Oct

2

2008

Editing Your Photos For Free

By: Brian Wilson, Customer Service Manager


So you’ve been out all day taking photos of your real estate listings. After downloading them from your camera, you see that they’re good, but they’re just not perfect. You know that with just a few tweaks they’d be perfect. You're not the most tech-savvy and you don’t have the budget to purchase super fancy photo-editing software, so what do you do?

Don’t worry!

I found some web-based photo-editing tools that are not only easy to use, but FREE. Did I say FREE? Many of these tools will give you comparable results to brand-name software, but without the steep learning curve and hefty price tag!

One of my favorites is www.picnik.com. This site has all the basics you need to modify your photos. After registering for a free account, you can upload and modify photos in a flash.

The basic tool set allows you to:

· Rotate

· Crop

· Resize

· Fix exposure

· Change colors

· Sharpen

· Convert to new file type (png, gif, tif, bmp)

Should you feel a little adventuresome and want to test out the advanced tools, you can do the following:

· Convert to black and white or sepia

· Add borders

· Add drop shadow

· Add text

· Touch up

Picnik has all the editing tools that the professionals use, just without the high price tag. Best of all, this site is available to you from any computer connected to the internet—for FREE!

Sep

11

2008

Is Real Estate Your Life, or Does Your Life Include Real Estate?

By: George Salvador, Vice President/General Manager, Agent Advantage Website Services


Here’s my challenge to you:
Answer my first question, then go on and write down six words that each describe an important part of your day.

Tell me what happens first all the way to what happens last during a typical “day in the life” of you. We’re talking about a work day here. Your goal should not be to prioritize these items, but rather to isolate them.

I’ll give you ten assignments like this over the next ten days. My questions will progressively take you through a process. At the end of that process, you’ll get a listing. If you have a listing, you’ll get an offer that your seller will let go into escrow.

If I’m wrong, I’ll give you a FREE Premier Website from Agent Advantage, with free lifetime hosting.

If I’m right and what I promise happens, you just have to write about it in this blog and you have to send two other Realtors here to read your comments. I’m cool with that, are you?

The only thing I’ll ask of you during this ten-day journey is that you post a daily entry on this blog telling me you are participating in my process each of the ten days.
That’s all.

George Salvador
Vice President/ General Manager
Agent Advantage Website Services


May

6

2008

How To Live Green

By:


Going green, becoming eco-friendly and conservation are the hot topic these days. Whether you want to save the planet, save a few bucks or just get with the times, we're here to help!
Green Living 101 is a profile piece on Green Living with the help of Jessica and Jason Pelletier. They started their business, Lowimpactliving.com in 2006, and they have some great tips on how to live fully without a trouble non-green conscience.

Here is a slightly contrary view on buying eco-friendly housing and the cost it entails.

And finally, from the website, Thegoodhuman.com, comes ten things that can make a home eco-friendly.

Aug

13

2007

Social Bookmarking: Digg it!

By:


According to their own site, "Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web." That, in a nutshell, is what Digg does. And there are a whole lot of companies that do the same thing, as I mentioned in Pt 1 of this post.

Another site that does a good job of explaining how stuff works said the following:


The huge Digg community is made up of users who play different, often overlapping roles. There are submitters who post news stories that they find in blogs, professional news sites and random postings around the Web. These stories land in the Digg queue. There are casual reviewers who look for interesting stuff in the queue and "Digg it" -- meaning they click a button to let Digg.com know they think it's cool. Once an article gets enough Diggs (and meets a bunch of other secret requirements), it's promoted to the homepage. There are truly dedicated reviewers who spend hours every day combing the queue to actively promote good stories and report bad stories (which will eventually get removed with enough reports against them). These people really drive what ends up on the homepage and therefore what gets thousands and thousands of people clicking through to read the story, sometimes crashing unsuspecting Web servers. Small Web sites and home servers can get crippled when 400 visitors a day suddenly turns into 5,000 in two hours. Even at HowStuffWorks, where our servers can handle the traffic, we can easily tell when we've been Dugg. When our stats show an increase over normal traffic of thousands of clicks per hour to a single article, we check the news-compilation frontrunners -- Slashdot, Fark and Digg -- to see who's got it.

And finally there are the Digg readers, who make up the majority of Digg users and reap the benefits of the willing Digg army that promotes the best stories to front page. In return, the readers keep Digg in ad revenue and give the submitters and the Diggers something to do.


Digg is the number one social bookmarking site right now, and last time I checked their Alexa rankings, they were at 89. Being closest to 1 is good, and they are way way up there. For comparison, pepsi.com ranks 36,467.

Digg helps build traffic for your site when you submit your posts. You add relevant keywords and key phrases so that when Digg.com users are searching, they will run across your site. Readers will like your article and "Digg" it. According to JohnTP's website (a site with lots of good blogging info), it can take around 50 diggs to get to the coveted front page.

And that is just one of the myriad of ways to get help from using Digg.com. Just be careful to not abuse the Digg system. Being listed as a splog (spam blog) can be distrastrous. Keep it on the up-and-up and you'll be fine.

Page 1 of 1 page(s)