Go Beyond MLS – Page 10 – Internet Marketing Tips

Appointments Made Easy With Appointy

Have you ever considered allowing your client to schedule appointments with you right on your website? In search for such solution for my and for my friends and clients websites I came across Appointy, a Florida based startup. You can see the implementation of Appointy scheduling feature on my other website where I allow clients to reserve my interpreting and translating services online.

While Appointy offers an easy integration for WordPress websites via a plugin, their system can be implemented just on about any website through an “ifame” code.

Appointy comes “PayPal ready” allowing you to charge a fee for the appointment at the time of scheduling- either full amount or partial. You are of course free to not charge your clients for appointments, as it would be the case with most real estate agents I know. But if you would like to prevent “no shows”, you might want to implement a minimal fee refundable at the time of the appointment.

Currently Appointy offers four different plans:

FREE plan- this basic plan has some limits and you have no option to charge your clients for the appointment at the time of scheduling. Appointy also will inject some ads into your calendar – hey they need to pay their engineers and developers.
PLUS plan comes at $9.99 per moth and is ad free but it does not allow you for branding nor accepting pre-payments.
PRO plan will set you back about $19.99 per month- the plan I am looking forward to use. You can brand your calendar and accept pre-payments with this plan. This plan includes e-mail marketing tool that allows you to send different e-mails to confirm, remind or even cancel the appointments. The best thing of course that when you sing up for Appointy, you get to try this plan absolutely free for 30 days.
Finally the BUSINESS plan wich comes at $39.99 is the top level plan from Appointy. I would recommend this plan for businesses that have several staff members accepting appointments, the plan allows a separate logins for administrator and for the staff.

If you are looking for a solution that would allow your clients to book an appointment with you right on your website, Appointy should be given frist consideration.

As I have pointed out, I am using Appointy myself, although I am only beginning to test many of it’s features and probably have not seen yet what Appointy can really do for my business. I will report on the results about one month from now, so stay tuned.

Google Local Business Center Now Offers Reports and Statistics

I have always been a huge fan of Google Local Business Center– a free way to drive foot traffic to your business. When you list your business with Google Local Business Center, you business is likely to show up alongside a Google map for certain search terms. Let say you need to find a dentist in Jackson, NJ– all the listings along the map are result of dentist offices taking advantage of Google Local Business center. I have written in the past how a friend of mind noticed increase of visitors to her shop after we listed her business in Google Local Business Center. viewreport
I also wanted to see more statistics and reporting inside the Business Center account. My wishes have finally came ture. It appears that Google is now providing some insightful statistics for your business’ local ads and coupons associated with your listing. Just go to your account and you should see a link to your report as shown in the image to your right.

The port shows the graph of impressions and actions associated with your business:

The actions are divided into three categories: clicks to your website, clicks to get driving directions and clicks to get more info on Google Maps:
Actions: Clicks To Website, Directions and More Info

Actions: Clicks To Website, Directions and More Info

It shows you top 10 queries that trigger an impression when an internet user is looking for terms associated with your business:

And it also provides the list of top 10 Zip codes associated with the requests for driving directions:
topdirections

At this point I am not sure what statistics are available for coupons- as I do not have any active coupons running at this time. However if you do and are able to write a short post, with some snapshots of reporting for coupons, please come back and live a link to your post or article.

If you are a business owner and are looking to drive “foot traffic” to you store or business location you should definitely look into taking advantage of Google Local Business Ads– it is absolutely free!

What’s Up With Feedburner Subscription Numbers?

If, over the period of last few days, you noticed a sudden increase in the number of subscribers to your blog reported by Feedburner, there is a simple explanation – now Feedburner includes the number of subscribers to your Friendfeed:

For many bloggers, especially the ones that are active on FriendFeed, this can translate into a significant increase of readership.

For many blogs out there, the number of subscribers is an important factor in determining the price for advertising and the value of the blog. Needless to say the Feedburners decision to include FriendFeed subscribers may help to diminish the value of readership on blogs.

For example two days ago the number of subscribers shown for Go Beyond MLS was in 90s – today that number is 326 which includes the subscriptions to my FriendFeed.

I would have been pleased with such increase of the number of subscribers if Go Beyond MLS was the only blog I author. Unfortunately majority of FriendFeed subscribers tend to gravitate around SageBlogger.com as well as my other blogs. But for the most part the interaction remains within FriendFeed itself.

Id don’t find the new numbers to be accurate nor helpful. Do you?

Get Go Beyond MLS on Kindle – For $0.99 Per Month

As of today you can subscribe to Go Beyond MLS using Amazon’s Kindle, or try it out for 14 days – the free trial.

If you would like to know how to publish your blog to Kindle as well, visit Kindle Blog Publishing for details. It takes about 10 minutes to set set your blog and once approved, Kindle users can subscribe to your blog using their device.

Now, am I going to get any subscribers? Very unlikely, but of course I would be grateful to anyone who would consider subscribing to my blog that way. I know however many outstanding real estate blogs that probably can end up with hundreds if not thousands of users. Giuve it a spin, it’s does not cost you anything and can bring some extra cash into your pocket.

Trace Richardson: Victory Comes In Small Steps

If you followed my blog lately you know that a friend of mine, Trace Richardson is faced with anonymous coward who posted false and defamatory information about Trace’s company LeadPress on Ripoffreport.com.

I would like to thank every one who linked to my articles from two weeks ago, linked to Trace’s websites and online profiles, stumbled, mixed, propelled, tweeted, retweeted and otherwise tried to promote posts about Trace’s predicament. Thanks to you you we are beginning to see some results – http://tracerichardson.com/ now ranks number one on Google for “Trace Richardson” and rightly so!

Trace however still can use your help. In my previous post I listed a code which you can copy and paste into your articles. Please consider helping Trace. Do not let a fellow blogger to be attacked by these faceless cowards!