my|assistant - real estate virtual assistant

Sit Next to a Granola Bar

myassistantcan — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 04:22:53 +0000

I went to my local grocery store for square orange cheese crackers. In particular I was looking for Cheese Nips because they were on insane sale.

Cracker aisle. Found the Cheez-Its but where are the Cheese Nips????? Can’t find them anywhere. But they’re on sale. They must be around.

Cruise down the aisle to the granola snack bars. Lo and Behold – there are the Cheese Nips. Why here???

This immediately gets my attention. Why in the world would Nabisco choose to put their square cheese cracker so far away from the other square cheese cracker? Why would they choose to put their cracker where the other crackers are not?

Now, this was like five days ago and I can’t let it go. Something is significant here. Today, I think I figured it out.

Location, Location, Location!

You’ve heard it said before in real estate but it really is the best thing to consider in much of marketing, listings and otherwise. I don’t like Cheese Nips as well as I like Cheez-Its. My guess is that most people agree with me or at least they recognize the red Cheez-Its box much faster than they recognize the orange Cheese Nips box. My guess is that Nabisco purposefully moved their product out of their competition’s reach. Move it where there is no competition besides granola bars. The guilty indulgence may get the best of some people and they’ll reach for the cheese crackers instead of the granola bars.

That’s my theory.

What does it mean to you?

This can be applied to both listing marketing and agent marketing. If you can’t get a house sold, what is the first thing you recommend to the seller? Price reduction. If you can’t beat the competition, move away from it. Move away in price. Set yourself up with new competition. Sit next to a granola bar.

Same goes for agent marketing. Get out of Homes & Lifestyles and put yourself where the saturation is much more in your favor of getting seen. Where is that you say? Right now, it’s in people. It’s in social media. It’s in getting yourself out there where the people are. It’s about walking your neighborhood and talking to your neighbors. Ask for a referral. If you don’t have the guts, get some. (psssst….you’re in sales).Don’t be afraid to move out of the cracker isle. (No, I didn’t just call you a cracker). Hang out with some granola bars and you might find yourself with better exposure. At the very least, someone might start talking about you on some blog.

myassistantcan — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:45:54 +0000

With my | assistant, it’s done.

Do you enjoy completing the administrative tasks that are necessary to real estate (mailings,
printings, design work, internet marketing, listing maintenance)?

WE DO!
(crazy, but true)

You can’t be making money when you are stuck in the office and that’s where we can help. Let My
Assistant™ handle your time-consuming administrative tasks so you can do real estate.

See what we can do for you!

What is a Virtual Assistant?

A Virtual Assistant is a professional assistant who works from a remote location. A VA can perform any task an in-house assistant can offer. From flyers and postcards to promotional item ordering or simple research – we can do it.

Google and Page Rank

myassistantcan — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:42:22 +0000

Google’s page rank system is virtually dead. Google is producing more sophisticated methods or ranking websites and are becoming better and better at weeding out dead sites. Sites that don’t offer fresh content, sites that don’t bring and retain visitors are going to suffer page rank. Google used to crawl sites by looking at the keywords in your website, finding other sites that linked to yours and ranking those sites as well in order to help determine the quality of your website. Now Google wants to see how others see your website.

Google is now going to be focusing on a deeper algorithm. It is no longer going to just track your hits each month but is going to take into account how long each visitor stays at your site. Say someone did a search and your site came up in the results. They click on your site and then quickly realize it’s not what they were looking for of they just don’t like your site and leave rather quickly. A person can bounce by:

clicking on a link to another site
typing in a new website
closing the browser window
remaining idle for too long, causing the analytics session to timeout
hitting the ‘back’ button

Basically, Google wants to see that people like your site and want to stay there and look around.

How do you get people to stay on your site???

Videos
Record a video, upload it to YouTube, embed on your website. You want to try to keep your visitors around for a few minutes and have them check out other spots on your site while they are there.
Downloadable forms
Make clickable urls open in a new window, not in the same window
Sidebar widgets to entice visitors to look around your site (maybe Featured Listings if you’re a Point2 member or real estate agent)
Blogs

Be prepared to revamp your website and to really take a leap onto the social networking bandwagon if you haven’t already. It’s a great way to share your website with the world, gain traffic, and make friends. If you don’t have the time to blog, consider hiring a Virtual Assistant to help write your articles. Or, you could write them and your Virtual Assistant could post them all over the internet, driving traffic back to your site. Either way, now is the time to really consider getting involved before you lose your search engine placement to those who are.

Microsoft Office alternative

myassistantcan — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:54:52 +0000

Microsoft Office is pretty much the norm in computer world. Microsoft has a monopoly. Until now. OpenOffice.org is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. OpenOffice is made up of 6 basic programs :

Writer - a word processor comparable to Word
Calc - a spreadsheet editor and creator comparable to Excel
Draw – a graphics editor similar to Publisher
Impress – a presentation program rival to PowerPoint
Base – database program comparable to Access

Already have an older version or Microsoft Office or at least have some files others have created in MS Office? The great thing about OpenOffice is that is can easily integrate MS Office’s information into OpenOffice, meaning you can open MS Office docs in Open Office. If you are looking at purchasing MS Office, give OpenOffice.org a try? What do you have to lose? It’s free!

Social Media Explained

myassistantcan — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:49:32 +0000

With so many social networking applications available, it can become confusing to sort through all of them and really understand at the base what social networking is and why you should participate. You’ve joined local groups – BNIs, Chamber, Womens Council of REALTORs, etc – but have you joined groups online? Or did you realize that many of these real world groups also have social networking groups online??? The new web is based on real connections and real relationships. Come to the party! This video may help put it into perspective.

NOTE: there is one adult word in this video. If you have children around, you may want to use headphones or keep the volume low.

Google Maps Street View in Michiana

myassistantcan — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 20:17:32 +0000

We’ve made it! It’s here!Street view maps by Google are in Michiana. There have been some privacy concerns raised by the cars with the crazy cameras on top. I think most of the concern is in places like New York, Chicago and other major cities where these streetcars capture not only buildings and streets but people as well.

How cool is this? I’m giddy! Think of all of the applications: need to pull directions to a house. Go to streetview and see what it actually looks like before you get there. Or, need to figure out a place to meet a client but don’t know what’s in the area? Do a street view. This would have come in uber handy last week when I met my sister at the corner of I-94 and Westnedge in Kalamazoo. I didn’t know what was around and streetview would have been awesome.

Have any other ideas?Perhaps giving a link to the streetview in your listings?

View My Assistant | Real Estate Virtual Assistant on Street View

: Google Streetcar

My Wordle

myassistantcan — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 05:55:19 +0000

Oh My Wordle!

What a great little marketing application! With Wordle you can take the content of your website or blog or just type in the words that best describe you or your business. How fun! CAUTION: this is so much fun you might want to set aside a good chunk of time to play with it. Please share your Wordle when you’ve finished! I’d love to see it.

Add Social Media to your Marketing Plan

myassistantcan — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:26:45 +0000

Are you rolling in marketing dollars this year? If you’re like a lot of companies you are forced to give a hard look to your marketing plan and rule out what is working and what is not. Here’s what I’m hearing.

Not working:

Newspapers
Homes & Lifestyles
Open Houses

Working (in our area and across the country)

Websites
Postcards
Twilight Open Houses
Social Media Marketing

Social Media is the NEW internet. Have you heard of Web 2.0? That’s what it refers to – social networking online. While we’re in winter, let’s not hibernate but amp up our marketing plans and pull new ideas into them.

Not sure how to get started with Social Media Marketing? It can be a bit overwhelming if you’re just starting out. Here’s an intro to a couple of the major social media sites. You will also want to check out this article by David Wilson, owner of Braveheart Design on why you need a social media presence. I’ll work on pulling together more information on ActiveRain and Broker Social Network. Those are both real estate specific networking sites.

Twitter- a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real time. Basically, you create a profile, find people to ‘follow’. You get updates from them about what they are doing/thinking and vice versa. I’ve made 5 real life friends from Twitter and received quite a bit of paying business. I’ve also connected with other VAs and learned valuable tips. View my Twitter profile.

Facebook – Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and connected. Millions of people use Facebook everyday to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet. You can also connect your outside blog (short for web log) to Facebook and your Facebook profile will automatically be updated with your new posts (are you blogging your listings yet? If not, winter is a great time to learn how). Visit my Facebook profile.

I offer training and profile set up for those who want to get started but don’t want to do the set up.

Custom Animated Graphics

myassistantcan — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 20:23:46 +0000

I get asked quite often to put animated graphics on websites. When I think of gifs (graphics interchange format) I think of dancing elves or cats licking their paws. I think of cheesy stuff. But now with great technology you can make your own classy gifs. At Picasion.com you can upload a series of photos with which you want to create an animated photo. For instance, I took a logo and saved it with one word missing, then two words missing, three words, and on until I was down to nothing. I uploaded each photo to Picasion.com and they generated a wonderful gif for me to use on a client’s website.

Try it out and let your creativity flow. I’d love to see your results!

Reminder for Thanksgiving Postcards

myassistantcan — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 03:16:07 +0000

Just a reminder that the Thanksgiving postcards are ready to print this week. Get your order in now!