Ruthless Accountability

In my quest to bring my own costs down and also find "new" things to share with with my readers and "earn extra money" list subscribers, I recently revisited the wonderful world of finding free web traffic.

There are some great free things you can do out there, and many of them that I've been learning about myself lately center around the concept of blog promotion. While I've converted most of my own web sites to blog publishing platforms of one type or another, I've never really gotten into the learning about RSS feeds, content promotion through blog rings, pinging, and that sort of thing. Now that I've started to implement it, I'm really fascinated by the possibilities, and have added some blog feed based marketing methods to my list of things to always do. Speaking of which, if you don't have a marketing playbook or checklist of things you do regularly, then I encourage you to adopt one.

Content is, and always has been, the king the any media source. This includes television, newspaper, magazine, radio, Internet, and any other medium. The only reason that people tune in to a medium is for the content. With that in mind, you'll notice that most of my basic, free marketing methods in my playbook revolve around providing content, and using that content to build my lists (the money is in the list!).

Without further ado, here is my marketing matrix of free methods:

1. Ads on free classified ads sites, such as Backpages, Craigslist, and Kijiji.

2. Posting articles on article directory sites, such as EzineArticles.com
(a) Corrolary: All articles are blog posts, and most blog posts are articles!

3. Creating educational YouTube videos and putting URL in the video and link in the description text.

4. Posting content to industry hubs and networking sites. For example, ActiveRain.com is a very popular blogging and online networking community for real estate brokers, in much the same way that Facebook.com is for college students. Networking with other people expands your sphere, also.

5. Discussion board participation. Pick forums related to your industry and site, and put links in your signature line so it appears in all your posts. These can be stand-alone sites, or "groups" on sites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

6. Comment on related blogs, leaving a link behind.

7. Automatically submit your content to aggregators. The easiest way to do this is to burn your feed to FeedBurner and enable the feature to distribute your feed to blog aggregators.
8. Place links in your blog posts to allow readers to submit them to Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Fark, and other such "best of blogging" sites.

And last, but definitely MOST important, the number one web traffic generator of all time...

9. Build your list! Get people to subscribe to your email list or blog feed to receive announcements of blog updates, product promotions, tips, tricks, secrets, and anything else your readers might want to know about.

I recently became a huge fan of Feedburner.com, a Google product. It allows you to automate several functions listed above, as well as BUILD A LIST for FREE! You can add a "Get email updates" subscription form on your blog and they will be automatically notified whenever you put up a new post. While lacking the significant power of a sequential autoresponder, it's a great way to build a list without subscribing to a service. Feedburner will even let you export your subscriber list in Excel format, so you can take it with you if you move beyond it's capabilities.

These 9 free marketing methods should get you thousands of unique visitors per month to your site, which is sufficient to generate a small but significant Adsense or affiliate revenue stream.
To your marketing success,

Jassen Bowman

The list of real estate resource sites on the blogs are now alphabetized thanks to a very fast reply to my post on the forum by ¥åßßå. Thank you very much and be sure to check out ¥åßßå's site.

Until my next post,

James

For this Ruthless Accountability and the network of Real Estate Resource blogs, I am using the B2Evolution blogging platform.

Overall, I love the platform. There are some small things I'd change if I were to use my magic lamp (and I do have one, but that's another post).

For example, where is the ability to sort the blogs both in the list of blogs in the admin control panel and the list of blogs on the sidebar alphabetically? Maybe I am the first one to have more than a few blogs in the engine, but I doubt it. It would seem a pretty logical feature to have the ability to sort the blogs by name alphabetically as well as sort them by ID.

In any event, that is my frustration for the evening... I posted on the help forum (which has been very responsive by the way) and I am waiting for someone who can help with that.

Until my next post,

James

About 2 minutes ago, I turned on blog commenting for this blog. In total, I write on just over 100 different blogs and this is one of the few that I have actually turned the comments on. Why?

In the past, I have found that many of the comments placed on the blog were just comment spam and I one day I got tired of deleting all the comments and just turned off the comments completely.

So, this is a test to see if blog comments will be productive or if I will ultimately shut them off again. If comment spam becomes too much to handle, I definitely be turning it off.

If, however, I find the comments to be helpful and add value, you can expect it to stay. So, it is really up to you, the readers, to decide.

Until my next post,

James

I just finished adding ten new Real Estate Resource websites today. Tammy assisted and did the domain name configuration and set up the e-mail lists for priority e-mail notifications for investors in those markets.

I set up and configured the blogs and set up the ads to run to build the individual mailings lists.

Here are the ten that we added today:

1. http://alaskarer.com
2. http://augustarealestateresources.com
3. http://boiserer.com
4. http://columbiarealestateresources.com
5. http://flagstaffrealestateresources.com
6. http://gainesvillerealestateresources.com
7. http://littlerockrealestateresources.com
8. http://provorealestateresources.com
9. http://topekarealestateresources.com
10. http://wyomingrealestateresources.com

I plan on making a couple other blog entries tonight and will share those in a few minutes.

Until my next post,

James

I made some enhancements to the Analyzed Deals Control Panel today including:

Deal Researcher Updates

If you are a researcher, you will notice the page that shows the list of deals you submitted has been changed. You now see the payment status of the deals you have submitted instead of the last time you updated the deal.

I also made a new page on our Admin Control Panel that allows us to manage payments for the deals researchers submit.

These two features are to assist us in managing the researchers we are hiring to research and submit deals in markets that we do not have a real estate agent or broker to sponsor that particular city and submit deals.

Deal Submission Form

I also made some new updates to the deal submission form from feedback from Tammy with publishing deals that people were submitting.

Some people were submitting incomplete forms by leaving out critical information we need to do our analysis including property taxes, insurance estimates, interest rates (even when you think you don't need them) and rents. In response to this and at Tammy's suggestion, I added some very simple checks to the deal submission form.

Now, many of the fields that are potential errors will appear in red. This is not a "catch all" error checking system, but it should help reduce Tammy having to reject as many deals for incomplete information.

Admin Control Panel Updates

I also made several new updates to our admin control panel today.

For example, I made a template to make it much easier for Tammy to send out deal of the week notification e-mail blasts.

I also added a template for Tammy to make it much easier for her to advertise our deal analysis on classified ad websites like CraigsList.

Plus, I built a new database table for tracking the Real Estate Resources websites we have in our network. This new database tracks the domain names, city, state and some other key data. It will be used to roll out some additional new features like a queue for tracking which sites have had deals added and which sites have sent out an e-mail blast.

For now, the new database of Real Estate Resources sites is used to help manage some of the ads we run. I made a system that makes it easy for us to keep the Cash Flow Properties HQ database up to date with the latest Real Estate Resources sites and also the manage the ads we use to promote CFPHQ.

All this, plus we added the 20 sites I shared with you earlier.

Tomorrow, I plan to catch up on some e-mails and add 10 more sites. Tammy plans on adding 40 new sites by close of business on Sunday as we push to meet the goal of approximately 300 Real Estate Resource sites up by the end of the month.

Until my next post,

James

Today, Tammy is taking the lead in adding 20 new Real Estate Resource sites to our network.

The following sites are being added right now and should be up by the end of the day:

1. http://annarborrealestateresources.com
2. http://batonrougerealestateresources.com
3. http://binghamtonrealestateresources.com
4. http://carbondalerealestateresources.com
5. http://cedarrapidsrealestateresources.com
6. http://charlestonrealestateresources.com
7. http://cincinnatirealestateresources.com
8. http://daytonabeachrealestateresources.com
9. http://desmoinesrealestateresources.com
10. http://erierealestateresources.com
11. http://grandrapidsrealestateresources.com
12. http://gulfportrealestateresources.com
13. http://iowacityrealestateresources.com
14. http://ithacarealestateresources.com
15. http://mobilerealestateresources.com
16. http://savannahrer.com
17. http://scrantonrealestateresources.com
18. http://spokanerealestateresources.com
19. http://syracuserealestateresources.com
20. http://tallahasseerealestateresources.com

If my math is right, this means that we have doubled our network from about 50 US cities to about 100 total as of right now. We are still on track to have approximately 300 by the end of the month.

Until my next post,

James

Tammy helped get the 10 up for today and we managed to add:

1. http://akronrealestateresources.com
2. http://birminghamrealestateresources.com
3. http://greensbororealestateresources.com
4. http://laredorealestateresources.com
5. http://lubbockrealestateresources.com
6. http://madisonrealestateresources.com
7. http://modestorealestateresources.com
8. http://montgomeryrealestateresources.com
9. http://rochesterrealestateresources.com
10. http://shreveportrealestateresources.com

We may decide to add more than 10 today or just add the next 10 tomorrow.

Until my next post,

James