Real Estate Marketing Blog • George Fanucci

Intermittent Fasting. Week 8 Results.

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:59:38 -0700

Intermittent Fasting, Week 8. Personal Experiences, Results, and a Few References.

Feeling great, burning fat, preserving lean mass.

Forget about eating five smaller meals. Grazing or snacking is definitely OUT. Fasting is IN. Low-carb is in.

☞ When you eat can be as important to healthy weight loss as what you eat. ☜

Yes, this is based on real science, not junk science. Be willing to forget what you thought you knew, keep an open mind, don't knock it till you've tried it, fasting is both an ancient and a newly-rediscovered health practice!

What is Intermittent Fasting?

There are many variations on the intermittent fasting (IF) theme. Some recommend fasting two days per week, say Monday and Thursday. Others suggest fasting for 16-20 hours per day, four to six days per week. The plan I have been following is a feeding period of 4-6 hours per day and fasting for 18-20 hours each day. I am allowing one "cheat-day" every week or two, for both social and metabolic benefits.

Some variations on the Intermittent Fasting theme:

* The Warrior Diet (20/4 hrs fast/feed).

* The Fast-5 Diet. (19/5 hrs fast/feed).

* Leangains (16/8 hrs fast/feed).

* Eat. Stop. Eat. (24 hour fast, twice per week.)

Benefits of Intermittent Fasting?

By allowing the digestive system more downtime, the body goes into a type of healing mode. New brain cells grow. Insulin response changes for the better. There can be both a measurable metabolic shift (ketosis, lipolysis) to burning more fat for energy; and complex, interrelated endocrine and hormone shifts (Insulin, Leptin, Ghrelin, Adiponectin, etc...) Many other benefits are being discovered and scientifically studied. (See the links at the bottom: Ready, Set, Fast.)

Tips for Beginning Fasting?

Check with your doctor before beginning fasting. From my experience, I was concerned about low blood sugar. The first few days I felt a bit light headed and shaky in the afternoons. Whenever I felt hungry, I made sure to drink a lot of water, which I discovered was a good appetite suppressant. It may be best to ease into fasting. Start by skipping breakfast for a few days, then delay lunch until later in the afternoon. By the third day, my body was adjusting to longer periods without food. After two weeks, it was easy, nearly effortless. My mood was good, mental focus was clear, and I had plenty of energy. I felt great. My relationship with food had begun to change. I was becoming more and more comfortable with a very heathy and liberating detachment from food.

Intermittent fasting may be the easiest way to change body composition, burn fat, and benefit lean mass, not to mention many other physiological and mental benefits. I learned that some hormones will naturally adapt over the first week or two. I was amazed by how I felt much better, burning fat, not losing any lean muscle, without much hassle -- easy as pie, after the transition period.

Week 8 Results?

So far, after the first eight weeks, I have lost 12 lbs. and one inch around my waist. Feeling liberated from the need to eat breakfast and lunch. Planning to continue until I have lost 25 lbs. or 2 inches around the waist, whichever comes first.

With some background and training in fitness consulting and nutrition, this whole idea went against a lot of common wisdom, broscience, and established science from the 1980s and 1990s, so I did a lot of reading before jumping into this a few months ago. Some old studies were flawed, the paradigms are shifting now, and new strategies are being found. Below are a few of many good references that I found. Be aware that there is some controversy about this, and check sources, but also know that this is not yet mainstream -- many of the established, mainstream authorities have not updated themselves yet with the solid science and good results the current proponents (and some iconoclasts) are seeing. It may take a few more years (or a whole generation of scientists?) for the mainstream to accept this. Conventional wisdom changes very slowly. Clearly, more research is necessary. Meahwhile, I will continue reading, adjusting, and tuning my own expiriment-of-one.

References?

Eat, Fast and Live Longer with Michael Mosley (BBC / PBS)

http://video.pbs.org/video/2363162206/

British journalist and physician Michael Mosley has set himself an ambitious goal: to live longer, stay younger and lose weight, while making as few changes to his life as possible. Find out if the ancient idea of fasting holds the secret to a longer, healthier life.

AIR DATE: 04/03/2013; Expires: 05/03/2013 (The video was online at PBS.org in April.)

Mark Sisson, Primal / Paleo Diet and Fitness Guru

www.marksdailyapple.com

Intermittent Fasting FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions | Mark's Daily ...

Apr 25, 2012 ... These are your questions about intermittent fasting, answered. In this post, I answer all the most commonly asked questions regarding fasting ...

www.marksdailyapple.com/fasting-questions-answers/

Why Fast? Part One – Weight Loss

Why Fast? Part Two – Cancer

Why Fast? Part Three – Longevity

Why Fast? Part Four – Brain Health

Why Fast? Part Five – Exercise

Why Fast? Part Six – Choosing a Method

Why Fast? Part Seven – Q&A

Martin Berkhan, Leangains (pro trainer, fitness model, blogger)

www.LeanGains.com (Fat Loss Category)

Fasting Myths Debunked (Long read, see the updates in the lower half, Heading: November 4th Addendum.)

Selected Intermittent Fasting Resources... more coming... updated 5/24/2013:

Intermittent Fasting Roundtable Expert Panel Interview. (Martin Berkhan, Brad Pilon, Mike O’Donnell)

Intermittent Fasting Evolved, by Paul Nobles (Crossfit Trainer)

Evolutionary Fitness Philosophy (includes some notes on intermittent fasting), by Art De Vany

. . . there is a lot more out there, this is only a representative sample of some stuff that I liked.

. . . and, if you want some real science, here it is (links below.)

Ready, Set, Fast:

How Strategic Meal-Skipping Can Help You Lose Fat, Gain Muscle, and Get Healthier

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2012/01/25/intermittent-fasting/

Beyond vanity, the reported health effects of a well-designed Intermittent Fasting program read like a laundry list of live longer, live better benefits including: reduced blood lipids, blood pressure, markers of inflammation, oxidative stress, and cancer. Increased cell turnover and repair, fat burning, growth hormone release, and metabolic rate. And improved appetite control, blood sugar control, cardiovascular function, and neuronal plasticity.

Is Yelp Evil?

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 09:58:30 -0800

Please support this petition on the White House website if you agree that Yelp needs investigation. Ask your business associates about their Yelp advertising experiences. Please spread the word to help this petition go viral.

I decided that I could not trust Yelp anymore when one of my local small business clients experienced this:

Many good reviews, a few bad ones on Yelp. The day after canceling $300 per month Yelp advetising, most of the good reviews disappeared and all the bad ones remained. Coincidence? Seems very unlikely. Does Yelp use different "filters" on reviews depending on your advertising spend?

Here is the petition on the White House website:

Investigage Yelp.com deceptive practices

SIGNATURES NEEDED BY FEBRUARY 08, 2013 to get a response from the Obama Administration.

Many others have commented on Yelp's practices, here are just a few:

Yelp Extortion: The Lawsuit's Dismissed. Are They Back At It In 2012?

Yelp Review Filter

“Yelp is Evil” – SF Chronicle Newspaper Ad

More than just awareness, it's time something be done about this. What would be effective?

Wine Club Blog Challenge! Gift wines... Wine-of-the-month...

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 15:03:37 -0700

Looking for some different and great gift ideas?

Would you consider giving wine as gifts to your friends and clients? How about a monthly selection from Celebrations Wine Club? Makes a great thank you gift! You can choose from their entire list; for one-month, two-months, or more. Wine from California or Italy; Red, White, or in combinations. Wines are carefully and expertly selected.

The BLOG Challenge!

Active Rain Bloggers • You are cordially invired to take up the challenge!

Please write and post your entry about this blog-worthy wine club:

www.CelebrationsWineClub.com

The top two monthly winning blog posts will receive free gifts from
the Celebrations Wine Club, value up tp $75, as a thank-you gift.

Please email promo@wineclubpro.com with any questions, suggestions, or to
submit your entry in this challenge.

Please leave a comment below, also.

For more info, please go to: www.WineClubPro.com

Sponsor of this blog challenge:

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California Wine Clubs
Italian Wine Clubs
Combination Wine Clubs
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Celebrate with us!

Click the button below for more info on these great Wines-of-the-Month Clubs:

MorganHillAttorney.com is for sale

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 10:34:21 -0700

Morgan Hill Attorney?

This domain name

MorganHillAttorney.com

is for sale.

Investing in domain names?

You can acquire this valuable asset as an investment, or for your business and your professional image, to use it for a website, a URL redirect, marketing, advertising, email, lead-capture, blogging, etc. Let us know if you know anyone who may be interested in domain names and the domain name aftermarket. Just because the domain name is taken already does not mean it cannot be aquired at some price.

Please contact domains@vanduz.com to acquire this domain.

Morgan Hill, California

As of the 2010 census, there were over 38,000 residents of Morgan Hill.

The MARTINDALE-HUBBELL® Directory lists about 73 attorneys.

Morgan Hill Attorney produces over a million results on Google.

The search "morgan hill attorney" produces over 15,000 results on Google.

Over 400 more domain names for sale at www.SiliconValleyDomains.com

Internet Marketing Process for Real Estate

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 08:35:15 -0700

Outline of an Internet Marketing Process for Real Estate.

Integrate your web, email, social media, and print marketing strategy.

Assess

Your vision, business plan, objectives, business model
Personal style and how to maximize your assets?
Specify your target niche and your audience:

Demographics
Locale
Competition
Differentiation
Technologies

Articulate brand identity, brand image, value proposition
Marketing channels, resources
Website, blogging and social media presence
Key Performance Indicators, Critical Success Factors
SWOT - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats

Set Goals

Website, Blog, Media, and Content Development
Audience Engagement; Leads; Conversions:

Contacts per week
Transactions per month

Plan and Design

Website Content, Features, Design
Domain name(s) and URLs
Target Keywords, Brainstorm, Refine
Blogging and Social Media Presence
Business networking resources
Media and Branding
Processes and Workflow; Methods, Systems and Tools:

Lead Capture Systems
Followup and Conversion Systems

Execute

Website Templates, Prototypes
Design, Logo, Images, Photos; Layout, Style, Fonts, Color palette
Content Development, Copy-Writing, HTML and On-Site SEO:

Navigation Structure, Pages, Titles, Headings, Keywords, URLs
Community Info; Links, Resources
Testimonials, Proof of Production, Listings, Sales
Buyer info; Seller info; Referral info; Contact Me
MLS and IDX; Custom Search; Email alerts
Hyper- Local Market Data
Home Value Estimate
Lead Capture widgets

Inbound Links; White-Hat SEO, Quality and Relevance, Off-Site SEO
Sitemap, Directories, Social Bookmarks, Blogs, Articles, PR
Social Signals:

Social Media Development and Engagement
Blog, Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, etc.

Contacts database, contact management and followup tools; Email templates
ActiveRain; Craigslist; YouTube; Posterous; Tumblr; Instagram; Pinterest?
Media channels, resources, develop marketing collateral materials, Exposure

Listing presentation; Property Flyers
Staging, Virtual tours, Listing syndications, Signage
QR Codes, Mobile/Local, Google Places
Market update postcards
Lead Capture Postcards; Just Listed/ Just Sold, etc.

Measure

Business Metrics
Technical Metrics, Web, Social Media, Analytics:

SERPS - Search Engine Results Positions
Web Traffic; Social Media Engagement
Inbound Links (Quality, Relevance, Quantity)
Lead Generation, Followup, Conversion
Competition

Web presence, assess reputation and improve

Evaluate, Repeat

Measure, Evaluate
Revise, Maintain, Improve
Lather, Rinse, Repeat...

This outline was inspired by this contest. It focuses on aspects of real estate marketing.

Do you have a system to develop and deliver your marketing value to your clients and prospects, recurrently and consistently, with continuous improvement?

Before you can sell for your clients, you have to sell yourself. What works best for you?

Central California Coast Real Estate Features

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 13:27:22 -0700

On the scenic and sparsely populated Central California Coast, Real Estate has many unusual situations. It's more important than ever to use an agent with local expertise. The beach areas, small towns, and rural areas have many very good Real Estate buys today.

The California Central Coast area spans roughly from Carmel to Pismo Beach, North of Santa Barbara and South of Monterey Bay. Nearby are the renowned Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Hearst Castle, and Big Sur.

The Central Coast offers many natural wonders and spectacular views, mild climate, and coastal access points. Big Sur has many resorts, parks and campgrounds, much in demand with summer vacationers from around the world. There may be more campsites than homesites in the Big Sur area. Anyone up for whale watching, condor watching, or otter watching?

The town of San Simeon is close to the Hearst Castle, but more accommodations are available in Cambria, a few miles south. Cayucos is located on Estero Bay offering sandy beaches and a pier. Morro Bay has a fishing community and is also popular with visitors and Los Osos is another popular coastal residential area.

Some local real estate websites:

HomesForSaleBigSur.com

HomesForSaleCambria.com

RealEstateCayucos.com

HomesForSaleCayucos.com

HomesForSaleMorroBay.com

HomesForSaleLosOsos.com

LosOsosHomesForSale.com

HomesForSaleSanLuisObispo.com

Personally, I am very fond of this area and have great memories of many visits for camping, hiking, sightseeing, and SCUBA diving.

Aloha Hawaii LIVE • Concert Tour • May 2012

Wed, 09 May 2012 09:06:32 -0700

• UPDATE 2 •

The producer, Gary Vecchiarelli, wrote a TXT MSG to me:

"Change CANCELED to POSTPONED!" about 10 AM, Saturday, May 19th!

• UPDATE 1 •

Gary Vecchiarelli Productions, LLC of Las Vegas has regretfully informed me that this auspicious May 2012 Concert Tour — planned for 10 Cities in California and Nevada, May 16 - May 27, 2012 — has been cancelled. MAHALO for your patronage! Please stay tuned for news ... You may contact AlohaHawaiiLive at gmail. com or visit www.AlohaHawaiiLIVE.com where you can sign up on their guestbook — or sign up on their email mailing list for news updates.

☞ Refunds are in process.

This will be an unforgettable experience, not to be missed! — Even if you are not familiar with Hawaiian Music, this will be very enjoyable, entertaining, and interesting. — A rare treat for West Coast audiences!

Aloha Hawaii LIVE • Concert Tour • May 2012

• Ten Cities • California & Nevada • May 16 through May 27, 2012 •

Aloha Hawaii LIVE ®
2012 Concert Tour
Dates and Places

Click a city near you!

May 16 • Carmel • 2 shows

May 17 • Cupertino

May 18 • Hayward

May 20 • Eureka • matinee

May 22 • Folsom

May 23 • Santa Rosa

May 24 • Fresno

May 25 • Escondido

May 26 • Torrance

May 27 • Las Vegas

Aloha Hawaii LIVE - May 2012

• Featuring WILLIE K. - Maui
• NOHELANI CYPRIANO - Oahu
• LARRY RIVERA - Kauai

From the Pacific Islands of Tahiti, Samoa and Hawaii, Gary Vecchiarelli Productions in Las Vegas
brings you a Night of Island Music with Special Guests:

• Brian Pi'ikea • Sabrina Tahiti • Lafo Fire Knife • Ote'a A'pi • Ho'omana Band •

Share the ALOHA, join our MELE!

Brought to you by
GARY VECCHIARELLI PRODUCTIONS
6655 West Sahara Avenue-Suite #B-200
Las Vegas, Nevada 89146-2832
(702) 251-1515
(408) 298-2323 fax
(800) 385-2323

Questions?

AlohaHawaiiLIVE@gmail.com

   Find us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AlohaHawaiiLIVE

   Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/AlohaHawaiiLIVE

Bringing Aloha & Mele to a City Near You.

For more info on the tour and the performers,
please see www.AlohaHawaiiLIVE.com

Tickets are on sale NOW.

Find a city, Select your seats, Buy tickets online:

••• Limited VIP Backstage Passes are still available. •••

Let's see your comments, please add your own notes below . . .

. . . or, please re-blog if you are near one of the cities!

Can you hear OPPORTUNITY knocking — will you answer the door?

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:51:43 -0700

I think we are now positioned at the beginning of a PERFECT STORM for Real Estate (in a good way!)

It's SPRINGTIME, with historically low interest rates, and the Economy seems to be turning around.

How does the present situation look to you? How will you take advantage?

Can you hear OPPORTUNITY knocking?

Will you answer the door?

Spending some time, energy, and money INTELLIGENTLY at this time should bring you truly GREAT ROI (Return on Investment) for your marketing.

What is your 2012 Marketing Plan?

I.E. Internet Marketing, Blogging, Social Networking, ActiveRain,
CraigsList, Postlets, QR Codes, Real Estate Property Flyers,

Real Estate Postcards, Real Estate Newsletters,

Real Estate Market Reports, etc...

Let's inspect, study, and brainstorm about what is working and what is not working for you, so we can improve your results.

My goal is to mentor, coach, and train you and your team to help you to get you where you want to be in 2012.

At this time, the smartest thing you can do is to invest wisely in your marketing, branding, and professional image, to stand out from the crowd.

Time for Spring-Cleaning!

Let's measure what's working, what isn't working, try some new things, and do more of what works and less of what doesn't work.

Are you spending as much on marketing your listings as you spend on marketing yourself? Spending on listings helps you short-term, spending on yourself helps long-term. You must do both, design well and allocate your budget intelligently.

☞ Take a good look at what you have been doing, and
see what you can do differently or do better now. ☜

When you have time, take a look at the CoreFact Real Estate Marketing System, to integrate your web and print marketing.

Capture more leads to
Build your sphere-of-influence,
Get more listings, and
Promote your listings to
Close more transactions!

How are you measuring your marketing results? What's your 2012 Marketing Strategy?

Let's talk? I have worked with hundreds of agents over the past five years and accept a very few new agents each month to provide new marketing technology that works.

:: Pro-Tip ::

Create property flyers online using professional templates,

download FREE, printable PDFs.

http://bit.ly/CoreFact-1side-Flyers

CoreFact offers unsurpassed results for targeted, measurable, Real Estate lead capture,

and cost-effective Marketing ROI. Ask me how it can work for you...

The New ActiveRain?

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:44:13 -0800

ActiveRain is a very classy act! (Did you see this last night?)

What have YOU noticed about the NEW ActiveRain?

— i.e. new since Thursday, 2/16/2012 —

Please leave your comments, and I will also log mine, below.
Be constructive, be a good citizen, and be considerate toward the developers — who will work with any complaints.
Share your appreciation about whatever you like about the new AR experience, too.

Thanks for taking good care of us, ActiveRain! This stuff is not easy.

(I should know, because as a Systems Engineer, and IT Development Manager,
back in the 1970s — 1990s for some large "mission-critical" systems...
I had responsibility for some big upgrades and database migrations.)

I am eagerly looking forward to seeing and using all the new stuff!

Please add your comments below, and I wlll add new links here, as I find them, on any new ActiveRain features?

Links will be added here, as they are found, please check back!
It may be the case, upgrades of the back-end system may not be so visible.
A performance improvement of 25% can help us all, but is nearly imperceptible to most users.

Here is a screen shot I made last night:

The text reads:

Intermission

We're working behind the curtains to improve ActiveRain…

It's hard to wait, but new features, bug-fixes, and other goodies are coming soon!

That was what I saw between about 8pm Wednesday night and 2am Thursday morning...

Which looks so much better than something like this:

Meanwhile... here is a freebie for you!

Create your own property flyers online, using professional templates,

download your FREE, printable flyers, as PDFs:

http://bit.ly/CoreFact-1side-Flyers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CoreFact offers unsurpassed results for targeted, measurable,
Real Estate lead capture,

and cost-effective Marketing ROI.

_____________________________

George Fanucci

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

Very Impressive,
ActiveRain!

2/17/2012

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

The Next Big Thing? :: Pinterest :: What Is It?

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 09:04:03 -0800

IF you are a real estate professional using Pinterest, or have any tips or questions, please check-in via the comments. (Add links? Yes!)

What is Pinterest ?!

A VISUAL tool ...

trying to describe Pinterest is like trying to tell someone what a strawberry tastes like, just try it!

It may take just a bit to wrap your mind around it, but as soon you begin to use it, it becomes very easy, yet very powerful, as a visual tool for collecting, saving, storing, organizing, curating, sharing, and discovering stuff you see and like on the web.

You may or may not have heard of Pinterest. If not, you soon will. I just discovered Pinterest this week.. I'd been hearing (or reading) it mentioned for awhile, for a few months or so ... but never took the time to look into it, until this week, Wednesday. Now, It's only Friday, and I am so very impressed, and infected, I had to share this on ActiveRain!

Pinterest users have skyrocketed from 50,000 (December 2010) to 1 million (in August 2011) to 12 million (in February, 2012.) WOW! It could be the next big thing? Pinterest is growing a rate of more than a million new users per month... as of mid-February, 2012. Not bad, for a start-up. Pinterest is based in Palo Alto, CA.

"Nearly 6 out of 10 users are women aged 25 to 44," Mashable reports. So, it's not just for geeks, or high school & college students... unlike the beginnings of some other social networking tools.

Ian Shafer writes: "Pinterest’s growth rate recently has been staggering, according to a recent post from Hitwise. And it’s referring a ton of traffic to retailers — even more than Google Plus and Twitter."

Why use Pinterest?

I've been exploring Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous, Imgur, Opez, and other micro blogging, and simple sharing, social website tools, for personal and small business use, over the past year or two. Choosing one new tool every few months to discover, experience, dissect, evaluate, and understand. Finding the competitive advantages, disadvantages, and best uses for real estate agents, small local business professionals, or family photo sharing and social network use is my goal.

Pinterest may be the newest, simplest, most elegant, yet powerful and useful tool of them all... for organizing and displaying and annotating and sharing visual things, visually.

Yes, there are some themes for Tumblr that could make something a bit like Pinterest, but they are not nearly so easy and so powerful — Pinterest itself is going VIRAL, now.

OK, what is Pinterest, & how to use it?

Pinterest is a new way to organize/ store/ post your bookmarks to web-pages, and to share them. Also, to discover stuff others like that are similar to your likes. Because of the social sharing, and the Likes, it becomes a tool that may also be used for marketing.

A web-bookmark is now a Pin. A folder is a Board. Each web-page MUST have a noteworthy image: photo, diagram, video, etc. to use as a visual label.

You can create your very own Pin-Boards, with your own topics, or titles, like labels on boxes or albums of photos.

Then, you Pin things (using a photo as a key link) from any web-page, or your own image files, for photo sharing!

{Other users can browse your Boards, your Pins, and then like or re-pin them on their boards... Like shared, visual, Social Bookmarks.}

Click on a board to see its items, click on an item (aka Pin) to see more details, and then click on the pic to go to the original source, hopefully. (If you don't get the source, you can always try tineye.com to help find it.)

Each board has a subject category (from a list of about 30 or more built-in topics, such as: Architecture, Art, DIY-Crafts, Travel, Products, Men's Apparel, Women's Apparel, Science & Nature, or Other, etc....)

You assign your own titles to each of your boards, which you put it into one of those built-in categories.

Boards can be like Projects, Locale-Lists, Wish-Lists, Photo albums, Book-lists, Movie-lists, Topic-logs, Food/ Drink/Recipes, or an "electronic junk drawer" for a bunch of your favorite web links, indexed by a memorable thumbnail image from a web-page, each under a topic-title-heading that you make.

Whatever you like, or want to put into a grouping, Pin-It!

You must also put a caption, or some brief notes (a few characters, a word, or up to a few hundred characters) under each Pin. Also, you can type @username to mention other users in the caption. When you Re-Pin something you see on Pinterest that you like, you may use the old title from the last user, or enter your own, or edit/add to theirs. It's up to you. It's your pin.

You can choose to share your PinBoards on your Facebook timeline (wall) or not.

You can choose to share your Pins on your Twitter blog, or not.

When you sign up, Pinterest may use your Facebook or your Twitter profile picture, automatically. You can change it later, if you want. The profile picture is also your thumbnail/ icon/ avatar image label. Pinterest joins you with your friends who are already on Pinterest, automatically.

How to Begin to Explore Pinterest?

Start out by exploring two or three of your favorite categories, here is a partial list, click a few links:

... those show you Pins which are indexed by the category assigned by users to their boards where they put the Pins.

Or, to see what's popular, right now, on Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/popular/

.... also Popular Videos: http://pinterest.com/videos/

Or, check out what someone has pinned on their boards, to see how it's actually used: (stats below are as of 2/15/2012.)

My daughter has made some Pinterest Boards: Here is the link to Amara's Pinterest (Pin-Boards) pinterest.com/afanucci/	::	Amara Fanucci 175 followers, 111 following 15 Boards · 325 Pins · 8 Likes
... and mine... which I just started this week pinterest.com/gfanucci/	::	George Fanucci 2 followers, 25 following 14 Boards · 30 Pins · 7 Likes
... and one of the Pinterest founders: pinterest.com/sharp/	::	Evan Sharp 810548 followers, 1173 following 95 Boards · 3100 Pins · 6837 Likes
... and the other Pinterest founder: pinterest.com/ben/	::	Ben Silbermann 883412 followers, 1377 following 70 Boards · 3769 Pins · 4208 Likes

Want to get started?

You need an invitation to join Pinterest. If you request one from Pinterest, there is a long waiting list. If you are invited, you can get in as soon as you accept the invitation. Tip: Ask a friend to invite you.

Your Pinterest LOGIN is your EMAIL address (or your USERNAME) Usually, you choose your user name as your own name or your company name, for branding. The URL for all your Pinterest Pinboards will contain your UserName, such as you can see above. It must be unique among Pinterest users.

You MUST link your Pinterest account with either your Facebook or your Twitter account. They are trying to make sure that only REAL people are enrolling, and to facilitate sharing outside of Pinterest, to bring in more new and returning users.

For a business, you can use your logo as your avatar/ icon/ profile pic. Profile pics are from about 100x100 px to about 180 x 240 px (scaled) ??? Pinterest seems to use the top part as a small square icon-avatar-image-tag for your posts.

Lastly, you need to install the Pin-It bookmarklet into your web-browser bookmarks bar ... the magic button that will Pin a web-page onto one of your Pin-Boards with any large-enough image from the page, into your Pinterest account.

W A R N I N G : Pinterest can become very addicting...

Also, be willing to explore outside your circle of friends and immediate interests. The danger in these social network sharing tools is we can become isolated (marooned?) unto our own small island, one we create for ourselves. Step outside your territory...

Guideline: "Try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion." So, you can make a board for each town or locale, or listing, and also make boards for your other personal interests. Express anything you care about.

Pinterest = Home & Hearth, and therefore Real Estate?

Who uses Pinterest? — According to Experian Hitwise:

"Boomers and Boomerangs are the group most likely to visit, particularly the Pinterest website (comprising over 10% of visits). This group of consumers is characterized as baby boomers and young adults who are heavy web users who spend time on house and garden, sports and fitness, and family-oriented websites. This information is useful to companies who wish to target their content to be “pinned” by Pinterest users."

So, it looks like prospective Buyers and Sellers, especially during DIY, leisure, or hobby time, will be on Pinterest?

How will it evolve? How would curators be monetized? Will there be advertising opportunities? Time will tell.

Reports from retail sector indicates more hits from Pinterest than from some of the big guys... Check the links below.

What could go "viral" on Pinterest? Anything with a high visual appeal.

Read more about ...

Pinterest Etiquette <== Official tips

How to Use Pinterest for Your Small Business <== link to Intuit's Small Business Blog

_________

:: See also, PINTEREST statistics (click the pic below, a link to hitwise) ::

Share and Enjoy! If you want an invite, let me know.

Found these after writing the above. Good links about Pinterest, How-to, and Real Estate Marketing...

Updates:

Brad Andersohn : ActiveBrad "Z" Blog : Posted on 02/12/2012

Pinterest - A Social Cataloging Community - A good visual summary, and good comments... lots of discussion.

Please leave a comment here, before you rush over there! Thanks...

Helpful stuff for Pinterest beginners:

Where is it on Pinterest? Posted by debsanswers in pinterest

San Jose Mercury News, 2012.03.03, front page news:

... more to come ... please check back ... and see comments below, subscribe ...

Found on Pinterest:

From lifehacker.

:-)

George Fanucci

Newly hooked on Pinterest!

2/14/2012

Real Estate Marketing Plans: Most Effective Marketing of 2011

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:25:59 -0800

Looking for a way to put your marketing plan on a solid footing?

How does your 2012 Real Estate Marketing Plan and your marketing budget stack up with other agents?

Here are survey results of nearly 2,000 real estate agents;

"What is the most effective real estate marketing or advertising that you do?"

Key points:

Referrals are #1. How are you keeping in-touch with your Sphere-of-Influence?
Direct Mail, Blogging, and Internet Marketing are important items for your Marketing plan.
ActiveRain, CraigsList, and Facebook are essential tools for your Marketing.

Best tools for Direct Mail?

CoreFact (Real Estate Marketing System) integrates your Direct Mail with your website and provides a Lead Capture System.
Besides keeping in-touch with your Sphere, you can use CoreFact for demographic or geographic farming.
Just Listed! Just Sold! postcards, seasonal postcards, and property flyers, too.

Create your own property flyers online using professional templates,

download FREE, printable PDFs:

http://bit.ly/CoreFact-1side-Flyers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CoreFact offers unsurpassed results for targeted, measurable,
Real Estate lead capture,

and cost-effective Marketing ROI.

_____________________________

Here is the original article on the Real Estate Marketing survey results:

Via ActiveRain Corp.:

Real Estate Marketing Plans

Do you have your real estate marketing plans for 2012 ready?

With SO MANY alternatives for real estate marketing plans, are you confused on what to do in 2012?

So as you develop your 2012 real estate marketing plans, here is some great food for thought:

ActiveRain, the largest blogging platform and professional social network in real estate, conducted a survey of 1,910 real estate professionals asking the simple question of "what is the most effective real estate marketing or advertising that you do?"

The results:

Referrals (including word of mouth and sphere of influence) were overwhelming the most preferred marketing with 26% of responses.

Blogging was #2 with 13% of responses. (Keep in mind that the survey was conducted on ActiveRain, so these results may naturally be skewed to blogging).

Direct Mail continues to be incredibly popular. Direct Mail includes post cards, mailers, and newsletters. Direct Mail also received 13% of responses.

Internet Marketing as a general category received 12% of responses. Our assumption is that Internet marketing is generally speaking pay per click marketing on Google, Yahoo or Bing or lead generation from a number of different sources.

Networking Networking includes partner referrals and face-to-face meetings. Face-to-face networking received 8% of the responses.

(Share these stats - link to this article: http://activerain.com/blogsview/2641172/real-estate-marketing-plans-most-effective-marketing-of-2011)

As you can see based on 2011 real estate marketing plans, real estate professionals continue to favor more traditional offline, "tried & true" hand to hand real estate marketing techniques. Though the general bucket of Internet marketing & blogging are equivalent to direct mail, the top marketing techniques tend to be more offline - referrals, direct mail, networking, working with past clients, open houses, door knocking and cold calling. Hard to know if ActiveRain is the same as blogging and if Zillow or Google are the same as Internet marketing, but interesting to see that from a response perspective, that Open Houses are more popular than any one web site AND Door Knocking is more preferred than CraigsList and FaceBook.

When real estate professionals were asked, "What is the most effective real estate marketing or advertising that you do?" only a small number of real estate web sites were mentioned in reasonable frequency: ActiveRain, CraigsList, FaceBook, Zillow and Google. Of course, blogging and Internet marketing are large categories with a lot of different companies. But there were very few mentions of Wordpress or other ways to market online. Noticeably absent were Trulia and Realtor.com Though we believe ActiveRain is a very powerful blogging platform, fans of ActiveRain are likely over-represented in the survey. Kudos to Zillow to have name recognition equivalent to Google in the real estate industry.

For 2012, here are the key questions to ask:

How important is developing your REFERRAL BASE? How are you going to do it?

Are Blogging and SEO part of your 2012? If so, what to do - ActiveRain, Wordpress, Blogger, or other?

Direct Mail continues to be an important part of the real estate professional's marketing mix. It is amazing, but true. Direct Mail allow neighborhood targeting unlike online marketing. What kinds of direct mail campaigns will you be using?

Internet Marketing needs to be part of your 2012 marketing mix, but there are a lot of options from pay-per-click advertising to lead generation to Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com

ActiveRain is great place to start the learning process to figure out the best Internet marketing strategies to achieve your personal and financial goals in 2012!

Share this blog post! Either blog about it or share on your social networks. Link to and reference this blog if you use this content: http://activerain.com/blogsview/2641172/real-estate-marketing-plans-most-effective-marketing-of-2011

OOPS! A story about the Google cache

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 19:59:17 -0800

Update!

Testing 123 {20120212abc123test}

Test. Test. Test. Testing 123. Test. Test. Test. 1 2 3 4 5 Testing. 20120212abc123test. Test.

... an exercise to see how long it takes Google to update the web page cache. Any guesses? Hours? Days? Weeks? Months? Check back for updates in the comments...

Google Cache

What to do if you accidentally post a draft, which is en stored in the Google cache?

Lessons Learned

If you update the page, Google may not visit the page again for awhile (days or weeks) and even if the page content changes, the Google cache is not always updated.

See comments below for some details of this story...

What is your data backup strategy?

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:56:09 -0800

ALL hard drives will eventually fail. Do you have a data backup strategy?

Don't put all your eggs in one basket! Like baskets of eggs, the data on your hard drives is fragile...

I recently had an internal hard drive failure, and did not lose any of my data, but it reminded me how important a data backup is. "Never trust your valuable data to any single storage medium" is my rule.

If you don't already have Dropbox, you will get an extra 250MB (total 2.25GB) by accepting this invitation. Then, you can also invite your friends, and you each can get 2.25GB, with another 250MB free, for each one who signs-up.

Dropbox is a very good place to save, store and share your files "in the cloud." It's secure, and free. IF you have more than a few GB to store, then there would be nominal fees.

Dropbox works with your PC or Mac, your desktop, your laptop, your smart phone, your iPad, etc... So you can backup, and.or share data files among your devices, or with selected friends, safely and securely.

Please accept your personal

Dropbox invitation HERE, <== click it!

and we will each get an additional 250GB over the 2GB standard, for free.

Here is your invitation from me to join Dropbox: http://db.tt/LaGOIM2s

Why Dropbox?

You never want to have all your eggs in one basket...
On your PC or Mac Hard Drive?
IN your Microsoft^® OUTLOOK data, address-book contacts, emails...
On Google... Gmail... Google Docs...
On Apple's iCloud...
On Dropbox... etc...
It's a handy way to securely share stuff, among your own devices, or with friends.

Pick at least one (or two) CLOUD-based locations to keep your most important data.

What's Your Data Backup Plan?

What if you lost your smart-phone? What if your hard-drive crashed? What if your laptop were stolen?

Be prepared for the worst, and make a good backup plan for your data:

• Use a big USB flash-drive? A 32GB USB flash drive now costs under $40.

• Use a terabyte USB external drive? A Terabyte now costs under $100.
(A terabyte, abbreviated TB, is 1,000 GB or 1,000,000 MB, or over 200 DVDs!)

• In the Cloud, via Google, iCloud, Amazon, HP, BOX.net, SugarSync, or Dropbox?

Do a data-backup at least once a week. It's good to use a different removable storage, with rotation monthly. Swap that USB Thumb Drive with the one in your Safe-Deposit box, once a month. How much is your data worth?

Besides using the cloud for my data that is updated often, I use Apple's Macintosh TimeMachine for my weekly backup. That saved all my data from the hard drive failure. It takes about 20-30 minutes, once a week, for that TimeMachine backup of my 500 GB hard drive. I dismount, unplug, and put that drive in a safe place, offline, when not actually doing the weekly backup. TimeMachine also permits continuous, online backups, but I guess I am just too paranoid...

But, is Dropbox secure, reliable, versatile, and here-to-stay?

Dropbox CEO: We’ll integrate with everything

Cloud-storage startup Dropbox just closed a $250 million funding round...

Having used Dropbox (and Sugar-Sync, and Google cloud, and Box.net) for more than a year, I can say they have all been reliable and highy available. You can get 2.25GB for free from Dropbox, use my link. Add another 250MB for each friend who accepts your invitation to join Dropbox, too!

UPDATE: Not just for backups, Dropbox also makes it very easy to (securely) share folders and files between you own devices, and with your team: Your Desktop, Laptop, Home, Office, iPad, Tablet, Smart phone, iPhone...

Need a few good links for your website or blog? Try OPEZ.com

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 15:13:48 -0700

What is OPEZ.com?

Let's have a look at OPEZ.com — It's a new networking tool and a referral magnet for local service professionals and small business owners. Service professionals such as contractors, interior designers, hair stylists, DJs, caterers, business consultants, insurance agents, real estate agents, etc. all can benefit from an OPEZ profile, for local networking, referrals, and client testimonials.

Need a few good links into your website or blog? Your opez profile is simple, yet SEO and link-friendly. I can recommed OPEZ.com as a great new resource for promoting your website and your business, and it's still FREE.

"We Love Opez: Stylists, Personal Trainers, Masseuses, Bartenders, Managers, Sales Associates, Realtors®, Professionals, Local Business Owners..."

Every website or blog needs as many good links as it can get... you can put some links, with anchor text, on your OPEZ profile. Search engines like Google seem to like these links, they have good SEO value.

OPEZ fits in the gap between Twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Facebook... It fills a valuable niche for local small businesses and service professionals. Clients can post reviews, and you can network with diverse local service pros and business owners.

Simply post your brief OPEZ profile, add links, update your OPEZ mini-blog with a comment or two, and get brief reviews from a few of your best clients. Network with local resources and associates, get recommended, and build an active fan base.

Today's OPEZ front page, screenshot:

Why choose OPEZ?

There are many other alternatives, but most have become too bloated with features and ads, are too restrictive, or have become very costly. For now, OPEZ.com remains very simple yet very powerful, elegantly clean, and FREE.

It's very easy for clients to post brief reviews, and when you get a few reviews and recommendations, you can be featured on the OPEZ front page.

Even if you don't have a blog or website, OPEZ can be a simple way to fulfill your need for a web-presence. If you already have a blog or website, links from your OPEZ profile can help your Google search results. Links from your OPEZ to your facebook or twitter can help make it easier for people to find you by using Google search. Make sure to use good keywords to label your anchor text for those links. Need any help setting up your OPEZ profile? See some examples, below.

Starting a new website or blog? You will need a few links to help prime the pump and get search engine spiders attention. This new website got into Google with good keyword ranking within a few days with help from an OPEZ profile: Camille Stephens, Hair Stylist, Mountain View.

Examples:

George Fanucci • OPEZ profile • http://opez.com/george

Camille Stephens • Hair Stylist • http://opez.com/camille

Any comments, questions, or critique of this OPEZ.com review? Please message me, or comment below. Thanks!

UPDATE: November 23, 2011. OPEZ is now invitation-only, but it is very easy to get invited.

Your Sphere-of-Influence: What are YOUR Realty Contact Management Challenges and Solutions?

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 21:15:09 -0700

Sphere-of-Influence, or Circle-of-Influence, is yours 3D or 2D? :-}

Do you have any system, methodology, or tools that you find effective for sync and management of your contacts, as a professional real estate agent? Maintaining a strong Circle-of-Influence is a powerful marketing engine for any agent, yet a perpetual challenge for all. How do you keep your data in sync?

Do you use anything you recommend for realty PIM/CRM? (Personal Information Management / Customer Relationship Management) I have years of experience with collaboration and coordination systems, and a set of ad-hoc tools and techniques, but am always looking for other experts with anything to offer in this area. I have helped many agents with database migration and contact syncing, and also formed a network of help, with freelance experts in specific niches... See reteam.info which clearly needs an expert designer and a makeover... the cobbler's children often have the worst shoes.

With Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Business Email, Personal Email, TopProducer, WiseAgent, AgentAchieve, PropertyMinder, Contact Managers like ACT! for Real Estate or GoldMine, MS-Outlook, Lotus Notes, SalesForce.com, Zoho Free CRM, BusyAgentPro, Google Apps, To-Do lists, not to mention Smart Phone apps, Desktop apps, etc... There is always a lot of database sync and coordination to be done!

What do you use for Real Estate Lead Capture, Lead Management, and Contact Management? Are they integrated?

Questions, please comment:

What techniques and tools have you found most effective and efficient?
What tips can you share, or what questions do you have?
Do you use any CRM/PIM systems, methods, or apps?

Now OPEN to the PUBLIC. This post was originally protected, for ActiveRain MEMBERS ONLY, to stimulate comment and discussion...share best-practices and learn together within the ActiveRain community.

Is Your Email Address Portable?

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 02:23:23 -0700

Is Your Email Address Portable & Professional?

As a Real Estate Professional, your email address should be a key part of your personal branding, your professional image, and your marketing strategy.

Many agents change their brokerage once or twice during their career, some more than twice. Any un-planned change in your email address can have a huge impact on your productivity, and your continuity with your personal sphere-of-influence. Shouldn't your email address, like your website, blog, and personal branding, be part of your personal marketing strategy?

Using a generic email address such as Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, or your ISP, or one from your brokerage, has several disadvantages. Not only technical ones, but also for your brand-image. What if you had to change your ISP or your brokerage?

Your Own Domain Name Email?

The best solution for your professional image is to have your own domain name, and use it for both your email and your website. This presents several technical hurdles, but not any big ones, and it ensures your own portable, professional branding.

Get your own domain name(s), if you don’t have one already. Make it personal, and/or local. GoDaddy is neither the cheapest nor the most expensive, but is the most flexible and convenient. I've had experience with all the major domain registrars, and prefer GoDaddy for its many features/ benefits/ advantages. (Ask me for a discount code if you are interested in registering, transferring, or renewing your domain name with GoDaddy.)

With your own domain name, you have several choices for your email handling.

1. GoDaddy free email forwarding:

Go Daddy FREE Email Forwarding Setup, in six screen shots

— or —

2. Google Apps, with Gmail for Your Domain, to host your email, which is still free for small businesses and organizations. As of Mid-2011, you can get up to 10 free logins (inboxes) for you and your group, with over 7GB each for email storage. This offers a complete solution with flexible options, including Gmail for web-mail, and POP, IMAP, MS-Outlook or other email clients for offline storage, backup, and syncing. Spam filtering, HTTPS security, and several types of email authentication (SPF, DKIM) are available. There are many steps and a large variety of options, Gmail is simply powerful, so it does take a bit of planning and configuring.

You can have specifically purposed email addresses such as:

MyName @ MyDomain .com
Team @ MyDomain .com
Sales @ MyDomain .com
Info @ MyDomain .com (or .net, .biz, .us, .info if necessary, but .com is best)

etc.

... all coming into your Gmail inbox. You can have a few other inboxes for an assistant, associates, webmaster, or aide, still for free, from Google, at this time.

Your Email, Contacts, and Calendar, all within Google Apps, can sync with many devices, such as your iPad and smart-phone.

You can always use your brokerage-email for internal communication, while publishing your own domain-email on your business cards and marketing materials. There are options for consolidating these in your main Gmail inbox, as desired.

I've helped many agents with the technical side of their setup for email, websites, and real estate marketing including SEO, Lead-Capture, and branding. There are various possible scenarios for your email solution. Let's outline the choices, tradeoffs, and tailor an approach that would be customized for your own needs to make your email address professional and portable.

Any questions?

2011 Baseball Schedules and Personalized Real Estate Marketing

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:54:24 -0800

How to use 2011 baseball schedules for personalized real estate marketing?

Hit a Homerun with Baseball Schedule Postcards! If you don't see your favorite team, please call.

Want to stay in front of your prospects for the entire baseball season? Baseball schedules are great farming cards to market your services for the next six months.

Order Real Estate Marketing postcards online to:

present your professional image and your brand,
promote your website, build your Sphere-of-Influence, Own Your Farm™,
capture fresh, targeted, actionable leads.

Try out CoreFact's Capture Marketing System today! Personalize each of your postcards with unique information such as the visual market update map, the home owner's name, along with a unique tracking code key for each card recipient. CoreFact home value estimate postcards drive traffic to your website, then you track your leads and see who is actually responding to your postcards through our lead management system.

Overview:

Create your free CoreFact account. Configure your preferences online.
Select postcard templates, customize with your branding and marketing messages.
Select a back side design. Use local market maps for optional lead capture feature.
Load your farm (mailing list data) online.
Select a lead capture widget style and insert into your website.
Order your postcards. Printing, delivery, and lead capture included.
Follow up with your leads to develop relationships, get listings...

Select a postcard template. For example: Just Listed, Just Sold, Seasonal, Local Expert Series, Sports Schedule, etc...

Benefits of a Sports Schedule:

Imagine it on the refigerator
You'll be visible for many months
It's fun
Select a capture marketing back-side, and track your results (optional)
Order in minutes

Select a back side design:

Selecting a map generates a unique market update neighborhood for each postcard and uses the lead capture feature.

Click to view the catalog: Real Estate Marketing Postcards

Professional Designs to build your Sphere-of-Influence and capture timely, targeted leads.

Just Listed, Just Sold, Market Update, Home Estimate, Local Expert, and many other designs available.
Newsletter templates, brochures, and other products are also available... browse the catalog online!
CoreFact offers unsurpassed results for targeted, measurable, Real Estate lead capture, and cost-effective Marketing ROI.

For more information, see CoreFact Lead Capture & Real Estate Marketing

Google Webmaster Tools now available to Google Analytics users

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 19:13:30 -0800

Want to see statistics about your website that Google collects and uses?

Do you have Google Analytics installed on your website? If so, now you can easily add Google Webmaster Tools. It will show you things like:

how often Google crawls your website,
if there are any errors detected by GoogleBot,
what pages of your website are indexed by Google,
what keywords Google considers significant for your website,
links GoogleBot has found to your web-pages from any other web-sites,
what queries were used when people have used Google look for your website,
and more...

The linkage from Google Analytics to the Google Webmaster Tools is new. Until last week, it was harder to get access to your Google Webmaster Tools data.

How to setup Google Webmaster Tools

Log-in to your Google account, then go to:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Add your website,
Verify using the "Google Analytics" option: Link to your Google Analytics account.
After a week or so, check back for data...

You will be able to see key data that Google collects about your website, uses to position your website in the search results, and will show to you only.

More here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1120006

Measure Your Marketing Results, Part 1: Craigslist

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 22:15:40 -0800

Can you get leads via Craigslist?

Maximize exposure for your listings, get buyer leads, get seller leads; using Craigslist .. the results:

After doing many measurements in the SF Bay Area, observe that a "good" Craigslist ad may attract about 100+ visitors to your ad in the first day and about 200+ in the first three days, rapidly tapering off after day three. You can post the same info every 48+ hours (at least two days apart.)

Of those 200+ visitors to each of your Craigslist ads, if the ad is properly designed, you may attract 10% or more to visit your website, on the average, via click-thru from your well-labeled, prominent link (call to action) in the ad.

So, each well designed ad could bring in 20 or more new visitors for you. (For a well-designed ad.) Of those visitors, about 10~20% may like what they see and sign up for your automated listing search updates, yielding several active buyer leads per ad, or more.

(Stats on over 100 ads for over 10 listings and many open houses, over 12-months, using specialized techniques.)

Here are some quick tips:

How to design ads for maximum response?

Plan your campaign(s).

Each title must be a grabber, target your audience well.

The ad should be informative but brief, with only a few photos, and contain a link to your custom landing page for more details (as appropriate for each campaign, such as for each single property listing.) The link's anchor text must be a grabber, too. Think of your ad as a teaser with a call-to-action to capture leads. If you develop the call-to-action, you will win leads, if anybody is interested.

On your landing page, you can measure your hits. You won't get SEO benefit, because all Craigslist links are NOFOLLOW, but you should get good leads in the first few days... and a spike in your web traffic.

Prep a few different ads (20% or more difference in text) and rotate them if you want to post more than one ad every 48 hours per listing or per campaign. You could post one or two ads per property per day if you design them well enough. You can also design generic ads (but if they are not property-specfic they are more likely to get flagged off by your competitors or community.)

How are you capturing your leads?

Make sure you have a website (or landing page URL for a specific target campaign or listing) that offers a very simple, lightweight signup process for potential buyers. If you require them to enter too much info, they will enter bogus info, or abandon your signup process. Provide optional fields for phone, name, etc. but require their email address, to opt-in ... for email alerts on new listings matching the buyer's search criteria, or home value alerts for owners looking to sell.

What's the best time of day and day of week to post, how often to post on Craigslist?

Try randomizing a bit, but here are some rules-of-thumb:

Post weekend open houses on Thursday afternoon (catch the early birds going online to plan weekend tours.)

Post a similar ad on Saturday morning, and another different ad on Sunday morning.

Post another one early in the week... yes, you're on MLS but the more exposure the better. Got a pocket listing (not on MLS?) promote it via Craigslist, while capturing leads in your neighborhood.

Blacklisting and Flagging-Off?

If you put too many links into Craigslist, or break other unwritten rules, you may be blacklisted for awhile, a few days perhaps. Your ads will seem to post into your account, but they won't show up in the public search. There are a few other caveats, such as blacklisted servers for your hosted images, but with trial-and-error you may find out what works and what doesn't work... always check the public index, about a half hour after posting. If you ad does not appear within 20 ~ 40 minutes, you may be blacklisted.

If your competitors or your community doesn't like your ad, it can get flagged off. It takes more than a few different IP addresses to make that happen. After your get flagged off, your threshold may decrease for awhile. Don't worry too much about getting flagged off. If you ad is legit, you can re-post immediately, and you go back to the top. But, if you get flagged off repeatedly, it becomes easier to get flagged off, due to thresholds. (You'll get an email immediately if your ad is flagged off. Check to see if it's still there or not, and if it's gone from the public index, you can re-post the same ad immediately. Better wait 20 minutes for the flaggers to get busy somewhere else.)

Follow-ups?

Be sure you have an email drip campaign to reinforce the call-to-action, and keep them coming back to your website... measure activity, and follow up, espeically with your most active contacts, adding the human touch to your marketing campaigns.

Measurement and Contiuous Improvement?

It's been said, "If you cannot afford to measure your marketing results, you cannot afford to market." How are you measuring your results?

Want help, or more info?

Craigslist Marketing for Real Estate

Organic Traffic- There Are Only Ten Spots On Page One On Google

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 06:13:04 -0700

This is some of the most important Web-SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for any Realtor® or Real Estate Professional (Local-Small-Businesses, too!) to know about... and, there's even more here:

www.MyDotCom.INFO
Real Estate SEO hints & tips, free!

Your Internet Reputation LIVES in Google and the other search engines.

Knowing that, what will you do to improve it?

Via Nestor & Katerina Gasset Realtors® Wellington Florida Homes For Sale (International Properties and Investments, Inc.):

Organic Traffic- SEO is not a vacuum.

There are only ten spots on page one on Google.

Are you on one of those ten spots? Do you have more than one of those ten spots? Do you have more than 8 of those ten spots?

The good news is that SEO is back, well, I never believed that it left. But many people in internet marketing did not want to do the work it takes to build good solid organic traffic. There are a lot of people who hate to blog and hate to use the white hat ways to build a website. So they looked for short cuts.

If you remember the beginning days of Google selling ads on Google- It was the banner ad. Remember the banner ads? Those annoying flashing neon banners whenever you got your results back? Banner ads were great in their day. Whenever the human eye sees something different, it pays attention. But then, over time, you become insensitive to it. Over time, you ignore the ads.

Then came the pay per click ads on the right side of your SERPS. Those were clicked on a lot in the beginning. Google was onto something. They generated a lot of income this way. Again, we saw a huge amount of clicks when this model was started. So those who hated to write content could use PPC to get traffic to their websites. But as usual, these clicks become less and less as people get sick of being taken to ad sense style sites and sites without good content.

Here are some great stats from Google to show you how you are on the right track if you are eying one of those top ten spots on organic SERPS.

The top Pay Per Click sponsored spots- those 3 spots you see above the organic search results- these three spots get 2% of the total clicks that go to that particular page. So out of 100 clicks to that page- those three spots will get 2 out of those 100 clicks. That is one expensive click!

If you have the #1 spot on the ORGANIC SERPS for that same search- you get 40% to 45% of the total clicks to that page. That means that if you have the first spot on Google page one- you are getting 40 to 45 of those 100 clicks.

If you have the #2 spot on the ORGANIC spot on page one of Google- you get 11 to 18% of the total clicks to that page. That means that if you have the second spot on Google page one- you are getting 11 to 18 of those 100 clicks.

If you have the #3 spot on the ORGANIC spots on page one of Google- you get 7 to 15% of the total clicks to that page. That means that if you have the third spot on Google page one- you are getting 7 to 15 of those 100 clicks. WOW, think about that for a minute!

If you have the third spot out of 10 spots on page one of Google you are getting 3 times more traffic than the Pay Per Click ads did.

If you have spots 4 through 9 you are getting the same amount of clicks as the top Pay Per Click ads are getting! Think about that for a minute! So a free spot on 4 through 9 is just the same as the expensive PPC sponsored ads.

Now the most amazing part is this:

It is better to be #10 on page one of Google organic search results than to be numbers 4 through 9. The #10 spot on page one gets 3% of the clicks to page one. So you are getting one more click than the sponsored ads and the spots of 4 -9.

That is why Corinne's traffic went through the roof when she moved from #2 on her keywords to #1 spot. She went from getting 11 to 18 clicks to getting 40 to 45 clicks in as little as a few hours!

Use sold SEO practices, don't give up and keep on blogging and adding good value content to your blogs and websites. You will not go wrong!

You can sign up for our SEO Tips on SEO for Agents too!

Copyright © 2010 By Katerina Gasset *Organic Traffic- There Are Only Ten Spots On Page One On Google*

Nestor Gasset and Katerina Gasset- Realtors®, CIPS, ABR, SFR, GRI, REOS

International Properties & Investments, Inc

Call us today at 561-753-0135 to get your house sold.

Authors of Short Sales Success

Wellington Florida Short Sales | Wellington Fl Short Sales | Wellington REO Servicers

Wellington Short Sale Agents | Video Tutorials About Wellington Short Sales

Search Wellington Fl Homes For Sale | Wellington Equestrian Properties For Sale |

Wellington Luxury Homes | YouTube Listings and Short Sales |Wellington Fl Short Sale Agent

Who turned you onto the Activerain network? When did you join and do you like it?

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 01:13:44 -0700

SEO... I found ActiveRain via Google .. OVER two years ago .. now, I visit daily .. 5 minutes per day reading AR Blogs has exceptional value for me! I highly recommend AR to anyone who has ANYTNING to do with Real Estate... Sales, Marketing, or related Services. Any Realtor® who does not read at least one or two AR blogs per day is falling behind the pack, those who post at least once in awhile, are leading the pack!

||  www.CoreFact.com
||
|| See also . . .
||  www.iNetMore.com
||  www.reteam.INFO
||  www.GetMeMoreBiz.com
||  www.MyDotCom.INFO

Via VEGAS BOB (REALTY ONE GROUP - LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 702.443.7156 ):

                Who turned you onto the Activerain network? When did you join and do you like it?



Three Huge questions for members of Activerain and here are Vegas Bob's answers in a nutshell!

Robert Swetz (Vegas Bob) was turned onto the Activerain network by one of his web designers back in January of 2008. And when she mentioned about the network and blogging I had never even heard of a blog. She said Real Estate agents blog stories about Real Estate and more and I asked her "What is a blog"?

I have been blogging ever since with way over 2000 blog posts at Activerain and many different groups at Activerain.

Activerain has become a HUGE part of my life and I would never trade it for the "World"

I have created some wonderful business transactions, built some great friendships/ associates and Activerain has helped rank me on first pages of "Google" in different subjects within the World Wide Web.

If you are a "Newbie" and unsure about Activerain please give the network 6-12 months and you will be hooked.

And if you have been here for a long time and have lost interest, etc., try something different. I try to hit the Activerain network from all different directions, from "Localism" within different communities, states, counties and more, covering different subject matter.

I have also found that if you have any questions about Real Estate/ etc., AR members will come around with some wonderful advice.

Post by Robert Swetz (Vegas Bob) 7-24-2010

Photographs & Videos by Robert (Vegas Bob) Swetz ©All rights reserved - All photographs for sale

Direct: 702.443.7156

If you are interested in Investment Properties in Las Vegas and the State of Nevada I can help you with all your needs.

Las Vegas continues to be a very fast growing city with some great opportunities for employment, retirement and much more. Las Vegas is surrounded by many other places & cities of interest like Lake Mead, Salt Lake City, Zion National Park, Arches National Park, Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, San Diego, Reno, Phoenix, Yosemite National Park, Lake Tahoe and more.

"Have a Wonderful Day"

VEGAS BUILDINGS FOR SALE Las Vegas Real Estate

VIDEOS BY VEGAS BOB

Robert (Vegas Bob) Swetz

Climbing the SEO Ladder with Real Estate Keywords

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:46:53 -0700

Please let me know if you would like to attend a Webinar on CoreFact Real Estate Marketing Systems, Real Estate Marketing and SEO. Here are a few good ideas, springboard for discussion:

Via RealSupport Real Estate Virtual Assistant (RealSupport Inc.):

I’m sure by now you have all heard of Google rankings. We are all striving to climb that ladder up to the top of the search engine. It is called building your SEO - Search Engine Optimization. This coveted top spot is not something that Google is trying to hide from you - in fact, they have a special tool just to help you get there. It's called the Google Keyword Tool, designed to help improve your Google rankings.

But if Google wasn't quite helpful enough, a man named Kevin Harper wants to make it even easier for all you Real Estate agents out there. He has created a site called the Real Estate Keywords Tool. For all of the times that you have tried to update your web page or blogged and racked your brain trying to figure out what words you should be using to get you nearer to that top spot - this tool takes out all of the guess work.

Here's how it works. All you need to do is enter your state, along with your core cities, counties, or other local geographic areas. You can then adjust the keyword modifiers in the right that you wish to optimize the most. Once you click "Submit Keywords" at the bottom, you are given a whole laundry list of keywords that you can use for future reference.

Copy and paste these keywords into a document and refer to them when you are ready to update your website or when you write your next blog. You can get up to 1,587 keyword variations. This may seem a little overwhelming to include in a blog post or a webpage, but remember that you can always use these words to put in your Meta tags. These are those tags that aren't visible to visitors, but are visible to search engines.

Plus, it gives you more ammunition to use for all those future blogs you will be writing. If you don't have time to blog and don’t know how to SEO your website content, this is a perfect project for your Real Estate Virtual Assistant. Have them perform the search and store the keywords for you. Every time they blog on your behalf, make sure they use up a handful of the keywords. You'll be soaring to the top of that SEO ladder in no time!

Stacey Clarke
Listing Coordinator

The RealSupport, Inc. Team
1232 West Northwest Highway 
Palatine, IL 60067 
Office: (847) 705-1655 
Fax: (847) 589-8989
Info@RealSupportinc.com

Connect With Us:
Our Website
Client Testimonials
"Like" Us On Facebook
Follow Carrie on Twitter
Follow Erica on Twitter

RealSupport Inc. - Providing superior Real Estate Virtual Assistant services to Real Estate professionals nationwide since 2000.

Capturing Internet Leads, Eminem Style.

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 16:27:10 -0800

How is your lead-conversion doing?

What are your Follow-Up processes?

You have several paths to follow, depending on the type of lead...

Are your respondents automatically becoming recipients of your followup email campaigns?

Are you growing your Sphere-of-Influence?

You may only have ONE SHOT and it better be swift, short, and sweet...

... sweetness is in the eye of the recipient.

So make it sooner not later, shorter not longer, and relevant to THEIR direct concerns....

Reading the tea-leaves in your CoreFact Lead Manager?

Responding via...

Phone call - leave an effective message... Got scripts?

Personalized email - reply via your CoreFact message templates... Got templates?

Automated-Follow-Ups?

Hand-written note with business card? (for potential sellers who logged in)
Knocking on doors... wakling your farm? Prepared with your CoreFact Lead-Manager info?

etc..

Make your followups quickly, and make them specifically relevant to each type of respondent.

... it's gotta be more about THEM than about YOU ...

Recurrently mailing CoreFact Lead-Capture postcards to your farm(s) is the best way to extend and deepen your Sphere-of-Influence.

Best,

George

www.iNetMore.com

Via Christopher and Stephanie Somers - Realtors - Philadelphia Real Estate (Realtor / Owner - RE/MAX Access):

"Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity

To seize everything you ever wanted-One moment

Would you capture it or just let it slip?"

Eminem- Lose Yourself lyrics

Sometimes I compare and contrast our Real Estate experiences to silly things like a Si Fy show, or even a Beastie Boys music video. Today my Real Estate thoughts turned to the lyrics of a renowned rapper, Eminem. What is so important about what Eminem writes ? Well, read on and let's see if this rapper's lyrical message resonates with you. You do not have to love the musician to learn a little about Capturing Leads, Eminem Style.

We get a lot of internet leads every day through a variety of sources. I do not now exactly how many but we do get a lot. They vary in content and interest but most are buyer leads that typically leave us a return email. And like Eminem's lyrics, I really believe we have just one shot to seize their attention. One moment to connect with them, relate to them, and excite them enough to return the email for an opportunity to convert them into a client.

I did a quick experiment the other day.I received an Internet lead who left me both their email and telephone number. After calling this lead on the phone two times and sending an email, the lead had made no effort to respond back to me. I know time is of the essence with Internet leads. You have just one small margin of opportunity to connect with them before they are linking up with another Realtor who was more on the ball. Should I just give up ? Let the moment go and focus on business as usual ? I decided to take my chances with one more email.

Here is the first email I sent:

Subject line: Properties for you in Philly

John,

Thank you for looking at our website for information on 123 Main Street. I'd like to send you more detailed information on that property and I can send you a list of other available homes in the same neighborhood that fall in that price range. Let me know your thoughts and feel free to visit our website often.

I received no response from this email.

- and -

Here is the 2nd email I sent:

Subject line: Short Sales, REO's, Foreclosures in Philly

John,

We'd like to help you find that great deal in Philly. Let me know if you have a target area you'd like to zero in on or perhaps a price range you want to stay within. I can send you a list of hot properties that meet your needs.

I got an immediate reply !

And the choir sang in elation..

"You own it, you better never let it go go

You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow

This opportunity comes once in a lifetime yo. "

I think the moral to my story is not to listen to more Eminem or to send a flashy message with some cool words. The moral of this story is to follow up, don't give up that opportunity if you do not get the immediate response, and change your voice if you need to. Just don't "let it slip". I think this can be applied to most any opportunity in life.

Do you capture leads Eminem style ?

When you get an internet lead, how do you take your one shot ?

Feel free to subscribe to our blog or our monthly newsletter to stay up to date with our latest posts and information on the Philadelphia Real Estate Market. You can also sign up to receive the Philadelphia Real Estate Blog via email.

Top 100 Real Estate Offices?

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 11:53:54 -0800

I'm beginning to compile a list of the top 100 Real Estate offices in the U. S.
— any suggestions?

I'd like to cover the top 25 or more metro areas. How would you approach this research project?

Please comment if you have any recommendations, either on offices, or on methods of finding and ranking them.

Ranking by number of agents
Ranking by number of active listings
Ranking by number of closed sales per month

Why every Agent needs a Facebook Page, NOW!

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:42:30 -0700

Get your keywords before they are gone... here is a great SEO tip.

Via Mike Mueller (Tech and Social Media Consultant):

It won’t be anything like the land rush of the first Facebook URL frenzy but starting Sunday Night June 28th at 9:00 PM the gates are open for all.

Facebook was pretty smart in the way they released custom URLs.   You see, most anyone can create a “Fan Page” for virtually any product, group or person. These Fan Pages usually have little or no fans. All it would take is for one quick kid with a finger on his mouse to steal away something like http://www.facebook.com/MountainDew

So Facebook slowed the release of Custom Page Names to those pages with 1,000 or more fans and to those created prior to May 31, 2009, That allowed all those real companies to get in and secure their Facebook Page Name.

Image by kittyz202 via Flickr

You and I didn’t have to worry about that, but we certainly do now. If you have a Facebook Business Page you’ll want to be in on the new land rush.

Why?

First of all, every business should have a Business page on Facebook. I’ll take that a step further and suggest every page should also be customized to best fit the business.

Here’s 4 reasons why your business needs a Facebook Business Page.

Pages allow a business to "Publish to the Stream" (this shows up on your fans homepage)

Pages allow a business to engage fans with Rich Media (video, pictures, events)

Pages let a business analyze how fans are interacting with the Insights Dashboard (Facebook has deep analytics)

Pages let a business increase SEO (pages show up in higher Google keyword searches)

So you sell Yugos in Yuba City ? There’s nothing stopping the Yugo dealer in Yreka from setting up http://www.facebook.com/YubaCityYugo and stealing your thunder. (Does a Yugo really have thunder?)

Chiropractic in Crockett? http://www.facebook.com/CrockettChiropractic would rock!

Dentist in Dublin? Only one person is going to get http://www.facebook.com/SMILE

Real Estate your game? First one to score http://www.facebook.com/RedwoodCityRealEstate wins!

Catching on?

That also brings me to the next important item. There’s nothing compelling about a standard Facebook Business Page.   Why drive clients and customers to a standard page? Nothing at all.

Your Business Page MUST have compelling content that engages your visitors or they’ll leave just as fast as it took the page to load.

What can a Facebook Business Page do? It might be easier to say what can’t they do? Here’s 7 Facebook Business Pages that work.

Remember, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Related articles by Zemanta

Facebook Vanity URLs are Available Now. Get Yours. (biztipsblog.com)

Follow me to Facebook (AreWeConnected.com)

Facebook Pages and Groups (AreWeConnected.com)

Like Facebook? (AreWeConnected.com)

This post brought to you courtesy of Mike Mueller.
Feel free to ReBlog or ReTweet as you like as long as you credit the source (him).
Did you know? He's for hire! He builds Blogs, Graphic Images and Widgets and Facebook Pages and besides… He knows lots of really cool stuff.

Hire Mike (925) 456-4567

Sample Facebook Pages:

View on Flickr

Sponsored Links: (check these guys out!)



Did you know?

Real Estate Marketing Blog • George Fanucci

Intermittent Fasting. Week 8 Results.

Intermittent Fasting, Week 8. Personal Experiences, Results, and a Few References.

References?

Eat, Fast and Live Longer with Michael Mosley (BBC / PBS)

Mark Sisson, Primal / Paleo Diet and Fitness Guru

Martin Berkhan, Leangains (pro trainer, fitness model, blogger)

How Strategic Meal-Skipping Can Help You Lose Fat, Gain Muscle, and Get Healthier

Is Yelp Evil?

Wine Club Blog Challenge! Gift wines... Wine-of-the-month...

The BLOG Challenge!

MorganHillAttorney.com is for sale

Morgan Hill Attorney?

Internet Marketing Process for Real Estate

Central California Coast Real Estate Features

Aloha Hawaii LIVE • Concert Tour • May 2012

• UPDATE 2 •

• UPDATE 1 •

Share the ALOHA, join our MELE!

For more info on the tour and the performers,please see www.AlohaHawaiiLIVE.com

••• Limited VIP Backstage Passes are still available. •••

Can you hear OPPORTUNITY knocking — will you answer the door?

The New ActiveRain?

ActiveRain is a very classy act! (Did you see this last night?)

What have YOU noticed about the NEW ActiveRain? — i.e. new since Thursday, 2/16/2012 —

Intermission

The Next Big Thing? :: Pinterest :: What Is It?

What is Pinterest ?!

Pinterest = Home & Hearth, and therefore Real Estate?

Updates:

Brad Andersohn : ActiveBrad "Z" Blog : Posted on 02/12/2012

Pinterest - A Social Cataloging Community - A good visual summary, and good comments... lots of discussion.

Please leave a comment here, before you rush over there! Thanks...

Real Estate Marketing Plans: Most Effective Marketing of 2011

Real Estate Marketing Plans

OOPS! A story about the Google cache

Update!

Testing 123 {20120212abc123test}

Google Cache

Lessons Learned

What is your data backup strategy?

But, is Dropbox secure, reliable, versatile, and here-to-stay?

Need a few good links for your website or blog? Try OPEZ.com

What is OPEZ.com?

Today's OPEZ front page, screenshot:

Why choose OPEZ?

Examples:

Your Sphere-of-Influence: What are YOUR Realty Contact Management Challenges and Solutions?

Is Your Email Address Portable?

Is Your Email Address Portable & Professional?

Your Own Domain Name Email?

2011 Baseball Schedules and Personalized Real Estate Marketing

How to use 2011 baseball schedules for personalized real estate marketing?

Order Real Estate Marketing postcards online to:

Overview:

Click to view the catalog: Real Estate Marketing Postcards

Professional Designs to build your Sphere-of-Influence and capture timely, targeted leads.

Google Webmaster Tools now available to Google Analytics users

Want to see statistics about your website that Google collects and uses?

How to setup Google Webmaster Tools

Measure Your Marketing Results, Part 1: Craigslist

Maximize exposure for your listings, get buyer leads, get seller leads; using Craigslist .. the results:

Measurement and Contiuous Improvement?

Organic Traffic- There Are Only Ten Spots On Page One On Google

Who turned you onto the Activerain network? When did you join and do you like it?

Climbing the SEO Ladder with Real Estate Keywords

Capturing Internet Leads, Eminem Style.

"Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity

To seize everything you ever wanted-One moment

Would you capture it or just let it slip?"

Subject line: Properties for you in Philly

John,

Subject line: Short Sales, REO's, Foreclosures in Philly

John,

We'd like to help you find that great deal in Philly. Let me know if you have a target area you'd like to zero in on or perhaps a price range you want to stay within. I can send you a list of hot properties that meet your needs.

"You own it, you better never let it go go

You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow

This opportunity comes once in a lifetime yo. "

Do you capture leads Eminem style ?

When you get an internet lead, how do you take your one shot ?

For more info on the tour and the performers,
please see www.AlohaHawaiiLIVE.com

What have YOU noticed about the NEW ActiveRain?

— i.e. new since Thursday, 2/16/2012 —