Union Street MediaReal Estate and Ecommerce Web Design

There has recently been some chatter about long-tail-focused blogging, especially in that little corner of the blogosphere occupied by your local-loving real estate bloggers. And since I can’t help but wade into something that could possibly be measured I bring you this post.

What is the Long Tail anyway?

The Long Tail as a marketing theory was established by Wired editor Chris Anderson back in 2004 and or Clay Shirky in 2003. Wikipedia tells us that the Long Tail is used:

“to describe the niche strategy of certain business such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The distribution and inventory costs of these businesses allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or “non-hit” items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail.”

(more…)

I didn’t get a chance to give a weekly overview of activity on the RE.web last week so I’ll do a quick rundown. Lots of deep thoughts were floating out there last week, the ripples are still spreading on some of them.

(more…)

A little run-down in the week’s runout, in case you missed it all:

• Trulia does Google Street View
• Flickr does Video
• My personal pic for Bad MLS Photo of the Week
• Catfight at the Dogpound yields lessons in civility and philosophy
• How-to on Hashtags

You’ve read the Twitter resources page. Or maybe your Twitter-fu is already rocking the free world: you’re tweeting left and you’re tweeing right. You’re following people who post insightful-tweets. You’re looking for the next thing to do with this whole micro-blogging thought-exchange.

Enter: Hashtags.

(more…)

Twitter for Real Estate now has it’s own page serving as a roundup instead of the archived post. The page will be updated as new information crosses my desk. Recent additions include tools lists, a few usage ideas and discussions of TwitterLocal.

Readers of my “Site Optimization Series for Real Estate” may find some usefulness in my recent guest post for Nicole and Reggie over at MyTechOpinion.com.

It’s called “Three KPIs for Real Estate Websites.”

I couldn’t resist picking up the gauntlet dropped by Louis Cammarosano over at HomeGain. In his post, an excellent outline of all the questions one should answer before embarking on blogging for real estate or for any business, he asks in point #3

Is blogging a cost effective use of time?

Ask yourself, why spend time blogging (unless you like to) when you can spend time engaged in other activities that help you sell real estate? Indeed, blogging will probably cut into your leisure activity time too.

This is all the hook I needed to put together this how-to on answering this important question. I advise everyone to apply similar discipline for the “other activities that help you sell real estate” (or whatever else you may sell) as well. If you measure it, you can improve. Here we go: (more…)

While at Inman Connect in New York last month Maggie and Gahlord had a great conversation with Charlottesville, Virginia real estate maven Daniel Rothamel. He’s promoting his business by being an active video blogger in his community. One of the things I admire about his work is that he just keeps putting it out and doesn’t let the technology get in his way.

Later on during the conference Daniel approached us for some video quotes for his coverage of Inman Connect, which you can see posted on Real Estate Zebra blog.

We picked up a Flip Video camera this weekend. I wrote about this in an earlier post - these are $150 digital video cameras which are really easy to use. We’ll report back soon when we have had a chance to play with the camera and see what we think. See theflip.com for more info.

I read this on RSSPieces and it’s worth sharing:

How To Write a Killer Real Estate Blog About Page

Has some good criteria and perhaps inspiration for creating an about page for your blog.