ActiveRain - The Official ActiveBlog

Linking from your posts to your IDX home search site should be one of the primary strategies you employ as you create content for your blog. How you create these links and where you send the person clicking on them could make the difference in how your readers interact with you. The proper implementation of this strategy could be the difference between converting your blog readers into clients and ultimately business and simply being someone providing information out of the goodness of your heart.

Remember, you should be blogging for business!

It is no secret that consumers want the information they are after in the easiest, most direct fashion possible. One need only look at Google's insane traffic numbers to prove that point. Google does a great job of letting consumers search for exactly what they want and returning results that are relevant to the search they just did. Are you employing a similar technique when you create links on your blog posts? In most cases the answer is NO.

Sometimes the answer is no because you don't know where you should actually be linking (or maybe even that you should be linking at all) and sometimes the answer is no because even if you wanted to, your site doesn't allow you to link to the right place. In a lot of the cases I come across on ActiveRain it's probably a combination of both.

So first let's deal with where you want to be linking when you create links in your blog posts. You want to send the person to the exact information you just told them you were going to provide with the link you created. Does that make sense? Let's do an example:

The correct way:

(Click on the link below and see where it takes you. DO IT, I'll wait! Now once you are taken there, pay attention to the URL that we land on. It is specific to the exact link that we created, and more important takes to the results that we said we were going to deliver)

Affordable homes in Seattle under $300,000 with 3+ bedrooms

• sends us to: http://www.servingdowntownseattle.com/listings/area/seattle/propertytype/single/maxprice/300000/beds/3/   See that URL? It's exactly what we just said we were going to send them to.
  

Maybe our blog post for this specific search was referring to affordable homes for new families in the Seattle area. New families need at least 3 bedrooms, and they generally can't afford much more than $300,000. So does it not make sense to send them to a SPECIFIC search on your website that delivers the information that your reader thinks they are about to find?

The way many people are doing it:

(In this example you can only mirror the wording for the above link if you can create a unique URL to a search of that nature. Otherwise, you are simply sending them to a page where they expect one thing, homes for sale in Seattle under $300,000 with 3+ bedrooms, and they get something else.........the home page of your website or a search page where they can then do that search on their own)

Affordable homes for sale in Seattle

• sends us to: http://www.servingdowntownseattle.com/   See that URL? It's the home page of her site. Now she has to depend that the person will actually perform the search once they reach the site. Her site makes it really easy to find that search function. It's right there, at the top left of the page, the place a person's eye naturally falls so she has a better chance of them performing the search then most people do.......but why even take the chance if the post they were reading was about affordable homes for families buying their first home?

Biggest Folly I see when people include a link: Linking to your home page

What if, unlike our home page above, the home page of your website doesn't make it so obvious how someone actually searches for homes? Here are three completely random examples that I just pulled from ActiveRain members in Seattle:

• Affordable homes for sale in Seattle (http://www.murphybrown.com/)
  
• Affordable homes for sale in Seattle (http://www.seattlecondohotline.com/)
• Affordable homes for sale in Seattle (http://mssold.net/)
  

Please click on those sites and you tell me how long it takes you to actually get a list of homes for sale in Seattle? 5 seconds? 30 seconds? you couldn't figure it out? (I'm dead serious!! This is important!! Do it! Click on those links and figure out how long it takes the consumer to find homes for sale in Seattle) How about on your own website? It's going to be hard to judge your own website, hopefully you know how to quickly access your search feature. Have someone else try it then, your spouse maybe or a friend. Stand and watch them do it. How long did it take them?

"Remember, consumers have an average attention span of 3-5 seconds.  When they’re scanning your website for an answer to their question or problem, they want to find it quickly.  An effective website doesn’t force a customer to frantically search their website."          Is your website consumer focused?

The better place would be to link them directly to the home search function on your site:

Most of you have the ability to do this with your site. For the three examples above, here are the links to the home search portions of their site:

• Affordable homes for sale in Seattle (http://www.murphybrown.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Listing.SearchPropertyNeighborhood&st=wa)
• Affordable homes for sale in Seattle (http://www.seattlecondohotline.com/Seattle_WA_listings/index.shtml) This one was actually tough. I still couldn't really figure out how to access a complete home search and I've seen way more real estate websites than any consumer
• Affordable homes for sale in Seattle (http://lakere.com/search/property_search.php?county=no_king) This one redirects away from her site to what appears to be the brokers site. I wonder if it tracks that traffic as having been sent from her and if that consumer registers does she get the contact?
  

The best place to link them is directly to a specific search that best matches your blog post:

Of these three completely random sites, none of them have the ability for you to create custom URL's out of the search functionality. They all use database queries to pull up the results that you search for. Anytime you are searching on the murphybrown.com site, you remain on that same URL and the home search results load in a framed solution. There is nothing wrong with that per say, but if you are writing a blog post about Affordable homes in Seattle under $300,000 with 3+ bedrooms, the only options these sites provide for linking out of the post to the home search is to drop the consumer on the front of the home search page. And if that's the case, can you really make your link say 'Affordable homes for sale in Seattle under $300,000 with 3+ bedrooms' if the link actually takes them to a default home search page?

What kind of options does your current home search solution give you?

If a consumer is reading your blog post, chances are they are already a highly targeted visitor. Does it make sense to take a highly targeted visitor that knows they want to look at affordable homes in Seattle under $300,000 with 3+ bedrooms and send them to a page that forces them to figure out how to actually navigate a search to obtain the information they desire? Remember above? You have 3-5 seconds.

If you haven't heard, ActiveRain is offering an IDX solution, Vision, through a partnership with Market Leader. The site I was using above in the example is one of those sites, servingdowntownseattle.com.

You can find out more information about it here and you can get started with your own Vision site here.

(Disclaimer: I only used $50,000 in the title line to grab your attention. I don't know how much you will add to your bottom line. The more content you produce the better your chances and the more targeted your links the better your chances of adding real dollars to your bottom line.)

Back at the beginning of this month (June 2009) we announced the introduction of the ActiveRain Approved Business Builder Program. At the time, the pickings were pretty slim by way of Vendors and more importantly deals for our members (if your clients all want a deal, why shouldn't you get a deal).

Over the last two weeks our team has been working hard with lots of the companies out there to bring some great deals to the table for our members. The companies we are lining up to work with are being impressed upon that the culture here at ActiveRain is one where we lay all the chips out on the table and allow everyone and anyone to have an opinion.

In order for the Approved Business Builder program to really have an impact on the businesses of our members, we need your participation. If you have ever used the services of any of the Vendors in the program, we (and the other members on the site) need your feedback. Did you have a great experience? Let everyone know. Did your experience leave something to be desired? Leave constructive feedback so that the company can have a chance to grow from your experience and potentially rectify that portion of their business for the next person using their service.

Are you a bitter bitter person who has it out for everyone and everything that comes in your path that doesn't turn your $99 investment into $1,000,000? Think about how you can be constructive. The idea here is not to bash or beat these companies into submission. If you truly had a poor experience, be constructive in your feedback. We have decision makers at all of these companies following the feedback of our members. Your constructive feedback will get you so much further than a rambling rant. Hopefully our research into these companies has produced a crop of the top vendors in their field; none of them having ever had a dissatisfied customer. Of course that's a pipe dream!

If we can leverage where these companies have fallen short to help them raise the level of their service and their product, then we have something valuable for everyone involved.

We want you to become familiar with the ActiveRain Approved Business Builder Blog so that when you see it, you stop by to check out the special deals that are being announced. We also want you to use this as a tool to investigate products and services before you take the plunge into buying something. Of course, that depends on the feedback of our members. So if you've used the products or services being offered, take the time to leave your comments. You can find each of the companies on the home page of ActiveRain, on the right hand side under the 'ActiveRain Business Builder' title, directly under the featured members.

Hopefully everyone can see how the vetting process here could be very powerful. Not only can your peers see your experiences with particular companies, we also have an opportunity to help raise the level of service for these companies across the board.

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be featuring a profile or an offer from each of these companies on the ActiveRain Approved Business Builder Blog. As these companies make additional special offers we will be featuring their posts so you can be made aware of it. Check the newsletter as we will be running special offers from these companies in there as well. The idea is that you are already buying these products and services in the course of your business. As a group, we have the potential to get a better deal, let's take advantage of it. (who doesn't love Costco or Sam's Club, right?......buying in bulk is the coolest).

Get familiar with this image:

When you see it on the feature board or in the blog roll, it means another company is ready to bring you a good deal. Right now below my post is an offer from the folks at Real Estate Lead Source. Take a minute to check them out. You'll see many more in the days to come.

Some of the links in the Business Builder area on the home page say 'coming soon XYZ Company'. You can head off and check out the companies website right now, their special offer and blog post to give feedback on is on it's way.

If you are interested in getting more infomation on becoming part of the ActiveRain Approved Business Builder Program, you can contact Chris Martin, ActiveRain Director of Sales.

At 12:00 Pacific Time on June 1, 2009 we will be introducing the 'ActiveRain Approved Business Builders' feature on the home page of ActiveRain.com. The 'ActiveRain Approved Business Builders' will be an area where we highlight some of the many tools available to help take your business to the next level.

On the Home page when you are logged in, you will simply see links for a series of different categories ranging from 'websites' and 'IDX providers' to 'signs' and 'print and mail'. We are starting with 14 different categories. You can see them here:

As we bring on approved business builders, the power of the network will take place behind the simple link. After clicking on any particular link, you will be able to see a list of vendors in that category. Looking deeper at any particular vendor will take you to their 'ActiveRain Approved Business Builders' blog post where they will be able to give a basic description of their product, tell about what sets their product apart, and potentially provide our members a discount on their service.

We will be strongly encouraging our approved business builders to offer best case pricing and in some cases will be able to get pricing at a better rate than ever before provided. Bulk discount pricing because we have such a thriving network is a great start, but being able to get immediate feedback on products from your peers may be even better.

In true social media fashion, the 'ActiveRain Approved Business Builders' will have their blog posts on the ActiveRain Approved Business Builder Blog and will be able to allow comments from users of their product. This healthy discussion allows members considering using the product to see the experience of other members. It also allows the vendor to get candid feedback from users of their product thereby helping them perfect their service. This is the essence of businesses participating in social media and we hope to bring some transparency to the multi-million dollar real estate vendor business. The great vendors deserve to have their praises sung by the people that use their products with success.

At launch today, things are going to be a little bare as we have a team of people and lots of interested vendors putting the finishing touches on some great product offers. As new vendors come on we will be featuring their posts on the home page so that you are aware of some of the great offers that will be available. However, make sure that the next time you get ready to purchase some kind of service that you take a look at the 'ActiveRain Approved Business Builders' area and make sure you are making a smart decision based on the experiences of others and that you are getting a great price.

Vendors: If you are interested in having your product represented, you can contact Chris Martin, head of advertising here with ActiveRain for details.

I am honored the TLW would ever consider parking her comment on my post so that she can follow what may develop in the comment thread. It's a common tactic around ActiveRain and the greater blogosphere. Maybe you don't have anything to say right that minute about a particular post, but you want to see what others are saying and have those comments delivered to your email inbox. Maybe you just want a little time to collect your thoughts so you can go back and comment later. Maybe you just want to see how the thread develops before you leave your comment, but you don't want to have to remember to go back and find the post later. So what do you do?

You park your comment on the post and check the 'notify me of comments' box. But you have to leave something, so you just say "parked".

Well those sneaky developers of ours slid in a little feature sometime in the last few days so you no longer have to do that. You can just ask to be notified of comments without even leaving a comment of your own. TLW, you are still welcome to park on my posts, we just didn't want you to have to if you didn't want to.

At the bottom of every post now is a check box that says:

'Notify me of new comments'

This isn't just a feature for logged in members either. Anyone can park themselves on your post and ask to be notified of comments. It makes sense, right? They could come back tomorrow and read all the comments if they wanted to, so we are just making it easier for them to keep up with the conversation on their terms, in their own inbox.

Once you would prefer to stop being notified of comments on the post, you can go back to the post and there is a button that will say:

(I must admit. I could be losing my mind. This feature could very well have been around for a lot longer than the last few days. Jeff is the only other one in the office and he thinks he saw it sometime last week. Jorgen isn't here for me to ask him when it was added. At any rate, none of us have written about it and I thought it was cool. I often want to follow comment threads but don't necesarily have anything of value to add at that moment to the post)

(update: I am not crazy!! Jorgen confirmed it just went live this morning.........well I'm not crazy on this one thing. I could very well be crazy on many other accounts :-) )

Update: I guess this would be a little cooler if you still had the ability to subscribe to comments when you leave a comment. Should have that back soon. Right now this is the only way you can subscribe to comments. I'm so out of touch.........

Now you can drive traffic to your website at the same cost as the big boys do. ActiveRain announces wholesale auction-based pricing directly to real estate agents for the first time ever.

Today we upgraded our Hit Router pay per click marketplace from a tiered pricing plan to an auction-based platform. This change takes away the predetermined pricing for Hit Router clicks and lets the market dictate what the price should be.

Why buy clicks to your website?

Consumers are getting smarter. In a time gone by, large lead generation companies could drive high volumes of consumers to their sites based on economies of scale. They would then convert this traffic to a lead and sell that lead to an agent. Today, the idea of converting leads on a massive scale is much tougher. The new 'lead' has become traffic to your website!! The Hit Router marketplace allows ActiveRain members to buy traffic to their websites without facing the retail mark-up. We are partnering with companies in the industry that specialize in generating consumer clicks and offering those clicks to ActiveRain members at wholesale prices.

This new shift allows you to control how much traffic you drive to your own site. It also puts you in the driver seat for determining how you convert that traffic into a lead. The entire consumer experience of searching for a home can take place on your own branded site.

ActiveRain's hit router is a way to drive traffic to your IDX (home search) site.

Is this your first time hearing about Hit Router?

I beg you, if you are not familiar with the hit router concept on ActiveRain, take the time to watch this video and read the additional posts linked to on the bottom of that page. After watching the video and reading the accompanying links, you should have a good idea what hit router is about.

How did it work? How does it work now?

When we initially launched Hit Router, we put set pricing on the cost of clicks in each market. Members could then decide to purchase traffic from Hit Router at the set price and the traffic would be dispersed on a rotating basis. If Jon and Jeff both agreed to pay $2.89 per click (the price we set) for traffic in Seattle, Jon would get click one and Jeff would get click two and it would continue in that fashion until one of them hit their budget.

The new upgrade to Hit Router has transformed the pricing into an auction based model. Pricing is now set by what someone is willing to pay for clicks for that market. In a majority of markets across the country, Hit Router will deliver clicks and traffic to our agents far below market value. Not only that, but as a buyer of Hit Router clicks, you only pay for traffic that is delivered to your site. In addition you can set your budget, make changes in real time and there is no contractual obligation. You can start and stop campaigns any time you choose.

Auction-Based Pricing:

Auction-based pricing allows our members to take advantage of the remnant traffic we were selling at wholesale rates. It also allows the market to set a price for the traffic. No longer do we have set pricing. The person who decides to bid on traffic and has the winning bid will get first crack at the traffic for that market. They will continue to get the traffic for that market until their budget is met.

One other upgrade:

An additional enhancement has been made so that you can now edit existing campaigns to change the bid price, maximum spending limit and URL.

Additional Links for information:

The ActiveRain Listing Router

Listing Router - How To Setup & Save Your Own Traffic

How To Setup Your Own Click Campaign

Back in late October, ActiveRain launched listing router as a tool for members to drive traffic from their blogs to their home search site. You can watch the video and read all about it here. (if you don't know about listing router, you HAVE TO click that last link, I beg you!!) Since then we have given our Localism sponsors the chance to use the feature to enhance their Localism sponsorship (although I must tell you, not everyone has taken advantage of this awesome upgrade). You can read all about that on Jorgen's blog, here.

Late Tuesday night (1/13/08) we will upgrade our new ActiveBlog platform by adding the Listing Router Feature. (You can read about the new ActiveBlog platform here and here)

If you have upgraded your prior ActiveRain Outside Blog to the new ActiveBlog platform you will now be able to integrate listing router with your new ActiveBlog. Giving visitors an outlet from your blog to search for homes is a critical component in converting that reader into a client. Of course, an effective home search or IDX solution is just as important so I strongly suggest you read Jeff Corbett's take on effective IDX solutions.

At some point, every one of your potential clients is going to be out on the internet looking at homes for sale. In a perfect world, a potential client woud land on your blog because of a search they did on some search engine, they would read your incredible prose and they would immediately pick up the phone and beg you to help them find their next mansion. This isn't a perfect world. In fact, the reason internet leads have gotten a bad rap from many is because of the time it takes to cultivate a prospect that you may have 'captured' on your website (you are trying to capture some component of contact info from your site visitors, right????? If not, you really need to read Jeff's post).

If you haven't figured it out yet, blogging is a powerful tool to bridge that gap between when someone first starts looking and when they are actually ready to work with you. So if you are writing content on your blog that is engaging your visitors as they research (then research more, then keep on researching) where they want to live, it only makes sense that your blog have a clear avenue for them to search for homes on your site.

Listing Router is that avenue.

Your new ActiveBlog will now display a prominent listing search box that will route visitors from your outside blog to your home search solution. It will look like this:

At this point, I beg you that if you are not familiar with listing router, please go and review my post that I linked to above. It will save all of us a lot of pain and suffering in the comment section.

Your ActiveRain listing router account will be where you manage how traffic is routed on your blog. You can find it on the left hand side of your 'my home' page.

Jon Washburn, our CEO and ActiveRain co-founder has been driving traffic to and converting clients from real estate websites since 1997. We've had numerous sites and tested over and over how to get people clicking on what we want them to. We'll get them clicking over to your site, you worry about what they click on once they get there. (again, please read Jeff's post about effective IDX solutions if you skipped over it above)

Additional tutorial posts from Brad:

How to set up and save your own traffic from Listing Router

How to set up your own click campaign with Listing Router

How to opt out of Listing Router

EDITED:

Quite a few people already are leaving comments to the effect of: "I'm really starting to fall behind on all this stuff........"

Please, if you feel totally out of the loop and wish there was someone you could just talk to and get an explanation from, that person is me. Do not hesitate to pick up the phone and call me. 425.753.7340. That's my cell phone and I try to answer it any time I am free and it rings. If you combine it with an email to me, I'll do my best to get you a call back. If you send a second email saying, 'gee, you're a real jerk for not calling me back' you can pretty much assure yourself a call, haha.

Our site is growing at a pretty steady clip. Almost every day we are getting a couple hundred new people signing up on the site. When we first launched ActiveRain, we had very aggresive goals for membership numbers. We also had limited programming resources. So as we added features and members at a dizzying pace, sometimes the necessary attention was not paid to scalability issues.

Over the last six months we have been retro fitting the site to make sure that all of our features can scale with the increasing membership numbers. Last night, we pushed a critical infrastructure upgrade to the site. As you attempted to log on this morning, or today you may have been met with upgrades evil twin Mr. Proxy Error. He is a mean guy who does not care about your passion for real estate.

What the heck is a Proxy Error anyways?

Whenever you click on a page on ActiveRain, a query is sent to our database to display that page. There's a pretty good chance that someone else clicked on another page .001 seconds after you. This happens in succession and there are always pages waiting to be loaded. Every once in a while (although it seems more frequent recently) one of the queries will run into a problem and not be able to display the page in a timely manner. This is where the Proxy Error starts. At the same time, Queries that are in line to be displayed begin to time out and the result is proxy errors for pages that would otherwise display fine, but since they are behind a page taking too long to display, they are affected as well. Of course, if you are anything like me, you hit the refresh button five times and force the query to be requested again. The vicious cycle then displays Proxy Errors for everyone in line.

(please note, this is a very elementary explanation because quite frankly my understanding of it is very elementary.......the developers are busy fixing this stuff so the PHD explanation is not available)

Please know that your frustration is shared by our entire team. Our developers have been working their fingers to the bone over the last few days to ensure that Mr. Proxy Error is eradicated. Mr. Proxy Error is still lingering a bit but his appearances are becoming fewer and farther between.

In addition to Mr. Proxy Error there may be some other minor issues on the site today as well. We are aware of many of them but if you know of something please feel free to leave it in the comments.

We are really sorry for the annoyance that these upgrade cause and want everyone to know that we are continually making improvements to the foundation of the site so that you don't have to worry about stability. I promise you that no one reading this is getting more gray hairs over this thing than Jon and Jeff (wait, nevermind not those two.....they have no hair) Brad and Rich and I.

Thank you for your support and your patience, we really appreciate it!!