I’ve had this idea for a long time about how cool it would be to open up a blog to the general public with only minimal moderation to keep out spam, but I could never put all the pieces together until the wonderful folks at WordPress created a twitter-like theme called Prologue.
It was at that point that I knew I had to move 4realz.net to a self-hosted environment so I could realize this long-held dream and open up the site to the rest of you. Well, after messing with the code for a while to get the site to operate just how I wanted, I’m ready to release what I’m calling the 4realz Hotlist.
So, here’s the idea… Once you register with the Hotlist you’ll be able to submit articles to be published on the site. And because I’m going to be very liberal in what I let get published on the Hotlist, it just became quite trivial to give yourself a link from the 4realz.net domain.
Here’s one way to think about the 4realz Hotlist. After you write a blog post that you know is great, think to yourself: why did I write this post? If you can sum it up in one sentence, then publish that one sentence as your 4realz mini-post along with a nice link back to your site.
With that said, don’t limit your activity to simply promoting your own stuff. You can also use the Hotlist to promote just about anything interesting you find on the web. And if you check out how I’ve been using the tool over the past few weeks, you’ll see that I’ve been embeding YouTube videos, photos, and generally linking out to anything that catches my eye.
But here’s the catch, I really want to encourage clever, interesting and/or insightful mini-posts. So to put the incentives in the right places, I’m going to publish the highlights each week here on 4realz.net (Carnival of Real Estate style) AND include the highlights in my weekly emails that go out to many of the most influential people in online real estate. This means that a clever one-liner is likely to get you some great traffic, some nice inbound links, and in front of some interesting people.
But enough about the tool… You really have to try it out to get a feel for how cool it is to publish a blog post from the homepage a blog, so get over to the Hotlist, register for an account and start posting!
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