Minggu, 14 Agustus 2011
How to Market Real Estate Properties for Success
How to Market Real Estate Properties for Success in the Laurentians, St-Jerome, Mont-Tremblant.
by Sebastien Prince - www.Web-Success-Marketing.com
Gain Theoretical Experience in Real Estate Marketing.
It's always intimidating at first to do anything new and being perplexed or even a little scared and apprehensive is quite normal in the beginning.
There are plenty of resources for information about marketing approaches and, if you are new to the business, finding out a little theory will help you become confident enough to move to the next step: choosing a technique you are interested in and which matches your personality.
Don't become a victim of Paralysis Through Analysis: you can't nor should you want to know everything about every single aspect.
Don't get blocked by insecurity and simply pick one or two techniques you think you could be comfortable with and test, test, test and test some more..
Make your Real Estate Marketing Mistakes Early on.
Don't be afraid of making small mistakes: they are your surest way to success.
It's much better to test and fail with small and affordable quantities until you finally succeed than to put your year's real estate marketing budget on a campaign you think is amazing; to find out too late it doesn't produce the expected results.
Start a marketing campaign.
Knowing where you want to go with your real estate marketing campaign is the best way to get there. Answer the following questions about you average client:
Age
Sex
Income
Education
Interests
Favorite media
I know this sound like a waste of time and that you are willing to sell real estate to anyone, no matter how old or young they are.
The bad news: there is no way you can reach / sell to everyone.
The good news: you don't have to in order to be successful and you can reach a specific type of clients, perhaps the one you feel most comfortable with, if you identify what they do and how they look for their real estate.
Get Clear, Realistic and Measurable Real Estate Marketing Objectives.
How many leads do you need to generate per week /month/ year?
How many people does it take to get one lead?
How will you evaluate the quality of your leads?
How will you know your marketing campaign is working (or not working)?
How much can you afford to spend?
Delegate the T Word.
Technology is nothing to be afraid of, especially in real estate marketing.The most important here is to select the media that will reach the niche market you chose earlier.
Don't waste your time understanding or even worse: doing yourself, what others can do for you, for cheap and with quicker and most likely better results.
You don't have to be able to program HTML or become an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) specialist to take advantage of technology in real estate marketing, just as you don't have to be a mechanical engineer to drive your car. You are most likely not in the business of building websites or publishing 4 color pamphlets so leave it to the professionals and concentrate on what you and only you can do to move your business forward.
Make the Time.
If you follow advice number 4, you have no excuse for not taking charge of you marketing success.
How to make the switch to working online
The hardest part about making the switch from, say, a traditional 9-5 job to working for yourself online, is the ability to stick with projects and even more importantly, letting them go. Since starting out online, I have participated no less than 10 different ways of making money online over a 6-month period. I have made money or broken even on pretty much everything, but the downside was the amount of time invested in some of these ideas. Nothing beats the time when I planned on writing and promoting ebooks. I wrote wrote and wrote, only to discover I really didn’t want to do that type of work. It was too labor intensive on the front end and there were no guarantees on making any money from the ebooks themselves.
Think of your bottom line and how much time it is worth in order to earn that money. If you spend a lot of time just to earn a little return, you are fighting a losing battle. On the other hand, if you have to spend 100 hours without seeing any profit in order to make much larger returns, that is the better deal. Most of successful work online involves more front end work and higher rewards after the time, energy and effort are put in. This is why most make money online schemes don’t work, because they promise the returns before the effort. Rarely is this ever true. Like I said in the earlier posts, there is no magic bullet. The key is determining when to hold onto those projects and goals as they start costing you more money and time than you had planned or anticipated for. For me, I like to make a plan and return to that plan even if it is just mentally to reassess where I am at in the process. If I feel directionless and unmotivated, it is probably because I have strayed from my original plan or I am realizing the cost benefit ratio is changing.
I really don’t have a set guide for when to drop a project and when to keep it. I spent about 1 year working on an ebook site to help unpublished authors and ended up putting the idea on the shelf. That was a really hard thing for me to do, especially after all the work and time invested. Fortunately, I had only invested a tiny sum of money into the project, mostly due to the limited budget. The project could have easily cost me a lot. It was a hard choice to tuck the idea away, knowing it would probably never see the light of day again, but I had a couple quiet secessions with myself. I really dug deep and asked if that project was something I really wanted to pursuit, or did I want to cut my losses while they were still minimal and move on? I chose the latter and have been thankful ever since.
On the reverse side, I made the choice to stick to my guns and pursuit other ideas that have paid off much more in the long run. It is a hard choice to stick with a dream as you are watching your bank account dip into the double digits territory and just hope that some of the auctions you have on eBay are enough to carry you through til things pan out. It was slowly becoming a reality that I might have to pick up a part-time job to make sure I was able to pay my bills. Just for future reference, potatoes are $.67 a pound, hard not to be able to eat when some food is that cheap. I truly loved what I was pursuing and was going to stick with it until the last possible second. After being humbled by an extremely tight budget fit for a college student it did not take much to feel rich. This is why it is so important to be doing something you really love and would do even without pay. When times get hard, that desire to continue on will be the driving force to carry you through. What separates most successful people from others is the ability to make it through the dip, because I can promise you there will be dips when you start to question your sanity.
If you have forgotten what sunlight looks like it, might be time to reconsider how much effort you are putting into your project. I made the decision to have the freedom and lifestyle that working online allowed. Recently, I made a trip to visit and help family for 3 weeks, and nothing changed as far as my business was concerned. In fact, I saw a slight boom in business while away. This is not always the case, depending on the kind of work you have chosen or are preparing to choose online. My goal was not to choose a line of work that I had to babysit on a regular basis but rather work that molded to my desires and lifestyle goals. Lifestyle design is a really important aspect of choosing what online ventures you pursuit. If you are interested in lifestyle design, I highly recommend Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Work Week.
Having determination and a love for what you are doing is vital for making it through the rough times when things are highly uncertain. I lived off of about $800-900 a month for a few months in order to realize my dream of working online and the flexibility it brings. This is another reason to have a financial buffer while you make the switch. My reasoning of quitting my job and jumping in head first was to force myself to really work from day 1 at making money. I made a sign and posted it right above my computer that read “will this make you money?” For me, it was sink or swim, because there was no way I was going to return to my previous job, and I was willing to do anything to avoid another job just like it. This was not the easiest way to make the switch and being young without many liabilities aided in my ability to approach my new career this way. I would highly recommend for anyone else thinking of making the switch to really analyze your situation and make the proper preparations to ensure your success. Mostly, that involves saving a lot of money or phase out the old job while phasing in your new career as it becomes more profitable.
I can’t encourage you enough to pursuit your dreams, whatever they are. The neatest thing about those dreams and the things that you love is you can make good money doing what you would do for free for a friend. The biggest thing is asking the right questions and really targeting the people you most want to work with. I love helping small businesses because I can relate with so many of them and their desire to succeed in what they do. I get a sense of reward and accomplishment watching others succeed and knowing I was able to assist them in their efforts.
How to make the switch to working online
I know everyone wants the magic bullet or the secret elixir to making money online, and the truth is I don’t have it. The most I can do is tell you what I have done and the things not to do in order to make the switch. The best part about not being able to tell you how to make your money online is that it will not limit you in your pursuit to do so. The sky is the limit and when you find your niche you’ll watch your business returning more than you ever thought possible. I don’t have to remind, but the Internet can deliver more customers to your business than being located in the most expensive and trafficked intersection in downtown Manhattan. Here are four lessons to keep in mind while discovering your calling online. Hopefully they will reduce the bumps along the way.
First:
Wait before you act. I am sure most of you were like me and discovered how some others were making their money online and decided to do the same exact thing in order to make some cash. You have to give yourself a breathing period before you act on those urges and more importantly before you spend money. Here is a simple rule: For every $100 you are about to spend, wait a day. The average wage is about $10 an hour and $100 is roughly 1 days worth of work. Before you spend that money on something, ask yourself if it will help you in your quest to making money online. Wait, think about it for a day, then if you still think it is a good idea, go for it. Even if that idea doesn’t pan and make you money back, you had the time to properly analyze the information and hopefully did a little more research and soul seeking. You’ll be surprised how much money you will save when you employ this tactic of waiting.
I love to read both online and offline and when I get into the mode of one idea or another I want to jump on it while it is fresh and seize the day. This is particularly dangerous online because of all of the information and plethora of ideas available from all sorts of people who claim to have made it big online with whatever technique they are promoting. Don’t forget they got rich promoting those ideas and encouraging that “I can do anything” emotion.
Second:
Ask for someone else’s opinion. When I say most of my friends and family don’t know what I do online, I mean it, they don’t. The reason for them not understanding what I do is simply because their generation was not immersed in the age of the Internet like my generation was. But business is business and marketing is marketing both on and offline. I know there are a lot of different techniques, but the basic principles hold true in both worlds. Before you set out to make your millions online, tell someone else how you plan on doing that. On top of telling them, ask for their opinion and listen. More often than not, you will have to explain things like you are talking to a 5th grader, not in disrespect but in order to bring understanding of what it is you are planning on doing. If it is a get rich quick scheme or sounds to good to be true, you will probably see that in your discussion. Listen and heed those warnings. Don’t get defensive with question after question. A one-hour discussion with another person can save you hundreds of hours of work and more importantly wasting your time. The Internet is full of ways to make money online, but if you can’t name one person who has done that to make money, it is probably because no one else has.
Third:
Develop a leather skin. I know after that last point you might think this is counterproductive, but I am referring more to the criticism you will for sure get. I was fairly lucky in the area of criticism. Most of my friends and family have come to expect that I would try and do things others typically don’t. With the help of family, I bought a house at 19 to rent out the rooms while going to college and many more atypical things. Other people are not so lucky when it comes to criticism from their support group. It is hard to combat that negative energy and comments while you aim for your goal. Most of that criticism comes from a lack of understanding on their part. Take the time to sit down with them and explain your logic and method you are using to obtain your goal. Hopefully that will squelch the criticism, but it is not guaranteed to do so. The truth is those criticizing your idea normally care about you and don’t want you to fail trying to obtain some lofty goal they don’t understand. In this case, the more they know about your goal and method, they will probably start supporting you in your endeavor.
If talking fails to rally the support you need, surround yourself with others who have the same type of goals you do. Find a forum or small group that is aiming to do what you are doing, and join the community. Others might not understand your need to go after these goals, but your new friends will. Make your intentions known, and see who is in support of them. Those are the people you should develop a strong relationship with.
Fourth:
Draft your ideas. Like doing an outline for a paper in high school, it is still important to map out your plan of action and develop the idea. The last thing you want to do is get caught with your pants down in the business world. Having a clear thought written down with the steps you want to take will save you a lot of time. As you truck along on your online ventures, it is easy to get sidetracked and lose focus. Having your plan or goals down and in a visible place will bring you back to where you need to be, much like the Constitution is for the United States (bad example but you get the idea). Goals and visions change all the time, and that is okay. When you feel the project is going to take you in a new direction, simply make the changes to your business constitution.
On a final note, I wish it were easy to tell people how to live and make money online, but it isn’t. The most I can do is give you a set of guides and some time saving methods to help you along in your quest. I have had to learn the hard way more often that not even though I had the counsel of others that had gone on before me. I still tried the same stupid techniques guaranteed not to make you money and wasted countless hours doing so.
Senin, 08 Agustus 2011
Google Adsense: Understanding Image Ads and Making Google Adsense Dollars with Writingup.com
What are image ads?
Image ads are graphical ads. Unlike traditional banner ads, image ads are also targeted to the appropriate audience, just like text ads. A publisher that has a combination of image ads and text ads has a greater revenue generating potential.
Image ads are only for Adsense for Content pages and not available for Adsense for Search results pages.
There are 5 major formats of image ads. The Leaderboard, which is about twice the size of a banner ad, the banner image ad, the skyscraper, the wide skyscraper and the medium rectangle. Google’s technology determines on a page by page basis whether image ads, text ads, or a combination of both will make you more money and then delivers the appropriate format.
You can choose to run only image ads, but Google recommends selecting both, thereby giving them a better chance to target the right advertising for your page, generating more revenue for you.
Bottom line: taking these two methods together will give you the best chance at making the most revenue.
How to Make Google Adsense Dollars at Writingup.com
To get started blogging at writingup.com, first you’ll need to create a Google Adsense account. If you’ve already done that, you’ll just give them the same publisher id you got when you originally signed up with Google Adsense. Since you can only have one Google Adsense account, you will always use the same publisher id on every site you add. Next, you’ll create an account at writingup.com and within minutes, start blogging!
You still have to follow the Google Adsense rules as to the type of content not acceptable but other than that you have carte blanche as to what to write about in your blog. Paste your writingup.com URL into your email signature and every time you send someone an email, you will be referring them to your blog, thus increasing your traffic on writingup.com.
Comment on other publisher’s blogs. If you interact with the blogging community, you are more likely to have your blog read more often. Again, traffic.
Writingup.com has a list of successful topics you can write about. You don’t have to choose from that list of course, but it’s quite extensive and if you look it over, you’ll probably find something that interests you. They are successful topics because they turn up in search engines a lot. More traffic.
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