Browsing made easy for Tablet Toters
One of the richest experiences I have had with my iPad is browsing news sites, articles, blogs and of course social media sites. There are now some really great apps to help you make sense of all the information you like to browse. Here are some of my favorites along with some specific browsing apps you may find useful. Zite Personalized Magazine. Their tagline is “the personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.” You can download Zite for free. Choose from hundreds of...
A Generational Housing Story
We just put our home on the market. As we were preparing the marketing, the words came to mind, taught to me by Martha Webb through her CHMS Class. She teaches to always ask a seller, “what made living here special?” For me, it was the opportunity to live in a house big enough to enjoy three generations living together under one roof for two years. When we build our 3500 sf home in 2008, we did so with the idea that one of our sets of parents would end up living with us. but sadly that did...
Webinar Q & A is as Good as the Presentation
Everyone month, The TechByte offers a free webinar to our database. Why? It hones our skills, allows us to interview people with new products, and makes us stay up to date on this ever changing world of tech. Recently we did a series of webinar on Working with Buyer and a Tablet and Working with Sellers and a Tablet and at the end we did some crowdsourcing with the group. We aksed them to share some of the apps they just can’t live without. Here is the list of apps that we presented during the...Editorial Calendars
Here are some great resources for editorial calendars and some good ideas for how to implement:
This is for blogging, but read the post, some great inspiration on what and when to post:
Demand Metric offers another one here:
Blogging Editorial Calendar by Socialologist
One with information on the editorial process Click here
2012 Online Marketing Plan – Do you have one?
The New Year brings opportunity. You have a new business plan and goal, and hopefully a new marketing plan that includes new technology to help your business. Here are some of the tools that stood the test the year and now are part of our marketing plan. So here it goes:
SEO:
- Review your On-Page Optimization and make sure it’s all complete – a free tool to try is www.websitegrader.com
- Think about keywords that you need to have exposure on. Use Google keyword tracker to find other terms you may not of thought of.
- Have a content strategy in place – through blog posts, articles and text that needs to be on your site
Site:
General Marketing:
- Review follow up emails – when someone contacts you are you sending a message that will help engage them as clients?
- Google analytics - are installed and configured?
- Check site for broken links (and fix them!)
- Update photos and content – throw out old content.
- Plan to review web stats regularly
Blog:
- Create a plan to post regularly, check out this post we did on this
- Check to see if your plugins are updated and you have some that help with SEO.
- Don’t forget to use Keywords/Tagging/Categorizing on posts
Facebook:
- What are your goals – put them in writing
- What type of followers do you want
- Create buzz
- Set up a strong personal profile
- Set up Fan Page with custom look. Make sure you have a special tabe that offers them something when theclick
- Make sure your FB badge is placed on your website
- Include your FB Page info in your email signature. (Try Wisestamp)
- Create an action plan to:
- Network and engage friends/fans
- Increase Fans and promote page
- Keep content updated
LinkedIn:
- Make sure your profile is set up and complete
- Request endorsements
- Participate in Questions and discussions
- Connect your profile to your other social media accounts
Twitter:
- Make sure your custom background done and compelling
- What are your goals – put them in writing
- What type of followers do you want
- Create buzz
- Montior your tweets to see if your getting reactions. I use Hootsuite (paid version) to monitor retweets of my posts.
Other social media sites:
- Find other relevant industry social media sites
- Google Plus
- Youtube
- Yelp and Google Places
- Flickr
- Trulia, Zillow
- Other?
- Create your profile and create action plan to participate
Video
- Consider a video strategy for 2012
- Create a list of videos you need to create
- Hire or put a plan to learn how to, in place
This is just the beginning. Remember if you need help with this, find out about our coaching programs at The Tech Byte.
Do you have a Social Media Business Card?
As we create more and more profiles online, a social media card may be a good solution. Our personal information was once manageable. Today we are overwhelmed by our online information. Every day more profiles, more contacts, more content, creating new problems for consumers and businesses.
What’s a social media business card ? It is a mini website or a virtual card that will hold all your social network identities just like in a business card so you can hand it over, or share the link to anyone. Its a fairly simple concept, where you just need to give some details, like your social media identities, a quick bio and picture and these sites auto generate the card for you.
If you have asked yourself the following questions a social media card site is for you.
- How can we make money not spend money?
- How can we help clients with social media?
- How can we drive people to our official Facebook Page?
- How can we increase our client base?
A Personal Profile Website or Social Media Business Card is all about you and your listings. It organizes your bio, your social network profiles, your content and your contact information via a single, easy to remember Website address.
One of my favorites is published by a company called Agency Logic. Their product is called Follr.com. They have a special product just for the real estate industry. Follr is a personal profile website organizing the chaos. It offers a simple to fill out format and the website has several tabs. They include:
- A personal “home page” to anchor information
- Your resume and digital personal brand
- Content and contact information
- Biography, video and professional summary
- Connecting to official marketing channels
- All your listings
For real estate, Follr offers to use of Rlty.Me for Real Estate Agents and Rlty.us for Brokerages or Teams.
Here is a great example. rlty.me/HeidiGolff
The best news is that is is FREE. Check it out at
Have you Googled yourself lately?
Online reputation management has become a very important topic in class. As we venture online and start putting profiles on websites to connect with prospects, the need to monitor these sites become vital. Why? Because people are talking about you!
I use a product called StepRep to monitor my husband’s building business. They help you find all the sites where we are listed and then I make sure our profiles are complete. Recently an email came through telling me to edit a website. The website was CitySearch so I changed some of the content and was about to go on my merry way when I decided to search Southington, CT businesses, where I live, work and play.
Wow! So many “bad” reviews and not one of the businesses had responded. If we are getting comfortable writing reviews about books, (Amazon), and shoes (Zappos . . . I love Zappos), electronic gadgets (Cnet, Engadget) Hotel visits (Trip Advisor) and now painters, electricians, (Angies List) why, oh why would we not think that consumers want to write reviews on us!
Look at Zillows (review an agent) and Trulias recommendations called Social Search. For the last few years the Houston Association of Realtors has allowed past customers of real estate agents “Rate their Realtor.” The consumer is already writing reviews about their real estate professionals. Why not be proactive? Invite your past customers to write reviews for you on Zillow and Trulia.
Now you need to start monitoring your presence online. Make sure you set up a Reputation Monitoring system.
Start with Google Alerts. Put in your name, your website name and any “usernames” or branding terms you use. Google Alerts will send the information to your email. Here is a link to a video that I did on Google Alerts. Click here.
If that is not enough, look at a reputation monitoring tool like one of the following. It is better to be informed so you can take action, isn’t it?
I know this list is not complete. These are just companies I am familiar with. Do you have any other suggestions?
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