Do you own your Real Estate Business?

This may seem like a strange question, and for some of you it will be a 100% absolutely, yes I do answer.  Particularly if you are the owner/broker of a real estate company.  But that isn’t actually what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about your online real estate business:  Do you really own it?

For example, how many of you have, as your primary email address:  SuperAgent@aol.com, or SuperAgent@yahoo.com, SuperAgent@cox.net, or even SuperAgent@gmail.com?  If you do, who owns that email address?  It doesn’t look to me like you do.  Rather, it looks to me like AOL, Yahoo, Cox, or Google own your email address, and they are simply letting you use it for a while.  I wonder how long they’ll continue to do that?  Forever?  For a year?  For a decade?  What if they start charging you for their service, or impliment anti-business rules for their “free” email accounts?  After all, each of those businesses can decide to do whatever they choose to, since they own the email account.

For bloggers, let’s look at another very common example of NOT owning your business.  Is your blog at Blogger.com?  Is it at Wordpress.com?  Both of those sites allow you to create a free blog.  Each has some sort of rule about blogging for business, which many people ignore, and for the most part, so do the sites.  But tomorrow they could actually start enforcing their own rules, and shutting down blogs, or even just sending you a nice fat bill each month.  How prepared are you to lose months or even years worth of blogging over night?  Speaking from experience, when I accidentally deleted the first 100 of my own posts from my blog, and thought I had NO backup, your heart will sink to the floor, and you will think the world is crashing in around you, if that happens.

The fix for both of these problems is relatively simple and relatively inexpensive. For each, I believe you need to start by purchasing a domain name that you OWN. At GoDaddy.com a domain will cost you around $10/year, but if you are nice, I can show you how to get one for a buck or two less.  So for the cost of 2 cups of coffee at Starbucks (and feel free to cut out two trips this week to pay for your domain, if cost really is an issue), you are well on your way to ownership.

For the email problem, I highly suggest you find a Microsoft Exchange hosting provider for your email.  MailStreet.com is a good choice, with pricing plans starting at $13/month.  For more ideas, Microsoft has this list of Exchange hosting providers.  Why do I recommend an Exchange solution?  Because it works.  And it works well.  With Exchange you’ll get integration with your email, calendar, tasks (to-do list), and contacts all in one application.  Exchange will push your email, contacts, and calendar entries to your smart phone real time.  And of course all of these companies provide web mail support, so you can view your email from any computer anywhere, if your laptop crashes on the day your smart phone is run over by a bus.

For me, the beauty is in the real time integration with my iPhone, although Blackberry users will benefit just the same.  There’s nothing like having your phone notify you of a new email as fast or faster, than your desktop computer does.

For a good, and a bit less expensive solution, you might also consider using Google’s business apps version of Gmail to have Google host your email/calendaring, which allows integration with a smart phone.  I don’t have any experience with this solution, but I have heard it works well, and the full blow business account is only $50/year.

To own your blog, there are a number of hosting providers you can choose from, which will allow you to use download the free software from WordPress and host your blog.  As a side benefit to being hosted, you’ll get to pick any theme and any set of plugins you desire in WordPress, which will further make your blog truly unique, and thus truly yours.  GoDaddy will host your blog for $10/month, however they are not very tolerant of blogs that get a lot of page views for that price, so while it can be a good place to start, with success, you may outgrow them.  Many people believe the leading hosting provider is currently MediaTemple, however HostGator and A Small Orange are each well thought of.

At this point, you may be wondering what I use?  My solution isn’t for everyone, but it works well for me.  In my office, I have a Windows Server with Windows Small Business 2003 installed, which gives me remote access and a Microsoft Exchange server.  Sitting right next to the Windows server is a Linux server, which hosts my blog (actually, it hosts many blogs).  Because I already had a T1 line coming into the office for phones/internet, and I have the skillz to build and maintain these servers, doing it myself was a no brainer.  I know a few agents across the country that self-host, but only a very few of us.

There are more choices than what I’ve given here, but hopefully I’ve given you some nuggets to think about and places to start looking if you don’t yet own your online Real Estate Business.

WordPress 101: Dashboard basics

My Word(press)! Is it Monday already? Then it must be time for the next installment of our WordPress tutorial series “WordPress 101″, the special series of articles helping you, the beginner blogger, set up your first self-hosted WordPress site! This week, let’s kick* a ball around the WordPress equivalent of the back yard and learn all about the Dashboard.

But first, we need to tidy up a couple of loose ends left over from last week’s WordPress 101: Installation article. This is important, so please pay attention! :-)

Do this: Cleaning up the Install

Hopefully all went well with your WordPress installation and you have a lovely, shiny new site ready for action. However, before we can forget all about installation and get on with the really fun stuff, we need to do the following to help keep our new site safe from nasty hacker types…

Open up your FTP client, and delete (yes, I said DELETE) these two files from your WP installation:

../wp-admin/install.php
../wp-admin/upgrade.php

You don’t need them anymore (any subsequent upgrade of Wordpress will automatically load new versions), and you don’t need them lying around where they could be misused by hackers (unlikely, but you never know).

Do this: Change your admin password

Unless you have the memory power of a super-computer it is unlikely that you will remember the admin password created for you during the WordPress installation. So let’s change it!

Login to your WordPress site in your favourite web browser using the username admin and the password provided to you by WordPress during installation. You did write down that password, didn’t you? For future reference it’s a good idea to bookmark the link to the login screen which, typically, will be:

http://mydomain.com/wp-login.php

Look for the menu item called “Users”, click on it and you should see this:

Click on the User admin and you will see the profile page for the admin user. Change the password to something “strong”, ie a mix of letters, numbers and characters, but memorable. Once finished, click Save and your new password will be set.

Ok. All done? Let’s get on with this week’s tutorial!

The Dashboard

Think of this as the nerve-centre of your site. The Dashboard is where you access all of Wordpress’ administrative tasks, be it writing/editing posts, managing plugins, approving comments, or even editing your template theme files. You will be spending a lot of time working in the Dashboard, and although it won’t be long before you can zoom around it like an expert, as it’s still all new to you (and perhaps a little daunting), let’s take a quick look around and see what’s what.

So, login to your Dashboard using your admin username and (new) password. You should see something like this:

I am not going to go into detail describing every single menu item, for two simple reasons. Firstly, “doing something” is often better than “reading about something”, so take a look around, open up some menu items and see what’s there. Don’t worry, you won’t break anything - just don’t click “Save” or “Update” or “Delete” unless you mean it! Secondly, a brand new version of WordPress, version 2.7, is just about to be released. Whilst the basic functionality and organization of the new-look Dashboard is very similar to today’s version, the layout and look and feel of the Dashboard is radically different. No doubt this will be the subject of a future WordPress 101 article.

Here’s a brief run-down of the key menu items:

Write

This is where you write new Posts and Pages. You can also create new Links here, for example for your “blogroll”, should you choose to have one. We’ll look at the differences between Posts and Pages in more detail in a later instalment of this series.

Manage

This is an important section of the Dashboard and you will spend a fair amount of time here once your site has some content. Basically speaking, this is where you edit content you have already added via the Write menu. Editing Posts, Pages, Links, Tags and so on, is all handled here.

Additionally, the Manage menu gives you access to two important features - though perhaps not used very frequently - and these are Import and Export, very useful tools which enable you to download or upload a copy of your database in XML format. Don’t worry too much about what “XML” means, other than it is a way of formatting data by organizing it into a text document using XML markup, not dissimilar to HTML, so that it can be easily “read” by software that understands XML, for example your web browser or text editor. Import and Export are very useful because they enable us to move the contents of one WordPress database to another WordPress site, or even import the contents of a database from another blogging platform such as Blogger, Typepad, etc.

Design

The Design menu is where you select the Theme to be used by your site. Upon installation, WordPress loads 2 basic themes but it is unlikely that you will want to use one of these given the vast number of Themes available, generally free to download and use. This section of the Dashboard also gives you access to setting up and displaying Widgets and, depending on the current Theme being used, access to any Theme Options that may be available.

Wotsa Widget? A Widget is a small predefined piece of code that you can easily configure and add to your theme sidebar, for example. They are very user-friendly, generally self-explanatory to configure, and enable you to add many of the typical things found in a sidebar: category lists, recent posts, calendars and more.

Comments

Comments are postings made by visitors to your site in response to the articles you have written and published on your site. This section of the Dashboard is where you manage comments, specifically whether to “approve” them or not, or mark them as spam.

Sadly, comment spam is inevitable. You will receive comment spam. End of story. For example, at the time of writing, this very site has already received almost 2000 spam comments since its re-design a few months ago. Luckily, WordPress provides an excellent anti-spam system called Akismet, a plugin automatically installed with WordPress and which is, generally, very good at catching comment spam. We’ll look more closely at this in a future article.

Settings

As you can see, the Settings menu gives access to several sub menus, all of which control various aspects of the configuration of your WordPress installation. As a rule, you will set these up once and then forget about them. The default Settings are perfectly fine for the moment and, for now, I recommend that you leave them as they are. Again, we shall come back to this in a future installment of this series and adjust some of the settings to fit specific site requirements.

Plugins

Plugins are an essential part of any WordPress installation. Whilst the basic WordPress installation provides most of the functionality we need to run our site, Plugins provide additional functionality or make an existing process easier to use. I shall be devoting an entire article to Plugins. Yes, they are that important. In the meantime (and in a shameless plug) I’ve assembled a brief list of what I consider to be “essential” plugins, which you can see here.

Coming up next…

In next weeks’ WordPress 101 article I shall be running through some important Dashboard Settings and explaining what they mean and how to use them.

Until then… Happy web developing!

This article is syndicated from Studiograsshopper.

Footnote: * That’s what we do with footballs’ in my part of the world. :-)

AZ Real Estate Blogging Network Meetup - November 19, 2008

Come join us for our monthly meet up for all real estate professionals eager to learn and share about blogging for business! AZ Real Estate Blogging Network is excited about November’s meetup and our featured speakers!

Jay Thompson, Broker, Avid Phoenix Blogger with Thompson’s Realty will be organizing a FAQ session for bloggers on blogging and marketing for your online presences! Jay has been blogging for almost five years now and comes with great experience and so willing to share his knowledge!

Also joining this month is Dave Smith a fellow Realtor from Tucson, Dave will be sharing his experience with building several WordPress blogs such as Real Estate Blog Lab that offers basically a laboratory for blogging. Dave offers great advice, tips and how to’s on blogging. Dave will be sharing his experience, successes with his blogging and online presences!

Justin McHood with Arizona Mortgage Team will be speaking about Social Media Networking and how it became a permanent fixture to his business plan! How he got started and how it has helped his online presence.

Please mark your calendars for our AZ Real Estate Blogging Network for November 19, 2008 meet up from 10:00 a.m to 12:30 pm. Lunch will be served!

The Wednesday mid morning workshop will be RSVP only with limited space. Be sure to sign up with our group within the MeetUp.com platform. You can reserve your seat with AZREBN MeetUp group here.

SPONSORS:

Fidelity National Title - 60 E Rio Salado Pkwy - Tempe, AZ 85281

Map to Fidelity National Title

Justin & Tammy McHood - Arizona Mortgage Team

Please be sure to RSVP as soon as possible and spread the word! We encourage inviting others to join our Meetup group and also find us on your favorite social networking group.

See you in a few weeks!

Candace