A down-turned market is not the time to quit marketing yourself and your listings. It’s also not the time to spend your days latched to your office’s front desk, complaining to the receptionists and listing coordinators how bad business is lately. Truly successful REALTORS® are always successful, even in a bad real estate market. The key to their success is learning how to drive qualified buyers to their listings.
Savvy REALTORS® know that GlobalPropertyDirectory.com is the way to find new buyers for your old listings. Have you been sitting on a palace fit for a queen? Then you should be marketing to queens looking for palaces. Do you really think your local newspaper’s real estate section taps in to the palace-seeking queen market? GlobalPropertyDirectory.com markets your listings through a cutting-edge technology platform with a global audience.
What happens when there just aren’t any buyers out there for your listings? First, stop lying to yourself. There are always buyers out there for your listings. If a listing is priced right, staged to wow buyers during a showing, and you’ve done your part, there will be a buyer for your listing. Have you missed something? Have you failed to think of potential relocation buyers who are searching the Internet desperately for a house you already have in your inventory? Logon to GlobalPropertyDirectory.com and post your listings today! It’s FREE! It’s easy! It works!
How to write a press release is a major challenge facing both experienced and aspiring PR professionals.
Press release writing is a learned skill. This article contains press release sample writing, including that all important first paragraph.
“If it bleeds it leads” is a famous saying amongst news editors on why certain stories are on page one or first up in a TV or radio news bulletin.
With so many big news stories breaking recently, such as the Pope’s death and the Navy helicopter crash in Indonesia, how can you make your media release stand out?
Well, the success of a news release being followed up by the media depends on the all important lead or first paragraph.
After the headline, this is the first message an editor or journalist will read and it is one of those critical moments of truth when you either win over or lose the media.
The first paragraph sets the structure for the whole of the media release.
Take this example of a very poorly written opening or lead paragraph that was actually sent out from the office of Northern Territory Opposition spokesman, Richard Lim on March 9, 2005.
Shadow Minister for Employment Education and Training Dr Richard Lim says that private registered training organisations which provided vocational education and training for Territorians are struggling to survive because over the last two years, the Northern Territory Government has a policy of using the Equipment Grants for government providers only, they being the Charles Darwin University and Batchelor of Indigenous Tertiary Institution.
(Source: D.D. McNicoll, The Diary, Media Section, The Australian, Thursday march 17th, 2005, pg 22.)
What is this person trying to say?
As a media and communications specialist working with clients, I find I spend at least half my writing time working on that all important first paragraph. It is were all the value is.
Here are my Ten Commandments for writing a great lead paragraph. A good lead paragraph must:
1. Summarise The Whole Story.
This is the sharp end of your message and the reader must understand what the whole story is about just by reading the first paragraph. The most important and critical information must come first.
2. Answer The Five W’s.
It must answer the who, what, when, where, and why of the story.
3. Grab Your Attention.
Like a good headline, the lead paragraph must grab and hold the attention of the reader.
4. Make Every Word Count.
Aim for brevity and word economy. Less is more. Edit out words to increase impact.
5. Make Sense.
Write for meaning.
6. Be Accurate.
Always stick to the facts and be truthful, no matter how bad the news. Avoid fluff and hype. Remember it has to be newsworthy.
7. Keep To One Sentence.
Simplicity is the key to great lead paragraphs.
8. Provide Context.
If you are introducing an organisation or person for the first time, put this in context by providing descriptive, detailed and meaningful words immediately prior to the company or individual name.
For example:
Thomas Murrell - poor, no one knows who he is!
International business speaker and co-author of Understanding Influence For Leaders At All Levels, Thomas Murrell - better and puts person in context.
Different descriptions can be used, depending on your objectives and the context of the release.
9. Be Precise.
Precision is vital. Out of all the information you could get across what is the most important? This must be communicated in a precise way.
10. Edit, Check and Proofread A Minimum of Three Times.
Nothing will shoot your credibility down like a typo or error in the lead paragraph. First impressions count no matter how good the story is. Professionalism is essential. Get someone else to check and read your release.
Thomas Murrell MBA CSP is an international business speaker, consultant and award-winning broadcaster. Media Motivators is his regular electronic magazine read by 7,000 professionals in 15 different countries.
You can subscribe by visiting http://www.8mmedia.com. Thomas can be contacted directly at +6189388 6888 and is available to speak to your conference, seminar or event. Visit Tom’s blog at http://www.8mmedia.blogspot.com.
Everyone wants their carpets to stay looking new and fresh, and of course to extend their life as long as possible. Regular vacuuming certainly helps but cleaning your carpets regularly will make a really big difference. Carpet Steam Cleaners can be rented or you can high a professional. Read on for the pros and cons of carpet steam cleaners.
Steam cleaning is a very good type of carpet cleaning. It’s also very good for getting into those tiny cracks and crevices that are usually difficult to reach. Steam cleaning is safe for your rugs, your drapery, and your furniture as long as it is done properly. Another benefit to steam cleaning is that there are no chemicals but you have a very sanitary clean because of the heat factor. It will clean dirt, kill parasites like carpet mites. A very safe process!
Steam carpet cleaning equipment works much like a boiler where the tank gets heated up to a very high temperature, around 250 F, and the vapor or steam is allowed to escape through the powerful jets. The vapor sanitizes and cleans the surface very quickly and very efficiently. . Your house will sparkle!
Here are 6 Top Carpet Steam Cleaners
1. Eureka Atlantis Deluxe Steam Cleaner
Comes with a deep cleaner with 62 scrubbing brushes and a looped handle to give you better control. Great for cleaning carpets, floors, and upholstery. Costs around $160.00
2. Bissell Little Green Clean Machine Steam Cleaner
This is the perfect machine for cleaning up spills and stains. It’s a little small for doing a full carpet but in a pinch you could. It’s not that it isn’t capable of cleaning a full carpet it’s just its portable size that could be a bit awkward. Its high pressure sprayer is excellent for loosening dirt and stains. Costs around $80.00
3. Hoover SteamVac Plus Steam Cleaner
This gem is designed for some heavy duty cleaning with a 12 inch path and an 8 foot hose. 27″ cord assures you won’t be constantly looking for a new plug. It deep cleans both forward and reverse and has a two speed option. Use on carpets, floors, or upholstery. No tap hook up needed as it carries two tanks one with clean solution and one with the dirty solution. Costs around $190.00
4. Bissell PowerSteamer Proheat Plus Carpet Cleaner
The deep cleaning action on this machine will have your carpets sparkling clean. Use on carpet or upholstery. Comes with upholstery tool. Built in heater heats up tap water and maintains the temperature. 12 inch path for each cleaning and a wide nozzle that works in forward or reverse. Costs around $190.00.
5. Bissell Big Green Clean Machine Steam Cleaner
This is the big brother to the awesome little green machine talked about earlier. Full size ready for those full clean jobs. Comes with a two gallon tank which is double the size of most uprights. A canister model with a high pressure rotating brush and 40 jets for that deep cleaning action. Its biggest draw back is the power head has been discontinued. Costs around $150.00.
6. Dirt Devil Easy Streamer Carpet Extractor
Lightweight and easy to use this upright cleaner is up for most jobs. Carry handle and dual cord hooks. 11 inch wide. Feather light but a heavy weight in the cleaning department. It has a motorized roll brush for deep cleaning.
These are our top picks for carpet steam cleaners but of course there are plenty of other excellent choices. A quick search on line will provide you with all the information you need and many more choices.
John Murray makes it easy to go through the carpet buying process and provides tips to keep your carpet lasting long. To learn more and receive your free mini-course visit the carpet rugs website.
Would you attempt to use a cell phone with a dead battery? Or drink from a cup with no liquid in it? Drive a car with gas but no oil?
Of course not. Each of those probably sounds like a silly question.
But we often forget that the same thing goes when you’re promoting a site. Web site promotion relies on several components to make it successful. And if you’re just using one part, it may seem like everything is fine.
For example, perhaps you’ve been relying on search engine marketing alone in order to get clients to your site. You build a search engine friendly site, with the right keywords, get some links leading back to you, optimized title tags, etc.
And for a few months, you’ve got a steady stream of traffic leading into your site. Yippee!
Then one day, Google changes its algorithm, and what you thought was a perfect site for a term tanks, and you’re suddenly on page 20 of the results. Sales drop, and you have no idea what happened, or how to get back in position.
It’s frustrating, I know. I’ve been there. But this doesn’t always need to happen. And if it does, it doesn’t have to be a disaster.
How can I say that?
Look at the bottom of my home page (see the resource box below) and see how many people have clicked through to just that page from Google and Yahoo in the past 24 hours. Again, that number represents my home page only, not the rest of my site.
A quick check of my stats tells me that last month, visitors clicked through to my site for “1959 different keyphrases”. 15% of those phrases yielded more than 10 unique visitors, with the top result sending 214 people to my site.
And I was slacking last month - I’ve really been too busy to optimize my blog posts.
“Well, hurray for you Tinu. Where does that leave me?”
The example from this site was to illustrate to you that first - search engine traffic only brought around 6% of my traffic last month and I still did fine in sales and in increasing my subscriber base and exposure. It’s none too shabby but I could do a lot better with this site - however, it would mean that I spent most of my time promoting the site instead of working with clients.
On the other hand, if your website promotion was set up like mine, you could be completely dropped from Yahoo, Google, MSN, Alta Vista, Excite, and all the other engines, and still have an okay month. Then the next month you could either recover your position in the search engines, or focus on strengthening your promotion in other areas.
In order to prevent such a fall from happening to start with, or to quickly recover, you need to have more than one web site promotion method in place. What are these other methods and how do they build on each other?
You can find the answers in part two of this article.
Read part two of this article on site promotion in the Free Traffic Tips blog.
