I’m expecting a big day today where we really roll out the Craigslist campaign.

We got some of our ads built and are ready to start being posted. Now comes the testing phase where we see how effective these things really are.

I spent all day studying up and learning about some of the posting tactics and looking at what the competition is doing. Then I started posting a few ads to see how the process worked in the real estate section.

I also posted again about the open house we were having out at the $1.339 million property from 1 PM to 4 PM. That was quite a success because we had one buyer from Fort Worth come through and another buyer we’re talking with.

It was a little bit out of the Fort Worth guy’s price range but he is going to work with our real estate business. Steve’s phone died so the other guy couldn’t get a gate code but we’re going to follow up with him to see what he is looking for.

Overall, for our first luxury open house it was a smashing success. This further reinforces open houses still work especially when you can be productive during the down times of the open house.

Since Steve has Internet access through his cell phone he can be doing calls to generate more leads, doing what he needs online in terms of e-mail and other communications, and he also took Gary Keller’s book “The Millionaire Real Estate Agent” for reading.

So it can be totally productive time even when there aren’t any buyers walking through.

Andrew and I also attempted to get the new iMac working with BootCamp and Windows. That was a colossal disaster which caused us to have to format the hard drive.

Fortunately, I have some experience dealing with new programs and operating systems. So we got a time machine backup of the entire hard drive before beginning the process. This turned out to be a prophetic decision.

There were tons of video files and other software on there which we simply could not have gotten back with out doing the backup.

Saved us hours of time and incredible frustration by having this backup. It still wasted about 11 hours attempting to get the system to work because the Windows disk was stuck in there and it kept booting to it. For some reason iMacs don’t have an eject button on the CD drive.

Finally, after doing some reading on forums I saw some guy give a tip that if you hold down the mouse button during start up the CD will eject.

Then we got a new copy of the Snow Leopard disk, completely wiped and formatted the hard drive to be Mac compatible, then install BeOS, then did the time machine backup process.

We had to do a little research to figure this out but it came over successfully and I’m very impressed with the time machine backup system that Apple has. It was smooth and seamless once we understood the steps in the process.

If we ever have to do this again it will go much faster and smoother.

Overall, there were some setbacks but we learned a lot and got validation on the open house’s as well as what we need to do on craigslist. So it was a good day.

Follow all the stuff we’re doing on the 45 days to freedom small business marketing challenge on twitter.

I had some ideas rolling around in my head last night about different video scripts and things we should be doing. Steve mentioned that Rocky Creek had sold over 47 homes already and it’s only been open in 2011.

This is a new neighborhood which is only 3 1/2 months old and has already sold 47 properties. It’s definitely the hopping neighborhood and the hottest one around in Austin.

So we’re doing a major shift to focus on selling homes in the Rocky Creek neighborhood.

I started developing some sample video scripts we’ll use for this campaign. It’s going to be a point of our focus for the finish of the 45 days to freedom small business marketing challenge.

I also worked on a checklist for how to build and post our craigslist ad. This is going to be a major point of focus so we have to do this correctly.

The notification feature on our mobile marketing platform is still not fixed even though our contact said it was. Don’t have any idea on a timetable for when it will be corrected.

Steve and Andrew went out to the luxury property where we’re having the open house tomorrow on Good Friday. The new wide angle lens is performing spectacularly well for getting video footage inside of homes.

This is an absolutely spectacular property which it would be fantastic to get sold today. Definitely worthy of the $1.339 million price tag carries.

It also got Steve’s juices flowing again. He’s excited about the possibilities.

I posted a couple of ads on craigslist promoting the luxury open house on Good Friday. One was just a basic ad and the other included the video footage. We had created a video the night before which came out pretty well.

I also posted it around on Facebook. Steve and Barb also posted it to their Facebook.

On the way back Steve and Andrew stopped in the Rocky Creek area to get some video footage there. It was windy as hell but they did get some quite spectacular footage.

Back at the HQ we met up and did a daily run down. Then the most exciting part of the day happened.

Earlier in the day I had contacted a couple of people off of Craigslist regarding their Apple computers. I talked with a guy named Matt about his 24 inch iMac that met my price criteria and also had the hardware I wanted.

It’s been about a two-week process monitoring Craigslist so I was getting tired of it.

Only the day before I had a spectacular Mac Pro that I had found for 1200 bucks which had a 3.4 GHz quad core, 16 gigs of RAM, 4 TB raid hard drive, 2 extra 1 TB hard drives, all kinds of software, a TV out black magic card and it was an absolutely sweet system even though it was from 2008 so already three years old.

So we got there even though it was way out north off of North Lamarr to test out the system. Everything checked out in terms of the hardware and software that I wanted on it so I bought.

We’re now ready to rock when it comes to video editing and being very productive and efficient.

Upon returning to the HQ we enjoyed some pizza because Papa Johns was doing a buy one get one free day.

Andrew was recording a webinar about Google’s latest update. I’ll be interested to check this out tomorrow.

Barb started her Bold class today. We did a recap and it seems like an excellent program which is really going to move her forward in the business. I can see her skills increasing already.

Tremendous productivity today and you can follow all the small business marketing challenge updates over on twitter.

I had some administrative stuff which had to be dealt with including billing clients, e-mailing my coder over in Thailand, and contacting one of my clients about a paper click campaign we’re looking to get started.

I had to prepare reports and charts to show the progress of my clients which always takes longer than expected.

I also wanted to talk with Josh who I met at Sente Mortgage yesterday about who created and edited their promotional video for their unlimited video marketing workshop.

So that ate up my morning.

Steve was very productive with high quality phone calls yesterday. He got done with 18 phone calls and had 4 warm to hot leads of people looking to move or buy property.

Andrew also made strides creating more Craigslist ads as well as getting our video homebuyer series edited and uploaded. Now we’re ready to unleash the full marketing campaign to promote these videos.

Continuing education is always something you want to be doing so I checked into a luxury short sale home workshop. This is the area of the market we targeted to specialize in and so these tactics will be highly useful.

Also set up an MLS search which will alert us to any status changes in the properties we’re marketing. This is just good business because when a property goes into a contract pending sale and is no longer available to buyers you don’t want to keep marketing it on Craigslist because it will upset the community.

Respect the communities you run in and communicate in. This is just good business 101 whether it’s a free website or something you’re paying $5000 per month for.

Barb also met a potentially lucrative contact who works out at the reserves at Lake Travis. He just sold a lot for $2.5 million and says he doesn’t have any realtors to work with so we’ll be following up with this over the next day.

She made a couple of other excellent contacts of potential sellers. And she also starts the Bold training program through Keller Williams tomorrow which should be awesome. She’s going to be focused on getting listings which means honing in on expired, canceled, withdrawn, and for sale by owners.

Times are getting more exciting as progress continues to be made. Follow all the progress on the 45 days to freedom small business marketing challenge over on twitter.

So I work up extra early at 8 AM because I need to do a few things before leaving. I ended up talking on the phone right when Brian called. My roommate also asked me to ask to interview me for a paper he is writing for his college class.

This was an unexpected detour of time but I did wake up early and so took the 10 minutes to help him out.

One of the most important things I’m learning in the CD series “Good to Great” is your “stop doing list” is as important if not more so than your “priority list”.

I knew we had meetings at Sente Mortgage and to learn Final Cut Pro at the Apple store at Barton Creek at 4 PM. So our afternoon was basically taken up.

We had the time block from 10 AM to 11:30 AM to get 3 Screen Flow videos shot and in the can. Steve got some good practice in on his first 2 takes but we didn’t get final footage.

The meeting at Sente Mortgage was outstanding and I got a number of good golden nuggets we can put into play right away.

A couple of things to take note are that people under the age of 40 would rather YouTube search something then Google search it. This was a major revelation to me to confirm this only because I usually go to YouTube first myself.

YouTube is now the world’s 2nd largest search engine.

The other revelation is that 73% of people online would prefer to work with a real estate agent who uses video but only 12% of agents actually use video. So this is a gaping hole in the marketplace that we can fill and take advantage of in a massive way.

And we’re already on the fast track but this was excellent confirmation and validation we’re taking the proper steps and prioritizing the right activities.

Final Cut Pro is an extremely powerful tool and I’ll definitely have to go back to multiple sessions to get a better handle on how to maximize all of its capabilities. And its capabilities are so vast I may never know the full extent of them.

But the upside is it’s so powerful we’ll probably never need to use its full capabilities for the videos we’re doing. We can crank out some pretty damn professional looking videos right now using the skills we have.

Once we got home Steve did a final take through and got the screen flow videos done. So they are in the can ready to be edited. Then we’ll upload them to YouTube and start promoting the heck out of them.

We also went on a wild goose chase for an iMac 24 inch on craigslist I’ve been hunting down. But as these things sometimes go if it was meant to be the deal would have happened. Since it did not I’m okay with that and still on the search for another deal.

Follow the story as the plot thickens in the 45 days to freedom small business marketing challenge here on twitter.

I got fantastico to install WordPress on one of my domains that I’m probably going to be hosting a contest on. I want to build up a massive site very quickly and the only way to do this is to crowd source.

So now I have to design exactly how the contest works, the rules, and be able to display it in an incredibly simple way that someone could take a 10 second glance at it or less and know exactly what is going on.

Anything too complicated in this world almost never works.

I also had to deal with some tax issues and Steve did as well. This burned up most of the morning and no lead generation activities got done.

On the bright side Andrew did get another 20 of our craigslist ads built.

So he was very productive even though Steve and I went by the wayside. The later afternoon did get better because we had a meeting with Blake at 5 PM.

The meeting went well and I talked with her about some of my contest ideas which she got really excited about. She knows it can work fantastically well which only confirms my belief that I’m on the right track.

Right before Blake got there I was working on some keynote presentations for the screen flow videos that Steve is going to be doing. Microsoft PowerPoint for Mac was totally crapping out so we had to go over to keynote.

It works very smoothly and I was able to get those completed.

On the outside in the evening for Steve he found a customer relationship management free software called Soho which integrates well and with Google calendar.

Then we talked more about my vision for the company, how Steve sees the business going, his reading of the book “the millionaire real estate agent”, and overall how the contest is going to work and run.

Despite some setbacks things are coming into focus and falling into place. Follow all the updates about the 45 days to freedom small business marketing challenge right here.

This was a very revealing search to see how different people are grabbing homebuyers attention. And also to see what kind of ads they’re using in terms of images or text only.

I also texted back-and-forth regarding an Apple Computer and am looking to set a meet tomorrow to test out the system. We definitely need a newer more powerful Mac so we can do all of the video editing we need to do.

I also watched Barbara Holden’s webinar on how to do video. She was a Hollywood insider who now teaches businesses how to boost their business using web video and YouTube.

Follow along with all the small business marketing challenge updates.

I also called James our contact over at our mobile marketing platform to fix a notification problem we were having. When we start generating tons of leads I want Steve to be notified every time a lead comes in so he can follow up with a phone call within 10 minutes.

This is the kind of response people searching on the Internet expect and will allow us to rise above making Steve their preferred choice for real estate agent.

We ended up having to put in a support ticket with the mobile marketing platform. Hopefully that will be fixed by Monday because that is when we are rolling out our lead generation campaign en masse.

I talked over a couple of other ideas with Steve before he was off to attend a wedding. And later I was attending my sisters dance performance because she is on the Texas State Strutters team.

It was a restful yet productive day. Follow all the small business marketing challenge updates here at my twitter feed.

Ken is our contact over there and we talked about many interesting things. He mentioned some of the things he was doing in his business which  increased his business in 2010 by over 30%.

He’s doing mostly old-school things sending out e-mail communications and information through e-mail to his contact list. As well as making phone calls reaching out to his contact list.

Some interesting ideas he brought up that we could potentially use are educational information on the homestead exemption, how to protest your tax appraisal, holiday promotion ideas, seasonal and event style of information, as well as doing some charity things which Gracy Title would be willing to be a sponsor of.

It was definitely an interesting meeting and he will be an excellent contact to have.

The meeting lasted much longer than anticipated going well past 12. I figured it would be a 1-hour meeting but it was definitely a good use of time.

We got back to the office HQ and Andrew got 21 different craigslist ads built. So he was productive.

Steve and I were working on shooting videos. We got this cool free Teleprompter software that is making our videos go so much smoother and better. The eye contact level with the camera and overall competencies Steve has is exciting.

We got done 2 different intro videos and 2/3 of three other educational videos we are making for homebuyers. For the 3 homebuyer videos all we have left to shoot are the middle scenes which will be done in screen flow using a slideshow.

This was definitely the most productive day we’ve had so far in the 45 days.

Barb also got a tremendous amount done. She showed a house to one of the lease clients who put in an offer to get it. She also received an offer on one of her listings which her seller accepted.

It was a buyer who is already preapproved and wants to close within 3 weeks. It was $5000 under the listing price but because of the strength of the buyer and the desire to close quickly the seller accepted it.

She missed out on an almost $800,000 listing but we learned a lot about what we need to improve in terms of her listing presentation. We are working on making this presentation as strong as it can be as we speak.

The 45 days to freedom small business marketing challenge is heating up on twitter.

Steve and Andrew were headed off to his parents house to do some repair work from the hours of 8 AM to 10 AM. Now I’m all for helping family. The big problem is today is Thursday and should be a productive workday.

The beautiful thing about having your own business is you can set your own schedule. The bane about having your own business is you can set your own schedule.

Having your own business requires a resolute discipline to certain core income producing activities which must be accomplished each day.

Our project has been lurching forward in fits and starts not really getting any results or anything done. We’ve had some productivity in terms of foundational structures like websites and some lead systems and ads but no results yet.

We did get a laydown listing for one of their neighbors and Barb has another listing appointment at 2 PM today from a lead which was referred to her by another realtor. The other realtor doesn’t work this part of town and knows Barb so sent the lead over.

To get where we’re wanting to go we cannot rely on these type of serendipitous sources. We must get better at implementing the core income producing activities each day in which we know the numbers are going to lead to the result we want.

The biggest thing about knowing your numbers is knowing what parts of the equation you have command over and doing enough activity in that part of the equation to lead you to the results you want. You know the process and what it will lead to so when you implement it the results are guaranteed.

So helping family has to be done after the core income producing activities are accomplished for the day. Or they can be done on the weekend.

The biggest thing successful companies do is tap discipline in their core income producing activities.

This morning I was able to go through the numbers after seeing Ben Kinney presentation yesterday. It really cleared a lot of things up for me.

I have a much better idea of what our numbers are. Now it’s assigning certain activities to each member of the team and monitoring those results. Tracking our daily income activities is paramount.

So I was able to plan out a sheet and we will now put it up on the white board so it’s there for all to see. This accountability is absolutely critical. You must be accountable to the results in your organization and each result one person must be accountable for ultimately.

I was also able to put together some craigslist headlines for ads in various parts of the market like bank owned properties, lakefront properties and luxury properties. We’ll do some brainstorming with the team to come up with some more of those as well.

Now it’s off to shoot some video footage for our homebuyer intro video as well as the “top 3 free homebuyer tips” video series.

Got over to the office HQ to some very dreaded news. I called Time Warner to see what the problem was with the Internet connection and it ended up that we had to get a new cable modem. The modem had timed out over 200 times in the past 48 hours.

So we had to drive a long way into town to get one and then we get it back and the modem is bad. So completely more time wasted doing that.

We didn’t get back to working on business and having Internet access until after 5 PM. One good thing I did get to do was meet with Barb to really get clear on exactly what activity she was doing and what she defines as income producing activities.

The “bold” program is starting next week which will be excellent for Barb. I got clear with both Steve and Barb exactly what activities and our numbers need to be so we can get to our goals.

We want to get five buyers signed up in the month of April which means we will have to get 250 visitors to our website and they will have to make 250 phone calls.

We achieve this level of activity and the results should be pretty guaranteed. Time will tell of course how successful our process is.

I also got to talk one-on-one with Andrew and get clear on exactly how he felt he was progressing. And also where he felt we were as a team.

He had a very honest assessment and promised to commit to a better level of income producing activity going forward. The fact that Ben Kinney said that craigslist was his number one source for both Internet visitors and leads really had a profound effect on him.

He now believes just how valuable his job really is.

We were able to shoot some footage video footage from about 6 PM to 7:30 PM. But then the sunlight and the lighting started to get bad with the angles so we had to shut it down.

Steve did download a free Teleprompter software which is going to vastly improve our videos. So we’re going to lay down the video footage we need to do tomorrow and it should be outstanding.

We are fully fueled and on the launching pad and a countdown from 10 has begun. We should be able to blast off in massive earnest out into the marketplace starting on Monday.

Follow all the progress and updates about 45 days to freedom small business marketing challenge here over on twitter.

I had to talk with a few people including my brother, my coder in Thailand, and my cabinets client. This burned up quite a bit of time as it always does but was necessary.

After that I talked to Steve a little bit about how the day was going to play out and the things we needed to get done. Then I went to work on the final two videos in the 3 video series for home buyers.

Andrew and Barb went out to a property in Spicewood that had lake views. It’s a probate property which is going to be listed for $2.5 million.

Andrew got quite a lot of video footage and footage of them driving around the neighborhood so this was a very good use of time. Barb got paid to stage this place and give advice to the owners.

Unfortunately, Steve sent both of the ZX3 Kodak camcorders with Andrew so we did not have any camcorders to shoot the video footage we needed to shoot. So that was a bust.

Instead we went over to Flores’ to have some lunch. We got up to the Keller Williams Southwest market Center 30 minutes early for a presentation by Ben Kinney on how he does his real estate business in Bellingham Washington.

This was a very informative 2 1/2 hour presentation. He talked about his top traffic sources, how he’s getting that Web traffic, what kind of conversion tactics he’s using, some of his ads that we could look at a terms of their headlines and body copy, as well as going through some of the scripts he uses when he’s talking with buyers and sellers.

This got my mind swimming with ideas that we can start implementing immediately. It was also excellent validation for Steve to see someone else talking about the ideas I’ve been talking about with him for the past 3 weeks.

We met up and talked a little bit with Ken Renner who’s a local real estate agent making excellent use of video.

Andrew got the video footage labeled and downloaded from the camera so we have that ready for editing. He also got some of our craigslist ads built.

Steve went to a local meet up group and got to mastermind with some excellent players.

Looking forward to another exciting day tomorrow as the 45 days to freedom small business marketing challenge continues to roar on and you can follow it all on twitter.