BANKING/MORTGAGE NEWS: In today's market your number one rule should be PRE-QUALIFY YOUR CUSTOMERS! In today's mortgage climate, it will be tougher than ever to get financing for marginal buyers. Lenders are being much more careful, looking for more documentation than in recent times (where the down payment comes from, bank statements, pay stubs, tax records, job stability, etc). They're going back to more traditional times.
In addition, non-conforming loans (Jumbo, no doc, stated income, etc) will be harder to get and for those with the score to still obtain them, the interest rate will be higher than before (often 1.5% over as compared to .5 over).
FHA is still a good deal for those looking for 100% financing or where the seller can assist with closing costs &/or down payment. FICO minimum of 585 for FHA & VA, Fannie Mae is 620 and Fannie Mae Flex is 680.
Darren was in Chicago for training and met the CFO of NAR. He felt that there will still be 2.3% growth this year and next year should see 2.5%. He felt the real estate forecast was good and we should see a real rebound by next spring.
Some Real Estate news from our Corner of the world...
1 comment • Kay Bennett, Realtor® Your Cookeville Area Agent! • August 26 2007 07:39PMComputer tips...Keeping your email cleaned up...
Many of you know to empty the trash in your email software to help keep the size of your mailbox reduced. But did you ever think about your SENT folder? Most email software keeps a copy of every email you send unless you have your option set to not do so. It's a good idea to go through it once in a while and delete the sent messages you no longer need. We had a recent case where a user's sent folder was so full that when it tried to send a new message that was quite large, it would fail because it couldn't store the message in the sent folder. Next time through, it would try to send again. This resulted in the recipient getting anywhere from 2-20 or more of the same message. In addition, some email programs (Outlook Express and Thunderbird come to mind) allow you to compact the folders to reduce the space used on your hard drive. For more information use the HELP function in your software.
2 comments • Kay Bennett, Realtor® Your Cookeville Area Agent! • August 26 2007 07:35PMBasic Computer Housekeeping tips....
Is your computer getting sluggish? There are some basic things you can do to improve its performance. (NOTE: The following steps apply to WinXP and Internet Explorer but should be similar for other Windows systems). This is a good thing to do after cleaning up your email, deleting old messages, sent messages and emptying the email trash.
First, restart your computer first, close any programs that run at startup (email, browser, etc. but NOT virus software) Next, clean out unused temporary files
1) Click START/RUN
2) Type %temp%
3) Hit Enter
4) A window will open displaying all the temporary files on your computer.
5) Click the DATE MODIFIED column title to sort by date
6) The system will not allow you to delete files currently in use so you want to highlight all files EXCEPT those with the current date
7) Click the DELETE button or choose FILE/DELETE 8) Close the window Now, clean out your browser cache and set it to clean automatically
1) Click START/CONTROL PANEL
2) Click INTERNET OPTIONS
3) If your days to keep history is more than 7 days, you might want to reduce that
4) Click DELETE FILES (this will clean out your browser cache - copies of all the pages you've viewed)
This can take several minutes if you have never done this before....just be patient.
5) Click the ADVANCED tab at the top
6) Scroll down to the security sub-section
7) Check the box that says "Empty Temporary Internet Files folder with browser is closed)
8) Click OK Now is a good time to delete any old files you no longer need...
1) Right-click the START button
2) Choose EXPLORE
3) Look through your folders & files, deleting anything you no longer need
4) Empty your recycle bin (right-click and choose EMPTY RECYCLE BIN) Last you will defragment your hard drive, optimizing it for quicker access to programs & files.
1) Close any running programs
2) If you have a MY COMPUTER icon on your desktop, right-click and choose PROPERTIES or
2) Right-click the START button, Choose EXPLORE, right-click your C drive and choose PROPERTIES
3) Click the TOOLS tab
4) Click DEFRAGMENT NOW
5) Click DEFRAGMENT Depending on several things (size of hard drive, computer processor speed, any running programs, how fragmented the drive is), this could take quite a while. You can pause and resume it if needed. 6) When done, restart your computer.
4 comments • Kay Bennett, Realtor® Your Cookeville Area Agent! • August 26 2007 07:31PMArticle marketing...tips
Article Marketing - Articles Are The Quickest Way To Your Customers Wallet
One way of promoting your website and product can be achieved for free. As an additional bonus, this free method can boost your sites and sales, doubling and even tripling your income.Articles. One of the easiest ways to promote your website in order to generate traffic and increase your earnings.
How does this work?
Write articles relating to your website and submit them to free content submission sites. Easy to do, takes little time and can increase your website traffic, sales and of course, your income.
How can article writing boost traffic and income?
The article on the free content site contains a link to your own website. Readers, after reading your articles, may choose to click on the link and pay you an unexpected visit. Having them on the free content sites is also making these articles available to other webmasters who may wish to publish that article on their site.
If they do, your article will include a link back to your site. And anyone who reads the article on that site can still click on the link to visit your site.
As the list of your published articles grow larger, and more and more of them are appearing on different websites, the total number of links to your site increases also. Major search engines are placing a lot of significance on incoming links to websites so they can determine the importance of a certain site.
The more incoming links the website has, the more importance search engines attaches to it. This will then increase your websites placement in the search results.
If you site is into promoting a product or service, the links that your articles have achieved will mean more potential customers for you. Even if visitors only browse through, you never know if they might be in need of what you are offering in the future.
There are also those who already have specific things they need on their mind but cannot decide yet between the many choices online. Chances are, they may stumble upon one of your articles, gets interested by the contents you wrote, go to your site and became enticed by your promotions. See how easy that is?
Search engines do not just index the websites, they also index published articles. They also index any article that is written about your own websites topic. So once someone searches for that same topic, the list of results will have your site or may even show the articles that you have written.
And to think, no effort on your part was used to bring them to your site. Just your published articles and the search engines.
It is no wonder why many webmasters are suddenly reviving their old writing styles and taking time to write more articles about their site than doing other means of promotion.
Getting their site known is easier if they have articles increasing their links and traffic and making it accessible for visitors searching the internet. Since many people are now taking their buying needs online, having your site on the search engines through your articles is one way of letting them know about you and your business.
The good thing with articles is that you can write about things that people would want to know about. This can be achieved in the lightest mood but professional manner, with a little not-so-obvious sales pitch added.
If you think about it, only a few minutes of your time is spent on writing one article and submitting to free content site. In the shortest span of time also, those are distributed to more sites than you can think of. Even before you know what is happening, you are getting more visitors than you previously had.
If you think you are wasting your time writing these articles, fast forward to the time when you will see them printed and wide-spread on the internet. Not to mention the sudden attention and interest that people are giving your website and your products or services.
Try writing some articles and you will be assured of the sudden surge in site traffic, link popularity and interest. Before you know it, you will be doubling and even tripling your earnings.
Nothing like getting benefits for something you got for free.
Provided by Ray DuGray & Maria Ngo, 'The Entrepreneur Doctors'
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1 comment • Kay Bennett, Realtor® Your Cookeville Area Agent! • August 26 2007 04:34PMWeb traffic tips...
Web Traffic - How to Build a Google Sitemap.
Google has implemented a cutting edge method of crawling web site for its search engine index. This unprecedented method of indexing web pages is known as Google Sitemaps, and it is quickly growing in popularity among webmasters and SEO agents and managers due to its ability to get entire web site indexed quickly and to pick up errors in the links coming into and out of these web site.Google Sitemaps consists of placing the URLs of your pages along with important information regarding how Google should index them into an XML document. This information is then read by the Google Spider and the pages are normally indexed quite quickly assuming that they are coherent to Google's standards for indexing pages (and also assuming that the sitemaps conform to Googles Sitemap Criteria which will be explained a little later).
There are two primary types of Google Sitemaps. The first is a list of pages in a website and the second is a list of sitemaps in the website. Google has limited the number of URLs in its sitemaps to fifty thousand URLs. This may sound like a lot, but for some of the more intricate web site, fifty thousand URLs may not even make a dent in what they want indexed.
This led to the advent of the Google Sitemap index file which can index up to one thousand sitemaps. If you do the math, this means that you could have one thousand sitemaps with up to fifty thousand URLs in each sitemap which allows for fifty million URLs to be placed in your Google Sitemap scheme. But wait, there's more. Who ever said that you can't have an index of indexes? You could actually make an index of a thousand index files which are all indexes of a thousand index files. Basically, there is no limit to the number of URLs that you can hold in your Google sitemaps.
Now that you understand the power of the Google Sitemap you're probably asking yourself how to create and implement a Google Sitemap. The first step is to simply create your sitemaps. Here are the templates which are also available at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
For a sitemap file use the following format:
http://www.example.com/
2005-01-01
monthly
0.8
http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&desc=vacation_hawaii
weekly
http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&desc=vacation_new_zealand
2004-12-23
weekly
http://www.example.com/catalog?item=74&desc=vacation_newfoundland
2004-12-23T18:00:15+00:00
0.3
http://www.example.com/catalog?item=83&desc=vacation_usa
2004-11-23
Everything here is pretty self-explanatory with the exception of the changefreq and the priority aspects. The changefreq asks how often you think the page will change on average. The possible values for the changefreq option are: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and never. The priority aspect basically just asks how important the particular page is in your website. The value can be anywhere between 0.0 and 1.0. If you decide not to specify a priority it will default to 0.5.
To create a sitemap index file follow the following format:
http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz
2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00
http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz
2005-01-01
This is all pretty straight forward but it leads me to my next point. You notice that the file names all end in .gz. Google allows you to compress your sitemaps so that they take up less of your disk space when you place them on your site and less of your band width when Google downloads them (which it seems to do approximately once every 9 hours or so). You may only use .gz compression. If you try .zip, it won't work.
Now all that you really have to do is submit your sitemap to google. In order to do this you must go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login and log into your Google account. If you don't have a Google account, you can create one. Once you log in you will be allowed to submit your sitemap into the google index. At some point within about 24 hours of your submission, Google will give you the option to place a small HTML file onto your website so that it can confirm that you do, indeed, have access to editing the site. Once you have done this it will begin to provide you with statistics regarding your google sitemap. (Note that even without this feature you can see when google downloaded the sitemap last and what the status of the sitemap was at that time.)
How Google Sitemaps Fits Into Search Engine Optimization.
According to Google, the Sitemaps utility is free and will continue to be yet it s almost as good as the paid inclusion service offered by rival search engines. So how can you take advantage of this great service?
First of all, you should create a Google Account. Although you can still use Google Sitemaps without an account, you need one before you can use Google s tools to check your site submissions. Once you do that and go to sitemaps.google.com, you ll be guided through the process.
Google Sitemaps has a very helpful question and answer page that will give you the help you need the answers to most questions people have can be found right there. Good luck!
Provided by Ray DuGray & Maria Ngo, 'The Entrepreneur Doctors'
Professional Development and Information Marketing Specialists
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1 comment • Kay Bennett, Realtor® Your Cookeville Area Agent! • August 26 2007 04:25PMOnline business marketing...
Online Business - Affiliate Marketing 101
Affiliate marketing programs are a great way to get
income for your website, and a great introduction
to e-commerce. The more people that drop by your
website, the great your chance will be at creating
an excellent income.
Affiliate marketing programs are where a company
offers to pay you a set amount for either a click
through from your website, or a set amount for
visitors signing up, or even a percentage of a
purchase made by visitors as a result of being
referred from your website.
Even if visitors don't make a purchase immediately,
almost all programs offer cookie duration, normally
consisting of 30 - 90 days. What this means, is
that as long as the visitors have the cookie in
their cache, you'll still recieve a profit from
the sale.
The biggest amount of time in maintaining your
site will be searching and implementing affiliations
with various companies. Even though there's a lot
of money in affiliate marketing, you have to take
the time to search for the best programs.
One thing that you may not be happy with, is the
idea of other companies banners littering your
website. If you use too many banners or links on
any web page, it can confuse and help to irritate
your visitors. More than one animated element on
a web page can be very distracting as well.
Affiliate tracking can also be a problem. Once
you have applied to become an affiliate for a
company, they'll usually supply you with a
personalized link or code. It's very important
that you implement this code into your page
correctly, or you may be sending visitors to the
company without recieving any profit.
A majority of snippets in the code will contain
a unique user ID, which the company uses to
distinguish which site sent traffic.
Provided by Ray DuGray & Maria Ngo, 'The Entrepreneur Doctors'
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0 comments • Kay Bennett, Realtor® Your Cookeville Area Agent! • August 26 2007 04:23PMTips on List building...
List Building - The 3 Things To Avoid When Emailing Your List
When you decide to have an opt-in list, it is not just a matter of sending your subscribers your promotional newsletters or catalogs. There are many things to consider in avoiding many complications. While there are so many ways you can make people subscribe to your list, there are also some things you must do to avoid subscribers from wanting to get off from your list.Aside from that, you also want to avoid any problems with the law and your internet service provider or ISP. There are now many laws and rules that are applied to help protect the privacy of the internet users from spamming and unwanted mails. With the popularity of the electronic mail as a medium for marketing because of the low cost, many companys have seized the opportunity and have flooded many peoples e-mail accounts with promotional mail.
But, with an opt-in list, you avoid this annoyance because people subscribe to the list; they want to receive the newsletters and promotional materials. They have consented to being on the list by subscribing themselves, just dont forget to put an unsubscribe feature everytime in your opt-in list so that you avoid any confusion. There may be times when an email account was provided when the real owner didnt want to subscribe.
It is essential that you keep your list clean and manageable. Arrange it by using the many tools and technologies available for your opt-in list. Do not worry; your investment in this marketing strategy is well worth it with all the coverage you will get which will likely be converted into sales then to profit.
Keep yourself and your business out of trouble and potential run-ins with the law and the internet service providers. Keep your operation legit and clean. Your reputation as a legitimate businessman and a legitimate site depends on your being a straight and true marketing strategist. As a tip, here are three things to avoid when emailing your list.
1) Take notice of your unsuccessful sends. These are the e-mails that bounce. Bounced emails, also known as undeliverable messages, are those messages that, for whatever reason, were not successfully received by the intended recipient.
There are bounces that happen or occur because the server was busy at that time but can still be delivered in another time. There are also bounces because the inbox of the recipient is full at that time. There are those bounce messages that are simply undeliverable ever. The reason for this is that it may be an invalid email address, a misspelled email address, or an email address that was abandoned and erased already.
Manage your list by putting markings on those that bounce. Erase an email account from your list so that you have an accurate statistics and records as to how many are actually receiving your mail. You may also want to check the spellings of your email addresses in your list. One common mistake is when an N instead of an M is placed in the .com area.
2) Always provide an unsubscribe feature in your site and an unsubscribe link in your mails. When someone in your list files a request to be unsubscribed, always take that request seriously. If you dont take them off your list and keep sending them your e-mails, you are now sending them spam mail.
When you are reported as a spammer, you and your business can get into a lot of trouble. You can be reported to the authorities and maybe blacklisted by many internet service providers. You will lose a lot of subscribers this way and many more in potential subscribers.
3) Do not provide pornographic or shocking and disturbing content in your newsletters. It is hard to decipher the age of the recipient and many complaints may stem from these. Controversial issues also are to be avoided to not be branded by your subscribers. Stick to the nature of your site and business.
Always remember these tips in this article so that you can have a healthy relationship with your subscribers as well as be kept within the boundaries of what is allowed in sending mails to an opt-in list.
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0 comments • Kay Bennett, Realtor® Your Cookeville Area Agent! • August 26 2007 04:17PMArticle Marketing tips...
Article Marketing - Making Money with Articles: What Kind of Experience Do I Need?
When you are trying to make money with articles, the beauty of it is that you dont really need previous career related experience and that you can learn the ropes as you go. That being said, there are some skills that you will need to teach yourself or pick up along the way to make your sites successful. You cant go in not knowing anything, not learning anything, and still expect to make a good income (or any income at all).
First, you will need to know how to pick out the correct articles to make your sites successful. There are many types of content, from free content to high dollar content, and each comes with its own advantages and disadvantages (although high dollar content is more likely to give you a successful site in the end).
Second, you will need to know how to choose keywords that can help you get a good amount of traffic, without being too competitive to get on the first or second page. If you choose highly competitive keywords that are used by large, mammoth website, you are likely to never get up to those much needed first two pages.
Third, you will need to know how to optimize your websites for various search engines. Search engine optimization skills will allow you to get high rankings for your chosen niche keywords, which will help to get visitors and make profit.
Fourth, if you opt for a large website that you will focus most of your internet marketing career on, you will also need to know how to market your website to your intended audience through paid banner ads and text links. If you prefer very small 2-5 page niche sites, then promoting all of them this way will not be cost effective and will eat up more profits than it is worth.
If you can capture some of these skills and attack them aggressively during your first few small websites or the first few months of a larger website, then you will eventually become an expert. Since you can learn the ropes first hand on your own, the only thing that you will need to do before you begin your new career is to read up on how to get started (maybe purchase an internet marketing e-book or two) and make sure that you have the funds available to start a small site.
Provided by Ray DuGray & Maria Ngo, 'The Entrepreneur Doctors'
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0 comments • Kay Bennett, Realtor® Your Cookeville Area Agent! • August 26 2007 04:15PMInternet Security tips...Top Ten Tools ...
Internet Security - Top Ten Tools to Boost your Internet Security
When you think of security, you likely think of banks and financial institutions or at least companies in fear of corporate espionage. However, they are not the only ones that have to be concerned about security. Anyone, including you, who use a home or business computer to get on the Internet, should be concerned about security. The Internet, though a wonderful tool full of a wealth of information, is also full of hackers, viruses, and scams that can cause your computer a great deal of damage. Luckily, though, there are ways to prevent a lot of what is out there from getting to your computer. There are tools and precautions that you can take. The following is a list of ten that can go a long way in protecting you and increasing your internet security.
First of all, make sure that you have a firewall up and running on your computer as well as a virus checker. In addition, make sure what any firewall that is included in the software that you are using, has been activated and is set properly. Consult a professional or your software s manual to make sure you have the settings on and correctly placed for optimum security.
Secondly, try not to share your computer. Obviously there are times when, especially with a home computer, that there will be multiple users. The problem is more with kids than anything. Children have a tendency to download anything they think they might need without thinking it through. If you do have to share your computer with kids, take time to talk to them about the risks of downloading software.
Third, backup your data often, especially what you consider it to be essential data. If you don t do anything else, make sure you backup your files. Anything you backup can then be recovered if there is a problem. Viruses, worms, and the like can eat up files and before you know it family photos, business files, or important contact information can be lost.
Fourth, make sure you know what you are doing before you download anything. Don t click on any unknown link that asks you to agree to install software to view their page. Sometimes those contain spyware.
A fifth way to increase security is to be careful about any business or sensitive information you access or pass on a public computer. You don t know what has been downloaded onto those computers that could affect your files. Public computers could even have spyware, key logger software, or a number of other programs that could steal sensitive information. If you must use a public computer, make sure you sweep it with some sort of spyware seeking program.
Sixth, carry a flash card with you. You can load your own software onto the flash card for use on any public computer. This will help keep you safe from viruses. You may also want to use it if you are going to be using a family computer that you are not positive its virus and spyware free.
Seventh, be aware of visiting porn sites or anything like that. Those sites often contain spyware, Trojan horses, viruses, and all sorts of nasty bugs. These sites can even have software that will run in the background of your computer without even asking you, so it is a good idea to just stay away.
Eighth is to never open SPAM email while you are still connected to the Internet. Many times, just by clicking on SPAM you may be adding yourself to your own email address to another SPAM list. Often your email address will be used as the sending address and you will not know this, until your account is closed. You can also end up with viruses or worms from clicking on SPAM emails.
Ninth, turn off your Internet connection if you are determined to see what is in the SPAM email. If you really feel like you need to look at a message, but are unsure where it is from, shut off your connection at the firewall first.
Lastly, make sure you have a good virus checker installed on your computer. There are many free ones out there and they work well at protecting your computer from viruses. Look for a virus checker with regular updates, even daily updating, and make sure you receive those updates. Virus software will help protect your computer from new viruses and new worms that get discovered on the Internet. By making sure you are updating regularly, you can keep up with the viruses that are out there.
Provided by Ray DuGray & Maria Ngo, 'The Entrepreneur Doctors'
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1 comment • Kay Bennett, Realtor® Your Cookeville Area Agent! • August 26 2007 04:12PMInternet Security...
Internet Security - Dial-Up vs. Broadband - Which is the Safer Alternative?
You ve finally gone high speed with a cable modem or DSL and you love the speed. However, are you taking the right precautions to keep your computer safe? High speed broadband is a blessing. Remember the days when you could go make yourself a snack and go to the bathroom while you re computer downloaded one page? That is no longer true when you have broadband service. Dial-up is limited by the bandwidth of phone lines and web content is getting larger and larger. The bandwidth for dial-up is not usually large enough to send large content file pages in a timely manner. There is new technology that allows you to speed up your dial-up connection. Both NetZero and EarthLink offer high-speed dial-up that are said to be five times faster than traditional service.You will also see advertised on the Internet, special programs to boost speed. As always with any program that you download from the Internet, you need to know the site you are on is secure. You don t want to add Spyware or adware while adding the program to speed up your connection.
I found as an early user of new cable Internet service that it was so much faster I was amazed at how fast my pages loaded. I was one of the first in the city to receive this new service. As more and more users jumped on the high-speed bandwagon, I noticed a slow down to my Internet service. The cable company has fixed that performance issue by adding new channels and splitting the users. This allows the speed, which we can easily get used to and like.
How secure is broadband service? Broadband does have its advantages but there are also some dangers involved as well. First, when you are using dial-up, you are more than likely shutting your computer down when you are done surfing or working on the Internet. With your computer shut down, it won t allow hackers or Spyware to get into your system. With broadband, their boast is you are always connected. I know this to be true; because when I turn my computer on in the morning, it stays on until I shut it down for the night.
While this is convenient, it also poses a danger by leaving your computer exposed to the work of hackers and Spyware all that time. With your computer always on , an important fact to remember is the road to the Internet is a two-way road and Spyware and hackers can be having a field day with your computer.
One such attack is called denial of service and has hit prominent sites like Excite at Home, eBay, and Yahoo. The Undernet, which supports the IRC chat network, has also been hit with this attack. Many experts warn that a particular worm can potentially cripple the Internet and could already have the worms seeded into many computers. They are afraid that these worms will be activated all at once and cause a massive failure of many Internet sites.
Hackers can get into computers that are serviced by these high-speed DSL and cable modem connections and are able to get personal information like credit card and bank account details. Many companies provide the first step in stopping these intruders by disabling the file-sharing program that is on the Windows operating system of their customer s computers. This help prevents other users from seeing inside your computer.
Installing a firewall is another simple and inexpensive precaution. A firewall is just what it says. It builds a wall around your computer to keep hackers and Spyware from getting your personal information. Experts say that once your computer is compromised, sometimes the only cure is to reformat the hard drive. This is something that is time-consuming and frustrating and should be done only as a last resort.
Security issues with broadband connection will continue to grow as many more households start connecting with high-speed connectors. According to Nielsen/Net Ratings, broadband users increased by 134 percent in the past year. They report that nearly 29 million users are connected to a broadband connection in the year 2004. It s mind boggling to think how many more have been added since then.
Enjoy your broadband speed and convenience, but prepare to take the right precautions to keep your computer safe.
Provided by Ray DuGray & Maria Ngo, 'The Entrepreneur Doctors'
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1 comment • Kay Bennett, Realtor® Your Cookeville Area Agent! • August 26 2007 04:10PMContent © 2009 'Frequent Contributors'. Design © 2009 ActiveRain Corp.
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