I am Jeff

Apparently the “sales team” from a company called Inside Real Estate (normally I’d provide a link here, but it’s against my “no links for sleazy companies” policy) is making the rounds in Portland selling their “blogging services” to agents.

For the low price of $75 a month, plus a small $199 “creation and setup fee”, you get a… Drum roll please… WordPress blog. But wait, wait, wait, there’s more…

For an additional $10 per month they’ll set you up with your very own Twitter account, Facebook account and even an RSS feed!

You thought I was done?  Oh no my friend, oh no.

Don’t have time to write your own content?  No problem, they have a cure for what ails you! For only $27 per month (on top of the $85 you’re already spending), they will provide you with Real Estate related articles for you to publish on your blog.  Presumably the same articles they’re providing every other agent in the Nation who is foolish enough to fall for their sales pitch. Think about that for a second…

So what is it that has me so worked up about this?

Is it a bad product? Nope. WordPress is my platform of choice and what we build for our agents at M Realty (examples). It will do pretty much everything they say it will. No issues there.

Is it the price? Yes. $75 a month for a WordPress blog?  Come on…  The other fees/services are equally ridiculous. Unless you’re getting a top notch IDX home search and contact management system (like HomeQuest) along with that fancy WordPress blog, you should only be paying about $5 a month for hosting. I guess they have to pay their traveling snake oil salesmen somehow, right?

$10 a month for a Twitter/Facebook/RSS feed? Sorry to say, but if you need to pay someone to setup your social media accounts for you, you’re never going to get it. Don’t even try.

$27 for ghost writing? Same deal. This is your blog, you need to create the content that expresses your personality, your attitude, and the way you run your business. Plain and simple.

I think more than anything, I was a little perturbed by the sales tactics these guys were using on the agents. Telling them there are only a limited number of “spaces” available in a market, guaranteeing top placement on Google search results, you know all the usual bullshit sales tactics companies like this would have to use to get people to give up their credit card info and get the sale. When I heard several of the agents in the office fell for it and signed up, all I could do was shake my head.

On behalf of all the honest vendors out there, I apologize that we couldn’t get you more information in time to make a better decision.

I just added a new WordPress Plugin that adds the @Anywhere functionality to the blog. So now every time I reference someone’s Twitter ID in a post or page, a couple things happen.

First, the username is automatically converted into an active link directly to the persons Twitter profile. A definite time saver there…

Secondly, if you mouse over the link without clicking, a hover box appears with the user’s basic details. Clicking the “more” link expands the box showing the user’s full bio, latest tweet, follower stats and even a +follow button, as seen in the image to the right.

Go ahead, check it out for yourself on my Twitter ID: @JBern

Cool huh?

If you’re looking for the easiest way to add Facebook’s “Like” Button to your WordPress blog, I’ve got a lil’ something for ya…

Our team at HomeQuest whipped up a quick WordPress plugin that allows you to install the new “Like” button functionality WAY easier than what I outlined in my post yesterday (Using Facebook’s “Like” Button in Your WordPress Blog).

So, if you want to add this to your blog, here’s the plugin to do it.

While you’re at it, check out Dustin’s post on adding Facebook’s “Recommendations” social plugin. It’s a pretty sweet sidebar widget that shows visitors recommendations based on what their friends have “Liked” from your site.

Today at the Facebook developers conference, better known as f8, Facebook announced a new set of plugins (more like widgets) for your website or blog. One of the widgets is the new “like” button, which as you may already know recently replaced the “become a fan” button where visitors can become a fan of your Facebook fan pages. The thing that caught my eye on this new button was the ability to use it on blogs and websites outside of Facebook to promote your content back inside Facebook.

While the functionality is pretty much the same as the current “share this” Facebook plugin, I think this new version will actually perform better.  My two main reasons for thinking this are that the plugin now tells you which of your friends have “liked” the content, and then it displays pictures of other people who have done the same. I guess it comes down to the fact that this plugin/widget just looks better in my opinion. Check it out:

In the setup options for the plugin, you can specify the width, number of rows, color, and whether you want it to display “like” or “recommend”, which ties in perfectly with the “recommend” sidebar widget as seen in the sidebar to the right of this post. This widget shows who has recommended or liked specific content on your site. Kinda like a “most popular” blog posts widget, that also posts the status to each users Facebook page.

Getting it to work on a WordPress blog

I found that using the stock code that Facebook generates doesn’t work for promoting specific posts on your blog. It sends over the title and URL of your blog to the persons Facebook page. So basically when someone named Bob clicks the Like button, they would see ” Bob likes XXXXXX on YYYYYY” where the X’s are the name of your blog, and the Y’s are the URL. This works, but isn’t ideal for promoting the awesome blog posts we all write.

So how do you fix this problem? Well, I had to do a little digging, but I finally came across someone who had figured it out. You just have to replace a snippet of the Facebook generated code with a piece that tells it to use the title of your individual blog posts in your single.php file. It took a couple tries to get it in the exact location I wanted, but I finally got it.

So, instead of going into detail on which code you need to change, I’m just going to give you the exact code you need to use:

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>&amp;layout=standard&amp;show-faces=true&amp;width=500&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light” scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ allowTransparency=”true” style=”border:none; overflow:hidden; width:500px; height:60px”></iframe>

A couple items to note:

You can change the width and height variables.

The basic “Like” button is available via a simple iframe(code above) you can drop into your site easily. A fuller-featured “Like” button is available via the <fb:like> XFBML tag and requires you use the JavaScript SDK. The XFBML version also allows users to add a comment to their “Like” as it is posted back to Facebook.

I tried using the XFBML code on one of my other WordPress blogs running the Thesis theme, using Open Hooks, and had no luck. I then tried the iFrame code above and it worked fine. However, by doing so it screwed up my original Fan Page box in my sidebar. But then I was able to use the XFBML code to replace that box with the new “Like Box”, so it all worked out in the end.

So what does all this mean?

Well, basically it means a couple things. You’re now going to have a better looking, more flexible way for readers to share your content with their friends on Facebook. Plus, you’ve now got more options for building community engagement (with the other plugins/widgets) if you are using a Facebook page along with your WordPress blog. Will this result in more traffic? I hope so. Will it promote better interaction with readers? I hope so. Only time will tell.

Want to see this plugin in action? Go ahead and click the “Like” button down below. It’d be much appreciated!

WordPress permalinks can be a tricky subject.  So I’m going to stick to the basics in answering this question I received from a Real Estate agent up in Seattle: “do u have any permalink structure recommendations?”

Why yes, yes I do…  Here’s how I’ve set permalinks on pretty much all the WordPress blogs I’ve ever setup:

Straight outta the box, WordPress permalinks are stupid. You can see the default setting in the image above and the corresponding URL structure. It’s horrible for search engine optimization. The next two settings aren’t bad, but they’re not great. The last setting, is pretty much just as worthless as the default.

We want to go with a custom structure, that helps maximize how the search engines see the keywords in your URL. As you can see in the image, my preference is to use the category and post name options in the custom URL structure. By doing so, whatever words you choose to use for categories are included in your URL along with the title of each blog post.  It should be noted that this specific string of structure tags is not recommended for WordPress sites that contain a lot of pages. If you’ve got more than a few pages, you should add the /%year%/ tag into your permalink structure to avoid the related performance issues. This will grow increasingly important as Google adds site speed into their web search rankings.

Ok, so all that seems pretty easy right?  Yeah, it is…  The hard part of changing your permalink structure is when you’re told you need to change your permissions in order for WordPress to write the new permalink structure. This doesn’t always happen, but if it does, be careful. If done incorrectly, you run the risk of frying your WordPress install or leaving it vulnerable to attacks.  Best to call in a professional if you’re not sure exactly what to do or completely comfortable with the associated risks.

So, hopefully that answers the question for you and gives you a better idea of why you would want to set things up this way.  When setup correctly, the custom permalink structure can help immensely when it comes to SEO.

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This is part of the “pick my brain” series of wordpress support posts. An experiment in social support. If you find this post useful, feel free to donate.