Tips and tricks for Wordpress, Bluehost, Microsoft office and other items.

Seth’s Blog: The internal blog

What a great idea.  This could be something to track all of your thoughts…similar to what I am doing here.  Maybe track expenses and meetings.

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Where do you start?

Web Site Survey Check List:
1. Determine the 5 market leaders in your area. This information is usually obtainable through your MLS.
2. Go to http://google.com/ and enter their names (conduct a separate search for each)
3. With the search results, visit the web sites of the market leaders
4. Record the following for each of their web sites:

A. Colors
B. Content (Listings, theirs, much of the MLS, National)
C. Design and ease of navigation
D. Do they contain Privacy Policies?
E. Is their e-mail address on each page?
F. Any outstanding features you liked?
G. Is there a method for collecting e-mail addresses?
H. Any Features to Avoid ?

What do you put in your website?
Create a web site that people will visit and return to, even if they are not interested in buying and selling real estate. People buy and sell homes on average every five to eight years. Your objective is to get people to go to your Site as often as possible, so when they are in the market for real estate services, they think of you. For Site content try information such as:

1. Weather
2. Travel
3. Sports
4. Local info, such as the high school football schedule and restaurant reviews
5. News
6. Kelly Blue Book
7. Technology info
8. Garage sales
9. Stock quotes
10. Government agencies, such as the IRS

Tips for helping your Page Ranking
Check your Meta Tags at this website. It rips apart the whole website and shows you the word count popularity and such.

http://www.widexl.com/remote/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html

You can increase your popularity by joining link exchange sites. (however, read this blog and you will find out that its not really needed, but the jury is out for some folks.  Its entertaining.  Karen George is good!!!)

http://www.realestatelinkexchange.com/
http://www.directory4realestate.com/
and so on, just Google “free real estate link exchange” Most require you to add their link first… “Show me yours and I will show you mine” theory.

Bio Tips. (Long and Foster website in My System)
Since Long and Foster spends a lot of money on their keywords and so forth. You should make sure if someone should stumble across your bio that it stands out. It should be relevant to you and also important to the future customers. Read some of the bios, you will get a chuckle. This is not going to be a big driver to your business but it is a reflection of you. Once someone knows you, they will look you up on Long and Foster or got to your website which also has your bio. Sometimes it is hard to talk about yourself, so get a case of beer or bottle of wine and ask some friends over to your house and gloat about you.

If you have seen my Bio, here is the way to make a moving marquee in yours. You can change the marquee by replacing “Call or email me today to get started” to whatever you like.
Call or email me today to get started.(font size=”2″ color=”000065″)(b)(marquee)Call or email me today to get started.(/marquee)(/b)(/font)

You have substitute the ( ) signs for “< >” repectively.

You can dress up your Bio with a little bit of HTLM. It drives our IT department crazy.
Google “HTML 101″, it will have some short tutorials about HTML. Key thing to remember about HTML. There is a beginning TAG and an ending TAG. See above.

Enjoy…

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Virtual Hosting Blog » The Digg Toolbox: 70+ Digg-related Scripts, Tools, and Tutorials

I need to do more with Digg. This looks interesting.

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I have been stressing the move to Bluehost for about the past month.  I have been digging up everywhere looking for the answer.  Cheryl has started playing with WP.org and offer some advice…ALL THE ADVICE HAS BEEN VERY HELPFUL, but it didn’t answer my the specific question I had in my mind…Ya See, here was the situation…I spent soo much time on my wordpress.com blog and google was loving it, Everyone was reading my blog via readers, and accessing it through my domain http://focusonfrederick.com/  My domain was a part of WordPress.com.  My mind was racing…how do I get this over to Bluehost without disrupting service and risk losing my google juice.  I first ran a couple test blogs on Bluehost, but I never took that last step…make the change to the domain!!!  Well, it turns out…that is the first thing you do and the rest falls into place…whew!!!  So here you go:

1. On your wordpress blog (you can move others here too) go to manage
   1. Click export 
   2. Save this xml file on your hard drive (remember where you put it)
2. Move Nameserver to bluehost on your godaddy domain.  You can click either one to change it.
3. In cPanel goto manage domains 
   1. Create Addon Domain
   2. This is your domain with godaddy
   3. Get EPP code from godaddy 
   4. Paste it in the space & hit verify.
   5. Close that new window if you aren’t transferring the domain
   6. Scroll to the bottom click accept or ok.  (I forget what this says because at the time I created a ticket for my “problem” The problem was me.)
   7. Verify that your domain was just created as an addon domain.
4. Now go to your cPanel and find Fantastico De Luxe 
   1. You will see WordPress on the left hand side
   2. Click New Installation
   3. Pick your domain
   4. Follow the instructions for creating your account
   5. Now you are set
5. Open a new browser window and type in your URL.  You should see a generic looking blog.
6. On the bottom right you will see the admin link.
   1. Click on it and sign in with the name you used in the set up with Fantastico
   2. Bookmark this page.  This is how you will go back into it.
   3. It looks just like your wordpress.com panel with some changes.
   4. Click manage and then import this time
   5. Browse for your file.  The one you saved in the 1st step.
   6. Wahlah… you have all of your post and comments
7. Now you have to set up your themes and widgets.  That will be a different post
8. All of your pictures will be links to your old blog…so don’t delete your old blog until you transfer all of your pictures.  Otherwise leave it up.

The process was pretty painless (20/20 hindsight)  If you don’t have an outside blog yet, I would suggest WordPress.com as a place to start.   If you already have an outside blog, I suggest Bluehost.com as a place to host it.  There is a lot of bundled up software in there…I will have to figure it out and get back to you.  (like photo gallery software to create your own gallery website) See below for more information.

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[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE]

How are you relating to people? This is our future…be a part of it.

Edit: I decided to add the rest of Mike Wesch’s videos. The theory is amazing. You don’t realize it until you really see it.

Introducing our YouTube Ethnography Project This is the beginning. You have just watched the first project above.

A Vision of Students Today The one that Cheryl mentioned. Sucks, I was in school before this was popular. I can so relate to this.

Informations R/evolution This is his latest project.

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