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| A Network of Blogging Evangelists Writing On Effective Real Estate Blogging | A Blogging Systems Community Blog |
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Marlow Harris
Marlow Harris has been a licensed real estate professional in the State of Washington since 1985, with several brokerage houses including Windermere and Coldwell Banker Bain.
She is an award-winning real estate agent, a Realtor® (member of the National Association of Realtors®), a member of the Washington Association of Realtors® and the Northwest Multiple Listing Service, designated as a Senior Real Estate Specialist (SRES®), an Accredited Buyer Representative (ABR®), and a Accredited Staging Professional (ASP®). She has been a seminar leader, public speaker and real estate instructor in the real estate field.
She has her own award-winning website, www.SeattleDreamHomes.com and has appeared in local magazines and newspapers, on HGTV, The Fine Living Channel and in The New York Times.
Marlow's specialty is the unusual home. Vintage homes, modern homes, luxury homes, the more unusual the better. She combines her love for unusual architecture and technology in a website entitled www.UnusualLife.com, which features offbeat dwellings, amazing architecture and strange places worldwide. Marlow has another blog, www.360Digest.com which features real estate, news, opinion and popular culture, and moderates a blog on the Seattle P.I. newspapers website, Seattle Real Estate Professionals.
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Grant Crowell of "Search Engine Watch" has written an excellent article on optimizing your blog or website images to maximize your search engine optimization. He believes while bloggers, site owners and merchants are more often seeing their images show up in the regular search results, few have come to understand the benefits of image search optimization. And for professional optimizers, it requires a much broader understanding and specialization over what traditional search allows.
Image search, by one definition, is query results, accompanied by thumbnail graphics and supplanted by contextual information, that best match users' search queries. Such information can be generated and submitted by the image creator, by site owner where the image resides, or by 3rd party reviewers.
He offers several suggestions to boost your ratings in the search engines by doing a few easy things when adding photos to your blog.
Optimizing Images for Search Engines
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Some real estate blogs are aimed towards other industry insiders, other agents or technology providers. But some blogger are attempting to reach buyers, sellers and the public in general.
When these bloggers write about a new listing that is not their own, is this prohibited promotion? Realtors are not to advertise listings that are not their own without the listing agents permission. When does blogging cross the line and become "advertising"? Some corporate blogs are attempting to send writers out into the field to attend Open Houses, take photos and comment on the value and condition of the properties visited. Is this "legal"? It may only violate the NAR's Realtor Code of Ethics. But what if the offending real estate firm or agents are not Realtors? It's an interesting question and a slippery slope these bloggers are attempting to climb.
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Word on the street (or in the blogosphere) says that a great way to get noticed and inspire link-love is to make a list and/or note as many other blogs as you can in one post. People love Letterman's Top Ten and blog readers love them too. But Darren Rowse in Problogger.net notes that this could also be a trap. If you use up your top 10 or 101 ideas in one post, you might run out of interesting things to write about, at least in the short-term. He suggests considering the impact of such an inclusive post and to try to use it for a spring-board for future posts.
101 Ways to Run Out of Things to Blog About
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The blog, Real Estate 2.0 (tm) debuted 96 hours ago. Approximately 48 hours later, the owner of that site received a notice of trademark violation from Redfin. Turns out that Redfin trademarked "Real Estate 2.0" (tm) several months ago, and sent the blogger a polite "cease and desist" note as a result.
Obviously, this has created quite a stir, both because of the actions of Redfin and because it has many people wondering what other obvious terms have been trademarked and are unable to be used in marketing materials, for domain names and for blog titles.
Domain names and trademark chat from JRB Technology
Redfin's claim to Real Estate 2.0 from The Future of Real Estate Marketing
Redfin's Fins Emerge from In The Trenches
Redfin does NOT own trademark! from Sellsius Blog
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The way this works is that the Washington Post is building a network of bloggers who want to participate in the program. Like BlogAds, advertisers can browse the network and find blogs to advertise on within their verticals. The bloggers and the Post split the ad dollars. The Post has put out a call for blogs that focus on technology, business, health, automotive and travel topics. Nevertheless, they are interested in all submissions, including real estate.
Bloggers who opt into the program don't just earn dollars but also a rotating link to their site in a special Sponsored Blogroll box that sits right on the Washington Post home page.
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