Category — Tech

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Audio Interview - Banner Ads and Paid Search Comparison
In this second part of my interview with Les, we discuss the differences between banner ads and paid search.

If you’re just starting to use search engines in your marketing or you’ve been at it for years, you’ll find a lot of help in this interview.

Click the green button to play:

 

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Audio Interview - Oveview of Paid Search vs Organic Search

Les Reaves is the founder of one of the leading search engine marketing companies in the country, Market Square Media. In this first part of this 3-part interview, geared toward brokers, Les discusses the differences between paid search marketing and organic search marketing and why you need both for a successful search campaign.

If you’re just starting to use search engines in your marketing or you’ve been at it for years, you’ll find a lot of help in this interview.

Click the green button to play:

 

 Standard Podcast [8:19m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Got an iPod??

Get this interview with iTunes

A bunch of you haven’t caught on to RSS feeds yet. I spent hours getting that little orange subscribe button there on the right all dialed-in and some of you aren’t using it. Watch this short, fun video about what all the cool kids are doing and join the RSS craze!

Here’s an RSS page to get you started.

Poor John, he’s an older guy who got bit by technology.

Nothing on the web is anonymous. You’re required to have a corporate email address so they can keep tabs on you.  Your surfing at work is logged in the office routers. When you delete a file it still exists - all you did was delete the reference to that file in the table of contents. Cheap forensics software can recover almost anything. Some students did a study on used hard drives a while back and what they found was astounding.

The last thing you want is to be on a roll and some ugly stuff pop up from a previous relationship years ago.

If you’re about to be in the market for a new computer you should consider a Mac (I promise to post more on this later) . Here’s a video from Walt Mossberg about his frustrating experience with a new PC:

And yes, you can run Windows to use Paragon.

At your next open house, consider using one of these LCD picture frames. It plays video. So shoot a video of yourself talking about some great features that someone touring the house might miss (”Be sure to look in the closet on the left. There you’ll find a secret compartment…”). Then put it upstairs or some strategic place where your guests are likely to be alone. It’s an intriguing approach and they’ll appreciate the added info and your client will appreciate your added value.

You can get one here:
Thinkgeek.com

And if you can’t shoot the video, give us a buzz, we can shoot it for you.

A great post recently popped up outlining how a hacker can get your password. You can read the interesting details here:

One Man’s Blog

After my Dad died, we found that he had password protected his Microsoft Money file. Fortunately for us he used a really bad password and after downloading a free cracker utility from the web, we cracked the password in 3 seconds (he used “bucks”). I tried this method below and gave up after 3 continuous days as the password still was not cracked.

As a real estate professional you’re responsible for a lot of sensitive client data as well as personal data. For those of you who’s passwords are based on your kid’s name, pet’s name, birthday etc. I’ve got an easy 3-step solution to have a different password for every site and NEVER forget it.

1. Simply start with a base word - in this example I’ll use our dog’s name “Bashor.”
2. Change one letter (at least) to a number like 0 (zero) for “o” or 3 for “E” or 5 for “s.” In this example I’ll change the “s” to a 5 - Ba5hor - Great now I have a base word that is extremely hard to crack since it contains upper & lowercase letters and numbers. Remember, the more characters the better. But we need a unique password for each site.
3. Pick a consistent character or characters from the name of the website and append it to your base password. In this example I’m going to pick the first and last character of my banking site wellsfargo.com. I’ll take the “w” and the “o” and append it to the beginning of may base - woBa5hor. So my passwords begin to look like this:
   www.countrywide.com: ceBa5hor
   www.united.com: udBa5hor
   www.schwab.com: sbBa5hor

This gives you a different password for each site that you’ll always remember and is really, really hard to crack (just remember to tell your loved ones about it).

In the mid-90’s when Dell announced they were going to use the web as their primary channel for sales, other computer makers for the most part ignored it. Around the same time I remember meeting with a prominent full-service investment brokerage, regarding their internet strategy, who completely discounted the internet as a viable channel for investments. Dell was right & the others were wrong. Dell has reigned supreme for almost 10 years and how often do you actually walk into an investment broker’s office?

The size and location of Steamboat provides a bit of insulation to disintermediation changes but all that does is buy you time. Redfin is out there looking to change the game. They’re not going away and even if they did, another would pop up the next day. Your 2nd home clients are going to begin expecting this kind of information, followed by your local clients. You’ve got some extra time - watch this interview with the CEO of Redfin and get busy.

Imagine you’re driving along and an important idea comes to mind. You NEED to capture it. Or you think of something you forgot and need to send a reminder to someone or remind yourself. You’re late for your appointment so you can’t stop - what do you do?

Enter Jott - Push the Jott speed dial button on your cell phone, speak your message and voila - minutes later your voice note has been transcribed into text and is in your email inbox - or your co-workers’ inbox, or all of your employees’ inbox - whatever you choose.

I think this service provides real value in that it leverages technology to truly help you remember, communicate and stay organized. Plus it is soooo simple to set up & use. I have a digital voice recorder that I use all the time but the one bottleneck is that I have to stop and transcribe my voice notes into my system manually. This service does that for me. Give it a try - it’s free for now so there’s no risk. I signed up yesterday and have already used it 7 times.
www.jott.com

I can’t for the life of me understand why cell companies didn’t think of this.