Realespace

I recently did a keyword analysis for flat-fee home loans and the results really startled me. There is a huge competition for keywords associated with flat fee home loans and and mortgages.

The image above shows how much competition is in this field, or how much mortgage brokers are spending on these keywords to get business. YET, the keywords are hardly searched for…

This is a great case for why the RateWindow™ Flat Fee Mortgage application is such a great tool for mortgage brokers. Our widget engine allows mortgage brokers to put the application on any website, for free without spending any additional dollars for online marketing. It also allows the mortgage broker to establish good online relationships between websites.

The Consumer has spoken, and we listened
The consumer is looking for honest, transparent mortgage brokers and mortgage products. The consumer will demand tools like this as word gets out that you don’t have to be in the dark when buying, or refinancing a home. The more demand, the higher those keywords above will go. It will be very important that mortgage brokers and real estate agents, get the RateWindow™ application on there site becuase the consumer will be looking for it

This brings us to another benefit for the widget.

The RateWindow™ widget co-brands with any website it is placed on. The Realespace widget platform handles all the hard work.

Bottom line, this widget will save mortgage brokers advertising costs and provide additional marketing benefits for both the mortgage broker and the owner of any website the Ratewindow™ application is on.

Signup for the RateWindow™ Application at RateWindow.com

Realespace is proud to announce the Ratewindow™ widget for mortgage professionals, real estate agents, and most important, the consumers of mortgage products. Ratewindow™ is a plugin “widget” that functions like an interactive Web 2.0 application on a any website. RateWindow™ is setting a new standard in mortgage lending.

Using the widget, a mortgage shopper can produce a simple, clean and honest quote based on a mortgage’s wholesale par rate without broker manipulation.

RateWindow™ provides the consumer the same information that is available to loan officers in a simple, easy-to-understand format. It also meets all state and federal disclosure regulations to ensure that you have all of the information that you need to make your best decision.

Screenshots:
[GALLERY=1]
We are looking for 3 types of beta testers…

1. Mortgage Professionals.
   Mortgage brokers always need to differentiate themselves. Certain transaction fees based on the Yield Spread Premium can be hidden from the consumer, and some brokers manipulate these fees to provide a negotiation edge or pad profit. No national mortgage brokerage has created a marketing position based on the full disclosure flat fee loan model.Simply create an account, and then put the widget on as many websites as you wish. Create relationships with real estate agents to provide industry leading technology to consumers.
2. Real Estate Agents / Website Owners.
   Realtors are now able to provide a one stop home search and mortgage product search to their website. Our new technology brings the transparency to the real estate market the consumers have been asking for. The application allows potential clients to shop for mortgage products from your website without ever leaving the website! The Application also co-brands all email results when the consumer pulls rates.If you own a large real estate community website, brokerage, or property listing service and you think that RateWindow™ will provide additional features and benefits that your clients demand, please contact the Ratewindow™ Support Group for more information about partnering with Realespace and deploying the RateWindow™ tool into your website
3. Consumers.
   Demand that your mortgage broker uses RateWindow™. There is no other way to be 100% sure you are getting the absolute best mortgage products for your needs. If you are currently looking for a mortgage product, contact the RateWindow™ support team and we will put you in contact with the RateWindow™ mortgage tool immediately.

Technically speaking:

The RateWindow™ plugin is not just a simple advertising widget but a full application that can be added to ANY website with just ONE line of code. Yes…That is correct, ONE line of code adds a full mortgage application that pulls up-to-date mortgage rates without ever leaving the host website. It becomes part of the website and is fully styleable with CSS to blend in seamlessly with your websites’ look and feel.

• Wordpress Plugin - Just upload and activate.
• Javascript version - Copy and Paste one line of code to any website
• Automatically co-brands between the mortgage professional (widget owner) and the website (widget container) providing FREE advertising for real estate agents or any other website that displays the widget
• Up-to-date loan rates that cannot be manipulated!
• Email Verification - spam and robot proof.
• Custom Debt-to-Income calculator for accurate results
• Only 13 fields in the form makes for easy loan requests. You don’t have to give away all your personal information

A widget or plugin is nothing more then a client interface to your companies API. API stands for Application Programming Interface. The API is a set of functions that your company website offers to remote developers. As the saying goes, build it and they will come. If you provide a good set of programmign tools that allow developers from around the world to access you data, your widgets (or the widgets that developers make for you) will grow far beyond your expectations. If you are thinking about adding benefits and features with a widget,

• Brainstorm and decide if your data is beneficial to start. If it is, go ahead and move to the next step.
• Do you think your data can be used outside of your initial plans? if YES, then you definitely need an API, give the world access to your data. An API not only allows you distribute your data, but it also lets you maintain control. Your company builds the API so you control what data is released.
• Remember, even if nobody makes widgets from your API, you will still have a great framework to build widgets in house.

A good example is the Zillow API. Zillow has tons of data ranging from values of home prices to demographics. When Zillow released their API, they did not have any widgets. I think they still have not made a widget in house, but many developers (including myself) have made widgets based on the Zillow API.

Other API’s:

• Google Maps - Probably the most famous
• Yelp - great for consumer reviews
• De.licio.us - Good for bookmarking and very simple to use
• Yahoo Developer Network - I visit regularly
• Google Code - another fav

Recently, many companies that I talk to either have a widget concept in development or they are looking into creating a widget strategy. Unfortunately many of these companies are missing some main concepts about deploying a widget. Without the basics, your widget will not get the attention and user distribution that you are looking for.

1. Benefit all parties involved.
   If you are thinking about deploying widget, don’t just think about your company and how you want to get your information on as many websites as you possibly can. Widgets are all about adding additional features and benefits to the host site. A widget that only benefits the parent company is nothing more then a glorified banner ad. Good luck trying to get people to put a banner ad on their site to benefit your company.Your widget should add features and benefits to the host website. Provide benefits to the visitors of that host website, and in turn the widget owner will benefit from additional exposure. Put yourself third in the hierarchy of widget deployment.
2. Do not take visitors away from the host site.
   How simple can that be? Yet, the majority of all widgets do that. Web programming has come a long way. We can add full applications on host websites with only one line of code. The webmaster simply copies and pastes a line of code from the widget companies website and they have a feature rich web application on their site. If you are thinking about a widget, you really need to think about full applications running on the host site. Remember give that host site features and benefits and co-brand with the host site. The visitors will not leave the host site and all parties benefit!
3. Give the host site credit
   Everyone that puts your widget on their site should be given credit. Give them thanks by linking to them on your company website. Make a widget page that shows all stats for that widget. Another great way to give credit it to add a feature to the widget that shows random links to sites that have the widget. Be careful, of course, many people will not want to send people away, but I want to touch on a key aspect of widgets. That key concept is the viral aspect of widgets. Think of them as a snowball. Think of ways to give credit to all parties and that widget will grow and grow!

These concepts are just the tip of the iceberg, and give a very general overview. In upcoming posts, we will talk about better alternatives to widgets, how to deploy widgets, and all the components of widgets. So grab our feed if you want to stay up-to-date with widget strategies.

Long time ago I was a big fan of Ultimate Tag Warrior wordpress plugin for tagging my posts. I loved that plugin. It was definitely in my top 3. Now that Wordpress has incorporated tagging (term taxonomy), UTW has all but disappeared. I think it is still around, but last time I looked for it, I could not find a version for Wordpress 2.3. Wordpress now has all the functions for terms and tags and you really don’t need UTW anymore.

The feature I really liked about it was the ability to do a yahoo keyword search based on the post content and then choose which keywords you want to use for tags.

I found a couple auto-taggers, but each of them included all the keywords from yahoo for your post. I would rather pick and choose the keywords for tags. So I wrote my own plugin.

Download the plugin here

It’s really simple. the button is added directly below the edit field for writing a post.

Once you are finished with your blog post, and before you publish it, just click the button and it will return all the keywords for the post. Then click on the tag and it automatically gets added to your the tags input.

Please note:
The hosted by godaddy checkbox is important. If your website is hosted with godaddy.com, you have to check that box to get results. This is because godaddy.com make you go through proxy servers to fetch remote content using CURL.

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        $curl = curl_init(); curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
 
curl_setopt($curl,CURLOPT_VERBOSE,1);
 
if(get_option('godaddy_host'))
 
{
 
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_PROXYTYPE, CURLPROXY_HTTP);
 
//"http://64.202.165.130:3128"
 
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_PROXY,"http://proxy.shr.secureserver.net:3128");
 
}
 
curl_setopt($curl,CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER,false);
 
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
 
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30 );
 
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,500 );
 
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "appid=testingyahoo&output=php&context=".$_POST['context']);
 
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1 );
 
$res = curl_exec( $curl );
 
curl_close( $curl );

More information on the api for Yahoo context search

Update: 3-10-08
Fixed permission denied error on the ajax call.