[Sliver]

Originally Posted by KTrain

I understand where Table 5 is coming from with this. I'm not a huge fan of spec contests that ask a bunch of people to do work and only one person gets paid for it. Especially when the company/person has the potential to make thousands of dollars off that work. I'm not saying a slogan on a bus bench is going to make Travis a ton of money but the potential is there.

It would be comparable to me asking Travis and a dozen other realtors to write up the description of my house for MLS. Each of them spends time doing it, I pick one, throw away the rest and pay the person that won a pittance of the money I'll be making on the sale of my home.

If Travis offered his $50 on marketingforum.com where only marketing professionals hung out, I think your point would be valid. But he wasn't asking for the help necessarily of professionals; he was asking for anybody's help. Add to that the fact we all hang around posting on this board all day anyway, he was pretty much offering people $50 to do what we normally do for free.

Originally Posted by KTrain

I'll help people with Photoshop questions if they're easy enough to answer. Telling people how to copy/paste and resize an image is quick and is easily found elsewhere on the internet. It's not a skill that takes years to develop.

That being said, Travis I think you'll be wasting your money if you don't put together a marketing strategy for your company. You seem to be throwing as much as you can against the wall, hoping something will stick, when you could be more targeted in your approach to advertising.

I totally agree with this.

Travis, I think you need to remember what you're selling...you. You're not selling houses, you're selling your ability to broker deals between buyers and sellers. Don't waste your money and effort trying to attract attention to one house (e.g. your wacky-inflatable-arm-waving guy) as you stand too low a probability of that paying off.

This also goes for putting up listings on here. People will critique them and nothing good comes from that. If I was your client it would actually piss me off to read what we say about them. Interesting listings like multi-million dollar listings are worth posting, but your average house in Deer Run? What for? The probability of one of the maybe 40 people that check this forum out buying it are so remote that it makes it pointless to do.

Another issue you have to look at IMO is your deal with CP. First thing you should do is get powerful mod privileges in your sub-forum and remove from existence (not just mod edit) any negative posts that reflect poorly on you. This obviously has the potential to limit conversation, but I think the challenge of that will be for you as the moderator to foster a positive, constructive atmosphere here. If you can't, you need to think about this deal because as an outsider looking in, it doesn't seem to be working for you like it could.

As an example of what I'm talking about, take this post:

Originally Posted by Table 5

Wowee, $50.
Next time I need someone to sell my house, I'll offer you a kit-kat for your services.

You should be on that as fast as possible to delete it so it looks like it was never posted. It instantly derailed this thread right out of the gates to obliterate your message. After you removed it, you should have gone back to your OP, added a blurb like "Please note, I'm not looking to take advantage of any professional services...just thought we could all have a little fun brainstorming and maybe us amateurs could show those pros how it's really done." That would hopefully diffuse the concerns of those in the professional crowd. Then a PM to Table 5 thanking him for raising the issue would have finished off your damage control.

Those are just a couple of notes. But the point is basically an expansion of Ktrain's - you need to put a few bucks into talking to a marketing professional to come up with a clear and effective strategy.