Jason LaVanture

Over the last two years, Jason and I have attended the Home Buyers and Sellers “How To” Expo sponsored by the Traverse Area Association of REALTORS. The event has provided us each year with an excellent opportunity to showcase our powerful property marketing tools and interactive 360 virtual tours to the many visitors in attendance.

The shows work very well for us in two truly unique ways that no other shows in the past have been able to offer. Because the general public attends the show we are able to get our message out to them as well as to other members of the real estate community. For us, this is truly a win-win event. Each year has resulted in a direct increase in business in our customer base and of course has generated business for us.

Thanks to the wonderful staff at TAAR everything runs perfectly for us each year. The layout is great, the catered lunch is delicious and who can complain about having that wonderful view right on the bay. Most importantly we always seem to have a great time at the show and this year we even took a bit of time at the end of the show to do a virtual tour of the event which can be seen here:
http://rtvpix.com/BU-3308-R5TLM7-01

Thank you to all of you who work so hard to provide us with this super event.

PS. If you would like to attend our FREE TAAR social networking online webinar please click below:

http://www.bluelavamedia.com/socialignition

Jason LaVanture and Jim Blue
BlueLaVaMedia
Traverse Area Virtual Tours
www.BlueLaVaMedia.com
Toll Free: 877-941-TOUR (8687)
Your Property Marketing Experts!

BlueLaVaMedia is proud to announce our new 2009 Exposure Engine. The new 2009 Exposure Engine now only $20.00 ($5.00 more than our 2008 product) comes fully loaded with our all new Smart Phone virtual tour an E-Flyer (email ready listing flyer), and blog distribution to www.TourGrandTraverse.com. First off, let’s talk about the Exposure Engine in itself.

The Exposure Engine by BlueLaVaMedia allows real estate agents and local business owners to do what they do best and that is list homes, sell homes, and conduct everyday business while not getting their hands dirty with the online promotion of their listings and products. That is where we come in. The sheer purpose of the Exposure Engine is to generate more traffic to the online virtual tour which, simply put, is an extension of the agents or business owners existing website in the form of a virtual tour.

Virtual tours in nature are quite viral. In fact, I personally know of very few virtual tours where the number of tour hits from email don’t over shadow the number of hits from other sites like Realtor.com, the local MLS and others. Simply put; virtual tours, once opened, are aggressively sent from person to person via email and the Internet.

Over the course of our first year in business the BlueLaVaMedia Exposure Engine was our #2 highest sold product next to our interactive 360 virtual tours. In fact with over 200 virtual tours completed in our first year of business we sold 130 Exposure Engines. It only makes sense then that we would reinvest our time and energy into making our existing Exposure Engine more robust. Our Exposure Engine keeps the virtual tour listing refreshed on Craigslist, pushes the virtual tour to YouTube, and also pushes to popular sites such as Google, Trulia, Zillow as well as to many others.

Aside from its ability to mass syndicate a 360 virtual tour, the Exposure Engine also builds many back links to the virtual tour. In the end, this means that our virtual tours start building natural rank on Realtor® name, and listing address. That’s right…when you google any of our customer names or the addresses of their listings you are more than likely to see their virtual tours popping up organically in the search engine results pages aka SERPS. Try it if you don't believe me!!!

Let’s discuss briefly the updates made to our new 2009 Exposure Engine. First off, we are now including an E-Flyer with the purchase of our Exposure Engine. The E-Flyer is an HTML email-ready flyer that our customers can easily send out to prospects anytime they wish. You can preview a sample BlueLaVaMedia E-Flyer HERE.

Secondly, and by popular demand, we are also creating a SMART PHONE virtual tour that is sent to every customer upon completion. The new Smart Phone tour allows real estate agents and local business owners to carry with them at all times their virtual tour on their cell phones for on demand preview. See our new Smart Phone tour HERE.

Finally, we are very proud to introduce our all new local Northern Michigan real estate and virtual tour portal, www.TourGrandTraverse.com. Every new virtual tour completed by BlueLaVaMedia gets published to our Blog which allows home shoppers and internet visitors to preview our entire virtual tour inventory. Visitors and local real estate agents alike can also take advantage of our new virtual tour feed which will automatically email out any new virtual tour postings daily.To subscribe to our virtual tour feed click HERE.

Jim and I are very pleased with your ongoing support and will continue to enhance our property marketing offerings. Are you photographing your own virtual tours? Are you using another virtual tour service that is not adapting to the power of web 2.0 and social networking? Are able to tell your customers that you are sending in a professional virtual tour photographer to showcase their home online? If not, perhaps it is time that you give the BlueLaVaMedia team a try! Sell Smarter...Sell Faster with team BlueLaVa!

Team BlueLaVa
Traverse City Virtual Tours
www.BlueLaVaMedia.com
Order Property Marketing Services Today! 877-941-8687

Over the last year while Jim has been in and out of several hundred homes here in Northern Michigan, I have been busy working on something truly unique, that is so powerful, and yet incredibly easy to learn. In fact, every time I show someone they always wonder why they have not been doing it all along.

I must admit that I used to plug my ears anytime someone mentioned Digg, Delicious, Furl, Technorati, Backflip, or Twitter to me. But that was before I realized the sheer potential for literally ANYONE...in ANY business...anywhere in the World to maximize their online exposure. So yes, this does mean YOU!

Like you I used to hear these new buzz phrases and ignore them. I used to see little symbols popping up all over the web and, yes, I simply looked the other way. Do you remember when email was the same way? Back when you could still run your business without a website? Times are quickly changing and once again real estate agents must do the same.

Don't worry because once you learn a few of the basics this will be just as easy for you to do as it is to send an email. I promise! If you are a member of TAAR and would like to find out how you can start to leverage the power of social networking and bookmarking I highly encourage you to attend the BlueLaVaMedia Social Ignition Webinar next month.

The webinar is absolutely FREE to all TAAR members. Yes I said FREE. The only thing that my program will require of you is a bit of your time and willingness to make some small changes in the way you conduct business online.

Are you ready for Social Ignition? Stop by our website www.BlueLaVaMedia.com/socialignition and sign up for this event! ONLY 100 SEATS AVAILABLE!!!

Once you're pre-registered just keep an eye out for our next BlueLaVaMedia newsletter which will contain our activation link and webinar schedule.

See you at at the show!!

BlueLaVaMedia
Traverse City Virtual Tours
www.BlueLaVaMedia.com
Take your business to the next level today: 877-941-TOUR (8687)

We are very pleased to announce many new features on our virtual home tours here in TC. You can read all about BlueLaVaMedia in the our latest Traverse City virtual tour newsletter for January 2009.

We now import your Traverse virtual tours directly into the most popular social bookmarking sites which helps promote further syndication of your listings online. You will also be very pleased to know that our new virtual tour links (SpiderLinks(tm)) are search engine friendly and get indexed by all search engine spiders!

As a final note please keep your eye out for our new Social Networking Workshop that will be open to all TAAR members. This will be a free service provided by Jason LaVanture of BlueLaVaMedia. Take some time to read more about these new features and upcoming events in our newsletter found here: Traverse Virtual Tour News.

Enjoy the weekend!!!

Team BlueLaVa
Http://www.BlueLaVaMedia.com

Here is some information for all you Canon SLR users out there. I have been shooting interactive virtual tours here at BlueLaVaMedia for a little over a year now using a Canon 20D camera with a 17-85mm 4.5-5.6 EFS IS Canon lens. I also use a Canon 550 flash on a bracket attached to the RTV Rotator and use the flash for all my images.

This allows me to easily balance the exposure in the rooms with the ambient light through the window, as many of the homes here in Northern Michigan have great views. We are now approaching our one year anniversary here at BlueLaVaMedia and I have created well over 200 Traverse City virtual tours. We are continually expanding our client base and so far everyone that we work with has been extremely satisfied with the quality of our virtual tours. Exposure is good, white balance is not a problem, the tours are very sharp and RTV continually adds more and more features to the system giving Jason and I something new to talk about nearly every month.

Overall in my humble opinion the tours look just great! As we all know in our industry virtual tour quality is extremely important. Many online shoppers will form their first impression of a property, the seller, business owner or a listing agent from the tour. At least that is what my friends all tell me when I tell them what I do now.

Anyway, all was well and good in my world except…when I photographed a property that had very white or light colored walls. In this type of home I would definitely have a problem with a dark vertical banding where the images were stitched together. It was time to do some trouble shooting. It was not an exposure inconsistency issue as my overall exposures were dead on. I then decided that since I was using flash that it must be related to that.

I tried two different types of flash diffusers as well as bounced the flash off the ceiling where applicable. My flash also has a built in wide angle panel that spreads the light wider then my lens. Nothing was working and I was getting frustrated as I still had light fall off at the image corners. I then tried some spins without flash and still experienced the problem. I tried closing the lens down more, to the “sweet spot” and still light fall off! Ok so what next??

I tried a newer 580 flash (I have a good relationship with my local dealer so I was lucky enough to borrow it.) I also have a Canon 30D and I tried that, still the problem persisted. At this point I figured it had to be the lens, so I tried an inexpensive Sigma 18-55 lens. (Borrowed that too) and it seemed to help the problem. It was however still noticeable. What’s a photographer to do????

Well not to long ago I was reading my favorite monthly publication Outdoor Photography and looked over the initial test report on the new Canon 50D. What to my wandering eyes should appear than the addition of a lens peripheral illumination setting to correct light fall off at image edges. All of that testing for not. It was a problem that Cannon has had all along and they have now presumably fixed it.

I haven’t had a chance to borrow one of those yet though. (Don’t know if my Canon dealer likes me THAT much) I still love my Canon system and have quite a few other lenses so I am not about to change. I still use the Sigma because the problem seems a little less pronounced with that lens (I have no idea why) and I have become pretty darn proficient and fast at using Photoshop’s dodging tool to blend the issue when necessary.

In the meantime I am saving my pennies for that 50D or maybe even the (by then) 60D camera. Well in closing I hope some of you Canon users will find all this helpful and save some time by realizing it’s just the nature of the beast or should I say, the Canon sensor!

Good luck out there!

Jim Blue BlueLaVaMedia
TC Virtual Tours
www.BlueLaVaMedia.com
Order a virtual tour today! 877-941-TOUR (8687)