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Buy A Home, Save Money!
Inexpensive real estate is getting to be a hotter and hotter item due to the recent declines in the economy. There are always ways to pinch pennies when buying a home; look below to find a few.
Ironically, the economy is one of the factors in making the homes as affordable as they currently are. When homeowners fall short of their payments, they may either lose their home, or try to sell it for a price that is much less than it is worth to try to cut their losses. Seattle currently houses many foreclosed and short sale homes, offering screaming deals to house hunters in the Seattle area. You can view homes such as the ones described above by visiting Washington short sales.
Fixing up an older home is becoming a more and more popular way of saving money when buying a new home. There are hundreds of homes in Seattle right now that are under $150,000 that could really use a nice little remodel. To see for yourself, visit the affordable Seattle homes to find homes for you. The prospect of ‘flipping’ a house really works out for some people, but really turns sour for others. Experience, time, and money are three things that you must have at least a little of in order to have a successful project. Each home that needs to be fixed is at a different level, as well as the expectations of the fixers. This is why it is extremely vital that you analyze and evaluate to what scale the home will need to be worked on. Are the fixes you’ll need to do simple ones that can be done yourself, or difficult and complex projects that will take an expert to do? What is a rough estimate of what all of these fixes are going to cost? Do you have the time it will take to repair the home? All of these items will be well worth your time to sit down and evaluate to see if it is really going to be a good investment to buy a rundown home to fix up.
Re-decorating is a fun way to customize your home while saving money. You would be amazed at what a little sand paper and some spray paint can do for an older piece of furniture bought for a few dollars at a garage sale or local thrift store. Ugly chairs and other pieces of furniture can be re-upholstered with the fabric of your choice to make your home unique to you. One of the most popular DIY items on the web right now are custom home decor pieces made from items found at a thrift store. There are so many DIY projects on the web right now, that you could transform the interior of your home yourself.
Well, you know what to do! Why not start buying? Find a house that can be transformed into the beautiful home you’ve been dreaming of
Website Security in WordPress
In recent months there have been more website security attacks than I’ve ever seen before. These attacks have mainly come in two different classes.
Malicious Virus Attacks
The first is just plain old malicious and mean – the type of attack that makes you wonder “do these people have a life?” These attacks infect other websites which install software onto your computer and destroy it, unless you sale your soul to them. Typically they will say “this virus can only be removed for X-amount of dollars.” But these people are more clever so they disguise it. These cause physical damage which you can immediately see. They may mask your website by giant words and an evil face that says “YOU’VE BEEN HACKED!”
Phishing Scams Attacks
These are very clever people who will inject code into your website which will copy any forms that you fill out, and acquire credit card information, address, telephone number, name, whatever they can gather. What they do with that information is then up to them. The most reason time I saw this was code was injected to the akismet plugin on a website, and created a fake “PayPal” page on the website. eBay then e-mailed use and let us know “a phishing scam is reported at such and such location.” Thank you eBay! We don’t want to be hosting anything bad.
How To Remove a Virus
Unfortunately, because we’ve had our share of experience in doing this, we have some tips to share. The first thing to do is install some antivirus software, that way your computer will not become a host for any viruses. You don’t have to install an expensive one. There is only one free one that I suggest, and it is provided by Microsoft – it’s called Microsoft Security Essentials. Download it here.
One of the main ways that hackers will inject a virus is to a theme where they’ve exposed vulnarabilities. The themes which are attacked most often are the themes which most popular have installed, such as the default WordPress themes. So update your current theme, and remove any other theme.
Much like themes, plugins are also attacked, and the most frequently used plugins are attacked the most. For example, as mentioned above the akismet plugin had fake eBay installed onto it, collecting PayPal information. Keep your plugins updated, and removed excess plugins. By removing the excess, you eliminate possibly entry points of a virus.
Next, there are several different plugins which you can install. I have tried some that others have recommended, and the most basic and effective one seems to the be the antivirus plugin. This will scan your theme and let you know where a line of code that may be a potential threat. Most of the threats that it points our are nothing that will actually cause a problem, but it does find things from time to time.
If you are suspecting anything now, then you can always reinstall WordPress. This does not mean start over, this simply means that update the WordPress files. This means go to your core-updates and reinstall WordPress right there.
To summarize:
- Install Security Software
- Remove Unused Themes in WordPress
- Remove Unused/ Unnecessary Themes
- Update Every plugin, every theme, EVERYTHING as soon as an update is released.
- Install the AntiVirus plugin
- Reinstall WordPress
How Many Leads Will Realtors Get With Boomerang Leads?
Most of our potential new leads want to know, “how many leads am I going to get?”
We get it. We wish that we could tell you exactly how many leads we will be able to provide. Unfortunately, we can never really know how many real estate leads we’ll be able to generate for a specific area. We can make educated guesses based on past experience, but sometimes we are completely wrong. There are many factors that will determine how many leads you will get.
Some of these factors include:
- How established our website was when our client started. Some of our websites already get LOTS of traffic. Others don’t get traffic yet, but will start getting it once we focus our efforts on the site.
- How long it takes Google to respond to our increased efforts in improving the websites once we get a client. Google, Yahoo, and Bing have a mind of their own. Sometimes they immediately recognize our websites as “authority” sites, while other times it takes months before they will grant them the “#1 organic ranking”.
- How competitive the SEO and real estate markets are in a given area. Some areas have lots of competition from other real estate agents and brokerages competing for the organic SEO spots. Other areas have only competition from the national syndication sites.
- Consumer behavior, trust, and willingness to fill in an online form. We have found that different regions of the Country are more trusting than others. In some areas the percentage of visitors who fill out our online forms is much higher than other areas.
- Quantity of overall online searches. The time of year, holidays, consumer confidence, and other external factors influence the quantity of online home search activity. For example, less people search for homes online in September compared with the spring or summer months.
Visit the Boomerang Blog to see actual stats on how many leads our actual clients are getting each month.
via Broker Agent Social Network – Alan Barker’s blog – How Many Leads Will You Get With Boomerang Leads?.
Google vs Yahoo & Bing
Often times getting a website to rank #1 is the only thing that matters. But infact, it’s not actually the only thing that matters – 20% of what matters is also Yahoo & Bing (which use the same engine to gather results now. The proof is that when you try something in Yahoo, the bottom of the page says – you guessed it – Powered by Bing). More detail is visible at the website link at the bottom.
But here is one quick example of how Yahoo and Bing can be more powerful than Yahoo. At the very beginning of creating a website, Google doesn’t favor it quite how Bing does. Google wants a site to prove itself, but Bing seems to instantly recognize any you work you do on it. For example, Cape Coral Florida has a new website which was nearly blank, but several leads started going into it. After a short time when you enter Cape Coral Florida as a search term was listing CapeCoralFlHomes.com as #4 in Bing! And it was being lead to the internal Short Sales page where all the other links were directing. Don’t underestimate the power of links.
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