The Mortgage and More Blog

Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category

Today is a very exciting day as Sell Buy Rent Online has launched ahead of schedule.

As you may be wondering what SellBuyRentOnline.com is exactly here is the mission statement:

Expertly optimized website that is designed to centrally locate and/or search properties around the world.

As the world has shrunk thanks to both travel and the internet a Realtor’s® client is not necessarily limited to the local shop owner from Main Street anymore. In today’s world your next client could just as easily be the shop owner from half a world away. From vacation homes and second homes to rental and commercial property the only limit listing agents have is their exposure to that wider audience. Sell Buy Rent Online is designed to provide that exposure. Simply click the image to the right to visit Sell Buy Rent Online today. The value of SellBuyRentOnline in terms of exposure for your listings will far exceed the annual $25.00 (USD).

SellBuyRentOnline.com Launches Ahead of Schedule is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

Over the last year to 2 years, I have been talking to REALTORS® from all over the USA and abroad. It seems that no matter who I talk to the one bit of universal feedback I hear is that agents want to be able to list their properties as cheap as possible, and without competitor ads.

Well, being the web developers that we are, we decided to see what we could do about that. So, we developed a site that will allow it’s members to list their properties advertisement free. Now that does not mean the site is completely free of advertisers. It just means that the listings themselves are free of advertisements. We are offering memberships to the site for $25 a year and you can list all the properties that you have contracted. We are not allowing agencies to list all of their REALTORS® listings at this point in time.

Listings can have up to 11 pictures.

You can have a contact form embedded in your listing as well.

So, what makes this site different from others. Simple, the only listings that are searchable on this site are our members’ listings. Also, it is free for the public to search and they do not have to sign up for anything.

With that said, if you are interested in joining prior to launch, email me. I will send you an invoice for the $25.

Lastly, we will be allowing guest post on the site as well. This way, you can drive readers back to your personal website as well.

If you have questions please contact me directly.

SellBuyRentOnline.com Set to Launch on 7-26-2010 is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

One of our greatest features is the fact that we are constantly evolving. When we come across a great tool, we test it out to see if it fits our real estate network and would be a benefit. What is even better than that is when one of our members sends us a message on a tool they have come across that will be a huge benefit to our site. That actually occurred this morning and I would like to thank Ramona Strojevs of Burlington HomeForYou, your connection to Burlington ON real estate.

Ramona had came across a great application this morning and then pasted a link to that on my own wall on FaceBook. She had found Tynt. I immediately went to work checking out this new potential tool for PREP. My first instinct was that I really did not want to have a new tool that we would have to go through each and every account to get it added to our members’ sites. My first path was to go to WordPress.org and see if there was a plugin for easy integration. Fortunately, Tynt had been integrated into a plugin called easy tynt.

Once I got it loaded into PREP, I went to work testing it out. What I found was just extraordinary to say the least. In today’s world where people take content from your site without thinking much about it, this tool will alert you to that very fact. If you look to the left, you will see a screenshot from the plugin that I took this morning. If you can’t make it out, just click on the picture and it will open to original size in another window. Being able to track the content from my site that has been copied and applied elsewhere on the world wide web is a huge benefit. Also being able to tag that content with a license is an even bigger benefit.

With that said, the benefits do not stop there. Another great feature is the SEO benefits that you can actually track using this new tool. Each and every time that someone copies content from your site, you will get a link back to the original content. The more that this happens, the stronger your content becomes. However, it does not just have a positive effect on your content. It also creates more links to your site. That in itself makes the plugin well worth the time to set it up.

So, let’s talk about setting it up on your PREP account. You can ONLY use this if you have an account that is MAPPED. No sub domains or sub directories can be used. Once you are logged onto your dashboard, follow these instructions:

1. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu under ‘Post’ in WordPress.

2. Click on the Easy Tynt settings link in your WordPress settings to configure Easy Tynt. Easy Tynt will not work until this is completed.

3. Visit http://www.tynt.com and log in or register a new account.

4. Chose the options you are interested in. I suggest looking at the Attribution Link. We are using the ‘Attribution No Derivatives’ License.

5. Once everything is setup to your satisfaction, copy the provided “YOUR SCRIPT” code into the Easy Tynt settings in your WordPress dashboard. Hit “Update Options” and you are done!

Now that you have done that, all you need to do is login daily to check your stats. Everything else is done for you. Once again, I would like to thank Ramona for sharing this awesome tool with me this morning.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

PositiveRealEstateProfessionals.com Adds Tynt To It’s Tools is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

It is with great pleasure and pride that I am happy to announce that our online real estate network, PositiveRealEstateProfessionals.com, has come to an agreement with Jeremiah Mumbower. We are officially making him our newest Facebook Guru. We are excited in this newest edition to our staff and want to publicly welcome Jeremiah aboard. It has been a long time coming.

If you are wondering what added value that Jeremiah brings to our team, then check out his business page on Facebook. To give you an idea of Jeremiah’s background, he is a clip from his bio:

“My story I was laid off from Intel in Oct. 2009. I found the social media network facebook was in awe! I use to have my own business in the cleaning industry did my own marketing and media design found that I really enjoyed working on computers and software. I had a love for the social media in the past but, I saw that facebook had business pages. I had a feeling that this was something unique and some thing of the future. I told myself at this point I was going to learn facebook period. I have learned the business pages and the options and capabilities by studying this technology social network 3 months worth. I acquired my knowledge of software/computer components and networking computers over the last ten years. I have a love and natural knack for technology. Well here I am now making Facebook business pages for people.”

We are excited in what Jeremiah can do for our members. While his services are a premium, he has agreed to discount them for our members. To have your Facebook business page constructed professionally, Jeremiah will offer our members a price of $150. This is a $50 discount from his regular charge. While we will still offer the basic Facebook Business Page help, if you are wanting more done, then please contact Jeremiah.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK.

Jeremiah Mumbower Teams Up With PREP As Facebook GURU is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

It is with great pleasure and pride that I am happy to announce that our online real estate network, PositiveRealEstateProfessionals.com, has come to an agreement with Jen Monastero. We are officially making her our newest Community Recruiter. We are excited in this newest edition to our staff and want to publicly welcome Jen aboard. It has been a long time coming.

So, what does a community recruiter actually do you ask? Well, that is quite simply to answer. Jen’s main focus is to help us continue to recruit members to our online real estate network. For those of you that do not know Jen, she has spent several years in the mortgage industry. Most recently, she has jumped on a start up called Know your Pro. I first met Jen about 2 years ago when our paths crossed on ActiveRain. At that point and time, I knew that she would be someone that I could definitely work with and respect. Today that thought has become reality.

While Jen is still focused on Know Your Pro, her sole responsibility with us is to help us grow. In turn, PREP will also be promoting Know Your Pro as we believe that they are onto something over there. If you are not a member of their site, I would highly recommend becoming one. Enough said on that matter.

Please join me in welcoming our newest admin, Jen Monastero.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

Jen Monastero Joins PREPS Team as a Community Recruiter is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

In addition to this Real Estate Network’s recent migration from Host Monster to Host Gator the admins of PREP have continued to search for tools to help enhance the performance, visitor and member usability, and overall satisfaction with the network as a whole. Just as 8 tracks gave way to cassettes, and cassettes gave way to cd’s, and cd’s gave are in the midst of giving way to iPods and USBs, so must plugins that were once quite popular and useful give way to the next generation. While you were selling houses, inspecting roofs, or pursuing the numerous other ventures that occupy our days, Zipli-Retweet went the way of the cd.

Zipli-Retweet was a very useful plugin for WordPress websites and networks. It allowed a visitor to your blog and/or website to use the enormously popular system to share with their friends on Twitter a particularly good, funny, scandalous, or whatever criteria tickled the reader’s fancy post you had written with the click of a button, the zipli-retweet button to be precise. Why you might ask would such a seemingly useful tool be replaced? To answer that we must look at some of the relevant information regarding the plugin. From a high of 112 downloads of the plugin to its current average of <1 a day, the popularity of it has been steadily decreasing. There is also a related stat in the form of its update frequency; it was last updated on 2009-11-12.With that said, many plugin designers recognize the limitations of there creation and abandon them in favor of an entirely new plugin. Please note that I am not attempting to disparage the plugin designer, many of these designers have regular day jobs and create these plugins for free.

Now if you will allow me, let me introduce TweetMeme. This Retweet button  is being touted as the latest and greatest available. It can be seen on sites as diverse as , , and So you may be wondering why would the admins of this network go with this plugin? It receives average 4 out of 5 user rating. It was last updated on 2010-2-24. It has also been downloaded 225,000+ times including 506 times today.

It has been activated sitewide but still must be setup by each member. From your dashboard, locate the TweetMeme header near the bottom of the left column (Refer to the image to the right). If you hover over it you will get a gray dropdown arrow that you should click on to reveal two options; ‘settings’ and ‘analytics’. Click on settings to setup this button. So how does this affect you as a PREP member? This button should definitely bring more traffic to your website and more traffic definitely means the potential exists for increased business. We would highly recommend that all PREP members utilize this excellent and FREE tool.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

And Now … Tweet Meme is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

PositiveRealEstateProfessionals.com now offers Video Blogs in conjunction with an account on our real estate network. The Video Blogs, just like the Photo Blogs and other additional blogs, can be purchased for a one time fee of $100. One of the greatest benefits of having this additional blog is that the page with all the blogs would be indexed and followed by the search engines, unlike tags or categories. In addition, you will be able to set the keywords for the Video Blog as well as each and every individual post that occupies space on the Video Blog. Any of these three blogs can be purchased from the main page of PREP.

So, what is a Video Blog, you ask. Video Blogging is also referred to as vlogging. Vlogging uses videos to create your articles as opposed to text. This creates a sense of internet television. Entries include videos or a link to the videos, supporting text, images, and other metadata. The best vlogging is done when the author provides a transcript for the article. These particular articles are drown with search engine juice. While it takes a little bit of work, the transcript can be keyword intensive.

In closing, if you are looking to increase your SEO without having to add a bunch of extra steps to do it, look into adding a Video blog or any of the other blog products that we offer to your PREP site. The additional potential for search engine juice is yours for the taking.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

PositiveRealEstateProfessionals.com Now Offers Video Blogs is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

PREP now offers broken link checker to it’s members. We decided to add this tool after running a number of reports on our online real estate network. For those of you that are unaware of what damage broken links can have to your SEO and your site, let me explain it this way. When a link is broken and someone clicks on it, they are directed away from your page. Sometimes you will get a “500″ error, but most of them come back as a “404″ error and state nothing was found. Not only are these errors encountered by human searchers, they are also encountered by search engine bots. In the end, neither are happy when they encounter this.

As part of full disclosure, when we ran ours on PREP, we found 144 broken links out of 1751 for just over 8%. For me, that is just too high of a ratio and damages our SEO. Once we figured that portion out for our site, we thought that the members would have similar issues. So, with that coming to light, we decide that this was a “must have” tool to offer to our members. It is free to use and can be located on your dashboard under tools. The first time that you run it, it might seem to be stuck, but let it do it’s thing. It will clear out.

Now, what causes broken links, you ask. Well, that is a simple answer. Links can be deleted over time. A website can expire over time or go corrupt. Even worse, a site can be moved from one domain to another. While there are other fixes out to preserve these links, you have to ask yourself if it is worth the effort to track down the new URL. Once the program runs, you will have the choice to edit the URL, exclude it, or unlink it. In most cases, the only real choice is to unlink it.

So, what all does this tool do? For that information, I thought that I would just turn to Wordpress Plugins Directory for that answer:

Features

• Monitors links in your posts, pages, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).

• Detects links that don’t work and missing images.

• Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.

• Also detects redirected links.

• Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).

• Link checking intervals can be configured.

• New/modified posts are checked ASAP.

• You view broken links, redirects, and a complete list of links used on your site, in the Tools -> Broken Links tab.

• Searching and filtering links by URL, anchor text and so on is also possible.

• Each link can be edited or unlinked directly via the plugin’s page, without manually editing each post.

Basic Usage

Once installed, the plugin will begin parsing your posts, bookmarks (AKA blogroll), etc and looking for links. Depending on the size of your site this can take a few minutes or even several hours. When parsing is complete the plugin will start checking each link to see if it works. Again, how long this takes depends on how big your site is and how many links there are. You can monitor the progress and set various link checking options in Settings -> Link Checker.

Note : Currently the plugin only runs when you have at least one tab of the Dashboard open. Cron support will likely be added in a later version.

The broken links, if any are found, will show up in a new tab of WP admin panel – Tools -> Broken Links. A notification will also appear in the “Broken Link Checker” widget on the Dashboard. To save display space, you can keep the widget closed and configure it to expand automatically when problematic links are detected.

The “Broken Links” tab will by default display broken links that have been detected so far. However, you can use the subnavigation links on that page to view redirects or see a listing of all links – working or not – instead.

There are several actions associated with each link listed -

• “Details” shows more info about the link. You can also toggle link details by clicking on the “link text” cell.

• “Edit URL” lets you change the URL of that link. If the link is present in more than one place (e.g. both in a post and in the blogroll) then all instances of that URL will be changed.

• “Unlink” removes the link but leaves the link text intact.

• “Exclude” adds the link’s URL to the exclusion list. Excluded URLs won’t be checked again.

• “Discard” lets you manually mark the link as valid. This is useful if you know it was detected as broken only due to a temporary glitch or similar. The link will still be checked normally later.

In closing, this tool is set out to benefit our members. Unfortunately, we do not have the time to run these for you. We also do not have the time to review your broken links to give you direction. Ultimately, this is something that you are going to have to make the call on. There is really no right or wrong answers.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

PREP Now Offers Broken Link Checker is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

Many of you that have followed me over the last two years might remember that when I first broke into blogging, I was a manager for a mortgage company. I originally started blogging on ActiveRain as The Mortgage & More Guy and soon converted my blog name to The Mortgage & More Blog. It did not take me long to know that I needed to grow my presence and that is when I gave birth to The Mortgage & More Blog. Just so you know a time line, the site was born in April of 2008.

I originally turned to Blogger, which was a free platform through Google. I went there thinking that because it was tied to Google, I would be able to garner more Google Juice. Boy, was I dead wrong. It did not take me long to realize that this was the wrong platform. I soon started looking for a platform that I could expand on.

This is when I found WordPress. Many people do not realize that WordPress comes in two flavors; WordPress.com and WordPress.org . If you want to get techinical, there is also MU.Wordpress.org , in which Positive Real Estate Professionals is actually built on. I won’t get into that as it is a bird of a different color. The big difference between the .com and the .org is that .com host your site for you and there are many restrictions. The .org does not host the site for you and there are few limitations. In my estimation, .org and the MU platform might be the best content management system on the market today in terms of what it can do for you.

Now, let’s get back on track. I originally went with the .com version. However, it did not take me long to know that it was not the right version and I soon mover to the .org version. Since that point and time, I have been able to increase my web presence with little effort. The tools that this platform offers is extremely powerful. With that said, the people that still follow me know that I left the mortgage industry last year to follow a dream. Since that time, I have tried to keep this site going, but it has been difficult. I have since automated the site to pull my articles from PREP.

With the time running near for the site to renew, I have decided to sale it off. With that said, if you are interested in purchasing the site and all the content on the site, then we need to talk. The site is established and still has a following. It is generating about 200 hits a day at this point. If you want to discuss this, you can call our office @ 865-951-0522 or email me.

Today was a good day for PREP admins and hopefully for the general public who have their own website or blogsite built on a platform. This is because we launched SEO Info Now. This site is independent of the Positive Real Estate Professionals network.

Why did we build this site?

The reason for this site is rather simple. Since many of our PREP members find our SEO posts helpful, and the tutorials on the Test Account helpful as well we wanted to launch a site that combines both.

Will all the articles from PREP be on this new site?

While we are using a syndication from PREP’s main blog and the Test Account, these are going to be the only two sources of information for this site. Also, we have set up the syndication to hold posts in draft for the simple reason that if they are mainly concerned with PREP and not SEO or SEO enhancements or Wordpress tutorials we can simply leave them in draft.

What is the benefit to PREP overall (why should I care)?

This new site will provide backlinks and deeplinks to PREP. This will strengthen and enhance even further our positioning as a network with the search engines.

If you have a chance check out the new site and if you know someone whose site is built on a Wordpress platform that might appreciate the articles, send them on over too!

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

PREP Launches SEO Info Now is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.