Facebook changes, for the better

On Wednesday Sept 21 2011 Facebook made some changes to the layout and functionality of Facebook. This has happened on a few occasions. When they make changes to the user interface usually people go wild. In a bad way. In most cases they allow for a “revert button” or a “classic view” so that visitors can switch their profile back if they do not like the look. This is usually an option that is short lived, because as soon as a functional enhancement comes along they have to switch everyone’s profile to the new version.

This will not happen to this layout. it cannot since it is a functional update from the beginning. They are not moving existing features around or adding in advertising. This time Facebook has added in significant improvements in a few areas. And for good reason.

The first major enhancement is the real time bar to the top right. It shows all activity of friends in real time. This is major for a few good reasons. The main thing have heard is that people want to know “Where their stream went” Well this actually is your stream. You might not know it but Facebook has always scored posts. What that means is that when you posted Facebook scored whatever you wrote. It gave it a certain percentage based on their algorithm for scoring posts then, and there is a good chance not all of your friends seen it. In this live stream you will see every update, every comment, every image update and image comment. It also it shows all activity, things that were not in your stream in the past. Like if someone commented on an image they uploaded a year ago. So if you did not comment on an image, and then the up-loader or another friend comments on it at a later date you will know. This will give you a good chance to interact with more people at the point they are interacting with others, thus widening your social footprint in a shorter amount of time.

How you can use this to interact better:
To get quick interaction out of your time on Facebook check out your stream. When you see someone commenting on a status or a image, jump in and join the conversation. Social networking is about getting involved and being relevant. If you are only a reader and not interacting then you need to push to interact more and you will see it pay dividends when you are interacting with business associates.

Facebook has integrated media like never before. What this means is that people can watch a movie or show on Hulu, check out a story on the Washington Post, or listen to music on Spotify, right on Facebook.

What this means for you:
Whenever a friend does this it will be shared in your ticker. So it will say something like, “William Ryan Harrell read Marketing Yourself in Real Estate using Social Media & SEO.” Displaying this information will open up new avenues for discussion with your friends. You might see that a business associate is watching Vanilla Ice’s new DIY show and know they are into or could possibly be into remodeling and real estate investment. I just seen today that a friend I worked with in college was friends with my neighbor. You will be able to recognize and foster relationships and connections like never before.

Sure, with the new timeline Facebook is asking you to open up your profile like a new age digital scrapbook. It will give a new life to the internet for years to come. Imagine what it will be like for my daughter Maddie who gets to see my timeline in 15 years that will dictate every event that has happened in my life and how I reacted. How happy I was when her and her brother Aiden were born. This will change lives, and its pretty cool.

Marketing for Real Estate Agents using Social Media & SEO

I have finally finished the first version of my eBook geared specifically towards real estate agents who are looking to get the word out using social media and search engine optimization. So many times I have talked to someone in real estate who needs to know the basics and wants a quick guide to get going online. Well I put it together. I am currently working on an eBook that tells you how to use blogging to gain relevance in search engines. I hope to launch a new eBook every few months. During that time the price will only be $9.77! As soon as the new book comes out I will push the price back up to $19.77. So if you are looking to find out more about social media, SEO and how you can use it as a real estate agent to grow your business; you need to download this book!

Using Linkedin to gain clients for real estate or service based businesses

I have had a Linkedin account for a while now. It is what I do, you know to get a social platform comes out. I secure the name, set up the profile and provide a presence on the site for myself and my companies. This is just second nature for myself and probably a lot of people who do what I do for a living. If you are going to consult people on how they can market their business online using different platforms like Linkedin or any social networking site you should probably know it in and out.

I must however confess; I did not know a lot about Linkedin. At least I thought I did. I figured you can gain another instance of your info on a reputable site for good SEO back-linking. I figured that heads of companies would use it to boost their relevancy and in turn boost the legitimacy of the company they represent. You know the regular, career development, recruiting, growing your network, joining industry groups etc. What I did not realize was that I only touched the tip of the iceberg.

Here are a few things I have learned about Linkedin and think you can take full advantage of.

• Linkedin Answers – Do you have a business related question? Is it late and you dont have anyone to call? This is perfect. Lets say you are a real estate agent. You are working late getting your paperwork together for a client and realize the MLS / IDX plugin for your website is not working. But your IT guy who did the site 2 years ago is not returning your calls. You can jump on to Linkedin and ask “Who is a good, fast reliable web developer?” and get literally a dozen results in hours. ( http://www.linkedin.com/answers )
  
• Spy on the Competition – You can learn a lot about the health of a company by the employees, or better yet former employees of a company. Guy Kawasaki says “These pages surface key stats on companies; recent hires as well movers and shakers. Not only do company profiles give you unique insight into your competition, they also give you an opportunity to stumble upon potential hires by browsing through company pages.” Take it from Guy, you can learn enough to stay ahead of the competition.
  
• Use the 3rd party apps – If you are a real estate agent and use the right MLS listing software you can gain some really valuable search engine visibility using the WordPress plugin. It will pull in your latest posts in your WordPress. Which if it is set up correctly will be your featured listings. Using the twitter app could shoot listing information or other valuable tweets out to anyone in your Linkedin network.

This is only 3 of the things you can be using Linkedin for. I would recommend talking with a professional (I happen to know one!) that can assess your business and make recommendations based on your business model and service type to ensure you are getting the most bang for your buck not only out of Linkedin but other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Real estate agent marketing, about getting traffic to your website

I was asked today how someone could get traffic to their real estate website. Real estate agent marketing is one of the hardest areas to work in since there are so many agents all acting independently on the web. I mean this isn’t a hard question because there are literally thousands of ways to drive traffic, the problem is that most cost $. Being that we are in a recession and home prices are the lowest they have been in a really long time it is the perfect time to buy. But how do you get those buyers who are wanting to buy to come to your site without spending a ton of money on paid ads?

Blogging is something people have been talking about for years and it has always been a source of good SEO relevance. However with the recent devaluing of link farms and most sources of back-links we have seen a rise in the value of fresh content. The quickest way to gain good fresh content is to write it. Or have someone write it for you. If you are lucky enough to have a company doing your internet marketing for you then you are all set. A good SEO or marketing firm (like the 219 Group, hint hint) will often times write the articles to gain good SEO traction and submit them for you in a variety of places along with your own blog.

Paying someone to write the blogs however may not be an option for you, in which case I say write them yourself. This takes literally 15-20 minutes a day and can be very beneficial to your marketing of your real estate website. If you are in real estate, or better yet you have a few listings this gives you plenty of good ammo to write content about. You can talk about the # of homes on the market with a particular feature, like say a pool, and show pictures of the pools at the homes you have listed and add links to those properties.

What if you do not know what to write about, you have writers block or your just a bad writer? This is not uncommon. I mean you are a real estate salesperson, not a web copy writer. I have been preaching PLR articles for some time now. PLR or private label rights articles are articles written by someone and then sold along with the rights to publish that article as if you wrote it. This is not a great idea if you want to get the article and put it up without changing it because larger search engines will ding you for having the same content as a ton of other sites. What I suggest instead is to use the article as a template and rewrite it. The bones of the story is there. All you have to do is use new words, move things around and rename the article. If you do not have time you can still buy an article pack, send it to a web copywriter and pay them to re-write them for you using your local keywords for your website and BOOM, you have copy for months.

If you are interested in a PLR article pack full of real estate articles contact me. I can point you in that direction. I have a package of 200 PLR articles perfect for real estate in categories like selling, financing, investing, etc.

You can download OVER 200 PLR articles to use on your blog today!

Internet Marketing for real estate agents

I am currently putting the finishing touches on an ebook for real estate agents that shares valuable information about how to use the web, more specifically social networks to gain more leads and make more commissions.

I should have the book out within the next 2 weeks, maybe sooner and plan to carry it on Amazon, B&N and on this site as a digital download. We are entering a great time for anyone wanting to market themselves on a larger scale with the integration of social marketing in our daily lives. It presents a tremendous opportunity for anyone wishing to grow their business in a huge way. Contact me below if you are interested in learning more about the book when it comes out.

Thanks
Ryan

Twitter stepping up to the plate

Twitter has made what some people might call power moves in the past month. I would call them a death sentence to anyone wanting to compete in their space. They have purchased a industry leader in the application Tweetdeck and just announced that they are going to be offering image hosting. No longer will you have to email your images and set the subject, etc to a third party place that will then tweet it for you. Just sms the message up to twitter, the same way you are tweeting now. Using Tweetdeck your images should flow in your stream, maybe not right away but rumors are that it will all be seamless. This royally screws a lot of third party app developers, which I have no problem with. Building a business by complementing another business, especially one as large and growing as quickly as social networking was probably a bad idea. Twitter has been hinting to developers that they should stop build apps. Probably one of the most straightforward nice-guy moves, only to be ignored by new image hosting start-ups.

I cant help but think of the April fools joke from the president of Hootsuite, (a competitor to Tweetdeck) where he says something to the effect of, “Building a business by complementing someones technology isn’t a good long term business model.” Of course at the time he was joking and who would have thought within that short amount of time he would look like a prophet?

37 Signals founder Jason Fried also bashed the young start up a few years ago saying they didn’t have a real revenue model and it was a joke for them to be getting all the venture money without figuring out how they were going to generate revenues. He also hinted the same thing about Facebook and to his credit a lot of other start-ups that are either out of business or seriously hurting right now. However what twitter and Facebook have done is built a rabidly loyal following, then slowly slid ads in, not so much that it would hurt the user experience but enough to generate a fortune for them and their investors.  Doing this before people relied on their services would have made them, well Myspace. All this time business experts and know it all tech geniuses thought they were idiots, when in fact we were the idiots.

Twitter will begin to display ads on the image gallery pages, as well as in Tweetdeck. Both should increase ad revenues into the billions in the next few years. Bravo Twitter, well played.

Can you make me #1 on Google please?

One of the questions I get asked a lot, by friends, relatives & both when I was with ARC Design agency and even now as the creative director for the 219 Group is about being #1 on Google. The conversation will start off about work and web design and then I will hear something along the lines of “I just want to be the #1 result for all my keywords for all potential customers”, OK I exaggerated a little but you get the point. The fact of the matter is that people just are not sure how they rank sites and it is tough for someone not in the web design world to imagine that there isn’t a particular formula guaranteed to get your site to #1. The fact is that when there was, searching sucked. All I had to do for my customers was keyword load, fill up fake meta data, place tons of text the same color as the background with lots of keywords etc and BOOM they would be right at the top. So if you were searching for let’s say Disney cartoon images you would get sites that had images your kids shouldn’t see. That sucked, and people didn’t really think search engines were the best alternative. In some cases directories were an option, or if you had a service like AOL you were sheltered from this somewhat and could still search safely.

When someone asks me now about getting to #1 I tell them the only thing I know to tell them, to work on your site all the time. Non-stop. That is the only way to guarantee you will be #1, just stay up 24-7, place legitimate back-links, write tons of good SEO copy and you will be #1. Oh and of course I can’t guarantee this, no one can. However there are a ton of things you can do to get better ranking and of course come up well for most of your customers. I would indeed recommend hiring professionals to do this. (Like the 219 Group) In most cases they have worked SEO for a similar business, have web copywriters on retainer and have methods of getting legitimate back-links that you would never be able to get.

Another thing that people may not realize is that if you are logged into Google with a Google account then you are seeing personalized results. That is right, you are not seeing what everyone else sees. You are seeing the results that are tailored to your past searches, preferences, etc. So if you type in “Real Estate Agent Fayetteville NC” Google may pick which answers you might like based on where you live, your demographics, and political preferences. Oh and also the ads on the page, they do that with them too. So if you get emails to your gmail account from Barack Obama’s campaign then you may get someone who has links to Barack Obama’s website somewhere in their algorithm. This also means you aren’t seeing results in other areas as well. Like for instance the news area of Google, may not show you Fox News articles etc.

Another thing people forget about is the local results. All the major search engines have a local arm, or a listing of local businesses which fit the search criteria. Google has its own algorithm for listing businesses in both the local view and the maps. No one can tell you this formula, because it is not known. It is always best to set your site up in local, use webmaster tools and list your site in multiple listing sites.

In a round about way by making the web more custom we have made it almost impossible to get to #1 on larger search engines in a competitive industry and stay there without some help from the experts. Which is good for people like me & 219.