Free Credit Help for Your Real Estate Clients

Do you frequently get credit-related questions from your real estate clients? Want to offer free credit help through your website or blog? If you answered yes to either of these questions, you'll be interested in the Consumer Credit Help blog we have launched over at the Home Buying Institute.

This blog is our way of responding to the housing and credit crisis that has wrecked our economy. It serves as a convenient Q&A tool, through which consumers may ask credit-related questions (any subject related to credit reports, scores, managing credit card debt, etc.).

All questions are answered by financial experts with a wealth of knowledge on the subject. Best of all, every Q&A session is posted on the blog, as opposed to being handled by email. This benefits the home-buying public in general. The more questions that get answered, the more valuable the blog becomes. At the rate we are going, I expect to have more than 100 Q&A sessions posted by the first week of January.

The ultimate goal of the new site is to create a better-educated group of future home buyers. That's also why I'm reaching out to real estate professionals with this awareness campaign -- we all benefit from an increased buyer pool. And you would be surprised how little the average American knows about credit scores, as they related to mortgage qualification.

Offer Links Through Your Website

We have also created some helpful links and graphics you can use to offer this service through your own website. You can find them here:
http://www.homebuyinginstitute.com/help/share.html

Labels: Industry News

How to Promote Your Website on a Budget

Many website owners are stuck between a rock and a hard place right now, in terms of promoting their sites. They know they have to promote their websites constantly in order to drive qualified traffic. But times are tough right now, and many people are cutting their marketing budgets in response to economic changes.
Website Promoting on a Budget

It's a classic catch 22. How do you promote your website on the cheap? What kind of low-cost promotional techniques can you use to generate valuable traffic without blowing your budget?

It's time for some hard truth about Internet marketing. If you don't create the kind of business website that promotes itself, you will always have to spend your precious time and money to promote the site. So the goal here is to develop the kind of website that other bloggers and webmasters talk about without being paid to do so. If you can achieve this goal (and you can if you put your mind to it), you will find that your website essentially promotes itself. And think of the time, energy and money you'll save when that happens.

Building Value Into Your Website

Buzz. Word of mouth. Citations and referrals. These are the things that every webmaster should strive for, and this goes double for those of us who rely on our sites for business purposes. If you can create the kind of website that generates constant word-of-mouth exposure, links and citations, the site will promote itself.

You see this kind of thing happen all the time online. In fact, as I write this blog post, I'm listening to an online music website that I heard about through word-of-mouth marketing. It's called Pandora, and one of my friends was telling me to check it out for the longest time. "It's so great," she would say. "So much better than the other websites offering free music." So I checked it out, and you know what? It is great. I'm now a member, and I use the website every day. I also tell people about it constantly! And that's why Pandora does so little marketing (if any). Their website promotes itself through buzz, word of mouth, and referrals.

Granted, most business sites won't have the kind of traffic and user base of a website like Pandora. But it's the concept I want you to grasp, not this particular manifestation of it. If you work hard to build value, usefulness into your site ... if you make it better and more unique than competing websites within your niche ... if you exploit an under-served niche or come up with some truly unique ... then you won't have to spend anything to promote your website online. The promotion will run on auto-pilot.

So how do you build this kind of site? Well, it's not easy -- I can tell you that much. If it were simple, everyone would have this kind of web presence. I feel I'm starting to achieve this goal on one of my other websites (the Home Buying Institute), because I can see that people are beginning to talk about and recommend the site to others, without any input from me. Here's a list of things I've put in place on that website in order to get people talking about it ... and to make the website promote itself. Note: For the sake of simplicity, I'll refer to the Home Buying Institute as "HBI" from here on out.

Content, content and more content. It's hard to get excited about a business website with five pages of information. But if you can develop extremely useful articles, tutorials, glossaries, learning center, blogs, market news and the like, you'll get some people talking. This is the hardest part about creating a quality website, because you can't "copy and paste" your way through. You have to develop highly useful and original content. This is the centerpiece of a website that promotes itself.
Organization and usability. With all of that great content, you have to make sure the site is nice and neat. Everything should have its own place on your website, and it should be easy to find through more than one path (navigation, search, site map, etc.). Clutter and disorganization will kill your online success before it even gets going. After all, why promote a website that people are just going to leave upon arrival?
Interactivity and feedback. People like to interact with websites these days. It's part of the social web, also referred to as Web 2.0. When you offer people more ways to interact, participate and respond, you'll enjoy greater success (more leads, more clients, and more business). On the HBI website, we recently launched the Consumer Credit Blog that allows readers to enter their questions for a response within 48 hours. This has not only generated a ton of interaction from site visitors, but it also gets links and citations from other bloggers and webmasters.
Being different and better. Find out what your competitors are doing with their websites, and then do something different and/or better with your own site. If you simply replicate what others are doing, you have little chance of standing out. That's now way to promote your website to Internet users! People are tired of the same old thing. So offer something unique -- great content and more of it, useful tools and resources, an interactive blog or community of some kind.

The Internet is an overcrowded place with an abundance of competition. Even if you serve a small niche, or you focus on a small geographical area, you can be sure there are other websites already occupying that web space. The key to promoting a website is to create the kind of site that promotes itself. This will save you time, energy and money.

Labels: Real Estate Websites

How to Start a Blog Using WordPress

Once in a while, I'll receive email questions in response to a blog post or tutorial I've written. When it comes to the topic of blogs, the most common question is this: "How do I create a blog using the WordPress blogging program?" So in this tutorial, I'm going to explain how you would start a blog using WordPress.

Why Use WordPress in the First Place?

I'm not going to tell you which blogging tool you should use. That's beyond the scope of this lesson. But I will tell you that WordPress is one of the more popular programs among bloggers these days. The Blogger program (owned by Google) and TypePad round out the top three, in terms of popularity and usage. Now, I use Blogger for this real estate marketing blog. But I also use WordPress on some of my other sites, including my refinance Q&A blog.

So for the sake of getting on with the lesson at hand, let me just say that WordPress is a fine choice for someone planning to start a blog. It's versatile enough to support any goal you might have in mind, and they update the program frequently to add new features.

Back to the question at hand. How do you start a blog using the WordPress program? In this article, I'm going to give you an overview of how the setup process works, as well as some tips for success. I won't publish the complete instructions for starting a blog with WordPress because those instructions are already online.

Creating a Blog With WordPress

The first thing you need to decide is where you want to publish your new blog. When using the WordPress system, you have two options. You can publish your blog on their web domain or your own domain. If you publish it under the WordPress domain, the installation is very simple ... because there is no installation.

But I always recommend that people publish the blog on their own website (if it's truly meant to be an extension of that website). And this will require instructions, because you'll actually be installing the WordPress program onto your own web domain. In other words, the following instructions will show you how to add a WordPress blog onto your existing website, such as the refinance blog I mentioned earlier.

Before we get started, let me offer one word of advice. If this sounds overly technical to you, don't worry. It's really not as complicated as it sounds, for someone who is familiar with the basics of web maintenance, file uploading, and that sort of thing. So if you know anyone who has even the most basic website publishing experience, they can probably help you with this. When I start a new blog using WordPress the setup process only takes about 5 or 6 minutes. So take it from me -- it's not as difficult as you might think.

Step 1. Download the WordPress Program

To start a blog with this program, you will actually download the entire program (files and scripts) and then upload them to your own website hosting account. So you need to start this whole process by downloading the most recent version of WordPress to your computer. You can do this by visiting the website below:
http://wordpress.org/download

Easy enough so far, right? Let's move on...

Step 2. Set Up a MySQL database

You will need to set up a MySQL database on your web hosting account. WordPress will actually run on this database, so you can't proceed without it. This is where your web designer or resident I.T. person can help you. This is another one of those areas that sound harder than they really are. For instance, I use GoDaddy as the web host for most of my websites, and I know that they (and many other hosting companies) offer a way to create a database at the click of a button.

When you create the database, or have it created for you, you'll need to take note of a few items. You need to write down the database's user name and password, the name of the database itself, and the local host address. You may or may not need that last item, depending on your web host. But you'll definitely need the database name, user name and password.

Step 3. Modify Your "Config" File

After you download all of the WordPress files, open the folder and look at what's inside. You will see a file named "wp-config-sample.php" ... as seen in the image below.

This is the only file you need to edit before uploading and using the WordPress program on your website. Let me say that again. You must make some changes to the "wp-config" file before you run the WordPress system on your website.

Open up the file and look at the code up top. You'll see where you need to add the MySQL database information -- name, user name, password and (possibly) the local host address. The image below shows the code I'm referring to. Again, this is the only file that needs to be edited before uploading the WordPress files to your web host, and the lines outlined below are the only parts of the file that need to be edited.

As is says in the image above, there's a chance you won't have to change the line of code for database host (DB Host). If you use GoDaddy for your web hosting, you will have to change this line of code as well. When you set up your MySQL database through GoDaddy, their system will give you the host address that needs to go here. It will probably end in "secureserver.net" or something similar.

Step 4. Change the Name of the "Config" File

After you have made the simple edits listed above, you can rename the "config" file by removing the sample part at the end. So the new file name becomes "wp-config.php" after you rename it. This is all you have to do before uploading the files and using the WordPress blog on your site.

Step 5. Upload the WordPress Files to Your Web Host

Now that you've made the necessary changes to the program files, you can upload them to your web hosting account. First, you should figure out what you want the web address of your blog to be. For example, if I want to start a new blog on this website under the domain www.ArmingYourFarming.com/newblog ... I'll have to create a sub-directory folder by the name "newblog." Then I would upload the contents of the WordPress folder from my computer to this new sub-folder (using a file transfer / FTP program).

Step 6. Run the Install Script

This is the last thing you need to do before using the WordPress blog program. This will be the final diagnostic and installation step that's needed to get the blog up and running. All you have to do is visit http://example.com/wp-admin/install.php (with "example.com" being the web domain where you put the WordPress files. If you put them into a sub-directory folder named "myblog" then you would visit the install page at http://www.example.com/myblog/wp-admin/install.php ... you get the idea.

So let's sum up the steps you've taken to start a new blog using the WordPress blogging program:

You downloaded the WordPress program to your computer.
You created a MySQL database to power your new blog.
You edited the "config" file to include the login info for the MySQL database.
You renamed the "config" file by chopping off the "sample" part at the end.
You uploaded all of the files into the appropriate place on your hosting account.
You ran the installation script, as described under Step 6 above.
And if you did everything correctly, you can start using WordPress to blog!

So what's next? For one thing, you probably want to customize your new blog. And, of course, you'll need to start adding quality content on a regular basis -- because that's what blogging is all about.

Customization and Content

One of the great things about using WordPress is that you change the design simply by uploading a new "theme." This refers to the style and template files used to create your blog's design. Whether you realized it or not at the time, you actually uploaded the "themes" folder when going through the installation process outlined above. So you can change your blog's look and feel simply by uploading new themes, and then selecting those themes from within the WordPress control panel.

Also, if you have a webmaster or somebody who is familiar with HTML web code, you can customize your blog's design as much as you need to. Even if you start with a theme / template that other people are using, you can make it truly unique by changing the logo, colors, etc.

Of course, the most important aspect of your new WordPress blog is the content you put on it. You could have the best-looking blog around, but nobody will care if it lacks quality content. This is another topic entirely, and you can learn all about it below:

So there you have it. Nearly everything you need to know in order to start a blog using the WordPress blogging program. I know it seems like a lot of information, but it's fairly simple for somebody who is familiar with websites and web publishing. So if you really want to use WordPress on your website, but the information presented above sounds like Greek to you, then get somebody to help you.

Labels: Real Estate Blogs