Affordable Real Estate Solution is a new Real Estate directory that was started in late February by Gary the owner of US Real Estate Directory . I wrote about USRED back in April of 2006. His real estate directories are a great place to listed in as they are relevant and can drive traffic to your sites. ….click here to read more

So a discussion about Listing Presentation Manuals has peaked my interest and forced me into actually sharing some information. This information cost me thousands of dollars to learn and is used by many top producers.

New agents come into real estate and feel this will be “easy money” and are shocked at how much work is actually involved. The first thing a new agent wants to do is go out and list a house, but they have no idea where to start.

The first step is ….click here to read more

Here is yet another way to build some links to your site and add another place for clients to find you on the web. Windows Live allows you to create a profile page. This profile page can link to your website and other resources that you want to share with others. The process takes about 5 minutes to set up a page and add some content.

Created this Arlington Heights real estate page in less then 10 minutes and while it doesn’t look great it is yet another online resource. Need to play around with this page and add some pictures and real content about the area. Charles shared his Las Vegas profile page with me and that is what made me decide to give it a try.

Hope that you take a few minutes and set up a profile page at Windows Live. If you do, or already have a page, please leave a comment with a link to your page. Would love to see some other examples of how people are using their profile pages.

A Squidoo lens to be more specific. Squidoo.com offers users the opportunity to create a page about any topic of interest and share links, photos, earn money, and more. While I do not claim to be an expert with the ins and outs of Squidoo it is worth sharing with you.

Here is a lens I created about Arlington Heights, IL, the town I live in. As time goes on I will continue to add links to sites about Arlington Heights or to sites that are for places, employers, events, shopping, restaurants, and things to do in Arlington Heights.

Why would I spend the time to do this? ….click here to read more

This post is some time in the making as I have done a little here and a little there. The site review session at PubCon was great and it showed how quickly a site can be picked apart with a few tools. You will find some specifics, but it was hard to keep up with the notes.

The panel was a “Dream Team - the Who’s Who of search.” per the session details and there aren’t to many people that would disagree. When you have Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Greg Boser, Todd Friesen, and Danny Sullivan giving you advice you better listen. So before I bore you to death here are my notes site by site: ….click here to read more

Social networking sites like Digg, Myspace and many more are for the most part very general in nature. The next evolution of Social sites will be smaller Niche sites in my opinion. A great example of this is ActiveRain.com.

ActiveRain.com is a site that by the time it hits 5 months old it will have over 7,000 members and all of it via word of mouth advertising. If ever a site displayed the power of the web and niche social networking this is it.

The site is all about real estate and those that support the real estate industry. Real estate agents, loan officers, staggers, and others have a place to talk about the industry, network, and share ideas on how to better serve our clients. Also members have blogs that can be used to drive traffic to their main sites to generate business.

So who cares besides the real estate industry? Well it is my strong opinion that the growth of Active Rain will cause others to take notice and mirror their success by creating other niche social networking sites. Learn from the successes and errors of ActiveRain.com to apply this to other niches and maybe the power of web can help your next site become the next big thing in your industry.

About the Author: Ken Smith, e-PRO is the owner of Suburban House Hunters Team, one of Chicago’s top real estate teams.

So is a link in Yahoo Directory a worth while investment? This question gets asked over and over in forums. There is never a clear cut answer to the question.

It is my opinion that a link from the Yahoo Directory is worth getting and as a little bonus you will end up in the Yahoo Canada Directory also. Here is an example for Rolling Meadows, IL in Yahoo and also Rolling Meadows, IL in Yahoo Canada.

Why is Yahoo Directory worth it? Simple in my opinion, they are a trusted directory. A human edited authority directory. What more can you ask for?

Remember being a trusted site is becoming more and more important so getting links from authority sites like Yahoo is worth the effort and cost.

Have you ever been to a site that has so much information you have no idea where to start? The homepage is so long you have to scroll and scroll to see everything. It’s so long and there is so much to look at that you have no idea how to find what you are looking for.

This is something that I see over and over with real estate sites. The problem is agents that have no idea about web visitor viewing habits are their own webmasters. If someone would tell them that a visitor will leave a site that looks complicated, even if the info is there, to find a simple and clean site with the info maybe site owners would do a better job of designing their sites. ….click here to read more

We all know that we should be farming a geographic area. But…we don’t like to spend the money. It can take years to start to see a consistent return on your farming investment and most agents stop before the results come in. For best results you should be farming every 21 days so it can really add up.

To farm 1000 homes you will spend about .25 on bulk postage (use the bulk stamp) each and .10 on printing and envelopes. So you need to spend $350 per mailing, lets round it to $400 to be safe.

So how can we farm 1000 homes for free? ….click here to read more

Previously we featured BOTW, an established directory. They now have a blog directory and it is currently Free to have your site listed. This is an authority site and is worth getting your site and blog both listed.

An update on BOTW’s main directory, the prices have increased and they are now $49.95 annually recurring review fee or a $149.95 one-time review fee.