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Free Google service puts you on the map!

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:00:51 +0000

I’ll bet that you know that 90% of home buyers use the Internet at some point during their home buying process. (Source: NAR’s 2009 Survey of Home Buyers and Sellers).

But, did you know that Google can put your business on the “map” for free?

Here’s how to take advantage of this Free service from Google:

Open your browser and navigate to http://budurl.com/LocalBizCtr
Create a Google Account if you don’t already have one
If you have an account, Log In
You will be taken to a page where you can fill in the necessary information about your business (Hint: As a real estate agent you ARE a business)
You can upload pictures and videos. (The videos have to be on YouTube first).

When you are finished, Google will want to verify that you are the owner of the business by calling you and giving you a PIN number (Or Snail mailing the PIN number). Once you enter the pin, you are good to go!

Watch this short video for a quick overview.

The video uses a restaurant as the example, but think about the ways that a real estate agent could use this. Why not put your vitual tours on YouTube and then bring them back into your Local Business Center listing?

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Free Google service puts you on the map!

backupify your social content

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:00:37 +0000

I had a minor disaster at my casa last week in which I lost all access to a VMWare Fusion Windows XP machine. Fortunately it was quickly resolved by using a backup. That started me thinking about what I have that is NOT backed up.

All of my computers use backup drives that are physically connected to my computer. They run continuous backups and are available to move my data to another machine if I need to do so. Or, they can be used to restore missing or corrupt data.

I also use MozyHome as another way to back up data. So in theory I am covered, right?

Not so quick. What about my social sites like Twitter and Facebook? It turns out that I have not been backing those up. What if my account at either site got trashed or even worse, cancelled? How could I recover my friends lists or pictures or the content that I have posted?

To put that in perspective, at Twitter I am following over 4500 people and over 4300 are following me. Trying to restore those lists without having a back up file would be impossible. The same holds true for my Facebook account where I have over 600 friends, many Notes, a few pictures and so on.

In my research to solve this problem I ran across a service that I am using and thought that you might like to know about it too.

This is a cloud based backup service that will use your login information to go to your Twitter, Google Docs, Wordpress, GMail, Facebook, Zoho, Delicious, Flickr, Basecamp or Photobucket accounts and perform daily or weekly backups of your data.

The service acts as backup program and does not actually store your data on their servers. Instead, the data is stored on the Amazon S3 Web Services Cloud, which in my opinion was a really smart move on their part. To understand why I say this, click here to read more about Amazon S3 web services.

You can also download your data to your local computer once it has been backed up. This now gives you 3 copies of your data. The original is on Twitter, Facebook, etc. But, you also have a copy on the S3 cloud and the one on your hard drive. The chance of all three failing at once are very, very small.

Finally, until January 31st, you can get an account for free. Hmmm, sounds like a good deal to me. Better click on the backupify logo in this post or just click http://www.backupify.com and sign up.

About the Author: Jerry is a 23 year veteran of the real estate industry and has done it all from listing and selling, to managing single and multiple offices. He has been the IT Director for a major SF Bay Area company, and has also been the Training Director for another major SF Bay Area company. In addition to writing this blog, Jerry is the Principal of Jerry Kidd Training and Consulting, specializing in showing real estate professionals how to utilize today’s exciting social tools to create and nurture relationships with home buyers and sellers. Visit http://www.JerryKidd.com to learn more about the training and consulting services offered.

Last minute shopping for you!

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 03:00:50 +0000

Got your shopping done yet? Most people I talk to have gotten theirs done or most of the way done. But, when I ask them what they got for themselves I get a blank look. Apparently nobody thinks that they should get themselves a gift. Well, let me offer a suggestion. Go get yourself a gift! After all, haven’t you been nice this year? I’ll even go so far as to make a suggestion: Give your self the gift of never having to use a fax machine again! Imagine if you could send a fax with the press of a button and not have to wait around to see if it got delivered. And imagine if faxes that were sent to you always got delivered with all of the pages intact and readable. It’s all possible if you follow my suggestions below.

To start with, go sign up for MyFax for $10.00 a month. MyFax® is an award-winning Internet fax service that lets you send and receive faxes through your email. MyFax provides exceptional value, a great low monthly price, and 24/7 customer support. And, although there are others providing a similar service, it’s the one that I use and therefore recommend.

Although MyFax will let you send any document that is already on your hard drive, what about documents that are in paper form? Wouldn’t you need a fax machine to send them? Nope. Not if you have a scanner. Again, there are any to choose from, but the Fujitsu ScanSnap series is the one all the rest try to beat. And can’t.

The ScanSnap comes in a version for Windows and a version for Mac. There are desktop models and portable models to choose from. The desktop models come with Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Standard which allows the scanner to save scanned documents as Adobe PDF files. All models come with Rack2Filer software which simplifies document management. The Fujitsu web site is offering a free carrying case for the Windows version of the portable scanner and a $50.00 rebate on the Windows Desktop and Mac desktop and portable versions.

So, if you’ve got MyFax and one of the ScanSnaps you won’t need to ever use a fax machine again. A side benefit is that any thing that you ScanSnap and fax will arrive looking as good as the original copy. No more messy faxes coming from you.

So, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Winter Solstice and whatever other holiday you may be celebrating! Be sure to include yourself on your gift list and get one of these. It will change the way you do business for the better. (I own 4 of these devices and have them at home, at my office, in my briefcase and at my wife’s office and have been a MyFax customer for years, so I am speaking to you from experience and as a satisfied customer)

For your convenience you can visit my Amazon Store so you can purchase the ScanSnap. You may be able to get a better price by shopping around. I’ve also provided a link to MyFax (above) for your convenience.

Realtors® guide to making a living in a Web 2.0 World Part Twelve ~ YouTube

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 03:00:04 +0000

The next step along the way to utilizing Web 2.0 tools to enhance your business is to utilize video. In a previous post I talked about the Flip video camera, which in my opinion, is tailor made for real estate agents. Go here to check it out http://realtytechbytes.com/video-made-simple/. Once you’ve got your hands on this little gem you are ready to go.

You may be wondering why I think that online video is a necessary component for your Web 2.0 marketing. I’ve heard it bandied about that YouTube is now the number 2 search engine behind Google. Never one to just blindly believe that sort of thing, I went looking around to find the source of the statement. Along the way I ran into this site http://www.alexa.com/topsites which ranks the top 500 sites on the web. At the time of this writing, YouTube was number 4. (I did find the original reference to the claim that YouTube is the number 2 search engine, but there is some controversy there about whether YouTube IS a search engine or whether it simply HAS a search engine – who cares? A lot of people look at YouTube, daily.)

That makes me think that it cannot hurt you to have videos on YouTube. Since YouTube allows you to have keywords listed with each video submission, and since you can link the videos back to your blog, and since once a video is on YouTube it can be emailed to anyone or embedded in your blog or uploaded to Facebook…why wouldn’t you just do it?

Getting started is easy. Go to http://www.YouTube.com and just log in. If you don’t have an account, just follow the prompts to create an account. Once the account is created, log in. Then double click on your name to enter the Channel editing location. This is where you can spruce up your Channel (What other people see when they search for you or your videos on YouTube). You can upload your picture or logo, set background colors and choose what you will display about yourself.

YouTube has an excellent help section which you can find here:
http://www.youtube.com/t/yt_handbook_produce. As you might expect, most of the help is in video format.

Now you just need to create some videos. If you are using the Flip, just get to it. The Flip makes getting the video out of the camera and up to YouTube a very easy process. Once it’s there, why not embed it into a blog post? Or email it to clients, prospects and other agents (if it’s of your new listing)? Some of the things that you might want to video are your listings (of course) and neighborhood tours or highlights. You could do interviews with lenders, inspectors, title companies, escrow companies or even do “man on the street” interviews with people at neighborhood events.

Get creative. Get started. Go for it. But, if you are feeling overwhelmed, get in touch with me. I can help get you set up. It’s part of what my new company does for real estate agents.

And if you are already using video in your business, won’t you please share what you have done by posting some links in the comments?

A great light has gone out; Jim Rohn passed away today

Jerry Kidd — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 03:53:12 +0000

“For things to get better for you, you have to get better”, Jim Rohn.

Those 12 words spoken by Jim Rohn on a Nightengale-Conant tape, and heard by me in the summer of 1982, utterly changed my life. I was given the tape to listen to by a man who thought that it would help me improve my life.

Up until that point I was sure that my lack of success in life was due to the circumstances of my birth, the lack of a college education, the time spent in the Marine Corps when others my age were in college, where I lived, the clothes I wore, the car I drove, in short everything around me was holding me back.

Jim’s twelve words stood out so brilliantly that I scarcely heard anything else he said on that 1 single cassette tape. It wasn’t until later during subsequent listenings that I learned much more from him.

Jim had a very clear way of taking complex subjects and putting them in a way that I could understand. And the understanding allowed me to apply them in my life. He said that profits were better than wages. And that I needed to be working on profits instead of wages. At the time that I heard that I wasn’t able to quit a job to start a business. But he assured me that I could still start on building the foundation that would lead to a business. And so I went to Santa Rosa Junior College at night, and my job by day. Four years later I obtained a real estate license and my life was forever changed.

I met Jim at a seminar in San Jose in 1995. I shook his hand and thanked him for the gift of his wisdom and the gifts that his wisdom had given to me.

I’ll never forget that day, and I’ll never forget Jim.

http://tribute.jimrohn.com/

Realtor’s® guide to making a living in a Web 2.0 World ~ Part Eight

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 02:00:09 +0000

In Part Seven, I encouraged you to utilize a blog as your home on the Internet, and gave you five reasons why a blog is a better bet for you than a standard web site. But I left you with these questions:

By now you are wondering what you would say on your blog. Why would anyone want to read what you have written?

To answer those questions, let’s take a step back. NAR tells us that 84% of consumers start their search for property on the Internet. If you believe Realtor.com’s statistics, it looks like they get the lion’s share of that traffic. Assuming that this is true, then most of the online consumers will be there and they can see all of the active listings that are on the MLS. This in my opinion is a very good thing.

They can utilize the virtual tours that are with many listings (yours do have virtual tours don’t they?) They can look at many photos (yours have lots of QUALITY photos don’t they?), they can map the homes online, in short, they can get a pretty good idea of all active listings on Realtor.com. (By the way, you DO want to pay to have the ENHANCED listings on Realtor.com. And drive the inquiries to you and your blog)

But, here is what they don’t get from the large sites like Realtor.com…they don’t get the expertise that a real estate agent brings to the transaction, which is why people still use an agent even after they have searched online for properties.

Stop and think about the conversations that you have with your buyer clients when you first meet them. Aren’t you asking them questions about their lifestyles, their family, their wants, needs and must haves? Don’t you use that information to help them choose the right home?

What about the conversations you have in the car with them when you are driving them to properties to see? Aren’t you talking about the neighborhood amenities, the schools, the shopping, the traffic patterns, the issues and other facts that will affect their decisions to buy?

And then of course there is that whole topic of discussion about what it takes to obtain a loan today. The credit issues, the availability of money, the appraisal process, the underwriting, the funding. Don’t forget the conversations that you have about the escrow process, the inspections, and the negations after the price negotiation. Move in dates, what is included and all of the many thousands of details that go into buying (or selling) a home today are also conversations that get interspersed with the other conversations.

The person looking to buy or sell a home wants to know these things as much as they want to know what is for sale. Where would they go to get this information before they choose a real estate agent? I suppose that they could go to Google and search for some of those items and end up at another agent’s blog. Or, they could end up at your blog. Now there is a concept.

What if your blog had all of that information? What if your blog had frequent posts on what was going on in your market area? What if your blog encouraged readers to ask questions about your market area that you could publicly answer on the blog? Would that help you build relationships with those consumers before they decided which agent to use? I think so.

So, start a blog. Of course you want to put IDX search for properties on it. There are lots of free and paid IDX search solutions available. To start with, ask your MLS what they suggest that you do.

But, then start adding content about your market area. Ask your favorite lenders to give you some content about loans. Ask your favorite title companies for information about holding title, the escrow process and other interesting info they all have.

You need to write articles at least weekly on what you see happening. There is ALWAYS something interesting going on at your office that consumers would love to know about. Don’t disclose names or other facts, but do tell in general terms how you or someone else in your office solved a problem that came up.

Put your past sales up. Since you control the blog space, put up the photos, the virtual tour, and the statistics of the sale. Have a separate page for each city you work in and list the pertinent sales under the correct city. Over time this will be the best indicator of your professionalism. Solicit past clients for recommendations and post them.

Get a Flip video camera and video the neighborhoods where you work and post the video tours under the appropriate cities. Try to capture the quality of life that someone is likely to experience if they were to live there. This is something that they can’t get today and it’s something that every buyer would like to have.

You could go to Zillow and Trulia and sign up with them to place their widgets on your blog. This will give consumers the option to view the data that Zillow and Trulia make available. (Stop fighting them and join them already!)

For a reasonable amount of money, go to Altos Research and sign up for their service which will give you statistical analysis graphs of your market area to place on your blog. They take the work out of analyzing listing and sales data and present in colorful and interesting ways.

If you are in California, the California Association of Realtors® provides a weekly email update of information that they boldly state that you can use in emails or websites (a blog is a website) just by copying it and pasting it in.

If you had a blog that had this much information available to consumers, and you kept it up and promoted it effectively, you would, over time, become the local expert. And that can only help build your business.

This may be more daunting than you wish to do. I understand that, but it really is as easy as follow the numbers. But, if you’d like help, I am available to help you set one up and train you how to keep it up. (See my post on Change) Contact me for details.

In the meantime, get started, because we are going to look at ways to promote your blog next time. And you need to get this part done so that you have something to promote!

Two Twitter Tools for Real Estate Agents

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 02:00:46 +0000

Unless you have been on vacation on Mars for the past year, you have heard about Twitter. You may know that Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows you to post messages limited to 140 characters. This messages are called Tweets and can theoretically be seen by every Twitter user. Of course a person would have to be logged on to Twitter to even have a chance of seeing your message go by on the public timeline.

In practice, your Tweets are most likely seen by random people who happen to be on line as your Tweet goes by, by people who have chosen to “follow” you and by others who are conducting a search for one of the words you used in your Tweet.

For those who have taken the time to study Twitter, it has become perhaps the single best online vehicle for marketers that has been developed so far. Some may care to argue that point, but I don’t know where else you can start with no followers and with a few months of some concerted effort end up with a list of thousands who want to hear from you.

People from all walks of life and from all age and social demographics use Twitter on a daily basis and many of them are looking for services. In fact, many people turn to Twitter first before using a traditional search engine. I’d much rather get a recommendation on something I needed from someone I knew versus be sent to a commercial web page (as Google searches tend to do).

So armed with this information, I set out to see what was available for real estate agents that wanted to use Twitter to enhance their business and to provide better service to their clients.

I came up with two really nice services. Oh, did I mention that they are free?

DemandSpot bills itself as Real-Time Lead Generation for Real Estate. Notice that it is in Alpha mode which means that they are still working out performance issues and maybe even changing what they are offering! So be prepared for things to not always work as expected. But, don’t let that stop you from checking them out. Here’s a partial list of what they offer you:

They search Twitter and FriendFeed to find people talking about their home hunting experience
They list them in one place
They make it easy for you to search by your area and other criteria important to you
You can set up an automated function that searches the Tweets based on your criteria and then sends pre-defined messages to them automatically. This part does cost you in a fashion similar to Pay Per Click advertising.

You may not want to use the automatic feature, but their aggregation feature of Tweets that mention your search criteria is a real time saver. You would then manually select the users that you wanted to contact individually. You’ll want to check out their FAQ (Scroll to the bottom of the homepage) for details, but the basic search is very intuitive.

My second “find” is tweetlister. I’ll let them tell you what they are: “TweetLister is a free service that allows real estate brokers and owners to take full advantage of the vast, wide-reaching social network on Twitter.com. With TweetLister, you can easily create, post and manage all of your Twitter listings. You can track clicks on your listings, and collect leads – all in one spot. It’s easy. It’s friendly.”

Here is a partial list of what you can do with tweetlister:

Enter information about your listings into a form on their home page
It gets converted in to a 140 character “tweet” that contains the relevant info about your listing along with a link to a detail page on the web where viewers can see the details that you originally loaded along with the photo that you provided, two links to your blog or website and your virtual tour. There is also a Contact form that can be filled out. You would receive an email if anyone did so.
You can schedule the Tweets to run once, daily or weekly and you can schedule the start and stop dates.
You can also fill out a detailed profile page on yourself or company
They have a very extensive FAQ page that I strongly suggest that you read before getting started as it will enhance the experience that you in using this tool

Finally, I want to leave you with a word of caution. Rather than be the only one cautioning you to use these tools responsibly and not as a spammer, I’ll just repeat two tweets that I have received in the past few months from different Twitter users. Pay careful attention to what they are saying:

Tweeter from Hawaii said “I love to buy but hate to be sold to!”

Tweeter from Georgia said “Ended up on a Realtors mailing list. Now I get DAILY emails on how she is dedicated to serving me. Talk about a business killer…”

Be very careful to not come on like gang busters with either of these tools. Careless use will brand you as a spammer. Careful use will help you build your business.

I’d love to hear about your experience in using these tools, so go ahead and leave a comment.

Pico Projectors = Pocket sized Presentations

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:00:21 +0000

Do you have an iPod or an iPhone? If you do, you are half way there to creating a pocket sized method of delivering your listing presentation or property tours.

Instead of lugging your laptop to listing presentations (Note: You may still want to take your laptop if you fill in contracts online) you can take one of the new series of mini-projectors and your iPod or iPhone instead.

Here is how it works. Create your presentation using Apple’s Keynote (if on a Mac) or Window’s PowerPoint. When you have it the way you want, save it as a series of pictures. Then on the Mac import it into iPhoto. From iPhoto bring it into iMovie, add music or a sound track, titles and then save it for iTunes. Once in iTunes you can sync the iPhone or iPod to get it on the handheld device.

On a PC you would save the PowerPoint as pictures, same as the Mac. But in this case you would import the pictures into Windows Movie Maker (It’s free and is on every copy of XP and Vista). In Movie Maker you can add music and a soundtrack along with titles. When finished, you can save it as a movie file which you can then import into iTunes. Once you have synced your iPod or iPhone with iTunes you are ready.

If you didn’t want to add a sound track (Most of the projectors do not support sound) you could just save the pictures and import them into the iPod or iPhone using iTunes. Then you could just run a slideshow using the iPod or iPhone and the projector.

Here is where the fun begins! If you have one of the new mini projectors (see a review on PCMAG.com to decide what to buy) you can connect your iPod or iPhone to it and deliver your presentation where ever you happen to be. No computer to set up, no power needed (it’s all battery powered) and if you have one of the cool Binders with the built in screen you are all set to go. (You will need to buy a cable from Apple to make the connection) Here is a video comparing two of these little projectors.

You are not going to be able to deliver a presentation to a room full of people or in bright ambient lighting (these projectors are not bright enough for that) but they are perfect for delivering a presentation at a listing presentation, buyer presentation or even at an open house.

This is pretty far out on the bleeding edge as these devices are relatively new and will undoubtedly get better, brighter, cheaper and have more abilities (like sound!) as time goes on, but if you are looking for a differentiator, this could be it.

True Confessions of a Windows user in a Mac World – Part Three

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:42 +0000

In the first part of this series, I told you how I came from the PC world to the Mac world. In the second part I told you about the “gotchas” that are part of the process. This week I want to tell you about why it’s all worth it.

Aside from the very obvious design factors that Apple brings to the table, why would I want to pay more for a computer from Apple than I would for one that runs Windows? There are a number of answers to that question, but I’ll start with security.

You KNOW that you have to run anti-virus software on your PC don’t you? And you know that you have to keep it updated daily, don’t you? And you know that if you fail to do that basic preventative care that you WILL get an infection don’t you?

I don’t have to do that with the Mac. I do run antivirus on the PC portion of my Mac, but I run the free program AntiVir. I don’t need expensive AV products on that virtual PC because I ONLY use it for WinForms and MLS access. Every thing else is done on the Mac side of the fence. Some people say that it’s only a matter of time before virus writers learn how (or take enough interest in doing so) to write Mac specific viruses. I don’t really agree with that thinking as I believe that the UNIX operating system that OSX is built on is inherently a safer system to run.

The Macs also have Time Machine built in. Time Machine allows me to connect an external USB hard drive to my Mac and it will create a backup of my hard drive and then every time ANYTHING changes on my computer, it adds the change to the backup. It keeps the backups in a format that allows me to find anything I want going back as far as the capacity of the drive will allow. And it does so in the typical easy to figure out and use Mac interface.

Speaking of the Interface, it is truly easy to use. Apple has a very complete and nice series of videos on it’s website that you can look at when you need to learn something new. Most everything is intuitive and I haven’t been stymied for long when trying to figure out something new.

It comes with some pretty amazing software that handles my email, web browsing, contacts and calendar items. Of course iTunes and the whole iPod (and iPhone) experience on a Mac is so much better than on the PC side of the world.

I purchased Microsoft Office for the Mac so I could get Entourage, which is the Apple equivalent of Outlook. Guess what? It’s better than Outlook! I use it to connect with my company Exchange server. All of my company email, contacts and calendar items seamlessly sync with Exchange. The interface is easier to use than the one that Outlook provides.

I also purchased iWork 09 which gives me Pages, Numbers and Keynote, the Apple equivalent of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Although Word and Excel are more powerful than Pages and Numbers, Keynote beats PowerPoint hands down in terms of what it can do and the ease of doing it. I paid $129.00 for it and that allows me to install it on all three Macs. Try that with MS Office for Windows.

I believe that the agent of the future is going to have to learn to communicate using video and audio in ways that we don’t use today. Video and audio emails are so much easier to accomplish using the Mac than they were on my Windows PC. The hardware and software on the Mac is designed to work with each other and it shows in the ease of use. Said differently, it just works, every time.

Putting together multi-media presentations can be described as fun when done on a Mac as compared to doing the same thing on a PC. I often work in Keynote, save the completed presentation as a movie, drop it into iMovie, create a soundtrack in GarageBand, take the sound track and drop it into iMovie with the Keynote file and create a movie with sound and graphics that can be uploaded to a video sharing site on the Internet or emailed to clients. All done by dragging and dropping…

Finally, there is less clutter on my desk. The iMac is fully self contained. There is a power cord, an Internet cord, a keyboard cord and the cord to my external backup drive. Everything else is built into the iMac. No more separate display and big clunky box.

So, for all of those reasons, this is one PC guy who is now a Mac guy. How about you? What are you running? Mac or PC? And why? Let’s hear from you.