Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

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 no 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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Today I have begun my running routine under the training one of the best running coaches in Italy. I have been running with my kids and it has been a double pleasure. We skirted around a gold course that is near my house in Florida and we also watched some of the players: really a great time.

My coach is coaching me from a distance, via e-mail, and the sole fact that I have a routine to follow for actually keeping myself healthy is a wonderful thing. I have purchased the right shoes. I didn’t realize there are different types of running shoes for any type of foot. I have gone to a local sport apparel shop and I have found a very competent young man who got me walking and swinging and standing still, and who by the sole observation of my gait was able to determine what was needed for me.

This is the kind of professional service one expects from any type of business. The competence must be so high that by only looking or listening to your costumer you should be able to know right then what is good for her. And as a matter of fact the shop where I went to buy my running shoes is always busy, despite it being relatively small, kind of hidden inside a secondary mall.
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Yesterday I began a twenty days series of posts dedicated to the twenty golden rules on how to gain money, based on the works of PT Barnum and his book “The Art of Money Getting”. The first rule we saw yesterday was. “Don’t mistake your vocation”, not we come to the second that is “Select the Right Location”.

You can be very good at your trade and you can perform it with passion, but you won’t very far if you don’t have a public available or if you have too much competition doing the same as you do. The Web offers new ground and elbowroom for growing any business, but you must also realize that the entry barrier is very low. Anybody who can put a ridiculous amount of time in developing his skills in Internet marketing or affiliate marketing can beat you so finding a very selected niche is often one way around the problem, but that reduces also the number of people you can serve.

I was listening live to a presentation by Gary Vaynechuck one week ago, one of the most popular businessmen on the Web, and he told the story of a liquor store run by his father. The location was not optimum and particularly the trading of liquor was a very competitive market.
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Yesterday evening I was about to go to bed when my e-mail box was hit by a promotional message by Tellman Knudson, one of the heaviest list promoters out there. He was trying to sell a new system for making money online, which I haven’t tried, but he was using a very unusual sales pitch to drive it home. The slide of his video kept showing content from a famous book by P.T. Barnum titled “The Art of Money Getting – Golden Rules for Making Money”.

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Tellman mentioned in his video that this book is still very relevant today and that it is well applicable to Internet marketing. I got curious and I searched for a copy online. I didn’t know it before, but it seems to be a classic since you can find a full free copy of the book in the Gutenberg Project.

These are the twenty rules mentioned in the book:

1.Don’t mistake your vocation
2.Select the right location
3.Avoid debt
4.Persevere
5.Whatever you do, do it with all your might
6.Use the best tools
7.Don’t get above your business
8.Learn something useful
9.Let hope predominate, but be not too visionary
10.Do not scatter your powers
11.Be systematic
12.Read the newspapers
13.Beware of “outside operations”
14.Don’t indorse without security
15.Advertise your business
16.“Don’t read the other side”
17.Be polite and kind to your customers
18.Be charitable
19.Don’t blab
20.Preserve your integrity

I have therefore decided to take cue from them for the next twenty days and every day take one and discuss it with you. So we begin with: “Don’t mistake your vocation”.

It is the starting point of any successful venture and I quote directly from PT Barnum: “Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed.” This is easier said than done since sometimes we have no clear vision of our vocation and we need to try different avenues until we really find it.

When I began my working career I wanted to deal in technology, electronics and complex machinery, but when I looked at the people who were doing that type of work, I saw they were introverted and generally out of communication with anybody else. So I ended up becoming a computer journalist for the next 30 years.

Then I realized that I wanted some independence, I wanted to be able to track my own future course. Therefore I changed my life all together and I have become an entrepreneur and I like it very much, although it is quite tough at times. I deal with real estate and I take pride at my products, but the other day a friend of mine pointed out that my core knowledge is in content creation. This is very true and I bet this “core” will influence my evolution in 2010 and beyond.

I will not abandon what is working today, actually I will find a way to make it more powerful by doing more what is closer to my core competence.

Roberto Mazzoni