Month: January 2019

Marketing Hard to Sell Properties

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Property owners tend to have a different view of the value of their properties when the time comes to sell, but from time to time it is necessary to market a hard to sell property. Whether the property is in a state of poor repair or there is a high volume of similar properties for sale in a the area, there are a number of techniques that can be used by for sale by owner (FSBO) sellers and real estate agents such as Minneapolis Realtors alike to market hard to sell properties. These techniques range from free methods to highlight the benefits of a particular property to expensive marketing plans developed by consulting firms. Each with its own benefits and drawbacks but the joint message is that you must identify your target market and your message in order for any marketing plan to work effectively.

Having a clear message in your marketing is a key element to marketing your property. Typically in the case of selling a property, even a hard to sell property, the message is that the property is For Sale. It does not matter how many things you say about the property if people don’t know that it is for sale. Some real estate companies overlook this key aspect when they place signage. There are for sale signs that have numerous riders and large print contact information but a teeny tiny for sale or for rent message. The same goes for open house and yard sale signs. Often we see signs at the corner and don’t bother to drive around the block because it is not clear if the sign is for an open house or a yard sale. Other messages you may want to consider when marketing a hard to sell property are: Reduced Price, Buyer Incentives or, Special Financing Offers. Remember though, one message per marketing piece. Now that you have a clear message make sure that it applies to your target market.

Identifying your target market is just as important as your clear message. You can send your message out to thousands even millions of people but if they are not the type of buyer who would be interested in your property the chances of your marketing message resulting in a qualified buyer are slim. Sending out a property flyer for a 5 bedroom family house into a neighbourhood designed for executive couples makes about as much sense as marketing a rib fest in a vegetarian establishment. Now if you sent that same marketing flyer into a family oriented neighbourhood where the typical house has 3 or 4 bedrooms, the chances of your attracting a family that is looking for a larger house greatly improve. Now that you know the importance of targeting your market, let’s look at some of the free marketing methods that can be used to highlight the benefits of your property.

The internet is a great place to start. The majority of buyers look for real estate such as Minneapolis real estate, online. Here are a few ways to strategize your marketing plan:

Digital Pictures: Buyers like to see pictures! Even if the property is not in the best shape, pictures will allow the buyers to have an idea of what the property does offer. If you had two properties with a similar price and one had pictures that showed some flaws such as peeling paint or outdated decorating and the other property only showed the outside of the house, wouldn’t you wonder what the seller was trying to hide? Furthermore, if you did happen to attract a potential buyer without posting additional pictures they would likely turn a run when they got inside the place and saw that it needed work.

You Tube style video tours: This is the new trend. FSBO sellers and real estate companies alike are beginning to make free You Tube type virtual tours of the properties that they are trying to sell. Similar to pictures the video tours give the buyer an idea of the overall picture of the property. You can even add audio to your video and give it that little something extra.

Blog-sites: In some cases you can set up a free blog-site that looks and acts just like a website. WordPress.com offers some easy to use templates that allow users to upload videos, photos, links and other information. You can even have more than blog-site that can be customized to highlight different properties. Take it one step further and purchase an inexpensive domain name as outlined below.

Email Campaigns: This is likely more applicable to real estate agents as they typically have at least a few contacts who are looking to buy at any given time. Email flyers and templates can be made up which include the information on the property. Effective email campaigns are an inexpensive method to reach a number of pre-qualified buyers.

Print marketing although lessening in popularity with today’s buyers may be suitable for certain properties or in certain market places. Commercial magazines are still very popular in some markets and may be worth the price of placing an advertisement, if the above guidelines regarding clear messages and target marketing are applied.

Larger real estate companies or specialized industrial property owners may consider utilizing large scale marketing techniques. A few examples are:

Professionally shot video tours – these tours are often used to professionally highlight the numerous features of a particularly large or special use property.

Dedicated websites – similar to the blog-sites mentioned above, dedicated web sites are designed specifically to provide information about the property. This strategy involves a great deal of commitment, time and investment and is more suited for large and specialized properties that will take longer to sell.

Extensive Marketing Packages – an effective follow up technique used to provide interested and qualified buyers who have already responded to the initial marketing pieces. These packages generally include items such as estimates for repairs, information on repairs that have already been completed, property surveys, zoning information (where applicable), pre-listing home inspection reports and other property specific information.

In some markets it may be necessary to enlist the services of a consultation company. This can occur in markets that do not have a real estate company who specialize in the type of property in question. This typically applies to large and specialized industrial properties. They may use a number of the same techniques mentioned above and many will coordinate the entire marketing project.

When it comes time to market a hard to sell property there are a number of techniques that can be utilized by real estate companies and FSBO sellers alike. Knowing your target market and using a clear message in your marketing program can be applied to a variety of marketing techniques. These techniques rang from free online methods to highlight the benefits of a particular property to expensive marketing plans developed by consulting firms.

Apply Attraction Pincipes Into Your Social Media Marketing And Watch How Your Online Business Grows

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If you have an online business or any internet network marketing business, and you are using any social media marketing platforms, you have the power to tap millions of customers globally for only a tiny investment and create infinite returns. Any small business owner or network marketer who is not leveraging the power of the internet or social media marketing is leaving thousands of dollars on the table. Unfortunately lot of network marketers are using social media the wrong way to the point of pushing away their prospects and even their own friends. You don’t have to go through this process of making cold calls or pitching your product to people you don’t know and get spammed before you knew it.

But How Can You Really Make Social Media Marketing Work for Your Online Business?

A very effective and professional approach to leverage social media marketing for any internet or network marketing business is through applying the principles of attraction marketing. Attraction marketing is about establishing yourself as a leader in your industry then using this to entice people to join your business. It is a very effective strategy that does not involve making cold calls or untargeted sales pitches that are the traditional methods in network marketing.

Some Bits of Information That can Help You Understand How to Apply the Principles of Attraction Marketing into Your Social Media Marketing 1. It takes time for you to establish yourself as a leader in your niche. This is the very first thing you should know about attraction marketing even in social media marketing because you cannot attract any leads if you don’t make yourself into a leader first. So how long will it take you to become a leader? It depends on a lot of factors. First, how good are you in marketing yourself out there? Second, do you have any previous experience in network marketing or social media marketing? Third, do you personally know other leaders out there whom you can use for your advantage? And fourth, do you know who your target market is? If your answer to these questions are all positive, then it’s going to be a lot quicker for you to become a leader in your chosen field.

2. Attraction marketing is about providing lots and lots of good content (often for free). In any industry, you have to regularly create good content to make yourself stand and rise among the others. You can apply this in whatever social media marketing platform you are using such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google +, Blogs, etc. Just give your followers food content, day in and day out, and sooner or later you will become the go-to guy on your niche. 3. Attraction marketing is leading with value. It is about nurturing those who look up to you. It’s about keeping the communication lines open, answering their questions, providing them with tools and resources, and providing them advice and solutions to their problems. This is network marketing so their success is also your success. What’s really beneficial about this concept is that the better you are in nurturing your network, the more warm leads you receive through referrals made by your own followers.

If you are able to fully and effectively utilize all these social media marketing strategies, it won’t be long before you will be perceived as a leader. Be reminded however that becoming a leader won’t happen overnight. It will take some time before people will start noticing you. Once their eyes are upon you, what you need to do is nurture their attention by giving them what they want or need in the form of free content like articles, ebooks, training materials, software, etc. See to it that the content you provide are always of the best quality. As was stated earlier, with attraction marketing, you are not going to send pitches to people you don’t know. Instead, these people will be going over to you and asking you details on how they can join your business. The concept is really simple. In searching for business opportunities, people are attracted towards people who are treated as leaders in their chosen niches. So this is exactly what you should do. Make yourself a leader and the people will start approaching you. If you keep on doing this, that’s when people will start recognizing you as a leader. The power of social media marketing and attraction marketing put together will really bring your business to the next level and long term huge success.

Lina von Frausing-Borch becameserious in her internet network marketing business since she discovered this marketing systemcombined with theattraction marketing principles. If you would like to be really successful in your network marketing,she highly recommends this system because it doesn’t only build a strong online business for you but also builds you as a valuable leader.

Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click Your New Marketing Techniques

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As the world becomes increasingly digitalised, its easy to find your business lagging behind the competitors with a neglected website which adds little revenue. But its never too late to begin online marketing for your business, and theres no time like the present.

2012s new marketing techniques
Local and national newspaper circulations are declining and TV and radio adverts are often too expensive. Fortunately, there is now a new way to increase awareness of your business and expand your customer base.
You dont have to be an online business to make the most of online marketing. Your business no matter how small and how local your customers can benefit from the new techniques on offer from online marketing companies.
Local businesses can feel like a very small fish in a very big pond online. Thanks to Googles location search, you dont have to be in competition with the sharks. A professional search engine optimisation agency can improve your websites prominence with local people, or people searching in the local area.
Whether you have an existing marketing department or youre a one man band looking to promote your business effectively and affordably, dont overlook the importance of these online techniques:

Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation helps search engines like Google work out what your business is associated with. Keywords related to your business (such as “emergency plumber in Shropshire”, “hairdresser in Birmingham”, or “cheap shoes”) will be researched and focused on, and the aim is to increase your websites prominence in the search engine results pages for these particular terms. The higher up your website, the more visitors you are going to receive from that search engine. Think of your own searching techniques, for example. Whatever your search term, you are unlikely to venture past page one, and most likely to click on one of the top results.

PPC and Google AdWords
While search engine optimisation could be compared to your business being featured in a story in the press, pay per click (PPC) marketing is the modern equivalent of a paid-for newspaper advert. PPC advertisements are paid adverts which show alongside search engine results, and you may have noticed Googles PPC AdWords ads on the right hand side of the results page.

How are SEO and PPC Marketing Achieved?
Each search engine optimisation company uses different techniques to boost online visibility, so speak to potential agencies about their methods. Their work will generally involve writing and distributing online articles and press releases, and creating page content and blog posts for your website, all using the relevant keywords which people are searching for.
PPC like Google AdWords is also targeted to particular keywords, but with these you pay for each click your advert receives. The ads must be intelligently targeted to result in conversions either sales, bookings or enquiries on your website – or you risk paying for clicks which offer little or no return on investment. Fortunately, PPC professionals can manage your account for you and help your business generate sales. These could be online sales, if you have an online store, or offline, such as a booking or enquiry about your services or products in your shop or business.

Hiring the Professionals
Search engine optimisation and PPC Google AdWords can generate a lot of business, yet require time and expertise to be profitable. It is therefore important to hire an experienced agency rather than attempting the complex techniques yourself. You may not require both of these services, and a discussion can help assess which techniques are right for your business and budget. Search engine optimisation is tailored to each business, and offers infinite potential to attract customers and clients to your business.

Successful Html Email Marketing Campaigns And Lotus Notes Issues

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As the online world changed in the nineties from informational to commercial and highly competitive, marketers embraced the new technology and the need has arisen to send graphically appealing newsletters and marketing messages. You have only seconds to capture attention, and the right picture will grab quicker than the right copy, as they say, “a picture can be worth a thousand words”. Just ask your clients if they would use plain white paper, rather than letterhead, to send an offline message to prospects and customers.

Today, the vast majority of all email clients can render (that is, display) HTML emails fairly well. Notable exceptions are older versions of Lotus Notes and pre AOL pre version 6.0. So whereas a few years ago the answer to the question was rather complex, today it really comes down to message purpose, subscriber preference and multipart messaging. Studies show that roughly 95 percent of commercial messages sent today are sent as Multi-Part MIME.

Multi-part MIME is an older protocol that allows you to send both text and HTML versions of an e-mail in a single package, kind of like a sandwich. The recipient’s e-mail program then displays the HTML version, if it is capable of reading that, or the text version, if it is not.

MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions and is an internet standard for the format of e-mail. Virtually all human written Internet e-mail and a fairly large proportion of automated e-mail is transmitted via SMTP MIME format. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and if nothing else, you’ll learn a few more acronyms if you stick around. Internet e-mail is so closely associated with the SMTP and MIME standards that it is sometimes called SMTP/MIME e-mail.

Folks, while nobody can really agree on numbers and stats, we all agree on this: HTML Email Doesn’t Work Properly for Millions of Recipients.

HTML email breaks in a wide variety of email inboxes. This isn’t due to your creative abilities or lack of HTML knowledge – it’s due to the fact that the email client your recipient views your email in routinely breaks your message.

I feel like this is worth defining, as I know a lot of people get very scared when we talk about clients and servers, but will not admit it. An email client (some “big picture” folks also call it Mail User Agent) is nothing but a computer program that is used to read and send e-mail, such as Outlook, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, etc. A mail server (also called a Mail Transfer Agent or MTA, or a mail exchange server) is a computer program that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another. Most of the time, since nobody has time to learn all the acronyms and terminology coined by those “big picture” people, we are used to know a mail server as the entire contraption (wires and all) that runs the program.

Depending on the email system, your HTML images may be blocked so recipients see a blank white box and/or your live hotlinks may not work properly. AOL 9.0, Outlook 2003, and Gmail are most infamous for blocking and/or breaking HTML, “for security reasons”.

Another big offender for not letting HTML through is Mel, the guy that works in the corporate IT department. Many corporations have IT departments who can’t wait for the day when all attachments and all HTML emails are eradicated. That is because in their world, anything that is not pure text is spam, virii, worms, trojans, spyware, adware, pure evil(ware) that makes mailboxes grow and users growl. As a consequence, most of those cubicle inhabitants – the end users – who have to sign a hundred page policy before they start getting busy on those corporate e-memos, are unable to view and/or send HTML messages, whether the feature is turned off at a server level, or on their computers.

Everything else aside, there is no bigger offender here on Earth than Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes is notorious for its refusal to handle Multi-Part MIME the same way the rest of the civilized world does.

For your amusement, here is a definition of Lotus Notes that was created by one of those “big picture” executives: “Lotus Notes is a commercial workflow and groupware software package that also provides application developers an environment for quickly creating cross- platform client/server applications”. Still with me? Don’t be scared. For the purposes of this article, Lotus Notes is an email client. Ok?

If you work for a company that uses Lotus Notes as the email system, don’t even think about sending newsletters other than in text form from it. Besides the fact that as a general rule, I always recommend to marketers the use of a professional permission based email marketing service, in the Lotus Notes case you just have to.

If you communicate to the B2B market, particularly large professional services firms, large lawfirms, many Global 2000 companies, HTML email compatibility will be a thorn in your side, as a lot of these companies use Lotus Notes.

The issues include:

– Older versions of Lotus Notes (under R5) convert HTML emails to a Lotus Notes Rich Text format. Lotus Notes versions under R5 also do not recognize Multi-Part MIME messages (HTML and text combined in a single email).

– Some companies may be deploying later versions of the Lotus Notes client, i.e., R6, but using an older version of Lotus Notes/Domino server such as 4.6. In this example, the recipient’s email client would also render an HTML message incorrectly.

So for a recipient to view a properly rendered HTML email, a company must use both the Lotus Notes client and server of R5 and above.

Here are some quick tips you can take if you have a significant Lotus Notes subscriber base:

1. Include a link at the top of HTML emails named “View Web Version” or something similar. The link sends recipients to a web hosted HTML version of the email (either on the email technology provider’s server or the sender’s server).

2. Also include an “Update Preferences” link and provide a web site update form that then enables recipients to choose to receive Text rather than HTML.

3. Create complete Text versions for those who prefer not to receive HTML or cannot view HTML.

4. On opt-in forms, include an option to receive a Text version and potentially list tips (i.e., “If you are using Lotus Notes versions below R5, select Text”).

In conclusion, I will say it again: Folks, don’t try this at home. Instead, always outsource email marketing to one of the many professional services. Advantages are: No blacklists and established relations with the major ISPs, ensuring maximum deliverability (plus, you don’t want to be called a spammer and banned from everywhere). They also make it easy to create, send, and track permission-based email, have advanced reporting, message scheduling, the ability to create unlimited lists, bounce back handling (extremely important), subscription management, newsletter templates and many other major industry-standard features. The service I use for my company can be tried free for 15 days, here: http://www.bsleek.com/emailmarketing/

The Important Parts Of Internet Marketing Be Different From Business To Business

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Internet marketing is quite simply marketing that is done using the internet. Marketing refers to the promotion and advertisement of goods and services. It includes all the commercial aspects of transferring goods and services to a customer. Internet market usually includes advertising websites and products ordered over the internet, but internet marketing can also be used to promote offline businesses.

The most major part of internet marketing is probably the attempt at getting web traffic to a certain website. Traffic generally refers to the amount of hits and visitors a website receives. Traffic is also measured in quality based mostly on how targeted the potential customers are to the product. For example, a website about fishing that sells fishing poles would want a fisher to visit more than someone who does not fish. There are many ways to generate traffic. Internet businesses can pay money to get traffic to their website using methods such as banner advertisements and pay-per-click campaigns. Other common methods of traffic generation include viral marketing and posting about your website on other websites.

In addition to traffic, internet marketing also includes other aspects associated with getting the most customers to buy whatever the business is offering. These other aspects commonly include the effectiveness of the sales-pitch, the product, the website, and the customer service. The important parts of marketing differ from business to business, depending on what they are selling and to whom they are selling it.

Improving your internet marketing efforts will require that you analyze log files and tracking data. To do that, you must first install software on your website to record, log, and organize server data. This information will give you important statistics, such as how many people come to your website, which pages they visit, and how long they stay. You can use the information to compare the results of different campaigns. You can also use the information to find conversion rates. Once you find out when, where, and why some of your website visitors leave or do not leave your website, you can use that information to make changes that will help you get them to do what you want.

Internet marketers have to keep in mind certain concerns. For one, they have to worry about cost. The cost needs to be less than the revenue it generates, or else the internet marketing campaign will not be profitable.Another concern is traffic overload. If a website gets more traffic than it is used to getting, then it may overload the servers. That can make the servers slow or cause them to crash all together. It’s recommended that marketers continually ensure that their servers can handle the traffic. A big marketing campaign can turn into a waste if the servers crash due to unusually high amounts of traffic.

When internet marketing, it is usually helpful to test and analyze. For example, testing different marketing campaigns will allow you to compare their cost-effectiveness. Also, testing how much of your computer resources are used in a marketing campaign will help you find out if they can handle a bigger campaign.