In a follow-up to how blogging is over-rated, I am curious who your targeted audiences are. Please take a moment to answer who you are blogging to. Feel free to pass the link along as well!!
Author Archive for Chris McKeever Page 2 of 7
Quick little idea here. As I was exploring the interwebs today, I realized that REALTOR information is EVERYWHERE. If you change brokers, get married, get a new cell number, how do you keep all these in sync? You could always keep a list of sites that you added your info to. Or you could make sure all inbound links to website can be tagged and tracked, such as www.yoursite.com/index.php?ref=yelp (this one would refer to yelp.com). When you check your logs (you do monitor logs to see where traffic is coming and analyze your ROI right?) you can see which are being used, and make sure those are up to date. If you have plastered yourself from here to Timbuktu this works great, you only maintain the ones that are working for you - the others can lay to rest.
This of course fails miserably if your change your domain name.
Are there any other services that automate identity syndication similar to the listing syndication sites (Point2, etc)?
Ackkkk…before you burn me at the stake - hear me out. This is a continuation of my thoughts inspired by the Clareity Summit.
I think within the first 10 minutes, Gregg said those exact words ‘Blogging is over-rated’ — so if you are still looking for someone to go after once you finish reading this, it was Gregg!! Although I think it was on the tip of everyone’s tongue, he just called it out.
I can’t agree more. There I said it. It’s not that blogging doesn’t have a place, or when used correctly, won’t yield great results — its just that blogging isn’t for everyone, and used incorrectly is just a waste of the author’s time and could prove detrimental to any search engine placement you were trying to achieve.
Let’s whittle it down to where ‘blogging’ came from, ‘web’ + ‘logging’, or in other words an online journal. So blogging is journaling in the public view. Journaling in its raw form has had several studies showing that it can have medical, emotional, inspirational, academic, stress reducing, etc benefits. Yet not everyone does it.
But wait, with so many positive reasons, why doesn’t everyone do it? Simply, because it is not for everyone and when used incorrectly could amplify negative issues. Bingo - lightbulb - viola!! The same goes for blogging.
So how do I determine if blogging is for me and that I can create a valuable resource?
Tweeting, the final frontier
If you can’t get enough of us via the blog, inviting us out to speak at your sessions, or hanging out with us at the blog room - now you can follow our chronological thought patterns via Twitter.com. How we (I) use this, is still in the experimental phase - right now it seems like it will be a thoughtpad for myself and a way to quickly disseminate quick tidbits of CRT goodness.
If you aren’t fully sold on Tweeting, you can at least check out what we’re thinking here. You can also subscribe to it via RSS.
We’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about ‘How can Twitter fit in my business’. So, what better way to figure out an answer than start to play with it. We’d love to hear your feedback on how you are tweeting.
Don’t have a clue what I am even talking about? Heather Norton gave a few great twitter tips and tricks last week.
Good thing I like to listen to myself!
Replace Medical with Real Estate
This morning, NPR had a story about Medical Blogging. What I found most interesting was that is you replaced ‘Medical’ terminology with ‘Real Estate’ lingo, a lot of the concepts, issues, and tactics still make a lot of sense for this industry.
- Blogging Creates a relationship with never meeting the ‘Doctor’
- ‘Patients’ are hungry for this information
- Privacy Concerns - there is a fine line
- Some are geared towards marketing
- Others are directed towards their peers and/or the industry
- Unprofessional Blogging (ie venting and pouting your frustrations) just comes off immature
I like it when others do some of my homework for me.
Completely off topic. I woke up this to see the following headline in my Google Reader. It was completely upside down. Its text. Maybe I am a bit tired and the novelty of it upside got the better part of me, but OMG!
Check out the comment thread here
Andrew - please confirm that I am in fact not about to go off the deep end!
There has GOT to be a use for this, or at least I want there to be.
update: I am not going crazy! Phew. But how cool.
Stemming off my previous post — It doesn’t get any more clearer than this!
Jessica Swesey of Inman News interviews Bob Hale of the Houston Association of Realtors
This is probably going to be the first of a series of articles (how many I do not know) that were inspired by the think tank known as the Clareity Summit. As I was sitting there,so many topics came to mind. Unfortunately, I wasn’t TransTwittering like Michael Wurzer was(update: I was told this probably should be called TransTweeting). On the other hand - I also want to expand on them. Maybe Twitter, for me, could be used as a thoughtpad for me to get to later, and if not, at least I put it out into the public realm more so than on my napkin-note. Anyway - I am diverging bigtime.
At the end of the first day of sessions, Bob Hale (Houston Association of REALTOR Fame) gave a mesmerizing presentation about their marketing strategies, and just why it makes sense to fish upstream. I knew I had to dissect this and regurgitate some of the numbers that he presented.
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to your website. CRT gets asked quite often by REALTORS ‘How do I develop my website on my own?’ It has taken me a little time discussing this concept with all ranges of REALTORS to finally understand there are some definitions that need to be laid out first before that conversation doesn’t just end up spinning some wheels and going nowhere.
First, think of a website as a car. There is the body that makes it look sleek, there is the interior that gives you the experience of the ride, the engine that runs the car, and finally the gas that powers the engine. Without the engine or the gas, the car is just something that looks good. Without the sleek body, the engine can still get it places, but it may not be something other people want to be seen driving.
Now lets apply this concept to a website: the layout, graphics, text, etc are the body of the website - it’s what people see. How the website interacts with the user (the user interface) is the interior of the website - that which gives you the experience. The foundation/software/programming language is the engine of the website - it’s what runs the show. Finally, the data is the gas for the engine. Without data, your website will just be a fluff site.
The next set of definitions are more preferential, but they help in making sure we’re all talking on the same page.
