The XBroker

Inspired in part by Brad Andersohn and Debbie Malones post, I want to draw attention to a potential marketing and monetization strategy for Individual or Team Blogs that most anyone can implement.  

Brad discussed one of 5 potential ways to maximize your Team Blog: recruit 'Your Affiliates Who Contribute to Your Business and Success'.  Debbie posted that how her hyper-local content about Lynchburg, VA was sending business to some other local businesses that she mentioned in her blog. 

Often times, the obvious isn't such, so I'd like to point out an easy way to monetize and otherwise add value to your AR Individual and/or Team Blog:  Recruit local businesses to contribute and/or advertise on your blog.

Think about it...you have The Juice, Google Juice, which is an online marketers Holy Grail.  Hyper-local blogs are quickly replacing Newspapers as the go to source for local news, events and area service providers.  Write a review about a local restaurant or 3rd party service provider, show them how they show up in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and offer up an advertisement placement in your sidebar for $25, $50, $100 (?) a month. As your traffic increases so does the value of your online real estate. 

With the pending release of 'Widgets' to our outside blogging platform, specifically the ability embed images in the sidebar, there is a great opportunity to sell that space to local advertisers, whether they be a service provider like a good plumber or simply a great restaurant that you want to share with others. 

Couple of points...

Be selective.  Don't indescriminantly slap up 30 advertisers; be thoughtful with who gets a spot on your site, they reflect on you.  Preferably only allow businesses or people with whom you've had a positive experience with to participate. I'd personally limit the advertising space to 3-4 to begin with. 

Be creative.  People ignore vanilla or ugly ads.  The ad should have a succinct call to action, offer a clear tangible benefit and look good.

Stay focused.  The more you write about your local areas the more likely you are to rank for seach terms for that area.  Concentrate your content and tag your posts appropriately.

This can be a great way to pay for the cost of the blog and subsidize your income, all for doing what you're already doing.  Start generating a Social Media ROI!

 

ActiveRain has been admittedly a little extra 'wonky' lately.  Everyone has probably experienced the 'Proxy' (and a few other) errors, including HTML, widget and other outside application disfunctionalities.

While it may seem like things are breaking down, in reality we're really beefing things up.  The programming architecture that AR primarily runs on recently underwent a pretty substantial upgrade.  In a nutshell, the version upgrade allows our programmers to work, implement and fix features and utilities much faster and easier than before.  It also places an emphasis on simplicity, security and stability, all vital for a bustling community such as AR to function properly.

Alas, little bugs, glitches and other side-effects are inevitable (1 step back to take 4 steps forward)...also, we've locked out certain widgets, HTML tags and other scripts that can be malicious in nature (which can/have caused other issues on the network), such as:

• Certain HTML tags will not work, specifically the <font> tag.  H (header) and tags should be used instead.
  
• Only 'approved' widgets will work in the network.  Brad Andersohn will be releasing a post with the specific approved widget providers. 
  
• Some 3rd party applications (i.e. realestateshows.com) were temporarily down.  Jeff Turnerites, please put down your pitchforks ;)

We've had other issues around commenting and inter-network email outages as well as links not opening in a new window, but they've been fixed. 

I've noticed various posts popping up around the network identifying some or all of the above.  While open communication is great, as it helps the entire community understand these issues are not theirs alone, if anyone notices 'bugs' in the future please also drop a line to Brad (brad@activerain.com), Rich (rich@activerain.com), Bob (bob@activerain.com) and/or myself (jcorbett@activerain.com).  Chances are the powers that be are already aware of and working on the issues but some items may slip through the cracks and we want to make sure we've addressed everything.  In any case, these bugs and issues are very temporary and will fade to black in the near future.

As always, we appreciate your patience and participation as we continue to build on the worlds best real estate social network. 

 

 

The ActiveRain Hit-Router

Feature Your Listings, Get More Traffic and Get Paid to Participate. 

On Tuesday October 28th, ActiveRain we launched a new service called ‘Hit Router’.  As the name implies, it's ActiveRain's initial move into the Property Listing aspect of online real estate search, albeit with a twist.  Instead of trying to disproportionately aggregate listings directly into the network, we are instead going to route visitor traffic to our member's existing IDX sites in a Pay and Get Paid Click Campaign. 

*Warning*  I write long posts and this one is no exception :-)  My style is to address as much and be as thorough as possible.  To break up the reading, as a team we are going to release information regarding Hit Router in multiple stages and formats, beginning with this post.  Brad Andersohn posted 'how to' tutorials as well as screen shots of the new service and Bob Stewart has a 'white board video' explanation of the new release.  

Before I get into the nuances of Hit Router, allow me to first offer some basic explanations as to how most consumers find ActiveRain, and what they typically do upon arrival…

Prologue

Google and the other search engines love fresh relevant content, granting a high degree of authority to sites that produce such and ranking them accordingly on given search results pages.

Google also grants authority to websites that have other like websites linking to them.  The more linkbacks a website receives, the higher the authority of that website through Google's goggles. 

These last two paragraphs very generally encapsulate what is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or ‘Google Juice’.  The better a website's SEO for a given term, phrase, topic, question etc. the higher Google will rank that site when someone (a consumer) types in a relevant search query, thus increasing the likelihood a given site (or page within a site) will appear on the Holy Grail of search results: The First Page.

ActiveRain’s community members produce a TON of fresh relevant real estate related content.  AR also has an incredible amount of other relative sites linking back to a multitude of pages within the community.  As a result, Google can’t help but consider ActiveRain and the content its community members generate as an authority for a myriad of search topics when it comes to real estate.  Proof of this resides in the fact that 80% of ActiveRain's 2M+ unique visitors a month come from Google and other search engines.

Google is very smart, however, it’s not perfect and cannot read someones mind.    Google knows when people are searching for a specific type of real estate information that ActiveRain is a highly authoritative resource for that information.  What Google doesn’t know is that the next logical step in a consumer’s journey, after they find information on ActiveRain, is a Search for property Listings.

Although many AR members have been extremely successful with generating business from AR, we believe the success found to date is just the tip of the iceberg, so the question we posed to ourselves was:

‘How does AR further leverage its valuable Google Juice to turn prospective traffic into MORE business for our members?’

The answer became this little but powerful property search tool called 'Hit-Router'.

What is Listing-Router and How Exactly Does It Work?

For a visitor, it’s a new header that will permanently reside at the top of every page within the ActiveRain network.  It will feature a search box preceded with phrase “Find Homes for Sale in: _________”.  Once a user completes the search box and hits enter, “Hit Router” will send the user directly to an ActiveRain members existing IDX (or other property listing) site.

 

Hit Router Property Search Bar

 

The idea here is that the prospective homebuyer now has a clear option to continue along in their home buying journey.

For an AR member, Hit Router is effectively a Pay Per Click account campaign that allows AR members to buy traffic from other member’s sites and pages, with one major additional member benefit that I will share with you right after the example below.

For example:

Jane is a AR member who works in Bellevue WA and likes to write about equestrian property. Bill is a horse breeder near Lawrence, KS and stumbled upon a blog post by Jane after doing a search on Google about equestrian property. Bill found the exact answer he was looking for in Jane’s post and is now more excited than ever to start his search for a new home. Since Jane is not licensed to sell real estate in Kansas, Bill would normally at this point leave ActiveRain in search of real estate listings from a website that served Kansas. 

At the same time, Todd (also and AR member) would love for Bill to come to his site and would gladly pay for his delivery or ‘click through’ for the increased potential of converting him into a client. 

 

 

Using the Hit Router search bar, if Bill, on Jane’s site searches ‘Lawrence’ via Hit Router, he will be routed to Todd’s IDX site and Todd will pay approximately $2.00 for Bill's visit.

 

And Now for the Really Cool Part!

Hit Router will credit Jane’s account a percentage of the $2.00 click to route the visitor to Bill’s site!  Jane may use these credits to purchase traffic of her own from other member’s pages in the same dynamic fashion. 

This is worth repeating: 

Any time a visitor uses an AR members Hit Router search interface to locate listings outside that agents area of service, that member receives credit to buy clicks from other member’s visitors.

How many credits do you earn?
How much you earn depends on a number of factors including how much someone pays to have traffic delivered to their IDX site.  The easiest way to track how much you'll earn is to sign up and opt to run Hit Router on your blog pages, then check your Account Billing page.

In the Account Admin and Billing section you can purchase credit that can be used to buy traffic from other member’s sites and monitor the 'Click Credits' you receive.

Keeping Visitors in Your Market for Yourself!

No ActiveRain member wants to send visitors to their own blog, searching in their own market away to someone else.  To insure this doesn't happen, there are two ways that a member can capture visitors in your own market and insure they get delivered to you FOR FREE.

1) Pre-select as many cities as you woud like to direct to your own IDX site.

In the My Markets section of the Hit Router admin panel, you may add as many city markets as you wish.  When someone searches for any of these cities while on your blog, your blog posts or your profile, they are routed directly to your IDX site's page for that city.  Again, this insures the traffic interested in your market is routed to your IDX listing pages.

 

2) Opt out of the program completely.

Simply unclick the checkbox you see below.

 

If you choose to opt out of the program, the toolbar will default to a hyper-linked text message of your choice. 

 

 

While opting out is certainly your choice, doing so prohibits you from accruing credits from traffic that would otherwise leave your site and pages anyway, so why not get paid for it?  

 

As always, your feedback is vital and greatly appreciated.

Here are links to tutorials and the 'whiteboard video explanation'

Setting up a click campaign

Saving your own traffic for free

Opting Out of Hit Router

Whiteboard Video Explanation of Hit Router

 

 

As Bob Stewart announced, I formally joined the team at ActiveRain last week.  To say I'm stoked would be an understatement.  The culture is great, working with a core team of talented people in this space has been an aspiration of mine for quite some time. 

I was reflecting on this personal desire when Jon Washburn serendipitously called me (very) recently, broached the subject and took my temperature regarding coming to Seattle to work with the AR crew. It didn't take long (3 days actually) to decide that this would be a great fit for me and hopefully the community as a whole. 

As i typically do when making a decision that carries any consequence, I weighed out the pros and cons of coming to work at AR...I'd like to share my top 5 pro's (Bob and his love for the Seahawks was really the only 'con' but I was able to look past that since my Buffalo Bills stomped all over his beloved football team).

5)  I've always been interested in Seattle as a city to live in, home to many companies in the 'Web 2.0' space.  Living in New York, North Carolina, Texas, and California, Seattle was the logical next stop on my horseshoe tour of thecountry.

4)  Being called a (AR) God has been a secret desire of mine for quite some time ;)  Seriously though, having the ability to make a positive impact on an industry I love via such a diverse and respected community like ActiveRain has me floating around like an elevated spirit :)

3)  The Opportunity.  While I can't discuss whats 'coming down the pipe' at AR, Localism etc (Jon has a gag order on me) to say that the collective vision of where this company is going is 'exciting', doesn't do it justice.

2)  The Community.  I joined AR as a member over two years ago and the community really taught me how to blog, find my voice and otherwise advance the relative skills to do well in this space.  I indirectly (and now directly) attribute much of the success I've had to the great people I've met via AR.  To now be part of this community, internally as well as a member, is pretty surreal.  'Pay it forward' is the appropriate colloquialism here...

1)  The Team.  From the top down, Jon the CEO to Bob the Janitor (j/k, Bob knows this), the individuals who are part of this company are brilliant, progressive thought leaders and genuinely good people.  Being part of a greater team rather than a lone wolf is the number one reason I took this wonderful opportunity. 

Anywhoo...I look forward to fostering and furthering the evolution of this company in my roles of business development and operations.  The sky really isn't the limit here, its just thebeginning.

 

P.S. Hopefully the mortgage contingency here on AR doesn't revolt, rebel, torch the palce and leave...I'm a pretty reasonable guy who just happens to be passionate about what he's involved with, that now continues withActiveRain ;)