Business

Revolutionizing Your Real Estate Marketing with Just Sold Postcards

white printer paper on black round table

In the rapidly evolving world of real estate marketing, keeping up with the latest strategies is essential to stay ahead of the competition. One such marketing tool that has proven effective recently is the Just Sold postcard. Real estate agents can use this traditional yet powerful method to showcase their recent successes and gain new leads and clients. This article explores how Just Sold postcards can revolutionize your real estate marketing efforts.

Just Sold Postcards: An Old School Approach with a Modern Twist

While the digital era has undoubtedly changed how we market properties, there’s still something to be said about the personal touch of tangible marketing materials. Just Sold postcards take the best of both worlds by combining the charm of a traditional postcard with modern design and marketing techniques. By sending these postcards to potential clients, you demonstrate your success as an agent and make a lasting impression.

Tailored Design and Messaging

To make your postcards stand out, it’s crucial to customize them with a design that reflects your brand and includes key information about the property. High-quality images, relevant data, and a concise message can go a long way in attracting attention. Remember to add your contact information and a call to action, inviting recipients to contact you if they want to sell their property.

Targeting the Right Audience

One of the primary benefits of these postcards is their ability to target a specific audience. By mailing them to homeowners in a particular area or demographic, you can focus your marketing efforts on those most likely interested in your services. Conduct thorough research on your target market and neighborhood to ensure your postcards reach the right recipients.

Boosting Your Credibility and Trustworthiness

These postcards are an excellent way to showcase your accomplishments and establish yourself as a successful real estate agent. You demonstrate your ability to secure client results by sharing information about recently sold properties. This can build trust and credibility with potential clients, increasing the likelihood of them choosing you as their agent when they decide to sell.

Encouraging Word-of-Mouth Marketing

In addition to directly reaching potential clients, these postcards can also spur word-of-mouth marketing. When recipients see that a property in their neighborhood has sold, they will likely discuss it with friends, family, and neighbors. This can lead to increased interest in your services and potential new referrals.

Implementing a Strategic Mailing Schedule

Developing a strategic mailing schedule is essential to maximize the effectiveness of your Just Sold postcards. Consider incorporating seasonal themes or local events to make your postcards more relevant and engaging. Consistently sending postcards after every successful sale can help to keep your name fresh in the minds of potential clients.

Measuring Success and Adjusting Your Strategy

To ensure your Just Sold postcard campaign is as effective as possible, tracking your results and making adjustments as needed is vital. Keep records of the number of leads generated, the response rate, and the overall return on investment. Use this data to refine your targeting, design, and messaging, continually improving the impact of your postcards.

Conclusion

Just Sold postcards are a proven marketing tool to help real estate agents attract new clients and showcase their success. These postcards can revolutionize your real estate marketing efforts by combining old-school charm with modern design and targeted messaging. To maximize their effectiveness, tailor your design, target the right audience, implement a strategic mailing schedule, and measure your success. With the right approach, these postcards can be a game-changer in real estate marketing.

Ella Raven

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Business

5 Data Backup Mistakes that Could Bankrupt Your Startup

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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

In the current information age, data disasters have become the biggest threat to businesses. Based on a 2024 data loss statistics report, 51% of businesses that suffer data loss shut down within two years, and 43% never reopen their doors. Although most startups take the precaution of backing up their data, many of them do not do that properly. In this article, I will list five of the most common data backup mistakes that could derail your startup and how to fix them fast.

Table of Contents

Mistake 1: Taking cloud storage as backup

One of the biggest misconceptions is taking data sync on cloud storage as an auto backup mechanism. Actually, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox are storage solutions, not backup solutions. Data sync helps when your local device is damaged or lost. But if you delete an important file on the local device by mistake, or your file is encrypted by ransomware, the copy on the cloud drive will also be deleted or encrypted.

I’ve encountered many such cases. For example, a design company enables sync between the local drive and Google Drive. One day, the hacker attacks their local systems and encrypts all the drawing files. When they detect the attack, they resort to Google Drive, but only find that all the copies on the cloud are also encrypted!

Solution: Find or implement a true backup solution that will create a separate and isolated copy of your data. The solution can be based on cloud storage. However, recent trends show ransomware will not only attack the original data, but also infect the backups. Therefore, to protect your backups from ransomware, it is better to make a backup that is completely physically isolated from your device and the internet.

Mistake 2: Backup via copy

Startups normally ask their employees to back up via copying files to an external hard drive, to save the cost of purchasing a professional backup solution. But this method has the following disadvantages:

Over time, it will become more and more complex to manage multiple backup versions.
Backing up duplicates files and data repeatedly in different backup versions, wasting a lot of time and unnecessary disk space.

Solution: It is more cost-effective to choose a professional backup solution because it can:

Manage the backup versions on different time points easily.
Most of the solutions support incremental or differential backups, which will only back up the difference since the last backup or last full backup, saving a lot of disk space and time.

Mistake 3: Manual backup

Similar to mistake two, startups normally choose to backup manually instead of automating the process. But there are many problems with this method:

Employees may forget to back up even if there is a regular backup policy.
Due to human inertia, employees who initially follow the backup rules may gradually begin to slack off.
The backup process will consume a lot of time and system resources, affecting the normal workflow of the employees.

Solution: It is always recommended to automate the backup process, because:

Data will always be backed up on the scheduled time, not affected by human factors.
By scheduling backup time on off-business or off-peak hours, the backup process will not affect the normal workflow or the computer performance greatly.

Even if you cannot automate the backup process completely, you should choose a solution that allows you to perform the backup via one-click or one-press instead of a lot of operations, which will make employees more willing to perform the backup regularly.

Mistake 4: Backup without encryption

Many startups will use various mechanisms to protect their sensitive data, such as privileged access management, multifactor authentication, etc., but neglect the protection of their backup data. Whenever the backup devices are lost, stolen, or the cloud data center for the backup is invaded by hackers, a data breach occurs.

IBM report shows that the global average cost of a data breach in 2024 is 4.9 million USD.
Other than financial losses, data breaches can also lead to compliance issues and may even result in business closure.

Solution: Find a backup solution with encryption support. Make sure you:

Use high-strength encryption algorithms. It is recommended to use AES-256 to encrypt and decrypt the backup data since it is fast and secure.
Do NOT use obsoleted or insecure algorithms, such as DES and 3DES.

Mistake 5: Backup without validation

Completing a backup is not the end of your data protection journey — it’s just the beginning. The next step is to validate the integrity of the backup data to make sure it can be restored successfully when needed. Validation is very important because:

Backup is time-consuming and typically involves a huge volume of data, so any error in the process can corrupt the entire backup.
With the elapse of time, the physical devices storing the backup data will deteriorate, causing data corruption.

Solution: Find a backup solution that supports validation. And make sure you:

Validate the backup immediately after a backup process completes.
Validate the old backups regularly. If possible, automate the validation periodically.

The startups that last longer are those taking data backup as the core part of their businesses instead of an afterthought. By checking and preventing the five mistakes in this article, you are planning for the worst and turning data vulnerability into resilience.

Mistake 1: Taking cloud storage as backup

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Intellectual Insider

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Business

Mark Zuckerberg Reveals Meta Superintelligence Labs

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 41, is reshaping the company’s AI efforts to focus on superintelligence, or AI that surpasses human intelligence.

In a memo to employees on Monday, released in full by CNBC, Zuckerberg announced that a new group called Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL, will house Meta’s AI initiatives going forward. Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old former CEO of AI training data startup Scale AI, will lead the group and assume the newly created role of Meta’s Chief AI Officer (Meta has a separate Chief AI Scientist, Yann LeCun).

In the memo, Zuckerberg called Wang the “most impressive founder of his generation” and said that former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman would “partner” with Wang to lead the MSL team. The new unit will encompass Meta’s existing teams that focus on developing AI models and AI products. It will also include Meta’s fundamental AI research (FAIR) team.

“As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight,” Zuckerberg wrote in the memo. “I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing what it takes for Meta to lead the way.”

Meta previously announced a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI earlier this month in exchange for a 49% stake and fresh talent from the startup, including Wang.

^{Alexandr Wang. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

Zuckerberg also wrote that Meta would bring on 11 new hires for MSL, including researchers from competitors like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The new team includes former Google DeepMind researchers Jack Rae and Pei Sun, OpenAI researchers Trapit Bansal and Hongyu Ren, and Anthropic software engineer Joel Pobar.

In the memo, Zuckerberg said that Meta’s vision for AI was “personal superintelligence for everyone” and that the company was going to start working on its next generation of AI models to debut “in the next year or so.”

^{Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

Meta has a broad reach: Zuckerberg disclosed in May that the company’s AI is used by more than one billion monthly active users across its apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The company is also investing heavily in AI, with plans to spend $60 billion to $65 billion this year alone on AI infrastructure.

Meta also isn’t afraid to spend heavily on AI talent. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated earlier this month that Meta was offering “$100 million signing bonuses” and “more than that” in compensation to many OpenAI researchers in an effort to poach talent.

Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, refuted the claims last week in a leaked all-hands meeting, saying that Altman was “being dishonest” about the signing bonuses and compensation.

“Look, you guys, the market’s hot,” Bosworth said at the meeting. “It’s not that hot.”

Meta is the sixth most valuable company in the world, at press time, with a market cap of over $1.8 trillion.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 41, is reshaping the company’s AI efforts to focus on superintelligence, or AI that surpasses human intelligence.

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Business

En Suite Bathrooms: The Secret to The Perfect Guest-Ready Home

We’re staying with our parents for five weeks in Honolulu, and I wanted to share a little revelation I’ve learned about making a home guest-ready. If you dream of owning a home where friends and family regularly visit—because you genuinely enjoy their company, this post is for you.

Not all of us can afford mega-mansions with separate wings or homes on sprawling lots with multiple structures. If you’re like most people and can only afford one structure on a modest plot of land, then there’s one key feature you absolutely need to prioritize.

En suite bathrooms. That’s right. The key to harmonious, low-friction cohabitation is ensuring everyone has their own bathroom. The more en suites, the better. The term “en suite” comes from French and means “in sequence” or “attached.”

Table of Contents

En Suite Bathrooms: The Unsung Hero of Guest Harmony

During our first week in Honolulu, I found myself waking up between 2 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. every morning—normal hours for me given the three-hour time difference from San Francisco. Unfortunately, nobody else was awake… except for my dad, who’s up by 3:30 a.m. to check the stock market. Cool beans, I didn’t know.

I had my own room, and my mom had hers across the hall. The shared bathroom sits between us—close enough to wake a light sleeper with even the gentlest faucet twist. Not wanting to disturb her, I found a workaround: I quietly crept upstairs and used my dad’s bathroom since he was already awake. Slightly inconvenient, but a solid solution.

Still, I couldn’t help but think: If only I had an en suite bathroom.

To be a courteous guest, I kept 85% of my toiletries in my room and left only my toothbrush, floss, and toothpaste on the bathroom counter. I even tucked them neatly to the right, so I took up minimal space.

A few days later, my mom asked me to move them. Apparently, I’d placed everything too close to the light switch, and she’d knocked over my electric toothbrush multiple times. My bad.

From then on, I moved those few items to another shared bathroom upstairs, the one my wife and kids use. But given it was already cramped, my stuff was regulated to a shelf in a closet.

Once again, I thought: If only my mom and I each had en suite bathrooms.

The Bathroom Ballet Continues

One afternoon, after a full morning of school drop-off, pickleball, the beach, and lunch, I took a well-earned nap. While I was sleeping, my wife walked to the local library to pick up books for the kids. When I woke up, I decided to use her upstairs bathroom instead of the downstairs one—just in case my mom, who’s always home, needed it.

Mid-grunt, my dad came to the back of the house to ask me a question. Two minutes later, my wife knocked on the bathroom door. She was back and needed to use it too. What was supposed to be a peaceful five-minute solo session turned into a series of interruptions.

Then, on another morning, I woke up at 4:30 a.m. to publish my post, Sleep In, Stay Broke: Wake Up Earlier for Financial Success. With a title like that, I had no excuse not to rise early. After writing and editing until 6:40 a.m., I went to the bathroom. Fifteen seconds in—like clockwork—my wife woke up and came straight to the door.

Finally, while staying at my aunt and uncle’s beach house, I slept on the futon in the living room. At 6:15 a.m., I got up to use the bathroom, which sits between the living room and my son’s room. Within seconds, he flung the door open with a big smile and shouted, “Good morning!”

Ah, more en suite bathrooms would be nice.

More Bathrooms = More Peace And Harmony

When you gotta go, you gotta go! Any type of delay or hinderance can be incredibly annoying, especially if you’re digestive system is plugged and you need to focus. The more bathrooms, the better.

What I’ve noticed over the years is that when people live together, their bathroom cycles somehow sync up. Even if I wake up at 4 a.m. and my wife gets up at 6:30 a.m., there’s still a high chance we’ll both need the bathroom at the same time at some point in the morning. Same goes for me and my parents.

In the past, I used to look down on large homes with as many bathrooms as bedrooms, or even more. It seemed excessive. But now I get it. It’s not about indulgence—it’s about comfort, privacy, and avoiding frustrating sighs in the hallway.

My parents’ house has three full bathrooms, which is more than enough for just the two of them. But with six of us under one roof, friction is inevitable. My aunt and uncle’s house has two bathrooms and two bedrooms over maybe 1,000 soft, which is tight for the four of us. But the freedom to be by the ocean is wonderful.

Buy Or Build The Bathrooms

If you enjoy hosting guests, do yourself a favor: rent or buy a home with at least two en suite bathrooms and an additional full or half bath. Ideally, you have an en suite bathroom for every person who lives in the house plus a guest bathroom. Both your sanity and your digestive system will be eternally grateful. In fact, I’m now including this bathroom requirement for anyone searching for the ideal home to raise a family.

When I hosted my parents at our new house for 10 days, I felt 80% less stressed and so did they. Why? Because they each had their own bathrooms—and so did we and the kids. That kind of peace is worth every dollar and then some.

Basic full bathrooms are just fine. However, when designing a luxury master bathroom, consider including dual rain shower heads with a handheld option, a private toilet stall, double vanities, and a deep soaking tub with jets. Make sure you also have an electrical outlet behind the toilet so you can plug in your Toto Washlet. Once you go Washlet, you can’t go back.

Take a look around your home and see if you can convert unused space—like part of a closet or part of your garage—into a bathroom. Even better, if you’re able to expand your home’s footprint, it adds valuable livable square footage, which can boost your resale value.

Final Reason For More En Suite Bathrooms: Your Children And Friends May Visit You More Often

As I think in two timelines, I hope that 20 years from now, my children will still come visit their mom and me. I’ve heard too many sad stories of adult kids going years without seeing their parents. Once they’ve gotten what they needed financially and emotionally, they’re gone!

But with two en suite bathrooms ready for my daughter and son, they’ll have no excuse not to stop by and give their old man a hug and a kiss. And if we really start to get on their nerves, there’s even a separate mini-kitchen and entryway they can use to escape us in peace.

The more inviting your home, the more likely your children, friends, and loved ones will want to visit. This is especially true when you have to convince your spouse to stay at their in-laws.

Since strong, supportive relationships are the number one factor in living a long, happy, and healthy life, adding more en suite bathrooms could quite literally be a key to a life well lived.

Readers, what do you think the secret is to having a guest-ready home where both host and guests are comfortable for an extended period of time? How many en suite bathrooms do you have in your home? What is the ideal number of bathrooms a home should have?

Suggestions To Build More Wealth

Pick up a copy of my USA TODAY national bestseller, Millionaire Milestones: Simple Steps to Seven Figures. I’ve distilled over 30 years of financial experience to help you build more wealth than 94% of the population—and break free sooner.

If you’re looking to invest in real estate more passively or diversify your holdings, check out Fundrise. Fundrise manages about $3 billion in private real estate investments, mainly in the Sunbelt region where valuations are lower and yields tend to be higher. With the Fed embarking on a multi-year interest rate cut cycle, there should be increased demand in real estate in the coming years.

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