This afternoon we experienced our first server down time... Apologies to anyone whom this may have inconvenienced. The internet provider to our servers (who shall remain nameless) was having issues, and it was totally beyond our control. At any rate-- we're back up and running strong. Again, we apologize for the delay.

If you're thrilled with the tools that we provide to you-- we wanna hear about it! Please send an email here with 1-5 sentences about your experience with PlugMyListing.com. Please make sure to include your name, your company, and your credentials. We will be putting testimonials on our home page, so that new visitors can see that our current users are happy, contented, jubilant, enthusiastic, etc. etc. etc.

We currently are offering a $10 Starbucks gift card to our members as a thank you for referring a friend or a colleague to use PlugMyListing.com! This promotion will last throughout the month of July, and there is no limit to how many cards our members can earn! Here's how it works:

Get a friend or a colleague to sign up for a paid subscription with PlugMyListing.com, at any level, and we'll mail you a $10 gift card as a thank you. Once your colleague is signed up, send an email to info@plugmylisting.com to let us know about it. Make sure you include the new user's full name & user name, as well as your full name and mailing address. We'll verify all of the information and then put your card in the mail! The deadline is July 31st, so get going!

It has been brought to our attention that images are not showing up on Craigslist when you copy&paste your code into their classifieds. We will be working with Craigslist this week to rectify the situation, and we hope to have the bug fixed this week. Thank you for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused. In the meantime, you can click Plug Help on the left sidebar to get other ideas for helping you to maximize the effectiveness of the online marketing tools that we offer.

ALSO: If you haven't already, make sure to check out our latest feature, Video Slideshow Virtual Tours, in your paid account.

We are extremely excited to announce the release of our newest feature available to all paid subscribers-- Video Slideshow Virtual Tours. This new feature adds incredible value to your subscription! Other Realtors are paying anywhere from $150 and up for virtual tours elsewhere, however we are providing it to all paid subscribers at no additional cost. I want to give you a rundown of what our newest tool offers you:

-Simple Integration into our Single Property Websites
-Extremely Simple to Create
-Animated Scrolling
-Attractive Media Player Inspired Styling
-Agent Branding
-Unbranded Option for use with MLS Systems
-Engaging To Potential Buyers
-Pleasant Background Music Options for Added Appeal
-30 Photo Maximum
-Editable Captions
-Available on Every Listing You Have in our System
-Embeddable on Your Website or Blog

Please take a look at a sample, by clicking the thumbnail below.


If you are already a paid user at PlugMyListing.com, you can access this new Virtual Tour feature in the Edit section of any of your listings. If you are still using a free account, sign up today for a paid account to access this great new feature (in addition to the other features that paid subscriptions offer) by simply clicking the Upgrade My Account button on your homepage.

If you haven't signed up for an account at PlugMyListing.com, you can view our other available features here, or you can sign up here.

We've got competitors, I'm not going to try to sweep that fact under the rug. And these companies offer great services, there's not doubt about that. But I also believe that here at PlugMyListing.com, we are setting ourselves apart by providing products, features, and services that our competitors cannot. The majority of our user base is in Portland, and the Portland-metro area... so these features are even more applicable to those users.

RMLS Pull For Brokerage Signups - There's no question about the fact that Realtors like to save time. If an agent can delegate a task to someone else, they most likely will. Our RMLS Pull feature provides agents with another time saving tool. For brokerages in Oregon that sign up over 10 agents, we waive our standard $250 startup fee and that brokerage receives the benefit of an auto-fill tool using the RMLS data. It all sounds a little confusing, but the bottom line is that you don't have to fill out the information for your listings on yet another website. Read more about this feature here.

Local Sales & Customer Service - Something else that we offer our Oregon users that the other guys cannot. We're still a relatively small company with a small user base. If you shoot me an email, you'll get a response! If you want to set up a training session in your office, I'll gladly come out and meet with you myself! Wanna grab lunch? Let's do it! We're local, and we work with local companies, and we understand our local market. That's something you won't get with a California-based company.

Customization - We offer complete customization of any of our tools, and it's really quite affordable. If you're interested in customizing your Single Property Website, PDF Flyers, Craigslist layout, or any other tool to match your personal branding... we can do that.

Single Property Website Tracking System - I'm not sure why this feature isn't offered by more of our competitors, because it seems like such a basic function. Through PlugMyListing.com, you can track all incoming traffic to your single-property website (this tool is not available on our free accounts). If anyone clicks through from your craigslist ad or a classified site like Google Base, then that visitor is registered on your tracking system, which you can view any time. There are always ways to increase traffic to that site, read more about it here.

Listing Presentation Tools - We understand that a lot of people utilize our tool as a selling point to their clients. An agent can go into a listing presentation and tell their seller about all the cool things that our site does. It makes sense, and we're helping you out even more with your listing presentations... utilize our Listing Presentation Tools to help your explanation of PlugMyListing.com become more dynamic and attention-grabbing.

Top Secret Ultra New Feature To Be Released Soon - I won't say much about this feature until it's ready to be released to our users in beta phase, but it's very cool... This is a tool that none of our competitors offer, and it's a tool that you would pay other companies a lot of money to provide. However, we aren't charging anything extra above our regular monthly fees. How cool is that?

April 22nd is Earth Day, and people everywhere are taking this 'holiday' just a little more seriously than they have in the past. I read a compelling article in the New York Times yesterday about how important it is to take the little steps to make your life a little more green, regardless of how futile it seems... You can change a lightbulb, give up beef, grow some vegetables in your backyard, buy locally, trade in the SUV for the hybrid, only flush your toilet after every other use, turn off the heater-- these things may seem increasingly unrealistic, but there are certainly simple things that we can do in our daily lives to contribute to the solution, instead of passively contributing to the problem. The sum of our tiny, incremental daily activities are a huge part of what's causing, and what can ultimately fix our environmental problem.

Those of us in the Real Estate business have heard all about going green. We've posted about the subject on this blog several times, as a matter of fact. And as much as I hate to trivialize the issue of climate change by turning it into a sales pitch for our product... I firmly believe that we can offer a green marketing alternative to Realtors. Do you still post your listings in the newspaper? First of all, I'm not convinced anyone under 50 still reads the newspaper... And second, you can take one of those tiny, incremental steps towards making your life greener by switching from newspaper marketing to online marketing. Not only are you increasing your exposure, but you're also making a conscientious decision to do something about helping our environment.

My wife and I just bought a planter and some seeds so that we can grow basil and chives on our back porch. I love basil, I put it in my pasta whenever it's in the fridge. Now I will be growing my own, and once in a while... I'll be taking that tiny step and contributing to the solution. I've also made a decision to walk to the grocery store whenever I can. I'm lucky to have one right down the street from my home, so it's not terribly difficult. Not only am I getting fresh air and exercise, I'm helping, just a little bit.

So if you're interested in making the switch to online marketing instead of paper marketing... Sign up here.

RE-Creative.net is owned and operated by a good friend of ours. RE-Creative is another great company local to Portland, Oregon providing online marketing solutions for Real Estate professionals. As we focus on online promotion of your listings to buyers, RE-Creative can provide a quick, inexpensive solution for promoting your listings to over 9,000 Real Estate agents in the Oregon/Vancouver area.

So what does this partnership mean for our users? We are promoting RE-Creative as our preferred email marketing system provider, and we will eventually implement a system that will direct your listings right from your PlugMyListing.com account straight to RE-Creative, if you choose. In the meantime, we're simply utilizing each other's services to help grow each others businesses. We like to keep it local!

If you are interested in sending out your latest listing as a flyer to over 9,000 Real Estate agents across Oregon and Vancouver... click over to RE-Creative.net to find out more info.

We've updated all of our PDF Flyer backgrounds to automatically display the Equal Housing logo and the Realtor logo. As I wrote yesterday, we've been making some updates to make sure your marketing materials are in compliance with all laws and regulations. If you think we're missing something, email us and we'll be sure to get it taken care of!

I've been getting over a cold, so I'm sorry we haven't been updating much lately!