Daily Archives: May 5, 2011

VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business: Fab Fives of VR Marketing Blog Posts

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May 02, 2011

Fab Fives of VR Marketing Blog Posts

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Cinco de Mayo is almost here, and to celebrate I'm sharing our fabulous blog posts that include the number 5. There were 11 in the last year alone!

Check 'em out and discover ways to add a little flavor to your email marketing and social media.

  1. 15 Upcoming Holidays and Observances – Mark Your Email Marketing Calendars!
  2. 5 Ways to Get More Action from Your Call-to-Action
  3. 5 Ways to Help Your Customers Fall In Love with Your Business
  4. 5 Emails on My iPhone
  5. 5 Tips for Dealing with Complaints on Twitter from Mashable
  6. 5 Ways to Ignite Advocates for Your Business
  7. 5 Types of Links You May Not Have Thought of Tracking
  8. Restaurants & Bars: 5 Ways to Use Twitter & Facebook
  9. 5 Tips for Winning Back Customers
  10. 5 Ways to Feature A Customer in Your Marketing
  11. Cinco de Mayo! Our 15 "Fives" from VerticalResponse for Marketing Your Biz

Now who's ready for some chips, salsa and a margarita besides me? Olé!

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Seth’s Blog: Seeing the truth when it might be invisible

I’ll believe it when I see it.

This is a problem.

It didn’t used to be. It used to be a totally fine strategy to work your way through life only believing what you could see and touch, only caring about what impacted your life right now.

Two things changed:

First, over time, the base of knowledge we have about the world has increased exponentially, and that knowledge compounds. Electrons and ozone and game theory and databases might all be invisible, they might be beyond your understanding, but they’re still important, still looming right at the edges of the life you live right now.

And second, of course, is the notion of a worldwide web of information, a system that brings every bit of news and data and discovery right to your door. While you may want to disbelieve what’s happening around you, that won’t make it go away, and what’s “around you” is now a much larger sphere than it ever was before.

If you are too trusting of the invisible, then you buy that $89 ebook that comes with the promise of instant riches, or you sign up for ear candling, or invest time and money with a charlatan. If you haven't figured out how to discern the invisible stuff that's true from the invisible stuff that's a trick, you're helpless in a world where just about every decision we make has to do with things that are invisible.

Thus, two kinds of serious errors: believing in invisible things that aren't true, or insisting that the truth might not be. They're caused by fear, by deliberate misinformation and by being uninformed.

We have to accept that once we start down the slippery slope of always (or never) believing, we end up in Alice-in-Wonderland territory. Do you have firsthand knowledge that the Earth is round (a sphere)? Really? Have you ever seen the tuberculosis bacteria? Perhaps it doesn’t exist, they might say it’s just a fraud invented by the pharmaceutical industry to get us to buy expensive drugs… Or consider the flip side, the Bernie Madoff too-good-to-be-true flipside of invisible riches that never appear. After all, if someone can't prove it's a fraud yet, it might be true!

Eight things you’ve probably never seen with your own eyes: Buzz Aldrin, the US debt, multi-generational evolution of mammals, an atom of hydrogen, Google’s search algorithm, the inside of a nuclear power plant, a whale and the way your body digests a cookie. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, nor does it mean you can’t find a way to make them useful.

Do governments and marketers lie to us? All the time. Does that mean that the powerful (reproducible, testable and yes, true) invisible forces of economics, history and science are a fraud? No way.

Once you go down that road, you’re on your own, no longer a productive member of a society built on rational thought. Be skeptical. Test and measure and see if the truth is a useful hypothesis to help move the discussion forward. Please do. But at some point, in order to move forward, we have to accept that truth can’t be a relative concept, something to use when it suits our agenda but be discarded when we're frightened or want to score a point.

Richard Feynman said, "I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!"

Merely because it's invisible doesn't mean it's true–or false.

Is it a skill to figure out what's true, even if it's invisible? I think it is, and a rare and valuable one.

Beware when rolling debt into mortgage | Inman News

 \Q: I think I already know the answer to this, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. What do you think about having your debt consolidated into a real estate mortgage loan? I would like to buy property, but my debt is what’s holding me back. Most of it is credit card debt. This is how my thinking is: If consolidated into a home loan, I can pay the one lump sum. Can you tell me how true this is or isn’t? –Tara B.

A: Please do a mental marathon in the opposite direction of this line of thinking. There are really two issues with the thought process around consolidating credit card debt into the mortgage on your home, but I have one preliminary concern.

You’ve said that your debt is what is holding you back from buying a home. I disagree wholeheartedly. Your credit card debt may very well be holding you back from buying a home right now. And I will make the case that the answer to this is not to pretty the debt up, roll it into a different kind of debt, or massage it until it sounds like something other than what it is.

The answer to your issue is to (a) face the debt head-on, (b) figure out how you got into it and stop those behavior patterns of spending more than you have (by the way, that’s the only way to get into debt in the first place), and (c ) pay it off.

Until you address the issues that got you into debt in the first place, you will persist in those spending patterns, even if and when you buy a home. Taking the steps to reverse those patterns and investing the time and discipline it will take to pay your debt off will create the sound, sustainable spending and saving habits that are necessary to own a home — and keep it — over the long term.

And that may mean you have to wait awhile to buy, but waiting to buy things until you can truly afford them is actually one of the very habits you’ll need to have to be a successful homeowner!

OK — other than the fact that I have a fundamental concern about your thinking on this, there are two other critical issues with the idea of rolling credit card debt into your mortgage when you buy a home. The first is simple — most lenders just won’t do it!

If your debt is too burdensome to qualify for a home loan, suggesting that the lender pay your debt off and extend you more money just doesn’t fly on today’s market like it once did. This is largely because most homes bought these days are just barely squeaking by to be appraised as having the same value as the purchase price.

Virtually no lender is willing to extend cash and dump it into paying off your credit cards to be secured only by a home that may depreciate, and is unlikely worth a ton more than what you’ve agreed to pay for it.

The second of these critical issues still bears discussion, despite the fact that the issue is almost certainly moot, because even if you do pay off your credit card debt, the time may come when you can buy a home, and do own a home, and do have home equity, and run more credit card debt up, and you begin to wonder whether you should take out a home equity loan or line of credit (HELOC) to consolidate your credit card debt and simplify your life.

Don’t do it. Your credit cards are unsecured debt, meaning that if you have to default on them, the creditor’s only recourse is to sue you — the creditor can’t take your house or your car. Your mortgage, including home equity loans and lines of credit, are secured with your home, meaning that if you default on them for whatever reason, your lender can and will take your home.

If you increase the debt load secured by your home in order to pay off unsecured debt, you are effectively securing your credit card debt with your home. If you lose your job or become disabled and can’t pay the HELOC off, you could very well lose your home over whatever purchases you made using those credit cards.

Not worth it, right? So please take my advice: Lose this line of thinking and take steps to lose your credit card debt, the right way, before you become a homeowner.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is author of “The Savvy Woman’s Homebuying Handbook” and “Trillion Dollar Women: Use Your Power to Make Buying and Remodeling Decisions.” Tara is also the Consumer Ambassador and Educator for real estate listings search site Trulia.com. Ask her a real estate question online or visit her website, www.rethinkrealestate.com.

       

      

    

    

     

      

      

   

  

 
    

A Realtor’s road rules | Inman News

 

1969 Chevrolet Camaro Sport Coupe ZL-1. Flickr image courtesy of <a href=

I’ve always been a car girl. At age 7, I was the first to yell “Burn some rubber!” out the window at stoplights and began begging my father for a ’69 Camaro — with flames.

To remind him, I used my acrylic set to paint hundreds of my little brothers’ Hot Wheels black, with red and yellow crab-claw flames licking out the sides of the wheel wells.

Dad, however, was not moved. Sure, he loved cars — more than me — but he was not going to get suckered into picking me up on the side of the road every three months when the brakes, transmission, radiator, carburetor, or whatever else gave out.

When I turned 16 he supplemented my few hundred dollars of savings and helped me buy a nice, used Nissan Altima. Ick.

Well, the first thing I saved up for in my commissions piggy bank was a “real” car — with a capital “C.” Sure, I still desperately wanted the Camaro, but as a young, single, rational Realtor, I thought better of putting 79-year-old Walter and his legally blind wife Adele in the backseat of a ZL-1 427 without seatbelts.