Morgan Carey's Blog: REW Blogs

To our valued REW customers.

By now many have already noticed and commented on an increase in both response times and efficiency during business hours at our REW customer support forums. This is no accident - Recently we have increased our team of daytime CSR reps responsible for non billable support of our technologies.

The most significant addition to our CSR program this year - is the addition of 3 full time programmers for providing tier 2 and tier 3 support for REW technology (CMS, Lead manager, IDX, Listings Manager, Hosted Blogs, Email & Server) Support.

The tiered concept (Sometimes referred to as escalation) is one that is new to REW, but one that has proven very effective in similar corporate envirements - Hosting companies being the best…

I have been getting a few inquiries from those that have paid thier setup fees for either their iframe IDX, or iFrame IDX + REW Template site on how to go about setting up the iFrame - I thought I would post a quick tutorial. (Note we have not billed out the iframes yet as we were waiting for more to come in to try to get you guys a discount on the setup fee, but we will need to bill them in short order)

So here's how you do it (Or rather the URL and code to give to your developer)

The URL for your iframe:

You will see /your-name-frame/ replace your-name with your name for instance mine would read /morgan-carey-frame/ and the full URL would be  http://www.nwhomes.net/iframe/morgan-carey-frame/

It is…

Imagine you finally take the plunge and purchase that amazing REW custom designed website you have always been wanting and through the amazing new limited edition custom program you end up with with a custom site, built in (Extremely custom) REW IDX and custom REW Blog for less than half of what it would have cost on the normal custom development program...

Now imagine you got it for free :)

To celebrate the launch of our very first limited edition custom design, that will be the reality for 20% of purchasers.

That's right folks, you have a 1 in 5 shot of winning your purchase of the new REW limited edition custom site.

Here's how it works.

• You purchase the REW Limited Edition Custom site (Exclusive to your market)
• Once 5 are sold we draw…

Every month we convert current users of the Advanced Access website platform to the Real Estate Webmasters platform and I find myself confronted with the same questions each time - so I figured I would write this blog post to provide a convenient way for those converting or thinking of converting to get the answers they need before making the switch.

I am going to adopt the FAQ format for this post so that as more questions come in, I can update this post with those answers as well for the benefit of future readers - So let's begin.

Leaving Advanced Access frequently asked questions

Q: My Advanced Access website ranks well in search engines, if I switch to Real Estate Webmasters will I loose my rankings?

A: This is probably the biggest concern / most…

Or maybe just a little bit of fun :)

My buddy Eric Bramlett who has been really firing it up doing his own SEO lately (He is first and foremost a Realtor - or at least he used to be heh) came up with an idea for a fun contest - the "Greatest Real Estate Agent In The World Contest" (He gets a link because it was his idea - this is NOT my idea and I take no responsibility for the great relationships you may build or the learning you may experience. Also as with any attempts at experimenting with your site to try to rank it - please be sure you are familiar and adhere to Google's Guidelines For Webmasters.

Anyways - what this is, is a good old fashioned SEO contest - We pick a phrase that is not very competitive (So everyone can compete on a reletively…

One of the first things you will want to do when starting to use version 2.0 REW lead management is create groups.

What are groups?

Groups are ways to organize your leads into specific types of leads such as "registered IDX users" or "relocating next year". Groups are tied directly to the drip email system, so creating and organizing your groups is the first step in creating a successful drip email campaign, which is the key to success in processing online leads.

The new REW Leads system allows you to create and manage unlimited amounts of groups, and assign any particular lead to as many groups as you like or you feel they fit into.

Creating a group

Ironically as important as groups are to laying the groundwork for your lead management, they are…

On Wednesday, February 6th 2008 we will be launching our new backend for customer use as a beta.

We are very excited about the new funtionality that this system provides to our customers and with this upgrade this should make 2008 the best year ever for client closings from their REW websites.

This very affordable upgrade represents a complete overhaul of our backend including new CMS (With new wysiwyg editor) new featured listings management, and most importantly new lead management. Some of the more significant changes I will list below:

REW CMS: (Content management system) - Our system still includes all of the great features our customers are used to such as adding unlimited pages and sub pages. Creating custom titles, meta descriptions, meta…

As any REW community member knows, a few days ago we took a hit in our Google rankings. I am still working on getting these issues figured out and it will likely be a timely process as Matt Cutts and the rest of great folks of Google have their hands full as you can well imagine with webmasters contacting them with "My site has dropped in the rankings, can you look into it" type inquiries.

I am of course concerned with getting my rankings back up to their former glory. But it has actually been really nice having a chance to turn some of my focus inward towards the REW site as a whole trying to figure this whole mess out and while I'm in here - I might as well make even more improvements to our great community right?

Speaking of our great community and…