Linda Craft. Raleigh Realtor
From Linda’s web site: Linda Craft and Team have structured themselves to deliver unsurpassed service and expertise to their clients. Every person on Linda’s Team has more years of real estate experience than 80 percent of the local Board of Realtors membership. Linda’s Team handles more real estate transactions in a single month than many of the “multi million dollar producers” handle in a year.
Linda Craft has a very impressive web presence that is obvious when you visit her site, lindacraft.com. Linda Craft’s Raleigh, North Carolina’s real estate web site is one of the most impressive sites that I have seen. Her professional web presence shows me her commitment to her career and her clients. One could land on her web site and stay for a very long time. There is a wealth of information about the Real Estate Market in Raleigh, NC. As a possible client, I would certainly appreciate the abundance of information she freely gives. Folks, this is not your cold static web page that so many agents post online from from web site factories. This site was built with you, the client, in mind and the information that one would need to make a decision about buying or selling property.
One of the features of Linda Craft’s site that I liked was her Featured Homes page. You can select homes by a range of prices, including New Construction. Most of the homes I viewed included professional Virtual Tours. If I were listing a home, this would be very important to me as I selected a company to do business with. Linda Craft also features a page with actual video tours. My suggestion here would be to feature more videos on this page and make it more prominent on the home page.
Linda goes all out in her marketing efforts and the promotion of her company. She get’s it. Her company was promoted at a Carolina Hurricanes Hockey game. You can view the video here. Linda also offers the free service of a moving van to her clients. How many companies go above and beyond with this type of customer service?
Linda’s Real Estate Blog goes deeper and gives her readers more in-depth views of Linda and the market she works in. Linda writes an article about the “Stress on families when foreclosure looms”. Once the process starts is not the time to consult with a professional. Contact Linda far ahead of time and she may be able to offer your family help.
If you are considering a Real Estate Company in Raleigh, NC I would recommend that you visit Linda Craft’s site to help you make a decision. Any company that puts so much effort into their web presence tells me that they are serious about earning my business. Almost all real estate searches whether buying or selling, start on the internet now. That’s where you will find Linda Craft.
Visit lindacraft.com
Copyright 2009 ncrealtorswhoblog.com NC Realtors Who Blog
This entry was written by , posted on March 17, 2009 at 9:51 am, filed under NC Realtors and tagged linda craft, nc board of realtors, NC Realtor, new home sales in raleigh nc, raleigh nc, raleigh nc real estate, raleigh realtor. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Active Rain
I think Active Rain is a wonderful site that gives real value to everyone who uses it’s platform to blog. Realtors all over the country use Active Rain to blog. As of this writing, there are over 138,000 members. I’m a member and I have written many blog articles on Active Rain. There are wonderful tools available to Realtors, Mortgage Brokers, Builders, Home Inspectors…you name it. There is a wealth of information available for members as well as the general public. Because of Active Rain, I have listed properties.
If you are a Realtor and you are not on Active Rain, I think you are making a big mistake. If you are a Realtor and you are only on Active Rain, you are making a big mistake. Active Rain should supplement your blogging endeavors, not be the one and only. Practice on Active Rain and perfect your style of blogging. You will be critiqued by other members who read your articles. You will be praised or you could be scolded. It’s a great learning environment.
Own your own blog and your own content! I cannot stress this enough. If you read the terms of service on Active Rain you will understand what I just said. Active Rain owns their site. Active Rain owns all of the content placed on their site. The following statement appears in the terms of service:
ActiveRain also reserves the right to cancel the account of any member it believes may be engaging in infringement of the rights of others, copyright violation, or any inappropriate behavior. We also reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to terminate your access to all or part of the ActiveRain Community for any reason or no reason , or without notice.
Active Rain can terminate your account at anytime for any reason at all. If you have built a significant part of your business on Active Rain and you are terminated, you are in a world of hurt. If you have placed links all over the internet to your Active Rain blog and it disappears, so could part of your business. It appears to me that many, many Realtors use Active Rain as their only blogging platform. They make great claims as to the business they receive from their Active Rain blog. When I look at their personal web sites they list in their profiles, it takes me to a cold corporate site that I have absolutely no reason to read. If this is you, you better have a backup plan.
I will close with the following statement. Active Rain is a wonderful site and if you are a Realtor, you should probably be on it. That’s a personal judgement call. If you do not have your own blog site that you control 100% of the site and content, you are asking for trouble. If you’re a Realtor, you need a separate blog on your own hosting plan on a domain name that you own. Consider it real estate that you own and this piece of real estate can never be foreclosed on unless you say so. By owning your own site, you will gain strength, traffic and page rank with Google and the other search engines. Do you realize how valuable this can be to your business over time? Extremely valuable. It only cost $10 to get started. If I visit your AR Profile page will I find a link to your personal blog? I recommend Wordpress as a blogging platform. This blog you are reading is built on Wordpress. For hosting I recommend BLUEHOST.COM.
Coming soon on NC Realtors Who Blog: A review of the Kodak Zi6 flip camera. Why every Realtor should own a flip camera.
This entry was written by , posted on March 10, 2009 at 9:02 am, filed under NC Realtors and tagged Active Rain, bluehost, nc association of realtors, nc brokers, nc mls, nc mls listings, NC Realtor, NC Realtors, north carolina realtor, north carolina realtors, realtors north carolina, realtors of nc, wordpress. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Vicki Burton. Southport, NC
Vicki’s welcome note on her blog: If you are reading this it means that you have stumbled upon my Southport blog. I hope that whether you are a local or a potential “newcomer,” you’ll find enough fodder to stick around and hopefully get something worthwhile from your mouse clicks. My original intention was for this blog to be all about the Southport and Brunswick County real estate market, but the further I get into it, the more it seems to be taking on a life of its own. I am enjoying the process, so any topic is fair game here….news, happenings, talk around the water cooler, and the people and places that make Brunswick County, NC such a popular destination. My home in Southport has changed a great deal in the 25+ years we’ve lived and worked here. The girls are all about grown now and it seems like the right time to take stock, to speak up, and to get involved in the things that will help preserve this wonderful town we’re lucky enough to call home.
Vicki Burton has one of the most impressive Realtor blogs that you will find on the internet. Packed with information about Brunswick County, NC. What I like and truly appreciate about Vicki’s blog is that it not all about real estate ALL the time! Vicki understands what a blog is all about. It’s about making a connection with her readers. It’s about useful information about her area. Folks, most Realtor blogs are not blogs at all. You land on their site and it is nothing but a landing page pushing their listings on you. It takes me about half a second to click away. When your reader clicks away, so does your hopes of doing business. When you come to Southport Soundings, you want to stay.
For example, Vicki writes a wonderful article about the surprise snow that fell on Southport. Her article, Southport NC - A Snowy Surprise is a great read because snow does not fall that often in Southport, NC. This article was accompanied by 9 awesome photos. I’m not talking about photos popped on a web page either. These photos are framed and drop shadowed, color corrected…very professional and suitable for framing. I personally know the extra time that it takes to prepare photo’s like this for a web page. Here are examples below.
Vicki blogs on the free Google Blogger platform. Normally, I would not recommend this platform, but I make an exception here. Vicki has used Blogger brilliantly with multiple sites highlighting area developments. There is certainly nothing wrong with Blogger, I usually recommend Wordpress because of the flexibility to do more with your site. She has obviously spent a tremendous amount of time in mastering the platform and her SEO techniques must be paying off in terms of traffic. You can visit Vicki’s Southport, NC real estate sites:
The NC Realtors Who Blog review, would make the following recommendations for Southport Soundings and all of Vicki’s blogs:
- Write more blog posts! The writing is so well done, there needs to be more content posted on a consistent basis. More content would eventually lead to first page Google search results for the terms that Vicki may be targeting.
- I would recommend that all of Vicki’s blogs need at least 10 SEO optimized articles per blog. I would also recommend keyword “ALT” tags on each photo.
The bottom line is Vicki has a wonderful blog and it deserves to be read. Now may be the time to buy property at the NC coast and if you have never been to Southport, NC, you have missed one of Carolina’s greatest little fishing villages. If you visit, you will want to buy a little piece of paradise. Call Vicki Burton to help you. You can reach Vicki at southportsoundings@gmail.com 910-540-0551.
Copyright 2009 ncrealtorswhoblog.com
This entry was written by , posted on March 7, 2009 at 9:54 am, filed under NC Realtors and tagged Brunswick County, NC, NC Realtor, Southport, Southport real estate, Southport Soundings, Vicki Burton. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.