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One Good Deed Leads To Another....and Maybe More Business!

By Liz and Bill Spear

Real Estate Agent with Transaction Alliance 513.520.5305 www.LizTour.com SAL.2002007747

November 15, 2011 01:27 AM

One Good Deed Leads To Another....and Maybe More Business!

You know we put a heavy emphasis on localism posts. Mostly events of community interest, but sometimes we will shine the spotlight on local businesses too. Recently we posted about one of the area Christmas Tree Farms, Rossmann's Christmas Tree Farm. With Thanksgiving coming up fast, it will be tree cutting season before we know it, and where to find those Christmas trees becomes one of the higher Analytics keyword matches for us.

Last year we did a general post on our county Christmas tree farms, and we got found! At least by the Christmas tree farm people! One area farm that was newer and didn't make the newspaper and tree farm websites contacted us and we added them to the post. Rossmann's contacted us a few weeks ago with updates to dates, times and services for this season.

Now this was obviously a great opportunity to build a relationship that could win for both of us. We asked if they had pictures we could use for a blog post dedicated to just their tree farm and Pati Rossmann was happy to provide. If you look at our post on Rossmann's Christmas Tree Farm, all the pictures are provided by them! And tough to get a picture with snow on it this time of year....but give it time! Once posted, we sent Pati a link to the post to check our work. We also posted to our Facebook Fan Page for a little extra press. Hopefully our teamwork leads to more business for the Rossmann family!

Now here's the bonus part for us: besides the P.S. call to action we put on our post, Pati is sending that blog post link out to other people to read and posting on their facebook page too. And even better, she's asked (unprompted by us) for us to provide her our business cards to put out at their Christmas Tree Farm as a way of supporting the businesses that support them. Now maybe nothing happens from those cards and reposts of our article, but maybe something does. Every opportunity to get our name in front of the area home buyers and sellers is one more chance to get that phone ringing.

So our recommendation is one we've made before, make sure your local businesses and organizations know you're blogging about them. They might not find you on their own, but we can almost 100% guarantee that they'll appreciate the free publicity! And who knows where it might lead from there?

Keep on Blogging!

Liz and Bill aka BLiz

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Marilyn Boudreaux

Marilyn Boudreaux, Century 21 Bono Realty - Lake Charles, LA

Lake Charles LA Century 21 Realtor

the rewards of blogging in action! Sometimes I forget to send the link to the business I have featu frred. This week I got an odd text from a a consumer/local owned business thanking me for my blog. I had to scratch my head to remember what blog she was referring to and it was a blog from a year ago! I did not notify her but she found me while searching online and probably googling her business name!

Nov 15, 2011 06:29 PM

Valerie Sagheddu

Apostle Art Home Staging & Design - Stroudsburg, PA

~Home Staging Professional, Poconos, PA

This reminds me of the philosophy of "Giver's Gain" that we use in our local BNI group. It also reminds me of the 2nd blog post I wrote here in the rain...many, many moons ago...Give to Give, Not to get...See what happens! Great job and localism is the way to go...gets you found and can make you a local hero whan you use it to help others succeed!!

Nov 15, 2011 11:32 PM

Liz and Bill Spear

Transaction Alliance 513.520.5305 www.LizTour.com - Mason, OH

Transaction Alliance Cincinnati & Dayton suburbs

Marilyn, The joys of blogging, those old archives of posts are working just as hard today as when we posted them months or years ago :) You've got to love it!

Valerie, True! First we need to convince people to a) live in our area and b) that we know the area and c) we know our real estate stuff. Mix it together and output one blog.

Nov 16, 2011 12:11 AM

Brad Andersohn

Retired Executive Director of Education at eXp - Boulder Creek, CA

ActiveBrad - 707.646.1876

You can never assume people will just find or stumble across your content. One of the most powerful hyper-local things you can do is post about local businesses etc. Being proactive and getting them to your blog is a win-win everytime!

Great post~ :-)

Nov 16, 2011 02:25 AM

Liz and Bill Spear

Transaction Alliance 513.520.5305 www.LizTour.com - Mason, OH

Transaction Alliance Cincinnati & Dayton suburbs

Brad, Thanks for stopping by! We find many local small businesses and organizations are way too busy to even think about checking their web presence. Sending them the link closes the deal. :)

Nov 16, 2011 02:28 AM

Kimo Jarrett

Cyber Properties - Huntington Beach, CA

Pro Lifestyle Solutions

Thanks for sharing your information. It just gave me an idea on how to employ this strategy in the future.

Nov 16, 2011 03:35 AM

Jennifer Chiongbian

Specializing in all types of Manhattan apts & townhouses - Manhattan, NY

Real Estate Broker - NYC

Great idea on being creatie with your posts to bring in some business. Over the summer I participated in a live art street show of a friend of mine. It was a very controvesial thing and got picked up by the Today Show, NY Times, etc. I happen to have blogged about it as soon as I got back. And in that one day alone, I got 600+ hits in one day! Of course there were residual hits in the hundreds days following that event as well. So that is really putting your money where your mouth is!

Nov 16, 2011 04:04 AM

BILLY CRITTENDEN

Missoula Valley Properties, LLC - Missoula, MT

Broker/Owner,ABR,CRS,CNE,CNHS,GRI,RCC,SFR,SRS,SRES

What a great idea! Thanks so much for the insight.

Nov 16, 2011 04:09 AM

Ric Mills

Keller Williams Southern Az - Tucson, AZ

Integrity, Honesty, and Vast Real Estate Knowledge

Blogging is for good promotions and bad performance. Keep blogging as they do make a difference.

Nov 16, 2011 04:09 AM

Liz and Bill Spear

Transaction Alliance 513.520.5305 www.LizTour.com - Mason, OH

Transaction Alliance Cincinnati & Dayton suburbs

Kimo, Glad to help!

Jennifer, Pretty sweet response! I remember reading your blog on the spike in traffic. It's what we all work hard to get, so love it when the pieces fall together :)

Billy, Glad to help, hopefully this will save you the months it took us to figure out how to close the loop!

Ric, For us, we'll keep the bad performance sector out of it. We've seen that be pretty effective when there's an issue though. Companies are certainly monitoring social media and reacting to what is being said about them.

Nov 16, 2011 04:16 AM

Kate Akerly

Kaminsky Group - Manhattan Beach, CA

Manhattan Beach Residential Sales

These types of posts are highly successful. We've done a number of them in a series that we call "Small Business Spotlight." Instead of just talking vaguely about the business, we interview the owner about what it's like to be a small business entreprenuer in NYC. How did they decide on the industry, how did they find their location, what was the build out like, what are their thouhts on financing and partnernerships, etc.? Of course we give them an opportunity to mention recent promotions or upcoming events as well.

These posts get A LOT of reads. Especially if you score interviews with very popular businesses in your market that everyone is searching for online. As you mentioned, it's a reciprocal thing and most of the business owners we've approached with the concept love the idea. We've even been approached by some of their publicists requesting that we cover them. These kind of articles also tend to get linked to. I send them to the editors of appropriate publications that cover restaurants or retailers, etc.

Nov 16, 2011 04:19 AM

Liz and Bill Spear

Transaction Alliance 513.520.5305 www.LizTour.com - Mason, OH

Transaction Alliance Cincinnati & Dayton suburbs

Mike and Kate, VERY cool work you're doing there. With an area as populated as yours, getting noticed and the extra PR has to be critical. Our population density is fairly low, so finding those PR avenues is more important than ever. Slowly but surely we're making in-roads.

Nov 16, 2011 04:39 AM

Winston Heverly

Coldwell Banker Access Realty - South Macon, GA

GRI, ABR, SFR, CDPE, CIAS, PA

The great tips from all you stars just keep coming.

Nov 16, 2011 05:04 PM

Liz and Bill Spear

Transaction Alliance 513.520.5305 www.LizTour.com - Mason, OH

Transaction Alliance Cincinnati & Dayton suburbs

Winston, Glad to share what we learn :) Bonus, the owner of the farm let us know she's got a friend reading our blog now!

Nov 16, 2011 11:58 PM

Lyn Sims

Schaumburg, IL

Real Estate Broker Retired

That's a good way to help local businesses. Glad you could help them, sometimes these places are barely holding on with only one income generation source - namely Christmas. You guys are great.

Nov 17, 2011 05:03 AM

Liz and Bill Spear

Transaction Alliance 513.520.5305 www.LizTour.com - Mason, OH

Transaction Alliance Cincinnati & Dayton suburbs

Lyn, It's great to help out the local businesses. I get so tired of having a favorite place to eat or shop, and then having it disappear.

Nov 17, 2011 06:06 AM

Anonymous

Sherry Swift

Thanks for sharing that reminded me that blogging like that produces a lot of good will and who knows maybe more business for you.

Sherry

Nov 17, 2011 01:37 PM

#46

Liz and Bill Spear

Transaction Alliance 513.520.5305 www.LizTour.com - Mason, OH

Transaction Alliance Cincinnati & Dayton suburbs

Sherry, Community good will is certainly important to us. When our local businesses succeed, we all do better.

Nov 17, 2011 03:13 PM

Sylvie Stuart

Realty One Group Mountain Desert 928-600-2765 - Flagstaff, AZ

Home Buying, Home Selling and Investment - Flagsta

That's awesome! Congrats! I do a lot of local postings and love telling them because they get so excited about the free advertising, and I try to get an email to send a link to for them to see!

Jan 09, 2012 12:30 AM

Liz and Bill Spear

Transaction Alliance 513.520.5305 www.LizTour.com - Mason, OH

Transaction Alliance Cincinnati & Dayton suburbs

Sylvie, We've exchanged a few emails with Patti Rossmann. It's been a pleasure to build that relationship! We'll promote her Christmas tree farm again next season :)

Jan 09, 2012 12:32 AM