Rocky VanBrimmer shared a very personal Real Estate Show with me this morning.
Rocky sent me an email with a link to a Show he produced for his wife’s birthday. Part of the response I sent to Rocky was this, “Are you aware that you can use hard returns in the titles to have them break to read easier?” Rocky’s response back was, “Showing my techno ignorance here, I do not know what “hard returns” means… Would you care to elaborate?”
Two things occurred to me as I read his response. First, I didn’t phrase my response very well. I could have been a lot more specific in my description. And second, I realized this “mistake” is one I see a quite a bit. So, I thought I would do a quick tutorial video on the topic.
Rocky graciously allowed us to use his Show as an example in this tutorial video.
Our Easter/Passover flyer templates have been live for a few days now. And since I wanted to do something different with this announcement. that meant this post had to wait until I returned from the Colorado Realtor Rally.
Be warned, this video is 20 minutes long. It is a “live” recording of my thought process and every action I took to create this Easter Show and Flyer example. It takes you from concept through completion. I started with only the notion that I wanted my greeting to be about Easter eggs. It takes you through how to search and download the photos on Flickr, how to edit them using Picnik and the full Real Estate Show creation, editing and flyer selection process. You’re seeing it in full (except for two pauses)… warts and all. (That includes some of my typing errors.)
I subscribed to Real Estate Shows a few weeks ago after seeing some posted by Missy Caulk and my seller’s love them - really adds to my listing presentation. Just when I was doing the trial run, I found out that RE/MAX has a similar tool in their design center but liked this one better… I have noticed that the pictures on the Real Estate Shows end up zooming into a particular spot that I might not have chosen - is there a tutorial to say what angle is best to take the pictures in the future - don’t want to go back and retake them all. Thanks for your help.
Well, we did have a tutorial on camera movement that I could have sent her to view, but I wanted to test a brand new piece of software, ScreenFlow, so I made the following video to answer her question.
I sent the video to her via email and this was her response:
It worked great – thanks so much – I have changed my shows and very quickly. I am having trouble with the sound on my lap top – very faint and volume is turned up the highest. So, I could hardly hear but the visuals were enough to do this quickly. I love that I don’t have to watch the way I take the picture but can adjust the focus here. Great idea – this is why I chose yours over the free version that RE/MAX offers J and Thanks for the quick response!!
It was, of course, my pleasure. I was asked twice last week why someone would choose to pay for Real Estate Shows instead of opting for some other “free” option. I’ve been asked that question many times. But I’ve never had anyone ask me that question who had actually given Real Estate Shows a try.
There’s an old adage, “free is usually worth what you pay for it.”
Success and mastery are always about the subtleties. Many presentations look the same until you examine them more closely. Then the details emerge, details that mark the difference between successful presentations and those that just go through the motions but don’t deliver great results.
You are in business to get results and earn a living. We’re in business to help you do that.
A very common email came into our customer service department last week. It was a request we get fairly often and it went like this, “I deleted a Show from my account and was wondering if you could bring it back.”
Sometimes this was a mistake, a show was deleted by accident. Since we don’t really delete shows, we would happily “bring it back to life.” But sometimes, a show was deleted because it was the only way to remove it from public view. This removed the show from the account and required a phone call or email to customer support to bring it back.
We thought you should have more control over this. So we’ve added a new Show category called “offline.” When you move a Show into this category, it is no longer visible to the public. The Show, however, remains in the account and you can edit it and view it from inside your account. And you can bring the Show “back to life” by moving it into any of the other Show categories.
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.
