Are Your Bored With Your Brand?

I’ve been there and it sucks. You look at this…thing…you created and it’s supposed to make you happy. I mean, it makes you money.

15 Actionable Takeaways From Social Media Marketing World 2013

With maturity of any new industry comes disruption. Just as email, the web and search disrupted entire industries several years ago (e.g., the postal service, print publications and traditional sales), we can also expect a lot of online disruption to happen because of social media.

How To Design A Landing Page To Generate New Listing Leads

In 2006, Seth Godin wrote an article that highlighted the 5 purposes of a landing page, and they’re still true today. Agent Avenue offers all of these tools and is included with your membership!

Google+ Redesign: This Week in Social Media

Google+ Unveils New Design: The new Google+ design “helps you easily explore content as well as dramatically improves your online photo experience to give you crisp, beautiful photos—without the work!”

34 Ways to Spread your Ideas with a Blog

Starting a blog shows commitment to a topic, industry, group, project, brand, etc. It establishes you as someone who can stick with a regular appointment, and has something to say, teach, and learn. There are many more benefits.

What do you think? Did you come across any awesome posts and blogs this week?

The post 5 awesome posts you may have missed this week appeared first on Agent Avenue.

If you can say it, you can search for it.

You can now search Google by saying your search term, instead of typing it. This could be a convenient way to search if you speak faster than you type or if you’re not sure how to spell your search term.

Our Test

Using Voice Search

1. Open the Chrome browser and go to http://www.google.com/. You’ll see a small gray microphone on the right-hand side of the search box.
2. Click the microphone or press Ctrl+Shift+Period (Mac: ⌘-Shift-Period) with your cursor in the search box to start voice search. When the large red microphone icon appears, begin speaking. You can press ESC or click the red button to cancel.
3. As you speak, Google will interpret your voice input. Afterwards, your results show up just as if you had typed the search term.

To improve processing of your voice input, Google may record a few seconds of ambient background noise in temporary memory at any time. This recording remains on the device only fleetingly and is not sent to Google.

Spoken Answers

If you ask your question to Google on Chrome, the answer can be spoken to you. The answer can be a fact, weather condition, stock price, flight status, sports score, currency conversion, mathematical calculation, and more. Spoken answers are only supported in English at this time.

What do you think of the new voice search?

The post Google Voice Search come to the computer via Chrome appeared first on Agent Avenue.

Join us along with one million other users watching this live online.

Google I/O is an annual developer-focused conference held by Google in San Francisco, California. Google I/O features highly technical, in-depth sessions focused on building web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies such as Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, Google APIs, Google Web Toolkit, App Engine, and more.

Watch live here https://developers.google.com/events/io/

Are you watching?

The post Watch Google I/O Live on Youtube appeared first on Agent Avenue.

Google said….

“Life gets a bit easier when your Google products work well together—whether that’s inserting a Drive file into an email or sharing a photo from Drive on Google+. As this experience becomes more seamless, separate storage doesn’t make as much sense anymore,” Clay Bavo, Google’s Director of Product Management said in a blog postannouncing the change.

With the new combined storage space you are free to store what you want where you want. So you could in theory have 15GB of files stored in Gmail, but nothing stored anywhere else; or 5GB in Gmail, 9GB in Google Drive, and a few photos hanging out in Google+.

Previously you were restricted to 10GB of free storage in Gmail, and 5GB for Google+ and Google Drive. You were also unable to upgrade Gmail storage past 25GB. Monday’s unified storage announcement removes that cap.

Bringing it all together: 15 GB now shared between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos

Do you use Google Drive, Gmail or Google Plus? Have you noticed the upgrade yet?

The post Your Google storage just got a little bigger appeared first on Agent Avenue.

The iPad is a fantastic tool but its primary focus is to consume content. This can be anything from music to videos, podcasts, reading blog posts and email. Producing it is another kind of animal. On our Macs we use a world of apps and websites to curate content, create images, edit images and produce the content for Agent Avenue/a>.

Must have apps to start

• WordPress for iOS – a good place to start but it tends to be clunky and hard to use.
• Blogsy – a blog writing app for WordPress (and a few others), this is the best app to date we have seen for blogging and offers a world of tools that others don’t
• Skitch – take your screenshots and then use skitch to add labels, crop and quickly produce user friendly images
• Snapseed – free image editor to jazz up and tweak your pictures

Tips and Tricks

• Screenshots – on the ipad click the power button and the main button at the same time and it will flash and take a screenshot for you. Easy!
• Watch the how to use Blogsy videos to help you get started with this fantastic blogging app.
• Try out the apps above to see if you can work them into your blogging workflow

Do you use your iPad or other tablet to post content on a regular basis?

The post Can serious bloggers only use the ipad to produce content? appeared first on Agent Avenue.

Maybe you’ve heard of Bitcoin? Its stumbled into the news recently with high profile real estate listings willing to accept this digital currency that not many people of ever heard of.

So what is Bitcoin? according to

Lifehacker.com, Bitcoin is here to shake the entire global economy, and has become the financial bubble du jour with a skyrocketing value. It’s online money—an alternative to dollars and euros. Well what’s that mean? It’s complicated, but we break it down.

Bitcoin is an anonymous digital currency…

Bitcoin is not real money. It’s an online “currency”—virtual tokens that can be exchanged for goods and services at places that accept it, the same way you’d give someone a dollar for a cookie. But unlike a dollar, a Bitcoin has no serial number or any possible mechanism that could be used to trace it back to a buyer or seller. This makes it attractive to drug dealers and/or privacy advocates.

So what does this have to do with Real Estate? Several people are now offering their homes for sale and they are willing to take Bit Coin, financing and they also take traditional dollars.

NYDaily News reports
Virtual real estate: An anonymous owner of a Trump SoHo Hotel condo is offering his property up on a high-end Bitcoin sale site; the condo is valued at $1.9 million. This luxury condo in the Trump SoHo can be yours — all for the low price of around 24,700 Bitcoins.

That’s by far the biggest-ticket item ever offered for sale in the virtual currency.

Read more

Several other properties have been listed as well and real estate may become a norm for the currency itself. The website Bitcoin.it records the currencies “firsts” from the first car sold, to chiropractors in an Fransisco accepting it. More here.

So what is Bitcoin really worth? Well this can be hard to determine because its not currently based on a physical source but more on supply and demand. Movoto.com now offers a Bitcoin calculator so you can offer your listings for Bitcoin.

A real estate listing offered at $150,000 coverts to 1359 Bitcoin which comes out to approx. $110.40 (at the time of writing) and fluctuates daily depends on the movement of this digital currency. Convert your properties here at movoto.

Would you advise against this if a client asked you to list via Bitcoin? Would you feel comfortable taking a new currency? Let us know in the comments.

The post Bitcoin For Real Estate appeared first on Agent Avenue.

Donna takes care of the little things so you can stop worrying. Ever find yourself late because you forgot to consider traffic, how long it takes to park, or how you’re getting there? Donna pays attention for you so you can focus your time on the people you’re with. She’ll let you know when it’s time to go—and even phone you if you want.

The Right Information When You Need It

These days, we don’t have a lack of information; we have a lack of filters. Donna only notifies you with important information just when you need it. She’ll tell you the night before what your next day looks like and when you have to leave for your first meeting. She’ll only remind you to bring an umbrella when you’re going to need one. And everything you need is handed to you when you need it: contact information, directions, even what that coffee shop looks like.

Connect Directly to Meetings

No more rummaging for clumsy conference access codes or finding that one app to connect to a meeting. When Donna tells you about a conference call starting, she will automatically connect you and dial the code for you, or open GotoMeeting, Skype, or WebEx and join the meeting for you.

Donna, She Takes Care of it

Donna is strong, intelligent, and proactive. The traits of a powerful and effective assistant, just like the characters she was inspired by. Good assistants give you what you ask for; great assistants get you what you need before you even ask for it. And like any great assistant, the more you interact with Donna, the more she learns. You don’t need to enter exact addresses for Donna to figure out where your meeting is and she will even try to guess where you’ll be leaving from. Over time, we’ll continue to make Donna smarter—for you.

[Sources http://don.na/]

The post Meet Donna – your personal digital assistant for Apple iOS appeared first on Agent Avenue.

1. Paid vs. earned: What’s the BEST media strategy for real estate?

Professional marketers aim to solve this problem on a daily basis. Therefore, it’s not surprising when ordinary folks, like us, get a little confused when trying to discern it.

Read More Here

2. Blogging On-The-Go With WordPress Apps

The life of a real estate agent is far from easy. In fact, when you are doing any level of business at all, it can be quite hectic. Between showing homes, taking photos, gathering documents, listing properties, and coordinating transactions, we belong to a busy group.

Read more here

3. The 4 basics of blogging for real estate

The 4 basics of blogging for real estate: Blogging is for everyone who has something to say about their real estate business and is a great way to drive more traffic to your site, get more leads and become the expert in certain topic areas. But how does blogging for real estate help you become successful on the web?

Rea More Here

4. The Walking Dead Guide to Writing a Killer Blog Opening

A sheriff’s car rolls up to an intersection, where several cars are burnt out and overturned. The occupant, a police officer, gets out, slowly walks to the back of the car and pulls out a gas can while cautiously looking around.

Read more here

5. Why Content Marketing is the New SEO

An oldie but a goodie! SEO isn’t the same as what it used to be. You can’t just popup an ugly website, throw up mediocre content, and build a few links and expect to rank well. These days you actually have to build a good website, write high quality content that solves peoples’ problems, build thousands of links, and get thousands of social shares.

Read more here

6. The 5 Cornerstone Values that Build an Authoritative Online Presence

Why do you want it? Because given the noisy, cluttered state of the web right now, it’s the authoritative site that earns the business. The “secret sauce” — the magic ingredient that makes the others work — is the intelligence and skill set of a talented, well-trained author.

Read more here

7. Do You Invest in Yourself?

It took a long time to realize that I should invest in myself, that I should put my own mask on first, etc. Too long. To that end, I wanted to share some thoughts with you.

Read more here

Did you come across any great articles and posts worth sharing? Let us know in the comments!

The post 7 Real Estate marketing articles you may have missed appeared first on Agent Avenue.

After trying out the new plugin we saw a very clean and flat design with a darker menu and the left hand side menu is dark as well. This gives excellent separation between the main menus and the admin screens on the left.

MP6 WordPress Dashboard

MP6 WordPress posts screen

Try the new admin design

You can try out the new design with the not so secret MP6 plugin here http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mp6/

The fun name doesn’t stand for anything and we highly recommend not trying this on your live site. If you are an Agent Avenue customer you have the option of a staging site which will let you try out fun plugins like this one without worrying about breaking your live one. For more info about staging contact support here.

WordPress has officially commented on this is..

Existence of this plugin will be officially denied, but discussion will happen at http://make.wordpress.org/ui/ if you’d like to participate. All comments and contributions are welcome, though we’re leaving the final call on decisions to MT.

What do you think about the new design? Let us know in the comments!

The post Introducing a new admin design for WordPress – MP6 appeared first on Agent Avenue.

In a nutshell, all you need to do is paste the link of the item you want to embed on its own line and make sure that it’s not hyperlinked (clickable or blue with a line under it).

You can embed any of these services on WordPress and we have included a few examples of what each embed looks like.

blip.tv (video)

DailyMotion (video)
Flickr (both videos and images)

FunnyOrDie.com (WordPress 3.0+)
Hulu (video)
Instagram (WordPress 3.5+)

Apple Store in NYC

Qik (video)
Photobucket (pictures and video)
PollDaddy (polls)
Revision3 (video)
Scribd (books, ebooks, papers, documents and even contracts)

SlideShare (WordPress 3.5+, presentations – like power point)

SoundCloud (WordPress 3.5+, music, podcasts and other audio)

Song from the Great Gatsby

SmugMug (WordPress 3.0+, pictures and video)
Twitter (WordPress 3.4+ and you can follow the person as well… wink… wink)

https://twitter.com/AgentAvenue/status/330044362325123073

Viddler (videos)
Vimeo (videos, note older versions of WP have issues with https embeds, just remove the s from the https to fix)

YouTube (only public and “unlisted” videos and playlists – “private” videos will not embed)

WordPress.tv (only VideoPress-type videos for the time being)

YouTube Embed

Do you embed anything in your blog or WordPress for real estate site? Let us know in the comments!

The post Easily embed media services into your WordPress site appeared first on Agent Avenue.