Comments on: The Low Down On A WordPress MU Blog

By: admin

admin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 23:55:35 +0000

Sounds like you have found a market that is missing something – your service. The other good thing about your ideas is that it would be quite easy to systemize meaning great for outsourcers and licensing opportunities.

While you are waiting for customers I’d suggest you start working on your seo and ranking so they are renting an asset that would be too much hard work for them to copy and recreate.

Good luck with it!

By: Karen Goodman

Karen Goodman — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 02:04:18 +0000

Thanks for the answers to my questions. My goal is to shift away from personally working with very many buyers and sellers, making my money from referral fees for leads that I generate to other agents. I also think there is a big gap in services to agents. There are options that are very basic and options for tech savvy agents, but nothing that is good for agents in between who have no desire to become tech savvy. I think I can generate some real income by offering an affordable solution that gets them up and running, hosting with updates and offers them posting support for an added fee. I agree that I need to hire someone to do the initial set. It’s just not work my time to learn WP MU/3.0. As soon as I know I’ve got some people interested, I’ll take the next step.

By: admin

admin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:39:20 +0000

Hi Karen, good questions
#1 yes they can point their own domain – domain mapping, and yes there is a plugin that will pull posts on the home page, you might want to check wpmu dev blog as they probably have a plugin for the featured post idea
#2 yes this is what I call a portal
#3 yes you can do this as well but it sounds more like an intranet to me unless you were linking from the blog to the main site and sharing the link love that way.

At the moment it sounds like you have a ton of ideas and I personally would just pick one to focus on that is going to bring you the most return for the least amount of work. Then, you can always go and do the other ideas.

WP is so easy to use and especially now with WP 3.0. You sound tech savvy enough to do this yourself but is that the best use of your time? Updating etc is a breeze in WP 3.0 so I wouldn’t worry about that but I’d be inclined to focus your efforts at what you are good at and pay other people to sweat the small stuff.

Hope that helps

By: Karen Goodman

Karen Goodman — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:35:44 +0000

I have a couple of ideas for WP MU now that it is being integrated into WP 3.0, but I’m having trouble finding basic info to make sure that I’m understanding how it works and if I’m on the right track.

I’m a real estate agent that has been blogging for a couple of years. I’m way more tech savvy than the typical agent and use WP.org easily, but usually have to go for help when I have to do anything manually or something breaks. I hired a wonderful designer to set up my custom blog.

I have 3 ideas for networks that I would like to set up using 3.0 multi-sites.

1. Real estate agent blogs – most agents know they should blog, but are overwhelmed by the idea. The current easy blogging options (WP.com, Blogger) don’t allow as much customization as agents should have. One example is we need to be able to i-frame in a home search like I did on my blog. I want to set up a MU blog and charge a nominal fee for hosting & setting up their initial pages and design, plus a small monthly fee. Agents can write about anything they want on their own site. Questions – Can they point their own domain to it like you can do in WP.com so it doesn’t appear to be a subdomain of the master blog to a visitor? Can I set up a home blog which pulls in all of the posts (gaining SEO ranking for all of the blogs) but also choose to not post specific posts if they don’t meet some standards? Can I select the best posts as featured posts on a page on the main blog? Can they export all of their posts if they ever want to move their blog?

2. Real estate featured cities/zip codes – the second idea is to basically do the same thing as above, but have agents pay to be the exclusive blogger for their area. They would write only about their part of town or general info on the buying/selling process, and the posts would show on their own blog and also on a main blog. The main blog would list each town with a link so that anyone on hitting it and wanting more info on a specific area would get sent to the featured agent’s site.

3. Brokerage blog – I could do the exact same thing as #1 above but instead of opening it up to the entire community, limit it to just the agents and staff at my company which would allow me to help my company get lots of SEO traffic and help us recruit agents.

Am I on the right track? Is this something I could probably manage on my own, possibly paying for someone to help with initial set up and when major upgrades/issues come up?

Thanks for your help!