While all the other rental sites that I track had amazing growth in Jan 2010, Rentedspaces.com took a giant hit in traffic.

Not sure why yet, perhaps it was from organic traffic or perhaps they reduced their AdWords spending. But wow what a nose dive when everyone else had big growth!

For me this is kind of fun to see because the main reason they got so much traffic was because of all the AOL properties linking to it. Perhaps Google has finally cracked down on this a bit.

Update: Not that I believe KeywordSpy.com that much, but it claims that RentedSpaces spends $83,000 a day on ads. To put that number in perspective, it claims that Rentals.com spends about $3,000 a day. Perhaps they decided to cut that off in January even though the chart below indicates otherwise.

If you guessed Craigslist.com then you would be right according to Google and Twitter.

Homeaway must be doing well to afford a Super Bowl commercial.

I called up Realtor.com after I got the email above and asked if they had a working relationship with Realtor-outreach.com from India and they said no. I noticed that the URL was just purchased last week.

Is this some sort of scam being run out of India? The only reason they might want to write for me might be links. Any other thoughts what they are trying to accomplish by lying about working for Realtor.com?

This graph says it all. Oh, I wish I had the power of AOL’s network behind my site!

From Compete.com, showing traffic stats.

I got the email above this morning that I thought I would share. When I first started reading it I felt honored that someone would wnat to write a guest post for me.  But as I read on something didn’t feel right.

Why didn’t they use my name, like “Hi Dave” because my name and photo  is plastered all over my contact page, and who has professional writers in the real estate market? Also why did they said “Real Estate” and not rentals – my site doesn’t sell houses.

Then I looked at where the email came from – India! So SEO companies are outsourcing guest post now to India. Interesting.

I have no idea what the quality of the post would be or if it would be really unique. If I can’t trust that the person from India’s last name is Smith, how am I going to trust that he is providing unique content?

I ran across this funny video called “We Got That B-Roll” and I laughed so hard the first time I saw that I ended up watching it several times and it gave me an idea to copy the format of their video.  Makes me feel better to poke fun at the rental scammers while they normally have me pulling my hair out!

I created this video several days ago and showed it to my wife and she didn’t think it was that funny, so I decided to can it. But my friend Dave saw it later and liked it! So I said to myself, “What the heck, let’s put it out there, maybe someone else might get a laugh out of me acting like a used car salesman.”

Enjoy. If you like it feel free to embed it on your site. Make sure you watch the original B-Roll video – it rocks!

Attribution: Sergio Cilli, Eric Ledgin, Casey Feigh, and Jacob Womack for the video idea (sorry I ’stole’ some of my favorite lines). The b-roll pictures in the video come from the following Flickr members: Brymo, Lisa Brewster, FaceMePLS, Afiler, Wili Hybrid, Christian Haugen, Ed.Ward. CC BY 2.0

I live near The Summit (Flat Irons) apartments and I noticed this sign above about leaving your heat on and letting the faucets dip.

We’ve had some really cold days the past week in Colorado and I am guessing this apartment complex has had some issue of pipes breaking and water damage to units below in the past.