BiggerPockets Founder's Blog

Improve Your Real Estate Marketing by Blogging on BiggerPockets

Many months ago, we launched our BiggerPockets.com blogging system as a way for real estate investors, professionals, and others in the business to share their thoughts, opinions, and knowledge. Of course, as a result of that participation, the goal was to help these bloggers get noticed.

BiggerPockets Blogs are fast and easy to set up, and now bring a new perk:

Top Bloggers and Blog Commenters are Highlighted to the Community

We felt that it was important to let everyone in the community know who those people were that contributed the most to the BiggerPockets blogging community, and have thus added the Top Participants this Month feature.

On the right side of the main blogs page, you'll see a box with the Top Participants this Month, which shows the five (5) most active bloggers and the five (5) most prolific commenters.

So What are the Perks for Being on the List?

If you're on the list (which looks back at the last 30 days, not the previous month), you'll get your name and personal avatar posted, which link back to your profile AND a link to your website will also appear in the list!

You can see that participation equals FREE PR for your profile and website link!

Are There Other Reasons to Blog on BiggerPockets?

1. BiggerPockets has a vast and captive audience.
2. SEO link back potential to help your offsite web properties.
3. Networking with others — Social Network isn't the future, it's here to stay. You have to be part of the conversation or you don't exist.
4. By providing helpful and meaningful content, members who blog actively on BiggerPockets will gain benefits including broad exposure for you and your business.
5. Do-follow links to your favorite websites
6. Make money! Our bloggers can make money by showing ads on their blog.

What Are You Waiting For? Jump on the BiggerPockets Blogs community and start posting your own blogs and engaging in conversation with others by commenting! You'll see the benefits yourself!

NOTE: If we feel that you are "gaming" the system by posting "junk" comments or blog posts to inflate your count, we will either remove your ability to participate, or we may remove you from the site completely.

One of the most important ways for real estate investors and professionals to expand their businesses is by networking.  While networking online is great, there is nothing like meeting people in person.

There are many opportunities  to do this, namely, by attending local real estate clubs.  That said, there aren't always clubs in your area, and many of these clubs aren't more than sell-fests.  We at BiggerPockets.com feel that these groups do a disservice to their members, who pay for the privilege to get sold someone's overpriced course or other materials.

Use BiggerPockets Events to Plan your Own Real Estate Networking Event

 Instead of suffering through one of these awful meetings, why not create your own?  With over 30,000 members and around 150,000 unique monthly visitors, BiggerPockets has a vast audience of real estate fanatics who would be great to meet in person!

Just figure out a time and place, and add your event to BiggerPockets Events.

Once you add the listing, which shouldn't take more than a few minutes, depending on how much information you'd like to share, it will be available for all of our members and visitors alike to see.  

How to Get People Excited to Join Your Event

On your event's page, you'll be able to invite your colleagues from BiggerPockets to join you, and you will also be able to invite others by email.  If you don't know many people yet, you can also promote the event in the local real estate networking forum, where others on the site can also learn about it.

Other promotional techniques include sharing the link to your event on places like Craigslist, FaceBook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Start Small and Spread the Word

Don't be discouraged if only a few people show up to your event.  These things grow little by little.  You just have to get it started and then begin hosting these regularly - people will let others know and you'll start to grow.

You don't need an agenda or plan to have an event!

 We put on events here in Denver once every month or two, and host it in a local pub with a great patio. These events provide a great opportunity for locals to link up, learn, and network over some food and drinks in a casual setting.  There is no pressure, no selling, no nonsense.

What are you waiting for?  Start planning your Local Real Estate Get Together with BiggerPockets Events Today!

Always looking to improve the user experience on BiggerPockets, we just launched a knowledgebase application to help answer your questions about using the site.

BiggerPockets Help consists of categories, questions, answers, and a search function to help you with any of your general questions about using the site.

How to Get to the Help Page:
There is a help link found above the search box towards the top right of most pages and another link can be found in the footer of all pages on the site.

You can also search the help database by looking at the dropdown next to the search bar at the top of the site's pages and navigating to help. Then, just enter a few keywords that you'd like to find out about and you should find your answers.

What if my Question isn't Answered Yet?
On the right side of the knowledgebase there is a section labeled Can't Find the Answer? Simply post your question in the box below and we'll get to it right away and respond either privately, or if the question is deemed helpful to others, we'll add it to the knowledgebase.

NOTE: The directory isn't completely filled in yet, but we're diligently working to make it as complete as possible as we speak. 

We've made a few improvements to the site today.  Most of these are for administrative purposes, but the notable changes that you'll notice include:

•  Groups Home Page is Now Sortable -Our Groups page is currently sorted by the most recently updated group.  To help members better navigate the groups, we've added two new sorting options: Most Popular Groups and Alphabetical List of Groups.
• Forums Posts are now Searchable by Poster - Several members made suggestions to improve the forum search options on the site and we've obliged.  Now, in our Advanced Forum Search, members can search for forum posts by keyword and author.  The advanced search link can be found at the top left of all forum pages (next to the forum rules), and gives much more sophisticated search options than the basic forum search.

Today BiggerPockets launched two new applications, our Events system and our PRO Account upgrades!

Events

 The events system is an events calendar application, where members can see events, classes, seminars, social events, etc. and choose to attend.  Only Pro members can create an event, but any member can see or attend events.

BiggerPockets Pro Accounts

 Our PRO Accounts gives members the ability to upgrade their account to get many value added features including:

• See who is visiting your profile, blog, and property listings
• Join as many groups as you'd like
• Send Private Messages to any member
• Increase your colleague requests from 10 to 25 at a time
• 1 Free press release per month
• Enhanced forum signature
• Ability to show your profile contact info to ALL VISITORS
• Show your property listings on your company's profile
• Post events on the events calendar
• Get extra exposure for your profile on the Networking page

I wanted to thank everyone for their patience today.  BiggerPockets was down for close to 4 hours while we upgraded the site and moved to our new servers. This move will help in the future growth of the site and will ultimately help us to serve pages to you faster and more reliably.

 If you experience any bugs or problems in using the site, please PM me ASAP so we can fix them for you!

 Thanks,  Josh