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How to Use Instagram Without Being Obnoxious or Dull | Bedford Corners NY Real Estate
Since its launch in 2010, Instagram has been on an impressive upward trajectory. The site announced last month that over over 5 billion photos have been shared. Its number of daily mobile users has jumped to 7.3 million, surpassing Twitter’s 6.9 million, according to data from comScore.
New York filmmaker Casey Neistat is pretty opinionated about social networks and how they should be used. His favorite social media platform is Instagram, but his message to many of its users is that they’re doing it wrong. The video below is his humorous guide to using Instagram and what users should and shouldn’t do.
“If Facebook is Lucky Charms, Instagram is just the marshmallows.”
Neistat argues that Instagram isn’t about the photos, but about sharing. Sharing enables millions of people to gaze into the lives of others and imagine experiencing what they did. Most of the points he makes about why the service is so great are right on, especially about the the storytelling aspect: Mold your feed into a story and give it personality.
As examples, Neistat points to the Instagram accounts of singer Justin Bieber and rapper Rick Ross. He likes both artists, but he says Ross is the one who’s doing it right — he regularly posts photos showing a lifestyle that you don’t usually see. Bieber’s stream, on the other hand, is filled with photos of his face.
Neistat’s other helpful suggestions: Don’t overuse hashtags, don’t bleed the feed, easy with the tilt shift, and make sure your crop works.
![instagram logo 150x150 How to Use Instagram Without Being Obnoxious or Dull [Video]](http://www.pamorama.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/instagram-logo.jpg "How to Use Instagram Without Being Obnoxious or Dull [Video]"){kind=logo}
via pamorama.net
Mike Wallace’s Central Park Apt. Listed for $20M | Bedford Corners NY Real Estate
Mike Wallace was far more than a newsman. One look at his Manhattan apartment reveals the original “60 Minutes” star’s place in the lofty firmament of the celebrity media.
Courtesy of an exclusive from The New York Times, Wallace’s home at 730 Park Ave, New York, NY 10021 has been put up for sale. The price is an even $20 million, which will deliver a 12-room duplex in one of the city’s most grand prewar buildings.
Wallace died earlier this year at age 93, and his wife, Mary Yates, lived at the apartment until her death in September at age 83. According to NY Times writer Robin Finn, the Wallaces opted to meticulously keep the apartment to its original standards instead of gutting the place:
Graciously appointed, No. 15-16A was carved from a 12-room apartment and retains ample architectural detail and charm: the ceilings are high, the grand staircase is curving, French doors connect the library and the master bedroom to terraces on both levels, and elaborate variegated plaster moldings and wood floors accentuate all the principal rooms except the eat-in kitchen, which is floored in vintage cork.
Unlike some other grand spaces at this address, the apartment has seen preservation take precedence over renovation. Modernization has largely been limited to the four and a half baths and the installation of air-conditioning. The monthly maintenance fee is $8,822.”
In addition to the Upper East Side apartment, Wallace was a famous part-time resident of Martha’s Vineyard. A year ago, his waterfront home at 48 Hatch Rd, Vineyard Haven, MA 02568 was sold for $7 million.
via zillow.com
The Best Economic News In A Long Time | Bedford Corners NY Real Estate
The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Bloggers | Bedford Corners NY Real Estate
The advice on how to be “the effective guy” is just so common online that it starts to get boring … You know, reading yet another article on how to be a great blogger and all…
So why not take a different approach and consider the seven habits of highly ineffective bloggers instead?
If you think that it’s a joke, it isn’t. If you look around in the blogosphere I’m sure you’ll find tons of bloggers who fit this description perfectly. In fact, I bet that you’re guilty of one or two of these habits as well (I know I am).
Habit 1. Not proofreading
This is the first sin bloggers make. I know that crafting a nice blog post takes time. You need to do your research, prepare the resources, and finally write the thing using a number of relevant links and keep all the SEO optimizations in mind … there’s really a lot to do.
In all this commotion, it’s easy to overlook one simple thing: proofreading. The fact is that proofreading is one of the most important phases of crafting a blog post. Without it, you’re not using the potential of your post effectively—some readers will simply be discouraged with all the grammatical errors you’ve made.
My advice is this: proofread your posts at least once. In addition, use a plugin like After the Deadline for some extra help (it provides automatic proofreading).
Bonus tip: There’s one more trick I want to share with you. I’ve found that I get much better results when it comes to the quality of my writing if I write a post one day, and then edit and proofread it the next day.
Habit 2. Not networking
Did you know that 80% of your blog’s success depends on the people you know, not on the content you write? You didn’t? That’s because I made that statistic up!
Whatever the stats, I’m sure the benefits of reaching out to your fellow bloggers are pretty clear to you. Building a successful site is always easier if you have someone you can contact for help, or for a joint venture proposition.
Treat your blog like business. The more quality business partners you have the better. Networking in the blogosphere isn’t even difficult. It all starts with a simple email that says hi.
Habit 3. Not using offline blogging tools
These days, I’m all about offline blogging tools. One particular tool, actually. It’s called Windows Live Writer. What’s great about it is that it allows you to create an optimized blog post offline, and then send it to any WordPress blog you want.
Let’s face it: you won’t have internet access at all times. Maybe you’re staying in a cheap hotel, or visiting your family over the weekend, or some other scenario. If you want to be effective, you have to have a way of creating a post even if you’re offline.
I know that the standard way of doing this is through Microsoft Word or some other text processor, but they are not very good at providing WordPress-ready formatting. Windows Live Writer is great in this regard—give it a go.
Habit 4. Not staying on topic
Going off topic makes you highly ineffective. And the reason is that your readers have come to your site to read a very specific piece of information. They’ve seen a headline, or a search engine listing, and clicked on it. Now, if you decide that you want to change the direction mid-post, they’ll simply leave.
Over time, such practice will make you really ineffective at writing about the things you wanted to write about. You’ll always get distracted at some point and talk about other things. This is something you really need to be wary of.
The simple advice is this: if you fail to stay on topic, your readers will get confused and leave.
Habit 5. Not promoting your stuff
Writing and publishing the post is usually only half the job. If you want to make it really popular, good content won’t be enough, you also need to spend a fair amount of time on promotion.
And by promotion I don’t necessarily mean spending money on ads and reaching out to investors. Just a couple of clicks on some social media share buttons might be enough, or sending an email update to your subscribers, or notifying your StumbleUpon friends and contacts, and so on.
Also, this is where your network of contacts comes into play again (mentioned earlier). If you have some friends in the blogosphere, you can let them know whenever you publish something really valuable (your pillar content).
Habit 6. Not writing guest posts
Every website you know of—every single one of them—became popular because of some other website. There’s not one website online that became popular on its own (no, not even Google or Facebook).
The key to success, then, is to get featured on other websites. There are two possibilities here:
- The difficult one is to do something remarkable and get mentioned naturally.
- The easier one is to write a guest post and offer it for free in exchange for a link.
I really can’t emphasize this enough, but guest blogging is the cheapest and the best way of building your brand online. If you think that you don’t need to do any guest blogging, then you are not utilizing your full potential as a blogger.
Habit 7. Not doing SEO
I know some people say that SEO is dying. Mostly, this attitude is the result of the recent updates like Penguin, which killed a number of legitimate websites and online businesses just because they were building quality (yes, you read this right, quality) backlinks.
This whole situation makes the SEO game a lot harder, but it doesn’t mean that you should leave it completely. The fact is that one thing surely won’t change anytime soon: Google will still remain the main provider of traffic online, and if you want to get a piece of this traffic, you’re going to have to learn how to be up-to-date with the best SEO practices and implement them in your blog.
Make sure to pay attention to the popular SEO blogs and also the official Google webmaster central blog.
Are you guilty?
This concludes my list of 7 habits of highly not effective bloggers. Feel free to tell me what you think, and admit how many of these habitds you’re guilty of. Be honest—I know I’m doing at least two myself!
via problogger.net
Why Prize Investment Properties Are No Prize | Bedford Corners NY Real Estate
Here’s a little real estate investing secret that few rental property investors know: The fancier and more prize location of a property, the worse the cash flow. In fact, most “prize” properties are going to have negative cash flows. And that’s not a smart way to invest your hard earned cash equity dollars.
Consider the options
Let’s look at an example. You want to buy about $500,000 worth of real estate, and with a 25 percent down payment plus costs, you’ll need about $150,000 in cash to close the deal. You have two choices:
- A swanky downtown San Diego condominium for $500,000, or
- Three nice moderately priced boring suburban $165,000 condominiums.
Now most people would think location, location, location and want to buy the prize downtown. That’s because their only investment criteria is that they want to buy real estate in hopes that it will go up in value. And the problem with that strategy is that they are totally missing the most important piece of rental property investing — the cash flows the property can produce.
Immediate cash flow
In reality, moderately priced cash flow positive condominiums are the best location, location, location, and here’s why.
A $500,000 downtown San Diego condo would probably generate negative cash flows of about $1,000 per month. That’s $12,000 per year — ouch — on a $150,000 cash investment or negative 8 percent return on the investment.
A moderately priced $165,000 suburban San Diego condo would probably generate positive cash flows of about positive $250 per month. Multiplied by three condominiums — so apples to apples on the $500,000 investment — is positive $750 per month. That’s positive $9,000 per year on a $150,000 cash investment, or positive 6 percent return on the investment.
See the difference? You can allocate your hard-earned $150,000 of equity into either a fancy prize property with negative cash flows of $12,000 per year, or into moderately priced properties with positive cash flows of $9,000 per year. That’s a difference of $21,000 per year on $150,000 equity investment into $500,000 of real estate.
Building wealth
If you’re hoping appreciation in value will make up the difference on your negative cash flow property, good luck with that. To be fair, over long periods of time, most real estate should appreciate in value about the same percentage each year. But as you can see, cash flows can be very different, and that’s where you earn your wealth!
You might assume that because rents increase and mortgages stay constant, the fancy prize property would turn positive one day. This is true, but it would take about 40 years until the fancy prize condominium owner really got their first dime of positive cash flow.
Think that through and pencil out your real estate deal before you take the plunge. Some properties are just much better wealth-building investments than others, primarily due to the cash flows.
via zillow.com
Shadow Inventory: Less Scary | Bedford Corners Homes
Visible inventory of homes on the market has been falling repeatedly. Existing home inventories are at an 8-year low, while newly constructed home inventory is near a 50-year low. As we enter the winter months, inventories will fall even further. Very little gets listed after Thanksgiving, and not until March will inventory show some additional choices for buyers.
Just because we are able to see low inventory today does not automatically mean that inventory will be low in the near future. There is also shadow inventory to monitor. These are properties not yet listed on the market but will surely come on the market since there are still plenty of homeowners under distressed conditions. CoreLogic indicated the shadow count has fallen from 2.6 million this time last year to 2.3 million today, according to its definition. If the shadow is defined as those homes in the foreclosure process or where mortgages have not been paid for 3 months or longer, then the count is higher at 3.4 million in the shadow pipeline today, though it is less than the 3.8 million from one year ago. Since not all mortgages that are 3 months late become an REO because a good portion catch up on payment later or get a “cure” via loan restricting, the actual number of properties reaching the market for sale will be measurably lower than the shadow count. Though one can dispute the definition and the exact size of the shadow, one thing that is consistent is that the shadow is less threatening today than one year ago.
A steadily diminishing shadow will naturally shed more light on normal sales. From 2009 to 2011, roughly one-third of all home sales were distressed properties. Based on recent data, the distressed share will be around 25% in 2012. The figure will reach the teens next year and probably single digits in two years.
What impact do falling distressed sales have on home values? The median price will be pushed up. As everyone knows, foreclosed properties sell for less. However since this negative impact will be less strong in the upcoming years, the median price of all transacted homes will be higher than when compared to the past few years. So aside from the normal supply-and-demand dynamics that have been pushing up repeat-price indices such as Case-Shiller and government price data, the median price will also be rising and probably faster because of the fewer distressed over the horizon.
Two years ago, the scariest of Halloween costumes was dressing up as Shadow Inventory. Today, not only have people gotten used to the sight, it is a greatly diminished figure.
Postnote: Shadow inventory is not falling in some judicial foreclosure states where a foreclosure process takes an incredibly long time because it requires a court approval. These states include Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. Though the intent is to keep financially troubled families from being forced out, there are increasing stories of gaming the system, where a homeowner does not pay the mortgage and collects money by renting out the property. As a result, any home price gains in these states will likely perform a “dead cat bounce” because of the very long shadow looming over them.
Homes of Former Presidents | Bedford Corners NY Homes
via zillow.com
Future of old NY amusement park to be discussed | Bedford Corners Real Estate
Drastic changes may be in store for Playland, the landmarked, county-owned amusement park just north of New York City.
Westchester County Executive Robert Astorino says he will have a major announcement Thursday about the park’s future.
Astorino has complained that Playland is losing more money than taxpayers should have to cover. He said last year that closing the park could save $2 million a year. He invited developers to propose ways to “reinvent” the park.
A citizens’ committee reviewed the proposals and submitted a report to Astorino a year ago.
Playland, a National Historic Landmark in Rye, opened in 1928 and was featured in the 1988 Tom Hanks film “Big.” Among its famous old rides are the wooden “Dragon” roller coaster and a high-speed carousel.
via online.wsj.com