Welcome to 5 Things.
Every week, I’ll share 5 things that I think you should look at related to content strategy, what’s going on in real estate, and useful apps I think you should check out.
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Open Home Pro released an iPhone app this week that allows real estate agents and brokers to create great looking listing profiles/pages straight from their iPhone. All you have to do is snap a couple of photos with your iPhone, enter a few listing details, and hit publish. The end result is a beautiful profile of your listing and even a mobile optimized landing page for that listing.
Honestly, this is a great way to quickly and efficiently upload property listings on the go! You couldn’t make it any easier.
The app is priced at $2.99 in the iTunes marketplace, but if you ask me, it’s well worth the investment.
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Why Real Estate Agents Rarely Rank Highly In Search Results
The folks over at Real Geeks published a neat little infographic with some interesting search result findings. Basically, they did a search with “[city] real estate,” and they found that 30% of page one listings were from local sites. Furthermore, 58% of page one listings were from traditional organic pages rather than paid listings.
Often times, it’s the large syndicators that are outranking the average agent in page one search results. So I always find it a little fascinating to see what agents are doing to boost their organic page one search engine placement.
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Google Apps for Business Is No Longer Free
I use Google Apps to manage all of my emails accounts – here on my blog, my membership site, and for work. So reading that Google Apps for business is no longer free, sort of bums me out. The good news is, if you were already using the service, you’re getting grandfathered in. If you want to use the service for your business, pricing plans are $5/user/month (which is still worth the investment). I know I’ll be using the service for an upcoming web project.
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Google+ Introduces Communities
I’ve been getting several invitations this week from real estate agents to “join their community.” That’s because Google+ rolled out their new “Communities” feature. Basically, you can create public or private membership communities with discussion threads and integration with other Google+ features such as hangouts.
I think this is akin to Facebook’s Groups feature. If you’re active on Google+ and you have an engaging community there, I think it’s worth checking out. Personally, I feel like I’m a part of enough groups as it is.
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If you’re looking for a little design/typography inspiration, check out Typespiration – created by my friend Rafal Tomal (Lead Designer at Copyblogger Media). It’s a pretty neat crowdsourced design community project. And each submission comes with the CSS code you need to design your pages the way you want. It’s really pretty neat.
Personally, I’m looking forward to using this one – Modern Sans – for my next web project.
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Bonus: (Warning, blatant self-promotion)
Earlier this week, the Copyblogger Media team and I launched the AgentPress Library. It’s a project I’ve been working towards since I joined the Copyblogger Team back in July and I couldn’t be more excited. We’re combining the best design on the web, with smart content marketing strategies for real estate. So if you want to get a lead up on the competition, go sign up. You’re going to love what we have in store for you…
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Over to you: what’s one thing that you saw this week that inspired you or you thought was useful? Drop a link to it in the comments and share it with the rest of us.