Featured Blog shows up in Google Alert

[svrpaul]

We've had this thread before concerning Featured blogs (Realtor.com) and not having any juice yet... but I just checked my google alerts and a Featured Blog just showed up for the first time (that I've noticed) for a good competitive keyword phrase.

Has anybody else noticed this in their areas? Does this mean that they are going to start having some value?

[jessiesc]

Our blogs get picked up quite often by g alerts (I dont post anything on r.com and have seen nothing from them in g alerts for my alerts). Mainly when we post our blogs with the alert keywords, they match the g alert setup and poof show up.

What I want to know, is how to find out who else has g alerts and kw's they are setup for

[svrpaul]

Our blogs get picked up quite often by g alerts (I dont post anything on r.com and have seen nothing from them in g alerts for my alerts). Mainly when we post our blogs with the alert keywords, they match the g alert setup and poof show up.

What I want to know, is how to find out who else has g alerts and kw's they are setup for

I get the usual suspects showing up in our keyword alerts but this is the first for a R.com blog showing up on a big keyword alert. I want to know if anybody else has seen one pop up in their alerts.

To me, it's a sign to not ignore them especially since it is real estate related. Unfortunately, I think due to past history, we are all under the consensus that R.com will eventually be charging an outrageous fee for this service once it becomes established and are hesitant to put any time into them.

[tyr]

Glad to hear you seeing some the featured blogs start to show up in search results. I imagine as the quality of the blog posts continue to increase (along with the increase in inbound links), you'll see more and more of that.

In terms of the price of a REALTOR.com blog, I feel pretty comfortable saying that there really are no plans to ever charge for this service. The team is pretty confident that the benefits in terms of outreach to influentials and goodwill among REALTORS will always outweigh the cost of providing the service. That doesn't mean the team will not look for upsell opportunities into the future, but the plan is to keep a basic blog with a WPMU-backend free...

Note: Although I don't work for the REALTOR.com team specifically, I do work for Move, the company that operates REALTOR.com for NAR.

[svrpaul]

In terms of the price of a REALTOR.com blog, I feel pretty comfortable saying that there really are no plans to ever charge for this service. The team is pretty confident that the benefits in terms of outreach to influentials and goodwill among REALTORS will always outweigh the cost of providing the service. That doesn't mean the team will not look for upsell opportunities into the future, but the plan is to keep a basic blog with a WPMU-backend free...

Note: Although I don't work for the REALTOR.com team specifically, I do work for Move, the company that operates REALTOR.com for NAR.

I think that is certainly the step in the right direction. Perhaps you should introduce yourself and tell us more about you. http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/...-yourself.html

That doesn't mean the team will not look for upsell opportunities into the future

Any ideas of what these may be? I've always found that it's best to be up front and I would think you are certainly in the right place to do so.

[tyr]

There's a few ideas that are being kicked around, and I don't think any of them will surprise people who read this forum. Things like allowing agents to host the blog under their own domain. If you had some suggestions for upgrades, I would be happy to bring them into the mix, and depending on the suggestion, we might even be able to implement some of them as free services.