TechTools Tuesday: Cool Tools to Sell Homes
PowerSites™ by AgencyLogic lets agents create single property websites which can show any home beautifully.
Easy to create and very affordable, PowerSites™ websites give you flexibility and many great features including:
- A vanity URL dedicated to just that property
- Large photos to grab the attention of prospective buyers
- The ability to upload and caption as many as 100 photos of the property and surrounding community
- Unlimited text so that you can describe the property in as much detail as you wish
- Syndication to many of the major real estate search portals so prospective buyers can more easily find your listing
There’s even an optional PowerTalk “click-to-talk” feature that lets prospective buyers place a call to you directly from the property website.
To get an idea of the power of PowerSites™, take a look at how one professional is using it to market a home formerly owned by President and Mrs. Gerald Ford.
Categories: selling homes · techtools tuesday
Tagged: real estate
Ever wished you could move the items around in your LinkedIn profile? Have you ever wanted to, say, de-emphasis your education by moving it toward the end of your profile or highlight your professional summary by moving it closer to the top? Well now you can.
LinkedIn’s new feature is great for real estate professionals who often come to the industry from other careers. If you were, for example, a teacher or a stay-at-home parent before getting your license, you don’t have to put that upfront, especially if you’ve long since made a name for yourself in real estate.
The new feature is easy to use and lets you use your LinkedIn profile more like a functional résumé, highlighting the aspects of your background that work best for you. To find out how it works, click the image or visit the LinkedIn blog.
Categories: LinkedIn · self-promotion
Tagged: LinkedIn
The arrival of Apple’s long-awaited iPad—a device that’s bigger and more powerful than an iPod but not really a full-featured computer–got me thinking: does each of us really need another gadget? How much electronic “stuff” is each of buying, using, and discarding? Is it possible to be up-to-date technologically and really live a green lifestyle?
If you’re a baby-boomer like I am, you can remember when one or two administrative assistants in the office had electric typewriters on their desks and the rest of us had only pen and paper. We wrote out reports and presentations longhand. We jotted appointments in a paper calendar. Memos that everyone had to see were passed from one person to the next (check off your name when you’ve read it) until everyone had seen them. Yes, we used a lot of paper, but we bought, charged, and trashed way less electronic junk.
Today, in that same office, everyone has a computer on his or her desk. There’s a laser printer in the corner for everyone to use and some people have printers just for themselves. Everyone’s got a smartphone in his or her pocket and a “dumb” phone on the desk. The typical computer CPU and monitor use a couple of hundred watts of power. Additionally, computers and printers drawing power all day long generate heat and require the building to have extra cooling. One American university estimates that personal computers generate $700,000 in annual energy costs. And that’s just at the office.
At home, many of us have several phones, several computers and at least one huge flat panel TV. We have cameras, scanners, iPods, and electronic game players. Many of these things run all day, and at night we plug everything in to recharge before we go to bed. Most of these things will become obsolete in 3-5 years and we’ll discard them and get new models.
But how much power are we using? How much junk are we putting in landfills? Even if we’re careful to turn off what we’re not using and to recycle what we discard, we’re still gobbling up way more than our share of the world’s resources.
So, the question I ask is this: is it possible to keep up with technology and truly live a green lifestyle? What do you think?
Categories: technology-general
Tagged: technology
A recently-released report by a California-based security company revealed that millions of computer users are selecting passwords that make it easy for hackers to gain access to their accounts. Are you one of those people?
The company, Imperva, analyzed 32 million passwords in December 2009, and discovered that:
- 30% of all computer users select passwords of 6 characters or less. The shorter the password, the easier it for a hacker to guess.
- Nearly half of all computer users create easy to remember (and therefore easy to guess) passwords, using slang words, dictionary words, or familiar number combination. The most common password, for example, is “123456”. Among the top 5 passwords are: “12345”, “123456789” and “password”.
- Half of all computer users use the same password for all the websites they visit. This means that once a hacker figures out a victim’s password at one site, it’s easy to invade that person’s accounts on other sites.
- Almost 60% of users create passwords from a limited number of characters. Passwords should not spell out a recognizable word and should contain upper and lower case letters along with numbers and special characters such as “!@#$%%^”.
If you’ve made any of these mistakes, you should take the time to review and change your passwords. Choose strong passwords and use these techniques to help remember them.
Categories: Internet · passwords · security
Tagged: Internet, security
It’s almost impossible to be successful in any field of endeavor without promoting yourself. Yet, in Western culture, at least, egregious self-promotion is considered taboo. This is especially true in social networking where the best way to create a negative image is to shamelessly and inappropriately call attention to yourself.
You’ve seen people who do this. They write comments on other people’s blog posts, but the comments have nothing to do with that blog; the comments are about them with a link to their stuff. Or, they invite you to connect with them and soon you’re deluged with messages about them, their product, their next seminar, or whatever it happens to be.
These people are boors. Like the guy at the party who corners you and won’t stop talking about himself, you always want to get away from them. And of course, you don’t want to be like them.
So how can you use social media for self-promotion without coming across as offensive? Here are some guidelines to follow:
- Never Use Someone Else’s Platform To Advance Your Cause. Recall how shockingly rude Kanye West appeared when he stole the mic from another artist during an awards ceremony to promote his own agenda. Never try to promote yourself on a site that’s about something else and never try to call attention to yourself in the comment section of someone else’s blog.
- Promote Yourself by Promoting Others. Find people in your network whose work you admire or who are doing things that are laudable and talk about them. When you promote others, people notice you too.
- Be Humble. Give lots of praise to others. Take little for yourself.
- Take an Interested in Others. When you’re genuinely interested in other people, they will be interested in you. Don’t beat people over the head with messages about what you can do for them. Instead, get to know them. Ask about what they do. Invite them to talk about their projects or what’s going on in their lives. Rejoice in their successes. Empathize with their challenges.
- Help Your Contacts Find Clients. If people in your network are in business, ask them what they’re looking for in a customer, then introduce them to people in your network who meet that profile. The contacts you help in this way will always be on the lookout for ways to return the favor.
- Introduce Your Friends to One Another. If there are people in your network who have much in common or who would certainly become friends, introduce them to each other or arrange a get-together. As their relationship grows, both parties will remember you fondly.
- Be Subtle with Blogging. Blogging is one of the best ways to subtly make people aware of what you know or what you can do. When you publish articles in your area of expertise week in and week out, people come to understand how knowledgeable you are without you having to explicitly say so.
- Bring People Together with Blogging, Wikis or Other Interactive Sites. The most successful sites bring people with similar interests together by inviting them to write articles and make comments. All of the people who participate on your site will see you as the expert because you made the venue available and you moderate the discussion.
- Beware of Spamming People. Self-promotion can easily cross the line and become spam. When you want to let people know about a new project or a success, send out one or two messages and let it go at that. Never bombard your contacts with constant or repetitive messages about what you’re doing. It’s the best way to get people to disconnect and start ignoring you.
What else would you add?
Categories: self-promotion · social networking
Tagged: social networking
