Real Estate Links Some of the Best, Some of the Worst

While Below Market Homes hold the position of some of the most impressive, cutting edge and prestigious websites online, they can also hold the reputation for the ugliest and least intuitive sites as well.

Zillow is a great example of a new media giant. What started out as a highly secretive startup by the ex CEO of Expedia turned into one of the most talked about sites of the year. It has already been branded by the public the "EBay of real estate sites". Their site technology has resulted in many industry innovations and in fact is changing the real estate industry as we know it.

Redfin and Trulia are another two up and comers in the real estate technology arena. Redfin has already dominated a 60 minutes show recently and Trulia has just received another 10 million in financing. In fact in January 2007, all three of these companies were listed in Swanepoel TRENDS Report as part of the "Top 10 Trendsetters" online.

Academics report that with over 100+ million websites online, approximately 6% of commercial websites are real estate related. The problem is that a vast majority of these sites are nowhere near the caliber of Zillow.com. Most are mere duplicates of poor real estate website design.

I'm sure you can picture them now, a headshot picture in the upper left hand corner, a pixilated, poorly designed logo, possibly an unnecessary, time consuming flash presentation at the beginning, content which doesn't stand out, poor information architecture, and countless links at the bottom of their homepage sending their site visitors to sites such as bulgariancardealers.com or real-estate-secrets-for-people-with-bad-credt.com.

At paperclipcms.com we only focus on real estate websites. We see countless real estate websites each day. We spend our days researching, analyzing, promoting, and designing real estate websites. Yet, we never get desensitized to the utterly horrible design and functionality of the majority of real estate websites out there today. It's sometimes shocking, sometimes tragic and often comical how poorly designed most real estate websites are.

The subject of real estate website design would not fit within the framework of this blog post, however we will point out some major "musts" for real estate websites.

1. Organize your outbound links and keep links to 3rd party sites to a minimum on your main page. If you have a real estate link exchange or resource page, make sure you have organized your links into categories and only included relevant links. A link from a coffee retailer will do more harm than good for your search engine ranking and your public image.

2. Organize your internal information architecture in such a way that is intuitive and minimal. Look at your metrics monitoring program to find out what your most popular pages are. While most real estate webmasters place a disproportionate amount of attention on their "about us" page, we have found these pages are frequented by less than 2% of website visitors. Our testing has shown the most popular pages on real estate websites have been property listing pages, property index pages, maps, blogs and of course the sites main page. People want properties and regional information before they want to know about what your education background is. Make sure you present your website information in an order that correlates to your website visitor preferences.

3. Ensure there is design continuity throughout your site. You should have one title font, size and color, one subtitle font, size and color and the body text should also be the same site wide. Similarly, ensure there is harmony between the colors on your site. There should be great thought put into the color combinations and the interaction between graphical elements and text elements. For example, if your banner has predominantly cool, blues and purples, then bring that into consideration whey dealing with your sites typography choices, such as page titles or subheadings.

4. Upload as many properties as you possibly can. All of our research has concluded the same findings. People visit real estate websites to search for properties. They want pictures, virtual tours, directions, descriptions and contact information. Too many real estate websites keep up a few outdated listings hoping their site visitors will call asking to see a particular place, to which there response will be "I'm sorry, that property is no longer available but maybe you should come by the office and I can show you a list of other properties that are available". This is such an ineffective way to harness the power of the internet.

The more properties you have on your site, the longer people will stay on your website and look around. The more properties you have on your site, the more education your site visitors will have regarding your property offerings and the less work you will need to do in the future informing your clients of property choices. The web saves both you and your clients a lot of time. You save time because you now have clients coming to you with printouts of the properties they want to see and you spend less time educating your clients. It's a win win situation, but it requires that you keep your website up to date and populated with many properties.

Again, you don't have to be the next Zillow.com, and you don't need to do an IPO to raise money to ensure you site gets the attention it deserves. While building a quality real estate website takes time, it's not something that out of reach to the average real estate professional. It just takes some pre-planning and a basic understanding of design and technology.

Flickr tries Create Filter Ala Instagram Photos

Photo filters such as pioneered by Instagram seems to be a trend among technology giants recently.

After Facebook and Twitter offer a function to turn the photos into memorable "retro", now turn to Flickr to implement a similar feature.

As part of an effort to further expand in the segment of mobile photo sharing service that is under Yahoo is providing 15 filter "insta-hip" in the latest update Flickr app for iPhone and iPod Touch. View photos also turned out to be bigger.

Flickr app update comes as Instagram break integration with Twitter that resulted Instagram photo could no longer be seen in the Twitter feed.

At the same time, Twitter began working with Aviary startup companies engaged in photo editing, which is also involved with the Flickr-to create her own picture filter for images to share it directly from the microblogging site.

In a blog post, Flickr said: "We have been working with partners to ensure that your photos look beautiful wherever you go, whether through Flickr or outside of it."

Photos taken with Flickr apps can be shared via Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler, and do not forget to e-mail.

Flickr Applications can now be obtained for free. For Adroid version or optimized for the iPad is not available despite site Flickr can be accessed via a mobile browser.

Real Estate Links

In order that a Fix and Flip website will rank high in the search engine result pages for specific search term it has to have quality links pointing to it from other websites. What are quality links? Well, it means that these links should come from relevant authority websites and that the links will have the required phrase as anchor text (hyper text).

How to get  for real estate links website?

Article marketing is one of the best free methods to build links from relevant web pages. This method is excellent for the long run but in order that all your work will be beneficial it has to be done correctly or you might be flagged as spammer by Google.

What do you get with article marketing?

You get exposure
You are strengthening your acknowledgment
You get valuable links to your website that will improve your search engines ranking (quality backlinks are the key ingredient to strong search engine rankings)
Other blogs and websites can reprint your articles including the links so your links popularity increases all the time in a viral manner.
It used to be that you write an article and submit it to as many article directories trying to gain as many links as possible from as many places on the web as possible. Times are changing and search engines tend to prefer quality over quantity and as times passes they know better and better how to differentiate quality from quantity. Search engines especially Google declared war on duplicated content (what is considered duplicate content is a subject for another article). As per my understanding for duplicated content is that there are some levels of duplicated content. The worst level is the same content on different pages of the same website. Less severe level is the same content on different websites, Google still shows the same article but usually it will be from the strongest sites and it seems that they disregard all the other weak article directories.

Because of the mentioned above it seems that submitting to as many as possible article directories is NOT the way anymore. When I submit articles I have two lists of article directories. One for the GENERAL strong article directories and another one is for article directories that SPECIALIZE in real estate. Relevancy is very important factor and if I had to choose between general and relevant I choose the latter.

Remember, link building is just a technique to reach your targeted audience. You want to fish where the fish are, right?

For better results it is good to make some rewriting to each article in the Title, first and last paragraph and the Resource box (change the anchor text)

The content of the article should be quality and informative that will add value to the reader. It can be tips on how to avoid common mistakes... or how to save money on a procedure... you get the idea

Very important: Until now you just set the domino infrastructure, now you have to make it work with a small effort but essential. You have to use web2.0 tools for that. It means that you have to bookmark (i.e. del.icio.us) the articles and use the social news network (i.e. digg) or any other web2.0 tools that the specific directory provides.

The best results of article marketing is when you submit articles on a constant pace. Put article submission in your weekly task list it is definitely worth it.

Galaxy Note II Apparently Can Be PC Desktop

The assumption that mobile devices could someday replace the desktop PC might not be a figment.

As shown by the YouTube video of ColdFustion, phablet (smartphones tablets) latest from Samsung, the Galaxy Note II, it can be used like a traditional computer keyboard and mouse.

In the video seen someone connect the Galaxy Note II to a 29-inch monitor uses Samsung HML adapter and an HDMI cable. As an input device, use the Apple wireless keyboard and Magic Mouse.

With a quad-core processor and 2 GB of RAM, this device is quite robust scenarios used to run multi-tasking, including play 4 video as well as from the native player and browser.

Operation "copy and paste" the image can be made ​​to the productivity of the Dolphin Browser app that does support the operation of "copy-paste", although the picture in question must first be copied to the Gallery.

According ColdFustion, first-generation Galaxy Note can not do this because of the limited amount of memory.

Another possibility arises from the proper functioning Galaxy Note II like the PC is doing a presentation and play games on the big screen. It can be run relatively no problems, except for a title that attempted by ColdFustion, which is locked in portrait orientation.

When tested, this device was able to play the videos directly through the USB flash drive is connected through the USB cable.

In conclusion, Cold Fustion said that, although not entirely practical, especially today's mobile gadgets Galaxy Note II already powerful enough to be used as a PC replacement. If it's been like that, imagine what would happen in, say, three years from now.

3 Operator Compact sings the RBT

Three major mobile operator in Indonesia ready to "hum" or generate more business mobile phone ring tones (ring back tone / RBT) through the Joint RBT project. The three mobile operators that are Telkomsel, Indosat and XL Axiata.

"The plan will be launched in December. Currently we are allowed to visit BRTI (the Indonesian Telecommunications Regulatory Body-ed) to RBT Together," said Dian Siswarini Director of Technology, Content, and Business News XL, in Jakarta, Wednesday (11/28/2012) .

This is justified by two other cellular operators, Indosat and Telkomsel. Project Director of Service, Content, Applications an Portal, Task Force Telkomsel Gideon E. Purnomo, said the plan has been discussed regularly by the three operators since 2 months ago.

RBT business is still run by the operator. RBT participate sluggish since BRTI urges mobile operators to suspend services related to premium SMS toll theft late 2011. According to Dian, there is a misconception that states that RBT is included in content services, which impact on the reduction in RBT subscribers.

"Amid the downturn and VAS content business, is the third operator to generate RBT, of course, with permission BRTI pending new regulation was passed," Gideon said when contacted KompasTekno.

Diana M. Sevi, Manager of Value Added Service (VAS) Indosat said the program is expected to run to increase traffic RBT. Purchase RBT will use the system one time purchase (one time purchase) within a specified time.

In the RBT project Together, the three operators have worked with major music labels homeland.

Money For Reviews - Get Paid to Write Music Reviews

Want to get paid reviews good money to write music reviews? If your into music, and you would enjoy this type of job, I have very good news for you: it can pay extremely well. Careful though, don't get suckered into selling your reviews on a "per review" basis, as I tell my students over and over, this is a massive mistake in every scenario. Your quality music reviews will create way too much traffic on there own to be sold for a few bucks, especially if you apply article marketing principles.

"Article marketing principles" as I call it, is following a few rules and principles on your article in order to get it ranked on Google and Yahoo on the first page. It applies a bit of "SEO" practices, an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It's a fancy word for "the science of getting your website(s) and article(s) ranked highly on Google, Yahoo, and other search engines.

Enough with the technical stuff, how much will you make?

Generally if you submit your review to a paid review service, if they decide to accept your review, they will pay you 5 - 15$.

However, using article marketing, the same review will make about 15-30$ per month for at least 18 months.

I don't have my own website, and I don't know HTML or any web design..

Perfect, neither do I! These skills are completely unnecessary in the article marketing business, it's simply about how you write your music review, not about making your own web page or anything of the sort. You will simply submit your reviews to websites such as EzineArticles, you wont need your own web page, ezine is free to use.

Conclusion: Do the thing you love and get paid handsomely to do it. There is a lot of money out there writing reviews, especially in the music area. You just need the knowledge and the power of article marketing behind you, and you will be very successful.