Yesterday evening I grabbed my gardening gloves off the stand. Left hand in, tightened the velcro strap. Slid my right hand into the glove and there was something that didn't belong, and my hand was out of that glove pretty quickly!
My first thought was a wasp or a thorn. Nothing fell out of my glove as I slapped it on the ground a few times. Some squeezing from the outside of the glove and I realized it wasn't a thorn. Something inside was occupying one of the fingers! Some more squeezing and shaking and I finally got out what was inside. For the sake of those of you with arachnophobia, there will be no picture of that 8 legged giant that I dumped out of that glove :)
Now I'll chalk this up as a learning opportunity. I got lucky and no bite of venom, no swelling and no visit to the ER. In the future I'll be more careful about where and how I store my gloves and making sure the only thing alive in them will be my hands!
Now blogging and real estate offer us learning opportunities on a continual basis and the challenge to each of us is making sure that we don't keep repeating mistakes.
Now some "mistakes" I choose to make over and over. I don't use a buyer agency agreement, preferring to trust the customer will stick with me, appreciate the work I'm doing for them and we all win at the end. It's risky business, but I know that. Now that gamble doesn't always work out, but the frequency of it not working out is tolerable to me.
Now other mistakes I've had happen once and I learn to protect myself. For instance, as much as I love blogging here in the Rain, I don't trust the blog editor to not POOF a post on me. I don't hit submit unless I've got my copy ready just in case. You just never know when that raincoated Chihuahua might make an appearance.
There are other blogging mistakes I've learned to avoid:
- The wall of words. Break the rules my junior high English teacher taught and sometimes break a paragraph into two.
- Itty bitty fonts. Keep font size reasonable and don't go overboard with colors.
- Missing Eye Candy. Even one picture can make a difference!
- Expiring info in a nonexpiring post. If you're writing a subdivision post you want to work for years, don't put in a lot of info that will become dated (e.g. homes sold for $300,000 in 2015).
- Writing to the wrong audience. Love y'all to death, but the people that are most likely to pay my bills are home buyers and sellers. Based on that, my mix of topics best lean VERY heavily to consumers and not too much to chasing comments from Rainers.
- Brawling. Keep it civil folks, memories are long and it's just as easy to write a name on the "Refer when hell freezes over list" as it is on the "Send Referrals" list.
- Not implementing what you should implement. I took way too long to put in place what I was learning here. Funny thing happened when I started writing more posts with information consumers wanted. My phone started ringing and our business increased.
So let's go out and make some mistakes, but make them NEW mistakes!
Until next Tuesday, just Ask An Ambassador if you need help!
Bill of Liz and Bill aka BLiz
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