Author Archive

So you have a blog, your writing a little, often, (as we like to say) and it’s in a very sharable format. What else can you do?

Everything you create on a computer has a format:

• your photos are saved as .jpg
• Word files as .doc
• Excel files as .xls
• Your blog articles? RSS

The slides below show you how to add your rss feed to your facebook page.

So, you’ve waxed lyrical, you have created, another, informative, succinct, original blog post. You hit publish, and you can see it, live, online. Feels good huh.

So what’s next, sit back and await the comments? What if you could encourage more search engines to come and take a look too, rather than simply waiting for them to come by.

Though, it’s certainly true that your blog may well be already pinging, or notifying search engines of your latest post when you hit publish, you can be proactive about it also.

Here’s how, visit http://pingomatic.com/

There you can ping multiple search engines that your blog has been updated. Here’s how you do it…as usual in just a few clicks.

Goto http://pingomatic.com/, you’ll see this page:

Type in your blog name, your blog’s home page, and your blog’s feed address, (normally your blog address followed by /feed

Then simple hit ‘check all’ to check all the blogs you want to ping:

Hit, send pings.

Ok, so now you are done!

We’re really enjoying the changes at google. We’ve often thought that google need to move away from their ‘no-design’ graphic philosophy into something that feels a little less outdated and a little more sophisticated…and they seem to be listening. (Ha, that’s right, we spoke, they listened…! NOT)

The interface is becoming much smoother to operate, from the fade in of your account settings from the default screen, to the new look google images.

Gone are they thumbnail borders around each photo with the originating URL, the file size and dimension, it’s now a photo gallery. Roll over each photo to get an enlarged lightbox effect with all the aforementioned information in place.

It feels, contemporary, modern and is beautiful. Well done google…see what happens when you listen!

The last few days have seen a change in google’s homepage. Their ‘no-design’ aesthetic, of a simple logo with some basic default html blue links seems to have morphed into…well, bing?

I have often regarded google as a no design company. By no design, I mean, no aesthetic consideration. Clearly they are concerned with design, but I think its pretty much left at engineering design. However, aesthetically, and to some extent their user interface has always been exceedingly stark in their use of graphics or style.

Beyond Bing’s large photo homepage format, I haven’t found much of anything to convince me to use them as a primary search source, (outside of facebook that is, which is who power their web searches from withing the facebook castle walls).

Oddly enough, as someone who has always called for at least some graphic consideration at google, I find myself feeling a little non-plussed at this new direction. Perhaps the starkness of their interface in some way prepared me for the onslaught of the search results I was about to wade though.

It seems as though your linked-in profile is starting to gain better traction at the major search engines…which, lets face it, means google.

We have always thought that it makes sense to have a linked-in presence, primarily because it gives a perceived level of legitimacy for testimonials. We very much like their ‘recommendations’ section for this. Occasionally we are presented with scans of handwritten testimonials by agents wishing this to be on their website. This image file is very cumbersome for the viewer and has zero value from a search engine’s perspective as its an illegible image to them.

However, ask your customers if they would be happy ‘recommending‘ you through Linked-In. This also has the benefit of someone else providing you content for you, which is always a good thing.

Up until now, the best case is that google would pick up your Linked-In account for someone searching for you. The good news is that with a few tricks you can also start to optimize your content to enable your Linked-In page to start showing up for real estate niche keywords.

Here’s how to do it in 5 easy steps.

Before you begin, think of one or two keywords that sum up your niche. Just as with your website, focus on being narrow, rather than broad. Remember you are not a Broker. You are a single agent. So for example: pick one town name and a style of home, eg. “Princeton Townhouses”. With that settled simply do the following, add your keywords in a natural sentence to the following 5 places:

1. Headline
2. Current Work
3. Past Work
4. Your Summary
5. Your Specialty

Let us know how you get on!

Microsoft is announcing that they too are going to be launching an online version of their Office product. This is being seen as a direct target of google’s cloud “Documents” product, which though only registering about 5% of the market, is growing.

The new product from Microsoft will be available through their Windows Live portal, that’s hotmail for those who still use it.

The word is that with google soon be lauching their operating system, Chrome OS, in direct competition to Microsoft’s strangle hold of Windows, Microsoft are going after google’s “Document” products!

On the face of it I wouldn’t be too worried if I was google…

However, the major coup is that they are going to be partnering with Facebook to offer this as an app there.

On second thoughts, google should worry!

The National Association of Realtors 2010 member survey suggest that their agents are becoming more tech savvy, and for those who are increasing their spend on their websites are getting returns!

56% of agents are now using a smart phone daily compared to 42% in 2009,  of which 66% were agents who had been in the business 2 years or less, compared with 48% usage for those with careers 16 years or more.

Social media, (twitter, facebook, etc) and  personal networking in general rocketed up to 51% in 2010 compared with 35% from 2009.

10% of agents reported having a blog (i wondering what % are actively blogging , 63% reported having a website, with a median of 3% of their business being reported coming from it.

Interestingly, agents who spent  $1000 or more to build & maintain on their site said that it generated 19% of their business.

Suggesting that simply ‘having  a website’ misses the mark by a long way. Agents who embrace the web and create a substantial and effective website site get significant returns.

Google has updated their user interface this week, thats the bit you use, and a ton of stuff that you don’t see. You may have noticed a subtle change in the way it looks, (that always throws me, my first reaction is that i have some malware installed, which has redirected me to a scam site!).

Really, the update brings some of the features that were ‘snuck’ in last time to the fore.

Type in a search query and you get the same set of results in essentially the same format. This is google’s ‘everything’ set of data. What’s new is the left column.

At the top you have, ‘everything’, all normal so far. Below that, they have moved the Maps, Images, Videos, News, Blogs etc to a much more prominent position. This means that its going to be more likely that people are going to perform subsequent search variations, from their original entry search.

As a real estate agent, you should make sure that your online strategies try cover all of these bases. Make sure that your website and blogs are loaded with local images, town images, development images, videos of the above, (even quickies from your smart phone) and blog posts.

Below, the ‘everything’ navigation is another category, More Search Tools, this is where users can find the most up to date information posted to the web. You can sort your results by the time they were updated such as latest, past 24 hrs, past week, past month, past year. Latest may show your twitter tweets!

I’ll say it again, you have to be blogging!

If you haven’t already done so, I would highly recommend downloading google chrome today. It’s simply the best browser we have used to date. I like it for a series of very subtle reasons, the tabs, you can change their order, you can break them out into their own window, the fact that you can search from the same place you type in urls.

The fact that it just seems to know what you are looking for. I rarely get more than two letters into the url i am looking for and chrome pops up suggestions which are usually bang on.

I am sure my every click is being monitored somewhere, by something for all this to happen, and perhaps I am sharing stuff I don’t know that I am sharing, but frankly, I’ll trade that for a great user experience.

I can also sync by bookmarks from one computer to another.

Did I mention too that it was fast? Check this out…

I can’t see Microsoft having as much fun as this…and it shows in their product.