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Emerald Isle, NC Real Estate News

By Kathryn Gorham, Emerald Isle NC Crystal Coast
(Green Key Realty)
Chicken soup to hlep clients, family and friends. One of my neighbors is going through some health challenges and the Bunko group stepped up and is providing them meals a couple of days a week. Today is my day. In addition - I have a client experiencing some heart issues - and I wanted to help her out. Lastly my husband is down with a cold. So what could be better for everyone than chicken soup on a cool spring day. I made a big pot and have my deliveries scheduled and thought what a great recipe. I'd like to share that on active rain..... so here goes.     Kathryn Gorham | Sun-Surf Realty | Emerald Isle North Carolina www.KathrynGorham.com 2010 President Women's Council of REALTORS® Crystal Coast Chapter 252.646.4656 cell · 252.354.2958 office Southern Outer Banks NC | Crystal Coast NC...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
In my previous Active Rain post, many of you voiced your desire to know "a little HTML code" so you could add those uber important h3 tagged sub headlines I mentioned on several occcassions. I confess, I'm a novice at HTML code, but I can wip out some code when I need to and sub headlines beg to be coded with h3 tags. With that said, here are some quick, and easy to follow instructions on using and adding HTML code to your AR post. Tips to Adding H3 Tags in Your Sub Headlines To make it easy, write your post first, then save it as a draft Click the edit button and click the "HTML" code view tab. You'll need to locate the sub headlines you created previously in visual view and substitute the "p" in code with an "h3" You will also need to close the tag. Again, substituting the "p" with th...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
Do you find yourself being asked by blog and website owners to read “War and Peace” novel articles with forever scrolling content? I call these novels a "Wall of Words". The sheer thought of reading it sends me in search for the big red X or the back button. Admittedly, I have written my fair share of terribly long articles in the past, but no more. Are You a Tease? Plus, most real estate web sites fail to use proper structure. Failing to use sub headlines (designated with a Headline tag-h3) to help tease the site visitor to what the paragraph will say is a missed opportunity on so many levels. Your website backend editor should allow you to designate your sub headlines with an h3 "tag". If your current website editor prevents you from having the ability to designate sub headlines in th...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
You have probably been told that you need to maintain at least one real estate blog, a Facebook Fan page, maybe you have a Twitter account plus you have to manage several profiles scattered all over social media, but are you really getting the most from your efforts? Utilized correctly, your blog and all those portals can work in your favor. Hang in there help is on the way! Learn & Achieve Greater Results with this FREE Dakno Real Estate Blogging Webinar! During this hour-long live streaming video training session Brad and I will show you ways how to help you truly benefit from what you have started and how to maximize your efforts. You will also discover how to drive more traffic to your blog plus you will gain incredible insight how to increase your Search Engine Optimization. For mo...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
Each time we receive a Dakno Real Estate Marketing website inquiry before returning a call I go through my usual "drill" and Google the name of the party interested in our Dakno real estate website & blog products and services. (Do you go through that drill when someone contacts you about your services? - Maybe you should.) Because of the awesome SEO-power of Active Rain, many times a profile will appear at the top of the search results of an agent who has invested considerable time blogging at AR. Why not take advantage of this Google power and really make your Active Rain profile work for you. Here are 5 recommendations you might want to consider: I see way too many AR profiles written with a 8 point font. Unless you target an alien audience under 35 years old with perfect eye sight m...
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There will be 30 maintenance plans sold this year for this low price.We are a new company here but have many years here doing vacation maintenance here on emerald isle.We are small but growing in good ways that is going to be good for both you and your guest-in.We offer fast service to all your problems that may come up unexpectedly.If you do  have this plan it will save you on service call charges on any after hours call.Not to mention you get the great service of us coming to your unit on a monthly service call to change hvac filters,check all 60 watts bulbs in unit,lube all locks and slider doors and screens, and do a property check and send you the results that day,all this for 19.99 and you are covered 24hrs/7days a week and that's a great deal for you and your guest-in.Darren Tupp...
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By Jason Tupper
(Crystal Coast Rentals)
I am always blown away by the number of sites I see, owned by local, legitimate businesses, in dire need of just a little SEO work on their sites. Once again I am here showing another Crystal Coast business how to improve search rankings and increase traffic. I am a fisherman when Im not blogging, fixing computers, or writing database queries. Well when I first moved to Carteret County I didn't know where to find a good tackle shop, or find out more information on fishing local waters. So naturally where I did start looking? On Google of course! Much to my surprise when I did my search for "Emerald Isle Fishing" the only tackle shop I had seen around was nowhere to be found. They do show up now, but in the maps section which is definitely a great start. But I usually go right past the m...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
Now that you have gone through the challenging birth process of your cherished online baby, it's time to begin to help your real estate website begin to grow. Remember, a website should be considered a "living document" and that means growing your baby into a toddler, then an adolescent and maybe even someday a full grown adult website. Do You Take the "Set it and Forget it" Approach? Then again, some many real estate agents have the Ron Popeil mentality when it comes to their websites. You know what I'm talking about - Set it (or in this case - launch it) and Forget It! If you adhere to this philosophy with your website, good luck attracting many visitors and benefiting from any potential ROI from your website. Does Your Real Estate Website Have Good SEO Bones? I wrote a couple of post...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
You Can Never Start Them To Young! Being a real estate blogging maniac that I am, I asked my five year old grandson, Taylor Cookman of Waxahachie, TX to write a post for me for my Crystal Coast Blog. I told him to write a post about his favorite things about North Carolina. This 5 Year Old Blogger Has Some Mad Skills! When you read Taylor's guest post at my Crystal Coast Blog checkout his blogging skills. You will notice: His consistent use of geographic keywords for superior keyword density and organic SEO (Raleigh homes and Emerald Isle) How he positions himself as an "area expert" identifying "kid-friendly" championship caliber Emerald Isle putt-putt tracts. This kid has chops! He "speaks" the language of his target audience using an excellent "blog voice" tugging at the heart string...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
Do You Own an iPhone? Even if you don't, I suggest you become familiar with the iPhone application called "Nearby". The other day I was reading Joel's FOREM post on the "5 APPS Every Real Estate Agent Should Have on Their iPhone" and thought I would give each of the 5 APPS a test drive. One of the more appealing iPhone APPS of the 5 mentioned by Joel was the one called "Nearby". Powered by the website Platial.com, Nearby offers real estate professionals a groundfloor opportunity. Take Dominion over Your Nearby City Map! By simply creating yourself a quick profile on Platial.com (arrrg - yes - the list keeps getting longer), you can begin creating plotpoint locations for all kinds of local resources for iPhone users who have the Nearby APP. Platial.com gives you the opportunity to map th...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
Yes, I have found yet another online social community for you to join. Let the whining begin. The site is called "Entrepreneur Connect" by the publishers of Entrepreneur magazine. This community is in its infancy (beta), so it's going to take a while for it to get its "legs". Entrepreneur Connect has all the traits of a successful community with the ability for you to create a profile and write an occasional post. Be sure to read my first post on the 10 Traits of a Successful RE Blogger! Not Another Place to Blog! I know, I can hear all the moans and groans from the masses saying when will the madness ever end. Well, it's not. Vertical online social networks predicated on niches are here to stay. And they are growing in numbers. As it has been stated over and over again, you must get so...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
Yes - This Post is All About .Me! Just call this a gratuitous solicitation of Twitter followers on a grand scale but this is all about .me! I'm not prone to recommend you go out and begin buying up all kinds of .me's but given the right scenario I say go for it especially if it were .me. BTW - My Twitter username is Realestatecoach and you can Twitter .me! In our preparation to attend the Inman Connect conference, Brad and .me (bad grammer!) decided to pull out all the stops to make it easy for people to connect with .us. No wait, that's a different extension. Armed with our new iPhones, Brad and I set about creating the following portals to make it easier for our "connected friends" to connect with .us, I mean contact .me. So whether you are headed out to San Francisco for the Inman Co...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
Want to separate the men from the boys and the women from the little girls? Show your potential clients the myriad of reasons why they should hire you, the high-powered real estate blogger instead of an agent who knows nothing of blogging. In my experience training, consulting and building blogs and websites, real estate professionals who blog stand head and shoulders above the crowd for many reasons. It's time you leveraged that fact and differentiated yourself from your peers. How Are You Different You Ask? Real estate bloggers possess unique qualifications, knowledge and abilities other agents who don't blog seldom if ever grasp. Below are a few of the many qualities I have observed as we work with real estate agent bloggers: RE Bloggers have a better understanding of the basic princ...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
Frustrated by the lack of good .com domain names? What if you could purchase MLS.search or Raleigh.realestate. In a ground shaking move, 1500 members of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) organization meeting in Paris this week annouced a sweeping expansion to the naming convention of domains. This domain extension expansion most likely will radically alter the way users navigate the web. The Current Standards for Domains As you know all web addresses currently in use today fall under one of 21 top-level domain names. They are: .country .territory domains And some generic ones in current use include: .com (the most popular and prefered) .net .org .gov .edu .aero What Could New Domains Look like? So what would the new extensions look like? Try .realestate as ...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
I am always "on the prowl" for new websites, and online social communities to create SEO-rich profiles for our clients so they can take advantage of the "Google Juice" and "Link Endorsement" opportunities these powerful websites provide. Ureaka! I struck the mother load last night. It was all because of a Google Alert I had set up for my keyword "Crystal Coast real estate". I Feel the Love! This new one I found last night is the online social community of writers, reporters and photoraphers called NowPublic. Just to make sure this portal passes some serious Google juice, I checked with Brad and he said "I feel the link love!" Strictly News! With the NowPublic site, it is purely a news reporting website so anything that smells faintly “spammy” will be red flagged by the moderators. So I ...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
Years ago before Al Gore invented the Internet, as a Raleigh real estate agent for Merrill Lynch, I rode around with a trunk full of MLS books. When "I found a buyer", I would "ask probing questions" to my home buyers of what they were looking for in their next home. We would cover the "basic stuff" like their budget, the number of bedrooms, baths they needed, and high priority items like location, schools and so forth. From there I would slowly identify their other "needs" (got to have it - can't buy a home without it) as well as their "wants" (I want it but if I can't have it that's ok). If a buyer came to me with their needs and wants list, I was in heaven! In those days that seldom happened. Armed with my answers, I "hit the books" for my clients to find them the home that best fit ...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
Everything! You've heard it mentioned here at Active Rain before, CONTENT IS KING! If copywriting is so important to SEO why is it the very last thing real estate professionals think about, if they even think about it at all? I know the reason why. It takes time, effort, resources and action for organically sound SEO copy to be written. And that doesn't happen by accident. Yes, there is actually a thought process that should occur when organically sound SEO copy is written for a real estate website (or any website for that matter). What the Experts Have to Say About Copywriting Skills Because of the driving need among search engine optimization companies, one of the much sought after skillsets in the world of search engine marketing today is copywriters. Remember, this requires the copy...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
It seems a week doesn't go by that a Dakno blogging boot camp student doesn't ask that million dollar question, "What should I blog about?" I like the fact that they are asking the question. New bloggers are so energized and enthusiastic. They still have that sparkle in their eyes. And when they get their new blog, you would think it's Christmas morning all over again. I've heard Christmas arrives each day for 80,000 new blog sites. That's a lot of new blogs hitting the blogosphere. On the flip side, I wonder how many blogs were abandoned today? The Reasons for Shipwrecked Blogs Too often I see relics of old blogs left high and dry, abandoned by their owners. What a shame. These valuable online tools going to waste. No doubt, the owners: Became "to busy" to write post Maybe lost interes...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
As a real estate marketing firm, our marketing consultants are called upon occasionally to perform website evaluations. One of the biggest problems we identify on many agent websites today is the problem of website "leakage". Well, it really shouldn't be called "leakage". It's more like "escape by invitation". So does your real estate website provide your site visitors with an easy way to escape. To often many agents are oblivious to what is happening. How you ask?Do You Need to Plug the Holes in Your Real Estate Website?In what way do we willingly "send" site visitors away from our real estate websites? For the complete story how your website might be "sending" site visitors to your competition, be sure to read the rest of the story here>Helping you build a better real estate website,B...
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By Bobby Carroll, Clayton NC New Home Happiness Coordinator
(Jaclyn Smith Properties)
No, I'm not talking about having school kids posting frequently on your blog. However - maybe after you read this post you will decide to put this idea to work in your area. Sure - I know there are those "purist" in our community who will shriek in horror at me suggesting that you fork over your prized online communication tool and place it in the hands of some high school kid. (And then again - for some it might not be such a bad idea.) :>)Are You Smarter than a Caveman? Before you pick up your stones, listen to this success story. To me this is the real definition of a blog that embraces a community and provides a platform for others to communicate the value of what it means to appreciate where you live. Yes - "it's so easy even a 12th grader can do it"! Or is that "are you smarter th...
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