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Real Estate Services by Jon Griffith

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E-mail and Websites for REALTORS, The Basics

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As a REALTOR, you need to maintain a digital presence.  At minimum, you need an e-mail address.  You could choose to use a free e-mail provider, or you could do it the right way, by registering your own domain name and making up your own e-mail address.  For example, you@yourdomain.com.  The only way you can achieve this is by thinking up and registering your own name.  Do this at Godaddy.com.  Register it for a year, so you don’t over commit to a longer period of time, in case your name doesn’t work out for you, and don’t privately register it.  You don’t need ANY other extras.  Just the name.

Once you have the name, you can do whatever you want with it, but the first thing you’ll need to do is establish your e-mail system.

Your best bet in our current internet climate, is to subscribe to Google Apps for Domains.  You can do this by visiting http://www.google.com/apps.  You get a 30 day trial, and after that, your cost is minimal.  It gives you a platform full of organizational and collaboration tools that are perfect for what you do.  Setup is a breeze, and the web interface works with every computing device and browser that exists, so you don’t need your own computer to manage the information, and the information remains updated, live, across every device you have, inherently.

The second task that is associated with your domain is establishing a website.  Find a hosting provider you trust, create your account there, then tell them that you already have Google Apps for Domains set up.  They’ll need to help you configure an account with them so your mail still goes to Google’s servers and not to theirs.  The last thing you want is a proprietary e-mail system hosted by a web-hosting provider, as they are sub-standard and do not play well with the rest of the online world.

You’ll want to lean towards WordPress as the framework upon which your site is built.  From there, you’ll choose from a host of free site themes, premium (paid) site themes, or custom designed themes.  Then, you’ll have your choice of free plug-ins to enhance your site, and/or paid plug-ins for features such as IDX property searches.

Once you have these two major components of your domain in place, you can forge ahead worrying about little more than providing good quality content regularly.

How to Adjust the Margins on Disqus Commenting

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I run a myriad of WordPress blogs.  On most of them, I utilize a commenting system called Disqus.  It’s just cool.  There’s one thing that I was troubled by when I first implemented it.  When enabled, the comment section seemed to be aligned flush with the width of my content, leaving no aesthetic margin to delineate a separation in design.  Thankfully, using Firebug, I was able to inspect the Disqus comment area to find the class identifier so I could modify the design slightly to fit my site.

Notice the following image.  The dark gray background and the Disqus comment area butt up against each other.  Not cool.  The right side of the comment form (not shown) also squished against the right hand side-bar.  Not attractive at all.

Simple Fix

There’s a very easy CSS style that you can apply to your Disqus settings for a given website and you do it from the Disqus website:

  1. Simply login, choose the site profile that you need to address.
  2. Click the settings tab, then click Appearance on the left.
  3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and paste the following into the Custom CSS box:#disqus_thread { margin: 0px 20px 0px 20px; }

Save your settings, and re-load your blog.  The setting above essentially squeezes the entire Disqus comment section by 20 pixels on the left and the right sides.  You can modify this to suit your needs, but it should help you line up your comment box with the other content on your site.

Here’s how it looks now:

Hope that helps.

Another Credit Card Company Scheme

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Credit card SEO Agency companyes come up with any and every desperate attempt to keep you as a “customer.” They do not treat you like a customer, however, and you’re the one who pays their bills with outrageous interest rates and risk of fees that your mother would be ashamed of.

The most recent interaction with a credit card company happened today when I noticed that my card company had boosted my rate from 12% to 25% for the second time. I pay my bills on time. With interest rates doubling, so do monthly interest charges. Their software is designed to work in their favor regarding statement dates and due dates.

To save you hours of frustration, do yourself a favor. Pay cash for things you buy. Reward points are not worth it, and this has been proved with statistics that show that consumers will spend on average 12-18% more using a credit card than they will using a debit card or cash.

The Scheme of the Day

If I enroll in a new program at the credit card company, which they say is completely free, I have the opportunity to be credited up to $550.00 just for making my payments on time. The trendy company names program lasts 8 months, and I have to make on-time payments every month for those 8 months. After this period, I will receive a credit of 10% of my balance up to $550.00 no later than 3 months after the program ends.

What do I see here? I see a credit card company desperately trying to lock me into an account that I cannot close. I see a scheme to force me to hold a credit card for at the very least, 8 months, and possibly 11 months. I’m sure that the cc company has researched the behavioral habits of overspending due to credit cards, and the increased likelihood that a card holder with a zero balance will soon become a card holder with a balance.

My representative was very short with me as I asked questions that slowly revealed the truth in the program. Sure, the program is free, but it’s worth more to me to not take on any risk at all.

Eyegazing: Overcoming Feelings of Insecurity

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The exercise of locking eye to eye with a complete stranger, intentionally, and holding until they break away, is one of those activities that will help you gain self confidence as you are introduced to the shockingly ignored concept that everyone else is just as insecure as you are.  As you do this, you will find that your self confidence will immediately receive a boost of energy.

Timothy Ferris in The Four Hour Work Week, Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, And Join the New Rich, talks about this as one of those critical exercises that will help you build self confidence and move you closer to greater success in the pursuit of your Entrepreneurship.

Sitting in Hava Java today, as people meander through, I have taken a few opportunities to lock eyes with people as they walk in.  Most people are immediate in how quickly they divert their gaze somewhere else, for who knows what reason.  Perhaps they don’t like looking at me, perhaps they’re insecure about being looked at, or perhaps they are just in their own world and don’t notice.  A large percentage of the people walking in have sunglasses on, so it makes the exercise impossible, but for those who come in sporting shiny, exposed, eyes, little do they know the trap that I have set.

I’ll have to admit, it’s extremely difficult to fight the temptation to look away first, but so rewarding when you conquer the fear.  Don’t try doing it with the same person twice, unless you intend to start up a conversation, which wouldn’t be that bad anyway would it?  And, if someone feels uncomfortable enough the first go-around to approach you and ask you what your problem is, as Ferris states, just tell them “I’m sorry, I thought you were an old friend of mine.”

My recent encounter was with a woman who walked in.  I locked on to her eyes and held.  It was difficult, but I did it, and she looked away.  It was at this point that I continued to hold the look.  What happened next was completely unexpected.  She looked again, and then I could really tell she was nervous.  I could also tell that she understood that I had established the upper hand in the exchange and I was the initiator, which boosted my confidence and gave me options.

I will continue to exercise this, and I would recommend that you give it a shot too!  It’s a great feeling to overcome insecurity when you realize you’re not the only one who feels insecure.

Why Do I Keep Forgetting So Much

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Last Sunday, while I was sitting in a money class, preparing to be coached on being a coach, I watched as one instructor mentioned to another that it would be helpful to give the coaches a list of preferred counselors to handle issues that we would not be qualified to handle.  Lawyers, marriage counselors, psychologists, etc., would probably be needed at some point to handle deeper issues that certain people may have regarding their finances.

Upon requesting this information, the other instructor promptly wrote it down, and my first thought was, “He’s doing that because he needs to remember to respond to a call to action.  Hmm…that’s quite mature of him.  Why do I feel like I avoid doing this?”

What I thought next was how quickly in life we are to “forget” things that we would rather have others think we’re to incompetent to handle simply because we don’t want to make the committment to handle the problem because it will be too much work, or will stretch us further than we intended to be stretched.  So, we don’t write it down.

I have lived like this for a long time.  I will forget things intentionally without even knowing it because I’ve gotten so good at it.  But, the time has come to acknowledge this as a weakness and take proactive steps to correct the behavior, as now I am not the only one who depends on me.  Other people depend on me, and stepping up my level of commitment to something is, I believe, critical to continuing to develop in a positive direction.  Whether it be responding to a call to help others, or something as big as getting married, making a commitment is something that I have been very selfish about.

I have trained my brain to forget selectively.  My argument may be that ‘I forget things’ but the truth of the matter is, if I put my mind to it, I can remember anything I want.  Instead, I typically will choose to remember things that I find more interesting, but may not be that beneficial to me.

No matter what I do in my mind, if I don’t write something down when I think about it, I will forget it.  When I come up with a great tune on the piano, if I don’t record it now, right there in the moment, it will be lost.  If I think of a great lyric, or think of an award winning million dollar idea, and I don’t write it down, it will never come to fruition.  Overcoming the fear of success can only be done by forging ahead through the hard committments and actually doing the hard work that it takes to become a success.  Imagine how many products or hit songs have passed through my mind that have not paid off because I’ve been too lazy to make them permanent in some way.

For someone like myself who has all of the classic symptoms of what they call Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD or ADHD), I have had to come up with creative ways to keep myself aware that I have something to remember.  For instance, when I bring my laptop into someone else’s house so that it is not sitting in my car, I must set my car keys next to it, otherwise I risk leaving without it.  I would have normally left the laptop in the car, but I’m tired of taking that risk.  I would rather have my laptop left behind than have it stolen from my car.  Harvey Mackay, in a column titled Put Your Memory to Work for You, writes the following:

I use what I call the original “Palm Pilot”—when I have urgent things to remember, I write key words on my hands! I also move my watch from my left arm to my right arm, signaling me that I have something important to do. If I’m going to a party or special event, I might request a guest list in advance and study who is going to be there to trigger my memory.

Tampering With the Habit

Since I am as much of a creature of habit as you are, I find myself operating day to day doing the same things over and over again.  To be specific, there are habits that I have developed when I get into and out of my car.  The order of operations to stopping, putting the car in park, grabbing the keys, the phone, and anything else usually never changes.  But when it does…when there’s something that occurs that tampers with the habit, it seems to short circuit key elements.  Every time I have had to lift something out of the passenger seat with two hands, I have locked my keys in my car.  I have corrected this consciously over time, but a few years ago, this was a real problem for me.  If any of the typical habits that I have in my life are interrupted in any way, something unexpected happens, and unexpected things can be extremely annoying because they disrupt the day.

Remembering something for me has been a matter of interest and repetition.  Today I was sitting at the Coffee Plantation with Susan Gruenling of SonoranHouse.com and we were attempting to solve an e-mail problem with her iPhone.  Through the process, we were given specific settings from the server administrator that we had to repeat over and over again until we got the setup right.  After the first 3 times entering the number, I was surprised to see that Susan had committed the numbers to memory.  I had too…repetition and association works, but it takes work to make it work.

We Are The Bucket

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I often use the metaphor to help me understand intangible truths and to help others understand me.  Some people get it, taking in the parallels that I draw, and others miss it completely.  Sometimes the metaphors are not well thought out, and other times they are, but every one of them goes through a series of changes and revisions until the truth of the matter at hand is more greatly understood both by the author and the reader.

We Are The Bucket

I liken my life to the characteristics and experiences of a bucket.  Perhaps any container would do, but the bucket is what I thought of, so I’ll run with it.  Should a bucket ever have the opportunity to speak for itself, I’m sure it would see how much like me it is.  Although, I don’t have Home Depot printed on my chest, and I’m not orange, and I’m quite sure I won’t be having a conversation with a bucket any time soon.

Cast in a pre-determined mold, each and every bucket starts off with a clean slate and is considered flawless, yet is not.  For on the surface of the bucket are tiny, jagged pits and bumps that are invisible to the naked eye, but nonetheless are there, and as smooth as the surface of the bucket seems, as soft and fresh as the baby’s skin may be to our weathered adult hands and our aging eyes, the flaws remain, and are inherent, and ordained.

Picture a brand new bucket, empty, with a new handle.  There’s a vast space inside that bucket designed to hold a lifetime of experiences coupled with the essence of God, pure and holy.  At birth, this bucket can be filled from the bottom to the top with pure, clean, refreshing water; water that will be spilled, poured, and that will slowly evaporate over time.  How clean that life is when it starts.  Yet it doesn’t stay that way.

As our lives progress, we bump into other buckets, sometimes spilling our water into their bucket, leaving a little piece of us behind, inadvertently or sometimes intentionally.  Others also spill over into our bucket.  The water that we started with becomes entangled with that of others.

Throughout our years, we, the bucket of water, find ourselves and others scooping from time to time little bits of debris into our bucket.  Dirt, glass, garbage, cement, you name it, we shovel it in ourselves and others dump it in too.  Every time a little bit of the world gets poured into the bucket, there’s a little less room for that clean water.  And, when we refill our buckets from time to time, or when someone else pours some of their water into us, the sediment at the bottom is stirred up, clouding the water, making it harder to see the clarity.

It is at these times when it would make sense to filter out some of that debris.  It would seem that when the muck that was settled at the very bottom of the bucket is agitated and swirled about, we would be more likely to see it, more likely to capture it and toss it out of the bucket, making more room for more clean water, but sometimes, we make sure our bucket doesn’t get jostled, and we set it aside and wait for the dust and debris to settle again; a perfect picture of our unwillingness to allow cleansing and our delusion that ignoring the junk that has settled into our lives, into our bucket, will simply stay put forever and won’t muddy up the water again.

Sometimes other buckets that are full of gunk and that are stirred up so much that the water looks dark and muddy spill their mess into our bucket, clean water or not.  We may identify this right away, or sometimes we might not be paying attention as the crap in someone elses bucket is unloaded into ours.

Other times we don’t fill our buckets at all.  We isolate them and let the water slowly evaporate.  The more water, the longer we can sustain, and the more debris we have at the bottom, the closer the bottom is to the top, making less room for the water that we need.  When this happens, the debris can dry up and if that debris is heavy enough, if that debris is cement, it hardens and is no longer affected by the water.  When we have that cement poured into our bucket, and it hardens, and we fill our bucket again, the cement doesn’t leave.  It stays there, and we cover it up with muddy water, hiding it from ourselves enough that we may completely forget that it even exists.  But, we know it’s there, because cement is heavy, and our bucket becomes heavier and heavier over time, as layer after layer of cement is poured into us.  As long as we keep the water moving, pouring in and pouring out, we are able to filter the cement out before it hardens, but once we stop and let that water evaporate, the cement hardens.  Some people have a little cement, some people have a lot, and the amount of water that their bucket can hold is determined by how full of cement they are.  By this time, it’s safe to say that all of the space above the hardened cement appears to us to be all the bucket will hold.  We look at this small space for water as 100% of the space that we have for water, and we forget that the cement has eaten up most of the space, and in fact, the bucket is only half available because it’s clogged with baggage.

Adversity

Until adversity.  When we are tilted so quickly by another bucket, or by ourselves, it’s likely that all of whatever water is left spills out and we feel completely exposed.  We see the thick layers of concrete, and we find ourselves sideways, with a heavy load, unable to pick ourselves up because of the weight of the cement.

That is when we cry out for help.  It seems to take vast adversity in our lives, or what the world would call “rock bottom” to realize that we need help.  But if I’ve been knocked over in a room full of other buckets who have been knocked over, who is going to grab that little handle and tilt me upright so I can be filled with more water?  Who is going to pour their clean water into me?

Bitterness

That cement is the bitterness that we carry from experiences in the past.  I believe that we are only able to be loved as deeply as the pain in our past.  In other words, that cement is in the way of our ability to be loved, and until it is chipped away and scooped out, it will continue to block the good water of others and the fresh water from the tap from getting to the bottom of our hearts, or the bottom of our buckets, and we’ll find that when we move around through life with a heavy load of bitter cement, we can easily mow over buckets that don’t have as much cement because of our mass.  We’re so heavy, we just don’t stop when we get going, and we can just crash into others with our problems and cause lots of spills.  Imagine trying to clean the bottom of the inside of your bucket while it’s half full of cement.

this metaphor is a work in progress.  Please follow me on twitter @realscottsdale if you would like to know when this metaphor is updated.