Roberto Mazzoni

Mercury is the only liquid that can cut a gold ring very neatly in no time or mix with it and turn into a silver-like dull metal. They call this reaction amalgamation and it is immediate. The only way to recover the original gold is to vaporize the mercury inside it, which few people are willing to do because it is toxic.

Today I am starting a major shift in the content of this blog because it is time that it focuses on its main subject: creating business opportunities, both in international real estate as well as other business and international areas. I am a fan of technology, blogging and Web 2.0 and I will be using these tools even more intensely in the future and maybe I will write an article from time to time on how to use these tools from a business perspective , but the transition is due now: I need to vaporize my old time passion for the Web as such and devote my blogging time to the main passion of my current working life, which is also where I can provide more unique content.

So what’s so special about international real estate or business selling? You have the chance of creating a win-win situation between a seller and a buyer, leveraging the availability of cash in Europe or other countries with the ample availability of housing or businesses for sale in the US. But some people get it wrong: they believe they can simply sell for an unrealistic price to someone who is far away hoping they would never find out.

With the modern tools, just anybody can find out anything in a few minutes and he can also get easily local people to check for him. So don’t do it. You will not have a second chance. So where is the win-win? You can probably get a more decent price and shorter closing terms if you involve a foreign buyer properly, but you need to do a bit of work: find out what tax advantages are available in the US as compared to the buyer’s original country. Yes, many times it is cheaper to pay taxes here than it is in Europe, believe it or not.

Find out the legal paperwork she has to sign and how you can make it easy for her to understand it and sign it. A translator doesn’t cost much and it can make a huge difference. Explain the huge advantage in renting a property in states like Florida, where prices have dropped, as compared to an average rental in Europe: it can up to be six times more profitable. Make it easier for them to get into the project with some owner financing.

And if nothing works of these, you can still ask me a few more ideas.

Roberto Mazzoni

I have just completed an important step of my professional evolution that comes with the recognition that blogging will constitute an important ingredient of all my activities in the future. There is a natural attraction to this tool and medium that probably comes from my previous long career in publishing, and it is even more interesting for the fact that I have overcome the language barrier and I am able to maintain my blog in English (in addition to the Italian one), which would be unthinkable for me just two years ago.

But now, how does this relate to you? In these first 18 months in the USA, I have heard many entrepreneurs say: “I want to do my blog!” or “I should update my blog more often, but I don’t know what to write”.

Well, first of all if you don’t know what to write, you have nu business doing a blog and if you do one then why not do it in a professional way? Would you consider it professional a newspaper that was published this Thursday and then next Monday and then may be ten days after? It takes dedication and a plan to write every single day, trying to share something of value but it is also the best system for improving yourself, since I you are always challenged to go one step further.

Can you be a professional blogger with being a full time blogger? And cultivate your social media contacts at the same time? This is the challenge I am facing and I will share with you in the coming months.

I am right now joining the so called “third tribe” that I mentioned in a previous article. It consists of those people who don’t want to be full time Internet marketers but who want to make more money in their business leveraging the power of the Net.

In the end, this is the new world and you need to master the new media, in addition to the conventional ones. What I like about the “third tribe” concept is that honesty and quality of content gets rewarded and you can make money online even if you don’t have thousands of people in your list or you don’t know all the tricks to convince them to buy.

It is desirable to have a big list, but you can start to gain and expand with a much smaller presence. It all depends on your public and the type of service you want to offer. There are some people that are already successful in doing with integrity and coherence. The more you are coherent with what you like to do, your true personality, the better results you can get, provided you do something that others find desirable or useful.

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I have been conducting a very thorough research during the last few days to evaluate which subject could work best in the evolution of my blog. Sometimes your blog doesn’t have to address directly what you do in business, but can rather be something parallel or connected that is interesting and that you have a passion for. I have therefore made a very wide scope research on the key subjects that word and don’t work on the Internet to establish what are the main topics of interest.

And it looks apparent that the three winners are: how to make money, how to have a better health (which includes looking better, losing weight, and so on), how to save time and have a better life, how to get a date or find a significant other. These are the four wheels that make the world go round: money, health and physical shape, freedom from constraints and love (which includes sex of course).

The picture doesn’t include entertainment as a possible way to make money online. It is actually confirmed by several Internet marketers and bloggers that entertaining others cannot be part of a profitable presence on the web. It can be part of a branding presence of course, but people are used to get entertainment for free and when they get to an entertaining site or video they just leave after the entertainment is over. Also affiliate sales don’t work on these type of sites.
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Time has come to make an assessment of my business and activity to ensure that I am on the right track and that I can travel with the highest speed possible. During a recent seminar I was told that the two key factors to assess a business success are a “clear strategy” and “flawless execution”. The second is heavily dependent on the first, because it doesn’t matter how well you execute if you are going in the wrong direction.

The Web has now become the fundamental sounding board for any business, whether online or offline. You can get an instant mirror of what people are saying and doing and what they want to achieve. You just need to know where to look and have the courage of facing what you find. So today I have started a process that will bring me to much better understanding of what is out there and how can I conduct this blog more properly.

I want to share with you the process I have followed so far, so that you can also use for your own planning. My core business is international real estate and also international business opportunities, and I focus mainly on connecting Europe to the USA.

The first reality check I have done is to go to Google Keyword Tool to see how many searches are available in this specific area and how much advertising is associated to those searches. I got 49,500 searches per month with a 100% saturation of advertising presence. This tells me that “international real estate” it is a nicely sized niche with a lot of competition, which is a very good indicator as competition and advertising exist only where money is available.
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When it comes to making business on the Internet or through the Web, there are two major recognized “tribes”. The first and most noisy one is composed of the Internet Marketers: they are aggressive, they have always some system that will make you rich in the blink of an eye, they will only require you to pay a high ticket to get into it. And when you do get in, you find out that it is either hype or that it is very difficult to make it work for you. They are the one making a lot of money while you basically work 90 hours a week trying to build a system that will make money “while you sleep”.

The second tribe is composed of social media cool fellows: they cherish relationships, values and community, they reject hype and aggressive sales tactics, they like to give more than they take, but they are actually not making much money if any at all, and they have little sense on how business should be conducted.

I have exaggerated the description here so to make them stand out, there are of course Internet marketers that actually deliver very valuable content and there are cool social media guys who do make a lot of money with a “regular” business that they promote through social media, but they are very few, on both sides.

So what happens to the rest of us? What happens to the people who do have something to say or share on the Web? To the people who have business models that can take advantage of the huge promotional potential of the Internet, but don’t want to join either side?

Welcome to the third tribe. It is a concept that is taking shape right now and that has gained the attention of some of the top bloggers on the planet as well as of some “enlightened” internet marketer. The third tribe is composed of those people who try to follow the rules, who value good relationships, who provide quality original content, but who also want to make some real money in the process.

I believe that every modern entrepreneur belongs to this tribe by definition and there are already many examples of people that are leveraging very good content and services and some wise Internet marketing techniques to produce good results. Going back to “The Art of Money Getting” by P.T. Barnum we see that rule number 17 says: “Be polite and kind to your customers” which includes, in modern wording, follow the rules of relationship building online, but rule 15 says that you also need to “Advertise your Business” so the third tribe is actually the Web answer to an ever lasting business need.

Roberto Mazzoni