Your listings should play a central role in how you bring traffic to your website, and with your Advanced Access Website we give your listings amplification by giving you the opportunity to syndicate them across the web. See details on our listing syndication partners on our Advanced Access Blog.

Secrets of Top Selling Agents™ presents Tamar Weinberg, Author of The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, in a FREE Webinar Thursday, April 29th 1 PM ET/10 AM PT.

Social Media: a Bird's Eye View
How to leverage social media marketing for your business

Register for this FREE Webinar Today!

OK, so you've set up your Twitter and Facebook accounts and even have a blog. But are you still lost in the social media woods? Get a bird's eye view with high-flying social media guru Tamar Weinberg, author of the popular Social Media Book The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web as she puts social media in perspective for your business with real-life examples and rules of the road.

Read more...

Hello Active Rain friends! Please check our official blog for updates regarding our recent data center move and the current system issues we are working to resolve ASAP.

http://www.advancedaccess.com/blog/

We appreciate your patience during this transition.

I just wanted to put up a quick post to remind you that our official blog is located at:

http://www.advancedaccess.com/blog/

Of course, we're always making sure to stay on top of whats going on here on AR, but if you're looking for information from us, you can either visit the blog or contact our Customer Support Team at:

TOLL FREE (866) 518-1571

or

Support@AdvancedAccess.com

Thanks and Happy Selling!

At this time most systems are up and running.  Specifically, certain websites will be running slowly throughout the rest of the day and the Classic 3.0 Virtual Office is currently inaccessible.  Email is operating and will be slowly moving through the backlog of messages from the past day and a half.  Our entire staff is working diligently to correct these remaining issues and we will continue to keep you updated.

On a positive note the resources available at this new location should help to prevent the very issues we experienced.  The new data center is a state-of-the-art facility with multiple fiber paths for internet connectivity, redundant environmental control systems, on-staff AC and electrical technicians and on-site backup diesel generators.

Please feel free to contact our Advanced Access Customer Service Team
Support@AdvancedAccess.com
866-518-1571

We are getting updates to everyone as quickly as possible... the above mentioned items are up and we will be getting more info out ASAP via our corporate website once that is restored to its current version.

We have our support center staffed to capacity as well to answer your calls.  1-866-518-1571.

- Anna

At this time, Advanced Access is having significant power issues at our offices and all services are currently down.  100% of our resources are dedicated to solving this problem with many various solutions being implemented at this time.   There has been no data loss or corruption of your services.

We are expecting that all services will be shut off for the rest of the day.  We do anticipate all services to be running tomorrow, Tuesday May 22.  We sincerely apologize for the downtime and are doing our best to get you up and running as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your business and support. We will continue to post updates at our Advanced Access Blog as we receive them and are able to post them from sources outside the office.

- Kristina

If you like to study the Google results for certain keywords in your community you may have noticed that there have been some changes to the landscape.  Many results pages that include the keyword of a local community or city now have a large map at the top of the results and three local businesses listed.  This has dramatically pushed down the organic listings for many local keywords that real estate agents target which makes it imperative that your business be listed in Google Maps.

With the new layout, as you can see below, it pushes down the organic search engine results a few more inches and placing quite a bit of importance on Google Maps and Local results. 

In the above image, three different sections are marked.  Number one indicates where sponsored ads are being run via Google AdWords.  Many times Google will show two advertisements at the top of the page and the rest of the advertisements are shown to the far right.  The number two position is Google OneBox results.  Scroll up to compare how it used to look for community or city searches and you will be surprised to note that it has almost tripled in size. The third section is where regular organic Google results start to show up.

How to Rank in Google Maps & Local OneBox Searches

Ranking your website in Google's organic listings can be confusing and difficult for most of us but at least there are many guides and helpful hints to show you the way.   Ranking in Google Maps however is more treacherous to navigate through because the service is so new and changing. 

First, you need to be signed up with Google Maps and get your site verified. It's very easy to sign up. Simply sign in using your Google account and if you don't have a Google account, it's easy to sign up for one of those as well. Justin from Christian Real Estate Network provides a possible solution if your office has already signed up using their office location by applying for a mail box from the UPS Store.

Second, make sure your physical address is also posted in other places around the Internet to let Google know you are on the up and up. Here are a few local search directories that you should be included in:

Other Important Local Directories:

CitySearch
InsiderPages
Live Search Local
Local.com
SuperPages 
TrueLocal
Yahoo Local
Yelp 

Third, make sure your business listing has a few reviews and/or testimonials through the local directory services. 

To read the full article that goes over these important tips, please visit our corporate blAAwg. :)

- Kristina

Dave Sifry from Technorati posted the quarterly State of the Blogosphere report. If you haven't seen it, it's worth a look. It's amazing to see the growth in blogs. One of the stats Dave posts about is that the blogosphere is doubling in size approx every 230 days.

To throw a little humor on that, Google Blogoscoped added in a few more lines to Dave's chart.

It's amusing how many spammers throw up sblogs and scrape content, websites, press releases, and more.  I have Google Alerts setup to track our company name and for a few weeks after we have new releases, they will pop up in the oddest places. Nice to see Technorati attempting to put a stop to them.

- Kristina

Who is writing these captivating blogs on ActiveRain that I am reading in my Google Reader each day?

I don't know.

To find out I have to click through. Clicking through on my Google RSS Reader is 'another click' and annoying. (To me, anyway) I just like to read them through my Reader. It's quick, it's easy, I can keep hitting 'J, J, J' and the posts fly by while I skim through. Many times I usually know who is writing the posts. The Lovely Wife has her unique style, I can usually pick out Krystal Kraft from her pictures, and Toby & Lenn drop descriptive links to their websites which points out the author pretty well. It's a good strategy too.

Why don't I know who the writer is? There is no 'author' setting in ActiveRain telling my RSS Reader the info.

I was going to post this weeks ago but I didn't. Why am I posting now? I noticed that my Google Reader has updated the author (I'm assuming AR updated something in their settings) which gives each blog the author of 'from Active Rain Blogs' and links to a Google search of ActiveRain blogs. Which is strange. I didn't know that field could be linked.  I was going to take a screen capture of it and then it disappeared.  Maybe AR is working on things, I'm not sure. Instead of 'from ActiveRain Blogs' it would be fabulous if the author could be the actual author of the blog. :)

Here is an example of the author setting under the blog title.

See how it says 'by William Slawski'? William is the only writer of the blog SEO by the Sea so hopefully many people would know he is writing the blogs anyway. (If you love to read about search engine patents, this is the blog to subscribe to, btw!) Another example would be The Bloodhound Blog who just recently introduced Russell Shaw as a guest poster and the 'author' field is extremely convenient for that reason.  I know right away if Greg is writing, or if it is Russell. 

Here is a blog by Matt but it has no author under the title. Since hundreds of blogs are written a day that are categorized as 'ActiveRain Blogs' it is a big folder to skim through. Having the author listed would be nice.

I remember reading Toby's post a few weeks ago about 'Spamming Your Own Site' and thinking while his point was valid, I actually liked the signatures because they told me who was writing the posts. When you are actually reading the posts on the AR site (and reading the comments!) the signatures and extra links are not needed as the link to your profile does the job just fine.

ActiveRain - For the RSS Readers around here, think about adding the author setting to your 'wish' list which must be miles long. :-)

For RSS subscriptions, each blog has it's own personal RSS feed. The categories and all the blogs have their own RSS feed as well. A few months ago when blogs were just getting started I subscribed to the 'Most Interesting' RSS blog feed from the AR Blog post about it. For awhile I would read the blogs in my RSS reader and then go to ActiveRain at some point and realize I was missing out on blogs. I didn't have the full RSS feed of *all* blogs.  I changed my RSS feed to setup all blogs written... and still realized I missed these 'Member Posts' that people would talk about.  That was when I realized I was missing out on some more valuable information and finally decided to sign up. :) 

I enjoy reading my blogs in my Google Reader.  It would be handy if the author tag was added. I still love to visit AR and do a quick skim through the Blog archive to view the comments and see the featured posts of the day though.

Thanks AR for being a great stop in my daily activities :)

- Kristina