---

Real Estate Webmasters Accused of Hacking

I just received an email from the Administrator of Pro Real Estate Network informing me that their security had been compromised and that I should log in and change my passwords. According to their post, employees of REW logged in to the Pro Real Estate Network forum by using the password of a Moderator who is also a member at REW. (note to self: Don’t use the same password on multiple forums)

Once inside, they proceeded to delete any threads that talked poorly of REW or it’s owner, Morgan Carey. Now I have no idea how accurate this accusation is, but if it’s true, I think it’s safe to say that the concept of “Reputation Management” has been taken to a whole new level.

New DoFollow Plugin

We’ve had a lot of great response to our DoFollow OPML project. While we work on compiling the list, I thought I would go ahead and release a new DoFollow plugin. We have been playing with several different plugins lately. Of all the ones we could find, we like the original by Kimmo Souminen the best. However, I wanted to have more control on a per-comment basis, so I had Dax add to it.

Once you’ve installed and activated it, you will be able add individual NoFollows or DoFollows from the comment moderation screen.

You will also find a new box on your editor that will allow you to add NoFollow to the comments of a single post.  

You can download it here.

The PropertyTown Real Estate Project

I’m excited to announce the launch of a new project that has pretty much consumed all of the last 5 months for us. PropertyTown is our new marketing platform built exclusively for real estate professionals.

Project Background

I spent a good chunk of ‘06 and the first half of ‘07 doing some consulting work for a couple different companies in the real estate space. During those gigs, I spent a great deal of time looking at many of the companies providing hosting and marketing services for real estate agents. I was truly stunned at how poor most of the services were. The majority of the companies we looked at were selling less-than-optimal platforms and giving their customers very poor marketing advice.  

When our last consulting contract was about to expire, we took some time to think about where we wanted to go. One of the options was for us to take on a new consulting job with a very large company that provided marketing services to thousands of agents. Our role in that project would have been providing them advice on how to develop new web 2.0 type applications that would help get their clients up to speed with the rest of the online marketing world. However, after a couple meetings, it became very clear to me that this particular company had far too much corporate bloat to ever be able to develop anything remotely cool in any type of reasonable time frame.

So we decided instead to explore the option of developing a product of our own. The biggest challenge was coming up with a plan that would not only be unique, but also fit us as a company. That meant that whatever we decided to do, it wasn’t going to be a high-volume, mass-marketed product. Instead, it needed to be something where we could leverage not only our programming capabilities, but also our years of SEO/SEM consulting experience.

We initially got the project rolling by recruiting a handful of real estate agents who were interested in participating in a beta program. We started banging out code and they spent a ton of time trying to break it. (And they did break it) They also had a huge role in feature development. They told us what they wanted, and for the most part, we built it. But the beta program wasn’t just about code. It was also about helping the agents learn new ways to build their online presence that wouldn’t end up getting them in trouble.

The project as a whole has been quite challenging. Turning Wordpress into a true CMS, and teaching real estate agents that there’s more to online marketing than keyword-stuffed reciprocal links were no easy tasks. But it’s all been worth it. In 5 months, we’ve accomplished more than some of the big “players” have accomplished in the last 3 years. We developed a ton of really cool features and tools, and our beta agents are doing exceptionally well. In fact, everything is now running so smoothly that we’ve decided it’s time to open up our community to new agents.

Join Our Community

If you’re a real estate professional who gets the web, and is tired of all the poor performance and broken promises that exist in today’s agent services market, swing buy the PropertyTown site and submit the contact form. We’ll follow up with you and schedule a call to discuss all the details involved with joining our community.

Join Our Affiliate Program

Also, if you’re someone who provides any other types of services for real estate professionals, you might want to seriously consider becoming a PropertyTown affiliate. We are offering a two-tier referral program that pays recurring monthly revenue for the life of the client.

 

Link Whores and Liquor Thieves

I while back, I received some swag in the mail from SEO Shirts. However, being the extremely lazy blogger that I am, I never got a round to giving them the link they wanted for the free shirt. So now I’m playing catch up.

Just for the record, I’m a big fan of “links for swag.” (Our mailing address is 23822 Valencia Blvd. Suite 310 Valencia, CA 91355) But I do think that if you are going to do it, you should take the time to make sure your swag generates maximum impact.

I think a T-Shirt announcing to the world that I’m a link whore is awesome. But this particular shirt falls a little short because of the size, typeface and colors used. It’s very difficult to read. A better approach might be a BOTW style white on black. That way, people could see that I was link whore from a good 100 ft. away.

Moving on…. I figured since it’s Beer Friday and I’m already pulling pictures out of the Blackberry, I’d go ahead and post a few more.

Last week, my good buddy Todd, accused me of swiping a cute little anti-spam flyer during a recent visit to the Plex. Now I can assure you that’s not the case. If I was going to take something off of a Google bulleting board, I would have took the picture of the weird guy with lines all over his face. (Which coincidentally, was posted in close proximity to the spam flyer….)

Most people think that Google is all about kitty cats and lime flavored soda.  But the truth is, that’s not the case. As you can see by this picture, there are some Googlers who really understand the concept of “work hard, play hard.”

And finally, here’s a photo from the end of the evening. It’s important to remember that if you leave your clothes hanging in the hotel bathroom with the shower turned on (anything to not have to iron) for too long, you will set the fire alarm off when you open the door. When that happens (at 2:00 am), the only way to get it to stop is to rip it off the ceiling and pull that battery out.

The Do Follow OPML Project

One of the things that happened over the summer while I was on my blogging hiatus was the launch of the “Do Follow” movement. For those that haven’t heard about it, it’s basically a group of bloggers who have realized that having comments and trackback links automatically default to “No Follow” isn’t really a good thing. (And it certainly hasn’t stopped the number of people attempting to spam comments).

The core concept behind the Do Follow movement is something I genuinely support. I’ve always moderated my comments, so anyone being a jackass never makes it live. Those that do make it through are either personal friends or trusted colleagues who I wouldn’t have any problem “vouching” for.

But the overall implementation of the idea in my opinion has been pretty poor. When I browsed through the many Do Follow Blogrolls or Do Follow directories, I found quite a few blogs that I would consider either poor quality or sites that are promoting things (selling text link ads or blog reviews) that I personally don’t want to be connected with. (From a linking standpoint).

I also noticed that for the most part, being part of the “movement” hasn’t really helped improve the level of participation in the majority of the blogs on the list. I think the biggest reason for that is the fact that the only real requirement to get on the list was to install a Do Follow plugin, and then put a copy of the list on your site. In the end, that just created a clever link swapping scheme. So once people got their sites added to the list, their support for the concept went away.

When everything was said and done, I found that the highest quality “Do Follow” blogs I cam across were ones that I found by accident. They weren’t on any published list, and they also weren’t displaying any kind badge that announced to the world that they support “Do Follow.” They were just great blogs being run by people who took the time to remove the link condoms, install the appropriate spam plugins, and dedicate some time to proper comment moderation.

Blogs with those qualities are the type of sites I’d like to spend time on. And those types of blog owners are the kind of people I would love to have comment on my blog, and in exchange for their commentary, I’d be more than willing ditch the love glove.

But there really wasn’t any easy way to find and connect with these types of sites. So I thought I would borrow an idea from Lee and try and put something together.

We have begun the process of collecting and categorizing feeds from quality sites that are not on any of the published Do Follow lists, and do not display any information declaring that they are a “Do Follow” blog. Once we have a good quality list built, we’ll turn it into an OPML file so it can easily be uploaded into any feed reader. The Do Follow OPML file isn’t going to be available to the general public.

So how can you get a copy?

Pretty simple really. Just help us build the list. If you have a blog that you think would be worthy, just visit our submission form and submit it. We will review your site and then make a decision on whether or not we will include it. If we do decide to include it, we will provide you with a copy of the OPML file, plus provide you regular updates as the list grows.

In the meantime, if you would like to start the process of going Do Follow, you find a great list of plugins here.