The Official ActiveRain Guide

Catch up here: What's In Your Marketing Tool Box? Part 1

I am going to start this series off with the Active Rain Tool Box. My Top 10 favorite tools to maximize Active Rain blogging.

The following tools are in our Active Rain tool box and should be in yours also:

Active Rain Rainmaker Blog:

The most effective $29 per month you will ever spend. If you are still on the fence on whether you should spend 29 bucks a month: equivalent to a few Starbucks each month or the price of a low cost dinner out- you just can not beat this deal. You will get many times more than this back in closed sales. Click here if you are not a member of Active Rain to give it a try .  There is no obligation.

Click here if you are a member of Active Rain and you want to upgrade to be a Rainmaker. 

How much do you spend each month on marketing to get listings or buyers? If you don't have the money- take it from something else you are spending marketing dollars on. If you are not spending any money on marketing- I will be very harsh here- then running a real estate business may not be the right fit for you.

Active Blog

Start your Active Blog now. If you are still waiting around to take advantage of building an outside blog with the power of Active Rain google juice backing you up- don't wait another minute. Before you close out of AR tonight- get your Activeblog up and running.

It is simple and easy. All you have to do is add some widgets, a title, choose a domain, choose a theme and you are off and running. Why go through hours learning wordpress when you can have Active Blog with a couple of mouse clicks!
When google pulls up your keywords- your Active Rain blog will show up but also your Active Blog will also. I try to dominate page one on google. This gives me two more spaces on page one. Google only gives 2 spaces for the same content per author.

Localism Sponsor

Don't miss out on Localism. This is a powerful part of Active Rain that you need to be a part of and a contributor too. We sponsor our area and it has been very profitable to do so.

Hit Router

Hit Router will not work very well without a good IDX product or some way to get your visitors to do their home search on your site or blog. It is run like pay per click. Hit Router needs a post by itself to explain all the benefits. Make sure it is set up on your blog for sure. Here is a link to more information about Hit Router.

Firefox Browser

Use Firefox for your best Active Rain browsing experience. Active Rain works best with Firefox. It is also the safest browser. Use IE for mls and Firefox for everything else. Firefox will be listed in time management tools where I will show you some time saving applications.

Real Bird

Add Real Bird as listing widgets to your Active Rain sidebar.
Add Real Bird as a search widget right on your Active Rain blog and on Localism neighborhood posts. The last 3 contracts that our buyers agent wrote and is closing on (one already closed) are from Real Bird widget searches on our Active Rain blog! Together Active Rain and Real Bird bring you powerful buyers that are leaving their phone numbers and ready to buy. We have discovered that 100% of our Real Bird prospects are ready to buy right now to within 30 to 60 days. This is way above our website prospect time frames. Click here to check out Real Bird.

I am an affiliate of Real Bird because I love the product so much. If you click here for Real Bird I will get credit for you. Real Bird is free and they have added features for small fees.

Iclip Clip Art and Photos

The best clip art to add to your blog that is safe to use for Real Estate blogs. If you are using free or paid clip art make sure you read their terms of service also known as TOS. Most of them including Microsoft say you can only use their clip art for personal use, school and community use but NOT commercial or business use. Here is one of the posts that I wrote about Iclipart.

Of course the best images are those you take yourself with your own camera but there are a lot of post topics that a photo just won't gel with. Iclipart has over 7 Million images that you can download on your computer in many different sizes so you don't have to resize. You can get Iclipart for only $34.95 for one year! I am an affiliate of Iclipart. Click here to get the best clip art available.


Snagit

A lot of Active Rain members ask me how do I get the cool edges on my tutorial screen shots. I absolutely love Snagit which also deserves its' own tutorial. This is software for your computer and it only costs about $49. ONE TIME FEE.No renewals, no annual fee, no monthly fee. They also offer you a FREE 30 day trial!  I get nothing to promote Snag-It. There is SO much more that you can use Snagit like arrows, borders of all kinds and colors, blurbs, add in text, cut out text, etc. I can not even list all the features of this product to jazz up your Active Rain blog and save time. Here is the tutorial I wrote about Snagit back in Feb. 2008. You can see some of the applications- but like I wrote- it does not even scratch the surface of what this amazing product can do.

Real Estate Shows

I was going to add this one to the marketing section, however, no Active Rain blog is complete without Real Estate Shows. I wrote a post about using Real Estate Shows here.
 

Flickr and Picnic

Adding your photos to Flickr you get the added benefit of more exposure for your blog. You also get the benefit of using Picnic where you can do all kinds of editing to your photos for Free from serious frames to funny faces.

Kompozer and ScribeFire 

Last but not least, Kompozer is my favorite blog editing tool to have in our tool bar arsenal. I wrote a post here about Kompozer so I won't go into detail here. But if you want to add color, highlights, fonts, text sizes and a lot more, choose Kompozer. Download Kompozer to your computer for Free. It is open source. Kompozer works like a breeze on Firefox because it is developed by Mozilla, the same company that developed Firefox.

Scribefire is an add on for Firefox. To get those cool colors in comments use ScribeFire as your blog editor. You can write your whole posts in ScribeFire too which I sometimes do but then you have to add link tags and image tags in the Active Rain editor. It also does not have the highlighting effect that Kompozer has, or maybe I am just not able to find it.


I will do another post in this series on tools to add to your Active Rain side bar and some do's and don't about those tools.

So there are my top 10 favorite tools to use on our Active Rain blog.

List yours in the comment section! See you next time for part 3 where we will discuss online time management tools.
 

SEO To The Top Webinar Starts September 2. Sign Up Today.

 

 

What's In Your Active Rain Tool Box? Part 2 by Coach Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

By TwitterButton

 

Sometimes I read comments from Active Rain members who wish they knew how to get more comments on their posts.

Before I found Active Rain I was on Blogger. It was very lonely there. I had one comment during that time and I felt like I was in some deep dark cave and no one was ever going to find me!  But I also knew that Google analytics would tell me if anyone was even reading and they were.

Writing for your local markets and posting your articles about your area to Localism is a great way to build upon your consumer readership. Localism posts don't garner a ton of Active Rain member comments. But that does not matter if you have readers who are reading your blog.

One time I read a post written by an Active Rain member who titled her post something like, Why is no one commenting on my blog? Just because no one comments does not mean that no one is reading. There is a big difference. Now if you don't have anyone reading your blog- well, that is a problem. You will have to figure out why no one is reading. But let's assume for the sake of this post that is not the case.

There are many more people reading your blog than are commenting on your blog. Typically I read many more blogs here on Active Rain and outside of Active Rain than I ever would have time to comment on. I try to make about 20 comments per day. Sometimes I can only get my 10 comments in on very busy days and often on Sundays I make no comments.

So I told this member to go and look at her statistics to see how many people came to each particular post she had written.

While we all love to have recognition and comments from fellow Active Rain members and that is great to build a referral business in this manner we must remember that the public, the consumers, the readers outside of Active Rain very rarely comment on any blog. So while you may feel lost in this community called Active Rain you may well be surprised to find out how many people are actually visiting your blog and profile.

How do you find this out?

On the left side towards the bottom of your home page on Active Rain you will see a set up links that looks like this:

 

Click on the link that is called, 'STATISTICS'. What a wealth of information you will find on your statistics page.

At the top of your Statistics page you can see how many times your profile has been visited. That is the page on your Active Rain blog that you place information on about your services, your experience, links to home searches, market information, email, phone number, etc.

Underneath that you will see two tabs. One of those tabs is Subscribers. This is where you can see who has subscribed to your blog.

There is the Blog Entries tab. At this tab you can see the title of your post, how many comments you received on that post, how many views of that post and how many click throughs on that post.

What I would like to call your attention to is that the posts with very few comments are my posts to Localism and our outside Activeblog. But the amazing thing is that these same posts have a huge draw to them by the readers that will never leave a comment. These are for my posts about short sales. There usually are over 1000 views on my posts about short sale information and help and only a few comments. Most of the click throughs are to our website since I do not link out to many outside sources. You can see the one below that has only 8 comments but 1527 views and 176 click throughs.  We also just got another short sale listing over the phone from a person who found our Active Rain blog and clicked through to our Short Sale information page on our website.

The best way to build a large readership of those who comment and those who don't is to provide value. Pay it forward attitudes really create a great energy around your blog that will attract others to you. Don't just post your listings. People can go a million places online to see listings. Don't just post to Members only. Actually, I can probably count on one hand how many members only posts I have written. You do not get the Google Juice that you are here to get by writing members only posts.

And if you want comments from members on Active Rain then go out and make comments first on their blogs. This is the fastest and best way to get comments.

 

        

Your Blog May Not Be As Lonely As You Think! No Comments? by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

 

Do you want to add color to your text in your posts?

Do you want to change the font size?

Do you want to add some highlights to grab more attention to your blog?

Here is a list of online editors that you can type in WYSIWYG- and then with one click have it all turned into html for you without you having to know any html code.  I have used all of these editors.

This is a review of the pros and cons of each of these online editors. This way you can choose which one or more that you want to use in your blogging.

When someone asks me which one do I use, I say:  IT ALL DEPENDS ON  MY MOOD! It also depends on what it is I want to accomplish and how.

My favorite online html editor now Kompozer. It is no longer called Nvu. It is now called Kompozer. Just click on the link to download Kompozer. Nvu and Kompozer are open source. I have Nvu on my laptop and Kompozer on my desk top. I use them both. These are free online editors that you can download right on to your computer's hard drive. It is a program that you can use off line.  There are times when I like to write offline especially living in Florida. We get power outages and daily storms. So when I want to write I do not have to be on the internet in order to draft my posts for my blog.

The features I like best in Nvu: ( Kompozer)

• Offline editor

• Save draft posts to external hardrive for copyright reasons ( among other reasons)

• Work on several posts at one time and move easily file to file

• The developers are always improving the product

• I like to save most of my posts on my external hard drive to gather data for writing books later on.

• Contains a CSS editor

• Powered by Mozilla

• Just like in Firefox, you can have one screen open and edit several documents at once.
  

• Move between Htmls and WYSIWYG easily. ( Wish AR had that feature:)

• You can customize all sorts of things with Kompozer if you do happen to know html. When you add an image, you can change your code right underneath the photo in a box that shows up with the source code. It is really neat!
  

The drawbacks to Nvu:

• You have to remember to delete the first 3 lines or so of html code in draft mode on the Active Rain editor.

• To add images in Nvu, you have to have a URL for the image. That means that you will have to upload your photos to Photobucket, Flickr or Picasa Web which adds an extra step.

•  BUT this is NOT the case with Kompozer! With Kompozer- you can do all sorts of cool things with your images. You can load them from your computer's hard drive, you can add alt 1 image tags and you can embed links right into your images.
  

To avoid this step you can grab the source code, ( html code) from Nvu, paste it in Active Rain html editor, then publish to draft. Then go back in under WYSIWYG editor in Active Rain and add your images from your computer the ordinary way.


The next online editor that I use quite a bit is the new  Box. net Web Builder Page. I really like this online editor. You have to be online to use this editor.  I like to use Box.net for posts that take up a  lot of space such as my tutorials because the files are stored in your Box.net account. I wrote a post on how to write a post using the Web Page builder here.

The features I like best in Box.net Web Builder Page:

• Online editor

• Online storage area

• You can share the files and others can add to your post before you publish. Great for team articles.

• You can access your files from anywhere and from any computer.

• You can add images from your computer without the extra step of uploading them to Photobucket, etc.

• It has an auto save feature so if you forget to click save often; it does it by default for you.

The drawbacks to Box.net:

• Some people have said the source code does not convert correctly in Active Rain html editor. I have not ever had a problem with converting.

• You can not add alt 1 image tags in Box.net. I have put in a suggest request to their developers to add this feature.

• You can not add link titles to your links. To deal with this, just add your links after you post to draft in Active Rain editor.

When I use Box.net- I use it for the font sizing, colors and highlighting. I then add the images and links in the Active Rain WYSIWYG editor.

A very fast and easy online editor is Online-html-editor.de. This is an open source product from Germany. When you go into this program you need to click on the English tab in order to use the editor in English. Of course, if you speak German and want to publish in Germany then go for it the way it is.

The features I like best about Online-html- editor.de :

• Online editor

• Fast and Easy

• The code seems to have no issues moving over to the Active Rain html editor. 

• I use this editor when I want to post something very fast such as the Thank You for Happy Birthday that I don't care about saving.

• The image feature is great. It has really good alt 1 image tag feature but you have to grab the URL so you do need to upload your images to Photobucket, Flickr or Picasa Web.

• This editor has a simple and good link title tag feature. 

The drawbacks to this editor:

• I don't like how you can not save the draft unless you save it as online as an html file on a web page.

• There are too many steps in order to save files.

• It does not have an auto save feature.

• I can not use this editor if I am doing a longer post that I need to come back to later.

• You can not upload images from your computer so there is an added step.

I use all of these editors like I said depending on what it is I want to accomplish.
You can try them each out and see which one you like best or you can use them all. My favorite one is the new Kompozer! It wins on every front.

Have some fun adding some color, highlighting, font sizes and other features these html editors offer without spending hundreds of dollars on fancy programs that you have to learn. These programs have the same features that Microsoft Front Page, Adobe DreamWeaver and other high end programs have.

You don't have to learn html to use these editors. You just write in English just as you want to see it when it is published.
Then just click on 'source' which turns all your work into html code with a click of a button.
Then copy and paste that source code into the Active Rain Editor under the html editor tab.

One of the biggest tips I can give you about this is to make sure that you post to draft first, then check to make sure you like what you see in the Active Rain draft mode before you publish your post.

The learning curve on all of these is very fast and painless.

 

        

How To Jazz Up Your Blogging- Free and Easy!  by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

 

One of the questions I get asked is, " How do you add the Google maps to your blog posts?"

Here is the tutorial on how to add the Google maps to your articles, website pages, blogs, etc. In just a few steps; you are ready to go.

First set up your own Free Google account. Go to Google.com and set up your Free Google Gmail account. This way you can save all your maps on your igoogle page.

I wrote this post about a small oceanfront community in Manalapan Florida in this post  in which I used a map. You can see what the end result looks like.

Click on Google maps from your Google browser.

Next, add the address or town and zip code or place of interest that you want to map in the search box  and click search maps to the right of the search box.

You will get a map back in your search. There will be a flag pin on your location. You can also zoom in or out to get more of what you want on your map.

Click on the red A flag on your map. You will get a box that looks like this. Click on, 'Save To My Maps'.

There you will get a drop down menu of your saved maps. So if you don't have any yet, just click on 'Create New Map' and click save.

Then you will get a screen that looks like this:

In this box you will add your title and your description. This is going to be a searchable map so you want to make sure you did your keyword research and use your best keywords here in both the title an the description.

On the left side of your screen you will see a box that looks like the one below. Click on the public button. You can add more than one flag with more than one title and description. When you make your map public it becomes a searchable map to Google and if someone does a search with your keywords, your may will show up in the SERPS for maps and many times in regular searches where the maps show up.

Click done! See how simple that is!

Now all you need to do to get it on your post is to click on the link tab up in the right top of the map page. Then copy and paste the html code from the embed field into your html editor on your blog or website.

You can also click on Customize and preview embedded map if you want to customize the size that you want to embed. There are choices of small, medium, large but also you can choose your own dimensions.

Disclaimer: Many people use Google maps on their blogs and websites. This post is in no way permission to post Google maps whether customized or not. Please read the Google Maps terms of use yourself. You assume all risk. This post is for informational purposes only.

        

How To Add Google Maps To Your Blog and Posts by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

By TwitterButton

This is one of the most frequently asked questions on our blog. I receive a lot of  emails asking me how I got the buttons on our blog.
This is a simple process. You will be able to follow the steps quite easily.

You first have to create the button. After you create your button you need to add the URL link to where you want the button to take your visitor should they click on a particular button. You add the URL through your Active Rain editor.

There are a lot of Free button creation websites all over the Internet. This is the one that I like because it is easy and has very few steps. Most of the free button making websites I have checked out all want you to add a link back to them in return.

Go to any free button site. This is an example of one of the sites. 

Choose the button size, shape and color here.

 

 
Enter the text as directed. The instructions are simple to follow. 

 

Click on get the code.

 

You then are going to copy and paste this code in your html editor on Active Rain.

When you are in Active Rain editor, click on the html tab. Once in this editor, scroll down to where you are going to want your button to appear. Here you will paste the code.

Then click on publish to draft to make sure it all works. After you have posted to draft go back into the WYSIWYG editor and click on the button. Then click on the link tab at the top of the editor and enter the URL that you want the button to take your visitor to. Once you are happy with the placement you can publish to public and you are done!

Here is the button site for the Twitter follow birdies. You can make your "follow me on Twitter " button here and follow the same copy and paste procedure above.

Once you have the buttons published on one of your posts you can copy and paste the entire button from post to post. You can also store your buttons on an unpublished page on your website.

You can also place your buttons in this same manner on your Active Rain profile.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful.

 

As we are going through your Active Rain blog structure we have covered the following tutorials;

Active Rain Tutorial- It's All In Your Name?

Active Rain Tutorial- How to Get Mileage from Your Active Rain Profile

Active Rain Tutorial- Profile Page- Make It Shine For You.

Today we will answer a question that we receive a lot and a few extra goodies and that is: what are all those little symbols at the bottom of your posts after you publish your post to Active Rain?

First let's start with the most frequent question that was asked in the previous tutorials:

How Do You Bookmark A Post That You Like On Active Rain?

At the bottom of any post that you read there are these 4 little symbols or buttons.
 There is one here that you click to bookmark the post. Once you click on BOOKMARK the color will change to red.

Now after you bookmark the post how do you find your bookmarks?

You go over here to your home page, scroll down on the left side you will see a list of links and one of those links will say, Blog Bookmarks.
Click on this link and up will come all of your bookmarked posts. The problem with these bookmarks is that there is no way to organize them which is of course on the wish list given to the techie gurus at Active Rain to come up with some way to organize your bookmarks. They are organized by the last comment made on that particular bookmarked post.

There are some other ways to bookmark and organize your favorite posts but we will learn that on a different tutorial. This is an Active Rain tutorial.

There are some other really nifty little tools next to the bookmark button. You can email a post to others by using the email feature of your favorite posts, this is a great way to make some of your favorite bloggers go viral. Please keep in mind that you can email 'members only' posts. Just the public posts.

The other button is the the Flag button. This is the best feature that Active Rain has in this section. When you  fit the flag button you get several options. If you think a post is feature worthy, you know, to earn the coveted gold star then you  just click the flag button and then check off the box that says FEATURE!  Please bear in mind that whenever you use the flagging feature Active Rain Corp knows who you are. SO if you LOVE to feature yourself, they will be able to tell that it is you and not someone else!

 

You also can flag the spammer and plagiarized content here. If you see those famous copy and pastes simply flag it for plagiarism and add the URL of the website the content was copied from. Then the post will get the dreaded yellow X .

 

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial, the next Active Rain tutorial will be about all the choices of where to post your Active Rain post to.

 

 

        

Active Rain Tutorial- Bookmarking and more!  by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

I wrote a post about how to best use the link of your first and last name for Active Rain, how to make it an part of your overall SEO strategy and how to grab attention with it. Remember to go back and read it if you have not optimized your first and last name fields on your profile in Active Rain.

The next post in this series of articles to help you make the most of your Active Rain blog was the post about how to best use the other contact information and description section of your profile area on Active Rain. So if you are following along you should have made all the necessary changes and additions by now.

This article is going to address the body of your profile page. These are the sections that are listed right below your blog description.

There are three sections here. You can rename each of these sections. I highly recommend you to change these to some of your keywords and make them appealing to your audience.

I read a lot of profiles and most of them can be more fully optimized and more engaging. While you need to have a part of your profile be about you, more importantly this is a chance for you to reach out and pull your audience in. They will not get pulled in if your profile is only about your company. Having too much about your company on your profile also wastes valuable Google juice because Google absolutely loves the Active Rain  profiles. 

You want to make sure you use every chance to use your SEO.

Click on the field that says "rename section".  This is where you should put your main keywords. You will see that I have our main key words as the name of this section yet it is not a turn off to the prospect looking at our profile because it makes sense. You want it to make sense.

Under the first caption what you will see here is all our buttons for search for homes, a link right to our short sale series and other links. After that is a little story of the markets we service with our longer tailed keywords in the body of that paragraph.

Below that we post our bios. Since there are two of us, to make it not look too long, we decided to go with the 2 column look. Nestor on the left side and Katerina on the right side. The bios are written in third person. The reason that is important is that it adds more credibility. If someone else endorses you it carries more weight than if you endorse yourself. This is a skill you learn in marketing. Just like with press releases, I always write our press releases as if someone else is writing about us.

We titled the next section with a higher demand keyword but that encompasses more than just our town of Wellington. Since Wellington is very small of course we list and sell properties outside of our town in neighboring villages and towns so this section is about what comprises our county. You will see again that there are many keywords being used in this paragraph.

Then the last section that is available on your Active Rain profile page we named: What Happy Wellington Homeowners Are Saying About Us. Again, contains keywords but does not take away from the attention grabbing headline. People love to know what others are talking about and doing. That is why Reality TV is so popular. Saying Testimonials is very bland and overused. This title is much more engaging. This is where we put our testimonials from some of our sellers that we closed short sales with and some regular testimonials also.

Make sure that you go to your profile and complete all three of these sections. There is also a difference in what a buyers' agent is going to write and add to their profile than listing agents. We are listing agents so we are attracting to us the sellers by the material we present on our profile. Sellers want to interview us and this is our interview. On the other hand a buyers' agent is going to need more information about the area like on Cyndee Haydon's profile. If you are a buyers' agent create something similar to Cyndee's profile. The videos in her profile are especially compelling and she has a lot of business just from her profile.

The most important thing to remember with working on your Active Rain profile is that it is being read! Our Active Rain profile has had more than 35,729  views.

So get creative with your copy writing and make sure you add links to your outside blog  and add keywords throughout your profile. By all means add video and audio. I am working on that this year. Come back in a year and you will see even more changes to our Active Rain profile. 

 

        

Your Active Rain Profile Page- Make It Shine For You!  by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

You just joined Active Rain after reading some posts and now you are ready to jump in and start participating in the Active Rain Community.

So you spend time doing research on a post to write, you spend 2 hours writing your first post on your blog, you hit the publish button with sweaty palms nervous about that very first time!

Then you sit there at your computer refreshing your home page to see if you get any comments.

Alas! No one comes! Your post becomes lonely and you wonder why no one appreciated all your hard work, doesn't anyone appreciate what you just went through?

So the question becomes;

What should you do first?

Comment on other member blogs or write more content?

It is like the age old question: what came first the chicken of the egg?

The very first thing to do is set emotions aside and do not take the response personal if you are writing valuable and good content.

The next thing that is very important to remember is that if you are writing content for your local market like market reports, information on the parks in your market, news from your community- those posts are just not going to yield a lot of comments, if any from members on Active Rain. But that should not deter you from writing this local content because the consumers, the sellers and the buyers in your market and from around the world will begin to read your blog eventually.
The consumers very rarely comment on the blogs that they are reading.

• The best way to gauge whether people are reading your blog is to go to your Active Rain statistics page and see your views for different posts.

• I also love to use mybloglog tracking because it gives me great ideas of what to write about based on the clicks and views that I can track there precisely down to the very words they used to find my blog.

• Another cool tool is to use the Clustrmaps to visually see all the people reading your blog from around the world.

Sidebar: We use this as a listing tool and it is very impressive!

Now of course if you are using Active Rain to just post your listings and write ads then don't expect any response from members or consumers.
You are NOT going to be getting any referrals if you use Active Rain and as a Dump Site for your listings.

You make friends who come to your blog and comment by commenting on other their blogs; meaningful comments that add value.
You keep those friends by writing articles that add value to the community, individuals and groups on your blog.

So the answer is that you must do both simultaneously.

What I do is that I comment on blogs in between phone calls, waiting for water to boil, in between activities to get at least 10 comments in per day.
Now when I first started blogging on Active Rain I made 30 to 50 comments most days and I made some of my best friends ever by just doing this.
I have friends that I can call on any time any day to come to my aid and I can depend on them to handle any referral I send their way!

Then since I am a night owl after everything is quiet in my home, my son cuddles up to me and I write the content for my blog.
I write 10 posts per week; 5 for Real Estate, Localism and Community information and 5 for my coaching business, helping the agents here to blog better, work smarter and follow their dreams to become all that they can be. I add a good amount of personal posts for transparency and building the relationship with the consumer and agent.


Do what is comfortable for you. Most of all have fun and enjoy the journey!

        

 

What Comes First? The Comment or the Blog Post? by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

 

By TwitterButtons.com

I wrote an Active Rain Tutorial on how you should be using your first and last name fields for SEO strength. You can read the SEO in your name post by clicking here. I suggest that you take care of your first and last name before you move on to this post on optimizing your Active Rain Profile.

When you are on your MY HOME page you will see a link on the left sidebar under the new blog links that says MY PROFILE ( EDIT).

Click the EDIT link and it will take you to your profile area. Here is where you make your changes and add content to your profile page.

If you don't like to see a lot of email in your inbox or have a hard time organizing all your emails I would suggest that you get a free gmail account to use for your Active Rain home page or just use a new email box within your Outlook.

 

Next, add your website addresss that you want consumers to go to.

We will go over more about choosing URLs, website addresses in my SEO To The Top Webinar.

I just noticed that I have not changed our URL since joining. We have a great keyword rich URL that we now own. I am going to go in to change that URL now.

After the phone numbers there is one line that has the EDIT ADDRESS link right next to it. Click this link and put in a complete snail mail address or a postal box complete with city, state and zip code. Please make sure it is an address that mail will get to you. If you work for a brand name company then you need to add that name to the address in line 1 because your mail will not get to you with just your name on it in most cases. I know because we send out letters of appreciation to our subscribers each Christmas and I am getting a lot of return to sender mail. When you move, please go back in here and change your address so it is updated. We have over 1100 subscribers but only 600 had addresses to mail our letter out to. Out of the 600 we sent out we are still getting letters back marked as undeliverable.

The next section is your Description section. In here you will add a description about your area and what is in it for the consumer. Make sure to add your keywords in this section in a nice flowing style that does not appear like you are trying to just get your keywords found by Google. You know the look! Stay away from looking like that.

There is a 200 character limit in the Description so choose your words wisely.

On the right side of your profile page you will see a PRIMARY MARKET box. Here you will add your state and county. When you get ready to choose your town or city you want to make sure that people are actually looking for your town or city. Just because you live in your town and love your town does not mean that others love your town as much as you do.

We will cover more about this SEO Tips in our SEO To The Top Webinar.

Make sure you upload your photo here too. No one wants to develop a relationship with those who do not show their face! I want to know who I am networking with and consumers want to know the same also.

Then click on SAVE PROFILE.

Save your work often. It is such a bummer to not have saved your work only to be kicked out of the system and having to start all over again. You can go back and change things as you learn to get better at what you should be writing about and what words to use on your profile page.

We will continue this topic in another post so stay tuned. We will cover writing the 3 sections underneath the profile section we just covered.

Follow me on Twitter at Twitter.com/CoachKaterina.

 

        

 

Active Rain Profiles- How To Get Mileage From Your Active Rain Profiles by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

When I wrote a post about going viral in your social web 2.0 marketing  we received a lot of questions. The question that was asked the most is how do you title your photos. I am first going to show you how to add image title tags to your photos and images that you put on your Active Rain Blog. If you blog on another platform than the format will be similar.

When you are using the Active Rain editor to write your post there is a little square on the tool bar that has a tree on it. This is the image uploader tab. When I first started blogging on Active Rain I had no idea how to add an image. So if you don't know, that is O.K., just follow these instructions.



After you choose a photo either browsing your computer or adding the image URL from PhotoBucket or Flickr; you  will see the image in the larger box. Above that box is where you add your Title tags and description field.


This is where you can get some great Google juice. Google and Yahoo index images. If you research your keywords and Title your images with those keywords that is going to improve your SEO for your blog and websites.  Don't be spammy.  Most of the time you will want to use your keywords but make sure your image description is really some sort of description if this is a highly searched  topic because the image description is how people who are blind can tell what the photo is about. You can add the keyword at the beginning and then describe the image after that. Please be courteous.

If you click on the Appearance tab you can resize your images to fit better on your post. Here is also where you choose in what part of the post you want your image to display on. If you click on your post where you want your image to be, make sure you see your curser there, then click the image uploader tab and from there you can choose to display the image to the right of your text or to the left, centered or at the bottom of the text. It gives you a lot of creative choices.

 

Remember to read all the terms of use for any clipart and images that you are using for your blogs and websites. Most of the sites that I have been to only allow personal use of their clipart not business or commercial use. I use Iclipart because there are over 7 million images that you can use on your business blogs and sites. I like it because it is one stop image search for me. If my image is not a photo that I took myself it is from IClipart. Try it for free for a couple of weeks. Right now they have a yearly special going on, unlimited use of IClipart for just $29.95. You can not beat that price for safe images that you have permission to use.

Katerina Gasset, CIPS, Realtor ®, Business and Life Coach, Speaker and Author. Reach Katerina at: 561-753-0135

Disclaimer:The information provided herein is supplied by several sources and is subject to change without notice. Wellington Homes Blog does not guarantee or is any way responsible for its accuracy, and provides said information without warranties of any kind, either express or implied. Entries on Wellington Homes Blog represent the opinions and ideas of the author(s). Wellington Homes Blog does not express the views of International Properties and Investments, Inc or those of the broker.

Copyright © 2008 By Katerina Gasset, All Rights Reserved.*How To Add Image Tags- Optimizing Your Images' SEO. Contact Katerina Gasset for Customized Business and Personal Coaching.