The Mortgage and More Blog

Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

***There have been changes to the widget discussed in this tutorial since the original publication (August 13th, 2009) of this tutorial. I have updated the tutorial to reflect these changes. Yellow font indicates where changes have been made. I have used the strike thru to indicate procedures that no longer apply. Also note that the first two images have changed to reflect the changes to the widget.***

One of the most powerful developments on the internet for both business and personal connections is the emergence and widespread use of social media outlets. I would surmise that most internet users and even many people who do not use the internet have heard of at least one social media network; even if they do not realize it. MySpace? Twitter? Facebook? One of these three will generally ring a bell with most people as they are mentioned often on television, the radio, and in print media. In addition to these three social medias there are others, lots of others.

As a PREP member you have access to a pre-loaded widget from your Dashboard that can easily allow visitors to your site to connect with you via numerous social medias. This tutorial is going to give you step by step instructions (with illustrations) on how to:

1. access this widget
2. enter your social media usernames
3. place this widget on your sidebar

To begin with you will need to be logged into your Dashboard. From your dashboard, here is the path to access the widget:

Dashboard > Settings > Social Media Page (SMP)

As you can see from the graphic to the left, the Widget named ‘Social Media Page’ is where you need to begin. Locate the ‘Setting’ tab on the left hand side of your dashboard. When you hover over the settings tab a grey arrow will appear next to the tab name; click this arrow. When you have clicked this grey arrow a dropdown with numerous options will appear. In this list of dropdowns you will need to locate ‘Social Media Page.’ This is the widget we will be working with. In the image to the left I have placed a red box around the widget with a red arrow pointing to it. Click on ‘Social Media Page’ to begin working with this widget. Follow the directions on the image to the left.

When you click on ‘Add profile to list‘ the image to below  will appear on your dashboard:

From this point you fill in your Username/User ID for each of the social medias that you belong to and that you would like to utilize to easily connect with visitors to your site. Be sure that once you have filled in this information that you click ‘Update Profiles & Options’ at the bottom of the page to save the information you have entered. WARNING: If you do not click update the info you entered will not be saved and you will have to re-enter it. Now you are ready to place the widget on your sidebar.

To place the completed Widget on your sidebar, here is the path:

Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets > Add

On left hand side of your dashboard, locate the ‘Appearance’ tab. Just like you did with the ‘Settings’ tab above, hover over Appearance and a grey arrow will appear. Click this grey arrow to open up a dropdown. In this dropdown, locate ‘Widgets’ and click on it. I have placed a blue oval around widgets in the image to the right.

When you click on widgets, a new screen will open on your dashboard. From this screen, you can now add the completed ‘Social Media Page’ widget to your sidebar. Simply click ‘Add’ to place it in drag the widget to the sidebar you have selected. Once you have added it to your selected sidebar be sure to click ‘Save Changes’ or it will not be added.

That’s it! Now if you open your PREP site you will see the widget added to your sidebar with the various social media icons present and linked to your accounts. Just another way to connect with those potential clients.

Integrating Your Social Media Accounts ***UPDATE*** is a post from: Test Account

©2010 Test Account. All Rights Reserved.

If you , you are not alone. In fact Twitter is probably the fastest growing social media that has ever hit the World Wide Web.  The term social media still holds some of the negative stereotypes associated with that term. But thanks to Twitter much of that negative image is beginning to diminish; think about the flow of information during the recent populist uprisings in Iran earlier this year that came via Twitter Here are some statistics from Business Insider that were released almost a month ago at Twitter’s developers conference.

• Twitter has 105,779,710 Registered Users – Just how many people do you think see that billboard, park bench, or phone book add that you PAY top dollar for?
• Twitter is adding 300,00 Registered Users A Day – Approximately the entire population of Albany, New York (Source: U.S. Census Bureau)
• Twitter gets 180,000,000 Unique Visitors – Some perspective, Brazil, the 5th most populated country in the world, has an estimated population of 192,000,000 (Source: Brazilian Official Population Clock)
• Apps are important because 75% of traffic is outside Twitter.com – PREP recently added TweetMeme alongside TwitMe to the available integrations to further the ease of use of Twitter by members
• Twitter receives 3,000,000,000 (BILLION) requests a day (Roughly the number of Tweets read per day) – This is roughly the same number Google receives per day (Source: Search Engine Land, Feb. 23, 2010)

WOW! These numbers may seem incomprehensible because they are so large; the upside to that…because they are so large, there is room for everyone at the ‘Twitter Table’. It would be very short sighted to view Twitter as people only talking about ‘…just washed the car’ or some other type of status update. Twitter is now a megaphone to what is going on in your community or around the world! Though Facebook still commands the spotlight in the social media arena, Twitter is the rising star that will continue to draw that spotlight to itself.

Again I ask: You Tweet, Who Knew?!? So dust off that Twitter account you created months ago and get to Tweeting. It is time for you and your business to shine.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

YOU Tweet, Who Knew?!? is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

It is with great pleasure and pride that I am happy to announce that our online real estate network, PositiveRealEstateProfessionals.com, has come to an agreement with Jeremiah Mumbower. We are officially making him our newest Facebook Guru. We are excited in this newest edition to our staff and want to publicly welcome Jeremiah aboard. It has been a long time coming.

If you are wondering what added value that Jeremiah brings to our team, then check out his business page on Facebook. To give you an idea of Jeremiah’s background, he is a clip from his bio:

“My story I was laid off from Intel in Oct. 2009. I found the social media network facebook was in awe! I use to have my own business in the cleaning industry did my own marketing and media design found that I really enjoyed working on computers and software. I had a love for the social media in the past but, I saw that facebook had business pages. I had a feeling that this was something unique and some thing of the future. I told myself at this point I was going to learn facebook period. I have learned the business pages and the options and capabilities by studying this technology social network 3 months worth. I acquired my knowledge of software/computer components and networking computers over the last ten years. I have a love and natural knack for technology. Well here I am now making Facebook business pages for people.”

We are excited in what Jeremiah can do for our members. While his services are a premium, he has agreed to discount them for our members. To have your Facebook business page constructed professionally, Jeremiah will offer our members a price of $150. This is a $50 discount from his regular charge. While we will still offer the basic Facebook Business Page help, if you are wanting more done, then please contact Jeremiah.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK.

Jeremiah Mumbower Teams Up With PREP As Facebook GURU is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

When I logged into Facebook this morning, I was greeted with the picture to the left. I am sure that many of you have already seen this. I am also sure that many started out the same way I did; looking for the path to add the “like” button to your site. With that said, I decide to write a post for all to read and learn. After spending nearly an hour trying to find this, I thought that I would save you all the headaches of tracking down how to install this little tool to your site.

Before I go into deep detail, I thought I would share what this button can and will do for you. If you look to the right, you will see this button in action on our real estate network. As you can see at this point, not many have used it. Over time, the number will grow and people will be able to share our network with their facebook friends a lot easier. All one needs to do is to click the “Like” button once, and it adds them. Below is an excerpt from the facebook page explaining this a little better:

The Like button enables users to make connections to your pages and share content back to their friends on Facebook with one click. Since the content is hosted by Facebook, the button can display personalized content whether or not the user has logged into your site. For logged-in Facebook users, the button is personalized to highlight friends who have also liked the page.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s take a look at how we add this neat little tool to our own sites. If you look to the immediate left, you will see the picture of the Like Button Generator. As you can see, I have filled out the fields that I need in order to create this button for our main page. Now, in theory, I could do this for each and every page that I wanted to on PREP, but at some point, you run into overkill. This is one of the reason why we use “sociable” on PREP. It already has Facebook’s share function in it.

Once all the pertinent information is entered, all you need to do is click on get code. Once that is done, it will generate 2 codes; one is an iFrame code and the second is a JavaScript code. Personally PREP stays away from the JavaScript coding as it can lead to some security issues, especially for a multi user platform such as ours. Once this is done, all you need to do is add this into a “Text” widget in your sidebar of your site. If you do not have access to do that, then contact your webmaster and they can instruct you more on this subject.In some cases this can require coding added to the theme itself or some adjustments to certain parameters that can only be done by an admin or webmaster. In our case, each and ever member has the ability to add this on their own site and place it any where on their sidebars without having to contact us. With that said, if you run into issues, please feel free to call us and we can walk you through the process.

OK, now that we have the why and how to out of the way, let’s get down to the where. I thought long and hard of how I could help each and everyone of you get this tool on your site the easiest way. With that said, I decide that I would just iFrame their page into this post. Hence, you will be able to generate your own code right from this article and there will not be a need to bounce around. I hope that you find this both helpful and useful.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

How To Add Facebook Like Button To Your Site is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

In addition to this Real Estate Network’s recent migration from Host Monster to Host Gator the admins of PREP have continued to search for tools to help enhance the performance, visitor and member usability, and overall satisfaction with the network as a whole. Just as 8 tracks gave way to cassettes, and cassettes gave way to cd’s, and cd’s gave are in the midst of giving way to iPods and USBs, so must plugins that were once quite popular and useful give way to the next generation. While you were selling houses, inspecting roofs, or pursuing the numerous other ventures that occupy our days, Zipli-Retweet went the way of the cd.

Zipli-Retweet was a very useful plugin for WordPress websites and networks. It allowed a visitor to your blog and/or website to use the enormously popular system to share with their friends on Twitter a particularly good, funny, scandalous, or whatever criteria tickled the reader’s fancy post you had written with the click of a button, the zipli-retweet button to be precise. Why you might ask would such a seemingly useful tool be replaced? To answer that we must look at some of the relevant information regarding the plugin. From a high of 112 downloads of the plugin to its current average of <1 a day, the popularity of it has been steadily decreasing. There is also a related stat in the form of its update frequency; it was last updated on 2009-11-12.With that said, many plugin designers recognize the limitations of there creation and abandon them in favor of an entirely new plugin. Please note that I am not attempting to disparage the plugin designer, many of these designers have regular day jobs and create these plugins for free.

Now if you will allow me, let me introduce TweetMeme. This Retweet button  is being touted as the latest and greatest available. It can be seen on sites as diverse as , , and So you may be wondering why would the admins of this network go with this plugin? It receives average 4 out of 5 user rating. It was last updated on 2010-2-24. It has also been downloaded 225,000+ times including 506 times today.

It has been activated sitewide but still must be setup by each member. From your dashboard, locate the TweetMeme header near the bottom of the left column (Refer to the image to the right). If you hover over it you will get a gray dropdown arrow that you should click on to reveal two options; ‘settings’ and ‘analytics’. Click on settings to setup this button. So how does this affect you as a PREP member? This button should definitely bring more traffic to your website and more traffic definitely means the potential exists for increased business. We would highly recommend that all PREP members utilize this excellent and FREE tool.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

And Now … Tweet Meme is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

With all of the hoopla over the release of Google’s Buzz  in the past couple of weeks I got to thinking about similar services that already existed. First lets look at what Google Buzz actually does. If you missed Danny Thornton’s recent post on Buzz, you may want to check it out Positive Real Estate Professionals adds Google Buzz; especially the video.

Buzz is basically a social bookmarking site. Once you have created a Buzz account http://www.google.com/buzz you can then begin building your friends’ list. An easy way to start building this is by utilizing your current gmail contacts. This type of bookmarking is a way to create a ‘Buzz’ about your articles and by extension your website and business. You actually setup an integration with various services you use, like , , etc. which will bookmark your posts from these sites to your Buzz account. These bookmarks are then shared with your friends.

I setup a Buzz account within the first couple of days of the service going live. While I appreciate this bookmarking service and what it can do as far as generating more exposure, I have had an account with for quite some time. Like Buzz, FriendFeed is also a social bookmarking site. FriendFeed has similar features in that you build your friends’ list and then share with those friends your posts from both your own sites and posts from sites that you like. There is not supposed to be any SEO advantage to using Buzz over FriendFeed simply because Buzz is a Google product.

Both of these systems are rather easy to setup. Simply visit their respective websites (link to FriendFeed https://friendfeed.com/account/create?next=http%3A%2F%2Ffriendfeed.com%2F and Buzz http://www.google.com/buzz) and follow the instructions to setup your own account.

FriendFeed And Buzz is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

Positive Real Estate Professionals adds Google Buzz to it’s list of tools. What does this mean for our members and readers? Well, for the members, it is just one more social outlet that their articles can be shared on. As well, it will create another link on the world wide web, so ultimately, it will provide more Google Juice. For our readers, it will provide an easy and quick way to add things to their Google reader or share them with their friends in their Gmail account. This might be one of the easiest share tools that I have seen in some time. Below is a short video that will help to explain Google Buzz.

It is the desire of PREP and their admins to stay on top of the social media world. The only way for us to do that is to keep up with the social media marketing tools that these social media networks are putting out there. Ultimately, our job is to provide not only our members, but our readers as well with avenues to share articles on our site with their family, friends, and followers. In other words, their sphere of influence (SOI). We will continue to march forward to bring the best of social media marketing to our members and readers alike.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

Positive Real Estate Professionals adds Google Buzz is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals All rights reserved. ©

©2010 Positive Real Estate Professionals. All Rights Reserved.

A few days ago I had a member  of our real estate network, Positive Real Estate Professionals, ask me “What can Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn do for my blog”? I decided the best way to answer this is by writing an article so that anyone else that has this same question lurking can get the answers. Without further adieu, let’s dive into this article.

I guess the first thing that one has to understand is Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and what they are designed to do. For those of you that are unfamiliar with the term “microblogging”, this is the best way to identify each of these networks. Microblogging is very different from blogging in that the posts are much shorter. In most cases, your posts are limited in the characters that you can use. For Twitter and LinkedIn, it is 140 characters. This includes spaces and punctuation. For , it is 420 and the same rule applies for spaces and punctuations. The biggest difference between microblogging and blogging is the fact that most microbloggers use “status” messages like ” I am brushing my teeth” or “I am heading to a closing”. While these are fine, they do nothing for your blog.

Having a blogsite that is integrated with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or even FriendFeed, it is easy to have a notification go out to the systems automatically that states that a new post has been created on your blogsite. In doing this, you can actually alert readers to this fact quickly and automatically. Ultimately, this will drive more readers to your site. A integration simply sends a message to the twitter account supplied and allows for it to state that “What can Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn do for my blog” has just been published on PREP, for example. With Facebook, the best integration to use is an application called NetworkedBlogs. It allows for a short excerpt to automatically post to your profile and/or fan page. With , there is an integration to have your blog feed set up.

In closing, the answer to the question is that these networks can drive more readers to your blogsite. Ultimately, this is what we are all after.

Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) can help you achieve the recognition you and your business deserve through our highly versatile and search engine optimized member websites, lead capture, and visitor friendly layout. If you are a professional who works in the real estate industry or one of the related fields that service the needs of the real estate industry then this real estate network can be just what you need to take your business to the next level. If you have questions or would like to join CLICK HERE.

What can Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn do for my blog is a post from: Positive Real Estate Professionals