Two days, a computer in the office had a bit of a hiccup. Being a bit of a workhorse, I was kind of time to give the old girl a reformat. So, I thought  I would just do a quick manual back up of the software using my Mozy home subscription. 

Mozy runs a bit of software on your computer and automatically updates your files, offsite on a scheduled basis. 

In running the software I realised two things:

1. I needed to buy more space
2. the software hadn’t backed up anything for the past 30 days!

So I logged into the Mozy site and was very easily able to 225Gb of space, for $19.99/month. Super easy.

I then tried to back up the computer and it took 12hrs to back up 3Gb of data, and had another 10Gb to go before I gave up and started to route around for the old school external hard drive, which I thought Mozy would allow me to replace…

Having reformatted the computer, moved everything over to google drive, I went back to Mozy, to see how I could downgrade my account to the lowest level, for some basic files. I was told that”

You are not allowed to decrease the amount of quota that you currently have.

It’s a shame that they don’t make it as easy for me to save money as they do to charge me money.

So I contacted Mozy through their live chat, which I included below:

Chat Started: 04-27-2012 13:16:01

Chat Log:

Jessica B: Welcome to live chat support! My name is Jessica. Can I please start by having you verify the email address associated with your account?

You: nick

Jessica B: Thank you! How can I help you today?

You: hello. how can i downgrade my mozy accont?

Jessica B: What are you wanting to downgrade it to?

You: i think the minimum

Jessica B: Do you mean the 1 machine, 50 GB account?

You: yes

Jessica B: According to our records, you back up a total of 199.7 GB with us. If you downgrade your account, you will have to deselect all but 50 GB of data from the Settings window in your PC.

You: that makes sense

Jessica B: Do you currently have Mozy installed? It looks like you haven't run a backup in a while.

You: well i’ve tried but it hasnt been working

You: hence the need to go an alternate route

You: i dont want to do this immediately, but I am just trying to understand the mechanics for when i want to do this

Jessica B: It hasn’t been working because you have version 1.16 installed on your computer, which we no longer support. Please log into your account via https://mozy.com/login and click on "Download Mozy". Then download version 2.12 onto your computer and your backups should work just fine from there.

You: how would i have known that?

You: i didnt receive any notification of this?

Jessica B: I didn’t say you were supposed to have known that. That is why I'm telling you now. But we did send out emails notifying our customers. I apologize if yours did not come through to your inbox.

You: sort of an important piece of information for me not to know…with me thinking that the ‘automated’ backups were doing just that no?

Jessica B: That is why it is always a good idea to monitor your backups every once in a while. Mozy is simple, automatic, and secure, but it is also unmonitored. It is up to you as the user to make sure that your backups are working fine. If they're not, we expect that you will contact support so that we can resolve your issue.

You: Well, anyway I am moving on. So I run the new (working) software, then deselect the files I dont want to a total of under 50gigs, and then how do I go about downgrading my subscription?

Jessica B: Yes, and let me go ahead and downgrade the account to a 1 machine, 50 GB account. For verification purposes, what are the last four digits of the credit card number associated with your account?

You: Earlier, I mentioned that I don’t want to do this now, but in the near future.

You: Am I able to downgrade the account from within the new (working) software

Jessica B: No, you will have to contact support to have your account downgraded. Please do so when you're ready to make that change to your account.

You: Thank you

Jessica B: You’re welcome. And thank you for using Mozy support today. As an added value I would like to introduce you to one of our preferred vendor who has offered to perform a complimentary security audit to ensure your Mozy backup and computer are running as efficient as possible. You can go to https://www.itok.net/landing/mozy/ to request the security audit. We highly recommend you take advantage of this service. Please feel free to contact us again with any further questions or concerns!

It be entered into the drawing, please add your email address below and we’ll let you know in 10 days if you one!

[ Offer only eligible for new google adwords customers. If you are already a google adwords customer or have received an earlier coupon from limeyboy.com you are ineligible for this offer ]

The website’s idexable IDX tool enables the active inventory to be credit to the site itself, rather than through iframing. This platform is highly customizable in design and fee. See it live here: Basking Ridge Real Estate

• High earners spend more on marketing.  63% percent of high income earners spent more than $2500/year on marketing
• High earners spend more on technology.More than 50% spend more than $2500/year, 25% spend more than $5000/year

What was really fascinating was the use of websites and social networking. 

• Nearly 50% say they updated their website more than once a week
• 39% of mid income earners update their website or blog only once a month

It’s critical to note a few things. It’s not simply a matter of spending money and assuming that the results will automatically follow. What is most critical is that any dollar spent has to be part of a structured goal focused approach. Spending money without a strategy can be as ineffectual as not spending money at all.

Also, agents who are getting most out of their real estate websites recognize that the project is never finished, and it is the on going addition of new relevant content that is critical to achieving long term goals.

For many agents, their website is the primary conversion point of their marketing efforts. When their site is down, the marketing $ are all wasted.

Typically speaking, most domain names are set up to “auto-renew” on a yearly basis. This is achieved through your chosen domain name registrar having your credit card information on file. You’ll receive an email saying that your domain will expire or renew in 90, 60, 30, 5 days. You may also see that those emails also say, “If you credit card on file has expired” or has been rewed during this time you will need to update the one on file to ensure there is no break in service…or words to that effect.

In our experience in real estate web design, this is the most common reason for domain names unintentionally failing to renew because, let’s face it, when you get a new credit card in the mail do you immediately think that your domain is directly tied to the old one?

So, to avoid this happening to you, why not log into your domain name registrar today and make sure that the domain name on file is currently update to through the renewal date of your domain name!

The example above is for our limeyboy.com page. Now we are offering this service to individual real estate agents and brokers.

Contact us for more details

I love the apps for the iphone, looking through the app store to me derives as much fun as looking through a library of books. One of my recent favorites is Instagram.

Instagram is essentially a camera app. What it does is offer you a series of filters to change the appearance of your images once you have take them. Those filters range from black & white, through to differing levels of color saturations and palettes.  One of my favorites is the filter called 1970′s which evokes childhood memories immortalized in pictures form a Polaroid. 

In addition you can also add blur. This enables you to give the effect of depth of field, which traditionally has only been achievable using an SLR. Even though this is an effect it still creates some lovely results.

What is truly amazing about these filters is how they have the ability to transform the mundane into the sublime.

For real estate agents, who are often struggling with “What to post” using an app like Instagram enables lemons to be made into lemonde. You can take a photo of something relatively mundane, tweak it with a filter and you have something stunning for your site.

What I am not suggesting for one moment is that you replace the photography of your listings with a product like Instagram. However I am suggesting that it is a great too to add some stunning eye candy to your real estate blog posts.

Give it a whirl, let us know how you make out!

After a flurry of initial growth, (20 million in the first few weeks) google+ seemed to flounder a little. No sooner was this reported on NPR, that google announced the next day that the beta trial, the limited invite system google likes to roll out new products, (google voice for example), was to end and the product was going to open up to the plebs. 

This reignited my interest in google+ and I started using it again, the problem then was that google+ wasn’t available to google apps for business users. This meant having to access to it via an alternate gmail account I had, rather than my main email account. However last week google opened up google+ to the google apps users so I could go from my email to the web, to google+ and back again. In one stroke, google made the utilization of their product much more convenient for me.

Yesterday some more good news came out of google, they had added the google+ pages functionality. Before this, all accounts had to be just personal. Great for the social side of life, but pretty useless for business users. You see I think that facebook has taught us, and for some the hard way, that there should be some differentiation between business and personal.

So now you, as a real estate agent can draw an electronic line in the sand between your google+ personal persona and your business life.

So why is this important, or even essential to do for any forwarding thinking real estate agent? 

Anyone who’s familiar with google’s webmaster tools may have noticed a new feature in the user interface recently, namely: +1 Metrics. Essentially google is trying to understand how people rate your content and information. In principle this is rather similar to Facebook’s “Like” tool. The difference being google can see your website’s +1 Metrics, how and what they make of Facebook’s “Likes” is a little less clear.

So in simple terms, if google can see that your site has a legion of followers who have +1-ed your site, that tells gives them valuable insight into your “authority” on the subject matter. Basic maths and common sense  suggest the more +1s your site garners the more likely they are to promote your site further up their index.

This is especially interesting in light of google’s recent algorithm update to focus on “newness” of content. If you are a real estate blogger, who on a regular basis generates quality, insightful, niche based content, encouraging your readers to share your content via +1 is only going to help.

So in short I would recommend setting up a google+ account and then creating a page for your business. Then, in the same way you use your facebook business page start adding content to it…and fast. In addition make sure that you are giving your readers the opportunity to share you content via +1.

The broker model also included our indexable IDX. Now, the information from each listing resides on the website, rather than being integrated through an iframe. This offers huge improvements in SEO.

With the sluggishness of the economy dragging on, the opportunity that the real estate rental market offers is being taken up by real estate agents.

It is estimated that by 2015 home ownership will drop to the level that it was towards the end of the 1960′s. In this time 10,000,000 homeowners will become real estate renters.

This represents both a loss of units in real estate sales inventory but also an increase in the number of rental transactions.

Getting into the rental real estate market has been seen in the past as being an opportunity to catch the first time home buyer while they are still tennants and also as a way to engage landlords with their services both in finding tennants and assisting in purchasing rental properties.

The real estate websites for real estate agent we are building are increasingly featuring rental sections or even dedicated rental real estate websites such as rentals in Princeton NJ and Westfield rentals.