Tag Archives: Cross River NY Real Estate

8 Essential Habits for Effective Writing | Cross River Realtor

Leave a reply

When it comes to blogging we all know that content is king and keeping things updated is the number one priority.

8 Essential Habits for Effective Writing

But how do you do that when you (at times literally) have a monkey on your back?

Between children, coworkers, construction, and other c words that stand for chaos, it is a wonder we can get anything written at all. This is when you need to develop some habits that create calm and order in the middle of mayhem.

Here are some tips on how to stay productive and writing, even when you have confusion knocking on your door:

1. Pick off times to write

It might be early in the morning, late in the afternoon or even in the middle of the night. You know when it is in your life. That time when everything seems to settle down for a little while, or right before it gets started all over again. If you can find this ‘prime time’ and get writing, you will be a lot more productive.

This might mean that you get up before everyone else, but so be it. If early morning is not your thing then try for mid afternoon. While everyone else is munching on chips and staring at the clock trying to see how many more minutes are left until it is time to go home, be productive and writing. If you are a night owl or have more flexible hours, the witching hour is a great time to get lots of writing done in peace and quiet.

I would not suggest writing time right after the kids get home from school, your spouse gets home from work, or during meal times. It may be just a wee bit distracting.

2. Set aside writing time every day

Beyond just finding opportune times to write you also need to make a habit of it. Making writing a part of your day like any other necessity (eating, sleeping, etc.) can make it feel like less of a struggle. Habits are easy to form and hard to break, so make it a habit to write.

When you set aside a certain time every day you also get less crud from those around you. If you are always busy at 4pm then chances are that nosy coworker will stop bothering you after a week or two. The same thing goes for working at home. If the neighbor wants to chat every afternoon but you are busy elsewhere they will eventually get the picture.

Setting aside a set time means fewer interruptions and more work accomplished. Setting aside the same time every day also means that your brain will be ready to cooperate with you when you sit down. It is used to gearing up for writing around this time, and just like getting hungry around noon you will start to get antsy to write around your accustomed time.

What a great natural motivator, right?

3. Make your own space

When it comes to chaos, a closed door is definitely your friend. Pick a space to write where you can get away from it all. The living room or kitchen is not it, as is anywhere close to the water cooler or coffee pot. Places where others hang out are not a good spot for a writing space. Instead, try to find a quiet corner or better yet a room with a door you can shut and tune out the rest of the world.

You should also set up an environment that promotes writing. A solid desk, a chair that is ergonomic and other basic necessities are a good idea. Do not try to use the edge of your bed or balance your laptop on a windowsill. I have seen it. It is not pretty and not conducive to writing long term. In order to be a really productive writer you also need to be organized. That means keeping your office space your own. I know that is not always doable, but do your best to keep your stuff in your hands only.

4. Crank up the tunes

If noise is your problem, then I recommend investing in a good headset or ear buds. Crank up the music and get writing. For some people (like me) music with lyrics is out. I have a tendency to listen to the lyrics instead of concentrate on what I am writing. For those like me, I recommend either instrumental only music or nature sounds like ocean waves or rain.

Remember that the faster the beat, the faster you type.

If you are stressed and need to think, turn on calm music. But if you want to get writing fast, crank up something a little quicker.

5. Turn off the phone

There is almost no situation where you can’t turn off your phone for an hour or two. Alert the masses with a text and then shut it off. No one will pine away by not being in contact with you for a short time. Remember the time before cell phones? So do I! Harken back to a quitter, more independent time and shut it off.

6. Get unsocial

If social media is your time waster of choice then shut it down. You do not have to check Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest every five minutes. You will not miss anything. I have found myself losing hours of valuable writing time on social media. Instead, you can use it as a reward. ‘If I write two pages I can look at three Tweets’ and so on.

I think you will find that you will not miss it after a while.

7. Learn what an emergency is

There are emergencies and then there are emergencies. Some things can wait and others can’t. Learn to tell the difference and prioritize. Giving the dog a bath can wait until after writing time. Taking your child to the hospital can’t. Make writing a high priority and then think before you act.

Remember it is okay to tell people ‘no’ or ‘later’.

8. Take notes

When I sit down to write, especially in a chaotic environment, most of the time I blank out completely. I can’t think of a single one of the great ideas I had to write about just days or even hours ago. Instead of losing all those great thoughts to the chaos that is my life, I have started to carry around a pen and notebook with me wherever I go. That way when inspiration strikes I can catch it!

Taking the time to write down a reminder is a very valuable thing to do. Do not think a word or two will suffice either. I still have a paper with ‘blindfolded coconut’ written on it and I have no idea what that means, but I remember it was incredible. Instead of just a word or two take a few moments to write down the whole idea, outline and all if need be. Make sure to make a list of the important points and possible title ideas.

The best thoughts often happen at the most inopportune of times, but do not let that stop you from capturing them and saving them for great writing fodder later. You can also do this when unusual or interesting things happen in your life. Hear about a great site? Write it down? See something cool? Write it down.

Like a photographer always needing a camera with them, writer always need to carry a notebook and write down the ideas as they come up. That can save you a lot of frustration and give you some great ideas when you are drawing a blank.

These are just a few of the ways that I have learned to write despite the junk going on around me. Most of our lives are not a calm sea rather they are more like a hurricane.

Sometimes you just have to do your best to hang on and keep going.

Guest Author: This guest post is contributed by Debra Johnson, blogger and editor of www.liveinnanny.com 

 

 

 

Want to Learn More About How to Create Compelling Content that Your Audience Wants to Read?

My book – “Blogging the Smart Way – How to Create and Market a Killer Blog with Social Media” – will show you how.

It is now available to download. I show you how to create and build a blog that rocks and grow tribes, fans and followers on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It also includes dozens of tips to create contagious content that begs to be shared and tempts people to link to your website and blog.

I also reveal the tactics I used to grow my Twitter followers to over 130,000.

Download and read it now.

31
inShare

via jeffbullas.com

A Complete Guide To Being Yourself Online | Cross River Realtor

Leave a reply

This is the Internet, where two things are never in short supply: information and opinions. If you’re the new guy (or girl) looking to establish yourself in the ranks here, or you’ve been online for more than five minutes, there’s something you’ll need to recognize:

Just Because You Read It Online Doesn’t Make It True

Shocking, I know.

There’s a lot of people and a lot of businesses dispensing advice. You’ll need to recognize quickly how to consider your source. If last week’s blog included something about flying pigs or the sky being green, then you immediately recognize that their opinions about the latest industry news could very easily be B.S.

Or maybe it’s coming from a good source, but you simply don’t agree.

That’s cool too.

No matter how prolific the source of the advice, if you have a legitimate, well thought out argument…

It’s OK To Disagree With The Talking Heads

Be the smart person your mother knows that you are. Be professional. But most of all, if you want to stand out from the thousands of other search results you’re balled up with, BE YOURSELF.

Don’t just repackage the same tips and tricks that the top websites in your industry are publishing. By the time you hit publish, that information will be stale, and you will have added nothing new to the conversation.

Why not give us your twist on the information?

Tell us what you think. Has one of the tips worked for you in the past? Is one of the tips just doomed to failure? That’s more interesting to your audience than mindlessly reciting the information.

Tell us about yourself.

What makes you tick? How does the essence of who you are as a person play into who you are as a business person? Tell us how one of your real world interests relates to your business.

A personal example: I love coffee. A simple light roast, black coffee will do. Love the flavor. I’ve written before about keeping your simplest products visible. Not everyone’s looking for a drink with a name that’s six words long.

How does your background relate?

When you’re busy trying to distinguish yourself from hundreds of other businesses in your area, trust me, it matters. There’s something about your background that makes you different from others’. It’s up to you to find out what it is.

For instance, copywriters are a dime a dozen. A copywriter with a journalistic background can find ways to tell your story.

Pick up the scissors, and cut off the tie.

Formal and professional are not the same thing. You can wear blue jeans and still know what you’re talking about. If formal is not a true reflection of your business, don’t turn into something you’re not.

Give us good info, but give it in a way that is a reflection of who you are.

We’re more likely to act if we like you.

We can’t make any decision on your likability if we don’t know who you are. So go ahead and put your cards on the table.

The Internet Is Watered Down

There are so many businesses out there, it’s too easy to get lost in the shuffle. You need to stand out to be noticed. This doesn’t happen through imitation. It’s time to just be yourself.

 

 

 

via business2community.com

 

6 Truths About Using Twitter that Traditionalists Might not Want to Hear | Cross River Realtor

Leave a reply

If you are a blogger or if you have an online business, then you must be on social media.6 Truths about Twitter that traditionalists might not want to hear

While search engine optimization and organic traffic are not a thing of the past and never will be, social media allows you to actually communicate with the ones who care about your brand.

So anyway, the hot three networks for marketers right now are Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter.

Lots can be said about Twitter. You can come across a ton of posts providing tips, tricks and different strategies to get you followers and retweets.

All of this however brings a ton of different misconceptions. And on Twitter there are lots of “traditionalists” so to say – people who never take their social media presence a step further and who simply  follow the stereotypes.

Well in order to maximize your Twitter presence and get some fresh traffic, sometimes you have to steer away from commonly adopted norms. Here are six truths about Twitter that you have to accept if you want to improve your productivity and results:

Truth #1. More Twitter Followers Should be One of Your Goals

Are you one of those folks who believe numbers don’t matter? Are you one of those guys whose favorite phrase is quality over quantity?

Well for good or bad numbers do play a role in the social media world. The reality is that how much traffic you will get (which should after all be your main social media goal) hugely depends on the amount of followers you have. And there’s really no such thing as “quality” followers. There are those who might be interested in what you have to say and those who simply don’t care.

I didn’t use the word “might” accidentally. After all, it’s all up to you to present your blog or website in the best light possible.

And with saying that traffic is the main metric you should be measuring, I lied a little…

Lots of people might click on your tweets and that will translate into a visit. Not all however will actually start reading. And from those who start reading not all will agree with you or like your style.

The idea is that you want the traffic to return. You need repeat visitors – those are truly the folks who might end up subscribing to your list, buying a product you are promoting or trying out a service you offer.

And from that point of view, going for more followers is the right strategy. The more people following your tweets, the more people will land on your blog, the more people will enjoy what you share and the more people will come back for more. Thus you will convert more people based on the call to actions you have placed on your blog. That’s far from complicated math, is it?

Truth #2. Scheduling Updates Won’t Hurt Your Reputation

It’s a weird prejudice that some people have about tweeting. Many believe that tweets should be a “personal” thing. And quite frankly I never actually understood the meaning of that. Unless you are chatting with someone, tweets can’t be personal.

So as “impersonal” as it might seem, scheduling tweets, instead of signing in every hour or so to share something you just discovered, makes for a lot of saved minutes. Minutes that you can put towards something else – like working on that guest article… The same that is sitting there and collecting dust for weeks…

In my case I use Buffer. The app works with preset tweeting times. You first choose the days on which you are going to tweet and also the times when the different tweets will be posted. Basically I am tweeting at the same hour, same minute and same second every single day.

And guess what – people simply don’t care! They want good content – they get good content, that’s all that matters!

Truth #3. Using Lists Can Help You in More than One Way

As you probably know by now, creating lists is a great way to split all the noise in your Twitter stream and get the content you’d actually like to read. That’s mainly what they are meant to do.

And that is all great. However lists can be utilized in different ways as well. Here is what I have tried and found of a good use:

  • List of people who retweet you – Having those folks in a list will give you easy access to their shares, so that you can also retweet them every now and then as a way to say thank you. That is also a great way to solidify your relationship with them.
  • List of bloggers of your level – Although you probably won’t turn those into brand advocates, staying updated to what they have to say is important. Firstly because you have to be relevant to what’s going on in your niche and secondly because having easy access to their content might help you produce ideas for future blog posts.
  • List of the “small players” – A good thing to do would be to discover some less-well-known bloggers in your niche and add them to a list. Once again the idea is to always stay tuned to their latest content and retweet it if it’s good enough. That won’t be left unnoticed and you are almost sure to get retweets on your own content in return.

The principle here is “help and be helped”.

Truth #4. Unfollowing the Inactives Isn’t a Crime

Seems like traditionalists hate everything when it comes to automation (you can check my post: “Automating Social Media: Do the Critics Have a Point” for more thoughts on the topic). One of the reasons, they say, is authenticity.

And there is no denying. In order to succeed in one way or another, you need to stand out. And for that to happen, you need to be unique…

But here’s the thing. When someone considers following you, your ratio (i.e. the relation between followers and people you follow) matters.

Wouldn’t you be a little more inclined to follow a guy, who follows 1,000 but who is followed by 4,000, than someone who has 2,000 followers and 2,200 friends?

The best way to go about this is by unfollowing the inactives. Those are people who don’t have much to say and who basically are’t there most of the time. It might be worth unfollowing them to save space for the ones who are more actively engaging.

What you can do is to log in to ManageFlitter, click on “Everyone You Follow”, sort by date and get going! Remove all those who haven’t tweeted anything for more than seven-eight days and see how it works!

Truth #5. Following People Gets You More Followers

I’ve heard all kinds of stories about how getting Twitter followers works. Some of them are true, others are false and a third part I haven’t tried…

Nowadays “content is king” is probably the most popular cliché out here in the internet marketing realm…

Can content alone get you in front of a new audience however?

Retweets might result in additional exposure. Someone might give you a shoutout or recommend you. You might obtain a couple of thousand followers via your blog. All this would make for a very slow progress though…

The reality is that you just have to follow new people. Some will follow you back, some won’t. That kind of activity however creates a buzz. A buzz that has helped me discover loyal supporters – tweeps who click and retweet almost every piece I publish.

And yes, this often times means following people who you don’t know and who don’t know you. However the chances are that the bigger part of the ones you follow will take a look at your profile – they might tweet something welcoming or they might comment on something you tweeted. That along with the new followers you might get, is also a great opportunity to start the conversation and actually create new contacts.

Truth #6. Replying Isn’t Always Worth the Time

Once you get into social media and blogging one of the phrases you start hearing is “you have to always be there”, meaning you should be logged in to your social accounts at all time, waiting to reply to those who mention you.

And although there’s really nothing bad in this…

If you’d really like to be productive, you should pay just a little less attention to those kinds of social media tasks. As important as they are, often times we put far too much emphasis on chatting and we end up wasting time that could’ve been put towards more important things, such as writing for example.

In order to minimize the time I spent chatting and still reply to most of my mentions, I have a “replying schedule” in place. The rule is to basically reply three times a day, whenever I find myself wondering what to do.

You see – that goes in between everything else.

Being constantly online shouldn’t be your main concern. Also – no – you don’t have to reply to every mention. Doing that might result in a stream full of “Thanks for the RT” or “Thanks for the follow” kind of messages. That is really not what you call engagement.

To Wrap it Up…

All in all what I came to realize some months after getting into Twitter was that not everything you read has been put to the test and not all the “warning signs” are actually real. Some tasks might seem bad in terms of credibility and authenticity, but in reality they simply aren’t. What are your thoughts – do you agree to the points I’ve made in the post? Do you have something to add up? Do share your two cents in the comments section! 

Guest Author: Daniel Sharkov is an 18 year old student, marketer, blogger and a social media enthusiast. Make sure to check out Reviewz N Tips – the place, where he shares his insights and experience!

 

 

 

Want to Learn More About How to Create Compelling Content that Your Audience Wants to Read, View and Share?

My book – “Blogging the Smart Way – How to Create and Market a Killer Blog with Social Media” – will show you how.

It is now available to download. I show you how to create and build a blog that rocks and grow tribes, fans and followers on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It also includes dozens of tips to create contagious content that begs to be shared and tempts people to link to your website and blog.

I also reveal the tactics I used to grow my Twitter followers to over 130,000.

Download and read it now.

 

53
inShare

via jeffbullas.com

Prices are up, but homes are in short supply | Cross River Real Estate

Leave a reply
home sale sign

Nationwide, the supply of existing homes for sale fell to 4.4 months in December.(Photo: Kevork Djansezian, Getty Images)

Story Highlights

  • New listings are down 14% in first half of January
  • Supply of homes on market is lowest in 7 years
  • Will spring bring out more home sellers?

The supply of homes for sale has been shrinking for six months and shows no improvement so far in January — a bad sign for buyers.

New listings of existing homes for sale were down 14% year-over-year in the first two weeks of January, according to Realtor.com, which tracks 143 markets nationwide.

In Phoenix, where prices were up 24% in November from a year earlier, new listings through the first three weeks of January hit their lowest level in 13 years, says Mike Orr, real estate expert at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.

That’s bad news for buyers, and it means “prices need to go up more” to bring more sellers to market, Orr says.

Nationwide, the supply of existing homes for sale fell to 4.4 months in December, based on the current monthly sales pace, says the National Association of Realtors. That’s the lowest level in more than seven years. A six-month supply is generally considered balanced between buyers and sellers.

Home prices in November were 7.4% higher on average than a year earlier, according to CoreLogic. Real estate experts had expected that rising prices would spur more sellers trapped by years of falling prices.

Instead, January’s listing data “is the same sad story,” says Glenn Kelman, CEO of online brokerage Redfin. If sellers don’t have to sell, “they’re holding on, thinking they’ll wait for prices to go up even more.”

Redfin’s data, covering 19 major markets mostly in the West, shows new listings down 29% the first two weeks of January vs. last year.

Scarce sellers aren’t the only driver of shrinking supplies. There are fewer distressed properties for sale. Foreclosure sales were down 7% through the first nine months of last year from the same period in 2011, RealtyTrac says.

Meanwhile, demand is up. Existing home sales were up 9.2% last year, NAR’s preliminary data show. New-home sales rose almost 20% in 2012, the government reported Friday, while supply fell to 4.9 months in December from 5.4 months a year before.

New home construction is still weak. In each of the past three years, builders completed fewer than 500,000 single-family homes. That’s less than half the number built annually between 1993 and 2007, according to the Census Bureau.

Home builders would need to double production this year to alleviate the tight supply, estimates Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist. That’s not expected.

Home supplies nationally will stay at about the five-month level much of the year, Yun predicts.

Some markets are far below that.

California’s supply of existing single-family homes for sale stood at 2.6 months in December, the California Association of Realtors says.

“Nobody is selling because no one has anywhere to go,” says Barbara Hendrickson, of Red Oak Realty in Berkeley, in the San Francisco Bay Area, which had a 1.8-month supply in December.

The low supply is feeding bidding wars. One of Hendrickson’s clients recently lost a bid despite offering $130,000 above the home’s $775,000 asking price, Hendrickson says.

Whether the supply of homes for sale will expand to meet rising demand is a “big question for the market” in 2013, says Jed Kolko, economist with real estate website Trulia.

This year is also the first since the housing bust began that falling inventories are not necessarily a good thing, he says.

Listings may still swell in time for the busy spring selling season, says Stan Humphries, Zillow economist.

He says listing activity next month will be key. If it doesn’t pick up by then, the spring season is likely to bring a lot of price increases, he says.

Seller shortage

Months’ supply of existing homes, based on the annual sales rate for each December:

via usatoday.com