Category: Blogging (page 72 of 84)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, Aspiring Spirit defines the fine are of being an unbearable co-worker:

Always show up late for meetings. Make it clear that you were busy and had to “squeeze” a few minutes out of your precious time to attend this meeting. Do not forget to regularly interrupt your co-workers in mid-sentence and disrupt their train of thought. If they try to continue speaking, raise your voice and waive your hands. While sitting in the meeting, whip out your blackberry (or any other communication device that you are carrying; the more the better) and start fiddling with it. For bigger impact, do this while speaking or listening to someone while they’re trying to make a point.

Do not agree with any of your co-worker’s points. If you have to, just say “we will have to discuss this offline”. If you see that the meeting is too focused or running smoothly, run off on a tangent. Resist every attempt to re-focus the meeting by insisting on the importance of your tangent.

Schedule as many meetings as you can with total disregard for your co-workers’ time and workload. Make sure to pick the worst time for a meeting, like just before the end of the day. And always make sure that the meeting extends beyond the scheduled time.

This is why I’m an entrepreneur…

I might be an Insufferable Bastard, but I will never ever waste your time at work — if only because that would be a waste of mine, too.

Aspiring Spirit’s article rocks, though. Read the whole thing…

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Marlow Harris’ 360 Digest weblog is a must-read feed. I say she’s serious, but she insists that her love of all things Elvis belies that. I say she’s serious anyway.

As with most good weblogs run by working Realtors, her site covers a lot of ground, but she seems to be more than unusually well wired-in to what is going on in the delicate dance between traditional and dot.com real estate companies. Reading her can be much more informative than prowling news sites.

If I have a complaint, it’s that she doesn’t write enough. But the quality of what she does write is so high that this seems almost like caviling.

Witness:

Lots of interesting changes and business partnerships emerging lately. I wonder how many more opportunities are still available. I checked MSN and AOL, and they’re both already hooked up with Realtor.com. Prudential has a deal with Yahoo. Seattle’s Real Property Associates is running a feed directly to Trulia (I like watching what they’re doing, as co-owner Gordon Stephenson is on the Board of Directors at Zillow.) I don’t see any reason why our other two local players, John L. Scott and Coldwell Banker Bain couldn’t also run feeds to Google Base and Trulia, but they may have their own reasons not to…

WordPress. Very clean. Very tightly coded.

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

More from Seth Godin offers 56 tips on how to get traffic for your weblog. Here is tip number thirty-eight:

Write about blogging.

This may well be the most self-referential medium in the history of media. That’s okay. Discursive prose is how we think orderly thoughts, and writing about weblogging is how we get better at weblogging.

The beautiful thing about this conversation is that sharing the purely introspective also amplifies it, while apprehending the amplified thoughts of others yields a better state of introspection. We become a forum, an agora — blog to blog, within a blog and within our own minds, solitarily engaged in the most blaringly public of debates. Very cool…

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, LearningNerd brings us “English Punctuation: Commas, Semicolons, and Colons”:

The colon introduces or restates something. Unlike the semicolon, the colon can connect an independent clause to a word or phrase.

There’s lots more, including links to other sources.

I have a certain love for punctuation. I read good writing as music, and punctuation marks are the rest notes. I have my own theories on how they ought to be used, and mastery in art consists of knowing which rules to break and how.

Like this: If a period is a full stop, I want for that colon to be a screeching slamming on the brakes. I want to hear a puff of breathe at that point, so much are you stopped short. I never know how any of this sounds in any mind but my own, but it works for me…

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

For a change of pace, let’s talk about Donald Luskin’s weblog, The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid. This is one of the few political blogs I am willing to read on any regular basis. Luskin’s is nobody’s demagogue, but he himself is very smart, as are the people who share information with him.

The site is kludgey, built who knows how. The permalinks are crap — as is the case with many older political blogs.

But: So what? Luskin has the inside track, especially on economics, and his writing, while sometimes very dense, is always engaging.

There are constantly-updated Tradesports lines, although Luskin has nothing good to say about Tradesports lately. The irregular “Joke of the Day” feature can be outrageously funny.

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

More from Seth Godin offers 56 tips on how to get traffic for your weblog. Here is tip number forty-seven:

Don’t promote yourself and your business or your books or your projects at the expense of the reader’s attention.

This one goes miles for me. I have no objection to you telling me about your product — particularly how it solves some problem at hand — provided there is a real problem that is really at hand. But if you’re just going to give me a commercial, do it on your web-site — or on TV.

This is a hard row to how, a thin line to toe, given that most real estate webloggers are blogging, at least in part, to drum up business. The bottom line is, if you start to look like spam to me, I’ll start to treat you like spam. How is that to your advantage…?

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, The Life Coaches Blog offers instruction in getting the most out of your brain:

Your Brain: it’s not just there to look good. Treat it well, feed it right, work it out, push it on, let go of the burden and give it some love, and instead of a beat-up old bicycle you’ll transform it into a rip-roaring Ferrari smokin’ down the tracks.

The article outlines a brain maximizing strategy, and also details how you can lose brain function — and not just by staying up all night writing blog posts!

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Copyblogger is a marketing weblog with a huge following. I like the content, to a degree. But to an even greater degree, I approach it with a certain kind of dread.

I am very aware of how easy it is to manipulate people into doing things they ought not do. I’m not accusing blogger Brian Clark of anything untoward. And yet, the motive, goal and purpose of Copyblogger is teaching people how to write manipulative copy.

There is a thin line between copy that is good, effective and useful, and copy that pushes buttons people don’t even know they have. Maybe I’m worrying too much, but this is the stuff you gotta watch.

Here’s a simple way of judging things: If you don’t want to name the motive behind the copy you’re writing — that motive is probably manipulative. Everybody’s got their own to look out for, but they shouldn’t have to be on the look out for you…

The site itself is simply gorgeous, beautifully designed. WordPress, of course.

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

More from Seth Godin offers 56 tips on how to get traffic for your weblog. Here are tips number forty-one and forty-three:

Post on weekdays, because there are more readers.

Post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts.

In real estate weblogging, there are a lot more readers on weekdays than on weekends. So why should you bother posting on weekends at all? Because that’s your chance to draw attention to your weblog when there is less competition.

If you can get people to read even one thing you’ve written when they have a little extra time, they may just go ahead and read everything…

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, March Choon advises us that if you work for passion, the money will come of its own:

Yes you need money to run your business but that should not be the driving force though. The issue is not to lose sight of your passion, the reason why you’re doing this instead of working for a monthly pay from someone else. Lose sight of that and your work will be tedious. What’s worse is that your customers can sense that you’re not doing it for the passion but rather for the money. That is greed. And greed is the path to the dark side…

This is a long article, and quite a bit of it strikes me as happy-babble.

I like the basic idea more than I like the execution, and I’m not 100% in love with the basic idea. I do believe in working for passion, but I think it’s important to focus your passion on things that pay well. An admirable poverty is only admired from the outside. From the inside, eventually, it can come to be a tailor-made hell.

So: Passion? You bet. Money? If you don’t make an effort to snatch it, someone else will…

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Since I mentioned Seth’s Blog, why don’t we review it?

I think Seth Godin has very interesting, very useful ideas on marketing. But I think his weblog can be too much a Delphic Oracle at times.

Visually, it’s very clean. Even though he easily could, he doesn’t clutter up his message with advertising, other than promotion of his own products.

On the other hand, he sometimes doesn’t clutter up his message with message. There are times when his profundities are about as deep as a fortune cookie.

Commenting is normally turned off, but trackbacks — Typepad — are turned on, so you can communicate with Seth’s audience, if not with the man himself.

I love this weblog, but I wish it were as consistent about addressing issues as it can be about raising them…

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Seth Godin offers 56 tips on how to get traffic for your weblog. Here is tip number fifty-five:

Don’t be boring.

I actually dislike much of the advice Seth is giving, if only because you see those stunts so often. I like organic search results, and I like authentic weblog entries. If I feel too much like there is a strategy or a tactic behind a post — even if it’s only “What do I do now?” — I get creeped out.

A useful mantra: When you have nothing to say, say nothing.

That doesn’t blend well with the idea of frequently updating a weblog, but that simply means you have to dig deeper…

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From the Problogger ‘How To…’ Group Writing Project, Nextebizguy shoes us how to establish business credibility:

1. Showcase Your Expertise

2. Establish Your Trustworthiness

3. Increase Your Exposure

I think this is exceptionally good advice for real estate webloggers. The article offers practical tips on each of these points, but the overarching point is that pedigree means nothing. To communicate with people, you have to earn their respect first.

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The problem is surely mine, but I don’t get Socket Site. It’s beautifully executed and cogently written, but I can’t for the life of me figure out who it’s written for…

Socket Site is one of many real estate weblogs I categorize under the general heading of “listing blogs”. It seems to be — although I admit I could be wrong — a daily review of available condominiums. One could draw an analogy to restaurant reviews — except that you eat out rather more often than you buy a condominium.

So my question is: Who is the audience? A rotating population of condo buyers? A regular population of condo aficionados? Other Realtors? I just don’t get it. It’s so pretty I keep it in my feed, but I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work…

Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing