The last few months have been just about as crazy as they get. Periods of insanity, followed by complete boredom. There’s three exciting things happening before the New Year (beside the birth of my first child) and I wanted to remind y’all that there’s a mailing list separate from this blog where I’ll be sharing them first.

You can sign up for the email newsletter here.

REALTOR® News

As you might have seen, I’ve just finished all the courses and exams to become a REALTOR®, and I’ve been interviewing real estate brokerages. I’ll be making a decision very soon and getting started helping people sell their properties and find new homes or investments. The lucky people on the email list will get to hear about it first (exciting, I know…) and also hear a little bit about the process (the things I’m reluctant to post on my blog for all to see).

Internet Marketing Workshops

Back by popular demand (i.e. people lovingly nagging me) will be my one day Internet Marketing Workshops. The date is yet to be set, since I’m trying to dodge Christmas Parties, but it’l be in early December. This will also be a very intimate session, limited to no more than 8 participants and it’ll be the last time I offer the course for $247 before I completely re-write the curriculum and the price goes up. This course is great for real estate investors, Realtors and small business owners.

Affiliate Webinars

And after a bit of a delay, the REIN affiliate program is going to get things going with a big December sale. Here’s part of an email I recieved from REIN’s Member Support Manger

Last year we decided to do a year-end clearance sale of a number of popular REIN™ products, and since it was so well received, we’ve decided to repeat that promotion again this year. So, get ready for the REIN ™ December Blow-out Sale for 2010 – we will be discounting nearly our entire line-up of programs, kits and some e-based products as well!

This year we are also going to give our Affiliates a piece of the action… You can publish those links or banners on your website, or use the text in an email or newsletter that you send out to your group. These promotional pieces are being designed now, and will not be available in your Affiliate dashboard until Dec. 1, so you may want to think about the timing of your next communication to your group…can you publish something to your database on, or just after Dec 1, and will that fit with your overall communication schedule?

As you promote our Sale to your contact database, every one of your people who clicks on the link embedded in the Sale banner or text copy that you post and then gets transferred to our shopping page will qualify you for a commission if they purchase a Sale item. They don’t even need to purchase an item on that visit – our system will also track future visits and purchases from that same user, and will credit you with a commission for a purchase even days later.

To help people get up and runing on the affiliate program, I’ll be doing a free webinar to help teach you the basics. We’ll get that rolling sometime the last week of November, but it’s only available through my email newsletter so sign up now!

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It’s been a common question at my workshops and when I run into people at events like REIN meetings. People love the simplicity and flexibility of WordPress, but want to list their current properties on their site. There’s a couple ways to do it, and I’ll cover some of them here.

Categorized or Tagged Posts

This is the simplest way to get your listings published. It’s how Brent publishes his current listings right now while we decide on a new theme.

• Do a new post for each listing
• Categorize them as ‘listings’ or ‘property listings’
• Tag them with appropriate attributes like price ranges, number of bedrooms or bathrooms, square foot ranges or construction type

Pros:

• Simple and easy – if you don’t know how to write a post, just give up and hire someone to do all this.
• Guaranteed to work with your theme and current plugins.
• Won’t break when you upgrade WordPress.

Cons:

• Can’t bulk-upload listings
• No templated fields for area, bath/bedroom and other attributes
• You’ll have to add pictures manually (or semi-manually), although Flickr slideshows are fantastic.

Here’s what a simple listing looks like on Brent’s site.

Real Estate WordPress Plugins

There’s some great plugins out there that are simple and free. Each one requires a little bit of work to install and configure, but they’re pretty easy to use. One good example is WP-Property. These plugins give you more flexibility and style than regular posts, but will work within your existing theme.

Pros:

• Still simple and easy. In the current versions of WordPress you’ll be able to do one-click installation of most plug-ins and they’re easy to configure.
• Usually they’ll work with your theme and other plugins. From time to time, you’ll get a conflict. If you use lots of plugins it’s more likely. If it’s a formatting thing, diagnosing a CSS conflict can be difficult.
• Lots of flexibility, functionality and style. There’s some truly great plugins out there, like lightbox for displaying photos in full size.

Cons:

• Limited bulk-upload of listings
• Mapping or MLS functionality is usually US based, and things like Trulia don’t work here.
• Can lead to technical problems, and if you’re already running a real estate WordPress theme you may run into conflicts.

Most plugins have screencasts to show you how to get started or explain how things work. Here’s one for WP-Property.

WP-Property – Tutorial 1: Adding Buildings from Andy Potanin on Vimeo.

WordPress Real Estate Themes

There’s a million of them. Themes are the skins which go over the chassis of your website and make it look and behave how you want. Here’s some Pros/Cons and then I’ll go over a couple of my favorites.

Pros:

• The best looking, most flexible and often easiest to use option.
• Bulk upload or automated feeds possible.
• Excellent ability to use multiple conversion points.
• Almost infinitely configurable and many premium themes (the ones you pay for) offer some level of support.

Cons:

• Some cost to the better themes out there.
• Configuring a theme to do the real estate things you require, and adjusting the design to fit your brand can be complex, or can be restricted by the license you purchase.
• Most good themes are US-biased, meaning MLS listings and such don’t always work the way they’re advertised.

Some Real Estate WordPress Themes I Like

ElegantEstate by Elegant Themes

AgentPress by Studio Press

Estate by Woo Themes

There’s a lot of ways to skin this particular cat, and it’s always changing and improving. Leave a comment and let us know if there’s a particular solution that works well for you.

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Several people have asked if I have another internet marketing workshop coming up, and I’ve heard some others mention going to a site several times a week to check for updates. There’s three or four easy ways to get what I write about, or to just find out about my workshops and other interesting info.

Internet Marketing Workshops and Ranking Reports

I have an email list for my workshops and other related topics. It’s seldom more than 1-2 emails a month, so this is the easiest way to keep in the loop without hearing from me every few days. You can subscribe here or use the form below.

Blog Posts, Website Updates and More Fun

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you can get the posts sent to you so you don’t have to surf back here every day or two. There’s two ways to do that.

First, you can subscribe to my RSS feed, using a reader like Google Reader.

Second, you can also subscribe to email updates, which will sent you a nice pretty copy of my posts by email. Here’s a quick signup form for the email updates.

Twitter, LinkedIn and Social Media!

And if you want even more frequent updates, you can follow me on twitter here (@w_chris_davies).

Connect with me on LinkedIn here.

I’m an avid user of the Social Media stock market called Empire Avenue. My ticker symbol is WCD.

You can add me on Facebook if we’ve met in person, but be warned, my Facebook has essentially nothing to do with real estate, internet marketing or social media and I will not likely join your groups/like your page if it has anything to do with real estate.

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There’s a scam that comes around every few years. You put an ad up for one of your units. Someone copies it, drops the price and ends up suckering someone out of a damage deposit or a month’s rent and running away. It’s the oldest trick in the book – sell something you don’t own. Here’s six tested and proven tips to help prevent people getting screwed and your name potentially being smeared by angry people.

1. Watermark your photos. Include your website and/or phone number. There’s a number of free options to do this, including the Picasa desktop app.
2. Pick a unique sentence that’s just in your ads and set up a Google Alert for it (in quotes). Then every time it shows up on the web you’ll get an email about it, which should only be when you put up a new ad. **You should also do this with your personal name and the name of your business.
3. Include several references to your name, phone number or website. This means in the body of your ad, not just in the fields where they say to put your name/phone number/email.
4. Inform your  caretakers or existing tenants when you’re advertising and if there’s a property that’s been hit by fraud like this. Also let them know when there’s people who are coming to view the suites.
5. Take your ads down when you’re done with them. This should be a no-brainer, but lots of people go for a shotgun strategy with their ads, meaning they’ll take forever to get them down. (You should be smarter and use a more focused approach to online advertising, but that’s another post.)
6. Include a link to your website and keep an eye on your Web Analytics. You should see each site under ‘referring sites’, or if you want to get sophisticated create URLs that label each site and then shorten them using a service like bit.ly so even if people share the link or copy and paste it you’ll get the referring information.

Photo Credit

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Here is the latest edition of the Calgary rental website ranking report. Like the other reports I’ve released this week, you can find full background and the Winter data in the last edition of the rankings.

There’s been a few small changes that I’ll talk about in a future post, but for now, here’s your very own copy of the Calgary Rental Website report (PDF ~1mb).

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The two rental website ranking reports we’ve done have been big hits, and I’ve had requests for more from landlords big and small (and also from a couple of the websites in question).

There’s a lot of cities and towns to choose from, and I have my own ideas of what people want. However, the point of these reports is to make things easier for you, the investor. Take 2 minutes to fill out our survey and let us know which areas are most important to you. Maybe there’s places we’ve forgotten or more information you’re looking for.

Anyway, take a minute and let us know how we can better help you!

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Advertising your vacancies on the right sites will save you time and money. What many real estate investors fail to realize is that between your property and the tenant comes an advertisement. The missing link is how they find your ads, and the answer is:

This whitepaper does the heavy lifting for you if you’re in the Ontario investment market.We’ve set out to rank the highest, most consistently ranked sites for the areas identified as the Top Ontario Investment Towns by the Real Estate Investment Network (REIN).

Since it’s release to 400+ members of REIN at the Advanced Landlording and Investing Expo, this report has helped investors fill vacancies faster and with less effort.

The towns we’ve covered in the whitepaper include:

• The Technology Triangle: Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge (KWC)
• Hamilton
• Simcoe Shores: Barrie – Orillia
• Brampton
• Durham Region – Whitby, Pickering, and Ajax
• Ottawa
• Brantford
• Toronto
• Vaughan
• Whitchurch – Stouffville

It’s 20-pages covering the backgound and methodology of the reports, tips and tricks for advertising online, and detailed results for these areas. It’ll help make your advertising choices easier, learn how to Google like a tenant and run your real estate like a business.

You can download the report here (PDF) and signup for future reports below.

Praise for the Ontario Ranking Report:

Chris, while you were in Ireland, you made a big difference for 400+ people in Toronto. Your Special Report on the Ontario Rental Internet-site traffic was fantastic and a huge hit at A-LIFE. THANKS! And that was before the Blarney Stone….. can’t wait to see what comes next.

- Don R. Campbell, President, Real Estate Investment Network

Thank you so much for putting that report together for ALIFE & sharing it here. It is BRILLIANT! It is now one of my most frequently used documents.

- Carla Johnson, Author of Magnetic Real Estate Photography

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I gave a talk about marketing for Canadian real estate investors this week, focusing on internet marketing. Given that I work as an SEO, it’s a topic I know a bit about, so combining internet marketing and real estate investing was a pretty good fit.

Here are some of the resources I promised people.

Canadian Search Engine Market Share

Hitwise is finally publishing Canadian-specific search engine statistics. You can see their full press release here.

Google Receives 80 Percent of Canadian Searches in April 2009
Search Engines, Social Networking and Entertainment top visited categories in Canada
New York, NY - May 27, 2009 – Hitwise, an Experian company, announced today that Google search properties accounted for 80.17 percent of all Canadian searches conducted in the 12 weeks ending April 25, 2009. MSN search properties, Yahoo! search properties and Ask search properties received 8.84 percent, 7.34 percent and 2.75 percent, respectively. The remaining 41 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1 percent of Canadian searches.

Percentage of Canadian searches among leading search engine providers
Domain	April 2009
Google search properties	80.17%
MSN search properties	8.84%
Yahoo! search properties	7.34%
Ask search properties	2.75%
Note: Data is based on 12-week rolling periods

Google Trends

Google’s Keyword Tool

Gmail (and how to use multiple addresses via Gmail)

Google Docs

Google Analytics

Google Webmaster Tools

WordPress.org (for install it yourself)

WordPress.com (which is simpler, but less powerful)

Netfirms (which also offers one-click WordPress.org installations)

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I’ve been asked to speak for a group of investors about marketing. Internet marketing is how I make my day-to-day living, so that’s obviously going to be a big part of that. I have a decent amount of property management experience, so I’ll work from that angle as well.

What do you think think are the ‘must cover’ topics in a 45 minute or hour long presentation?

Please leave a comment or drop me an email on the subject.

Topics I’m thinking about discussing:

• Where to advertise rentals
• Testing: Ad Copy, Calls to Action, Paper/Physical/Websites
• Photos
• Your own website
• Search engines….not as mysterious as you’d think.
• Why attracting JV partners with your website will be the death of you
• Why Social Media will then become your best friend
• And why your website will be useful in that process

More thoughts? What am I missing?

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About every three months I get a letter from a company that calls itself the Domain Registry of Canada. It looks like an invoice, knows my name and a couple of the (many) domain names I own. They ask me to pay $40 per year to renew my domain name registration.

For the love of all things Holy, don’t send these people money!

Three Reasons The Domain Registry of Canada is a Scam!

1. The letter looks like an invoice and targets individuals who aren’t internet savy. It’s actually a solicitation to switch from my existing service to theirs, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to tell people to put that letter in the shredder.
2. $40 per year is at least 400% more than I pay with my current registar, and you can get registration for as low as $5. I’m sure that if you’re not even sure what a TLD is then $40 seems pretty reasonable.
3. The name ‘Domain Registry of Canada’ is an attempt to make the business seem more official. There is a case where the same company was fined by the Competition Bureau back in 2004. It doesn’t look like much has changed since then. 

Just a quick search in Google for domain registry of canada scam will show you the very long list of people complaining about the company. 

Some other posts about the topic:

• DOMAIN REGISTRY OF CANADA SCAM WITH DIRECT MAIL AND ONLINE
• Be Aware: Domain Registry of Canada Snail Mails
• Domain Registry of Canada – SCAM Rant
• Information on Fraudulent Domain Registration Solicitations
• Domain Registry of Canada (DROC) Swindling Domains

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