Article Summary This article discusses my experience with real estate agents and the way they typically do marketing, most often online. More importantly, I present a checklist of items any real estate agent can do to build an online pipeline of client leads to grow a business helping people buy and sell homes. Here is…
The landscape of ecommerce has changed drastically since I started my first online business about 20 years ago. When I first began selling drop-shipped products on websites or sourcing products to sell on eBay, it was seen as normal to require the customer to pay shipping costs. In fact, many sellers on the various online…
I really don’t want any of my children to be a coder for a living. But I’m teaching all of them to write code. Here’s why. My Own Software Development Experience There was a time in my life when I thought I would spend my next thirty or so years employed in a career, from…
Over the past few months, I have been wading into real estate investing by purchasing a couple of nightly rental condos in the Saint George, Utah area. Because this is my first experience with nightly rentals, and due to the fact that I already have more things on my schedule than I currently have time…
The past decade has seen a mad rush “to the cloud”, as performance requirements (speed and availability) for apps, websites, and other technology have increased. For me, it seems like I’ve been looking for a solid place to host my websites for as long as I’ve been building them, as far back as 2000, when…
Several years ago, I was asked by a company that had over 50 employees to help their struggling marketing team, who was sending over to the sales team under the name of “qualified leads” simply a list of names, phone numbers and email addresses (many of them outdated) that had been purchased from Data.com. Desperate…
Last fall I had the opportunity to attend a community-based self-reliance class called “How to Start and Grow Your Own Business” along with twelve other people who were in various stages of business development. Some only had ideas they were hoping to vet. Some were operating fledgling companies or part time side businesses, and some…
I’ve made my career out of building and selling online businesses. After trying to start an automotive business (an endeavor that was going to cost us over a million dollars to get off the ground) with my father and brothers, then realizing how little risk was involved in selling things online, I jumped into the…
In the spring of 2008, the online sporting goods business my wife I had built and operated over the four previous years was growing and things were looking up for us. We were still inexperienced enough to not be considered experts at running a business by most professional standards. Almost everything we’d learned to make…
Several years ago, my wife and I owned an online sporting goods business. We shipped a lot of products, which meant we spent a lot of money on shipping. As any online retail knows, shipping costs continually are on the rise, and people don’t like to pay those costs, especially since Amazon has trained the…