Please make sure you only place listings in the appropriate:
Business Category and
appropriate
Business Area.
Many people today have blackberry
hand held devices and other Personal Device Assistants. Nothing is more
frustrating and annoying than to have listings come in that do not apply
to the appropriate Business Category and appropriate Business Area. It is
a lot of clicking for nothing and people do not like that. Please only
select the Business Category and Business Area that apply for your message
to the industry.
Highlighting all Business Categories and/or all Business Areas is a no no.
You can select multiple Business
Areas when they apply for Wants.
You can select multiple Business
Categories if they apply for your listing.
Do not type in all capital letters. It is better and more
professional to use upper and lower case letters. Capital letters are
like screen blare, like someone yelling at you and in some cases like
begging.
For "wants", you must start the subject line with the word Wanted.
Otherwise people think you have something for sale.
There are special things you can do to improve your response ratio. If
you ever wonder why you do not receive as many calls as you think you
should part of the reason from over 10 years experience in the
"information business" could be "the information that you have not placed"
in the subject, that you can or should place! The following are helpful
ideas that have made the difference for others to make money and hopefully
will for you as well.
Your subject line field when Adding/Modifying a message is missing one
or more ingredients.
Your subject line is very important. It is the SUBJECT THAT IS CIRCULATED
locally and around the world by way of EMail List Services. There are over
10,000 EMails delivering information daily. People do not read the body
of your message unless they are first interested by something that
triggered their interest in the subject. When it is sketchy, vague,
missing one of four ingredients, from experience, they may not follow up
because many people just do not have the time. Everyone is overloaded with
information and unless you make it easy for them, they just do not have
the time to check out whether or not it fits their criteria.
For this reason we suggest you PLACE AT LEAST FOUR INGREDIENTS IN YOUR
SUBJECT LINE: LOCATION, TYPE,
SIZE and/or PRICE, SIZZLE, and in that order is the
best advice. You will find the results better and more qualified. Some
find they are into a transaction in an average of four calls.
Location: We
do not mean the exact address. A general location is fine. Reference it
to a major center such as: (20 minutes to Orlando, 2hr. to Toronto, 1 hr.
flight to Vancouver, etc.) Think globally and act locally. There are
over 300,000 hits per month, 65% from the USA and the rest of the world.
This means many people may not know anything about your area location.
For that reason, unless you are already a known major center like a major
city, you should reference your town or area to the number of hours it is
from a major center.
Price: When
entering a price you need all the zeros in the price field. These are
searchable fields. However in the subject line we use short forms like
$3.2M so that you have more space to place information that may trigger
someone to contact you.
SIZZLE: Ask
yourself, what is so good about this property, over the many other
properties out there in the same price range? Usually the first things
that you can think of, you should add this to the subject line. This could
be busy location, a good cap rate, fully occupied, upside potential, etc.
In the case of Wants, ask yourself, what is so good about this buyer over
all the other buyers out there in the marketplace? Can act quickly, cash,
etc.? Read other ads to get ideas.
The subject should read like a mini classified ad. There is a limit of
160 characters or almost 3 lines of text. Look for the little counter
which keeps track of the characters. If you delete some, you have to press
the space bar to recalculate. The difference in a great subject line is
the difference between making money or no money.
Check your subject line and check your
categories and they should conform. Place another listing with a
different subject, different business areas, different business categories
to make it conform.
To see how your listing went in click on Latest
USA if in the US or Latest World. Check your links and all your
information in case the price is wrong or something is not right.
Click on My Listings then Modify to make changes.
Modify your listings every 30-90 days to
get the best circulation. They will also get sent out to the industry by
EMail.
Go to www.iciworld.net
click on Member Management click on Training Videos on the left.
You might want to print this out and keep this in a legal size file
folder. We know these ideas work because there are deals reported daily
by members.
Consider this service in one respect as an electronic equivalent of a
classified ads in a newspaper except that your market is over 500,000,000
people! Will they have heard of your location and know all there is to
know about it? Give them a reference to a major center, and include links
to a local economic development agency, chamber of commerce, etc. that
helps to sell your location. We have had stories about this kind of
information being circulated around a board of directors table when they
were making a decision to lease a property.
Make sure you have keywords in your subject line. If you have a donut
shop make sure you have the word donut and not just Tim Hortons for
instance. People search things by keyword. Make it easy for them.
After you have entered your information we suggest you Search "Latest USA"
or "Latest World" to see how the public actually sees your listing. Read
the body of the message, check your information and your links.
Watch that you have not accidentally entered duplicate messages!
If you hit enter again, it puts it another message in again so you now
have two. Wait about five seconds after you hit enter when you enter a
listing and then click on Latest World to see how the public sees it.
Click on My Listings to modify and/or delete your listings.
When entering the square footage for industrial, office and retail
buildings, watch how you enter things. Only place one square footage in
each field. There is a minimum and maximum field for wants.
Please leave spaces between words; not like this Office Bldg/11,000SF/CBD/Yourcity/$649,000/E.
with a slash between words. The Internet prefers spaces to hyphenate
things. The way html works it needs spaces to show properly on other
peoples browsers. Use spaces instead of slashes.
There is now a Training Program available on line. It can be found by
going to
www.iciworld.net, click on Member Links, log in, click on Resource
Center in left frame. Look for Help Files for The Market ICI Network,
click on Training Program. You should print it out. (6 pages legal size,
11 letter size) Every single item in the ten points is designed to make
you money. If you miss one you miss making money. We have examples to
show to you. Please feel free to call.
Market your location with links! In the Resource Center, Help Files for
The Market ICI Network, right after Training Program is a file called "How
to Link to Photos and Economic Development Agencies." Many say it is
location, location, location that are among the three most important words
in real estate. In my opinion you have not arrived on the Internet until
you start linking to things like the Local Economic Development agency
and/or the Chamber of Commerce to help market the location. One of the
"true powers of the Internet" is in linking. It is like have a $25,000
electronic brochure to market the location and you can link to these sites
absolutely free! Link to city sites, local economic development agencies,
local Chambers of Commerce, local State and Provincial sites, country site
that helps sell the location. Make a 15 minute appointment with me if
you need assistance to do this.
For Sold Listings, you should now Modify your listing, choose status Sold,
type (SOLD) or (LEASED) at the beginning of the subject line and click on
modify record.
To see your personal listings, go to
www.iciworld.net,
click on Member Links, click on My Listings, click on Modify, make
changes, click on Modify Record. Once you see success on the screen,
click on Latest to check and see how it went in.
You should modify your listings every 30-60 days. If you do not, your
information goes down in the database. We have noticed the majority of
deals are started at the top half of the database. This is where there
are over a quarter of a million hits per month, but also instantly and
automatically your information is emailed out to the industry. There are
over 10,000 EMails being delivered daily with new people subscribing
regularly. If your information is near the bottom of the database, people
simply get so busy working the top half they do not even get down to the
bottom and secondly, it is not distributed to all the new people who have
subscribed to receive things by EMail.
If you modify your listings within 30 days, it does not get EMailed out.
Only new or listings modified after 30 days get emailed out.
Remember people are overloaded with information, your subject has to
trigger someone to be interested. It is the difference between making
money or making nothing.
Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
