How to Make Money Using Social Networking
Filed under: Social Business - Strategy & Networking
Tonight, I received an email asking, “Has anyone made any money using social networking?”
- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
… I left the conference with even more questions about the value of social networking and how it would directly help me in my real estate business.
I am not a social networking expert and new to the total concept. Perhaps it’s the word social vs business that is throwing me off. At this point I am attempting to justify, value the time spent and to determine if it’s the best use of my time. I would appreciate any input from the “experts” who have financial success posting on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Active Rain, Linkedin and/or Flickr. I would also like to know how many sales you had and what you did to be successful.
Let me take a stab at responding to the questions you raise, John. You are not alone in the effort to understand what is collectively known as “social networking.” And, I concur with the strategy suggested in the Trump webinar you attended:
James Burgin and Elizabeth Serra-Eichler, who conducted the webinar suggested starting on Twitter (limited to 140 characters which is going to really require me to be brief), blogging about real estate and attaching links to the blog, being the real estate expert which in turn would gain respect, a reputation and revenues.
Let’s go back 10 years…
What was your first response to “the world wide web?” Do you remember when online communications were on discussion boards? Compuserve? How did you get started using email? Was it AOL? When did you begin to consider these business tools? Did you create your first website as an either/or proposition? How much time did you invest online prior to making money as a direct result?
I imagine many of us will adopt the emerging communication tools in the same manner we adopted the first wave:
The technology adoption lifecycle model describes the adoption or acceptance of a new product or innovation, according to the demographic and psychological characteristics of defined adopter groups.
The process of adoption over time is typically illustrated as a classical normal distribution or “bell curve.” The model indicates that the first group of people to use a new product is called “innovators,” followed by “early adopters.” Next come the early and late majority, and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called “laggards.”
Teresa Boardman, St Paul Real Estate is an early adopter of the emerging technologies. So is Jeff Turner.
The answers to your questions are better answered by Teresa, Jeff, Dustin Luther, Ines Hegedus-Garcia, Ardell DellaLoggia, and Marc Davison — among many others.
Personally, I don’t believe the question is “if” we adopt emerging technology. I believe the question is “when” and “how” we incorporate the tools into our marketing strategy.
How would you answer John? Is there a better place to get started with social networking than others?
How to Find and Use Free Photo Images with Flickr
Filed under: Tips & Tricks - Sites, Software, Shortcuts
One of the best pieces of advice I received early in my blogging: Use photos to attract reader attention to posts.
Photo by nattu
The images used in posts capture the reader. And, we all want to capture reader attention, right?
So, where do you find great photo images to use freely?
In this post I’ll tell you how to find the best free images on Flickr to use in your blog posts, eBooks, brochures or anything else.
Flickr hosts millions of photos taken by professional and amateur photographers. The best images are richly detailed, vibrant, and inspirational. Images on Flickr fall under a traditional copyright or a Creative Commons license.
Find images on Flickr to freely use
You are not allowed to use copyrighted images without express permission. Who has time for that? If you are like me, the need for a perfect image to use in a post is when I’m writing the post. So, let me tell you about the Creative Commons license to freely use Flickr images.
Non-copyright images on Flickr are available under a different kind of license called Creative Commons. Each image is available under one of six different licenses. For our purposes, we’ll focus on one license.
Attribution License
The images I use come under the Attribution License. You are free to modify the images — crop or caption, for example — as long as you credit the original source with a link back to their Flickr profile.
Find best images on Flickr to freely use
The starting point to find the best free photo images on Flickr is the Attibution License page. Clicking the Flickr Attribution License link navigates to a new window or tab depending on your browser settings.
- Search the keyword appropriate to your needs. To test, search the keyword ‘orange’. Flickr will search the image tags and return the 27,500+ ‘most relevant’ images. But, don’t stop here.
- Look for the ‘most interesting’ link below the displayed number of images. Click ‘most interesting’ to change the display. Most often you will see images of a much higher quality.
- Right click the image to copy or save.
- Copy the link location to credit the original source profile.
- Within seconds you have a targeted image to use in your blog post — or whatever suits your needs.
UPDATE: Be sure to check out the Multicolr Search Lab Flickr Set. Using visual similarity technology you can search Flickr images by color (colour).
Photo by Kyle May
