A New Season in Gaming

A recent study in the U.S. revealed that of the 31.4 million gaming fans, only 30% are female. As a full-time streamer on Twitch, Autumn Rhodes has made a name for herself in the male dominated gaming world. This Toronto based streamer, who started playing games with her dad at a young age, talks about […]

Is Marriage an Outdated Institution?

According to the most recent statistics, the divorce rate, often quoted (even by this author in classes) as 50% of marriages, is actually closer to the low 40 percentile. (Divorce Rate: It’s Not as High as You Think, By Dan Hurley, The New York Times, April 19, 2005). But that does not negate the fact […]

Digitally Designed Water Gardens: Big Bucks! Impressive

Usually a house is a man’s greatest asset; “his home is his castle.” A house or home can easily become the most important possession for a family, which would include its surroundings or landscape. Recently, several of the landscape architects and design associations have predicted trends towards homeowners spending more money to dress up their […]

What Different Options Are Available When You Need To Sell Your House?

For most folks, though, it's not so simple.

Maybe you don't have the equity necessary to pay commissions and fees. And you certainly don't have an extra $10,000 to $20,000 lying around to bring to the closing table... just to sell your home.

Or, you might not be able to sit around and wait 3 to 6 months of open houses and showings until the perfect buyer appears, with cash in hand, to pay you full retail for your house. It could be a job transfer, an illness, or any of life's other unexpected surprises.

In these situations the best thing you can do is hope and pray, or, attack the problem a bit more creatively.

There is one option available that most people overlook when trying to sell their property. One that can help you sell the house fast, get full price, and provide you instant (or close to it) mortgage payment relief. And that solution is selling with a lease option.

A lease option (or rent to own) is when you sell your property to a qualified tenant/buyer using a lease with an option to buy. The lease sets up a predetermined term, which can be anywhere from 6 months to 10 years (depending on what price you need to get to pay off your current mortgage) and an option that sets the purchase price and closing terms.

When selling this way, you get full retail price for your property, which is perfect if you don't have much equity or if your mortgage is higher than the current market price of the home, and you don't have to pay any fees or commissions, since you are selling privately and not through an agent or broker.

Now, you might be thinking, but I don't want to rent my house, I just want to sell it.

When you need to sell your house, things can get quite emotional. On one hand, you want to get the best possible price and terms. On the other hand, you have a timeline that might keep you up at night wondering how you are going to pull it off. In a perfect world, you would […]

Heavy Duty Tow Trucks

Owning a tow truck business can cost a ton of money because of the trucks that need to be purchased, the licenses that need to be acquired, and drivers that need to be hired. Heavy duty tow trucks are an important part of the industry because they are able to tow larger vehicles such as […]

I Want to Travel for a Living – What Are the Benefits?

Travelling is one of the best things that you can do in your life. Instead of purchasing material items and collecting junk in your basement, why not spend your money making memories? Better yet, if you can get paid to travel or work while traveling, how cool would that be? There are definitely ways of […]

Dhamma Vihara

Buddha en Mexico A Conversation between Morgan Zo Callahan and Bhikkhu Nandisena Jilotepec, Veracruz, Mexico It’s been an enjoyable two visits (April, ’08 and April, ’09) to Dhamma Vihara Monastery where I conversed with the abbot, Theravada Buddhist monk and teacher, Venerable Nandisena, and some of his students The retreatants at Dhamma Vihara practice both […]

The Foods You Need to Eat During Pregnancy!

Need some real, practical suggestions for healthy breakfasts, snacks, meals and drinks for avoiding excessive weight gain during pregnancy? Look no further – we’ve even given you a shopping list! PREGNANCY NUTRITION: TOP FOODS TO EAT AND TO AVOID! Pregnancy Nutrition: BREAKFAST IDEAS Fresh fruit smoothie: Blend any fresh fruit (with some natural unsweetened live […]

Samsung S9: More Evolutionary Than Revolutionary

It’s been a busy six months for cell phone manufacturers. First came Apple with the iPhone 8 followed by the highly awaited iPhone X. Google chimed in with its Pixel 2. Now it’s Samsung’s turn to join the party. The new Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ are ready for your chatting, texting and viewing pleasure. […]

Free Local SEO Tools That Belong in Your Kit

US Census Bureau Tool Set

Looking to better understand a target community for marketing purposes? You'll find 20+ useful resources from the US Census Bureau, including population statistics, economic data, mapping and geocoding widgets, income and language information, and much more.

Client Onboarding Questionnaire & Phone Script

Onboarding a new client? Reduce repetitious follow-ups by asking all of the right questions the first time around with this thorough questionnaire and easy-to-follow phone call script from Moz. Includes helpful tips for why you are asking each question. As local SEO veterans will tell you, a missed question can lead to unhappy (and costly) surprises down the marketing road. Be sure you have the total picture of an incoming client in clear view before you begin strategizing.

Location Information Spreadsheet

Vital when marketing multi-location businesses, this free Moz spreadsheet will ensure that you've got all the info at your fingertips about each locale of a company.

*Pro tip: When working with large enterprises, be certain that the data you're inputting in this spreadsheet has been approved by all relevant departments. It's really no fun to find out six months into a marketing campaign that there's internal disagreement about company NAP or other features.

Local Competitive Audit Spreadsheet

Now we're really getting down to brass tacks. When you need to look for answers to the perennial client question, "Why is that guy outranking me?", this free Moz spreadsheet will help you document key competitive data. The end result of filling out the sheet will be two columns of stats you can compare and contrast in your quest to discover competitors' ranking strengths and weaknesses. Need more guidance? Read my blog post in which I put this audit spreadsheet into action for two San Francisco Bay Area Chinese restaurants.

Manual GeoLocation Chrome Extension

Watch Darren Shaw demo using this tool to show how a local pack changes when a user virtually crosses a street and you'll quickly understand how useful this Chrome extension will be in approximating the impacts of user-to-business proximity. Works well on desktop devices.

Our industry still hasn't fully recovered from Google removing the Local Search filter from its engine in 2015, and I still live in hope that they will bring it back one day, but in the meantime, this extension gives us a good sense of how searcher location affects search results. In fact, it may even be a superior solution.

The MozBar SEO Toolbar

Local businesses in competitive markets must master traditional SEO, and the free MozBar provides a wonderful introduction to the metrics you need to look at in analyzing the organic strengths and weaknesses of clients and competitors. On-page elements, link metrics, markup, HTTP status, optimization opportunities - get the data you need at a glance with the MozBar.

Google Advanced Search Operators

Not a tool, per se, but the best tutorial I have ever seen on using Google advanced search operators to deepen your research. Dr. Pete breaks this down into 67 steps that will enable you to use these search refinements for content and title research, checking for plagiarism, technical SEO audits, and competitive intelligence. Be totally wizardly and impress your clients and teammates, simply by knowing how to format searches in smart ways.

Google Search Console

Apologies if it already seems like a no-brainer to you that you should be signed up for Google's console that gives you analytics, alerts you to serious errors, and so much more, but local SEO is just now crossing the threshold of understanding how deeply connected it is to organic search. When playing in Google's backyard, GSC is a must-have for businesses of every type.

BrightLocal's Search Results Checker

This popular tool does an excellent job of replicating local search results at a city or zip code level. In some cases, it's best to search by city (for example, when there are multiple towns covered by a single zip code), but other times, it's better search by zip code (as in the case of a large city with multiple zip codes). The tool doesn't have the capability to recreate user-level results, so always remember that the proximity of a given user to a business may create quite different results than what you'll see searching at a city or zip code level. I consider this a great tool to suss out the lay of the land in a community, identifying top competitors.

Offline Conversion Tracker Form

Give this handy Whitespark form to anyone who answers your phone so that they can document the answer to the important question, "How did you hear about us?" Submitted information is saved to Whitespark's database and tracked in Google Analytics for your future reference and analysis. For local businesses, knowledge of offline factors can be priceless. This form provides a simple point of entry into amassing real-world data.

For Content

What a lot can change in just a few years! When I wrote the original version of this post in January 2014, the local SEO industry didn’t have quite the wealth of paid tools that now exists, and many of the freebies on my previous list have been sunsetted. Definitely time for a complete refresh […]