BiggerPockets Founder's Blog

We've made a minor improvement to the forums that we wanted to share with you:

See Who Voted on a Forum Post - Members can now see who voted on any given post by hovering their mouse over the vote button at the top right of any individual post.  A list of members will show up detailing those people who have voted. 

We're planning on making it easy to track the votes of any given member and should have that deployed in the next few days.

One of the places that our members like to spend their time is on our Off-Topic and Political Talk forums.  That said, these forums can often-times be a distraction and a time-killer. 

Recently, one of our members suggested that we remove these forums from the forum feed found in your dashboard.  We agreed that it would be a good idea to give our members the option to ignore these distractive, and sometimes controversial subject areas while navigating their dashboard.

Members Can Now Ignore Several Forum Areas from their Dashboard

We've made some changes in our dashboard which will allow members, by default, to ignore the Off-Topic, Political Talk, and all Marketplace forum topics.  You don't have to do ANYTHING if you want to continue to ignore these areas while looking at your dashboard forum feed.

If you want to see these areas once again, just go to your DASHBOARD and click on the Settings and Password link. Then, just click on the Dashboard tab (see above image) and you'll be able to choose which of these areas you once again want to see in your dashboard forum feed.

We appreciate all member suggestions for improving the site, and do everything in our power to make BiggerPockets a place where our members come first.

Thanks again, and don't forget to invite your friends, colleagues, and associates to join you here on BP!

You can't go very far without hearing about Twitter.  Most people I know are now on Facebook, and I quickly see those in my circle of influence moving to Twitter as well.  With that in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to share with you how you can use both Twitter and Facebook to grow your network right here on BiggerPockets.

Of course, by building your own personal network here on BP, you're also bringing new people on to the site who can both help others, and benefit themselves from the knowledge, networking opportunities, marketing opportunities and deal making opportunities that BiggerPockets provides.

1 - Find Your Unique BiggerPockets Referral Link

• Start on BiggerPockets by visiting the Invite link found above the search bar on all pages on our social network.
• You'll be taken to the Send an Invite page, where you can directly email an invite to any friends or colleagues, OR if you scroll down the page, you'll see the following: Alternatively, just give out the following link to your friends for them to sign up!

Which is followed by a link on the following line that looks like this:

http://www.biggerpockets.com/signup/via_account?ref=9 

• The link on YOUR invite page will be identical to the one above, except the number at the end of the link will point to your unique member number.  
• USE YOUR LINK, NOT THE LINK ABOVE.  The link above will not give you credit for those people you invite, but will give credit to me instead.

2 - Share Your BiggerPockets Referral Link on Twitter and Facebook

• Now that you've got your referral link, copy that link and open either Twitter or Facebook in a new Tab or Window of your browser.
• Some people find it easier to share links by shortening them.  I recommend using http://bit.ly/ as it will allow you to see how many people have clicked on the link.  This could come in useful, in tracking which message you use works best for you (see below).  Whether you decide to shorten the link or not, you'll then want to craft an enticing message to get your friends and colleagues interested.
• On Facebook, you'll now want to place your message and the link in the What's on Your Mind box.  On Twitter, you'll place it in the What are you doing? box.
• Here are some examples of messages you can use (of course, replace YOURLINKHERE with your referral link or the shortened URL):

Join me at BiggerPockets.com, the best real estate social network! YOURLINKHERE

 

Network with me on BiggerPockets.com and help grow your real estate business.  YOURKLINKHERE

 

Want to build your real estate contacts?  Join BiggerPockets.com today! YOURLINKHERE

 

35,000+ people are networking with me on BiggerPockets.com. Join us! YOURLINKHERE

 

Learn how to make money in real estate for free on BiggerPockets.com.  YOURLINKHERE

 

Promote your properties and real estate deals on BiggerPockets.com. YOURLINKHERE

• All that's left is to submit your update on Twitter or Facebook, and watch to see what happens.  If you find that your message isn't working, mix it up and try something different.  Of course, you don't want to annoy your friends or followers, so be careful in your approach.

3 - Watch as Your Friends and Colleagues Join You on BiggerPockets!

Once people follow your advice and join you on BiggerPockets, you'll see that the number of colleagues you have begins to grow. 

 With a larger network comes the opportunity to grow your business, and the vast amount of shared knowledge on the site will also grow in kind. Be sure to get out and engage your colleagues -- keep up with their business, and make yourself helpful to them.  You'll soon find that this approach of engagement along with participation on BiggerPockets will help you and your real estate business to thrive!

 4 - Win Awards and Influence for helping us grow BiggerPockets!

• By referring 10 new members to the site, you can win the RECRUITER award badge.
• By referring 25 new members to the site, you can win the elusive HEADHUNTER award badge.
• For each new member that you invite to the site, you'll gain 30 Influence points.

Note: Be sure to follow @BiggerPockets on Twitter to keep up with site news, announcements, and other interesting real estate information.

Attention BiggerPockets Members and Visitors:

I want to apologize for the site outage this Wednesday evening.  I am never pleased with downtime, and this would have been noticed sooner had I not gone and taken the evening off (that'll teach me!). The site should NEVER go down unexpectedly, and it is up to us to make sure you've always got BP to turn to as your real estate network.

It looks like we're once again experiencing those growing pains that come with a rapidly growing website.  We're working on analyzing what upgrades we need to make to keep up with the traffic load, and should have these in place shortly.

Thanks for the understanding and for continuing to support BiggerPockets.  We appreciate that you spend your time with us.

Regards,

Joshua Dorkin

There have been many important changes to BiggerPockets over the past week and we wanted to share these with you.

Forum Changes / Upgrades:

We just launched a drastic change to the look and feel of the BiggerPockets Forums. After years of having the same design, and a ton of feedback from our membership, we've reorganized how things are found on the forum.

Here's a list of the changes:

1 - We created new Sections called Categories that are color coded. Within each section are now sub-sections, and within those are individual forum categories.
2 - For each Section, we've added a navigation area on the left sidebar called Jump to Category, which will quickly take you to the section you seek.
3 - We've added a Popular Tags area in the left sidebar so members can quickly follow discussions under the tags they are interested in.
4 - We moved our Stats section to the left sidebar from the bottom of the page.
5 - We added a new search feature at the top of the forums.
6 - We added RSS buttons for the feeds of each forum category, so members can subscribe to those that interest them.
7 - On each individual forum category page, you can now see the description of that category so there is no confusion as to the purpose of that category.
8 - We moved the Related Topics to the bottom of the forum topics as requested by our members. 

We're working closely with the membership to make this change as easy to digest as possible, and are open to suggestions, as always.  Nothing is locked in stone, and we do have a few tweaks to make to the final layout of the new forum front page, but you have the general idea of where we're headed now.

New Forum Topics

In addition to all of the structural changes to the forums, we've actually removed some forum topics that weren't being utilized and have added some new ones.

The additions include:

- Political Talk - Found in the Off-Topic area, this forum was born out of a need to separate the heated political debate on the site from everything else.  Enter if you dare! 

- Buying Real Estate - Found in the new General Real Estate section of the forums, this forum was created so the non-investors could have a place to discuss any issues related to the purchase of a home.

- Selling Real Estate -  Also found in the new General Real Estate section of the forums, this forum was created so the non-investors could have a place to discuss any issues related to the selling of their homes.

We felt that BiggerPockets has become well known as the go to investing site, but that others might feel unwelcome.  We hope that the Buying & Selling forums, as well as our new real estate professionals area (for real estate agents, lenders, & contractors) might make those who may not have considered participating on BP, think twice.  I hope so!

Forum Awards

When we announced the new Awards system on the site, our awards page showed a tally of all who received any given award, but there was no way to tell who all the winners were.  We've since added a directory of all award winners for any given award.

Just go to the Awards page and click on any award, and you'll see everyone who won that award.  You can sort the list by date the award was granted OR alphabetically.

Influence Fully Implemented

When we first announced our Influence system, we had only deployed it to include activities on the forum.  We've since added to the system to include activities on the blogs, bulletins, profile, etc. Members can now gain influence from Referring New Members  by invite, referral link, or by importing their colleagues through other mail systems.

A subsequent post will include all possible scoring for you to see.

Additions to Our Stats Page

Our Site Stats page now shows those members with the highest influence score (a great way to see who has contributed the most to the community), and you can see those site members who are currently online.

PRO Account Upgrades

Thanks to a great suggestion from Nick J. (motiv8td), we've added the ability for our PRO members to see any external links that are sending people to their profile, blog, and property listings.  Once a visitor goes to any of those places through an external link, it will show up on your dashboard stats tab.

We know that our PRO members will find this addition to be incredibly useful!

Not Enough to Digest?  More to come!

As our long-time members already know, we're always working to improve the user experience on BiggerPockets! Be sure to let everyone know what we're up to, and that BiggerPockets is the place to be for real estate investors, professionals, and anyone else with an interest in the world of real estate.

 . . . doing so gets you some great influence points!

Thank you, 

Joshua Dorkin, Founder/CEO