookmarklet.”  This puts a little app in your right click menu for any webpage you come across to post to any of your weblogs quickly.  We’ll get more in depth into the QuickPost function in another post.

Next is the Photo Albums Tab.  This is just what you think it is…a place to keep your photo albums. We’ll explore how you can use this to showcase homes and do other cool stuff in later posts.

Next is the TypeList tab.  This one is especially useful for adding blogrolls or non-standard widgets to the sidebar without having to edit HTML in Advanced Templates Mode (again…more on that later).  You can see I have 2 here…the Google Reader Widget and the My Favorite Sites Blogroll.

Finally, one of the most important tabs is the Control Panel tab.  This controls many of the features across all your blogs.  You will immediately notice a secondary tab set on this page (in light blue).  One of the first things you should do is complete your Profile.  We’ll start with some of the Control Panel Features in the next post.

See you next time!

Rob

Don’t be a secret agent

I use Google alerts to alert me to things that might possibly be related to Phoenix Real Estate.  Often, the alert will clue me into any new blog post by nearly everyone in the Phoenix RE.NET, whether I’m subscribed to their blog or not.  Today, a Phoenix area blogger wrote about purchasing foreclosure properties.  I hadn’t seen this blog before, so I clicked on through from the alert to check it out.  Once there, I was flabbergasted that this blogger had a Wordpress powered blog, had been blogging since January 2008, and I had yet to StumbleUpon him in one way or another.

For the rest of this article, I’ll call this previously undiscovered blogger our Hero.  I don’t mean to embarrass anyone, and if you have a blog that this feels eerily similar to, hopefully I can provide a few tips that will help you get discovered.

I looked at our Hero’s Archives more closely, and in early January he had a post with his 2008 New Year’s Resolutions.  Sitting at #6 was “Don’t be a secret agent”.  You probably know that this means if no one knows you’re in the business as a real estate agent, then you are in fact, a secret agent.  We must market ourselves and our properties to the public, if we are to have any hope of being successful.  The same is true of our blog.

Now, just because I hadn’t heard about our Hero’s blog, didn’t mean he was a secret agent.  It could simply mean I’m ignorant to someone that the rest of the world knows about.  Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I looked for comments left by other people.  Since January, our Hero has 37 posts, with a total of 3 comments.  One was by our Hero, leaving 2 comments from the outside world.  There were NO trackback links.  Personally, I don’t know if I would have been able to stick with blogging as long as our Hero, if that was all the feedback I had received in 6 months.  If nothing else, our Hero has demonstrated some very good stick-with-it-ness.

In my opinion, if you want to be a successful blogger, and not a secret agent blogger, you must do 3 things, and do them fairly well.  You must write a quality blog yourself.  You must comment on other blogs.  And you must link to other blogs.  If you don’t do all 3, you will probably end up being a secret agent blogger.

Scanning through our Hero’s blog, I found only a couple of posts that ever linked away from his site, and they were to AZCentral.com articles.  It’s not a bad idea to link to AZCentral, but it’s not going to get you noticed by anyone there.  And although I’m not going to profess to be an authority on every commenter in the blogosphere, I don’t recall ever seeing our Hero comment on anyone else’s blog.

I’m not going to critique the content of our Hero’s blog, but it’s certainly seems good enough.  What our Hero needs to start doing, is to let the world know that he’s there.  To do so, he needs link out.  Link, link, and link again.  My 2nd post on my blog I made the best accidental act of goodness I possibly could have, and linked to Jay Thompson’s blog (among others).  Jay immediately stopped by and commented.  He’s very friendly like that.  I didn’t know at the time just how powerful linking out was, but the positive experience encouraged me to do it more.  If you are starting a new blog, you probably cannot link out too often.

And then of course, you need to comment.  Not everyone uses Wordpress, and thus not everyone is alerted to being linked to, like a Wordpress blogger will be.  Leaving a comment is a sure fire way to let someone else know that you are there, and that you read what they are writing.  Almost assuredly, if you leave a comment on someone’s blog, they are going to track you down to see who you are.  A good percentage of the time, they are going to subscribe or bookmark your blog, and eventually they’ll comment back and/or link back.  At least, they might.  It’s a numbers game, like all prospecting, but if you are persistant, even mildly so, you’ll find the results will indeed follow.  Just be sure to comment on topic, and respectfully, as Jay suggested in his session at June’s Blogging Meet-up.  You will be rewarded for your effort.

Typepad Explained - Part 1 of many

Hello bloggers,

This week I’m going to start a series of posts on TypePad, one of SixApart’s blogging platforms.  TypePad is a hosted, you pay for it, platform.  I’ve used several different ones (in fact, I’m using Wordpress to write this post) and I keep coming back to TypePad because it is as simple to use as it is powerful.

Right out of the gun, I want to address the issue of cost.  First off, it isn’t a lot.  In fact, depending on what you might pay for a hosted site it might be less.  If you want your blog to be your site, with IDX integration and other forms and such, I would recommend the “Pro” package (14.95/mo).  It gives you the flexibility to edit directly into the templates and other powerful things but still use their basic setup.  All of the packages are listed here.

Why pay when there are so many free ones?  A couple of reasons.  The different packages come with varying levels of tech support to help you integrate different pieces like <iframe> for IDX and other widgets or anything else you might be having trouble with.  There is never any worry about updating software or making sure your webhost knows how to host your software because TypePad is hosting their own software on their servers.  In short, it just works. You get multiple blogs, multiple authors, unlimited photo hosting (in the pro package).  Full CSS editing capability and a ridiculous amount of bandwidth to name just a few things.

Next time, getting started with a new blog on TypePad…

Are Your Listings Picture Perfect?

Here is a great read in the REALTOR® magazine this month on perfecting your photographs on your listings.

Put an end to boring or unflattering property photos. Here are six quick fixes to common photo challenges.

By Melissa Dittmann Tracey | July 2008

Buyers today want to see photos, and lots of them. But if the snapshots you’re taking of your listings are unflattering, lack detail, or are simply too boring, you could actually be doing a disservice.

To get more eyes on your listings, you’ve got to make sure your photos are showing off properties to their fullest. Photographer Barbara Lane offers photography tips and illustrations for real estate practitioners in her book How to Photograph Interiors When You Barely Know How to Work a Camera (Barbara Lane Photography, 2007). Here’s how she solves the trickiest photo challenges: read more