If you lose something that you never knew existed in the first place, what have you lost? And how will you ever know that you lost it?

If a potential client or buyer doesn’t connect with you because they don’t know you’re there, what have you and they lost?

These situations illustrate Opportunity Costs - measured by the lost revenue and profit resulting from inaction. We incur those costs by NOT seizing on a situation, an event, an opportunity.

I call it the cost of What If?

What if I had done…? Would it have led me to seize an opportunity that I didn’t know about, or knew about but ignored? How would that have changed my results? Would my income have increased? Would my reputation be stronger, my referral network larger? Would I have made new friends?

Opportunity cost is rarely tracked or recorded, by companies or by individuals. It’s difficult to measure the result of a non-event.

So why try? Because awareness of opportunity costs often reveal great potential gains by implementing changes that can achieve dramatic improvements in our incomes and in the quality of our lives.

Most of us stay busy in the comfort of what we’ve always done. We fill our available time with the same things. We never step back and ask, “Wait – let’s look at what I’m not doing, that I could be doing to improve my results.” And, “What am I currently doing that I should stop doing because my results suck?”

Here, near and dear to my heart (otherwise known as bias), is a case in point – Internet marketing.

Here’s where, ostensibly, the dots don’t connect:

• More than 80% of buyers begin their home searches on the Internet.
• But only 20% to 25% of the homes shown on the Internet (depending on your information source) use home tours and/or multiple photos.
• This disparity indicates an unfathomable gap between market behavior and Realtor behavior. It suggests that Realtors are not listening to the market. It indicates apathy, arrogance, negligence and many other bad words.
• But the homes all sell anyway.

How can this be?

Why aren’t buyers refusing to buy homes and sellers refusing to list their homes unless and until Realtors provide professional, engaging, attractive Internet presentations? Why do they continue to work with Realtors who seem to blatantly refuse to give buyers and sellers what they need?

Because sellers must sell their homes and buyers must find a place to live. And buyers will endure all the crap, indifference and shoddiness they have to in order to find their castles of choice. And sellers believe that eventually, they will find a buyer.

So is the message, “Forget the Internet; it doesn’t matter what you do, the house will eventually sell anyway?”

No, no, no. For in this sea of seeming consumer indifference lurks Opportunity Cost. And for those who act, there’s money to be made and reputations to be enhanced.

The Opportunity Cost is your lost commissions and profits that will result if you do nothing beyond the minimum (an MLS posting and one photo of the home) with your Internet marketing presentations and presence.

But if all homes eventually sell, how can doing the minimum result in lost commissions?

The answer is also the opportunity. It’s this: Even though all homes sell, the best presented ones sell first. And the Realtors who represent them will earn more money.

Buyers who use the Internet first want to visit the homes whose presentations capture their emotions and give them sufficient, but not too much, information. Only after they rule out those homes do they go on to the next wave and the next. With a 10-month inventory of unsold homes on the market, there is a huge advantage in being seen first. To state the obvious, being seen first also means you get to meet many of these potential buyers before they have chosen their Realtor. Opportunity.

I know that much of this sounds pedantic. I apologize for that. But what drives me nuts about all of this basic as breathing stuff is: Why are so few Realtors doing it? Can someone please explain that to me?

The bottom line is this. There is a significant opportunity to earn more and grow your business by having a strong Internet marketing program. If you don’t do it you are incurring an Opportunity Cost. While it’s true that buyers will go through pain to find their home, they will gravitate to presentations that capture their emotions first.

When you plan your Internet presentation, mentally and emotionally become the buyer. Ask yourself what a buyer wants to see and to feel? Create presentations that deliver that.

Success will not come every time, but over time.

If you don’t know how to copy and paste, we’ve built a little tutorial to help.

I know some of you reading this will be saying, “Seriously? How could someone who doesn’t know how to copay and paste even be surfing the web?” Well, over the past few weeks I have been reminded not to assume anything. Several times over the past couple of weeks I’ve said, “just copy and paste,” only to hear the following: “How do you copy and paste? I don’t understand.” But it’s like anything else. If you’ve never done it, you can’t be expected to know how to do it. Can you?

So, if you don’t know how to copy and paste, don’t be ashamed.

Just click on this link… How To Copy And Paste

I wrote a post a few days ago entitled, A Closer Look At Google Presentations. In that post, I included some very general instructions on hosting your own presentations, Google or otherwise, that included the comment, “download the Google Presentation to a zip file, unzip it and load those files to your own server using FTP.” I then said, “If you don’t know how to do this, let me know and I’ll prepare a separate post about uploading files via ftp.” I received several emails as a result.

Several readers wanted to know more about how to FTP.

So, I thought a video on how to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) applications was in order. In addition, I’ve also tried to explain how URL’s work, so you can properly name and structure your files on your web server. In the simplest of terms, the “slashes” in web addresses are basically saying “then go here.” The graphic below illustrates how this works. The files for this demonstration were uploaded to our server at www.realestateshows.com and placed in the “presentations” folder, then in another folder named “googleftp” and then, ultimately, pointing to a file in that folder named “index.html.”

As you can see, the URL is made up of parts. Each part is referencing a different “folder” on the web server. When you upload your files using FTP, what you are doing is creating a file structure not unlike what you do on your own hard drive. You name files and place them into folders to make them easy to find. Web URL’s are really just short hand for how to find them.

Before you will be able to get started, you’ll need to know your FTP address, username and password. Your web host can provide this information for you. You will enter this information into the appropriate fields provided by the FTP software of your choice. Save the information in your favorites and you’ll never need to do it again. It will look something like this:

Here is a video which takes our Google Presentation from being hosted on Google’s servers to being hosted on our own servers. I apologize if this goes further than those who requested it might have like, but it wasn’t possible to explain FTP without explaining a few other things as well. I did not attempt to cover what FTP software is available, since they all work basically the same. I use Transmit on the Mac, but it’s simply a personal preference.

All over the country, universities put on what is called “The Last Lecture Series.”

It’s a unique program. Faculty members are invited to give a hypothetical final lecture, as if it were the last lecture they were ever going to be able to give before they die. They get to choose the content and it gives them and the audience a chance to hear what they feel is the most important thing they could share before they left.

This past week, 47-year-old Carnigie Mellon University professor, Rancy Pausch was invited to give one of these last lectures. Only in this case, it wasn’t hypothetical. He has only a few months left to live.

His topic: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. (Or enabling The Dreams Of Others)

I heard about the presentation yesterday morning while driving in traffic on the way to Marina Del Rey. Excerpts of the presentation were presented in audio form and I could not resist finding a video of the presentation to watch in full. It’s brilliant. It’s motivational. It’s inspirational. Randy Pausch is one of the creators of Alice, a 3D authoring system that teaches children how to program while having fun creating animations. “The best way to teach someone something is to make them think they’re learning something else,” he says.

He starts off the presentation describing what he was NOT going to talk about: Cancer, things more important than childhood dreams, like his wife and children, and spirituality & religion. However, he did say he had a recent deathbed conversion…. “I just bought a Macintosh.”

Some of his advice:

• Decide whether you are a Tigger or an Eeyore.
• Never Lose The Child-Like Wonder
• Help Others
• Loyalty Is A Two Way Street
• Never Give Up

This is NOT a short lecture. The speech itself is an hour and fifteen minutes long. In my opinion, it was 75 minutes very well spent. Gather your teenagers around the computer and make them watch it. It’s some of the best “television” they’re ever going to see. And a lesson in how to approach life.

For Your Viewing Pleasure

(Hanging head in shame.)

I got scolded by Jeff Turner today. It was all my fault.

OK, he didn’t scold me, but he called me on something when I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER.

I’ve begun posting the listings for my new team, Team Whitten. I got a well meaning email from a friend, asking why I wasn’t using such-and-such fliers because they’re so easy. Well, I just wasn’t. I wanted to BLOG about the listings. But sometimes I don’t know much about the house, or I might not need to throw in a lot of “bloggy” stuff, so a flyer might be a good idea. I tried it.

It was not the Real Estate Shows flyer.

Yes, I heard your gasp from over here! I know! I know!!

WHAT WAS I THINKING!?

That’s just it, I wasn’t. I’ve been busy as heck with my new team and other stuff besides, and I just didn’t think. Jeff called me on it. He was so right.

The other flyer was awkward anyway, I wasn’t really pleased with the way I had to enter everything in. IF ONLY I’D THOUGHT ABOUT THAT.

I have already entered everything for my Real Estate Show anyway. All I had to do was click to tell it I wanted to make a flyer. It displayed lots of choices and told me to pick my favorite. How nice!

I did, and then BOOM, there was a flyer. Really? That’s it?!

OK, I see the error of my ways. I grabbed a little code, went back to by blog and not only was there a flyer – but it ALSO had my lovely Real Estate Show right in it. Yes, it did.

How foolish was I to ever try anything else!!

I humbly apologize, Jeff. I see the error of my ways. I will not stray again.