Thoughts on Real Estate Marketing…

What is an empty adjective? It’s a word that doesn’t really mean anything – but it can mean different things to different people. For example: nice, large, small, great, pretty, cozy, cute, huge, and spacious. You’ve read hundreds of real estate ads filled with those empty adjectives. If you’re writing them, it’s time to stop. [...]

Your goal in writing real estate ads is to “Put the buyer in the home” and cause them to need to see it in person. To do that, you need to paint some word pictures of both the physical and the psychological benefits of the home. That means instead of writing “large kitchen” you should [...]

One of the first things a copywriter learns is that people buy from emotion and justify the purchase with logic. And… there’s nothing new about that, for here’s what Benjamin Franklin said: “If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect. Before you start to write your next business letter, or any [...]

It isn’t that newspaper advertising isn’t good – for the right businesses and in the right newspapers. It’s just that far too many small business people leave it up to the ad reps at the newspaper to put their ads together. And then they don’t insist on seeing a proof before it goes to print. [...]

This morning I got a frantic e-mail from one of the officers at our local animal rescue: The website is down! Upon investigation I found that their web host, Imbris, no longer exists. It’s been gone since sometime around the end of last month. According to news reports, no one knows why. There’s a sign [...]

Do you write your own advertising copy? Many do, for reasons ranging from budget constraints to not having experienced the value that professionally written ad copy can bring to their business. And that’s fine. You can learn how to do an acceptable job if you spend some time studying the psychology of advertising, read ezines [...]

All professional copywriters and marketers try to be careful with the words they use – thinking ahead to how someone else might understand them. That’s one of the reasons that writing good copy takes a lot more time than many would think. That said, I haven’t read the words that made the laws for the [...]

Yes, this blog is all about good marketing. But sometimes it pays to look at really stinky marketing too. Just now I came home from attending Priest River’s Tea Party rally and sat down to sort and delete my e-mail. Along with more great news telling me that some stranger is sending me anywhere from [...]

You probably know by now that the first task in writing a promotion is to dig out the benefits of a product or service – the obvious ones, and the not so obvious ones. It seems like focusing there rather than on features is a really hard task for some people. They just can’t get [...]

Reading computer related instructions always frustrates me, because I’m not techie enough to know what the words mean. When they say “enter name” my first question is “what name?” My name, the website name, the web host’s name? What??? From there it generally gets worse. The people who wrote the instructions knew what they meant, [...]