[tweetmeme] This month a client of mine (Michelle Silverman) is featured in an article in Realtor Magazine titled Winning With WordPress. WordPress is a hot topic right now in the real estate world, and for good reason. In such a competitive industry, smart agents are adapting quickly to meet the changing needs of their tech-savvy customers head on. WordPress allows agents to build sites that integrate social media tools and low-cost, do-it-yourself approaches into their marketing mix, helping them get found, showcase their listings to buyers and generate leads that increase their business.
Why Pay A Professional to Help You Build Your Business Online?
Note: The following article is a guest post I wrote for Rahvalor, an online creative agency in New Jersey that I work with on varied projects. The post takes 5-10 minutes to read and provides a detailed overview of the thought process any business owner should follow when evaluating their online strategy, and is designed to help them get a quick, broad awareness of the potential costs, effort and issues they need to consider before going digital.
Finding the right people to help manage your online business isn’t easy. In fact, it’s getting harder every day. To an uneducated consumer, a simple Google search for web design services can be overwhelming. Along with hundreds of services that offer cheap do-it-yourself packages, there are thousands of freelance designers, boutique agencies and large companies all competing for your business. It’s a competitive market, and it’s important to be able to know what to look for and how to separate the wheat from the chaff. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the things that consumers looking for these services need to be aware of before they go shopping for a professional. A little bit of information, and knowing the right questions to ask while shopping goes a long way, and can mean the difference between running a successful online business and struggling or failing.
Here are a few things we tell potential clients to be aware of when they call us with an inquiry…
Launch Day: A Fresh Look For Rahvalor
Over the past 2 weeks I’ve spent some long days and a few really late nights working with some great folks at Rahvalor on a complete redesign of their company site and WordPress blog. We got a lot done in a short amount of time and had a ton of fun in the process. Both sites went live this morning along with a fanfare of beautifully crafted emails and marketing.
My 3 Themes for 2011
Every year Chris Brogan does a “My 3 words” post to bring in the new year. The idea behind coming up with the three words is that they’ll be guiding pillars for what you’ll focus on in the coming year. Instead of resolutions, you focus on your own core themes as a lighthouse for your actions and efforts. I read Chris’ post this morning and my 3 themes popped into my head almost immediately, so I thought sharing them here was a good way to kickstart the year. Here are my 3 themes for 2011…
Presence, Focus and Personality.
23 Rules of Thumb for Effective Blogging
I’ll be speaking at Connected Marketing Week tomorrow in a session called “Small Voices, Big Results” at 1pm. Specifically, I’ll be discussing blogging rules that I’ve seen work over the years.Since I started blogging publicly in 2007, I’ve learned a lot about blogging and blogging culture. Along with things I’ve learned about myself and my own style there are some universal rules to follow to be a successful blogger, no matter who you are or what you’re writing about. Today I thought I’d share a few lessons I’ve learned and start a discussion. If you’ve got any additional bits of advice you would have given yourself when you first started blogging, please share them in the comments. I’d love to hear them. I don’t pretend to be an expert. I’m always learning like the rest of you.
Visualizing Twitter Activity Of Football Fans During The World Cup
Twitter’s given us the best approximation of a true, measurable “pulse of the globe” that we’ve ever had and in the last few years we’ve have seen some fantastic Twitter visualizations of world events using all sorts of approaches.
The Best Learning Hubs For Web Design, Development and Multimedia
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time learning on the web. I’ve temporarily put blogging and all the social stuff on hold in the name of focusing on teaching myself things I’ve always wanted to learn, as well as essential skills that, as a freelancer, help me deliver value to clients and broaden my skill set.
WordPress 3.0 “Thelonius” Is Now Available
3.0 is here, and it’s packed with awesomeness. I do all of my website development on WordPress these days and there are a lot of great additions in this release that I’ve been waiting on for this site, as well as on client projects. They’ve made the maintenance easier with bulk update functionality for plugins and the software, you now have custom post types for products, newsletters and real estate listings, and you’ve got a heck of a lot more control in the widget area. Here’s a 3 minute video overview on the new release, as well as an hour long video (bottom) where Matt Mullenweg talks at length about some of the updates, why they went that way, and shares some of the vision and philosophy behind what Automattic sees in WordPress’s future.