Real Estate Marketing SEO Blog

Are You Running Your Business at "Half Speed"?

If you read House Blogger at all then you know that I Coach a Youth Football team for the past 7 years. Besides absolutely loving the game, my real passion is in teaching the kids the analogous life lessons that practice and that games present to them.

Hang with me if you think I am getting too rah rah as this does apply directly to you and your business online.

I tell the story to my kids of how long ago when I played youth ball there was a kid on the team named Mikey. And Mikey had all the attributes that I and certainly all the other kids wanted. Mikey had speed, he had agility. And he had future NFL good looks. His face was made for a Football Card.

Well, my coaches (God bless them) taught us that we always had more in us than we were telling ourselves. That even though what we think is our 100% we really are only utilizing maybe 50% or 60% of our mental and physical capabilities.

I took this to heart and by the time high school came around I won way more awards than a kid should get. I even was the Senior Most Athletic . This over dudes that were future NBA players and an 11 time NFL Pro Bowl player. That blows me away to even say that.

May I say athletically these guys were given the goods. So I say to my kids, we are all born with our 100%, but what we think is our 100% is actually at around 50%.

We always, always have more. And most of the time if we could even crank it up to our real level. Say even 65%, we will outshine most of humanity.

So there are a ton of struggling folks out there today. Lots of bad news. And I have spun the news positive plenty in this blog. But what I am saying here is that it's only the second quarter. We got a whole 'nother half to play.

We, you, I have much more that we can give to our business.

Dude Are You Buzzed Yet? --Google Buzz

Google released Google Buzz last week. And it is well, all the Buzz. At least with the folks who care about these things.

For I, a search engine optimizing dude, it leaves me a bit numb as I consider buzz as :

a. another social networking platform to worry about.

b. another way for Google to track behavior.

This whole discussion is precluded however by Google's changes over the past month or so.

Personalized Search

Personalized search is when Google feeds you search results based on your past behavior. So that you will get the sites you visit the most as your top results for a search query.

This is goofy to me since I use Google to find new URLS not old.

Well good ole Google has made personalized search the default as opposed to you having to opt in. Now in order to not have personalized search you have to opt out. Most folks are not aware of this. 

As stated Buzz comes with privacy issues since you are actually signed into Google Mail to use it. Google has taken some steps to back off of some of their intrusions one of which was a ready made circle of friends.

It will be interesting if folks really accept the Big G as nothing more than a tool for the geekey. For those multi task social broadcasters Ping.fm has already added Google Buzz.

 

Their Loss is Your Gain

Exodus:

From Lasner:

The state Department of Real Estate reported that by the end of 2009, 503,284 people had California real estate licenses — down 29,247 or 5.5% from the end of 2008. December’s agent total was the lowest monthly total since May 2006.

Still, California had one real estate agent for every 25 households in the state by the end of 2009.The decline in agents has led to slightly less competition …

• In 2007, when to total number of people with real estate licenses peaked at 549,244, the state had one agent for every 23 households in the state.
• At the start of the decade, however, there 38 households for every real estate licensee.
• Put another way, California had one agent for every 76 men, women and children in the state in December.
• That compares to one per 69 residents in 2007, when the number of licensees peaked. But that’s down from 112 at the start of the decade.

State figures show further:

• Starting in 2000, California saw an uninterrupted increase in the number of real estate agents for 7 1/2 years while home sales and prices boomed.
• But well into the housing slump, the number of agents began a two-year drop.
• During that time, broker licenses held steady, while the number of “sales agents” — those who must be employed by a broker to work — fell 12%.
• California had a record 398,716 sales agents in November 2007. By last December, there were 350,870 sales agents.

We see this across the nation. The players are lasting the test of time.  Hang in there. The fakers are almost all gone.