Welcome to Chez Cliff!

With the release of our NestVest products, what is the fate of our first site BuyThatDuplex.com?

It’s going micro.

What does that mean?

These days it is not uncommon for a company to have multiple blogs.  The reason is that blogs have a main purpose. a main objective.  That main objective usually focuses on one segment of the market.  Articles are written, various how-to’s and 10-tips type, that search engines pick up.  Having microsites increases your company’s exposure on these search engines thus increasing the chances of your site being picked up when someone does a search.

Let’s take an example.  Your business is selling outdoor sporting goods.  So for having microsites, you break down each department of your sporting good store and each department has it’s own blog.  For instance, hiking has it’s own blog.  Fishing has it’s own blog.  Camping, canoeing, outdoor survival, etc etc however many you think they need.

In each blog, you write reviews of products.  So for fishing, there are hundreds if not thousands of different types of fishing poles.  Because you’ve been tracking your sales data, you know which fishing poles are the most popular.  So, you write a keyword rich article reviewing that product.  Meanwhile, your people in the camping department are doing the same thing for their blog.  So on and so forth.

This serves two purposes.  First, the microsite now becomes an source of relevant data to that specific segment of the market.  Second it allows businesses to leverage technology and provide very personalized information to each customer.  And as we all know, if you type in “St Croix Triumph fishing”, Lord Google will present two sets of data.  One will be those adsense links.  The other will be hyperlinks saying “St Crois Triumph Review”.  Guess which one will get the click?

So my business is gearing up to launch multiple blogs.  One blog, BuyThatDuplex is geared more towards first timers and beginner real estate folks.  My secondary blog is going to focus on technology and how it applies to real estate and real estate investing.  It’s been suggested I come up with a third, more pondering mobile life style but I’m not sure at the moment if I have time for that.

So BTD will be stripped bear, just down to the blog.  This is what 95% of the people find anyway.  I will be doing some advertising.

What software will BTD be advertising?

Take a look at NestVestApp.com.

First:  The site looks completely different.  Me likey.

Second:  The site is lightweight.

Third: the site doesn’t display well if you’re using Internet Explorer 6.  C’mon.  It’s time to upgrade to IE7 at least.  Do humanity a favor.

Tomorrow I’m going to talk a little bit behind the site mechanics.

We’re getting ready to push out our 2.0 product for Lite.

Pro is under development and looks to be ready for release into the wild in two weeks.

The new website looks incredible, if I do say so myself.

We’re putting the finishing touches on our marketing/advertising/media blitz.

See you on Monday.  Then you’ll get a sneak peak on what we’ve been working on.

I’ve had a chance to play around with the alpha version of our 2.0 software.  Yeah, I’m pretty stoked.

One of our goals with our new software was to incorporate 100% of our user suggestions into the product.  Some suggestions we incorporated right away, thinking the users would gain the most benefit from them.  For example: being able to input expenses either by month or by year.

One suggestion: add commas to separate big numbers.  Afterall, when you look at the number 1450000, does your mind think 14 million, 145 thousand or 1.4 million?  I went to a public school so I have to count.  But sticking in a simple comma turns 1450000 into 1,450,000 which is definitely easier and quicker to comprehend.

Does a suggestion like this require a complete upgrade for users?  I don’t think so.  This suggestion we put into a future-bucket, to be added when we did a major release.

Well, the major release is coming so we baked it in.

At the end of the day 100% of our customer suggestions will be addressed by version 2.0.

Gee, that almost sounds like a marketing point . . .

In this rebirth of our product line, one aspect I took a hard look at was our mobile site.

Back in the day, I spoke about a wordpress plugin that would detect and convert your blog into something compatible with mobile devices.  The issue is this: my regular site is slow enough but the mobile site is even slower.

BuyThatDuplex.com takes between 5 and 10 seconds to download on a computer.  The mobile version takes between 40 seconds and 1 minute 10 seconds to download.

Far far far too long.

In Apple’s documentation, they discuss how the wireless usage for the internet is a significant drain on the battery.  If the user has a WiFi connection at home, great.  If not, they are using their regular cell-phone channels to download data.  In either case, the battery is getting hit up for a minute each time the user clicks a button to view my site.  If a user visits 3 or 4 pages on your site, that’s around 5 minutes of hard wireless usage that eats away at the battery life.

Since I’m on this kick about the “user experience”, we started asking hard questions about how we could enhance this for our users.

1. Scrap Wordpress.  With a bare minimum compliment of plugins, the site takes too long to download.  Even on a computer.
2. Design pages that are formatted for mobile devices but are linked directly to the main site.
3. Fast, fast, fast, and easy navigation.  Images to a minimum.

My goal with this new website:  the real version downloads in under 5 seconds on a landline.  The mobile version in under 10 seconds.

Below is a sampling of mobile websites so those of you without smartphones can see what I’m talking about.  I timed each site and the maximum download time was around 10 seconds.

That Income Property show has grown on me.  So I’m launching a commentary of the shows.  So let’s dig in.

Everyone, meet Peter.

Peter is a young, 20-something traveling worker-bee who is paying $4,000/month to keep his home afloat.  For some reason, our not-so-sharp landlord procrastinated on redoing his basement apartment.

Enter Scott.  He flashes his Colgate whitened smile and presents Peter with two options.

• Option 1: Renovate the basement.  Completely.  Cost of the renovation:  $30,000.  Potential rent:  $1,000/month.
• Option 2: Renovate the basement but also frame the second floor of the main house out to accommodate 2 bedrooms.  Peter moves into the renovated basement and rents out the upstairs.  Cost of the renovation:  $33,000.  Potential rent:  $3,000/month.

Let’s examine Peter’s situation:

• Single
• Travels at least 50% of the time
• No furniture to speak of: only a bed and television.

So with the potential of making $3,000/month in rent, he turns it down.  His reasoning “It would be like taking a step backwards.”

Obviously he is not a financial consultant.

Renovations begin.  The newly poured concrete floor is missing it’s binding agent.  The whole floor needs to be ripped up and replaced.  It rains one day, thus revealing a path of water flowing from the roof to the rental unit.

“Yeah I’ve been selectively ignoring that,” Peter sheepishly admits.

Way to go Pete.  I’m sure that water isn’t the cause of all that mold.

We’re left wondering how much the total renovation costs.  Based on the numbers tossed around, I’m thinking around $43,000.

But it’s still not too late for ol’ Petey to change his mind.  If he lives in the basement for only 2 years, he could repay that $43,000 loan and then move back upstairs.

Nope.

He rents the spectacular new apartment out for $1,000/month.

Moral of the story:

1. Selectively ignoring problems won’t make them go away.
2. Don’t hire Pete as a financial consultant.