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Hurry up and get your .co!!!

(This is a post we meant to write a few months ago. )

.CO is a new domain name suffix. And it’s a good one, it may become a great one. There are many countries that use .co to denote business online. .co.uk for example is used in the UK for business websites.

We are not sure how readily .co’s will be used. Many are just being snapped up to add to the list of other ending versions people may already have, .net, .info etc . In those instances they may not ever really be used, choosing instead to promote their .com. However with any new suffix, the potential for new sites being built using them increases.

In those cases, the question really is, will it be regarded in a better light than .net, which has always been the poor cousin of .com

If your .com had gone, .net was the next best thing, or least worse, which of course is .biz

Today .com still holds top spot, but in 5 years who knows…

It may be that .co becomes widely used and adopted. If that’s the case you might want to pop along to your domain registrar and pick up the .co version of your domain names before your competition or a speculator does!

Buy the .co version of your domain today!!!

It seems like not a week goes by when facebook doesn’t launch an attack on google’s dominance of…pretty much everything.

The word on the street is that on monday, facebook will launch what’s been called “Project Titan” (seriously?) or the “gmail killer”.

This makes perfect sense from facebook’s point of view. Let’s face it, we are already there at facebook on some level most of our online time. We can message within it, and now we’ll be able to email within it. I am sure this will be incorporated into the messaging system and your contact list.

@facebook.com

I wonder though who will be an adopter of this? Changing email address is a pain, notifying everyone who is in your contact list, and hoping they use the new one.  I doubt that facebook  business page owners will want to have their email handled by facebook.

I think that this is aimed at the person, (yes I am talking about you again Mum), who has an email account, probably hotmail or one from your first ISP, who isn’t doesn’t have a good reason to keep it. Someone who predominantly uses the  internet for facebooking.

The trend though is to keep eroding the tools that google offer, and place them within the facebook walls. See the earlier post on Microsoft Office for Facebook we wrote earlier.

Facebook Office

Imagine arriving at “work” which these days means: glancing at your phone, or sitting down with your Latte at starbucks, etc …and proceeding to work on spreadsheets, dealing with email and tweaking that presentation you have been working on. Also collaborating with colleagues online, bit of social planning  and then you get a pop up that one of your prospective clients is in the line at the same coffee shop. You look up, see them and invite them over for an impromptu presentation you were going to be giving them later in the week.

Oh, and you were doing that all within facebook.

OK so here is my predication, full integration of Microsoft’s Office programs in Apps form within the year. You’ll be working within facebook using the Microsoft Office Cloud.

As google ups the anti this week with their decision to not allow your gmail contacts to be automatically fed into Facebook (because Facebook won’t allow you to download your full contact database in transferable format) the lines of battle are being drawn up with more detail every day.

A further sign of this could be seen when Facebook decided that Bing (microsoft) would be the search partner within the facebook’s city walls. (When bing launched someone wrote critically that the letters stood for But It’s Not Google, however I think facebook’s decision to partner with them could more accurately be described as Because It’s Not Google. )

As great as google Apps for business are, they are not part of Facebook, and it’s increasingly unlikely that they will be. Facebook and Microsoft on the other hand seem to be getting closer and closer by the day.

What do you think? Would you use Word, Publisher, Excel & Powerpoint if they were online & free at facebook, (in return for being bombarded with ads). We are leaving comments open for this.

So we’ve transitioned to the google cloud. It’s something we have been mulling over for a while…and trying to figure it out !

You see what we’ve done isn’t simply got a gmail account & then started using google docs for:

• presentations
• word type docs
• excel type docs

We’ve actually moved our domain to their control.

Why? Well for a number of reasons. One of the main was because we wanted the benefit of cloud computing but didn’t want an @gmail address to be our main company email domain.

We want our @limeyboy.com suffix for our email. This means that when we send an email from our google apps gmail account (confused yet?) it actually comes from our @limeyboy.com domain. We are essentially signed into gmail and they are co-opting our domain to send our email for us.

Where To Sign Up For Google Apps

This has to be done by signing up here There is a fair amount of geeky stuff that has to be done, like changing the MX record (now there’s a joy) of your email accounts to point to google email servers. Ok so hat part wasn’t much fun, and I think this is probably where most people give up and figure that the option of the gmail.com suffix is the lesser of two choices.

The Advantages of Using Google Apps For Real Estate Agents & Teams

So what’s the upside of all of this? Why go through this?

For us it’s all about collaboration. The dream of microsoft and Bill Gates, was a PC in every home, on every desk. That happened. The problem is that all this local storage of files and programs has become really annoying if we need access to them when we are not there. We can link desktop to desktop in a network but normally this is local too. If two people are working on a project files go back and forth like a tennis ball, from one local machine to another. What google apps allow us to do, is to position the files at the center of that collaboration where both can access them.

As an account administrator of my limeyboy.com domain at google Apps, I can create an account for my team members. For each team member I can:

• create a new email account and assign privileges to each account
• have their own set of google docs which are sharable among team members, and they can see the ones others have shared
• create their own calendar and also see shared company calendars

Team members can create shared folders. For each client we have a shared folder to place documents  team members have created or received.

It makes team work, work.

The real beauty is that all of this is available anytime from anywhere. Waiting for a client at Starbucks…you can access your entire office documents, programs, calender and email from one place.

Google has recently made some great improvements to the little things that were annoying in earlier versions. Up until recently for the google business apps user there wasn’t the option to create an email signature…crazy.

The google docs have also be come much more robust tools. Graphically speaking there have been some huge improvements to the aesthetic quality of their documents which no longer feel like the weak relative of their desktop cousins.

We’ve also transitioned from our trusty dedicated fax line to efax. As annoying as the $17/month fee is, it’s much better than the $40/month our local telephone company was charging us for a fax line. We also have the advantage of the faxed coming into our email inbox which can in turn be stored in the shared client file.

Google also handle our office phones through google voice too!

So what does all of this cost? $50/year/user account. Which I think is nothing for the benefits it offers our company..although it’s a wee bit annoying to still get the ads!

Just as no two real estate agents offer the same mix of knowledge and service, the same is true for web development companies. However do you know what you should be asking a real estate web design company?

Most agent seem to select a web design company using the following criteria:

1. aesthetics
2. functionality
3. cost

Aesthetics as subjective at best. Real estate agents often see examples of existing sites and decide they would like something along those lines. Graphics can be changed easily.

Functionality. Lots of real estate agents are sold on the sites functionality, such as:

• being able to log in and add/edit their own content.
• perhaps there are a selection of canned emails that can be sent out from the site on a periodic basis that is perceived as solving the ‘staying in touch’ conundrum.

Cost is an objective component. Everyone has a budget, and as an agent you have to be comfortable with the bottom line.

However, this leaves a lot of questions unanswered, largely because there were never thought to be asked in the first place.

Customer is always right….wrong

When a real estate agent embarks on the process of creating a new website, first on the list should be that the website is designed to show up online. No one has ever argued with that statement when we make it.

However, due to the level of competitiveness in online real estate search, clearly you can’t show up for everything you would like your site to show up for. It’s obvious to most agents that they don’t have much chance in showing up for “USA real estate agent”, there are 100′s of millions of sites competing for that one.

So, if agent’s know there site isn’t going to up at that level of general search, at what level do they think it IS realistic for their site to start to show up?

Most real estate web developers entirely refuse to discuss realistic expectations of their sites showing with their potential customers.

However, what they do say is “Your can have what you want”. In essence they leave it up to what ever you, the customer wants without offering any guidance or counseling regarding the likelyhood of the shiny new site showing up anywhere. There is absolutely no reason why a real estate agent should have inkling how to get their site to show up.

Well it seems another day another google tweak. Is is me or is google stirring the pot more frequently these days, maybe I am just getting older/slower and the world is getting faster?

Google instant is had added preemption to search. Philosophically it feels a little odd, as you begin to type letters into the search box, suggestions pop up, that’s right starting from the first letter. (It’s true that google weren’t the first to do this). What’s odd about the experience is that as it’s so fast to anticipate what you are about to type in a fair amount of tangential chaos ensues.

Paradoxically, in the process of instantly suggesting what google thinks you are searching for, it’s really easy to get side tracked by the suggested sites.

Say for example you want to search real estate in Morris Plains, this is what happens now.

As soon as you type in “m” for morris the google splash page swaps to the search results page.

Formerly you would type your entire keyword phrase into the search box and hit the button marked”google search” to be taken to the results page.

This button has really become redundant now, the first letter being typed initiates the change to the search interface.

Funnily enough when I was thinking about Google Instant, I was wondering how they were going to get you to see their ads, if the instant results were to be displayed on the ad-less google homepage. I guess they figured that one out pretty quick!

So typing the first letter does a couple of things, it swaps the pages from the ad-less homepage to the ad laden results page, and also start to anticipate what you are searching for.

1st letter...

Hmm, I am searching for Morris Plains real estate, but it thinks I want mapquest…

2nd letter...

Ok, the second letter, and google thinks that I want to look at Moma…

1st word...

Adding the next of letters brings up some Morris options…getting there…

2nd word...

As we move to the final phrase I was initially searching for, it anticipates pretty well…

Search phrase recognition

Though not totally new as a concept, google does feel responsive and refresh. However, what I am not convinced about is if this is going to same me much time, because I could have easily visited the Moma site, typing in “A” brings me to amazon, “E” to ebay…I don’t need more distractions! Perhaps when the novelty has worn off it will, in the long run save a few seconds here and there, and over our net lifetime that might be useful.

Serge Brin, one half of google’s founders said that he wants google to be the third part of your brain, for now, the anticipatory tangental nature of the suggestions feels more like my grandmother rattling through every name she can think of before she gets to actual one of the great grand daughter front of her!

So first of all congratulations on enabling Facebook places to your facebook account. As you were able to enable it, it should be obvious then how to disable it. Well that would be true of course, if you had actively enabled it in the first place!

Actually, what happened was those crazy kids at facebook, thought this one up, then added in an enabled form to everyones account. With all the bad press facebook have been getting with privacy issues, it’s frankly beyond me why they would roll something out like this, which surely is going to add fuel to the fire. Kids huh…(I am sounding old these days).

What amazes me most though is that this will annoy more people than it had to. How many people, well lets suggest everyone who didn’t want to share this stuff in the first place. This could have annoyed precisely no one if, they had rolled this new app out, with great fanfare, which you could sign up to add to your account. That way the one’s that wanted it would be happy, and the one who didn’t would also be…happy. This isn’t rocket science is it?

As someone who’s life is entirely divided between my office and then chasing after progeny who’s combined ages are less than the fingers on one hand, (I have a full set…of fingers I mean), the last thing I want to remind everyone of is that my days are spent entirely at the office, somewhere between my computer & phone and coffee maker, period. My evenings are spent trying to encourage said progeny to eat something, before suggesting that sleep, at some point for them, would a good idea.

As a consequence the whole 4square app passed me by, it is mildly interesting to see where people are, which bar, what they had for lunch, but my days aren’t spent like that. Boo hoo.

So, with much fanfare, Facebook launched their places app, and for me the hype didn’t match the product. However, by automatically adding this feature to my facebook account, they basically added the 4square functionality to it, which I did’nt want.

So, here’s how to keep your boring life a private…

How to Disable Facebook Places

Sign into your account, oh that’s right you already are: choose Privacy Settings

This is what you find: Click on image. That’s right, you’re already added to Places I Check Into. Click Customize Settings

Find the Places I Check Into section, click Customize

Select Only Me, you could of course do the Hide This From but you’d have to keep adding new friends to it…

Not quite done yet, scroll down lower on the page and where it says Friends Can Check Me Into Places, and select Disabled (one can imagine how this could be abused!)

That should do it. In order for anyone to check you in anywhere you would have to approve the checking in before it was posted, but again, this whole thing should have been disabled unless you actually wanted it.

If you like this, found it helpful, hit retweet at the top right and share!

Add a related posts section to the bottom of your articles

Here’s a good plug in for your real estate wordpress site. As you know, everything you post in your blog is categorized, it doesn’t have to be, you could always leave that section alone…what’s wrong with “Uncategorized’?

So, you have categories of posts, and you can view them all by category, but wouldn’t it be really nice to be able to see that list of ther ‘in-category’ posts at the bottom of each article? Right?

WordPress Related Posts

This is where the WordPress Related Posts plug-in comes in very handy. It’s does all the linking for you and places these related posts beneath your article. Easy and quick, and all done for you.

Wordpress related posts footer in action

This may also help with the SEO of your blog posts!

Found this useful? retweet it?

Let's get online vs online marketing in perspective

Why do you want your real estate website on the first page of google? Simple, to get more leads. So, once your there are you’re done right? Wrong!

Being found in search is key. Creating an effective online presence for your real estate brand by building the right site, in the right way is essential for real estate agents who want to take their business to the next level. However many agents think that once that has been achieved they can sit back and wait for the leads.

Well as an aspiration it’s admirable, however they may be leaving 50%* of their sites visitors unaware of their site’s existence. (*I don’t claim to know the % here, but probably neither do you! : -) the point is your site will be more effective the more eyeballs reach it)

It’s certainly true that more and more people use search engines as the starting point for information gathering, but one could argue that an equally sized group don’t. For those people, they don’t know you built a site to provide them with the information that they crave. Perhaps, they wouldn’t know how to go about finding this information online anyway.

That’s where offline marketing comes in. 50% of your audience need to receive the mailing telling them where to go to find this information. They’ll get the mailer, see the domain name and then type that into their browser giving you a direct hit.

Google analytics & real estate

Tracking traffic...terrific!

You can track this traffic through your website’s analytics software. Visitors to your site who came from typing in the URL or domain name are called a direct hit. Direct hits are usually from mailers, advertising or business cards. If you can track this, you can start to figure out which offline marketing avenues work most effectively. (You can learn more about using analytics to track your marketing spend here).

Another benefit of creating a niche focused, or community website is that it makes the offline marketing a more realistic proposition as you have already limited the geographical sphere of you reach.

Remember that your mailing pieces need to also promote the main topic people are interested in, which homes sold, which homes are available, what’s their house worth. That should be the focus of your website.

Josh Wilton, Manager of the Weichert Princeton office says it like this:

A real estate agents job is to market themselves. Period, end of story. The more they market themselves, the more money they put themselves in a postion to make.  A key mistake that Real Estate agents make, is ‘I have a website…now what?’ If the website is well constructed you will get Search results and business that way, though you don’t want to rely soley on that. Realtors have traditionally been neighborhood specialists, namely, marketing themselves to a neighborhood, getting marketshare etc. Results from Realtor direct mail is generally around .003 (that is 3/10 of a percent). We also know that nearly 30% of a realtors farm will check out their website

Why would a realtor not want to increase their presence in their farm via the website. Google does only some of the work, they need to do the rest.

Ok, so first off. What is google analytics? Remember a website stats counter? That small line text on the bottom of webpages showing you how many visitors your site has had? Well it’s like that,…but on steroids!

Google analytics offers you an invaluable insight into your website’s performance. For example, when you send out a mailer, you can count the number of calls you get on your phone. But did it bring any more visitors to your website?

Which are your most popular pages on your website? Which are the least popular?
Which pages are the most common entrances to your site, which pages are the most common exit pages. Can you improve those?
Do you get more hits on your site from a postcard than a local newspaper ad?
Where did your visitors come from?
What keywords did they type in to find your site?

Google analytics answers these questions for you, and more.

Real estate website as a tool for your business

By tracking and analyzing this information, your website becomes a tool for understanding the effectiveness of your offline and online strategies.

If you can measure where and when you leads arrive you can begin to figure out where best your marketing $$$ are being spent. Say for example you were thinking about doing a series of offline marketing pieces. You where going to a regular postcard mailer, and an ad in a newspaper. By staggering the launch of each campaign, say by two weeks, and following the spike, or not, of hit on your site, you can compare the effectiveness of both methods.

Where are your are you visitors coming from?

Fancy a slice?

Google analytics has this really nice pie chart that shows where visitors to your real estate website came from. They are all grouped into 3 categories: direct, referral, search engines.

Direct hits: these people came to your site by typing in it’s full domain into a browser. We can assume that they probably received an offline marketing piece, a post card, a mailer, a market update flier, a business card.
Referrals: these show the which websites feature a link to your website. These maybe self generated from your blogging, facebook, twitter account etc. Ideally they would be from other sites that link to you and your real estate website because they think you are fabulous!
Search engines: these show which hits came from search engines.

Ideally we like to see an even distribution between these 3 main sources.

Look out for the up coming “HOW TO…” on setting up analytics on your website.