” Upgrade current website to WordPress and add blog and iHomefinder IDX intergation….call anytime after 9am EST”

I called at 6:10 our time (9:10 EST) and asked him the question i already had an idea of the answer to:

“How did you find me?”

Of course it was a two word Google search: “ihomefinder wordpress”; which yielded this March blog post:

http://socialmediasystems.com/blog/seemless-integration-of-ihomefinder-idx-into-a-wordpress-blog/

I have been trying to explain this to people who are buying PPC and lousy leads for years, since 2001: because of ActiveRain.com, some of you are finally starting to get it.  Maybe this example will help   (PS: It is about the content!)

“I want to enable and empower yo to take over your website and online destiny.”

As usual he was reluctant at first, stating that “..we are not techies, we are Realtors…”

Now here is his testimonial two months later:

“A Case For Being Enabled and Empowered

-         By “A Busy Real Estate Professional”

Any real estate website has a #1 job. To get leads. That’s it. If people are not putting in their information into your real estate website, please take it offline tonight.

Israel Rothman with Social Media Systems was the perfect solution to our website, social media, and lead capture needs.

Some might say that a sales person should focus on what they are good at, and hire someone else to do their website. Others might say save the money & put up a simple site yourself. I’ve done it both ways. I’ve built sites from scratch, and I’ve paid good money to have sites built. I’m here to say that Social Media Systems offers the perfect hybrid of both.

One of the biggest investments any real estate professional will make is their online presence. Things change in this business every day. Why wait for someone else to make those changes & get charged for it? It just doesn’t make sense. If you can type a note in Microsoft Word, you can update your website with relevant information to your market with Israel’s system. And a partnership with Social Media Systems gives you a huge jumpstart. The key is that it’s not a build it yourself site, and it’s not a site someone else builds, only to leave you dependent on them. It’s the best of both worlds! Here’s how it works:

Israel builds the framework of your site, incorporating the latest search engine techniques to get you noticed. The latest gadgets are put in there for you, so all you have to do is login and fill in the blanks, Can you say “DREAM ANSWERED?”

You might be saying “but where will I find the time?” I am a former believer of that myself. I’m here to tell you that you will never find the time; you have to make the time. I pull in a very nice income just on website leads alone. If you target your local area with keywords and have good lead capture on your website, you can make a great living on website leads! Israel builds the machine, and you just fill in the blanks with topics you already know and talk about every day. He leads you through every step, so you are enabled and empowered to make your site the absolute best it can be!

I would recommend Israel Rothman with Social Media Systems to any high level high production agent out there. Please contact Brian at Brian@KroneTeam.com with any further questions.”

Thanks, Brian, I will spread this around: there are a lot of Real estate professionals who need to be reminded that success is possible with hard work!

Now, as is usually the case with me, there are a million copy cats out there claiming to be experts in ‘social media marketing’, as traditional SEO becomes outdated (related article: see The slow death of SEO).

Now, since things have changed so much again, that it is time to update the list: 50 Social Media Marketing Resources you cannot  be without:

0.0 Twitter.com is all the rage – global chat with instant Google search rankings!  Hook it up with your digg.com tohappen automagically!

0.1  Ideapals.org – the best features of Linkedin, Meetup, and Basecamp – share and get ideas, find and post jobs,meet locally and online, start or expand a business, manage a project: it is all connected, and it pays in NODs (natural overtures of distinction)

1. RoboForm is still on the list: with literally hundredsof profiles, all with usernames and passwords, I honestly do not know what I would do without Roboform to keep track of them: i can even create an identity for a client and automatically fill in the details into any number of web forms for them: I use the paid version but there is also a free version for the beginner.

2. Tubemogul.com Very cool, you upload your videos to one place, and they are automatically syndicated to up to 20 others in optimized format, including Youtube and Google video!  You can track statistics about your videos and do all kinds of cool things, a must have for video bloggers.

3. Veoh.com Like TubeMogul, Veoh allows you to fill in a couple of usernames and passwords for Youtube and Google (but not as many),  but Veoh has a very robust and attractive video player which displays the video nicely on your website, and allow for channels that make it very easy to show a streaming medleyof videos that you group together.  We have had some issues with  loading slowly at times ( with  their explosive growth is size), but they are worth looking at for aesthetics, and we still use them some.  In some cases you want the videos to be hosted and played on your website streaming right from Youtube  for the sake of the rankings boost you get from the click-through traffic.

4. Realtown: Realtown is owned and fed by the owners of Real Estate Magazine (RISMedia.com), Epro, Lowes, InternetCrusade and many other established icons in the Real Estate industry.  they have just re-done their site (went live in October) with new modern social networking features, and they are about to become the forums and local news areas for RISMedia.com with their new site launch.  Any group at Realtown will rank immediately for longtail searches, just as those areas of RISMedia.com do now: I know this because I was consulted on how to insure that, and I tested it last week in my first post: it took less than an hour!  They have established a way of dividing up neighborhoods by population instead of Zip codes, and they are about to go live in the communities area.  I encourage the reader to join, join a group, heck start one, get into the Realtown store while there is room!  What they are attempting to do (the grass roots localization of the web) has been attempted before, but I believe they have the resources and the software to pull it off, and they will have the reach any minute!.

5.    Plaxo: Plaxo is kind of an online  open-social contact management hub, which recently added profiles and many modern features to its already accessible from anywhere excellent Internet based contact management application – you can import your contacts from Outlook, Linkedin, Google, Yahoo and others – then sync them with the same and your cell phone, so that you can always stay in touch with many interactive features and restore everything at will – wonderful -plugs right into my Outlook.

6.  Meetup: Social networking with the whole world at will, with actual local meet up events and clubs in person, great, I have contacted and secured businesss here and it is free.  Why re-invent the wheel, start your local leads or affinity group here: it can feed your website, and you will rank  instantly on google for the name of your profile!

14 of the 15 recomendations from last year still apply: we must have picked them well: here they are:

7.  Activerain – social networking profiles and blog for Realtors and vendors
Most people do not notice that you do not need to be a Realtor to join, you can be a vendor like me, and the profiles and blogs are not bad for Search Engine Placement link-building campaigns.

8. Alexa – Traffic and Website Statistics and Archived Information and Reviews
An Amazon.com company, we use it to get quick information about any website according to everyone who has the Alexa toolbar – which collects a wealth of information and statistics. They also archive old websites, and provide links to reviews on amazon.com.

9. Associated Content – Associated Content is a buyer and seller, syndicator of user-generated, user-filtered content
One of the most successful and well traveled sites on the web, this site is a must for branding and link building: your clout and pagerank build as an author – you can even get paid for content, although that is not what I use it for.

10. Delicious – social bookmarking, link-sharing
You install a toolbar that allows you to keep a set of favorites online where you can access them from any computer, and share them with the world, if you like, as an online resource. Excellent for traffic building and link-popularity, I recommend that you add and use the toolbar.

11. Digg.com – social bookmarking popularity-driven site:
This site is great for traffic-building for your articles and blogs, and also for link-popularity for your main site and blog: users submit, describe, review, and rank each others preferences. It is also great for getting real-time feedback on what people actually like and do not like about what you and/or others who write stuff that you read may have to say.

12. Feedburner – a feed aggregator that allows you to monitor various statistics about your feeds,
make them available in every format to your visitors, even sell advertising fed into the feed.

13. Google Adwords Keyword Tool – find out what words are searched for, and how much competition there is to rank for those words
To use it intelligently, you must understand the concept of pack mentality: we track trends in key industries like real estate and get to where the market is going first; many Realtors search daily for the same things, but they are not always each others target market – so be careful how you interpret the results from such tools.

14. Google Analytics Account – track everything through Google:
Again, it is essential that you understand that maketing is not just about what is happening right now, but also about what is changing, and what is about to happen; that being said, these are the most reliable numbers about your website, who visits it, what page they enter on, what page they exit on, and a wealth of other information.

15. Linkedin – most well-known business-to-business social networking site
Linkedin was originally for job and employment placement services – it is a very full-featured business-to-business networking site.

16.  Mybloglog.com – Blog syndication, networking, tracking, resources, and communities
Everyone with a blog should be here, and I highly recommend some of their tools, like the one that lets you see who has read this lately at the right of this page! I visit and network with them!

17. Myspace.com – the most well known social media site
If you thought is was just for kids, think again: the average age is over forty, and a profile here can be used for link-popularity and business networking, not just dating and file sharing!

18. Onlywire.com – multiple social bookmarks with one click!
It will take you a while to do this, but it wil then allow you to bookmark files in several places building traffic in one click!

19. Stumbleupon – another social bookmarking site very useful for traffic building:

20. Technorati.com – a blog, news and file sharing aggregator
Another must for bloggers: you can tag your posts and make them available to millions by keyword search

20. Yahoo Groups
One of the most underused, unknown resources: formerly Yahoo 360: MyYahoo offers a feature rich social media site for free, complete with RSS feed importation and other nice features, very use-friendly.

21. Facebook has exceeded the size MySpace already, continues to grow!

Here is a list of the Top Scoial Network Sites (From Compete.com)

A year ago, we ranked the top 25 social networking sites by monthly visits, and I was curious to see how the positions would change if we re-ranked those same sites with the most recent figures.

Some key metrics in the health of a social network revolve around the activity of the user base – visits per unique visitor and time on site. While Facebook has excelled in both areas, MySpace has remained flat or fallen off, with new hot property Twitter climbing the ranks.

MySpace is still the clear number two player in the big categories, but its trends in some key areas aren’t quite so dominatingl and, at least in those areas, they could be looking up at more than Facebook soon.

I’ll add biznik.com, stumbleupon.com…

Are you getting overwhelmed?  Why don’t you just do what you do best, and let us do the rest, for as little as $24.95?!  Visit socialmediasystems.com today!