Tag Archives for " Branding "
Free Webinar: Using Trello for Projects | Management | Organization and more.
Trello is free. Please use my invitation link here:
http://KaterinaGasset.com/Trello
This is one of my most requested tutorials. I created some video tutorials on using Trello. They are among my most popular video tutorials. Based on these requests I decided to offer you a webinar to show you live how we use Trello.
Trello is a very visual organization app. If you are a visual person you will fall in love with Trello. If you like to work fast and easy… all my webinars are about systems and apps that make your work faster, more efficient and not rocket science.
There is so much you can do in Trello and now, even better, you can use Zapier with Trello to streamline even more tasks.
I use Trello for contact management, travel trips, website creation planning and executing, project management, homeschool records, house inventory, recipes and menus complete with shopping lists, Christmas planning and gift logs and so much more. I run nearly my entire business on Trello.
This will be a live webinar. I will not have slides as this is for hands on learning. You will want to make it to the live training so you can follow along. I will record the webinar but as always, if a technical problem occurs, there is no guarantee the recording will work. So it is always best if you can attend the webinar live.
The webinar is on Wednesday January 27, 2016 at 8 p.m. eastern standard time.
Please share this on twitter:
[bctt tweet=”Free Webinar: Using Trello for Projects & Organization in biz & personal life,”]You will get reminders the day before and an hour before you webinar starts from GoToWebinar.
Go here now to get registered:
https://katerinagasset.com/trellowebinar
Also, in the comment section below please comment on what you want to learn in Trello and I will do my best to add that to the webinar. If I don't know the answer, I will find out.
We will also have a question and answer session all during the training, so bring your questions about Trello!
Don't forget to register for this FREE webinar where I will be showing you how fast you can create landing pages, add content to your website in wordpress and a lot more.
The webinar is tonight at 8 p.m. eastern time. Save your seat now.
See you all later Wed 8PM Eastern (New York time)!
If you already registered there is nothing you need to do except get on the webinar!
If you have not registered for the webinar yet, Click here to register!
See you at the top!
How to Build Your Brand on Facebook without Annoying Your Friends & Family
This webinar was one of my favorite webinars I attended a few years ago. I am excited to be able to host this webinar training for you.
This webinar is popular and space will fill up fast.
Make sure you register today!
Date: Wednesday September 2, 2015
Time: 1 p.m. – 2 p.m. EST
This is a totally FREE webinar. Just bring yourself to a computer near you:).
Register now: : https://attendee.gotowebinar.
I am inviting you to hear REALTOR® Shaun Nilsson, the social media expert behind CityBlast walk us through how he used his time-saving secrets to attract new buyers and sellers while NOT annoying the rest of his social media peeps.
This is a 100% FREE workshop. We will show you how to close more real estate deals using only your Facebook while projecting an image of confidence and a seasoned professional.
You will learn how you can outsource this part of your marketing to others and avoid wasting your valuable time each day searching for great content to share.
You will also learn:
Reserve your space NOW for Wednesday's Totally FREE workshop and start doing more business through your social media.
Register Now: : https://attendee.gotowebinar.
What does Cecil the Lion have to do with your reputation management? A lot.
We don't take kindly to the dentist killing Cecil the Lion. We don't condone his behavior. We don't agree with what he did. I want to make that perfectly clear since mob mentality seems to run ramped these days.
There are good things and bad things about social media just as there is with nearly everything, you can call it: Ying and Yang.
There are of course consequences to all of our actions. However, we have judges and juries set up for this purpose in our country. Although we all have our qualms about our justice system, we still do have one.
Back in the wild west days someone could be accused of a crime whether they did it or not. The mob would gather and someone would lead in the instigtaion and incite the mob to hang the person. Most often, the punishment did not fit the crime. We have come a long way from the mob mentality, or have we? History has shown us that mobs are not the best instruments of justice.
With the speed of rumors that fly, the news that flies and gossip - facts get twisted out of shape quite quickly. Remember the game we played when we were younger, "Telephone". In this game one person would whisper a sentence into the person's ear sitting next to him, then the person who just heard the sentence would whisper into the next person's ear and this would go on until you reached everyone in the circle. The last person would then state what the sentence was. It most often was not even remotely the same as the initial sentence.
People will complain in a heartbeat but be very slow to give a compliment, especially on the internet. Social media is even worse.
You MUST be proactive in your reputation management.
Let's actually take a look at how fast the dentist's business, livelihood and life was destroyed:
When the news hit social media that Cecil had been killed the internet manhunt spread like a wildfire and included trying to kill anything along the path to find this dentist. But not only was the anger so infused as to attack his business and threaten his life and those of his children and his wife but also anyone who had helped him ever in his business.
There was a local SEO company that had his account at one time but currently the dentist is not their client. However, as you know from history of how mobs behave, this did not matter to the angry crowds. They started to attach the local SEO company online and writing bad reviews.
What is the one way that you can take down someone you hate that is faster than any other? Writing bad reviews.
All review platforms have rules and algorithms in place, filters to keep out spam. The TOS of all the companies is Reviews must be about the business, not about the person and not about their family, etc. Reviews must be done ONLY by customers who have actually been to the place of business and therefore have a reason to write the review.
We do the Local SEO for our chiropractor. Some person called the chiropractor's office to make an appointment to come into the office but did not ever come in. The person did not like the way the receptionist spoke to her so she left a scathing review on Yahoo reviews and yet, she had never even stepped foot inside of his office. The doctor contacted Yahoo and explained what happened and Yahoo could then remove the bad review as the person who left the review violated their terms of service.
Page 1 Solutions had Red Bluff Dental as a client back in 2013. The angry people were trying to find out who did his website and his online marketing. If you pay enough money you can find out what you want to find. So the vicious attacks started against Page 1 Solutions. Their Facebook page was being attached with horrible threats and vile language. Page 1 Solutions acted swiftly to protect their reputation. This is not easy against a mob.
The president of the company came out with a statement:
"We started receiving calls and social media posts attacking Page 1 Solutions. Then the angry social media posts and negative reviews started to appear. Initially, this took our staff by surprise because nobody was familiar with the doctor's name. Although River Bluff Dental had been a client of ours, we always referred to the client by the name of the practice and not by Dr. Palmer's name. Brad, our Senior IT Specialist, took three angry calls from people who were upset that we were marketing Dr. Palmer's website. This was confusing since our contractual relationship with River Bluff Dental was terminated in 2013 and we had not even hosted his website since then."
This can put any company on the defensive and wondering what the heck to do to save their reputation. The guilt by past association was ringing strongly. This is why we have due process in this country.
The mobs found the dentist's Facebook page and started attaching the dentist there. His Facebook page was shut down. So then the angry people went over to Yelp and Google Local Reviews.
At first I wondered, how did all those people get past the spam filters and the algorithm that makes sure the reviews are about the businesses and not about the people. No personal attacks are allowed in the reviews. In fact, Google local requires the review to be ONLY about the business itself. The reviews were coming in so fast and furious I think the systems failed. I saw hundreds of reviews that were full of death threats, foul and filthy language and threats against his family. None of those should have passed the filters.
One of the ways I noticed people getting through the filters was by using dental terms in between the foulness, filth and death threats to trick the filters. It worked.
Internet vigilantism can take any business down within 24 hours. Even the crisis management company that the dentist sent his message through to the press, was attacked and he had to withdraw from doing anything with the dentist. The dentist name and information had to be scrubbed from every dental organization.
Yelp received thousands of reviews on the dentist's page with death threats and all kinds of really nasty comments, even showing pictures of the home where his two children live. Yelp started to delete the reviews because the nastiest ones were getting 5 stars so they were moving up to the top of the reviews. Then the mobs virtually attacked Yelp for removing the reviews.
Yelp told BuzzFeed :
“Media-fueled reviews typically violate our Content Guidelines. One of these deals with relevance. For example, reviews aren’t the place for rants about a business’s employment practices, political ideologies, extraordinary circumstances, or other matters that don’t address the core of the consumer experience. Yelp reviews are required to describe a firsthand consumer experience, not what someone read in the news. Our user support team ultimately removes reviews that violate these guidelines.
Although most instances like these do not reach the current level of scrutiny and media attention, Yelp has proven policies in place to deal with such events and will remove content that violates our Terms of Service.”
Yelp has been able to scrub over 2000 of the reviews so far.
Google reviews were also bombarded with thousands of horrible reviews. Google local Specialists started escalating the issue once they saw how badly these were violating Google's terms of service.
Warning: there are bad words in this screenshot. Please don't read them around children.
Google had to start deleting the reviews manually. They said they had to read each review to see if it violated the TOS. We are talking about thousands! The only reason I added the screenshot was to show the severity of this mob mentality.
The casualties also include people who have names similar to the name the mobs are virtually and physically hunting down. Businesses who ever have an association with anyone the mobs decide to come after are at the mercy of those mobs. You are being held guilty by association. We each need to act and put safeguards and steps into place in case this should ever happen to any of our companies.
Take the steps now to be prepared should you ever be associated with anyone that has committed a malicious act. Page 1 Solutions did a very good job of being transparent about their past relationship with Red Bluff Dental and also with hiding the nasty threats their Facebook page was attacked with. They received 9 ( 1 star) reviews within 20 minutes on their Facebook page. They unpublished their Facebook page. They are waiting for Facebook to remove those reviews.
Get management approval ahead of time for the following:
You need to regain the public's trust by coming clean, make amends and get back confidence. If you are guilty by association, you have a client who needs to make amends, remember to be transparent, come clean and state the facts.
ACT QUICKLY
Follow the example of Page 1 Solutions and act swiftly and decisively. The biggest mistake businesses make is being slow to act and not having assigned a point person to execute your Reputation Crisis Plan.
Another company that was swift to act when they were guilty by association is Subway and how they dealt with the scandal of their Jared when he was investigated for child pornography. Subway did the right thing to get rid of all things Jared from their website and marketing. They had a point person who made the calls, they held press conferences and acted quickly.
A part of your social media plan needs to be to listen and then to respond. Put out all the fires. Sometimes it takes hiring an entire team of people to just do that 24/7.
You must get ahead of the news. Do NOT let the news lead. That is going to end up in a disaster. End the speculation by getting out there and telling your story. Don't blame. Don't point fingers. That will not solve anything.
No matter what you think about Cecil and the dentist- use this as a wake up call to create a plan of action for your reputation risk management.
My Top Prediction for SEO in 2015
With all the talk, double-talk, assumptions and guessing about what is what with SEO these days there are a few things you can count on no matter what happens with Google and other search engines.
You will not go wrong by drilling down into your niche, flying under the radar of the big 4.
Choose terms that their SEO departments are not going after. These big guys spend over a $100,000 a day for PPC and they want the biggest bang for their buck so they are not going to piddle around with terms that you can still make good contacts, closings and income from.
My top prediction for SEO moving forward is about branding.
I believe that just as I stated about 9 years ago that it was time to start building your own personal brand on the internet because Google is all about brand.
They have a patent for their Panda algorithm that specifically discusses the importance of ranking search results.
Then add on to that the fact that Eric Schmidt (when he was CEO of Google) stated that the internet is a cesspool and that brands would be who cleans it up.
Think about why the big 4 were able to capture so many top spots on Google page one for the very terms that real estate agents for years before the arrival of those “brands” were dominating by themselves. The problem was agents were driving their sites with IDX and home search results trying to be the search engine for the home buyers in anonymity which came back to bite them because that is absence of brand.
Moving forward into 2015 there are ways in which you can beat the big 4 in organic search using SEO and I predict that this will by establishing the following brands:
1. Your name or your name + real estate agent as a brand ( if you have a famous actor's name)
2. Your company name ( if you are the broker/ owner) as a brand
3. Your niche keyword terms as a brand
There was such a misconception in the SEO world about brands for years before Panda and Penguin, etc. The focus was on generic keywords and not brands. For years, that thinking was put into practice. I have always stated from the beginning of learning SEO that creating your brands online was going to be the way that you can set yourself apart from your competitors.
Those who followed this advice weathered the storm of Panda and Penguin and of the big 4 dominance on the SERPS.
If you are not one of those, it is not too late to start establishing yourself as a brand on the internet in 2015.
We started really working to dominate our company brand on the internet about 6 months ago. Before that for years we had some competing real estate companies who share the same name as our company: International Properties and Investments LLC. One of those companies had almost the entire page of page one on google serps packed in for them.
Today I looked to see how we are doing and to my pleasant surprise, in Google incognito window and logged out of Google, we have ALL 10 spaces on page one with our company name and platforms that have our company profiles.
Get your Free SEO Field Guide – containing your checklists of onpage and offpage SEO tasks, click here.
We can teach you how to do this yourself in our SEO courses or you can order done for you packages which include our virtual assistants to help you with your marketing.
What fun to write a post about two of my favorite companies on the planet!
If you are a listing agent, studying marketing should be on your list of business education tasks to do.
Studying the best in marketing helps you refine your own listing marketing and branding of your company.
The company that I love to study is Apple. Before we changed over to all Apple computers – Macs, iPhones, iPads… we could not really relate to the fans that seemed so over the top in their love of anything Apple.
The minute we opened the box to our first big 27 inch Mac desktop computer we were not just hooked, but became fanatical fans as well. Now we relate!
Apple commercials are the best designed messages and people and companies around the world continually copy the look and feel of the Apple website, store and commercials. Studying Apple messaging is a must for any serious marketer.
One of the fun things that comes from this is the Apple commercial parodies from other companies. There are some great ones out there.
This year, with the new Apple iPhone6 being announced to the new i08 update to the Yosemite OS, companies are jumping at the chance to grab a piece of the messaging moment and bring it to their own audiences.
Thumbs up to my another one of our favorite companies- IKEA, who we choose as the winner of the Apple parody this year!
IKEA takes their new 2015 paper catalog and creates a hilarious commercial parody that will have you laughing for a while!
Oh, I should also mention that this IKEA video has over 10,000,000 views!!!! That just goes to show how much of a hit not just this commercial is but also goes back to the amazing success marketing of Apple.
Here is the commercial:
How To Create Real Estate Flyers with Canva.com
Canva.com is a free service on the web where you can create all kinds of visual materials like your real estate flyers, graphics for your blog like watermarked images, infographs, images with text for Pinterest and memes.
You can also change out your Facebook timeline cover every month for free using Canva.com.
It is all free to use, to download and they don't put their logo or ads on your content!
The only thing that has a cost is canva does offer clipart for sale for $1 each if you want to use it but they have plenty of free clipart and you can also upload your own.
I am sure you have seen my blog images that have the title of my post on them and visual images to relate to in regards to the message of the blog. These are great to post on Facebook to get more attention to your blog but also these are excellent for you to put on your blog board on Pinterest because it shows a visual of what your blog post is about. This encourages people to click on your image and read your blog post.
Canva.com just came out with Real Estate flyers. These are very high end looking and if you print on nice brochure paper they will look very professional.
The real estate flyers are free but almost all of the built in images on the templates have a small fee. But for like $2. you can create an amazing flyer for your listings or you can create your own.
You can make a real estate flyer in about 5 minutes!
There are 3 video tutorials below that I created for you:
1. The basics of Canva.com
2. Creating a real estate flyer on Canva.com
3. Creating a meme ( visual for Pinterest and Facebook) for your blog posts.
The other thing that we do is to make this process even faster is we create themed templates.
I will break this down more in future posts and tutorials so make sure you are subscribed to our blog!
Basics and Overview of Canva.Com:
Creating a FREE Real Estate Flyer on Canva.Com:
Creating a Meme- Visual for Facebook Wall, Blog and Pinterest
Make sure you are subscribed to my blog for future tutorials!