Helping out with the recruiting is one of the biggest things an agent can do to help out your managing broker.  That looks to me to be the constant challenges in running a large company.  I know in the telecom industry once you get so large you lose people just to attrition.  Plus the growth just goes to replace the lost people.  Your Castle Real Estate does an incredible job of retention of it's agents.  Whoops, I digress.

Our Christmas party not only has all of current agents invited, but potential recruits are invited as well.  I deliberately am wearing a shirt with a pocket.  I have my business cards locked, cocked, and ready to rock.  I'm a mortgage broker as well, but this gives me an opportunity to market my services to them.  I just love find out what people are doing.  There is not a single person that I'm not able to learn something from or teach something to.

One of the first people to walk by is Sandy Segal, and a friend of hers.  Sandy say that she doesn't know a lot of the people who are here at the time, but was supposed to have her friend talk to some agents.  I immediately volunteer my services to answer any questions.  Our company, like Keller Williams and many others has a bonus for recruiting agents.  If your broker doesn't why not.  It's sales 101 reward the behavior you want.

I make a point of handing out my business card when I introduce myself.  I tell her to put my name down under referred by, I make the analogy to procuring cause.  I do this right in front of Sandy.  Sandy knows I am joking and I say just kidding, but we go on and have a great presentation.  One of the reasons my teams kicked ass was that I was really good at recruiting.  I just told her the honest reason I choose the company.

After a long conversation with her the next one was a conversation with another new recruit.  That was how it started.  I hope they both come aboard.

I love the Your Castle Real Estate Christmas party.  This is only my second one, so it's a new thing still.  What is nice is the company is still small enough, around 200 agents that we can still have it at the bosses house.  I have been there several times before, for other parties.  It's a family Christmas party so Rebecca is coming.  She made it last year as well.  The biggest difference is we are actually having two parties this year.  One on Tuesday and on Wednesday at a meeting place.

We make a plan for the party beforehand.  Mostly on the drive over there.  We plan on where to sit.  I make a suggestion that we make a plan.  I suggest the sit down plan.  I think we will get there early enough to pick a good spot.  We can also wait it out but we have our eyes planned on a particular spot.  My wife suggests the bar area at the end of the table.  I tell her that's the spot.

We get there and about 20-30 people are there ahead of us.  I don't think the party is big enough to push the traffic flow to where we want to sit.  There is also a little kid on the exact spot I want to sit.  I'm waiting there at the begining, eating chicken wings (Drummies only) and wait for the kid to finish his food.  Once he's done and I'm in.

Now we just wait for the people to show up.

  Social media can have a dark side, what happened during the Active Rain seminar, was the Dark Side.  I feel that I have a strong love for Active Rain as many of you here do as well.  To see the site presented in such a bad light it can cause a tarnishing of the brand.  I was not planning on attending the session except Jeremy with Active Rain and Jason Crouch were planning on attending.  This came from the Real Estate Tomato chat room.  I figured if they felt it could be of value to them, then I should show up.

I hesitate to write this, I know your not supposed to be negative or critical of other people or presentations.  I'm certainly not going to point out there name, but it was the weakest presentation I have seen on a webinar.  A few pointers going over this. 

This was a Rebar camp.  People are expecting a little bit more than a normal conversation.  This is a fairly sophisticated audience.  Maybe you haven't been to a Rebar camp before, I attended the one in Denver.  I was blown away by the quality of the speakers and the information.  I actually had a presentation last week on Social Media.  I was copresenting with Josh Dorkin, of Bigger Pockets.  I was going to let him do most of the talking.  I'm ok with it, but not enough to call myself an expert ... yet.  Josh had a family emergency and I had to step up to the plate.  I had 13 people in my class and I did ok.  You would of done ok with that presentation for the type of audience I had.  This was a little basic for them

I'm a business partner of Constant Contact and I had an opportunity to present at the Virtual Rebar Camp.  I make this point to say that I passed because I felt it was over my head.  I use Constant Contact myself and I know it's a great product. (Full disclosure I am an authorized business partner.)  I'm very confident in my speaking abilities, and I have taught over 10 public classes this year.  I contacted my Constant Contact representative and wanted to see if they were available that day for the event.  They weren't.  I passed simply because my inexperience in being able to do an interesting webinar.

Know your audience.  I will say that my experience with putting on webinars is zero.  Listening to webinars I've heard a lot, but I'm not a junkie.   You have got to realize that Active Rain is not always warmly welcomed or perceived by the Realtor community as the place to go.  People perceive it's all just Realtors talking to Realtors.  They ignore all the consumer success stories there are to many good and smart people here on Active Rain to say this site is not worth your time.

Why are you talking about the points.  I know it was because it was on one of your screenshots, but talk about the right things.  I've had two people refered to this site.  I think I've invited four.  Your story is you don't have anybody who has accepted, but you've sent out over 50 invitations.  THIS IS NOT  A GOOD STORY TO TELL.

You didn't talk about the extra google juice or credibility that Active Rain offers.  I want some of that.  I'm not sure if I've got it or how I'm going to get it, but I know the answer is in here.  I even bet that I have that site bookmarked.  I'm pretty sure this wasn't even addressed.

As far as the actual presentation, raise your voice.  One of the great things I have going for me, which most good speakers do is that I can talk loud.  I can present in front of a room of 50 people with no microphone and people don't have an issue hearing me.  You were the quietest speaker of anyone that I heard that day.

Make it visually interesting.  You can see in my other blogs that I wrote in this series I did a poor job with pictures.  I think this one has the best chance of being read.  Thus I added pictures.  Your presentation was a PDF file with poorly scanned images of Active Rain screenshots.  Again, this is why I wanted my business partner to be there to present.  I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that you could of got somebody from the Active Rain staff to present with you.  Think how that gets you in their good graces. 

The result of the call?  The dark side of social media reared it's ugly head.  I'm not sure how many people were on the call at the start.  I'm going to potentially guess 300.  It was conferencing software so it would make a beep whenever anyone would join or drop off.  Let me tell you there were people dropping off every few seconds.  It was torture to watch and listen too.  I like love this site.  If I was not familiar with this site, I certainly wouldn't be rushing over here.

This is the dark side of social media.  You have a customer of your product, the presenter.  They clearly love the product, they are featured in the area they work.  They even seemed like a nice person.  A social media expert? Someone you want representing your product to a group of several hundred targeted prospects?  This is an interesting quandry.  I used this time to listen and get caught up of some of my projects in the real world.

Interesting dilema to me, what do you think?

Popular Wordpress plugins for real estate bloggers.  Finally some real meat on the heart of the matter of using Wordpress.  The earlier section got my appetite watering to see what this is all about.  I'm getting ready to take the plunge of becoming a hard core blogger.  Clearly this looks like the best platform.  All of these plugins only work with .org, which is why if I go with Wordpress this is something that I will definately be doing.

Google XML sitemaps -  This looked like a must.  If you want Google to index your site frequently and correctly this plug in looks at the structure of your site and creates a site map automatically.  This was pretty cool and it looked like a must do.  This plugin really made me want to develop a Wordpress site.

All in One SEO - Wow!  An incredible tool.   Makes it very easy to add meta tags.  Also gave some good tips that the character length of the title should be between 60-75 characters.  The description can be 160. 

Share This - What a great way to make it easy for your readers to share the writings that you create and do.  Pretty amazing stuff.  The ease and popularity of these plugins made me want to switch blogging platforms.

Wibya - A great way to create a fan page.

Cforms2 -

Apture -  Wow.  This to me makes creating your blogs much easier and more professional looking.  I can't even really describe it.  The tool looks simply amazing.

This list is just a starting point for Wordpress plugins.  I'm not using the platform ... yet.  So I don't want to talk out of school.  It looks pretty freaking amazing to me though.

How to write a better blog.

5)  Hook the reader with a good title

A good title -

accurately describes the content

communicates the benefits of reading the blog

6) Create a sense of intimacy

Write as if you are speaking directly to one person.

Use you more than I

Write less formally

Eliminate unknown acronyms or jargon

7) Make content scanable

(This appears to be the only part that I learned)

Make a list

• Use bullet points

1. Use a numbered list (hint - don't mix them together)

Paragraphs should be 2-4 sentences long.  6 sentences are to long. 

Add bolded subheadings

8)  Write a call to action

This was great.  To many times I see the call to action being left off.  Many bloggers think that you shouldn't have a call to action.  I disagree, you want them to do something.  Figure out what you want them to do and then ask them.

• Call you

• Email you

• Go to your website

Another great session.

How to write a blog post.  Another great session.  I love it when they all come from back to back sessions.  She narrowed it down to eight narrow steps.

EIGHT EASY STEPS TO WRITING A BLOG

1)  Find topics fast.

What she does is subscribe to Google alerts.  This keeps her up to date with all types of ideas for blog posts.  As an editorial comment I find this one of easiest parts for me.  If you are busy doing things throughout the day I don't know what the problem is.  I can think up multiple ideas per day.  Maybe part of the reason I find it so easy is that I do read Active Rain almost daily and subscribe to several Google alerts.

2)  Find good Google keywords.

She recommends varying the tags with your keywords.  She recommends rotating phrases in your title.

(Blank city name) real estate

(Blank city) homes

(Blank county name) homes or real estate

(Blank city) real estate agents

(Blank city) homes for sale

3) The length of the blog

A blog should be about 350 words long.  It was this session or another one where they said that your blogs can be even longer.

Keywords should be repeated a total of three times

• Once in the title

• Once in the first paragraph, preferably in the first sentence.

• Once more anywhere in the blog post.

4) Add links for value

They expand on the information in your post.

They recommend other pages on your site.

They keep search engine spiders moving.

What sites do you link to?

Link to authoritative sites

Link to other posts in your blog

Link to your main web site

Link to your IDX

DON"T LINK TO YOUR COMPETITORS

Don't link to sites that link to your competitors

Include at least 1-3 links per blog

Have links open in a new window.

Part 2 - To Follow

This session has been awesome.  I'm having a hard time keeping up, not because the material is how fast they are giving quality information.  He then switches over to the things that you do outside the site.

He used the term link bait - LInk bait is stuff you put on your site to spread virally or have people want to come to your site.  Examples of this include:

• Tools

• Quizzes

• Contest

Writing articles is a great way to get your name out there.

Use submission sites

Use anchor tags

BLOGS CAN BE THE BEST TOOL

Key to blogs is to have quality content.

Convergence of Social Media and SEO.

Lots of statements vs. a conversation

Google Caffeine coming down the pike.

Real Time Searching

Increased SEO

attract links

media sharing

reviews

You need to know secondary sites to market with Squiddo, Active Rain, Real Town, Facebook

Social Bookmarking sites as well.  Digg is an example.

Google loves multimedia

Website

You Tube

Flickr

Social Networking

My last comments about this session.  It was awesome.  The pace was great.  The slides were awesome.  I have never seen a better webinar in the amount of time that they had.

Real Estate Search Engine Optimization.  Now here was a topic I was ready to sink my teeth into.  It was put on by www.realestateseopros.com  They certainly have a great domain name for the topic, it really does add credibility. 

One of the most interesting stats was that what drives traffic to a web site is that only 30% comes from Pay per click (ppc) vs 70% which is SEO.  This was a startling stat for me.  I guess I knew it, but I hadn't had it explained in such a clear manner.

The next tip is that you own your own traffic. 

Scott then talked about what happens to drive traffic to your site.  There is a difference between what happens onsite and offsite for your traffic.  The breakdown given was 20-30% of the battle took place on your site.

Your site is determined by several factors

1. Content
2. Structural - Navigation
3. Keyword research (consistent marketing message - keywords and search term

Google has a keyword tool.

Keywords

• Add to page titles
• Put them in every meta
• Content - repeat as often as possible

Keyword - Friendly URL's

XLM plus sitemap does it faster

Rich Content is a key

Blogging

Photoslideshows

Flash/Javascript

Get a relevant link

Part 2 : To Follow

Getting started with Wordpress.  I was really looking forward to this call.  As I'm getting started and becoming a more professional blogger I'm wrestling with this question.  It was interested for me to learn the difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com  I kind of new the difference before, but this laid it out in black and white for me.  I cleary recognized that if I did this I would want to go to the more professional version.  Even with having to pay for the hosting the higher fee will be worth it for the plugins.

Multiple blogs under one account.  I'm pretty sure that this was the professional version.  This feature really appeals to me in order to get going with more team oriented blogs.  He didn't explain how to do this, merely that it was possible.

He did show how it looks under multiple views from   Edit - View with the tabs.

I had a phone call that I had to take in the middle of this and caused me to miss a lot of the session. 

More to follow with a later session that went over the more advanced features, and what I plan on doing with it.

This session covered the basics of using market data.  It was put on by Altos research, so you know there is going to be a little bit of bias.  I work for a company in Denver, Your Castle Real Estate.  I joined this firm specifically because of the market data.  We are actually the source of real estate information for the Denver Post.  I just haven't done a good job of marketing the data and my expertise through the Internet.

How is the market?  That is a great question.  It is the question that consumers want to know.  If I hadn't had a lot of role playing on this issue, it would of been this is awesome.  Since I was it wasn't that revolutionary.  He did mention one great point. Confused people don't buy.  I thought this was awesome. 

He gave examples of four websites that were good examples

I believe these are correct.

locomarketstats

ocexclusives.com

Theresa Boardman

rerockstar.c

Mike stressed there were three questions all consumers want answered.

1. What's for sale?
2. What's my home worth?
3. How's the market?

All in all a good presentation.  I just had real high hopes.