Internet Real Estate Marketing Strategies

  Most business owners nowadays dedicate a huge chunk of their effort towards online marketing. A real estate business owner will benefit if he adopts tried and tested online real estate marketing strategies. One of these strategies is using SEO optimized websites. Another strategy is placing business information in online business directories. As a marketer, one should be a regular contributor to well-known forums so as to promote one's products or services.

The basic requirement in online marketing is online presence. A business will have online presence if it has a website. One can make his website using free templates or alternatively one can contract a professional web designer to make a professional website.

Websites made using free templates are normally less appealing and they look unprofessional. However, if one is a novice real estate businessman and one does not have a lot of capital, a website made using free templates will suffice. The most appealing template should be selected. Before launching one's website, one will have to register a domain name. Registering a domain name will prevent such a name from being taken by another person.

A professionally designed website will make a house buying and selling business to stand out among other businesses. Such a website will be a great promotion tool. Different web designers charge different rates. The designer who charges fair rates should be opted for. One should study a designer's history before contracting the designer. The designer who has a history of delivering on time and good customer policy will be the best choice. Good customer policy involves answering phone calls of clients at any time of the day or night and answering emails from clients on time.

So that one's website is known by many people, one will be required to place sponsored advertisements in search engines and to place ads in social networking sites. Sponsored advertisements expose one's website to millions of internet users who use search engines on a daily basis. Placing an advertisement in a social networking site is a very affordable affair.

Another way of exposing one's website to millions of potential clients is by optimizing one's website. A website will be optimized by use of SEO articles. Good outsourcing sites have good writers. Such writers will produce for a person excellent articles that have SEO keywords. Back linking must also be done so that a website is fully optimized. A fully optimized website is traced easily be search engines therefore it will be accessed easily by many internet users.

Real estate businesses that are listed in online business directories will be seen by many potential home buyers. It is important to list one's business in as many directories as possible so as to get maximum exposure. The full name of one's business and business contacts should feature in a directory.

Online real estate marketing strategies are used by businessmen who deal with buying and selling houses. These strategies include having a SEO website and placing business information in different online business directories. A website will be optimized by SEO articles and back linking.

Hard money lender has a crucial role to play in real estate market. They provide enough capital to the investors and give them ample monetary source to make money in. Money lenders have made it quite easy to access capital for the investors. There are certain parameters that make the lending of hard money feasible. If these parameters are met the investors face no problem in accessing the hard money. But recently, the money lenders have chalked out many requirements that omit quite a number of investors from being qualified of getting money. There are other investment programs that are beneficial for people and are easily accessible. Yet, nothing has hampered the relation between both the parties.

The strong relation between the real estate investors and money lenders is built on trust. The lenders do not require looking at the credit status of the borrowers but only consider the property. Before going for hard money first you have to look for the criteria that will be profitable for you. In some cases, traditional loan is better than hard money and vice versa. When you have finally decided to go for hard money investment it is time for you to look for a lender.

If you look closely at the established investors you will find that they have a back up of a hard money lender. This back up is not gained in a fortnight and one has to work on building good relations with the lender. In real estate business monetary assistance is necessary and one cannot do without it. When you have a good understanding with a money lender you do not have to go here and there asking people to lend you money in critical situations. You can be assured of some amazing deals when you have easy accessibility of investment money. You can make money in real estate easily and smoothly when you have trust on one source from where you can get money anytime you want.

It is quite simple for a newbie to extract money from the lenders after establishing good relation with them. This is better than other real estate investment programs where you have to pay heavy interest and present innumerable documents to be qualified to borrow the money. Here, the hard money lenders do not want countless documents https://www.finco.co/. One has to spend some time with the lenders in order to get a deal. It may take a few weeks or even a month to impress them. Conversation over dinner table or at a coffee shop may prove to be fruitful and will help you to end up with a good deal. Long discussions about the market and the investment will make them reveal some of the tips and tricks which you can apply in your business. So, if you are keen to make money in real estate then you have to go by some strategies. Do not waste your time on hollow investment programs instead spend some time with a hard money lender and you will be benefited.

Short History of Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the premier cryptocurrency of the world. It is a peer-to-peer currency and transaction system based on a decentralized consensus-based public ledger called blockchain that records all transactions.

Now the bitcoin was envisaged in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto but it was a product of many decades of research into cryptography and blockchain and not just one guy's work. It was the utopian dream of cryptographers and free trade advocates to have a borderless, decentralized currency based on the blockchain. Their dream is now a reality with the growing popularity of bitcoin and other altcoins around the world.

Now the cryptocurrency was first deployed over the consensus-based blockchain in 2009 and the same year it was traded for the very first time. In July 2010, the price of bitcoin was just 8 cents and the number of miners and nodes was quite less compared to tens of thousands in number right now.

Within the space of one year, the new alternative currency had risen to $1 and it was becoming an interesting prospect for the future. Mining was relatively easy and people were making good money making trades and even paying with it in some cases.

Within six months, the currency had doubled again to $2. While the price of bitcoin is not stable at a particular price point, it has been showing this pattern of insane growth for some time. In July 2011 at one point, the coin went bonkers and the record-high $31 price point was achieved but the market soon realized that it was overvalued compared to the gains made on the ground and it recorrected it back to $2.

December 2012 saw a healthy increase to $13 but soon enough, the price was going to explode. Within four months till April 2013, the price had increased to a whopping $266. It corrected itself later on back to $100 but this astronomical increase in price rose it stardom for the very first time and people started debating about an actual real-world scenario with Bitcoin.

It was around that time that I got acquainted with the new currency. I had my doubts but as I read more about it, the more it became clear that the currency was the future as it had no one to manipulate it or impose itself on it. Everything had to be done with complete consensus and that was what made it so strong and free.

So 2013 was the breakthrough year for the currency. Big companies began to publicly favor the acceptance of bitcoin and blockchain became a popular subject for Computer Science programs. Many people then thought that bitcoin had served its purpose and now it would settle down.

But, the currency became even more popular, with bitcoin ATMs being set up around the world and other competitors started flexing their muscles on different angles of the market. Ethereum developed the first programmable blockchain and Litecoin and Ripple started themselves as cheaper and faster alternatives to bitcoin.

The magical figure of $1000 was first breached in January 2017 and since then it has increased four times already till September. It is truly a remarkable achievement for a coin that was only worth 8 cents just seven years back.

Bitcoin even survived a hard fork on August 1, 2017, and has risen nearly 70% since then while even the fork bitcoin cash has managed to post some success. All of it is due to the appeal of the coin and stellar blockchain technology behind it.

While coventional economists argue that it is a bubble and the whole crypto world would collapse, it is just not so. There is no such bubble since it is an observable fact that it has, in fact, eaten away the shares of the fiat currencies and money transaction corporations.

Every little boy's (and many grown men's) dream of making a living by playing video games is edging closer to reality. The recent release of HunterCoin and the in-development VoidSpace, games which reward players in digital currency rather than virtual princesses or gold stars point towards a future where one's ranking on a scoreboard could be rewarded in dollars, and sterling, euros and yen.

The story of the millionaire (virtual) real estate agent...

Digital currencies have been slowly gaining in maturity both in terms of their functionality and the financial infrastructure that enables them to be used as a credible alternative to non-virtual fiat currency. Though Bitcoin, the 1st and most well known of the crypto-currencies was created in 2009 there have been forms of virtual currencies used in video games for more than 15 years. 1997's Ultima Online was the first notable attempt to incorporate a large scale virtual economy in a game. Players could collect gold coins by undertaking quests, battling monsters and finding treasure and spend these on armour, weapons or real estate. This was an early incarnation of a virtual currency in that it existed purely within the game though it did mirror real world economics to the extent that the Ultima currency experienced inflation as a result of the game mechanics which ensured that there was a never ending supply of monsters to kill and thus gold coins to collect.

Released in 1999, EverQuest took virtual currency gaming a step further, allowing players to trade virtual goods amongst themselves in-game and though it was prohibited by the game's designer to also sell virtual items to each other on eBay. In a real world phenomenon which was entertainingly explored in Neal Stephenson's 2011 novel Reamde, Chinese gamers or 'gold farmers' were employed to play EverQuest and other such games full-time with the aim of gaining experience points so as to level-up their characters thereby making them more powerful and sought after. These characters would then be sold on eBay to Western gamers who were unwilling or unable to put in the hours to level-up their own characters. Based on the calculated exchange rate of EverQuest's currency as a result of the real world trading that took place Edward Castronova, Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University and an expert in virtual currencies estimated that in 2002 EverQuest was the 77th richest country in the world, somewhere between Russia and Bulgaria and its GDP per capita was greater than the People's Republic of China and India.

Launched in 2003 and having reached 1 million regular users by 2014, Second Life is perhaps the most complete example of a virtual economy to date whereby it's virtual currency, the Linden Dollar which can be used to buy or sell in-game goods and services can be exchanged for real world currencies via market-based exchanges. There were a recorded $3.2 billion in-game transactions of virtual goods in the 10 years between 2002-13, Second Life having become a marketplace where players and businesses alike were able to design, promote and sell content that they created. Real estate was a particularly lucrative commodity to trade, in 2006 Ailin Graef became the 1st Second Life millionaire when she turned an initial investment of $9.95 into over $1 million over 2.5 years through buying, selling and trading virtual real estate to other players. Examples such as Ailin are the exception to the rule however, only a recorded 233 users making more than $5000 in 2009 from Second Life activities.

How to be paid in dollars for mining asteroids...

To date, the ability to generate non-virtual cash in video games has been of secondary design, the player having to go through non-authorised channels to exchange their virtual booty or they having to possess a degree of real world creative skill or business acumen which could be traded for cash. This could be set to change with the advent of video games being built from the ground up around the 'plumbing' of recognised digital currency platforms. The approach that HunterCoin has taken is to 'gamify' what is typically the rather technical and automated process of creating digital currency. Unlike real world currencies that come into existence when they are printed by a Central bank, digital currencies are created by being 'mined' by users. The underlying source code of a particular digital currency that allows it to function is called the blockchain, an online decentralised public ledger which records all transactions and currency exchanges between individuals. Since digital currency is nothing more than intangible data it is more prone to fraud than physical currency in that it is possible to duplicate a unit of currency thereby causing inflation or altering the value of a transaction after it has been made for personal gain. To ensure this does not happen the blockchain is 'policed' by volunteers or 'miners' who test the validity of each transaction that is made whereby with the aid of specialist hardware and software they ensure that data has not been tampered with. This is an automatic process for miner's software albeit an extremely time consuming one which involves a lot of processing power from their computer. To reward a miner for verifying a transaction the blockchain releases a new unit of digital currency and rewards them with it as an incentive to keep maintaining the network, thus is digital currency created. Because it can take anything from several days to years for an individual to successfully mine a coin groups of users combine their resources into a mining 'pool', using the joint processing power of their computers to mine coins more quickly.

HunterCoin the game sits within such a blockchain for a digital currency also called HunterCoin. The act of playing the game replaces the automated process of mining digital currency and for the first time makes it a manual one and without the need for expensive hardware. Using strategy, time and teamwork, players venture out onto a map in search of coins and on finding some and returning safely to their base (other teams are out there trying to stop them and steal their coins) they can cash out their coins by depositing them into their own digital wallet, typically an app designed to make and receive digital payments. 10% of the value of any coins deposited by players go to the miners maintaining HunterCoin's blockchain plus a small percent of any coins lost when a player is killed and their coins dropped. While the game graphics are basic and significant rewards take time to accumulate HunterCoin is an experiment that might be seen as the first video game with monetary reward built in as a primary function.

Though still in development VoidSpace is a more polished approach towards gaming in a functioning economy. A Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG), VoidSpace is set in space where players explore an ever-growing universe, mining natural resources such as asteroids and trading them for goods with other players with the goal of building their own galactic empire. Players will be rewarded for mining in DogeCoin, a more established form of digital currency which is currently used widely for micro-payments on various social media sites. DogeCoin will also be currency of in-game trade between players and the means to make in-game purchases. Like HunterCoin, DogeCoin is a legitimate and fully functioning digital currency and like HunterCoin it can be traded for both digital and real fiat currencies on exchanges like Poloniex.

The future of video games?

Though it is early days in terms of quality the release of HunterCoin and VoidSpace is an interesting indication of what could be the next evolution for games. MMORPG's are currently being considered as ways to model the outbreak of epidemics as a result of how player's reactions to an unintended plague mirrored recorded hard-to-model aspects of human behaviour to real world outbreaks. It could be surmised that eventually in-game virtual economies could be used as models to test economic theories and develop responses to massive failures based on observations of how players use digital currency with real value. It is also a good test for the functionality and potential applications of digital currencies which have the promise of moving beyond mere vehicles of exchange and into exciting areas of personal digitial ownership for example. In the mean time, players now have the means to translate hours in front of a screen into digital currency and then dollars, sterling, euros or yen.

But before you quit your day job...

... it's worth mentioning current exchange rates. It's estimated that a player could comfortably recoup their initial registration fee of 1.005 HunterCoin (HUC) for joining HunterCoin the game in 1 day's play. Currently HUC cannot be exchanged directly to USD, one must convert it into a more established digital currency like Bitcoin https://www.stabila.online/. At the time of writing the exchange rate of HUC to Bitcoin (BC) is 0.00001900 while the exchange rate of BC to USD is $384.24. 1 HUC traded to BC and then to USD, before any transaction fees were taken into consideration would equate to... $0.01 USD. This is not to say that as a player becomes more adept that they could not grow their team of virtual CoinHunters and maybe employ a few 'bot' programmes that would automatically play the game under the guise of another player and earn coins for them as well but I think it's safe to say that at the moment even efforts like this might only realistically result in enough change for a daily McDonalds. Unless players are willing to submit to intrusive in-game advertising, share personal data or join a game such as CoinHunter that is built on the Bitcoin blockchain it is improbable that rewards are ever likely to be more than micro-payments for the casual gamer. And maybe this is a good thing, because surely if you get paid for something it stops being a game any more?