Random Thoughts: Drivers, Laundry Machines and Hiccups

Christa (my wife) and I have had my parents in town for the last week. They came to join us for the season opener of the Michigan Wolverines and they are staying through this weekend for the Notre Dame game. I'm really excited they get to see the first game under the lights in the history of the Big House. The game is expected to break the official record for the most people ever to attend a college football game. Being in a stadium with over 113,000 people is pretty cool, I'm glad they'll get to see it. Last weekend at the game we got POURED ON. In fact the game got called because of lightning. We stayed the whole time which in hindsight was pretty dumb as lightning and metal seats don't mix so well.......but the lightning was never that close. I think UofM officials were just being cautious from the recent Indiana State Fair incident. Can't wait for this Saturday!

I had almost forgotten about my mother's obsession with laundry. When we were kids there was never a shortage of laundry to be done in our house. I have three brothers and if there is anyone out there with four kids, you know how much laundry they produce. My mom was a laundry machine. I highly doubt she liked doing it, but she was a machine nonetheless. She would come into my room in the early evening (or really track you down anywhere in the house) and demand that you basically remove every piece of washable clothing right down to your underwear. If I had a friend staying the night, they weren't likely to escape the laundry machine either. Needless to say, 20+ years later and there isn't a single piece of dirty laundry in our house this week.

Our RainCamp had a pretty major hiccup. Gotowebinar maxed us out at 500 attendees (for the first session) when we were suppose to be set up for 1000. So yesterday, at about 9:01am Pacific Time, there were hundreds of people left out in the cold (well not really the cold, since it's a webinar they were probably left in their recliner or office chair). I'm really sorry if you were one of them. We sent out an email to everyone suggesting that you get there early as we were already over capacity on registrations. Why would we do that to begin with? Because we've been doing webinars for quite some time and it's very standard that only 50% of the people that register will actually show up. I get it, this is a business where a lot of times you have to move when you have to move. Things come up all the time. So in order to make sure we get 1000 people there, we allow 2000 to register. If you get there on time, you get in. In fact, this time, at exactly 9:00 there were 490 people there.......and at 9:00 and 30 seconds there were 500....and then the onslaught started on my screen. Every time someone tries to get in and they can't, gotowebinar serves up this little pop up letting you know someone tried to access and it was over capacity. In a matter of one minute I must have had 100 of those windows pop up. It wasn't pretty. (I finally figured out to stop them from attacking me) I'm surprised it didn't crash my computer. Oh well, you live and you learn. If you were one of the folks who missed Ben, don't worry, we have it recorded and you'll get it early next week.

Make sure you are starting to gear up to write about the community events going on during the Fall in your area. Based on stats from previous years, people are really interested in corn mazes, haunted houses, pumpkin patches and cider farms during the fall. Really any kind of Fall local event that people in your area attend, they are going online to get information about it. Your blog becomes a great way for you to provide that information, potentially pick up new readers, and get a ton of 30 second commercials for yourself as the local expert.

September is REALTOR® safety month. Later this month we are going to have the director of safety for NAR on a webinar to discuss some of the things REALTORS® can do to make sure you are safe during the course of business. We'll have a post with all the details in the ActiveRain blog next week so make sure to keep an eye out for that. Our friends at Moby have put together a great REALTOR® Safety Toolkit that you download for free at the link I provided above. Just do it, your family will thank you.

I think this is the longest amount of time I've had my parents staying with me since I moved out on my own. Wow, did I marry my mother!! My wife and my mom are so much alike! My wife is super tidy. Our house is spotless, which is great considering most of the month I work from home. One of the things my mom instilled in us growing up was that even if you aren't rich, doesn't mean you can't take pride in the stuff you do have. She always trained me and my brothers to keep kept a clean house. This is a lady who can't eat dinner before the dishes are done. How she was able to do that when we were young and she was a single mom is well beyond my comprehension. In my eyes she wears a cape......and so does my wife. I'm incredibly blessed to have such amazing women in my life!

We held a Craigslist webinar earlier this week at ActiveRain University with our friends at IMSD. Based on a few emails I received, the class was really great. I wasn't able to make it so I can't confirm, but I think all the IMSD webinars at ActiveRain University are great so you can take the word of the folks that emailed me instead. If you didn't have a chance to catch it, here is the recording. Craigslist is a great way to generate free leads, you just have to know how to market there. Almost every large online venue has little nuances that really allow you to maximize your return. Craigslist is no exception. There is a vicious rumor out there that all you get when you advertise on Craigslist is spam...........I'm here to tell you that's not true. I have a number of friends around the country having tremendous success using Craigslist to generate free leads for their business. And who doesn't like free leads?

Would you like to see how a real estate agent can create a business page on Facebook that engages the community in which they work? This is one of the best examples I've seen. This is a community page created by my friend Ben Kinney. He has over 7400 likes on this community page. It's a great piece of guerrilla marketing. Most of the page focuses on what's going on in the community. They get great interaction from their fans. Very seldom does he use it to market his business, but when he does, it has great impact because people are willing to listen based on the fact the page provides great info about the community. Pay attention to how they engage their fans with questions and center the discussions on living in the area. I suppose you could have a business page for yourself.....but how many people care about what you are doing in your business besides you? Any other great examples of business pages on Facebook you would like to share?

I'm not sure if it's Murphy's law, but there is a law out there that says 'If you buy a new driver for your golf game, your old driver will immediately start to perform better'. I just bought a new driver on Craigslist for $35. It's a really sweet Big Bertha. New, it was a $400 club. It's about three years old. That's just fine for me. So right after I buy it, I take it out to the driving range and I was CRUSHING it. If you'd ever seen me golf, you'd know that it was absolutely the driver, not my swing. So just to make sure it was the driver and not my swing that had miraculously improved, I took out my old driver for a few swings. Now mind you, this is a driver that has landed in the fairway for me about 1% of the time that I've had it in my bag the last three years. I have no shot at getting this thing to go straight. Wouldn't you know it? On the first swing with that old driver, I sent it sailing 280 yards straight down the middle. It was almost as if I could hear the driver saying to me 'please don't get rid of me, I'll change my ways. I can be just as good as that crappy Big Bertha'. It was short lived, the second shot was a solid duck hook. Sayounara Titleist G5.