I’ve actually had better luck with rentacoder, but both can be hit or miss. What I’ve learned is to only work with coders who have at least 10 completed projects doing similar work, and a high rating. Also, I’ve learned to not accept the lowest bid unless I think it’s also the best coder for the job.

I do look local first though. Just posted a Craigslist ad yesterday to do some WordPress work. That’s been a pretty spotty venue to find good freelancers though, and I don’t think newbies should go there unless they know exactly what they want and about what it should cost. I give it first shot just to give locals first chance, but most replies are from out of state or out of country coders, and if I’m going to go that route, I prefer to have the built-in protections of the rent-a-coder escrow and job tracking system.

Steve

Regardless of which service I choose, I prefer to stick with someone in Austin. If not Austin, then Texas. If not Texas, then the U.S so I can support our economy. Keller Williams International and Apple (my previous job when I was in corporate) often has employees who moonlight for less than the full-time prices, so I go with them.

Everyone these days knows someone who’s a part time “agent” willing to give a cut of commission back to get that one deal a year done. It’s very tough to make it without quality referrals and a big sphere of influence. A website/blog can supply those leads in large #’s.

On the other hand, even agents in the top 10 for “austin real estate” aren’t doing so great (Based on sales data from MLS) so it’s not the only thing required for success.

An agent today must have a web presence. That is, a website that can be found and that has content is worth finding. The best way to help a website be found, aside from expensive pay per click campaigns, is to have a lot of real estate industry related content. I know of no better form of content, from an seo perspective, than blog content. Search engines like blogs in particular because of the freshness of the content. A static 5 page website, or a template site full of duplicate content doesn’t cut it anymore.

So while it is true that not every agent needs or should have a blog, it should be given serious consideration before eliminating it as an option. There are successful agents with lousy websites, but they have strong efforts in other areas of advertising, networking or prospecting to compensate for lack of a web presence.

Steve

It’s very good in a way. Maybe the internet and blogging will finally be that barrier which forces all the part-time soccer moms and other slackers out of this business. It’s getting tougher and tougher to make a good income as a realtor without understanding internet lead generation, so those bad agents will finally be weeded out.

Thanks for the tip. I do have a resizer already. What size should I aim for with my photos?

Thanks much!

Mary

Here’s another tip for you:

The images on your website are too big. They look like the right size but their actually file size are all over 700kb. That will make your entire site loading slower even with broadband connections because the client computers literally have to resize it to the desirable size on the browser.

Google Windows XP powertoys will lead you to Microsoft’s website. One of the powertoys is a image resizer. It’s developed by some programmers at Microsoft just for fun. You can download and install it for free and it works very easily. Just select all the images you want to upload, right click them at once (or one-by-one), then select “Resize Pictures” in the manu. You can shrink those pictures down to any size you want in no time. I found this utility to be the easiest way to resize pictures on the fly without having to start any large image programs like photoshop or such.

enjoy.