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Late, late, late on a Tuesday night almost two weeks ago, we re-launched FeedBurner.com with much-needed updates to the design, content and overall direction.

Traci already commented on the strategic importance of the new site, while Rachelle provided a more personal account.

But as the designer and half-developer (Rachelle did the other half — actually, probably more than half — with great skill and speed), I’m going to share a couple of “behind the scenes” details that I find super neat. Hopefully you’ll feel the same way.

Powered By FeedBurner

Going in to this project, two requirements became clear:

1. Traci (our marketing director) needed the ability to make content updates without routing all changes through the design team.

2. Many types of content needed to be reused in slightly different settings and formats around the site.

To address these requirements, we came up with the idea of modular content — basically, little nuggets of content that can be randomized, subscribed, inserted and updated anywhere.

For a couple of content types — blog posts, publisher buzz, press releases — we used feeds and our very own BuzzBoost service to repurpose content wherever we needed it on the site (mmm, dog food). For others, we generated custom blocks of static HTML or Javascript and included those in the JSPs that contain forms, session information (“You are signed in as…”) and other application components.

Of course, we had to generate all of this content somewhere…

Powered By MovableType

We’re using MovableType to store and publish the press releases, in the news, events, corporate backgrounder, stats, Publisher Buzz, and of course our blog, Burning Questions. Our MovableType installation is rigged up with a variety of templates that publish static files in HTML, Javascript and Atom formats — all of which are then pulled into the pages like I mentioned above.

One of the complaints people have about MovableType — that it creates static files by default — is actually a huge advantage here. We’re able to publish flat, lightweight static files to a single server, then pull in these files in a variety of ways across our distributed server environment.

Elegant, dual-float layout

When I was first learning CSS, doing multi-column layouts was always the hardest part. Even two-column layouts seemed tricky, weighing the pros and cons of various approaches and never being totally satisfied with the end result.

Then I got floats. Like, really got them. It was Doug Bowman’s slides from this presentation that secured my understanding and I haven’t fretted about CSS layouts since.

On the new FeedBurner.com, everything but the home page uses a classic dual-float, two-column layout. I set a width on both columns in the CSS, then assigned float:left on the left column and float:right on the right. Finished with a clear:both footer, it’s a solid layout that works regardless of which column is longest.

A new approach to navigation

While many sites feature massive navigation (practically a site map), we took a page from Flickr’s design books this time around and divided our navigation into two sections. A high-priority “primary” navigation and a lower-priority “secondary” navigation are based on prominence, not hierarchy, which helps focus the page and not overwhelm people with choices.

We also made heavy use of in-text hyperlinking across sections, to encourage exploration without forcing folks to grok and traverse our site architecture via the navigation.

Coming soon

Perhaps the best things to come out of this redesign process haven’t arrived yet. As a result of our extensive brainstorming and planning, we have tons of ideas and a general roadmap for web site improvements over the coming months.

And now, with the addition of Rachelle Bowden to our team, we have the manpower womanpower to get it done.

Questions? Comments?

Use the comment form. As always, I love to hear from you!

It’s been 11 days since I started my Google experiment, and I’m ready to declare it a success on all fronts. Not only did Gmail, Calendar, Finance, Search (and my browser of choice, Camino) live up to expectations, but I discovered some features and found the whole experience liberating and efficient.

Here’s a recap — tool by tool, again.

Camino

This little sharp-shooter didn’t miss a beat as my home base for email, calendering, stock quotes, and other daily information needs. In addition to the Google products that I was officially evaluating during this experiment, I ended up leaving Basecamp (for work) and Backpack open in Camino most of the time too. It was nice to have all of this information in one spot.

(Techie sidebar: Unlike Firefox and Safari, Camino’s memory footprint stayed nice and small over the course of the week. Even now, after running non-stop for 11 days, it’s using 581 MB of virtual memory and 85 MB of real memory. Not bad!)

Gmail

Did you know that Gmail has keyboard shortcuts? I didn’t. Other pleasant surprises include smart reply behavior, excellent handling of attachments and great built-in search (okay, that’s not a surprise, but it is pleasant!).

Perhaps the only downside to Gmail was getting weird looks from my co-workers. (Them: “You’re one of those now?”) Guess I’ll have to get used to it, because I’m fully converted! So long, Mail.app; it’s been fun.

Google Calendar

All around, Google Calendar feels like a nice step up from 30boxes. I barely used the Quick Add feature, instead opting to drag my events into place the “old-fashioned” way. I also appreciate the custom view (mine’s five days), Gmail integration and snappy performance at all times of the day and night.

Everything else

• I ended up using Google Local/Maps a lot more than anticipated. One handy feature is the ability to send business info (from Google Local) to your phone.
• Speaking of Maps — I used a couple of Google Maps Mashups a lot in the past week. Gmaps Pedometer is an oldie but goodie for figuring out how far I rode, and Yelp’s Maptastic is killer for finding a place to eat in a certain part of town.

All in all, a resounding success. Bravo Google! Imagine if they could apply this kind of innovation and quality to their advertising business… then they’d have something. (Kidding.)

For those of you playing along at home — how did it go? Any grand successes or failures?

I love my RSS reader. I have a gazillion website, blog and news feeds set up in there, and I get the latest information from all of my favorite sites. That means I can be one of the first to share it with you. And RSS Reader 1.0 has a doorbell sound effect that rings when there are new feed entries to read. So wherever I am in the house I hear it and take a look. I also get the additional bonus of six barking dogs to announce the new feed entries.

As an aside, I noticed something very interesting. Because of my RSS reader I was one of the first to cover adsenseblacklist.com, a terrific new web site that will help you screen out the cheesy AdSense ads. Because I was on it first, I popped up in the first five Google search results for this keyword for a while, which drove traffic to this site. So watch your RSS reader.

All that being said, we are beginning to see RSS used as auto update feature for websites and blogs. The first application was RSS feeds that automagically update your site with articles in your subject area from a free article site. The rationale is that this will give you fresh content that search engines will eat right up. They call it spiderfood. I call it a dumb idea. Have you read some of these articles? There's a wide disparity in quality from one to another, and I would never allow articles to be put blindly on my web site without my approval. For crying out loud...you spend hours and hours of time getting your site to a certain level of quality to build a certain level of trust with your visitors, and then you're going to allow some hack to put his content on your site without your approval, just so maybe a search engine will come a few extra times? That's just stupid.

Need more content? Turn off the football game and write some.

Seriously...if you want to use articles as supplemental content, hand pick them. Just like famous Internet marketer Wille Crawford did on his blog when he picked my article Chitika - What Went Wrong (a little humor there). I have at least 20 - 30 articles in an Outlook Folder that I'm going to post on the site as soon as a I get a chance. That's the good news - the bad news is I went through 500 or so articles to get those.

Closer to home, affiliate merchants are starting to get into datafeeds, which are sort of like file-based RSS feeds. Datafeeds provide direct access to merchant products using text files. The file contains a list of products, services, special offers, coupons or other information that you can display on your site. You then upload that information to your server and use some kind of tool or script to display the different items in that file. There are programs on CJ, LinkShare and Shareasale that have datafeeds.

While others are absolutely gaga over this, I look at it with the same jaundiced eye as the whole article thing - it all depends on your niche, the level of trust you want to maintain with your customer, and how technical you want to get.

If you have a niche that has a well-matched affiliate program, you might try a product feed. If you want to put up an occasional coupon or special offer, you can probably do it by hand rather than going through all of this mumbo jumbo.

We are starting to see products that convert merchant datafeeds to RSS, allowing you to auto-display products from affiiliate programs. Again, if you can maintain relevance across the entire affiliate line, it's a good idea. If not, you're not going to get conversion anyway, so you're wasting your time. Personally I want everything including the advertising, to have relevance to my visitors.

There's always a shortcut - in this case you're shortcutting the time and effort involved in finding relevant offers for your visitors. That may work with some sites.

If you want to know more or give it a shot, here are some resources:

1. FiveStarAffiliatePrograms - They love the idea, but I think they're plugging their own tool.

2. Smartsville has a nice synopsis. Oh...they also have a tool.

One last thing - while I was out looking for links and information, this is what someone said about using datafeeds:

Soon, I will let you know how I put this all on autopilot and never have to think about the blog again after I spend a few hours setting it up!

How do you think that blog is doing?

About the Author

Matt DeAngelis runs AffiliateBlog.com - A resource for Affiliate Marketing and Internet Marketing. Matt is the former CTO of Modem Media, a pioneer in the Internet ad space. As a foot soldier in the Internet revolution, Matt devised the technology behind many of the most successful ad campaigns of the time.

AffiliateBlog is his latest venture, and was started as a resource to help site owners and bloggers get more revenue from their sites.

I made some comments today during Steve Rubel's Gnomedex session. Steve asked, what are PR and marketing professionals doing right and wrong? What do people who blog want/need from such departments?

After much arm waving I got Steve to notice me, and I answered with three P's.

1. Permalinks: folks, this is such a simple one. Don't make your press release page be "press.php" and old news be "archive.php". Have a single, unique link for each press release, news story, product, or (*gasp*) blog post you make. This means not trying to make me figure out a crazy javascript or Flash navigation system, but simply having a clear, single link I can use to directly get to information. URL schemes like /news/2006/07/01/bigstory or /products/coolproduct/model-vw83 are some good examples.
2. Product Info: I like product info. I like permalinks to direct product info. I like tech specs, and I like easily grab-able (and even better, friendly licensed) product photos. Heck, encourage me to hotlink images from your corporate server. Include copy/paste code that includes the permalink and a caption that I can drop into any system that groks HTML. For bonus points, make a little Flash/Javascript/rotating GIF widget that I can put into a post.
3. Personality: yes, I want personality. This one is last, because a lot of corporates just can't get past legal, or want the community to bring in the personality. If you're not going to blog, perhaps upgrade your press release writer to someone with a little more human in their blood, or give me a contact that I can talk to/interview to get more of a human face to the information you're presenting.

It seems so simple. But I know how difficult this can be. Many marketing and PR departments rely on a chain of consultants, contractors, or other folks to manage their web presence somewhere down the line. PR types need to become actively vocal about the needs they have. The three P's might be a good place to start.

Here is a fun tool that you can use to see VE and G Maps side by side. You can really feel how web services are going to change everything soon...

http://www.flashearth.com/?lat=47.63766&lon=-122.133539&z=19.1&r=0&src=1

This location is my building.

Disclaimer: This post is about (gulp!) the Internet. If even the idea of putting up a real estate website for lease options leads makes you sleepless then wait for the next post on Hotlines etc that don’t require you to even have a computer. :-)

How to use the Internet to attract buyers for your Lease Options:

There is a pretty big section in most newspapers, week after week, called Rent To Own in the Real Estate Section. Some newspapers call the section Lease Option also.

You will also see ads targeting to prospects with bad credit saying something to the effect that if you have been turned down by the mortgage companies – call us to get the home of your dream.

As a side note I am not a big fan of Land Contracts in Michigan. The foreclosure process that is required to kick out a non-paying Land Contract buyer who bought your home and then defaulted is long and governed by the same laws in Michigan that govern a bank foreclosures.

Although in certain circumstances (property being vacant) you can accelerate the eviction and some astute investors who play in the Land Contract world have told me that they add a eviction clause in their custom made Land Contracts – I have yet to see one contract in reality.

So some of the companies in Michigan who advertise and focus especially on bad credit / home ownership themes might be selling a 12 / 18 month Land Contract deal which gets the seller cashed out at a later date via a refinance. So keep that in mind when you are reading these ads.

Rent To Own Ads are pretty much 100% Lease Option ads and it is a good idea to check them out in your local newspaper before you do anything so to get a feel of the marketing.

Very very few real estate investors use the Internet to market their lease options which if you choose to do so does gives you a pretty good advantage over your competition in your local city. This is how it works:

1. Run advertisements consistently (more on classified ads later) in your local newspaper. I said “local” and “consistently” – two very important and precious words to keep in mind. Also you want to run these ads EVEN when you have NO house at the moment to Lease Option (more on that strategy later also).

2. Direct your prospects to your website.

3. Your website has pictures (lots of them), virtual tour if you want to really blow them away, description of the house with the list of all the upgrades you have done, any promotion you are running (free appliances, gift gas card etc), lease details such as monthly payments, Option number and finally the most important thing of all….

4. An invitation to join your Lease Option Buyer List. So lets say 10 people come to your website as a result of an ad that you ran in your local newspaper.

Well technically you can only sell your 1 home to one out of 10 but the other 9 are still in the market to buy something. May be they don’t like “that” house but who is to say that will not like the second house that you put up next month.

Entice them and ask them to join your Hot Lease Option Upcoming Houses Notification List so they get priority notification even before the house hits the classified section.

Sort of a Pocket Listing Invitation if you want to use the REO slang.

Understand that this strategy is advanced and mostly not used by anybody. Everybody wants to wait till they have a house or worse when the house is done.

The term you need to remember in real estate is Build To Suit – if you doing this, week in, week out your market will tell you what kind of houses you should be looking for.

This is the beauty of having a website and use it for more to tell you what the market wants in your local Michigan city instead of thinking about your website as something to sell that ONE house that you have right now.

I know it might sound hard to believe at first try but really most investors get so tied up in “doing” that deal that they have burning a hole in their head that they forget to build a business.

Nothing personal – just a fact of life. All entrepreneurs go through it. I did too in the beginning.

5. These are some of the things that you should be asking at your site from your site visitors – name, email, number of bedrooms in the house they want to get, basement preference, brick or frame, garage preference, city preference, if you are operating in a city which is comparatively big – it would help to ask a more specific question for example if you see Detroit ads they will mention something like East Side or West Side preference.

Where can you advertise on the Internet to get leads?

1. Detroit Craig’s List; at http://detroit.craigslist.org Free

2. Google Base: http://base.google.com Free

3. Google / Yahoo will be a pain the rear to do and get some leads because you are competing against everybody and their mother selling a $20 book on how to do lease options. Very hard to do Pay Per Click ads and get some leads out of there – not to mention expensive.

4. The thing that I am watching closely is the evolution of Google Local ads that will let you target and run really local ads on Google, which will be really effective for our kind of business.

5. For Sale By Owner sites: cheap prices for the most basic packages. Owners.com is a good example. The whole idea is to get people come to your Lease Option website.

6. EBay – will cost money to run - $150 at least. Plus my feelings about EBay are that it is more suited toward building an Investor List than attracting local homebuyers.

Where can you advertise offline to get Lease Option leads?

I am very old fashioned when it comes to real estate leads. May be the reasons that the damm $26 ads have made me so much money. Real estate is a Local game.

Seriously doubt that a guy in L.A. is thinking about buying a 3 bedroom in Redford. But there are renters in Redford with kids in Redford schools and mom & dad working in Dearborn and Sterling Heights.

They are reading the Sunday’s Free Press and Redford Observer – may be a small percentage looks on the net – may be it is a big percentage; there is a no hard data available anywhere that can pinpoint where most of the people are looking for Lease Option deals.

But I would suggest to you that do both – with 1-2 Knockout punch:

Punch #1: Use the free resources – Google Base; Detroit Craig’s List initially till you close on some deals, put some new money in your business checking account and then think about spending some money on the Internet. Since both of the above are free (at least for the time of writing this)

Punch #2: Spend you money where it will get you the biggest Return on your Advertising Dollars – your local newspapers. In the above example – run small ads driving people to your website in BOTH newspapers – Detroit News and Redford Observer – I repeat run ads in not one but both newspapers.

Sometime I get emailed about the cost of running these ads – well I worry about what comes back to my bank account and not too much on what I have to spend.

As long as coming in number is bigger than going out number – all is good. You can charge the advertising on your business credit card and pay it once the house is Lease Optioned off.

Or you can close one deal and take $500 off right from the top to spend it on advertising on your next deal. The real big mind shift that most entrepreneurs never make is not to think of advertising / marketing as an expense but as investment to build their business.

There are 2 big things in my business I spend money like it is going out of style – my education and my advertising. As long as I feed these two dragons, all is good in Planet Ijlal.

Website Domain Name Tips:

Spend some time thinking of a good and short domain name for your website. Rule of thumb is that keep it within 21 characters with the dot COM thing so it fit in one line.

Newspapers classified sections have a notorious tendency to break down the name in 2 lines if it is long and put a hyphen in the middle. I don’t have to tell you that that becomes a different name.

I had this experience personally one time when my ForeclosureTour.com ad became Foreclosure-Tour.com in two lines. Suffice to say that I did not get any leads that week.

So keep it within 20-21 characters and you will be in the limit. Also you don’t have to use www moniker anymore. I don’t use it anymore. www.MarkIjlal.com or MarkIjlal.com work the same way.

Also I hate long winded domain names – abcpropertyinvestmentsgroup.com is a great tribute to your LLC’s name but come on…. One of my coaching group member Lou Provanzano got a cool name recently for his Detroit deal – www.DetroitOnTheMove.com which gets full marks for originality and sounding good when you say it, print it and leave it on your voice mail.

And yes I am guilty of having long names in the past too – some of them are so crappy that I am actually embarrassed to share them here.

But the point is you want to have a good name; should spend some time on it, make a list of 10-20 names; ask your significant other, if you are in my coaching group, email me the names before you blow the insignificant amount of money needed to reserve them via Godaddy.com. Get a second opinion. This is how the world will see and your business. It is worth spending some time on.

How to get your Lease Option Website Designed:

This is the part where most will hesitate because they are still thinking big dollars when it comes to websites. In 2006, websites are so cheap that there is no excuse left for not to have one.

Where can you get a decent site made?

1. Do you have kids? Do you have neighbors who have kids? Do you have nieces, nephews, and little cousins? Know anybody who goes to a high school??? Every High School in America has a clique of geeks who can design a better-looking site than most web design firms out there.

I have personally hired 16 year olds – one time even flew one from Denver, CO to Michigan to work for two weeks on a business that I used to have. I had one 18 year old actually move to metro Detroit from U.P. to work on a project.

These kids were smarter, harder working and had a better work ethic than most grown ups I have worked with in the last 10 years. They get it. And they love doing this stuff and putting it for the world to see it.

I met an 18-year-old two years ago who was designing websites for Detroit Hip Hop acts – his sites could go heads up with a $50,000 site – he was doing this for $10 per hour.

Ask anybody who is going to high school and is between 14-18 in your life. They know a geek who can whip up a world class website for you in 7 days for probably pennies.

2. You can always go the outsourcing route and use a website a www.elance.com or www.rentacoder.com which will let you post up for free what you are looking for; bunch of companies (most of them in India / China and Eastern Europe) will put up competitive bids. They all have reviews on the previous work they have done; read them and give one the site to do.

If you are totally lazy and don’t want to do anything at all – then spend couple of hours trolling Google and Yahoo and find a website on lease options that you like and then tell whomever is doing your site to make your site look like them.

And for crying out aloud don’t copy blatantly but use it for inspiration and ideas. Most people like me use a copyright protection service that trolls the web looking for lift offs.

When we find somebody cutting and pasting our stuff – we get him or her shut down. I did that to bunch of bogs already that were just copying and pasting my content on their sites.

Next Part 5: How to figure out your Cashflow Payments, Exit Strategies that nobody wants to hear about but they sure do work, the absentee owner thing.

According to a new study conducted by California University Psychology Professor Dr. Larry Rosen (download press release here), the MySpace sexual predator reports in the media are widely overblown/unfounded (via apophenia)

Rosen's study included interviews with 1,500 MySpacers and 250 parents and found that (partial list of findings - for full findings download pdf here):

• Only 7% of those teens interviewed were ever approached by anyone with a sexual intent and nearly all of them simply ignored the person and blocked him from their page.
• Two-thirds of the parents were sure that there were many sexual predators on MySpace, while only one-third of the teenagers shared this concern.
• Teenagers spend an average of 15 hours per week on MySpace.
• One in three admits their MySpace activity has negatively affected their schoolwork, family life, or both.
• Only one-third of the parents have seen their child’s MySpace page and only 16% check it on a regular basis.
• However, 70% of the adolescents said they would feel comfortable with their parents looking at their MySpace page.

Rosen makes an interesting point when he says "MySpace is the 13th largest country in the world. Teens live in this virtual world and parents need to pay attention. It is not a fad. It is not going away. And it is not a scary place. Teenagers can live and grow there with help from their parents.”

Meanwhile, the social networking space continues to heat up, with Bebo (a MySpace competitor especially popular in the UK) rejecting a $550M acquisition offer from British Telecom (apparently they are looking for offers north of $1b).

While there is no doubt that sites with that many users should be able to monetize their traffic, it is will be interesting to follow the emerging new marketing models that will make these sites truly scalable and predictable from a revenue point of view.

[Tags: myspace bebo social networking web 2.0]