My Projects
Coaching M agents – Marshall Wells Landing page
I will get back to the featured neighborhood pages on Alicia’s site. We have produced close to 50 Neighborhood landing pages on the site but managing the process turned out to be way more complicated than we anticipated. The difficulties include organizing taking the photos, processing the photos & video, writing, and producing the supporting content with multiple people responsible. We have a revised system in place and will be back in operation next week. A big part of why we are trying to create a system for good content production is that we work directly with the agents at M to transfer best practice. Which leads me to Jewel one of our star agents that has taken on a farming project from scratch in the Pearl district adjacent to Downtown Portland.
Pearl District Real Estate
Jewel has produced landing pages for the Condos buildings she is passionate about. She is from New York and loves the converted loft style condos. The Marshall-Wells lofts condo building is a great example. In only 8 weeks Jewel has gone from not knowing what WordPress was to managing a beautiful site with very good content that has a place withing a marketing plan.
45 Portland Neighborhoods in 45 days
Focus focus focus…conversion conversion conversion! As some of you may have picked up from my recent posts and talks, I am becoming militant about conversion! There is so much talk in our RE tech crowd about SM, WordPress, blogging dead or not etc. and I contend that unless there is a direct connection than can be documented and repeated it is not all that useful to our industry.
What does this have to do with 45 Portland neighborhoods? …well an analysis of new how out team produces new clients revealed that a significant portion of our web registrations originate through a Google search that combines a neighborhood name with either “real estate” or “homes for sale”. We built and tested several neighborhood landing pages and a strategy to promote the pages with a series of posts. Now that the prototyping is done and tested it is time to switch to operation mode and get some shit done that makes us money. BAM!
I will be describing the process over the next 45 days showing the example neighborhood page and hopefully some insight on the keys to converting neighborhood content into new appointments and closed transaction.
Portland Neighborhood #1 of 45 – Portland Heights
Portland Heights Real Estate is on the high end for our area. I drive through it every day on the way to work and when our little brokerage really takes off I would love to buy one of the spectacular moderns. The page took about 4 hours to build, I walked the neighborhood for 20 min taking pictures and a video with my iPhone, I used next gen gallery, and embed video served from you tube. The listing are pulled in using our Homequest IDX plug in short code.
Conversion on this page happen when the 3rd listing view is attempted and from request showings.
There are numerous on page details and conversion strategies to discuss, but this is only day one so….see you tomorrow;)
Lead generation – BuzzRE Orange County
I am Speaking at a great event on April 29th in Orange County CA – BuzzRE OC
Question…what is “Lead Conversion”? I like to bring everything into the real world experience of being an agent. In my mind lead conversion occurs the moment I set an appointment with a new buyer or seller. We will be talking about conversion from IDX registrations and sphere interaction.
There’s a great lineup of smart speakers including Dustin Luther, Linsey Planeta, Stacey Harmon, Robert Luna, Gahlord Dewald, Loren Nason, Dale Chumbley, and John Lansner
Hope you can make it…register here
RETSO preview – Empowering agents 2.0
I am Speaking on Thursday March 25th at RE Tech South to brokers about how to empower agents to better use technology. Obviously a topic I care about and think about everyday at M and HQ. I put together a vid on my thoughts as I am building the presentation today.
WordcampPDX – presentation notes
Last Sunday I presented our IDX and Non IDX versions of the octomap WP plug in. We still have some development to do in order to get it into a distributable state. Here are my notes and the links to the sites I referenced.
Wordcamp PDX
Octomap plug-in demo
I can get really spastic sometimes. I am very susceptible to going off on tangents.
In trying to figure out how to cover this subject I decided to trace our thinking and dev over the last 1 1/2.
Little Background
We develop property search sites for agents and we are agents with a brokerage here in PDX. Our primary focus has been on neighborhood level map property search. About two years ago we decided to use WP as the front end for all our sites.
Mportlandrealestate.com this was our first site for my real estate team. its focused on property search. then we thought it would be cool to add community content to show that we are out in the community. (demo site – community content, neighborhood search, author in hover)
Our little brokerage has been growing and all the agents are blogging and twittering and being really real estate 2.0.
Marisa’s sites: pdxmetroproperties & Modernhomesportland.com
where is she part of the community and what is she passionate about. (demo sites – activity, montavilla, modern)
As we started to grow we needed a corporate site for M Realty – Mportlandhomes.com – so we of course made a cool WP theme. then can a little ah ha. what if we fed posts form all the agent sites into the main site so people could see which agents where active in the different parts of the community. (demo site – the content is carrying the people)
Outside of real estate
PortlandOctopus.com
Early on we saw the power of wordpress posts about neighborhood shops, events etc. we were getting long tail traffic to our real estate sites.
We created a site for local content called portlandoctopus.com. it has no real estate listing content is a magazine type multi author blog site. Map with categories.
More octosites. Our support guy Tyler started Portlandroots.com about green issues. and Haley and I are working on a cool site endpoverty.theoctopus.com
SImilar to the real estate site we felt it would be cool to aggregate posts from multiple sources and the use geography as the association rather than time or category.
We created theOctopus.com as the main hub that aggregates content for the site on this MU install.
Demo the post editor -
Geotag
Categorize
Syndicate
Map Sidebar
Next steps.
You can create a site on our theoctopus.com site in fact we would love to get a core group of blogger interested in local and global stuff.
Few more bits of basic functionality to add in the next few weeks. one of which is the ability to make folders to save content to retrieve later or share.
Octomap a download-able plugin for wp.org sites. We hope to have it all done and out by the end of the year.
Anyone who would like to create sites on our theOctopus.com and help beta would be much appreciated