Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

I am almost 50 years old and I know very well how it feels when you have built a career leveraging a whole lifetime of work and connections: it feels comfortable and it feels like that’s he only way it cam be. I have been fortunate or unfortunate enough to have built my whole previous career on the computer industry and I have seen a whole market be born, grow exponentially and then fade away in little more than a decade. Some of you might know PC Magazine: it has been the reference reading for all computer professionals in the 90ties and I have launched its Italian edition back in 1991 bringing it to 110,000 paid readers and to 700 pages: the most successful international edition of PC Magazine the world over.

So I have had my heydays in publishing, but since the arrival of the Web I knew it was over and that the people were going to drop specialized magazines and go online: and so happened. Two years ago I was directing my last magazine. I had a biog office, a staff working with me and a nice paycheck paid by one of the top publishers in Italy.

Yet I knew it wasn’t going to be long before my comfortable position was going to be challenged by the death of the computer advertising market, that had been decreasing world wide. I couldn’t see myself doing anything else than directing computer magazines, but it looked like there weren’t going to be too many in the future and I was also a bit tired of it. My wife Maria started therefore a “campaign” to convince me that I was really an entrepreneur and that I was simply wasting my time. She did her best to convince me that I would have been at whatever I was going to do and I could trust her judgment: she has reached the highest levels in network marketing in Europe, developing a downline of over 10,000 people. So she knows people and how to motivate them.

Without her I would probably be still in Italy, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, trying to fight against a dying market. Today I am a real entrepreneur and I realize I don’t consider myself a journalist anymore. Sometimes your previous identity follows you even when you change job and you find kind of lost in the first months. I was still thinking at myself as the editor-in-chief not as Roberto Mazzoni.

Now is different and the funny part of it is: I have learned enough in this year in the US to start a new and successful “modern” PC magazine: I have been experiencing what my readers had been living all along and now I can talk with their exact viewpoint. But I don’t have to. I am an entrepreneur and I can choose my field based on my passion and the business potential. I am finally free to be what I want as much as I want it, and it was all because of Maria and her steadfast support in all these months of development, joys and tribulations. Surrounding yourself with the right people is the very first step in any kind of endeavor, that is what I learned.

Roberto Mazzoni