Blue Water Realty Group

Union Street Media is pleased to announce the launch of a site for Blue Water Realty Group, a firm serving the New Hampshire Lakes Region. Based in Gilford, NH, owner Karen Beane has served the Lakes Region for 35 years in both real estate sales and in architectural design. Karen and her husband Doug Beane have developed Team Blue Water consisting of the Beane family and an extended group of talented craftsmen, engineers, project managers and sales agents who work with clients from every aspect of real estate from design to construction to sales. 

Blue Water selected Union Street Media to develop a semi-custom site with all the bells and whistles their clients need: clear navigation, great search features, and tools to make their home search a breeze. These include saving favorites and receiving notifications by email of any new listings that meet their search criteria.

Zillow makes list of 11 “Troubled” Web Companies

C|Net’s Webware section has recently published a list of 11 “troubled web companies.” The piece appears to consist mainly of hypothesis by Rafe Needleman based on the various business models of the companies involved. Zillow made the list at position #4:

The real-estate site’s revenue model is advertising. Real estate and bank advertising. Unless the real-estate research site starts charging for foreclosure listings, I don’t see it doing too well in a hunkered-down economy, in which people are trying to hold on to their homes for dear life, not upgrade.

Not sure why Zillow was singled out among all the various real estate search aggregators, but I would imagine the same criticism would hold for any of them. For that matter, the same criticism might hold true for all advertising-based businesses as credit issues are not limited to real estate and banking.

Myself, I don’t entirely buy it. Needleman’s rationale for including Zillow involves the non-paying audience of the site (”people … trying to hold on to their homes for dear life”) and not the paying part of the Zillow audience. A commenter, Renoir, put the opposite spin on audience situation (emphasis is mine): “Zillow provides a valuable service and homeowners will be checking their home prices like they check the stock market to see which one rebounds first.”

Certainly banks and real estate are going to be looking pretty carefully at their expenditures; all businesses will. But do any of them think that decreasing their visibilty will help them improve their business? If Zillow can find a way to demonstrate value in a crumbling marketplace I’m sure they’ll do fine.

On the other hand, not everyone who is in the real estate profession today will be next year. If the ones that disappear are the ones who are advertising then I suppose there’s more merit to Needleman’s claim that Zillow is “troubled.”

I can appreciate C|Net’s requirement to publish eyeball-gathering content regularly. But a more interesting article might have actually looked into the business models of the “troubled” companies far closer and perhaps included financial information where it was possible.

[Update: Spencer Rascoff CFO and VP of Marketing (yeah, I admit that sounds a little funky) was interviewed by BlogTalk Radio and had this to say (about 19 minutes into the audio on the linked page):

Our whole goal is to get traffic to the website. Last month we got almost five and a half million people to the website. Up 42% versus the same time last year. ... Our advertisers are typically real estate brokers or agents who are advertising themselves or their listings. As well as large national advertisers that are trying to capitalize on this decision point of buying or selling a home. Which drives a lot of purchase activity whether it be a new car or TV or washer/dryer or a new lawnmower or new cable service or new cell phone or you name it. A lot of those kind of transactions occur around the home buying transaction. So we sell a lot of advertising to a lot of those types of companies.

Later on (about 29' 20" into the audio on the linked page) Rascoff is asked about the direction of Zillow and he says:

So we're a private company and we've raised almost 90 million dollars in venture capital. We someday may go public. We have very patient investors. The traffic is going great and the revenue monetization is coming along nicely our key areas of focus are improving the quality of the data that we have, the accuracy of the Zestimates, the information we have on all these homes, the quality of the listings. We have a lot of work to do on mortgage marketplace to really blow that product out. And we have a few other things up our sleeves as well so, we're busy

Ok so obviously these are a just nice simple answers to softball questions. But perhaps they could serve as a starting point for asking more pointy questions if someone wanted to determine if Zillow really was "troubled." Things that come to mind might be:

• Just how patient are the investors?
• What amount of the ad inventory is taken up by larger nationals or other types of clients who are likely to continue advertising through our current financial situation?
• Insert your question here.

My guess is that, if pressed, we could have answers to these questions. And then, based on those answers determine whether Zillow is "troubled" or not. But calling them troubled because they are a content play doesn't quite seem worthy of the "troubled" moniker. As my brother-in-law might say: that's just calling a dog a dirty name and hanging it.]

[Update Again: Today Zillow let go of 1/4 of its workforce. From the Zillow blog Rich Barton says:

This week we are reducing our workforce by 25%. This was an incredibly painful decision for me and the leadership team, but, in the end, we concluded that we had no choice but to securely batten down the hatches as we sail into a major economic storm.

He goes on to say (repeating some of the information Rascoff gave during his phone call the day or so before):

One of the reasons this is so difficult is simply because the business continues grow. In the midst of the madness that surrounds us, we counted 5.4 million unique visitors to Zillow.com in September, which was a 42% increase in traffic over this time last year. Fear, value-shopping, and curiosity are driving people in record volumes to our site. ... While our revenues do not yet cover our expenses, those revenues have been growing at a rapid pace and we will continue to have open positions in areas that are directly tied to revenue, such as advertising salespeople.

Best of luck to the Zillow team past and present.]

All that said, I’m [ed note: clearly] no business forecaster, I have no insight into how Zillow is run or managed and I’m sure I’m missing something. Please correct me in the comments.

See how your real estate web site’s SEO is performing: use Rank Checker for FireFox

Are you tired of spending time typing in your preferred keywords on Google or Yahoo to see where your real estate web site is positioned on the search engine results page (SERP)? If you’re below page two, this can be a real time drain and take up a lot of your search engine optimization (SEO) time . If you have several keywords to check, it can be an even BIGGER hassle. Whenever you want to see if your efforts at SEO are paying off, simply use Rank Checker to get the data.

The folks at SeoBook have made our lives easier with a fantastic Firefox plugin called Rank Checker. I’ve been using this tool since July and couldn’t live without it. Even though it’s easy to install and use, SeoBook’s Aaron Wall has made it even easier by creating a 5-minute video to tech you how to install and use it. I highly recommend taking the 5 minutes to view it.

Five Tips to make Rank Checker even sweeter

1. You can cut and paste your list of keywords out of a spreadsheet and add them all at once, or you can type them one at a time.
2. Be sure to save your list of keywords to the preset folder. That way, you can run it any time you like with almost no effort.
3. You can simply view the results on-screen, but even better is to download the .csv (comma separated value) file.
4. Save that raw data file to it’s own folder as simply MM-DD-YY, M-D-YY, MM-D-YY, or M-DD-YY. (see tomorrow’s post to see why this is so important!) feel free to open the file in Excel and save it as a .xls file so that you can format and play with the information. Just don’t mess with the original CSV.
5. Plan to run this once a month for three or four months so that you can observe the impact of your SEO efforts (changes to content, meta data, and inbound link building).

This is the second in a series of five posts this week on cool FireFox plugins to assist in optimizing your real estate web site. Yesterday’s post featured a Firefox plugin for easily adding images to your real estate blog. Tomorrow’s post will examine a cool (but somewhat tricky) plugin that helps Realtors visualize and report on the data they get from Rank Checker.

Tool for making your blog better: Zemanta

Ever been to a blog and seen page after page of pure unadulterated text? You know, a giant wall of words pummeling your eyeballs? Since you’re here at the Internet Marketing for Real Estate blog I would guess that the answer is: Yes. But what about your own blog? When was the last time you put up a picture or a link to some relevant articles that are outside of your usual feedreader favorites?

Hopefully you’ve noticed that posts here have gotten a little more picturesque lately. And that is due almost entirely to a tool called Zemanta.

Adding pictures makes your blog better

When I’m talking to Union Street Media clients about blogging or content strategies I always encourage them to take pictures. Provide words and images that your readership will find useful or entertaining (or ideally, both). Everyone nods their head and agrees but when I check back in, it’s often a wall of words. Here are some of the reasons why people avoid adding images to their blog posts:

• “Taking pictures might be fun, but uploading and managing them is not fun and takes time.”
• “I’m not any good at taking pictures.”
• “I don’t have a digital camera.”
• “It’s a real chore to add pictures via the blog interface.”

So yeah, I love taking pictures and I love playing with technology. But that’s a part of what I get paid to do. You might get paid to do something else, like sell real estate. So I’ve been keeping my ear out for a way to make it less painful to add pictures to your blog.

Zemanta: Quick and painless pictures for your blog

I can’t remember where I first heard about Zemanta. It was either Chris Brogan via Danial Rothamel or maybe it was Jay Thompson. So hat tips to all those fine guys. Zemanta watches what you write in your Wordpress blog and comes up with some public, creative commons licensed images that you can use in your blog posts.

Now let’s get down to business and get some pictures on your blog. Here’s what you need to do (sorry that there is a little technical stuff up front):

1. If you don’t already use Firefox as your browser when editing your blog, start today.
2. Install the Zemanta Firefox plugin.
3. Log in to your blog and start a new post.
4. You’ll notice over on the side, there’s a new section for Zemanta.
5. Hover over one of the pictures and see if you like it.
6. If you like the picture, click it.
7. You’re done, the picture is now in your blog post.
8. Go back to step 3 and repeat.

Other than the installation the whole process takes about zero time. If you want to refine your options, there’s a tool to help filter down the images it shows (example: for my posts about business and Twitter, I filter by “bird” and then put a picture of a bird in).

If you want a little more control and are willing to do more work, I recommend checking out Mike Mueller’s post about how to use Flickr to find images people want you to share.

So there you go. I don’t want to see any more blog posts without a picture.

Your home page is not a doormat.

There are a lot of web sites out there with a home page like a door mat with a big frilly “Welcome” sign emblazoned into it. We all know how people use door mats, right? They wipe their feet on them and then go inside the building to accomplish their task. A piece of plastic carpet with the word “welcome” printed on it is just an inexpensive way of not meeting someone at the door and welcoming them yourself.

Now let’s think about the home page of a web site. Better yet, let’s think about the home page of your web site. If you have a “welcome” message on your home page, when was the last time you changed it? If you answered anything less than one month you can pat yourself on the back, if not, please read on.

Read more

Mike Toomey Real Estate

Mike Toomey & Associates Real Estate has relaunched their Central Massachusetts real estate web site with Union Street Media. Located in North Brookfield, MA, they serve all the “Brookfields” and the Worcester area. This easy-to-use site makes use of Union Street Media’s semi-custom design services, one-click searches to define their service area, Google Maps, integrated MLS feed, and great user-tools such as “save to favorites” and auto-email notification of new listings.

Critique of the Long Tail

For those of you who have already read my Long Tail and business blogging strategy post, here is a review of a critique printed in the Harvard Business Review. I always like to see opposing viewpoints and I hope you do as well.

If you aren’t Long-tailed out I’ll get a copy of the HBR article and add my own two cents to it.

Merrill Bartlett Group

Merrill Bartlett Group Real Estate has launched their brand and their business this week with the assistance of Union Street Media. With a focus on Kingston NH Homes, MBGRE has reconstituted a long-standing family business under this new brand. Bill Bartlett originally established the Kingston Real Estate Company in 1955. In addition to his long career in Real Estate, Bill served 5 terms in the New Hampshire Senate, leading major economic and business initiatives.  The “Merrill” in this new brand is Bill’s daughter, Lynne Merrill. After a 25-year career in marketing and public relations, Lynne has “returned to her roots to partner with her family as a real estate team”. The breadth of knowledge on their team and the depth of their group’s more than half-a-century connection to the Southeastern New Hampshire community makes this new site and company feel like a reunion rather than a launch!

The MBG site makes great use of Union Street Media’s semi-custom graphic design services, featured listings, integrated IDX search, one-click searches, and more. In particular, note the highly differentiated one-click searches that showcase their market knowledge and insights into local architecture and lifestyles.

Home Field Realtors

Union Street Media is proud to announce the launch of a site for Home Field Realtors, a Naperville real estate firm located in the Western suburbs of Chicago. David J. Field, Associate Broker with RE/Max Naperville launches a new real estate venture and this site simultaneously — recently relocating from Seattle, where he built a a highly successfull real estate brokerage. David has returned to his roots as a fourth generation native Chicagoan and calls the Western Suburbs his “home”. David has unique, in depth, and first-hand knowledge of the Western Suburbs communities of Naperville, Oakbrook, Elmhurst, Downers Grove, Clarendon Hills, and Hinsdale.

Conference Dashboard: Vermont 3.0 Creative/Tech Jam

[Update: link to the dashboard itself is fixed. Click here to just go look at the dashboard.]

As mentioned earlier, I’ll be on a panel at the Vermont 3.0 Creative/Tech Jam on Oct 25th at Champlain College here in Burlington, VT. I’m really psyched to be up there with David Gibson from Propeller Media Works and Frank Canovatchel (who, it turns out, was an advisor to USM developer Scott Nellé). Our topic is about building websites and I’m sure between the three of us we’ll be able to handle most any question that comes up. Read a little more about the conference and my fancy conference dashboard after the jump. Read more

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