Bild a Better Business

Easy Time Tracking & Invoicing!!

admin — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 13:15:56 +0000

I just purchased Easy Time Tracking Pro from Logic Software Inc. and I thought that you would like to get it too. They’re offering a 20 percent coupon, all you need to do is click on the link below to get the deal.

http://TipFrom.Me/t/?E238MN

Brought to you by TipFrom.Me

Facebook Page or Blog? Where do I start? a repost from an article by Jimmy Mackin

admin — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 18:48:59 +0000

This is a good article written by Jimmy Mackin – I suggest starting out with a website in which your blog is a page within in it. Your goal is to drive traffic to you website and to optimize your web site – Call me for more information how this can be a part of your real estate marketing plan!!!

Facebook Page or Blog? Where do I start?

April 20, 2011 By Jimmy Mackin Leave a Comment

Where do I start?

Many Realtors® who are new to Blogging and Social Media do not know where to begin. A common mistake many Realtors® make is they try to do everything at once. I want to share with you the strategy we used to build our brand.

July 2nd, 2010 – we launched our Facebook Page.

Over the next 6 month, we focused all of our attention on connecting and engaging with our community. As a result of our efforts, we were able to consistently grow our Facebook Page month after month.

When we launched our blog (Jan 12, 2011)- we immediately started seeing traffic flowing in from our Facebook Page. In our first 108 days, we have driven in over 16,000 visits and 35,642 Pageviews. Our readership is growing by approx 30% per month.

The important takeaway here is that only 8.84% of our traffic is coming from the Search Engines.

We often think that the only way to drive in traffic is to rank well for relevant keyword phrases, we have found that there is an alternative marketing strategy that you can use that may help you get better results.

Pre Social Media

Realtors® would launch their blog, hope that Google would crawl their site, index their web pages, and “hopefully” rank their pages for highly relevant keyword phrases. This is a push and pray marketing approach - push out your content and pray that Google ranks your pages well.

The challenge many of us face with this approach is that we cannot control how well we rank for specific keyword phrases. We can optimize our sites until we are blue in the face, the fact remains, that ranking well for highly competitive keyword phrases very difficult.

Post Social Media

Facebook allows us to take more of a proactive approach to building a following.

There are two very important distinction worth making

Establishing yourself as a resource for valuable information is a great way to attract followers. This doesn’t require you to create all of the content, you simply need to be a good curator. A perfect example of this is The Corcoran Group.

People are the engine that drives growth – not bots.

REALTOR.com Reveals the Real Estate Search App on the iPad

admin — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 22:47:32 +0000

Hot hot hot!! Are you letting your clients in on this? Better let them know before someone else does!

Polish Your Presentations! (a repost)

admin — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 18:14:10 +0000

This is GREAT information about putting together a presentation that will knock the socks off of your potential clients – HOWEVER, tackling a Seller or Buyer presentation is not for the faint of heart or is it throwing everything you have into any old PowerPoint presentations. If you want a presentation done, let me know! I’m here to help. Sandy Bild

Published on Friday, April 1, 2011, 10:14 AM Last Update: 2 day(s) ago by Denise Lones

Category: All Articles » Technology and Tools

Gone are the days when you can simply show up at a listing presentation with data from your MLS that shows comparable homes. Today’s savvy sellers require much more information. They expect an in-depth analysis of their local market. They want a customized marketing plan, tailored to their home and their needs. They want to know they are hiring an expert. And if your listing presentation isn’t one of your most powerful tools, you’re going to lose the listing.

One of my new coaching clients recently shared her frustration with me. She simply isn’t converting listing appointments into listings. The questions I asked her were: “Tell me what you have in your listing presentation, and show me what tools you use.”

Before she answered, I knew what the answer would be. Like most agents, she doesn’t have a structured listing presentation. Yes, she prepares a CMA, she has information about herself and about her company, she has sample flyers, and she talks about her website. But very few agents have what I consider a powerful listing presentation.

Here are my ten tips for success at your next listing presentation:

1. Get organized! The better prepared you are, the more confident you will become. Do your research. Prepare your tools. Put everything in order. When you know you are as ready as you need to be, your confidence will come through.

2. Always follow an agenda. Let potential clients know you are organized. Show them that you have a system and that there are important items that must be discussed. When you have an agenda, everyone will be ready for a comprehensive discussion. The beauty of an agenda is two-fold: you won’t forget to cover key issues, and you can involve the sellers by allowing them to determine where they want to begin the discussion. Their answer will provide you with valuable information about their needs and concerns.

3. Grab a potential client’s attention early. Use visual “props”! Props are simply visual tools, but they are an essential (and often neglected!) ingredient in a powerful listing presentation. I know lots of agents these days think that their laptop is all they really need. While it may seem cool to show your “stuff” on a laptop, even today in our tech-savvy world most people still want something they can see and touch. Visual props will absolutely grab their attention.

4. Have a “toolbox” of props and use them with care. There are five essential categories you must cover in every listing presentation. You need tools for each one, based on what today’s sellers care about. Those five categories are:

a. Price
b. Communication
c. Technology
d. Marketing
e. Photography and Home Presentation

When your toolbox has several tools that cover each of the five essential categories, then you will have the beginning of a powerful listing presentation.

5. Let your clients know how you work. With few exceptions, we humans are not mind readers. We make assumptions based on past experience. Potential sellers may have preconceived notions about how ‘every’ agent works (or doesn’t work, as the case may be). Tell them exactly what you are going to do, when you are going to do it, and what systems you have in place to make sure you do what you say you will do for them.

6. Speak and present to everyone at the appointment. I cannot tell you the number of times I have observed a listing presentation where the agent focused on one person, and ignored everyone else in the room. It’s natural to focus on the person you have the best rapport with; however, you must focus on others as well. Part of your success will depend on building rapport with everyone in the room. Regardless of who the final decision maker might be, you must connect with all parties.

7. Adjust your presentation based on “signals”. Communication is more than just speaking words to each other; body language plays a huge role. If you sense that someone is impatient, you may need to speed up so you don’t frustrate them. If you sense that someone is confused, or is asking a lot of questions, you absolutely have to slow down. A truly good presenter is skilled at reading non-verbal clues, and responding accordingly.

8. Keep your presentation short and to the point. I’m often asked, “But if I have a lot of props, won’t that increase the presentation time?” The answer is a resounding “NO”. It takes less time to explain things when you have visual tools to refer to. Just as illustrations supplement a book, your props will help potential clients understand your point more quickly than words alone.

9. Choose your tools carefully. While I want you to have several tools or props for each category of your listing presentation, I don’t necessarily want you to pull out each and every tool at every listing presentation. You wouldn’t expect a plumber to bring in his entire truck full of tools into your house, just to fix your leaky kitchen sink. Determine ahead of time which tools will be the most appropriate for each presentation, based on factors like the clients’ personality, the market, and the property.

10. Practice makes perfect. I am constantly amazed at how poorly agents present when they’re not prepared. I am equally amazed at how well an agent will present when they are polished, confident and professional. Agents who understand the value of role-play, and who practice their presentation regularly with others, are the agents who will ultimately be hired by a seller.

If you find yourself competing for listings (and who doesn’t!), the way to get hired is to confidently and professionally articulate your value through your listing presentation. Remember this: a powerful presentation will win every time.

This is the first Zebra Report in a 7-part series about successful listing presentations. In the coming weeks I’ll break down each component of a presentation, including Pricing, Communication, Technology, Marketing, and Photography & Home Presentation. I’ll explain exactly what information you must include in your presentation, and what “props” you must have in your tool box. Look for Category 1: Pricing next week!

By Denise Lones CSP, M.I.R.M., CDEI - The founding partner of The Lones Group, Denise Lones, brings over two decades of experience in the real estate industry. With expertise in strategic marketing, business analysis, branding, new home project planning, product development, and agent/broker training, Denise is nationally recognized as the source for all things “real estate”. With a passion for improvement, Denise has helped thousands of real estate agents, brokers, and managers build their business to unprecedented levels of success, while helping them maintain balance and quality of life.

Fishing or Phishing – either way, something smells

admin — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:58:10 +0000

This is a great article on online security from “How to Geek”. Great group too follow!! This is a repost.

Online Security: Breaking Down the Anatomy of a Phishing Email

In today’s world where everyone’s information is online, phishing is one of the most popular and devastating online attacks, because you can always clean a virus, but if your banking details are stolen, you’re in trouble. Here’s a breakdown of one such attack we received.

Don’t think that it’s just your banking details that are important: after all, if someone gains control over your account login they not only know the information contained in that account, but the odds are that same login information may be used on various other accounts. And if they compromise your email account, they can reset all your other passwords.

So in addition to keeping strong and varying passwords, you have to always be on the lookout for bogus emails masquerading as the real thing. While most phishing attempts are amateurish, some are quite convincing so it is important to understand how to recognize them at surface level as well as how they work under the hood.

Image by asirap

Examining What is in Plain Sight

Our example email, like most phishing attempts, “notifies” you of activity on your PayPal account which would, under normal circumstances, be alarming. So the call to action is to verify/restore your account by submitting just about every piece of personal information you can think of. Again, this is pretty formulaic.

While there certainly are exceptions, pretty much every phishing and scam email is loaded with red flags directly in the message themselves. Even if the text is convincing, you can usually find many mistakes littered throughout the message body which indicate the message is not legit.

The Message Body

At first glance, this is one of the better phishing emails I have seen. There are no spelling or grammatical mistakes and the verbiage reads according to what you might expect. However, there are a few red flags you can see when you examine the content a bit more closely.

“Paypal” – The correct case is “PayPal” (capital P). You can see both variations are used in the message. Companies are very deliberate with their branding, so it is doubtful something like this would pass the proofing process.
“allow ActiveX” – How many times have you seen a legit web based business the size of Paypal use a proprietary component which only works on a single browser, especially when they support multiple browsers? Sure, somewhere out there some company does it, but this is a red flag.
“securely.” – Notice how this word does not line up in the margin with the rest of the paragraph text. Even if I stretch the window a bit more, it doesn’t wrap or space correctly.
“Paypal !” – The space before the exclamation mark looks awkward. Just another quirk which I am sure would not be in a legit email.
“PayPal- Account Update Form.pdf.htm” – Why would Paypal attach a “PDF” especially when they could just link to a page on their site? Additionally, why would they try to disguise an HTML file as a PDF? This is the biggest red flag of them all.

The Message Header

When you take a look at the message header, a couple of more red flags appear:

The from address is test@test.com.
The to address is missing. I did not blank this out, it simply isn’t part of the standard message header. Typically a company which has your name will personalize the email to you.

The Attachment

When I open the attachment, you can immediately see the layout is not correct as it is missing style information. Again, why would PayPal email an HTML form when they could simply give you a link on their site?

Note: we used Gmail’s built-in HTML attachment viewer for this, but we’d recommend that you DO NOT OPEN attachments from scammers. Never. Ever. They very often contain exploits that will install trojans on your PC to steal your account info.

Scrolling down a bit more you can see that this form asks not only for our PayPal login information, but for banking and credit card information as well. Some of the images are broken.

It is obvious this phishing attempt is going after everything with one swoop.

The Technical Breakdown

While it should be pretty clear based on what is in plain sight that this is a phishing attempt, we are now going to break down the technical makeup of the email and see what we can find.

Information from the Attachment

The first thing to take a look at is the HTML source of the attachment form which is what submits the data to the bogus site.

When quickly viewing the source, all the links appear valid as they point to either “paypal.com” or “paypalobjects.com” which are both legit.

Now we are going to take a look at some basic page information Firefox gathers on the page.

As you can see, some of the graphics are pulled from the domains “blessedtobe.com”, “goodhealthpharmacy.com” and “pic-upload.de” instead of the legit PayPal domains.

Information from the Email Headers

Next we will take a look at the raw email message headers. Gmail makes this available via the Show Original menu option on the message.

Looking at the header information for the original message, you can see this message was composed using Outlook Express 6. I doubt PayPal has someone on staff which sends each of these messages manually via an outdated email client.

Now looking at the routing information, we can see the IP address of both the sender and the relaying mail server.

The “User” IP address is original sender. Doing a quick lookup on the IP information, we can see the sending IP is in Germany.

And when we look at the relaying mail server’s (mail.itak.at), IP address we can see this is an ISP based in Austria. I doubt PayPal routes their emails directly through an Austria based ISP when they have a massive server farm which could easily handle this task.

Where Does the Data Go?

So we have clearly determined this is a phishing email and gathered some information about where the message originated from, but what about where your data is sent?

To see this, we have to first save the HTM attachment do our desktop and open in a text editor. Scrolling through it, everything appears to be in order except when we get to a suspicious looking Javascript block.

Breaking out the full source of the last block of Javascript, we see:

Anytime you see a large jumbled string of seemingly random letters and numbers embedded in a Javascript block, it is usually something suspicious. Looking at the code, the variable “x” is set to this large string and then decoded into the variable “y”. The final result of variable “y” is then written to the document as HTML.

Since the large string is made of numbers 0-9 and the letters a-f, it is most likely encoded via a simple ASCII to Hex conversion:

3c666f726d206e616d653d226d61696e222069643d226d61696e22206d6574686f643d22706f73742220616374696f6e3d22687474703a2f2f7777772e646578706f737572652e6e65742f6262732f646174612f7665726966792e706870223e

Translates to:

It is not a coincidence that this decodes into a valid HTML form tag which sends the results not to PayPal, but to a rouge site.

Additionally, when you view the HTML source of the form, you will see that this form tag is not visible because it is generated dynamically via the Javascript. This is a clever way to hide what the HTML is actually doing if someone were to simply view the generated source of the attachment (as we did earlier) as opposed to the opening the attachment directly in a text editor.

Running a quick whois on the offending site, we can see this is a domain hosted at a popular web host, 1and1.

What stands out is the domain uses a readable name (as opposed to something like “dfh3sjhskjhw.net”) and the domain has been registered for 4 years. Because of this, I believe this domain was hijacked and used as a pawn in this phishing attempt.

Cynicism is a Good Defense

When it comes to staying safe online, it never hurts to have a good bit of cynicism.

While I am sure there are more red flags in the example email, what we have pointed out above are indicators we saw after just a few minutes of examination. Hypothetically, if the surface level of the email mimicked its legitimate counterpart 100%, the technical analysis would still reveal its true nature. This is why is it import to be able to examine both what you can and cannot see.

This article was originally written on 04/13/11