Virtual Results Blog

I managed the Carnival of Real Estate from when it was founded back in 2006 up until sometime in 2008, and it will always hold a special place in my heart. The CoRE was started to be a means to discover great blog content from the RE.net. It’s certainly had its ups and downs over the past few years (and has been out of commission for the last few months) — but I’m excited it’s making a comeback as a monthly rather than weekly carnival. And I’m certainly excited to be able to write the first monthly edition right here on Virtual Results!

Please remember to submit your best post of the month by August 25th (if you’re a day or two late, don’t worry about it)!

Tune in right here on August 31st for the comeback of the Carnival of Real Estate!

I just watched Jason Fried, the Co-Founder and President of 37Signals, speak with Bruce Upbin of Forbes on the Forbes Video Network; the full video can be found here. I’d urge everyone to watch the entire 9 minute clip. It hits home on an important point related to social media marketing — that many people have no idea where they stand, what they want to say, what their point of view is, or what they believe before they start blabbing away on social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook. The problem with that approach is that, particularly in today’s world where it’s easy to reach thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people in a relatively short time period — that means a LOT of people potentially can see that you have no idea what you’re talking about. And that’s damaging to your personal brand, which for real estate agents, could prove devastating to your credibility and long term business.

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.

Who owns your Content…

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.

You can visit this site for more information on writing and how to check plagiarism in your content.

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.

Just thought it was a really cool gesture of Tom Ferry to mention me in his new book “Life by Design.” First to acknowlege me at all… I have learned as much as I have taught.

Secondly, to be surrounded in text by THESE NAMES… was simply surreal. I know and respect each one of these individuals as great coaches, motivators and writers… I am truly humbled to be included.

Here is the acknowlegement:

I want to thank all the people who have assisted, coached, and
consulted with me over the last twenty years. Each of you have made
such an indelible impact on my life; the late Jim Rohn, Mike Vance,
Ron Arden, Theresa Jabbour, Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Jim Marks,
Gary Vaynerchuk, T. Harv Eker, and Mark Victor Hansen. These are
just a few of the inspirational leaders who helped me learn, grow, and
become a better coach.

BTW, the book absolutely rocks, and is timely as all hell.. If this business climate, or life in general has you second guessing yourself, read this book. It is a shot of inspiration.

Writing a blog post with the goal of ranking for a specific keyword and don’t know how to maximize the chances (note I didn’t say GUARANTEE) that the post will rank for your desired keywords? Again, since I’m not a real estate agent, I’m a little different in the way I approach blogging — at least on my personal blog — due to not making a living from the people I attract to my blog. I’m not trying to sell anything, don’t make money on advertising, or hope to convince people to hire me as a consultant. Therefore, I really don’t think about SEO that much when I when I write on my personal blog aside from the title of the post and the links/anchor text I place in my post. But that said, I thought a lot about SEO during my time at Zillow and have successfully gotten individual articles to rank extremely well for desired keywords on Geek Estate Blog and Zillow Blog. For instance, do a Google search for “real estate website providers” and you’ll see my blog post #1 on that list. So, here’s the way I approach posts that I’m specifically trying to make rank well for desired keywords:

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?

The Maxine Website is a potent blend between our Buyers and Brokerage sites…

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Here is the post from Jane Wells at Automatic (the owners of WordPress)

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…