How To Create A Fan Page
March 6th, 2010
It is acceptable to use other peoples videos the way we do here. The reason, it is actually just implanting their video on your blogsite. It helps the author of the video with traffic.
Jing Is A Most Popular Tool
March 6th, 2010
If you click and play the video above you are seeing here is actually a video taken using JING of a video on their website.
JING is so handy, even for just making photos of your screen or some of what is on your screen.
Social Media Marketing introduces us to new tools that are handy in many different no social media marketing ways. Like JING. I use it almost every day in one way or another. Sometimes I send a quick demo on something, sometimes I craft a video to answer questions.
This is truly a tool where the phrase “Try it you will like it” is right on.
Go to http://jingproject.com/
Links Are An Important Part Of Social Media
March 6th, 2010Links provide so much flexibility in all of your social media marketing efforts. On sites that limit how much text you can write, such as Twitter or Facebook, links allow you to write a brief statement and send the reader to your blog, website, or to an article composed by another.
A blog is a fantastic place for linking out. The video below demonstrates the many ways our networks blogs utilize the power of linking out.
How About Thinking Long Term? It Can Be A Vintage Approach!
February 25th, 2010
I guess the business climate and the economy has been so bad that many have jumped on the instant gratification band wagon. We all need it now don’t we? This need, or want, is keeping many on the sideline when it comes to a serious approach to a Hub (Blog) and social media spokes approach to a marketing solution.. Knowing this, we are approaching social media on a very basic level. We see the need and the problem. Our hope is that we can bring the success we see happening with some to benefit many.
Gradon Tripp posts a very relevant article today. Click here for the full post.
He starts with this: Marketing has often been likened to a race.
The traditional view of marketing — especially that of most short-term campaigns — has long resembled a drag race: launch hard, burn gas, go-go-go!
A lot of what I hear in meetings with prospective clients is directly tied in to this “need for speed”: how quickly will social media spike our sales? Boost our traffic? Increase our donations?
But in my view, marketing — especially social marketing — is more like the 24 Heures du Mans.
Photo from Flickr and by shmeeed
Good Natural Search Results Require A Natural Real Network
February 24th, 2010For those looking for our workshops schedule please click events in the blue bar above or scroll down.
Some of our customers subscribe to our Bloggle Your Mind (TM) newsletter. I felt it important to share some of February’s newsletter with the public. I probably will do that many times in the future and I hope it helps you.
Natural Search: First to make it clear to our very basic customers and viewers, natural search is the part of a search result that is not paid for. The boxed area in the photo below is the paid search, the results below and to the left are defined as natural search results.
I think most businesses and professionals prefer to come to the top of page one via natural search. Of course paid search can bring an advertisement to page one and we endorse that. How else can this marvelous tool survive? So go pay for search, please.
This post is taken from our upcoming Issue of our Bloggle Your Mind newsletter. It is written for those who want to appear at or near the top of page one in natural search. As referenced in my title I am emphasizing two components, natural which I call real and network.
First a comment on SEO or Search Engine Optimization:
SEO as defined by WikipediA is Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
Thank you WikipediA.
A presentation we once had from an expert in SEO led me to conclude that some SEO is truly not natural. His service would have cost our company several thousand dollars a month. This was many years ago and I think it is now down to several hundred dollars per month. His model was that he had hundreds of websites hosted on different servers. He had an elaborate system designed to fool Google and friends. It was actually a fake networking scheme. He carefully and gradually used a process that resulted in our website receiving hundreds of links from his system over time. It didn’t happen immediately as that is an alarm to the search engines. Had we subscribed to his system he would have encouraged us to trade a few links with his clients. Again, this is not real and what he was proposing was building on fake relationships.
Have you heard the phrase, Google Likes Links? They all like links. Bing likes links. You want links. Relevant links are most important. A link from a real estate site to a real estate site is important. If the goal of a search engine company is to deliver the most credible search then a link from a site with the same focus is more credible than a link from a site with no topical similarity to your site.
Here are some tips:
- If you copy another’s work as if it were your own – that is not real so don’t do it.
- If you copy a portion of another’s work and link to it, that’s building a network and natural. (Don’t take more than 1/3 of their content. Don’t take their photos without permission.)
- If you are a single website or blog you are not part of a network – you have a lot of work to do. You must write good content and make a network of your own. You can build friendships and get links. It will take more time than joining a quality network but you can do it.
- If you ask a mass number of people to trade links you are not doing it naturally. Don’t do that. There is a number where the search engines say enough is enough and ban you.
In my humble opinion the search engine founders deserve to be billionaires.
The proof is in how we use Google, Bing, and the others. We do this because we have learned to count on the natural search in our daily research.
Here are a few tips from part of our training: “Writing For Google”
- Don’t expect an article to be indexed if it is real short. Writing 125 words in a post is pretty easy and tells the search engines you placed some effort in delivering that article or content.
- Don’t flog your blog article with an overabundance of so called key words. Use the rule, “if it isn’t easy to read don’t write it”. If you repeat a word or related words numerous times or in numerous ways not only will people not return to your site because of your writing style, the spiders that are indexing your site won’t like it either.
- Make sure your content matches your title, category, tags, and bolds. That is part of the credibility the search engines are evaluating.
- Make sure that in most cases the framework of your website, the tagline, articles titles, categories, tags, the words you bold or underline, and the links that come to your article are all real and relative that you will be found in a favorable way?
Am I making a case you don’t need to be an SEO expert or pay hundreds of dollars for SEO? For some of you the answer is yes. We aren’t condemning all SEO. We don’t know all there is to know about it. For sure our experience tells us that using blog technology, even our network and technology and what we teach has amazing results.
There are also ways you can help the search engine that are legitimate. When their spiders are crawling your site they are looking to make conclusions. Is this site creating real content? What is the content about? What is the site about? How should we rank it versus the other websites on this topic? Is this content fresh? The following tips provide this assistance.
- Your site has a title right? Make your title relevant for the searches you desire.
- Have a tagline in your site. Have the tagline summarize the purpose of your site.
I suggest you visit http://neighborhoodsUndressed.com/ here you will see the latest from a few of our networks blogs. Some are experienced and some are new. See if you can notice what I am sharing here plus other ideas not written but obvious as to how we seek to appeal to Google and the other search engines. Did you notice how natural the link above was inserted? It is a link within our own network, so it is a back link. Back links are good, real good.
The best way to end this post is the way I started it. I do so by restating that good natural search results require a natural real network. Larry Cragun
March 5th Event Info: 4 Agent CE Clock Hours
February 20th, 2010
Click here for registration information on all of our workshops.
Click here to visit Issaquah Undressed
Clicks, Bricks, Or Both?
February 19th, 2010
Certainly there are those who are willing to hit the bricks. One of the largest and most successful direct sales firms in the country APX Alarm prospers as it has tapped into those willing to hit the bricks and sell door to door. APX Alarm provides quality products and top notch service for home security. Most of their sales force is made up of college students. As in all sales not all college students are up to the rejection door to door salespersons must go through to succeed. A logical conclusion is that some can succeeding by hitting the bricks.
My background of real estate and mortgage sales has placed me in the company of many hundreds of friends and collegues in this industry. How many if any were willing to hit the bricks? I can think of 1 and it wasn’t me. Oh I hit the bricks one day. I hated it.
The one I can think of was really successful. She was a top producer. She dominqted her market, a community north of Seattle. Today she believes hitting the bricks or as the industry calls it, farming, is a certain way to success. She doesn’t do it any more. She found her way out of sales into management, then ownership. Now that may be a good thing and may have been her career path plan. But more likely she got tired of farming. Was it the Seattle rain she got tired of fighting? Was it the rejection? Was it the disclipine required? Is it just too hard? Oh, I just thought of a second one. He farmed his neighborhood in Bellevue. He too doesn’t do that any more even though it was good for business.
I think just too hard and maybe just too discouraging might be the reason agents don’t sustain farming. It’s not hard physically, rather hard emotionally.
So may I conclude that none of us are likely to hit the bricks permanently?
How about phoning the bricks? I was in an office sales meeting where a company top producer had been endorsed for his success in cold calling. We now had this guys fool proof no lose guaranteed sure fire phone script. YIPPEE the manager explained. Let’s all meet here next Tuesday at 10AM and do this together. Together we will be brave. As I recall there were about 40 of us in the meeting. How many do you think showed up for this 2 hour team marathon? Answer = 3. I was one of them. Now don’t get my motive wrong, I had no intention of doing this. I was merely curious if I was the lone party pooper. I came a little late, poked my head in the room to see the crowds on the phone, noted the two of them entusiastically making calls, and I quitely closed the door.
But I have discovered something I can do, will do, do do, and will do more often. What I do is come out of my bashful shell and go places. I go to bank grand openings, local events, chamber networking events, and I even visit merchants to make acquaintances. What makes it so I like doing this? I have a blog I am proud of. More correctly we, my wife Kathleen and I, have a blog we are proud of. It is about our little city Issaquah. We tell people we undress all the positive things about Issaquah. The time I spend doing this type of marketing is amazingly fun and effective.
Recently at an event we picked up a buyer as a client. She was one that was interested in us. She asked back, what do you do? We write a blog about Issaquah I said. Oh, what is its name? Issaquah Undressed .com. OH MY she said. Its ok I said, it’s G rated. OH SURE she said. It is I said, here let me pull it up for you. So out came my blackberry. She was impressed. I told her we do this to build our real estate practice. OH I HAVE AN AGENT SHE SAID. But she kept talking about the blog. Here let me show you some Google results I offered. She was interested. After showing her our front page results on important search terms she proclaimed she was interested in buying a home and renting out her condo. But I thought you had an agent I said. OH I WAS JUST THINKING ABOUT THE AGENT I CALLED OFF HIS SIGN. HE HASN’T CALLED ME BACK YET. I THINK I WANT TO DO BUSINESS WITH YOU.
As Kathleen and I left the bank we left we noticed we not only attended and tooks some photos we would post but that we actually mixed with almost everyone there. We were comfortable asking people about themselves. Of course not all asked about us which was ok.
There are so many good reasons to combine the internet tools to the personal contact opportunities going on. Not always is the result a sale but sometimes. Perhaps always is the opportunity to get to know someone new and someone nice.
Clicks, Bricks, or both? I vote for both.
Irregardless of what business you are in, doing both clicks and bricks works. Oh, that makes me realize there is another option: none of the above. I still vote for both Clicks and Bricks.
Photo from Flickr and by Pieter Musterd
Duplicate Content Is A No No
February 19th, 2010
I have to laugh when I think of my own level of writing skills and hear others say they won’t blog as they have no talent for writing. It is a bad idea to let fear of writing for online readers hold you back.
The three common responses to this fear is to 1- not particpate and 2- copy others work 3- have others write for you.
For those considering options 2 and 3 you should know this. Google hates duplicate content. If the goal is to deliver in the natural search the most legitimate, credible, and relative content duplicate content would be a bad thing. They say that is Googles objective.
So if you are placing duplicate content on your site expect to be punished by Google.
A strategy I see some taking advantage of is to have a writer post articles that are the same that appear on mulitple sites. Technically that is easy to do. There are tools such as Microsofts Live Writer that makes it possible to write one post and deliver it to multiple sites. People are using this approach to have some content placed on their blogs cheaply. After all, syndicating the same article to many customers blogs makes it easy to charge less for the service.
I guess it’s too bad Google treats it as spam.
We had good counsel when we started the Undressed Network. It has worked to make our blogs effective in bringing in business. That counsel of write often, write about something you are a voice of authority on, use photographs, and be yourself was great advice then and is great advice now.
What does work is for you to take a piece of another article, add your own take on it, and link from your blog post to that authors blog or website. If you copy less than 1/3 of that article and provide a link to the full original article you avoid be punished by Google, the other search engines, and the author.
Using other peoples photos is a big no no unless they license you to do so. That is one reason I love Flickr so much. A large portion of their photos are licensed by the owner for you to use on certain conditions. When we are writing about Issaquah we take our own photos. But when I am off the wall, like looking for a horse laughing Flickr is great. It is a little tricky figuring out the easy way to find those photos. That is for another post.
Horse laughing photo from Flickr and by cindy47452
Workshops Really Work Well When It Is Mostly About You.
February 13th, 2010 
Unlike a rah rah speach, our workshops share concepts and get down to the nitty gritty:
- Should you participate in social media marketing?
- Will it be overwhelming?
- Will it be a waste of time?
- Will it be to uncomfortble for you?
- How do you manage it?
- How do you even work it in to your busy schedule?
- Even, should you work it in at all?
- How to make it work for you.
It is not a workshop that demands a lot from you, rather is all about you.
In The World Of Copycats We Have Something Unique
February 12th, 2010I have been told I am so convinced of our product and approach that I come of as hard selling it. With that in mind I share with you that I have rewritten this article to tone the hard sell down. Hopefully I have accomplished that.
There is a learning curve going on in social media. The application of social media is so huge and those who can benefit so numerous, that it has a lot of attention.
As in most things in our age there are technicians that get it quickly or that will attack the learning process early. Thus it is with social media. Also, as in many good things about technology the bulk of our society eventually gets it and adopts.
That is how it is and will be with social media marketing. What may look silly will have a value. What may seem overwhelming will become doable. What does look like a waste of time will become important.
Also, many of those who are early adopters will make a business out of persuading and teaching those who need to look past the silly, the overwhelming, and the waste and see the value.
We are some of those. We use what we teach. Our approach is to not make our customers technicians, rather to bring them to a point they are involved effectively.
We do admit, we started early, but only with part of it, the blog network we are building. We saw that value almost 4 years ago. As we went steadily on our way we saw the importance of what we had built. We began to see it’s power in marketing, with Google, and with people who found our blogs.
Understanding the blogs role with social media came later. From seeing how social media and the blog work together brought on The Hub And Spokes Solution.
So, first of all we aren’t experts in social media, we are just doing it. We won’t make you an expert, our approach is to make this work for you without your 1- being overwhelmed and 2- without wasting time.
We do have a lot to teach, don’t be overwhelmed.
So now about copying others knowledge. Who copies anyway? We all do. We learn from what is shared by others and taught by vendors.
When it comes to “how to” there is no patent or trademark for “how to”. So what we know, others know. We go to competitve seminars and expect others in this arena to come to ours. It’s ok.
So what is unique about our social media marketing solution? It’s “The Hub” and “The Hub And Spokes Solution (TM).
Others can keep it simple as we are doing. Others can define a solution that is flexible to a businesses needs. Others can price it competitely low as we do. However, no one has the “Undressed Blog Network.” The combination of things that make up our network, one being the almost 4 years it has been live, (great for Google), are unmatchable. (Ok I guess this part isn’t toned down. Sorry for that).
As you look into our solution, which we hope you do, be open to the fact we do get social media and we have the undressed blog network you can particpate in.
A Video Clip From One Of Our Workshops
January 18th, 2010
To view some of the testimonials of our Hub and Spokes Workshops, go to the blue bar above and click “Testimonials”.
The video above is of Patrick Flynn, one of our instructors, talking about helping your business go viral.
Our Message With The Hub And Spokes Solution
January 2nd, 2010It is a simple message: Social Media Marketing Is Important. It need not be overwhelming. It should not be a waste of time. The Hub & Spokes Solution is to provide basic “how to” information for those wanting to utilize social media, but are confused, don’t know where to start or what to do. You need a plan to be successful. The Hub and Spokes Solution can help.
Social Media Marketing, it’s a “revolution”. You can do it without being overwhelmed. It need not be a wasted of time. It is important.
Photo from Flickr and by kodak agfa
Testimomials
January 2nd, 2010I thought it was great. It will completely change our marketing.
Thank you.
Volkmar Gaussmann
Chens Acupuncture
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I so appreciated your workshop and I personally got so much out of it! The main thing was the identifying of my business and who was my target customers. I also appreciate understanding the Hub & Spoke solution. All of the avenues of business “spokes” all return to the “Hub” in my case the blog.
The workshop is very valuable!
Dina Vodopich in Partnership with Sophie Perkins Keller Williams Realty, West Sound Gig Harbor, WA
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Thank you for allowing me to participate in your Hub And Spokes Seminar. This blog concept has been really great and a great addition to my marketing. Referrals are the best customers and my Sensible Savings Undresssed blog has helped get referrals, and now little effort, people are finding me and are easily able to share my information with others.
Kira Bishop, Senior Loan officer, S & S Northwest.
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“I have been blogging in the Undressed Network since the fall of 2007. Since that date I have personally closed 21 transactions. I closely track how these people came to me. Of those 21 transactions 18 came directly from my blog, 3 of those closed last week.” Matt Thomson, GigHarborUndressed.com : REALTOR
