Directory One doesn’t have many real estate agents in Houston, Texas but the list of real estate companies is growing, by 3 this week alone. I don’t know if it’s a sign of things to come but I don’t think real estate agents will spend more and more on search engine optimization leads because of the exclusivity of the leads they develop online. There are many lead generating real estate sites like www.homegain.com but not all of them have leads to sell right now. Also, the commercial real estate section is hot right now. I am surprised how many companies still are not selling their business’s products and services on the net. The Internet has change the real estate industry forever. I had a sales call this week of a gentleman who had a house in Houston to sell that cost about 3.7 million dollars and he wondered weather it would be worth it to sell it on the net.

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Directory One is increasing its’ portfolio of public companies that use search engine marketing training and are recieving inquiries from some big players in the search engine marketing community. Philip O’Hara has now been helping people create visibility on the Internet for 10 years. Many companies have their own search engine marketing people and like to keep it as an in-house task but need training from the experts. Directory One for a fee of $2500.00 a day plus expenses the company will send a search engine marketing expert to train your staff. They can get more from a service like this than they can paying someone 100K to 200K a year for this service.

You need competent staff to start with but at Directory One we’ve been helping people rank highly on the search engines for a while. We enjoy teaching our customers and offer classes for optimization customers to attend several times a year.

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Google Docs & Spreadsheets launches, an online word processor and spreadsheet program that allows you to create, share and store documents safely via your web browser.

Product home page
Google blog post
Link to the press release

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Google announces deal to acquire video sharing website YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.

Google press release, Webcast available here

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Having studied yellow pages advertising and the business of yellow pages advertising I feel I am witnessing the dying of a industry. Yellow Pages advertising was responsible for so many business’s in the early 80’s growing like they did. Most people who bought yellow pages from southwestern bell which was my phone company in the 80’s. I have lived in Houston, Texas since then. I think a guy named David Laird was the District or Houston GM.

I sold a service to the advertisers in phone company directories from 1981 until about 2000. The only real business knowledge I possessed was the knowledge of the phone companies billing systems the sales people use when selling yellow pages. My customer (the yellow pages buyer) counted on me to know how they could save money in yellow pages advertising. When I first started this consulting I charged my cusotmer a fee based on 50% of what they saved in yellow pages advertsing. It was a project based bill and there was not any repeat business unless the customer change the ads I recommended the year of the consulting. I recieved many fee’s for several thousands of dollars but never really showed a profit for many years. In about 1990 I changed the way I was billing people and I would charge the price of a bold listing in the yellow pages for consulting. I had a repeat business so to speak with a fee of 25 to 50 dollars a month per directory I consulted on. Shortly after the browser was introduced I began to learn from my yellow pages customers that they were getting leads off of these web pages they created on search engines like altavista, yahoo, and excite. I decided it was time to transform my agency to a Internet marketing agency from a yellow pages advertising agency. It was the best move I have ever made.

Learning how to get web pages to appear at the top of these search portal soon started developing leads for my customers and the rest is history. We now help hundreds of customers to appear at the top of the search results and we have made many customers millions of dollars. Most of these customers are yellow pages advertisers who made millions of dollars from the leads they got from their yellow pages advertising. If you advertise in the ATT yellow pages and you are not advertising with Yahoo, Google and MSN you are missing something really special.

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Google launched Google Code Search yesterday which allows you to search public source code.

Link to Google Code Search.
Link to Code Search Discussion Group

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