Archive for the ‘How to’s & Tech Tips’ Category

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!

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!

We at limeyboy are big BIG fans of the real estate agents we work with blogging. Why? Simple, search engines love them.

However we hear too often, and understand, that real estate agents simply don’t have the time to sit by their computer to write.

With a smart phone and a wordpress app installed you can now do it from anywhere. Like this is being done from my car now!

Real Estate Blogging Schedule.

Having been helping real estate agents with technology for the last 10 years, we know that if we suggest anything too time demanding it simply won’t get done. Actually this is something we are entirely in favor of. Your job is to sell real estate, not become a geek. That’s our job!

Therefore, our mantra to our blogging real estate agents is, write a little, and write often..

How little, look at this post. How long did it take. 5 minutes.

Facebook business pages are a great tool to use in offering real estate agents another avenue to generate leads. Here’s how to create a Facebook business page for your real estate business.

Open your personal facebook page, then go to the following url: www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages

From there click the “Create a Page” green button:

On the Create New Facebook Page window, select Real Estate:

Then choose the name of the page you will ultimately want to use. This will become your facebook url, or domain name, eg: www.facebook.com/limeyboy. Ideally, this should match the keywords that are within your domain name or the ones that you website is designed around. Once you choose your page name, you can’t change it, (you can delete it, or create another, but you can edit one that you have created).

Then click, “Create Page”, which will bring you to your Facebook business page:

This page will come with an initial facebook business page url such as the one below. It’s somewhat conveluted at this point…

It is this address that you need to share with your personal/professional facebook friends. Send out an email to suggest that your friends ‘fan’ your facebook page. Once you get 25 ‘fan’s’ of your page, Facebook will trim that down to the shortened version.

How To Add a Photo To Your Facebook Business Page

From your business page, homepage, roll over the words Change Picture on the large ?, and choose, Upload a Picture…

Navigate to your photo:

Wait a moment….

Then see the results: Cute!

Below your photo, click where it says, Write Something, and, well, write something about your business…

And your done!

How to Get to Your Business Page from Your Personal Page

Sign into your facebook account.  Click Pages & Ads, from the left navigation window:

This will take you a summary window, where you can click on your page:

How do you get one of those snappy, facebook urls for your facebook real estate business page, like www.facebook.com/limeyboy (for example

Simply get 25 fans, then with your facebook account open, click this link,

http://www.facebook.com/username/

Choose your the page you want to shorten, then type in the shortened version you want, if available and you are away!!!

So a friend stayed over with us the other day. They came with their laptop to do some work to prepare for a presentation. The did that. They left, and went to present. All was well, until they realized that the only part of their computer they took with them was their power cord. Sure enough, there was their laptop by the door.

In a scramble of panic they asked us to email the file to them so they could at least open the file on someone else’s laptop, and then figure out how to get that laptop hooked up to the LCD projector.

As we were trying to attach this enormous file to an email, and send it to multiple email address in the hope that at least one wouldn’t bounce such a monster file we once again thought about google docs. Having all these files, stored in one place, our laptops, our computers continues to seem a ridiculous concept to us know.

We are currently in the process of preparing a large presentation ourselves, which we are using google’s presentation app from google docs. Though everything in their program ‘sweet’ (sic) is very paired down, I have yet to find a function that needed that isn’t there. In a way, there is something refreshing about having less choice.

Do i really need 20 alternative fly-ins for my text to enter the page on each click?

With less gizmo’s, I find myself concentrating more on what I am trying to communicate.

The other joy of google docs is its in-built sharing function. More on that to come.

We strongly endorse google docs for real estate.