I have been out of competitive sports for a long time – for me, business filled the gap…and the major search engines are my favorite place to compete with the big guys. Our newest website – LandBin.com – is starting to make its way up the first page of the major engines for Minnesota land for sale as well as Wisconsin land for sale. We are competing against websites that have raised millions in venture capital and they take their search results seriously. It has taken more than a year to climb towards the top of this category and the last little bit is going to be the hardest. If you do a search for any terms related to lake homes in our markets – you will get an idea of where we plan on ending up. We will see you at the top.

We signed up LandBin.com for a couple of services – active rain and real town. (Update: just joined zolve as well) Just wondering if anyone out here has used either of these services – and if you have – what do you have to say about them? In the meantime – if you or someone you know is looking for Minnesota land for sale or Wisconsin land for sale – please point them to LandBin.com!

Beautiful new Barnes WI Lake Home for sale on Bony Lake – 4 Bedroom, 2 Bathroom luxury lake home. LakePlace.com is offering 1/3 ownership at $285,000. Visit the LakePlace.com Prime Property page for more pictures and information – or checkout the LakePlace.com Hayward Real Estate Team website (under “Our Listings”) for the video!

Today I am shining the spotlight on this very affordable Grand Rapids MN lake home on Little Split Hand Lake. Priced at $89,900, this little cabin (with a nice sized garage) would make a great weekend retreat for those on a budget. At this price point – the lakeshore is not what you would consider “prime” (and you will have to get used to the outdoor privy) – but you should be able to picture yourself kicking back and enjoying this little gem. To view all Grand Rapids lake property – be sure to visit LakePlace.com…and if it is hunting land you are looking for, our sister site – LandBin.com features virtually all Grand Rapids land for sale on the market.

So yesterday I was playing around with this blog and found out that it had actually been hacked. We were running an older version of Wordpress and did not want to upgrade because we are using a custom theme – and we were not 100% sure that an upgrade would not break the site.

When I contacted our host – it was made clear that not upgrading was not an option. So I went ahead and did it….and….it didn’t break!! I have been dealing with a lot of blog issues recently and did not need another one…so Im happy it worked out! All issues were fixed with the upgrade (and a couple of extra steps were taken to make sure it does not happen again).

Anyway – you do not stop here to read about blogging software – so I will send you to our Wisconsin & Minnesota lake homes page and/or our Wisconsin & Minnesota land for sale page. Have a great day and make sure you listed to that embedded broadcast in the post below this one!

This is just a quick post to mention that I quickly built a couple of new resort websites today. The first one is for Hayward WI Resorts. We plan on eventually building this website/blog out to extend our reach to vacationers interested in the Hayward Lakes area of northern Wisconsin.

The second website is Lake Superior Resort. While there are not a ton of resorts on Lake Superior (less than in Hayward, anyway) – we have been sitting on the domain name for quite some time and thought we might as well get this website up and running for future use. It can take some times for the directories to find a site – so the longer it is online the better

Both of these sites are built on the wordpress platform – the same content management software we use to run the Pine Needle Lawn.

If you are interested in advertising on either of these sites – or you have something else in mind  – please feel free to contact us.

So it has been just over one year since we launched LandBin.com – which is much like LakePlace.com, but instead of featuring lake real estate – the site features land for sale. We already had most of the architecture ready to go, so offering a site featuring land was kind of a no brainer. Again, only about a year after launch and LandBin.com is showing up very well in the search engine rankings for Minnesota land for sale & Wisconsin land for sale – but it is doing even better for what is known as the long tail. Just think of a little town somewhere in MN or WI – and search for that with “land for sale” afterwords and you may be surprised to see LandBin.com doing pretty well across the board.

Im going to make a prediction – I believe that LandBin.com will actually get more traffic than LakePlace.com within the next three years. You can still find some very inexpensive deals on land – which makes it a larger market because more people can afford to buy in…thus the prediction. We have some pretty good competition in the land arena – there is a company that has raised about $12 million – so it is going to be a lot of fun competing for the top spots for our important search terms and phrases.

See ‘ya at the top!

You may have noticed some downtime at LakePlace.com today – we just upgraded our servers (again). You may notice a faster LakePlace.com as we are now running on 8 processors, an ungodly amount of RAM and more hard drive space than you want to hear about.

Top of the line stuff..as of today.

We also upgraded our database software to the latest and greatest…so if you run into any bugs or issues, PLEASE let us know about it at d-a-v-e-g-@-l-a-k-e-p-l-a-c-e-.-c-o-m (obviously, remove the “-”).

Cheers!

After having dug to a depth of 10 feet last year, New York scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion, that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago.

Not to be outdone by the New Yorkers, in the weeks that followed, a California archaeologist dug to a depth of 20 feet, and shortly after, a story in the LA Times read: California archaeologists, finding traces of 200 year old copper wire, have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network a hundred years earlier than the New Yorkers.

One week later, The Pioneer Press, a local newspaper in Minnesota, reported the following: After digging as deep as 30 feet in his pasture near Embarass , Minnesota , Ole Olson, a self-taught archaeologist, reported that he found absolutely nothing. Ole has therefore concluded that 300 years ago, Minnesota had already gone wireless.