Mike Henderson 303-949-5848 Genius Ventures

I came across a great article in Business Week about the rental market and rents. Here was the quote comparing Denver vs. other national markets.

BusinessWeek teamed up with Reis to come up with the 25 most affordable large metro areas in terms of rents as a portion of local income. Oklahoma City, where people spent just 12% of their income on rent, was the most affordable. Other cheap markets included Indianapolis, Denver, Fort Worth, and Cleveland.

I've got some theories about why this is, but as a real estate agent I prefer to use raw data. What I found encouraging is that this holds better for the Denver market compared to New York City. In NYC people spend 58% of there income on rent. The lowest was Oklahoma City where it was only 12%. Which city do you think will be harder hit by an economic slowdown? Which city will recover faster?

On a side note for anybody who is looking at investing in apartments in Denver, Colorado I have incredible market data. If someone wants a 2/1 I can tell what the average rent is depenind on what part of town and even the price difference if there is on site laundry versus not having it.

On a side note if you are interested in apartment for investment property on a nationwide basis please drop me an email. I'm on several REO lists, but my current clients are only interested in the Colorado market.

I wanted to see Justin Smith of the Real Estate Tomato. He wrote one of my favorite posts ever here on Active Rain. As a former Diablo 2 player it really reasonated with me. I also just came from a class about writing taught by Gretchen Faber and she had this listed as one of the two sites that influenced her the most. He also lives in Castle Rock, which is just down the road from Denver so maybe I could see him personally for a drink when I visit one of the best outlet malls in the U.S.

He asked people, there were about 30 of us in the room what we were looking for. He also looked at what people were using and 80 plus percent of the group was using WordPress. That made me think about what I needed to be using.

He gave a great tool allinoneseo.com This seemed like the most important thing that I need to be getting and this alone was worth the price of admission :)

Justin also talked about the importance of titles and showed how they actually showed up on Google. You are limited to 65-70 characters and this was brand new information to me. You are also not supposed to repeat the phrase more than once. This message is to all you keyword stuffers out there. You are also supposed to use dashes not commas. Look above, see Justin I'm learning.

Duplicate content came up. It sounded like there were two ways to get around this issue

1) Always link from the copy to the original

2) If you are going to do this then you should allow 2-3 weeks between postings to give Google time to update it

Tags are what I was concerned with. I learned that tags were different on Active Rain versus what takes place on an outside blog. On AR they work more like catagories on the right side. This can make things to busy. He suggested that you only use one or two at most. On outside blogs they are not as important and he stated that he knows some very successful bloggers who don't use any at all.

The opening session and links to all sessions

I was looking forward to this because I suck at writing. I'll put my verbal communiation against anybody, including professional motivational speakers. Writing though ...

Gretchen has a blog www.lifestyledenver.com and I heard a success story about selling a 1.2 million dollar home off of a lead from her blog. That gave me hope. That is something all bloggers need.

Her biggerst tip was to write good headlines. The idea of writing practical title rather than cute seemed very relevant. If you want SEO write practical not cute.

Some of the other names and blogs that they threw out Marianne Wagner and Todd Carpenter. Specific names that were mentioned as good sources were Real Estate Tomato and Copyblogger as learning tools.

The class was good because there were a couple of people in the audience who were friends with Gretchen and knew a lot about what was going on. There was the best explanation of long tail keyword search that I had heard. It is very difficult to explain thouroughly in a short amount of space and I'm not the writer to do it. There is a book called, The Long Tail. It sounded like a great recommendation.

I brought up the subject of Active Rain because most of the big time bloggers appear to have their own domain, and most seem to be using WordPress. I got a great recommendation from Connie Watts, who drove all the way from Omaha, Nebraska to come down here. She stated that she is getting great results from using the outside blog feature on Active Rain. The fact someone drove that far really made me appreciate how valuable the Rebar camp was.

The opening session and links to all sessions

I was looking forward to this. I realized I was going to have to get into the Facebook game. This was the most unstructured class or it was our group that made it that way. There was about 30 people in the group and about half were probably women over 50. This made it tough for a smooth presentation. Lots of technical questions.

I think the topic really got off track, at least in my opinion talking about privacy concerns. Lots of paranoia and concern in this group. People concerned that other people can be posting pictures about them etc. We joked that this one woman had a lot of nude phots of her in the past. She commented that she was asking about a friend of hers. I pointed out that she is supposed to say that at the begining.

The thing I have difficulty in is trying to balance who I am as a person. Right now I'm focused on being the best real estate and mortgage broker possible. Not sure how being a stand-up comedian and professional poker player fit with that image. I don't think it hurts, it might even help, but how the client perceives it as is crucial. Best answer I got for this had to do with setting security and privacy settings.

The class is where I learned the least. It might of been the most fun. The speaker is starting to raise chickens at home and was talking a little about that. My collague Diane Wolta, whispers great now I have to raise chickens too? LOL. So much of the time that is what these classes seem like, that you need to do everything like the speaker does. Just remember it's about cutting your own grass.

A specific tip - Don't create more than one profile unless it's your own fan page or facebook can delete your accounts.

Opening session and complete links to all sessions

This session was awesome. It might of been the best of the day

The presenter Brad Hanks is a super connected user and did a great job of his presentation.

A SOCIAL NETWORK

Community of people connected online

Enables resource sharing, collaboration

Utilizing others connections

Different social networks have different cultures "personalities"

Caters to professional - "Linkedin is where business is"

SOCIAL NETWORKING IS WHERE PEOPLE ARE

500 million globally

It's where business will be done

LINKEDIN

40 million users in March of 2008 it had 22 million users

average age 40

10+ years career career experience

Household Income $109,000

Decision Makers 43%

WHY LINKEDIN?

Create a referal network

Connect with past clients

Prospect for New Clients (target industries, markets, individuals)

MARKET YOUR?

Properties, services, company

Expand your web presence

HOW DO I GET STARTED?

GO TO LINKEDIN.COM

Set up free profile

Start searching for those you know

Connect with SuperConnected networkers

Lurk and learn

Build your profile out

Join and create groups

USING LINKEDIN EFFECTIVELY

Quantity vs. Quality

Your profile is not your resume (tell your story, why would I want to connect with you)

BUILD YOUR REPUTATION

Ask for and give information

Answer questions

Participate in group discussions