Facebook Activities That Will Get Your Profile Disabled
and the steps to take before and after it happens.
There is a limit for nearly everything on Facebook.
Today’s real estate professional needs to stay connected to many social networking platforms. It can be overwhelming trying to keep track of all your login credentials, media files, contacts.
Marketing and participating on the web has become more than search marketing. Our client base is becoming more involved in the social web. They look to their online friends for recommendations.
Flock aggregates all your social web accounts and services. You only need to launch the browser and you’re instantly logged into and have access to all your accounts. It also brings together all your friends into one unified sidebar. From there you can view your Facebook friends, your twitter followers and the people you have a connection with on Digg, Flickr, Picassa, MySpace and YouTube. Read the rest of this entry »
There was a time when we advised Realtors that their phone number was the most important element on their for sale signs. Now, it’s most certainly your web site address that should receive special attention. Here’s why:
If you were to read three signs with the lines below, which would be the easiest to remember?
I always tell my clients that they don’t need to include “www.” on their signs. Home buyers know it’s a web site when they read the “.com” or “.net” suffix. You should alway capitalize the first letter of every word in your domain. Domain names by themselves are not case sensitive.
We’ve all been tempted to use images found on Google & Yahoo image searches. Unfortunately, “borrowing” these images will almost certainly bring you copyright troubles. So, I turn to two of my favorite sources for images:
Open Clip Art Library is a great source of illustrations that can be freely used. All the files are available as PNG or SVG filetypes.
Dreamstime has a huge collection of royalty free images at very reasonable prices. I really like their wide selection of photography.
JR Screen Ruler is a very useful and compact utility that allows you to accurately measure anything on your screen. I use it all the time to measure space in various browser windows, size of photos and graphics.
Pixie How many times have you run across a site with a truly inspiring color scheme? Just don’t know how to communicate those colors to your web designer or printer? Run your mouse over any on screen object and Pixie will tell you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values.
Inkscape is an open-source (free) vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. Professional graphic artists use vector graphics so logos & illustrations can be enlarged without loss of quality. This is especially important for sign graphics. You can also create Flash-like web content using Inkscape because was designed from the ground up to use Scalable Vector Graphics.
ActiveRain is, according to their website, “the largest and most active social network in the real estate space”. Launched in 2006, it’s present membership consists of 97,454 real estate bloggers. Unique in it’s Realtor to Realtor content, it is full of ideas and great advice. Sure, there’s some off topic posts, but it’s pretty easy to find members and groups that provide valuable real estate related content.
One of the best features is it’s specialized groups. You’ll find groups focusing on technology, marketing, referrals, regional content and company/brand specific private groups. I would encourage any real estate company to start a group for their agents – it could take the place of regular office meetings!
Last week, a potential client came to us with hopes of us making his sign more interesting. He was looking for new ideas on how to make his company’s sign more appealing. The original sign design was very outdated and resembled a driver’s license. It was my job to create a new, more attractive sign.
The original design was flat and boring. In order for me to create a more attractive sign I had to turn to Adobe Photoshop, which provides me with limitless possibilities. I started by adding a small gradient to the bottom of the sign, while making the phone number larger. This makes the phone number stand out more as it is the most important element of the design. I also added a slight drop shadow to the company name to give it more contrast to the orange background behind it. Next, I worked on the company logo. In the original design, the logo blended in with all of the other text because it had no contrast from the elements around it. Read the rest of this entry »
Ordinances usually start as well intentioned responses to improper use of temporary signage other than real estate signs. The law must treat all content equally; so these policies can affect the real estate industry negatively.
This is a story of a group of Realtors who banded together and challenged a potentially restrictive sign code.
Our village was updating their zoning code for the first time in decades. In the past, political signs where not posted even though there wasn’t a law prohibiting them. This particular year a few candidates challenged the village’s “unwritten law”. Since the trustees were rewriting the zoning code, they proposed requiring a sign permit for ALL temporary signage. Read the rest of this entry »
Brochure boxes (sign boxes, info boxes, flyer boxes) have been around for years. Our’s are affordable, durable and attractive. Top agents swear by them.
Here’s some tips on using this important marketing tool:
Home buyers shop neighborhoods, not newspaper listings. People prefer to do drive bys when house hunting. At this early stage, buyers don’t call to gather information. They expect a flyer. If there isn’t one, then they don’t call. Read the rest of this entry »
My name is Jason Russo. I created the website and shopping cart system for RealEstateSigns.com.
I met CEO Jim Calabrese in 2000 and was interviewed for an internship. At the time, RealEstateSigns.com was a mere one page website consisting of just one graphic. Upon completion of my internship I was immediately hired on to continue working on the website.
We were eager to create an ecommerce site tailored to a real estate agents needs. We quickly learned that this could not be accomplished by using a purchased e-commerce application or as we like to call it an “in the can” solution. Read the rest of this entry »
