Viral Tools to Boost Your Real Estate Blog’s Readership

By Reggie · March 5, 2008 · 6 Comments

Over the past few years we have all witnessed the explosive growth of social networking. One could argue this growth has been achieved with viral marketing tools. Think about it every time we sign up for a new network or add a new application we are given the option to spread the message (or application) to our network. By having the option to easily broadcast a message to your database, without having to retype your contacts email address, you are more likely to spread their word…right? Would that type of viral element work on your real estate website or blog?

Introducing Octazen Solutions a contacts importer and address grabber for PHP, .Net, Java, and Ruby. Octazen has built in support for all the major Webmail systems (Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, & AOL) also including Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and Mozilla. For their complete list of supported services, click here to review. Are you wondering if your server is compatible with the address book importer? Try this PHP test script? Try the contact importer demo.

Perhaps rather than importing contacts from an address book, you’d like to spread your message through a social network. With Octazen’s Invite Sender Script, your visitors can message their friend list in Friendster, MySpace, Hi5, Facebook, Orkut, Xing, BlackPlanet and Bebo. Your visitors with enter their login information and the Invite Sender script will compile a list of contacts to invite. Once the message is sent it will arrive as a social network email. Try the Social Network Friends finder

These scripts could be placed before the download of an eBook or other value added item. It would allow those interested parties to also help spread the word with other that share similar interest…easy!

Viral Tools to Boost Your Real Estate Blog’s Readership [1:45m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (308)

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Real Estate Bloggers: Increase Your RSS Subscribers with Facebook

By NikNik · September 12, 2007 · 6 Comments

If you are a member of Facebook, you have most likely been hugged, poked, or even superpoked by now. With over 2000 applications available on Facebook, it can be a daunting task to uncover the ones actually worthy of installing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for fun and interesting…and covet my iLike Music Expert status. But recently I’ve taken advantage of a fairly new application that real estate bloggers may enjoy and benefit from. The Blog Friends application allows you to share your blog and feed with your Facebook friends, and your friends’ friends.

With Blog Friends, you can:

Track blog posts made by friends—on topics that interest you
Display those blog posts on your profile page
Increase your network of friends with additional blog exposure
Increase your RSS feed count with RSS feed icons on Facebook

So real estate agents, if you are already on Facebook, this seems like a win-win application to take advantage of now! Viral marketing techniques are often criticized and the word “viral” alone calls out for hand sanitizer. That’s why I prefer the term “spiral”. Spiders work quickly and efficiently when making their webs, so why shouldn’t bloggers do the same. If a spider can utilize the wind to effectively to carry its adhesive thread…then its only fitting to make Facebook’s technology work for real estate bloggers. So consider installing the Blog Friends application and let the wind carry your thread.

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Filed Under: Blogging • Marketing • Social Media
Tags: viral marketing, MyTechOpinion, real estate agent, Viral, real estate, bloggers

New Email Stationery Technology for Real Estate Agents

By Reggie · July 6, 2007 · 8 Comments

Email stationery has been growing in popularity over the past few years. Real Estate agents like this particular technology because it allows them to brand each email with their photo, logo and website links to drive consumers back to key features on their website such as search the MLS and featured properties. Even prospecting features like newly listed homes by email, buyer/seller tips, ask the expert, etc. Think of email stationery as a simplistic form of viral marketing!

The email stationery technology became largely popular because of Microsoft Outlook support. However the challenge has always been that if you send emails from a blackberry, cell phone or other text email client you will not be able to take advantage of email stationery because of its HTML requirements. That is until now! inboxFX has created a very interesting web-based technology to tackle this very issue.

inboxFX, a Canadian company, has designed their technology to wrap their custom email stationery around your plain text email message after it’s been sent, but before it arrives in the recipients inbox. The inboxFX solution works in two ways. First you can choose to use the inboxFX SMTP mail server as your outgoing email server and it will automatically wrap your stationery immediately after you click the send button. However if you use Microsoft exchange technology, or would like to selectively choose who can see the email stationery, you may want to use their second option.

For this simplistic approach you can send to any email address and simply add “.inboxfx.com” to the end of the recipients email address. For example if I wanted to send my stationery to john@acme.com, I would send the email to john@acme.com.inboxfx.com and the template email stationery would be added before delivery. This solution will work with any email system…even from your MLS.

inboxFX pricing is volume-based, to see the pricing matrix click here. For a series of inboxFX email stationery examples, click here.

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