Blogging is a great tool for companies in very exciting industries.  Great examples of this include musicians, writers, lifestyle mentors and other personality-driven businesses.

However, most industries are a bit more boring and don’t lend themselves as well to this type of blogging.  This was a problem that I first ran into when I started my cleaning company.

I opened up a blog, and began writing about the core of our business.  This one is commercial cleaning.

As you might imagine, the content was pretty dry and unoriginal.  We would write articles on subjects such as “how to clean carpets”, “how to clean patios”, “how to clean tiles”, etc..This was very similar to what every other cleaning company and the world had been talking about.

It wasn’t very exciting and it didn’t attract people from our local business area. In order to fix this, I had to step back and think about the goals we were trying to accomplish.

My 2 main objectives were:

• to gain exposure for my company within our community and
• build relevant links to our website

Rather than just recycling the same boring old themes on our corporate blog, I decided to reach out to the local business community and lend my expertise to other blogs.  This had the combined effects of exposing us to new audiences while giving fresh and new insights on other blogs that were in need of inspiration.

For example:

• We might write an article for a local accounting firm’s blog about how to negotiate better prices on cleaning contracts.
• We might approach a local health food company and provide insights into how to clean in such a way that it helps people with allergies.
• We might approach a local business that markets to parents, and give them handy insights into   how to keep children safe from hazardous products.

As the specialists, we found that we had a lot of insights to offer that many of these other local businesses may not have thought of.  Customers who frequented their blogs often found this advice very helpful. It was a win-win situation for all parties involved.

If your company is having trouble keeping its blog fresh and interesting, you may want to consider contributing to other people’s blogs rather than maintaining your own.  It’s a great way to build relationships with complementary businesses while gaining exposure to new audiences that would have otherwise never heard of you.

About The Author: Ontario Cleaning is one of Canada’s top cleaning services, with cleaning customer in Mississauga, Oakville, Brampton and Toronto.

About The Author: Paul Rudo has been a freelance business consultant for over 5 years. He specializes in B2B marketing for technology companies and organizations targeting geographically local clients. For more information, you can visit his web site at Paul Rudo.

This article is from a real estate column I am running in my June 2010 newsletter, “Wizard’z Wordz”.

An Interview with Elayne Wooding of Showhomes, St. Petersburg

Considering that many of the readers of “Wizard’z Wordz” are real estate professionals, I thought to dedicate this month’s feature interview column to a real estate professional.

If you are not in the real estate industry, perhaps you are selling or buying a home or know someone who is…you may find this interview still rather interesting. Most small business owners are typically interested in learning about how others ‘think outside the box’.

This would be one such story.

Earlier this year, I came across an interesting article in Realtor.org entitled, “Consider Live-In Stagers for Vacant Homes” and was intrigued by the live-in concept. The article featured a company called Showhomes; a Nashville, Tenn.-based company, which has eight offices located in the state of Florida, (where I am located). Showhomes provides live-in stagers for vacant homes that are for sale.

I probed further and discovered a Showhomes office located in St. Petersburg which is managed by franchise owner Elayne Wooding.

Thank you, Elayne for so generously donating your time to answer a few interview questions for our readers.

Q – Please explain how you got into the staging industry and why you opened Showhomes St. Petersburg.

EW – I decided to become a home staging entrepreneur after working my way up the ladder in the real estate and finance fields. We’ve had so much negativity when it comes to real estate. I’m thrilled to be a part of a solution that helps everyone – the homeowners, Realtors, builders and top notch home managers that we find to live in the homes while they are on the market. It’s extremely rewarding to help people in distressed situations and homeowners who feel overwhelmed by all they are up against because of the market for high-end homes.

Q – Who is your ideal customer?
EW – The sagging real estate market has created ideal market conditions for Showhomes’ services, which help local realtors sell properties by transforming high-end vacant entities into valuable, staged homes.

Q – Why would a seller wish to use your services?
EW – If you present a vacant house, buyers are often unable to visualize the empty space as a home. Even if the empty house sells, it is often for a price far below the list price. Because the home is vacant, buyers expect a bargain – hoping to take advantage of an owner they think is desperate to sell. If you present a Showhome, buyers are able to visualize the fully furnished and decorated space as their home. This personal connection leads to a premium sale price. Buyers make higher offers because they have already bought a home in their mind – they can see it as theirs, and will offer a premium price to make sure it becomes theirs.

Q – If I were a seller, explain the steps involved in contracting with Showhomes.
EW – Contact us directly www.showhomesstpetersburg.com for a no obligation proposal.

Q – What is the cost of your services?
EW – Nominal Set-Up fee when Home Manager occupies the property, No monthly fees. Staging fees are paid at closing when the home sells.

Q – What types of homes do you accept into the Showhomes St. Petersburg program?
EW – Vacant homes generally starting from 300K to 8,000,000k.

Q – What are the benefits of staging a home using the services of Showhomes St. Petersburg?
EW – Transforming vacant houses into valuable, cared-for homes that buyers respond to.

Q – Do you have any statistics to back-up the benefits of your services? [Does a home sell faster? Receive more offers? Gain more traffic?]
EW - According to a survey from National Association of Realtors Showhomes sell 10%-20% faster and an average of 93% of list price.

Q – Besides staging a home, what role does the Home Manager play in the sale of a home?
EW – Keeping each home in show-to-sell condition seven days a week.

Q – With the Home Manager living at my home, do I have any guarantee that nothing will happen to the property?
EW – Showhomes contractually indemnifies the homeowner and backs this with property damage insurance on every home, plus $2,000,000 general commercial liability insurance. We also require each Home Manager to carry a minimum of $500,000 personal liability insurance.

Q – Are Home Managers’ backgrounds screened?
EW – All Home Managers undergo detailed credit and strict background checks.

Q – Can a Showhomes staged home be viewed 7 days a week?
EW – Homes will be accessible for showings seven days a week. Our Home Managers will open blinds and curtains and turn on lights to ensure that your home is in perfect condition when a buyer arrives. Buyers will see a perfectly maintained, tidy and clutter-free home.

Q – Where does the staging furniture and accessories come from? How is the staging-style determined, i.e., modern, eclectic, country, Florida-style, etc.?
EW – Home Managers who have contracted to keep your property looking like a model home. Furnishings and accessories that are appropriate for the property are owned and provided by the Home Manager and Showhomes supplements these as needed to make the property look its best.

Q – What happens if I do not like the way my home is staged?
EW – We inspect and arrange every detail to ensure that your home is shown at its best.

Q – Is there a ‘best’ time of the year to stage a home?
EW – Every time a home is on the market is the best time to state a home.

Q – Do you stage a home for holidays if requested by the seller? Do your stagers take requests for specific styles/designs if the homeowner requests this?
EW – We will use furniture and accessories that appeal to the demographic group most likely to be searching for a home in this area. We will create a warm and inviting environment.

Q – Are you specifically a staging company or do you have realtors on-site/staff selling my home in addition to staging it? Or do I use my own realtor?
EW – We are specifically a staging company. Many of our staff are licensed agents, but we work with agents as an extension of their marketing efforts and not competition.

Q – Showhomes is a franchise. Please tell us about the St. Petersburg franchise. Is your seller unique to other areas where Showhomes franchises are located? If so, explain why.
EW – Showhomes – known as America’s largest home staging company – began its operations in 1986 and started franchising in 1994. It currently has 67 franchises in 24 states. Showhomes has helped realtors and homeowners sell more than 25,000 homes worth more than $8 billion across the United States by transforming high-end vacant houses into valuable, staged homes.

Q – Is there anything else you would like people to know about your company?
EW - When your home sells, we prefer a 30-day notice to give us time to relocate our Home Manager; a minimum of 21 days notice is required. We will have your home cleaned and returned to you in the same or better condition than when we received it. We will work with you to make sure your closing goes off quickly and smoothly.

Thank you, Elayne.

Contact Elayne Wooding:
Elayne S. Wooding CMP, MIRM
Franchise Owner
Showhomes St. Petersburg
111 2nd Ave. N.E. Suite 919
St. Petersburg, Fl. 33701
ewooding@showhomes.com
866-797-7426 ext. 706
www.showhomes.com
www.showhomesstpetersburg.com
Learn about Showhomes on our You Tube channel
Visit and subscribe to our Showhomes St. Pete Blog

Have you thought of using videos to promote your business? Just the mere thought of creating a video stops even the most creative best business owners in their tracks.

If you want to move your company name to the top of the Google searches using video can be a viable option. But if you think that creating a video will take too much time or will not give you the SEO you are looking for, well I have an easy, fun and quick solution.

Every Monday afternoon, I log onto a sales call with a terrific sales consultant, group trainer and entrepreneurial junkie, Howard Howell, also known as ‘That Sales Guy’ of Sensible Selling. Howard demonstrated a fairly new and fun technique to promote a business using Google Search Stories video creator.

(You may remember Google Search Stories being advertised during half-time on this year’s Superbowl.)

The requirements: You must have a story you want to tell about your business. Your story needs to be told in less than one minute using the search feature in Google. You will also need to open a YouTube account.

The Google Search Stories program is designed to create the video for you and upload it automatically to YouTube. The program also provides a code which can also be embedded in your site or blog to get more bang for your efforts.

Here’s an example of the one I put together. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OR1WmUAuUQ

Here is the link to make your own Google Search Story with instructions on how to do so right on this site.

http://www.youtube.com/user/SearchStories

But there is More! Here’s How to Get SEO for Your Company Name!

I can take this useful tool one step further and offer other video tips on getting more SEO for your company name using the YouTube platform.

Once you have completed your Google Search Video and have uploaded it to YouTube, do a search there using your keywords. For example, my keywords are ‘virtual assistant’. I then find other people’s videos whose keywords appear in the search. I then select the top 2 or 3 viewed videos from this search.

Every few days I leave a comment each one of these videos with a good, well-crafted, meaningful observation. What will transpire over time is that when someone types in your keywords into Google, your keywords will appear higher and higher in the searches with your website name and your YouTube profile.

To explain this in greater detail, I found a great blog by Paul Rudo B2B Marketing Specialist of Small Business SEO who has written How to Get SEO Value from NoFollow Tags .

Rudo writes, “Increasingly, it’s getting harder and harder to find sites willing to give you high-quality SEO links. Instead, most web sites today will only give you links that are blocked using a NoFollow tag.”

The author continues, “However, despite the fact that their [YouTube] outbound links are worthless, there are 2 interesting things about YouTube (and other sites) that SEOs should consider:

• Google considers YouTube to be a very high-quality and authoritative site
• Internal links within the site are DOFOLLOW (Google considers these to be of value in the SEO ranking process)”

“In crafting your SEO strategy, your main goal should be to get your company to the front page of Google. And your web site is NOT your company. (Stay with me. This will make sense in a bit.)

So Here’s The Plan

For this concept to work, you’ll need to think a bit outside of the box.

The first thing you’ll want to do is create a YouTube profile name containing your important keywords. If, for example, you sell goods made from extremely rare “unicorn leather”… a good YouTube username would be UnicornLeather.

This will help you rank for that specific keyword.

Now, you should create a few high-quality videos that showcase your company and make a strong call to action. Your new YouTube channel will be the landing page that you hope to get listed highly in the search rankings.

Finally, try to find every single video that is remotely relevant to your subject matter, and make a well-thought-out, insightful comment that contributes to the content of those videos. It’s EXTREMELY important that these comments be of high-quality. Do not spam YouTube or you’ll run into problems.

With every comment you make, YouTube will add an internal DoFollow link… using your keyword (UnicornLeather)… and pointing to your YouTube video channel. Now, when people look for “Unicorn Leather” on Google, they’ll be directed at the most authoritative page on this topic… at the most authoritative site… which is your YouTube channel.

This Won’t Happen Overnight

Another tip would be not to overdo it. Search engines take timing into account when evaluating your links. If you come out of the gate with guns blazing… blasting out 1000 comments in the first week… you’ll be labeled as a spammer and sent to the penalty box.

Instead go slow and steady. No more than maybe 3 or 4 comments a day… and keep doing this steadily for months. Eventually, you should notice your rankings start to improve.

And another interesting side benefit that you’ll notice will be a gradual snowball effect… where all of these comments will start producing more and more referral traffic to your channel and your main web site.

If you do this properly, you can make it so that the top 2 results for your keyword are your web site and your YouTube profile. This strategy can also be applied to other social networking sites until you own every result on the front page for your keyword.”

Read Paul Rudo’s full article here http://www.smbceo.com/2010/05/10/nofollow/

Be sure to read a poster’s comment on the referenced article link above that offers yet another SEO tip.

I offer the tip to use Google Search Stories to get you started but you can also create great videos using PowerPoint and then convert them easily to vide to be uploaded to YouTube. Rudo recommends creating a few high-quality videos.

Creating easy PowerPoint video:

• Open PowerPoint; create your slides with text and images.

• Save the project.

• Download TechSmith’s Camtasia http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp for 30 days. Use this program to create the video using your PowerPoint slides.

• Upload to YouTube and add these videos to your YouTube account.

• Follow the instructions above to creating effective SEO in YouTube.

Janine Gregor

About The Author (quoted in this article): Paul Rudo has been a freelance business consultant for over 5 years. He specializes in B2B marketing for technology companies and organizations targeting geographically local clients. For more information, you can visit his web site at Paul Rudo.

Reviewers note: This book has been reviewed from the observations of a virtual assistant, which is important to note as the book is written for freelancers who primarily perform project-oriented work.

The Wealthy Freelancer
12 Secrets to a Great Income and an Enviable Lifestyle
by Steve Slaunwhite, Pete Savage, and Ed Gandia

“Ugh”, I thought to myself when I saw the cover of The Wealthy Freelancer, 12 Secrets to a Great Income and Enviable Lifestyle (TWF) featuring a bigger-than-life photo of a red Corvette. “Not another get-rich-quick publication selling a phony lifestyle reminiscent of late night gold digger infomercials!” To add ‘insult to injury’ the use of the subtitle word ‘enviable’ was equally as dubious. However, my first impression would prove to be utterly incorrect. Lesson to self: “Don’t judge a book by its cover!” In fact, TWF is not about becoming financially wealthy at all. The introductory chapter titled, What Being a Wealthy Freelancer Really Means explains that … “Being wealthy isn’t just about the dollars you earn; it’s about the life you build-and the kind of person you become in the process.” Unfortunately, at first glance, the book title and its photo cover, most likely used as a visual ‘hook’ promoted a brief amount of uncertainty which was quickly reconciled by the excellent content within.

Read the rest of the review here .

A colleague emailed me that he was terminated from a social networking site on which he had been a paid member for more than three years.

There was no real explanation given for the termination other than “…[his] style of participation … [and] … contributions to the community are not moving it forward, and have begun to harm its reputation. “Consequently, we have terminated your membership…”

His profile consisted of hundreds of network connections, forum posts, compliments, and event postings.

I personally could find no reason why this occurred as I found him to be a reputable sales person whose postings were continuously professional. But it does not matter why he was bumped from the site nor does my opinion matter. The site does have the documented right to do whatever they want with posted information.

This blog is a reminder to keep copies of all the contacts you make on any of the social networking sites including the content because once someone is terminated, everything is removed from the site. I suggest keeping a spreadsheet with contact information and copies of your posts.

This brings up an interesting point about who owns the digital intellectual content on any one of the social sites. Of course the fine print (that very few really read) on numerous social networking sites states that once an account, paid or free is terminated every contact and post is removed. So the rules to ‘play’ are apparent but I wonder if this is just.

I see two sides to this argument. When an employee leaves a company most are allowed to take their personal items with them. Although many companies do not allow employees to take client contacts with them if they are terminated even though that employee might have nurtured those contacts. But typically the latter rule is in place to protect the company as usually both the employee and the company are in the same business; governed by a disclosure statement.

In the case of a social networking site, which is merely a platform to post digital material and not a direct business competitor to the user, I question why the information is inaccessible for use by the terminated user.

What do you think?

Janine Gregor

1) Stay on topic – If the topic is about blogging, comment about blogging and not about your business or personal affairs. Those who do not stay on topic break the rhythm of the thread, waste valuable space and cause difficulty for readers trying to follow the conversation.

If you have another topic you would like to discuss, create a new thread. Try to keep ‘side conversations’ off main threads.

2) Sign your name – Some blog and forum sites do not offer areas to clearly identify the poster. On those sites without a designated spot to sign a name and company name, please type-in this information within the post for better SEO and for self-identification.

If you create a username which is different from your real name and do not sign your post, people will not know who you are.

Replies to your own entries will typically be returned using your name which personalizes the responses and engages continued conversation. Using your name in a post also makes it easier for you to search out any direct responses to your own posts.

Your name is your unique signature which sets you apart from other posters. Be proud of what you comment. Use your name.

3) Use back links which are useful for several reasons. Back links support a posting; provide easy clickability to the readers as well as confirm to the readers you have topic expertise. Back links will also help you to get the google juice for the sites you link.   If the site on which you are posting does not automatically link urls (Biznik is one such site) you can use code to make your links live.

HTML and Markdown Language (lighter version of HTML) are two code choices.

Example:  HTML <a href=”www.yourlink.com”<Your Site Name></a>

Example:  Markdown Language [Your Site Name](http:*//*yourlink.com) *Do not type in *characters. Demo purposes only.

4) If you provide back links in your posts, make those links relevant. Do not just put your website address or your blog address. Link back to the referred post URL itself or a document which is relative to what your post is mentioning. You will receive a high bounce rate on your blog or website if you are not using direct links to specific posts because folks will be frustrated when they cannot find what it is you might be linking and will quickly leave your site.

5) Try not to comment for the sake of commenting or agreeing. If you want to say ‘thank you’ to someone for offering valuable information or if you find someone’s post to be helpful, say ‘why’ it was helpful or how you can apply this newly found information.

6) Try to summarize your posts into an easy-to-read format. If you have a lot of information, try to breakup your thoughts into paragraphs or use bullet points.

7) Before you post, check first to see if someone else has made that same post. So if you are on a social networking site, do a search of keywords. If there is a previous post on your topic, do not start a new one; add a relevant comment to that particular post. Blog and forum posts have infinite lives. Adding fresh and relevant information to an already birthed thread brings the full string ‘out’ for new readers to view.

Janine Gregor

I was hoodwinked.

A few weeks ago, I was fooled into reading an article entitled, “Why No Business Should Be Involved in Online Social Networking.” Roughly halfway into reading this piece, the author explains that we should stop using the term ‘social networking’. We should be using the words, ‘social marketing’ instead.

Yes, that was the gist of the article.

Based on the title, I was expecting to read why social networking was a taboo for business.

I was ‘sucked-in’ like the eleven thousand or so other readers intrigued by the same headline. (Yes, the article received eleven thousand views.)

And that type of ‘Tomfoolery’ journalism bothers me.

Interestingly, the content of this article was rather robust with a good discussion about social marketing. So it was not a complete loss once I arrived to read the piece. It was the signage on this path which led me to the article that is bothersome.

But I wondered; did the End (good content) justify the Means (crafty title)?

Fellow commentator and blogger, Judy Dunn of Cat’s Eye Marketing and I both believed that the trick title stood out ‘like a sore thumb’ prompting both of us to write our own rebutted blog entries.

Judy makes some great points in her post, On Respecting Your Readers: Headline Trickery. She writes, “A headline can generate interest without deceiving the reader. When we write with honesty, we build trust with our readers. If we break the trust, it can be more difficult to keep our audience. And if we do it over and over again, well, they may stop reading our stuff.”

The author of the ‘social networking v. social marketing’ article had a follow-up piece which I never even bothered to read. As Judy mentioned would happened; the author lost my trust because he did not deliver what his title promised.

What captivated me the most from this experience was that a majority of the article readers did not object to being lured by the misleading title. In fact, several commented that they were glad the title was misleading because the content was well-written. Some claimed they may not have even read the article if the title had not been misleading.