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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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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..