Watch the entire video here.

I can say from personal experience that those with a point of view are much more interesting to follow, and hence more likely to generate business via social media, than those without a point of view or opinion. So spend some time thinking through who you are and what you stand for before engaging with social media tools.

What is the investment portion of the “return on investment” on your blog? It is not JUST dollars and cents..  If you are a blogger, who has decided that your blog is going to be a significant part of your marketing strategy, than the money you invested in it… 1, 3, 5 or 10K is insignificant compared to the TIME you have invested creating the content for it.  The money? Oh, it will come back.  A well-written blog site with proper Call to Actions will convert traffic like the wind…

But the TIME you have invested to write all that content is not ONLY an investment, but an asset.

Cover your ASSets…

How are you protecting THAT asset…  That’s right, more than ANY OTHER portion of your Internet marketing; your content is an asset, and this asset  will keep giving and giving and giving…  because Google LOVES aged content and aged LINKS to that content…  Often, our older content still gets more traffic over a long (90 day) period than our new content…

But who owns YOUR content…

Well, this depends on where you choose to host it?  If you are on blogging sites, such as Wordpress.com, Blogger, Typepad , Squarespace, or Active Rain?  Well, THEY do..  These platforms actually get credit for the content and the traffic for YOUR hard work…  (the inbound links will be credited to the domain, and can be carried with you, IF you have a custom domain pointed at your blog.)  But if you don’t? For example on Active Rain?  You get no content credit for all that hard work…

So what do you do?

Export your content to a blog you OWN…

Each of these platforms have ways to export the content into your own Wordpress Blog!  Make the investment or take the time to create a blog that you OWN…  ensure you can make changes, change hosts,  servers, etc.  but OWN the data…  you wrote it… you invested the time and it is YOUR asset…

Don’t have the time, money or ability to do that quite yet?

Then, at least take the time to get YOUR blog posts backed up and added to a Wordpress.org blog.  This can be done cheaply and easy.  Most Web Hosts have the ability to set up a simple WP.org blog with the touch of a button…

Then just export OUT of your current platform, and into your new blog…  Here are some basic instuction that explain how to do each… (plenty more on the Internet)

The first is a BRAND NEW EXCITING plugin from the mind of Jeff Turner and Zeek, to export and inport from ACTIVE RAIN to WORDPRESS..  This YOUTUBE video will take you step by step through exporting your content from Active Rain and importing it into your blog.  I followed Jeffs Instructions and was done in 5 minutes…  Brilliant.

The Zeek Interactive Active Rain Import Plugin

Here is a video on how to export from BLOGGER to WORDPRESS

You Tube Video- Blogger to Wordpress

Now SQUARESPACE is a bit tougher, here are the steps..

1. Export your blog from squarespace in Movable Type format?2. Create a free typepad.com blog?3. Import your squarespace blog into Typepad?4. Export your blog from typepad?5. Import your blog into Wordpress.com using the import tool

If you have any problems exporting or importing, a simple search of Google will result in many pages explaining the process…

But just get it done.  Your work, Your Asset, Your return.

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Jim Marks | jimmarks@virtualresults.net | 949.436.6106

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Read VR's Latests Blog Post Blog Post SEO - How to Make an Individual Blog Post Rank Highly

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1. Pick the keywords you want to go after. Let’s use “condos for sale in Queen Anne” as an example. For those who don’t know, Queen Anne is the neighborhood where I used to live in Seattle.

2. Make sure to include your desired keyword in the title of you blog post. This is the single most important thing you can do. If you don’t do ANYTHING else mentioned in this post, make sure you at least put your desired keywords in the title. You can certainly still rank without doing this, but you’re going to have to go through unnecessary hurdles and spend extra effort to get there. For the example of “condos for sale in Queen Anne”, I would consider post titles such as “Great Deals on Condos for Sale in Queen Anne” or “Latest Queen Anne Condos for Sale”

3. Write a GREAT post with relevant information, a good voice, and unique content that would interest the exact type of person you hope to attract to your blog. Content is still king in my opinion. In the “Condos for sale in Queen Anne” example, one piece of content that should be available in that post should be — you guessed it, actual condos for sale in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. If you use a company such as Diverse Solutions, this is easy with their new dsIDXPress WP Plugin. But make sure to include additional unique content to your post, as condo listings are not unique to your blog.

4. Include your desired keywords at least twice in your article. This is just common sense — if an entire page is devoted to a specific topic such as “condos for sale in Queen Anne”, a Search Engine such as Google would expect to see that topic mentioned in the blog post several times just as you would if you were listening to your friend tell you about condos in person.

5. Do some link building with domains and pages your control, making sure to use your keywords in the  anchor text of all of those links. Add a link to your blog’s sidebar with your desired keywords as the anchor text. Go back and edit other specific blog posts you’ve written which pertain to the topic your current blog post addresses (in this case, “condos for sale in Queen Anne”). Add links to your post from a few of your profile pages on sites such as Zillow and Linkedin. If you own multiple domain names, then add links to your post from all of your domains.

6. Promote your blog post. Email a few of your friends who write related blogs and see if you can get them to pick up the story, and of course link to your specific article if they choose to write about it. I wrote a whole post on this topic, so I won’t bore you with the details again.

7. Continually repeat steps 5 and 6. Don’t think that just because you spent a week or two trying to get a post to rank without success means you should give up. Every time you write a post on your blog in the future somewhat related to “condos for sale in Queen Anne”, make sure to link to your Queen Anne condos post. It can take weeks or months, depending on how competitive the keyword is, to get a post to rank highly.

And there you have it - my tips to getting a post to rank well for a desired keyword. Have you had success ranking individual blog posts highly for long tail keywords? If so, what have you done?

Remember when I posted earlier about the Twitter account, and I said that hopefully you’d find out later today what has been keeping us all so busy? Beta testers, this is your moment: the WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 has arrived!

This is an early beta. This means there are a few things we’re still finishing. We wanted to get people testing it this weekend, so we’re releasing it now rather than waiting another week until everything is finalized and polished. There’s a ton of stuff going on in 3.0, so this time we’re giving you a list of things to check out, so that we can make sure people are testing all the things that need it.

You Should Know:

• The custom menus system (Appearance > Menus) is not quite finished. In Beta 2, the layout will be different and a bunch of the functionality will be improved, but we didn’t want to hold things up for this one screen. You can play with making custom menus, and report bugs if you find them, but this is not how the final screen will look/work, so don’t get attached to it.
• The merge! Yes, WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard. If you’re interested in testing the Super Admin stuff associated with multiple sites, you’ll need some simple directions to get started.
• We’re still fiddling with a few small things in the UI, as we were focused on getting the more function-oriented code finished first. For example, we’re getting a new icon for the Super Admin section.

Things to test:

• Play with the new default theme, Twenty Ten, including the custom background and header options.
• Custom Post Type functionality has been beefed up. It’s really easy to add new types, so do that and see how it looks!
• WordPress MU users should test the multiple sites functionality to make sure nothing broke during the merge.

Already have a test install that you want to switch over to the beta? Try the beta tester plugin.

Testers, don’t forget to use the wp-testers mailing list to discuss bugs you encounter.

We hope you like it! And if you don’t, well, check back when beta 2 is ready.

Download the WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 now!

This is OFF THE HOOK exciting.  Expect to see some really cool multi user themes and sites coming soon from Virtual Results..  Oh, and there COULD be a super secret project on the horizon…

Are you a Broker with agents that NEED high quality WP sites at a reasonable price?  Stay Tuned…

I have to disagree with Jason Edwards on FourSquare’s usefulness (or lack thereof). I’ve become a FourSquare addict over the past couple months — I think my addiction really kicked into high gear starting with my trip to NYC for Inman Connect in January; it’s probably no coincidence that I’ve essentially been traveling non stop since then. One question I get quite often, particularly from my friends who don’t use social media, is WHY I use Foursquare. This topic came up at RE BarCamp in Austin in a session called “Stop Puking all Over the Internet” that I helped Andy Kaufman (MyEastBayAgent) with, and I thought I’d address the question here as well.

First of all, I’m not a real estate agent, but think I have very similar goals as agents do with my social media activity — relationship building. As someone who wants to succeed in the business world, my long term goal is to build a large and valuable network of relationships over time. Social media, and Foursquare, is part of that process for me just as it should be for a real estate agent trying to build their sphere.

That said, here are the 2 primary reasons I use Foursquare:

1. Long term relationship building. I think of the content created via Foursquare as nuggets of information for others to relate to. Over the past few weeks, I’ve exchanged numerous tweets and engaged in a few offline email conversations as a result of my Foursquare checkins. Surprisingly, the offline emails mostly came from contacts who saw my Twitter status updates on LinkedIn — who would have thought? They were mostly people who had been to the place I checked in at, or saw the city I was in and sent me a recommendation for something to do or eat. I used to think that integrating Twitter updates into LinkedIn was an incredibly stupid idea, but no longer. Whether it be on the phone or email, building strong relationships require offline conversations — and Foursquare helps facilitate more offline conversations with my network than if I didn’t use Foursquare.

2. Finding out where my network is (while traveling). While on the road, it’s extremely valuable to me to find out where my network is currently hanging out. At South By Southwest (which ROCKED by the way), Foursquare was a vital component for meeting up with others at the conference for drinks or food or to just talk. And again, this goes back to helping facilitate more offline conversations in an effort to build stronger relationships. But it’s also FUN to hang out with people I know, so it’s a win-win all the way around in my book.

So that’s why I use Foursquare, and why you should too. Why aren’t you onboard yet?

We all know that we want as many people as possible to read our blog posts (I’m assuming everyone knows how to WRITE a blog post already). If you spend hours crafting the greatest post you’ve ever written, and no one finds and reads that content — you have a problem. If you want your blog content to be found, you need a blog promotion strategy!

There are those that say great content will market itself. I agree with Darren Rowse that there are elements of truth to that concept. But, as Darren says, the reality is that unless you have a considerable built-in audience, the chances are good that no one knows your content exists except you. Blog promotion is all about changing that and maximizing he chances it’ll get picked up by others. So, what do you do AFTER you hit the publish button to ensure your blog gets read?

First of all, you need to seed your content into the places where it’s easy for others to help you share it with others. Here are some basic things you should do to seed your content in the social web:

• Post it on Twitter, with a custom, catchy headline. I admit I’m guilty of not customizing the title for Twitter very often (I have posts auto populate via Twitterfeed) - and David Gibbons continues to give me a hard time about it.
• Post it as a Facebook status update. This is where your close network spends hours and hours every day; maximize the chances they’ll see your blog post in their feed by posting it as an update - ideally, in the middle of the day.
• Submit your RSS feed to Outside.in and make sure to tag your post with the appropriate tag (only relevant if your post is locally focused). Especially in a market where Outside.in has media partners such as STLToday.com, I think you’ll find some decent traffic clicking through to your site.
• Tag your post in Delicious. For instance, you’d tag a post mentioning the new Seattle light rail with “Seattle“
• Get one of your close friends to submit it on Digg. Digging your own articles is frowned upon, and you’ll be less likely to get votes for it if you take that approach.
• Share your article on Stumbleupon. The traffic will be hit or miss and fairly unqualified, but it’s still worth trying.

The above steps are a good start, but I genuinely feel success with blog promotion comes down to relationships, just as success in life and business does. The more relationships you have in place and the stronger those relationships are, the more likely your blog will get read — and the more likely your network will help market your blog to their respective networks. Here’s how I recommend approaching blog promotion as it relates to networking:

• Use good blog posts (NOT every blog post) as a reason to touch base with your network.
• Be strategic about who you personally reach out to with each blog post. Don’t reach out to everyone with every blog post you are trying to promote. If you cover a range of different topics on your blog — for instance, real estate, tech, and global warming — you should have a list of 10 people in each of those niches that you can reach out to.
• Email them about more than just your blog post. Take a look at their blog and mention something they wrote recently, or something they posted on their Facebook or Twitter accounts. If you are close with the person, you likely already know something recent, but that’s not always the case. And I think it goes without saying that you should be interested in what they are doing; it’s not all about YOU.
• Include something to the tune of “any help in spreading the word or feedback you can provide would be appreciated” in your personal note.
• If they respond to your email, write a thank you email to them whether or not they wrote about your article. This is more important than you may think.
• If there is someone you consider influential and you know them (and they cover a topic relevant to your post), call them to catch up — and make sure you mention your recent blog post during that conversation. This both not only notifies that person of your post, but also helps you build a stronger long term relationship.

Lastly, remember that you still have to write, record, or design great content if you want others to read it; don’t expect a crappy (or even mediocre) blog post to get picked up by others.

Are there other things you do to promote your blog posts? Questions, suggestions, or observations - share them in the comments!