Always Leave ‘Em Laughing

The devil made me write this blog, and re-post it here.  I get a lot of comments on it, and I have no problem with anyone taking the idea changing it out for your market and using it because I believe in writing with humor. If you like it, use it.  WARNING: This blog post is NOT for the faint of heart

I call it “The Top 10 Reasons I Won’t Show You a Foreclosed Home in Tampa” (Tampa being the keyword in the headline that will get this blog to shop up on a Google search.).

I will show you foreclosed homes if you really insist and twist my arm and  I will bring with me my foreclosure-ready survival kit and you need to bring yours as I have written about below.

10.  The grass, if you can call it that, will be as tall as an elephant’s eye and the landscaping that was there will be growing across the sidewalks making it difficult to walk to the entry door.  Then there is the possibility that there may be living things in that overgrown grass and landscaping.  I suggest wearing waders when approaching any such growth, so pack them or bring them with you.

9.  Once the door is finally opened you will dodge mud wasp nests and spider webs always keeping in mind we have two dangerous spiders that like vacant houses – the Black Widow who spins her web from the bushes to the house and the Brown Recluse who likes to hide behind the lock boxes.  I will give you the code and a can of spider spray, you can yell to me when it is safe to come into the house after you check for spiders.

8.  The power and the water have been turned off, the bank expects me to pay to have them turned on, I think the lender who will make a lot of money on the deal should turn everything on, not me.  Therefore this house will be dark, musty and hot.  I will provide hand held fans and flashlights and nose plugs if needed.

7.  Now here is the really tricky reason I really don’t want to go into a vacant, foreclosed home-we don’t know if it is really vacant.  I suggest loudly knocking on the door as well as yelling as you enter before waving me in, because vacant homes have been known to have residents.  I will arm you with pepper spray.

6.  Now that you have assessed no humans live in this home, please be aware critters may have taken up residence.  If one window has been left open, one door, one dryer vent from the clothes dryer the owners stole there could be critters.  I will provide more pepper spray.

5.  Now that you have assessed the fact that there are no human or animal critters living in this house, look down.  That crunching sound under your feet is not a trail of potato chips, in Florida due to the humidity, they would not crunch.  Those are our state bird – the Palmetto bug also known as the largest flying cockroach known to man.  I have seen some as big as the State of Rhode Island.  Keep the waders on please.

4.  Keeping those flashlights on please train them to the wood moldings and anything else that is wood and I will at this time hand out magnifying glasses so you can get down on your hands and knees and look for sawdust piles.  If you see any then you will know that these are definitive signs of termites or other wood destroying organisms.  Nasty!

3. Please also train your flashlights to the corners of the ceilings in the bathrooms and laundry rooms where you might find mold lurking.  The advice by officials of the power company here is to crack one window on a vacant home so mold doesn’t develop – I guess they would rather have vermin move in than mold.   If there is a swimming pool be advised we do not have green pool paint here that is an overgrowth of algae and who knows what lies on the bottom of that mess.

2.  I know as you walk through these homes you will have noticed that there are no appliances, kitchen cabinets, plumbing fixtures or lighting fixtures.  That’s okay you want to re-design your new dream home to your perspective of what is acceptable.  If you purchase a foreclosure and get all the above cleaned up, killed, and repainted with everything brand spanking new here is the #1 reason I will not sell YOU a foreclosed home.

1.  You may not actually own it.  That’s right after plunking down all that money, doing all that work to make it YOUR dream home YOU MAY NOT ACTUALLY OWN IT and I don’t want to be sued.

(I hope you are smiling – and while I wrote it as tongue-in-cheek, I seriously do not show these properties. I let Larry, my husband, show them, he wears Texas boots I wear sandals.  My friend, Teresa Boardman, in Minnesota wrote me about sliding on ice in vacant homes after reading my blog.)

I apologize for the bug….when I originally wrote this the bug actually got people to read what I wrote-weird huh?

As a last suggestion – as much as I can I use “Greater Tampa Bay” or “Tampa Area” in my headlines.  People are searching by cities – your area is your keyword in your headline.  I hope you all come back

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Join “The Winner Takes It All” Club

This is a big week in real estate in Florida.  It’s ReBAR camp followed by the Florida Realtor’s State Convention. It will be a huge learning experience and I will come home totally psyched and tired in need of oxygen.

 

I hope that all readers here attend anything and everything possible wherever you live because things seem to change every day.  This is the perfect time to take any classes you have been too busy to take.  Many classes are discounted down because our boards understand money is tight. Search them out.

My state convention brings in the cream of the crop when it comes to social media advice.  I know most of them personally which is something else you should concentrate on doing.  Meet the experts, because in knowing them and reminding them you know each other, you can reach out to them and get answers to questions you may have. Read more..

Cheesy Ads + Junk Mail = Free Keyword Advice

If you write articles or blogs and if you don’t have a killer headline and compelling content, you may as well shut your computer down and stop writing immediately.

Remember when we sat down in English class and our teacher told us “words are powerful” and we all thought are you kidding me?  Words have overthrown kings, governed religions, and have caused many of us to fall in love.

However, words are not powerful enough unless they are the “right” words.

The right words make the difference between success and failure in your headline, your blog post or an article you are submitting.

Long before we even heard the term Search Engine Optimization copywriters understood what the right words could do for you. Read more..

The Down Low on SEO

Do you know that people pay tens of thousands of dollars to Google adwords for keyword assistance?  I am serious, people pay tens of thousands of dollars to figure out the right keywords to draw people to their websites.  It’s the old moth to a flame concept and if your flame is flickering your website is in trouble.

Let’s think of your website like a candle.  In order to keep the flame burning brightly, the wick needs to be short.  Short works when using your description on your webpage too.  Short and simple with rich keywords.  Think of keywords as being the oxygen needed to fuel the flame and keep it burning brightly.

I know this can be a confusing concept,  but hang in here with me.

You are going to start a website, or you already have one.  Who is your target market?  You have to know this to find your keywords.  What is your niche?  My target market is people who want to learn basic social media marketing.  This article is about basic SEO so guess what?  Basic would be a good keyword for me.  There are people who will enter “basic social media help” in a search engine and if I had a website that used the word “basic” at least 3 times, I might just pop up in their search.

You can Google keywords and start entering words that you think would direct traffic to you but when you see that 13,000,000 monthly searches were done on your word choice you need to understand that your choice will get lost among all the rest.

If you had your webside designed for you, open it up, put your cursor somewhere in the middle of the site and right click on your mouse.  Choose “review source” or “review page source”.  All kinds of interesting computer wording will come up but you will be able to see the word “keywords” and right after that are all your keywords.

If someone else wrote it for you – this is your chance to see the keywords they chose and you might want to make a phone call.

Back to basics now.  Remember this is the information age, and more than that it is the “What’s in it For Me” WIFM Radio age.  When people perform a search they are looking for something they are interested in-it is all about them. Therefore what is your hook?  How do you get them to your site?

They are using a search engine to get information, to answer the “why, where, when, what and how” of their needs.

The answer is in choosing the right keywords.  I ran the cost for a client today on the keywords he wants to use on his web page to get him to the first page of Google.  Are you ready?  The 5 words he chose if he ran a Google adword campaign to get him to the first page on Google would cost him $940 per day.  They were not keywords I could foresee anyone using to find him.  He would have to pay for them.

Worse yet if he could afford that account with Google what is to stop a bigger company with deeper pockets from approaching Google and paying $1200 a day knocking him down the search engine ladder?

Deep breath time – I am not advising paying for keywords-most of us don’t have the deep pockets to do that.  We have to be creative.  If we can’t do it ourselves there are people out there who will help you for less than $940 per day.

I know we all believe we are the most clever copywriters in the world when it comes to OUR webpages, OUR business ideas, if that was true Madison Ave wouldn’t be needed.  In essence we are not, it is essential that we start with the basic understanding of what it takes to keep the flame burning.

There are many things that go into building a successful website.  The #1 building block is SEO which consists of a a great title/tagline that is rich with your keywords, a great short keyword rich description about your business, and content on your page still peppered with rich keywords that ties it all together.

My husband uses the rule of 3 – making sure your keyword is mentioned at least 3 times, and the rule of 25 – don’t use more than 25 keywords.

I came across a really good website that understands the concept of clear concise keyword marketing.  It is:

http://imarketingsolutions.com/

I was so impressed!  Then I went and looked at a webpage a friend of ours has up and running which is of the same genre and the most glaring cardinal sin in writing stood out like a sore thumb, bad grammar.  I will save that for another article.

You need to always be watching your website, you need to add new content all the time, and you should be using a website grading tool at least ever 6-8 weeks AND after you make changes on your webpage.

Another great tool is Alexa.  Alexa will tell you what your standings are in the world of websites.  That means the entire world – our real estate site started as having 14,000,000 other sites ahead of us and we have it down to 835000 at this time.  Believe me we work on this constantly, it is not a set it and forget it thing.

When we run a website grading site, our score is 94.  My husband is striving for a 98.  My friend’s site scored 43 and he thinks he has a great site.

If you want the moths to come to your flame, your need to start with understanding keywords, there is no Genie in a bottle.  Roll your sleeves up and start your research.

Good luck and come fly with me again!

Carole

Carole Sanek is a REALTOR in the Greater Tampa Bay area and Director of Marketing for Castle Dream Real Estate. Carole has been in real estate since 1995 in both Indiana and Florida.  She specialized in waterfront second-home sales in the panhandle for years and she and her husband now specialize in the international market in Florida.
Carole’s social media experience started with blogging 5 years ago, and has expanded into hosting multiple pages on Facebook, managing 4 Twitter accounts, LinkedIn and 4 other blogs besides being a contributing writer on Social Media Advocate.

Click Here to mail Carole Sanek

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15 Ideas to Unblock Blog Block

OKAY so you have a blog set up now what?  You want to start writing, you thought you had some of the greatest topics in the world to write about and suddenly your river of ideas has dried up to resemble the Sahara Desert.  You thirst for ideas, and nothing appears on the horizon, not even a mirage.

I have great news for you, there is help and it is real – I am here with your own personal genie in a bottle to the rescue. Read more..

Compelling Content Rules

Bill Gates wrote about how “Content is King”.  In my humble opinion is “Content is the Supreme Ruler”.   Great content is what gets people to want to read your posts and/or your blogs.

When you are stuck in that dark place where words and thoughts will not gel in your brain your fingers suffer from paralysis.  They hover over your keyboard and you struggle to have a brain synapse that causes those words and thoughts to gel so you can post something intelligent.  We have all been there.  It’s frenzied activity.

Pretty soon your fingers cramp from being held in that position and you need help to bring them back to normalcy.

This is when you should take a detour.  By that I mean walk away from the computer and do something else.  Allow yourself to get distracted because when you are distracted many times new ideas form.

If all else fails, read someone else’s posts and/or blog and if you like what you see write your opinion about that and link your readers to that post.  There is nothing wrong with doing this now and then. Read more..

ConSIStency is NOT for Sissies

As you read more and more of my posts, you will see that there is a common thread – I like to play with words and ideas, and I hope what I write is coming through with some humor. I take social media marketing as the serious business it is, because it is my career. I also love to do it with humor.

Today’s topic is about being consistent but in a way in which you reap the rewards which translates into being successful.  ConSIStency is NOT for sissies.  If you make a commitment to be social then that means that you have agreed to socialize.  If you put up a Facebook page and think people are going to flock to you, think again.  They are thinking “who the flock is this person?”

If you set up a blog and post one article, no one cares.  You have to keep writing.

Success came to me after 3 years of blogging, and 2 years on Facebook, and I credit it all to 1) conversing with people (see previous blog post) and 2) being consistent. Read more..

I’m Loving Social Media Marketing Camp (on right now)

Join me! I’m at Social Media Marketing right now and loving it.

Wednesday April 6 from 12 Noon to 3pm Eastern – online and free!

It’s on for the next three hours and features 6 real estate social media experts who use Facebook Pages to find prospects, connect with clients, show real estate listings and build their real estate business.

Join me at www.smmcamp.com

Blogging and Videos and Bears, Oh My!

As Realtors many of us feel like we are on a grand adventure in these exciting (and violent) times of change.  Everything is changing, and sometimes I am pumped about the opportunities to use technologies, social media, and the Internet in new ways to connect with clients.  Of course, other times I feel overwhelmed with the challenges.

Thank God I started blogging a few years ago.  Every day adds another page to my learning repertoire of blogging, creating videos, mastering SEO, and building relationships using Facebook and other social media.  There’s no question that these times create an extraordinary opportunity for those of us who are early adopters.  I attended a recent BarCamp for Realtors, and it was packed with over 600 agents and brokers, yet that represented less than 2% of the Realtors in the area.

What used to work for agents and brokers for decades no longer works so well, and the most powerful tools available to us today are surprisingly effective.  But consumers are still learning, as are we, and there’s never been a greater opportunity for early adopters and anyone who is willing to learn and work hard, than there is today.

I love the ironic convergence that is taking place:  the Internet has made time and distance irrelevant in the world of marketing, and at the same time we are living in the perfect storm in this time and in this place.  I love it. Read more..

Deep Linking Strategies and SEO for your Real Estate Blog

I read a great article about deep linking strategies that you can use to generate effective SEO (search engine optimization) for your blog.  The idea behind deep linking strategies is to point links to highly relevant content pages within your site and not just your homepage. This strategy ranks highly for relevance in Google’s search algorithm and makes use of long tail keywords.

The article was written by the guys at IM Report C ard.

In summary they gave 5 main tips:

When leaving a comment on a blog, use a URL to link to a page on your own site that specifically related to the topic you are commenting on. Read more..

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