Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Managing business in remote has become common practice for me since I deal with International partner and my own business associate, Daniele Bogiatto, actually lives in Italy. Yet we do meet quarterly and he has just arrived in Florida with his family, but he is in orlando for the time being so we choose to discuss our initial plan for the next year over Skype.

Indeed our lives and our business model have changed dramatically in the last few months and now we need to decide how fast and strong to develop the various segments of our venture so that we can keep up with and we don’t waste any opportunity. The first decision is that we will focus on info-marketing, the production and delivery of training and coaching material to other businesses, while still retaining our real estate business that will be managed through partners mostly.

Me and my business associate Daniele Bogiatto in front of a house we have just rehabbed in Clearwater, Florida.

We realize that there is a huge potential and we more than happy to split revenues in exchange of competent help and the ability to count on other teams of people that would take care of some sections of the activity without us having to do all aspects of it.

The coordination of these teams will require a substantial amount of training, but this is something we are good at, so we believe that by concentrating on doing what we do best we will obtain the best results in all quarters.

Roberto Mazzoni

Today I met for the first time with Daniele Bogiatto after three months of separation. We have started our company and activity together here in the States during the summer and then he went back to Italy to develop all kind of projects stemming form what we had planned then and we have been in touch only via Skype or phone.

Now that he is back with his family it has been like starting a new relationship all together, so many things have happened on both sides of the Ocean and so much have we have progressed in meantime towards our initial goals and so much we have added to our initial business model.

We have visited together the first house we have bought together: it was then in horrible shape and today is a beautiful place for a family to live in, completely renovated and ready to sell: we have put in on the market yesterday, just as Daniele was landing at Fort Lauderdale, and we already have two prospective buyers, one of which is international.

It was like for both of resuming a conversation that had been suspended in August. I have been sending videos and updates about the work done, but being into it and “living it” makes it all the difference. We have decided that all the houses that we will rehab with European money will bring a logo from us, a sign to show that we have been there and we have improved a neighborhood and giving a nice place to live in for an American family.

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Today everybody was shopping all around, yet for me, aside from buying a trampoline for my kids, it was business as usual. I was inside one of the house we have finished rehabbing recently and I was checking the last items and designing the layout of the external lights so to make the house stand out.

I was actually in the garage when I suddenly got a phone call on my mobile phone from my business partner and best friend Daniele Bogiatto who was driving along the Italian highway towards to Rome for a major event where he will launch, together with other partners, a whole new company dedicated to Social Network Marketing. An enterprise that wants to be the first really successful mixture between Web 2.0 and network marketing.

He has been working on this project for some months now and in the coming week end they will organize in Rome the first world wide convention of the company that is an evolution of an already successful European network marketing company that has been using the Web effectively in the last decade but that now wants to master the social networks.

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The success of a business or a project can be measured by the reach of the effects it can create. When you can establish relationships and cause effects at a very great distance, then you know that you are on the right track and you have a role to play. During the next weekend, in Rome, there will be a major event on Social Network Marketing that has begun from an idea me, my wife Maria, my business associate Daniele Bogiatto and his wife Jenny talked about one night, last summer, under a palm tree on Ana Maria Island.

Maria has an extensive high level background on Network Marketing and Daniele is a genius in Web promotion, and I have been studying the merging of network marketing technique, e-commerce and Internet Marketing by meeting and talking with some of the highest people in the field to date. By the merging of our experiences and ideas, and with the superb development of the project by Daniele after he returned in Italy, we now have the first world wide convention on Social Network Marketing in Rome, next week end.

Many big companies, also in the US, have tried to merge network marketing and social media and have failed so far or have achieved limited results. This project, that will follow closely the culture and the etiquette of the Net, will probably bring together two of the most powerful promotional channels of the last hundred years: Web 2.0 and network marketing.

While this is going on, Mark Jackson, an experienced North American real estate investor is in Italy and is meeting all the people connected to this huge project and other connected projects to explain them why and how to invest in real estate in the US.

This all started with my arrival in the US 15 months ago and with the selection of the right people to network with and the development of such a network. It is a result I am very proud of and I can’t wait to see the evolutions it will have in the near future.

Roberto Mazzoni

This is a sentence I first heard from my business associate Daniele Bogiatto and it describes a very positive way of looking at life and objectives. The first time you do something you are facing many challenges and you never know whether it is going to work out. Even if somebody else did it before you, there is uncertainty on whether you can replicate the same result.

But once you achieve a desired result for the first time you know for sure that you can do it and that you will be able to repeat it again and again, probably improved. It doesn’t matter how complex it was to get there, you still made it and therefore you have proved to yourself that YOU can do it.

The road to success is composed of many intermediate steps. Break down your project in parts you can achieve easily and achieve them one at a time.

And if you can’t you can still try to achieve a part of the objective, diving it into smaller and easier steps, and then add them up until you get the total product. The real genius, I believe, comes from splitting complex tasks into smaller parts that we can successfully accomplish and then bringing them together.

When we try to do everything at the same time and we don’t have lot of experience in the field, it is likely to get baffled and confused and not recognize what we did wrong and what we did right. One of the readers of my blog quoted a sentence that reads “The Secret of Success is the Ability to go From Failure to Failure Without Losing Your Enthusiasm”. This is very true, but I would add to it that the secret of success is recognizing what you did right and reinforce it, while getting rid of what you did wrong.
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