The Real Estate Tomato

Real Estate Tomato on Facebook

Microblogging with the Tomato Twitter PlugIn Solves Two Major Challenges. 1. The biggest challenge to blogging is developing regular, unique content on your site. 2. The biggest challenge to syndicating your Twitter Updates to your blog is that often they are out of context and confusing to your blog readers. Now you can solve both of these challenges at the same time. Microbogging Is Blogging. Making/Finding time to blog is cause of death for most blogs. Although it is no replacement for rich, well-thought-out content, quick, unique updates relevant to your audience’s expectations are a great manner of keeping the regular content coming. Every update, long or short, is an opportunity to connect with your audience, and that is the goal in the first place. The Tomato Twitter PlugIn creates a widget that displays Micro Blogs (short text updates) on your blog, which then syndicate to Twitter. From the dashboard...

When I started the Real Estate Tomato, in June of 2006, I had one reader, me. Before the first month was over, I was averaging 30 unique visitors a day. Within 2 months it was 135 unique visitors a day. How did we get out of the gates so quickly? We did it in part, with an old friend: The Email Database. To make a business blog a successful marketing strategy, you need to have an audience of potential clients. Having been a consultant for online real estate marketing for 6 years before starting the Tomato, I had a mighty database of real estate agents, lenders, industry professionals and friends. If I was going to regularly write articles about leveraging the internet as a marketing tool for real estate, then this was the audience I would want to be paying attention. So I shoved it down their throat. Well, not...

Jim is not a fan of putting a lot of bling on the blog. I agree with him but would like to mention two widgets that I can't live without. One of them is the MyBlogLog widget. To get this widget sign up for an account, follow the instructions, grab the code and paste in in your sidebar. It is a bit more complicated if you have a self hosted word press blog but the MyBlogLog site has instructions for those too. Why do I like the MYBlogLog widget? Because it shows me the faces of my friends. I can see that they have stopped by. I know people read my blog I can tell by the number of visits it gets. Yet it makes me smile when I see a familiar face on the widget. Seeing those faces encourages me to do my best. When I see an avatar...