Small Business Marketing – Apr 22 – Day 32 of 45 Days to Freedom Challenge

Started bright and early today at 8:30 AM.

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.