kipdraper.com

I spend at least an hour a day cleaning spam w/ MailWasher Pro. It goes without saying that a real estate agent or company with a good online presence gets spammed as ruthlessly as anyone, no matter what you do. My spammy wife requires Thunderbird, needs her ‘from’ address to not say “gmail”, and she needs IMAP so her home, cell, office mail are all synched real-time.

I tried using gmail for forwarding: info@domain.com > username@gmail.com > shelley@domain.com(IMAP). But when a legit mail went into the gmail spam folder, “Not Spamming” it of course didn’t synch it w/ shelley@domain.com, and I had to manually forward it from username@gmail.com which gets messy & confusing to all. So using MailWasher was more efficient.

However, once I set the gmail IMAP account up in Tbird, I copied a year’s worth of incoming & outgoing mail from her domain.com IMAP account on to gmail folders (labels appear as folders) and she’s off to the races w/o noticing a change(very important!). Incidentally, I set her’s up to have her mail account forward only (no mailbox) to her gmail account, then in Tbird, I set her email address to shelley@domain.com so it looks like it’s coming from there.

Now I can monitor her spam from a browser,Tbird or cell phone, “Not Spam” it, and it pops back into her Tbird Inbox real-time. Conversely, I can “Report Spam” from the same devices to keep her Inbox clean like I did w/ MailWasher, but Google does most of the work now and I hopefully gain another hour a day for more productive endeavours. I’ve been using Gmail almost since its launch, and there is no easier, cheaper spam mail filter out there for my needs. It’s still technically in BETA, but in my experience, they filter email spam as well as they filter SE spam–not perfect by any means, but better than anybody else.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ22euWXYog

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75725

Didn’t really mean to. I did this video long before Google started displaying YouTube, etc. images in the normal SERPs. I’m a newbie to video editing and just stuck the logo in there for good old marketing reasons (branding for my website, not Google Video). In fact, I just uploaded a few property videos to Google Video because it was new and I was trying it out.

The logo could use a bit of optimizing for tiny thumbnails but having just Google’s and my logo on the page is pretty cool, even if I didn’t really mean to.

Wow. Time to start taking a serious look at Zillow I guess. I need to get to a conference and talk to this girl. I think this is an indication of a new direction/focus on real estate that many knew was imminent. Here comes Google Realty…

Now I have an all-new opportunity to work on the unique challenges of the vertical and local search space at Zillow.

Making the move was a very difficult decision, but the challenge of creating something new in a space that’s so young and evolving was too great to pass up.

http://www.vanessafoxnude.com/2007/06/14/a-few-changes/

I probably average 2 minutes a day now. It used to be wake-up, make coffee, d/l the logs, and 1-2 hours of checking rankings. What a waste of the best time of day for the brain. If you’re still doing this you don’t have enough websites.

Brett over at WW posted a few years ago that mostly all he did was check referrers. I thought, man, that’s nuts or he’s lying. Now I get it. And checking referrers for a real estate site is quick–work and really reminds you of where your efforts need to be focused for the long haul. Filling that list with authority sites that sometimes beat out the search engines in daily referrals is the goal.

When do I check keywords now?

-New website/occasional page, fun to see it Hello World into the SERPs

-Blog posts/comments, interesting to watch these days, ranking can be counted in seconds sometimes

-When Google (sometimes Y!/MSN) makes a move that makes it on to the forums. Then if nothing’s moving on my main terms, it’s back-to-work. If there’s major movement on keyphrases that haven’t budged often over the years, then perhaps it’s worth throwing a few hours at it.

When juggling RE & SEM, it’s all about shaving time off of compounding daily tasks that must be done. If you’re averaging more than a few minutes a day checking keywords these days, you probably don’t have enough posts/comments/websites/clients to respond to. Psst, it’s not all about anchor text anymore anyway.