Taking a Different Approach

For awhile now I wanted to get away from the "links directory" cliché and was trying to make improvements in the quality of the information provided by the directory. About 2 years ago I started gathering more personal and business data from the individuals and businesses that wanted to have their web sites listed here. Doing so greatly improved the quality of the content, and the web site's traffic overall. Some members repeatedly told me that they're

This is a 17 minutes screencast that shows how to submit your real estate industry related business to this directory. I know, it's too long but I tried to record it twice and both times it came out about the same. To be honest, it's a little boring to my own taste, but if you need to be walked through the submission process - this does the job ;)

In the last couple of days I had a few personal requests and most of them were about how to do this or that within the new directory setup.

Of course, I put together a small FAQ, but looks like not many people read it ;) So I decided to create a few screencasts about using this directory.

So, this is Screencast #1 that walks you through the registration process. (I've never done this before and with my English it's quite challenging :) but I hope it's helpful.)

This morning I finally switched to the new platform which was in the development for the last X months. Even though it's not near the completion yet, it should be more robust then the previous system.

I would like to ask everyone to comment here, or in the forums about any problems that you may have with the new system. anything that doesn't seem right would help to pin-point existing issues and improve the site.

Thanks!

Anyone that surfs the internet can help but notice that blogs are all the rage right now. It seems that EVERYONE has a blog, from stay at home moms to corporate moguls (including this site!). As the number of blogs has increased, so have the number of sites for blog owners and readers. There are tons of social networking sites for blog owners, but not all will make the cut. Aside from the granddaddy of them all Technorati, there are two definite networking camps: MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog.

There are were plenty of disasters lately (search engine penalties, power outage, email outage and other unsatisfactory services) with a few well known web site providers. A lot of real estate agents that utilize online marketing products and services are coming to the point where they realizing that it is smart not to put all the eggs into one basket.

There's been a pretty noticeable shake in the blogs, forums and social networks related to real estate industry where well known online marketing providers having troubles with their web sites staying with their "heads above the water". Yes, I'm talking about those penalties in Yahoo and recently in Google triggered by excessive reciprocal linking. In many forums agents announcing their links to be removed and many marketing companies removing (or suggesting to remove) them for their clients.

Social networking is all the rage nowadays on the web. The advent of "web 2.0" embraced interaction between surfers and websites. But is all that time and energy being put to good use? Today there are more social networking sites than ever. Every conceivable niche has a site for it. There are the biggies of course, Digg, Reddit, etc and then there are some up and comers targeting niches like Active Rain and Ziki.

Note to myself - "Max, read this!".. oh maaan.. more reading, where will I get the time for it...

• Document Scoring Based on Query Analysis

Danny Sullivan (at SearchEngineLand) wrote a very long articles on Google PageRank yesterday.. it already has over 500 diggs in one day. I haven't read it yet, everyone says its a must read :)

Here are the main topics Danny covers:

• Google's Definition: PageRank As Votes