We’re thrilled to announce some great new firepower to our Client Services team!
Introducing Megan Bookless as our newest Account Manager:
Megan Bookless – Account Manager
Megan Bookless has joined our Client Services Team as an Account Manager. She has extensive experience in marketing and customer support. Megan brings with her a great strategic mind, attention to detail and a warm personality that will make clients feel comfortable. Previously, Megan was an Account Manager for a design and branding firm. She worked closely with well-known companies to help them incorporate their offline brand with digital and social media marketing. Megan will join our team along side one of her triplet sisters, Michelle Bookless, who is a Project Manager working with our Interactive Clients.
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A third of all searches performed on Google now generate a blend of traditional website listings along with other media. If you are a commercial business owner or have a personal blog, understanding blended search results can help you better market your business.
When someone typically thinks of what a search engine does, the first answer is most likely to serve up web pages. This is true but the landscape has been changing for a while and it’s not just web pages that matter.
In the beginning, text was the important thing. Websites didn’t contain much in the way of rich media because we were all on dial-up, and sites were generally built in HTML. Search engines were simpler, relying on html for text cues to match up sites to queries.
“How often should I write a blog post for my website?” has been The Question to ask since blogging began. The answers to this question vary and should because it really depends upon your goals and the niche or audience that reads your blog. Most that ask the question just want a quick answer and there isn’t one. Ultimately the question is asked because the person wants their blog to be successful. There is a certain logic in thinking that if I produce X amount of good quality blog posts then my blog will be successful. There are many factors that make for a successful blog and, combined with the updates to search engines and online social landscape, the success of a blog becomes somewhat of a moving target. Although there is a core structure to effective blogging, some of what worked in 2006 for bloggers isn’t going to necessarily work today. The good news is there are guidelines below that will help get you on the right track with how often you blog. By using the points below as a guide and then adjusting to your specific audience, you can determine an effective answer for how often to blog.
The easiest answer to this question is if you can blog at least once a day, you should. Most don’t have that much time to dedicate to blogging and yet do want some success. To measure success, at a very basic level, a blog is effective when it brings in the right traffic. (A quick side-note: you shouldn’t expect that just because you write enough blog posts you will automatically get traffic, it will still need to be optimized and promoted). There is also a nice balance between enough content and other time commitments in your work week. To get and maintain a steady stream of readers, you will want to write at least once a week. If you write more, you will see additional benefits but if you write less, your blog won’t generally be a strong addition to your overall online efforts (whatever they may be).
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The harder question to ask is, why are you blogging in the first place? What are your goals? To write just for the sake of writing won’t get you were you need to go. When you review those goals and the benchmarks for their success, you may find an entirely different answer than the one above. To get an idea of how much blogging some of the professional bloggers do (such as those behind Wired, ProBlogger, Gizmodo, Engadget, etc.) take a look at the book Blogging Heroes by Michael A. Banks. Banks does an interview with 30 of the world’s top bloggers and the answers are not only insightful but contain over-riding themes (such as how often they blog and how much online content they read). Consider the varying perspectives from Hubspot, SEOMoz, ProBlogger, and Gigaom that offer quick answers to the same question of how often to blog.
We’ve had the privilege at Union Street Media of launching several new real estate websites.
www.nhhomes.com
Established in 1986, RE/MAX Properties specialize in all types of New Hampshire real estate services including exclusive buyer representation, exclusive seller representation, leasing, commercial as well as non-agency relationships. With some of the most productive agents in the State, RE/MAX Properties is consistently ranked in the top 100 of the prestigious Real Trend’s Big Broker Report of the most productive brokerages in the United States. They are responsible for about 20% of the real estate transactions in all classes that happen in the Nashua area and service an additional 25 towns.
Learn More About This Custom Project
85% of the agents we work with tell us that they need to get better at social media and technology tools.
I am super excited to be bringing Agent Reboot back to Boston this year. We have been traveling around the country, bringing Agent Reboot to 24 cities this year and the feedback has been phenomenal.
Agent Reboot Boston
October 26, 2011
Hynes Convention Center
Having your business on Facebook with a fan page is essential to staying competitive. Once you have a Facebook fan page, it is time to start looking at best practices to an effective page. One of the first questions to ask is, when visitors come to your fan page, are they seeing a consistent message that will get them to become a fan? When a first time visitor’s first impression is from a random wall posting, you have less influence over how they will perceive your business. You can change all of that by providing a consistent message via a custom landing page.
A customized landing page provides a consistent, branded message to the first-time visitor. When someone lands on your fanpage, instead of seeing a random posting on your wall, they get content and images that are specifically designed to convert them into liking your page. Once a visitor likes your page, your wall then becomes the default view.
If all you want is one custom landing element on your Facebook page, there are many free Facebook apps available. Some of these options require you to use code but there are others that have pre-formatted versions with default background images. Here are some to consider: Wildfire Woodbox Pagemoto Goso
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Who said dress up days were only for kids at Halloween?
Two years ago, Union Street Media redeveloped the website for the Burlington Tennis Club. One of the best kept secrets in town, they have eight beautifully maintained Har-Tru tennis courts and a pool that is home to the Vermont state champion swim team. Burlington Tennis Club has experienced a renaissance lately in part thanks to Union Street Media’s Andy Vota & his wife, Cara, who have recruited a number of new members. The Club is by no means a bastion of popped collars and top siders anymore. When we recently hosted our end of the summer party at Burlington Tennis Club, we decided to rock it old school style… and office Preppy Dress Up Day was born.
Here’s a photo of several Union Street Media employees, one of whom I don’t think any of us had seen wearing shoes all summer, decked out in style.
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In between reading exciting espionage thrillers and inspirational sporting biographies, I like to keep myself honest with a little online real estate statistics.
This month I delved into the National Association of REALTORS‘s Center for REALTOR Technology. To save you some time, I cherry picked what I believe to be the most interesting data and what it means for real estate professionals. (Skip to the bottom to get the summary, but only if you leave a comment!) You can also view the full report here
A survey of Realtors were asked:
Twitter provides such an easy way to share information. Tweets are quick to create, quick to read, and easy to share. The only downside is that it is hard not to have your tweets go out randomly and all at once. This is because most of us don’t have time to send tweets out all day long. Yet to be effective, to hit the target times when people are most likely to read, and not bury important tweets with another, tweets need to be spaced out. Luckily there is a nice free tool to make tweeting not only that much easier but have your efforts perform better.
There is some science behind using Twitter. Hubspot has done some studies on the best time to tweet. Their data shows some of the best times of the week and times of the day that work best for sending out tweets. For example, the best time to post if you want to get re-tweeted is generally between 2-5 pm and later in the week. If you want data more specific to your particular experience, you can try using Hubspot’s TweetWhen. Keep in mind though that if you don’t have enough retweets within your account, the tool won’t have enough data to provide any suggestions. In this case it is better to use the general guides from their study and then tweak after checking your own data.
If you want to take advantage of tweeting at the best time then use Buffer. Buffer is a free online application that makes it easy to amass tweets that go out at predetermined times. There are other tools that allow you to pre-publish your posts however Buffer takes this one step further. Buffer allows you to throw tweets into the application and it will automatically send the tweets at the correct times. You only have to set up your calendar once instead of each time you have a post. This makes it so much easier than trying to remember the best times to tweet each time you post. Set up Buffer with all the times you want and then throw in good posts as you think or find them. 
There is no real science behind just sending out tweets as you think of them. One tweet follows another at random times often burying a previously important item. At the very least you should use Buffer to space out when one tweet follows another. If you do use Buffer though did you know it can actually increase your followers? The data actually comes from Buffer so it is bias but why not give it a try in case it does work?
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A recent blog post from Wyatt here at Union Street Media, tackled the subject of why thin content can harm your search engine rankings. Now that he got the hard part out of the way, I wanted to provide a quick list of ideas to get you to write better content:
Write What People Want To Learn About
In some cases you might be able to enlighten them with a brand new topic but in most cases, visitors are looking for popular topics that you can tap into with insights. Keep an eye out for hot topics as you read newsletters, emails and websites.
Search Engine Optimization
