December Newsletter

Holidays come and go too fast – at least for me.  I enjoy shopping for obscenely colorful sweaters with my Mom, talking football with my Dad even though neither of us actively watch it, and creating distractions so my Aunt can sneak a cigar outside.  These seem like odd traditions: My mom knows people don’t actually wear those ridiculously over-stated / over-sized Christmas sweaters. My dad and I realize we don’t actually know much about football. And EVERYONE knows why my Aunt is always “forgetting something she left in her car.”  But traditions aren't about what we are doing, but about who we are doing it with.  This holiday season enjoy your traditions and appreciate the people around you.

Tally Tutorials

Our customers – particularly new ones – often have the same few questions: How do I download the still photos? How do I link a Virtual Tour to the MLS? How to I navigate the virtual tour? So I’ve created a series of short How-To videos as the answer. New customers will find them helpful, and current customers will find new information they may not have known.  This is an ongoing project and I’d like to expand on my topics.  Reply to this email with some input as to what else you’d like to see. View our current videos online by clicking this link.

Gift Certificates

Order a Tally Tour or a Photo Package as a gift for the Realtor(s) on your list.  Our Real Estate Photography packages start at just $40. Virtual Tour packages start at just $85. Call Amy at 491–3909 or call me directly at 491–8799. We accept all Credit & Debit cards. We will create customized or generic Gift Certificate and get it to you before December 25^th.  If you order a tour on our website, please call or note on your order that it is a gift. If you order a discount package, you may give one of your tours as a gift, just let us know and we will create a Gift Certificate for you at no additional cost.

December Discounts

During the Holidays we are able to purchase, at a discount, the online server space we use for your virtual tours.  This December we have 2 specially priced packages. Buy 2 tours get a third for only $25! Or buy our 5 standard tour package for only $425 (that’s only $85 per tour, a $200 Savings). Click here to purchase one of these specials online (or call to order by phone).

Thank you for supporting Tally Tours as we head into our 6^th year of businesses!

Tally Tours October Newsletter

Get it while it's green

We are still seeing those wonderful summer colors and fall is quickly taking over. This is a wonderful time of year to capture the exterior beauty of your listings before everything gets a little more brown (but we have our "magical" ways of dealing with that when the time comes). Buy a standard virtual tour right now and get $45 off an additional Standard Virtual Tour! Click here

This starts now and goes until the end of October. You must either purchase this deal online through this newsletter or print out email and bring it to your appointment.

Click here to get this discount online.

If you are looking for a special on a package of tours, see the bottom of this email.

I'm Back!

We love our customers and the work we do. We are a budget company that does very little marketing (outside of this newsletter). Customer satisfaction drives our business. I know a lot of our customers have missed me working on their virtual tours. So I've got good news. I'm back!

Over the past couple of months, I attempted to employ someone to do the production, billing, and customer support. It started out great, but over the past few months, I watched as turnaround time slowed, billing was incomplete, production quality faltered, and a few customers let me know how they were feeling about the "new guy". On the other hand, our photographer Amy was very good at picking up the slack when she could. Thanks to Amy's help, many of you probably didn't even notice the problems we were having on our end, and I hope to reclaim the confidence of those that did. I let our office production employee go, and I am now taking over the work of photo editing, virtual tour production, and customer support.

Amy is a great photographer, and I (as selflessly as possible) admit that I am the only one capable of providing the quality that my customers have come to expect from us over the past five years.

Unused Packaged

If anyone is interested, I recently purchased server space for a package of 10 Standard Virtual Tours for a Realtor who intended to purchase the package. That package order didn't materialize and now I have one package of 10 tours which I'm willing to sell for an extremely discounted price of $800 (a savings of over $400 compared to regularly priced standard tour) or I will break this into 2 package of 5 tours at $450 each. To get this steal, call me directly at 850-491-8799. This is first-come-first -serve.

Good luck everyone and may your fall be full of success!

Tally Tours August Newsletter

Social Marketing Tip

For those of you who are "socially inclined" and using sites such as Twitter and Facebook, I found a cool little tool that allows you to quickly and easily post and schedule recurring posts of your listings to twitter. If you have your twitter updates feeding to your Facebook pages, even better!

It's called TweetLister and you can find it at www.tweetlister.com. From the TweetLister Website: "Schedule each listing to post as often as you'd like for a set period of time - until it sells, rents or leases!

Build enhanced listing detail pages. Create broker/owner profiles. Post to multiple Twitter accounts.

TweetLister is the easy, sensible way to use the power of Twitter for your real estate listings.
And best of all, it's FREE!"

New Tally Tour Contact #

You all know the office number for scheduling tours and finding support (850-491-3909), but did you know that our Photographer also has a direct line? If your running late for an appointment, want to discuss a photo shoot that you aren't attending, or just want to speak with Amy, you can call her directly at 850-491-8799.

Also, for all questions, orders, and updates via email, you can reach David directly at support@tallytours.com . I know a lot you are use to emailing me, but the majority of the time I forward your emails to David as he is the one sitting in front of the Tally Tours schedule and computer during business hours.

Re-Using Old Tours

When we shoot a virtual tour, Tally Tours retains all rights to resell, redistribute and use the photos as we need them. This is the standard of photographers rights as long as they are within the legal limits of taking the photos in the first place. Photographers, like other artists, retain the rights to their creation. We have run into circumstances where Realtors who have lost a listing, have gotten upset when they see our photos pop up with the new Realtor. This rarely happens, as we almost always reshoot the property. However, I think it's important to point out how things work on our end. Anyone can pay to use the rights to our photographs... Which is a good thing for everyone because we don't need to completely reshoot the same exact photos just to keep both parties happy (although many times, the new agent want a reshoot anyway), and Realtors can use our extensive library of photos anytime a home is reposted to the market.

We have a surprising number of listings on file. If you'd ever like to check our inventory, give David a call at 850-491-3909 or email support@tallytours.com

August Special

This month we are offering a special for everyone. Buy one standard virtual tour, and get an additional fully featured Basic Tour for just $50! Use either tour for any listing. Basic Tours are a great way to cover a small home or to get extra mileage out of a listing that needs a little gas.

For those package buyers out there, I have something special for you too! This month, if you purchase your tour package from this email, every tour in that package is covered with a 1-week return policy. This means that if your listing sells within 7 days of us shooting the tour, you can re-use that tour credit for another listing at no additional charge! Better yet, we're knocking off $25 from each standard tour, so that's $500 total for 5 tours, with a 1 week return policy on each (proof of contract required).

Click here now for these specials!

Package Prices

With the new prices I wanted to make sure that I'm not adding too much more of a cost to my long-time customers. I have priced the 5 tour discount packages on the basic and standard discount 5-tour packages so that the per-tour coast is equal to the old cost of the single tour orders. So rather than saving $10 per tour as with the old discount package pricing, you'll be saving $20 per tour with the new discount packages.

Most of our long-time customers choose to purchase discount packages. If your a new customer and you have a few listings I encourage you to consider a discount package. When you buy from bulk we also buy our server space in bulk and we all save money! It's also nice to pay once and not have to worry about it any more.

Also I should have pointed this out in the newsletter but all standard tours now include an extra panoramic when you need it. So rather than limited your mid sized homes to 6 pans, you can now go up to 7 without an extra cost.

Tally Tours Major Service Upgrades

This is a Tally Tours Newsletter you can’t miss.

Major Upgrades
Over the past month Tally Tours has been going through some major improvements and upgrades. We have a new photographer Amy, a new office assistant David, and a new office (308 McDaniel St). I thank all of you who have had appointments during this transition period and bore with us as we upgraded.

Up until this point, Tally Tours has been a “one man show.” The photographer and office work were done by a single person. But keeping up with the work load was difficult if not impossible at times for a single person. Our photographer can now focus on what she does best, taking great photos, while our office assistant Daivd does all of the computer work, scheduling and customer support.

What this means is you will begin to see major improvements all across the board. We have retrained and retooled to have a more efficient workflow that will provide you with even better quality end products than you are use to! Our main phone number remains the same (850-491-3909) and will ring directly to Daivd to set up your appointments, answer questions, and provide support.

New Service Packages
When I was producing the tours all myself I put a lot of time and effort into a great product at as low of a cost as I could afford to live on. With the new employees and office space, we needed to create new packages and prices that keep the business going at this level without sacrificing what our customers are used too.

After surveying some of you, we have come up with 4 new price levels for our virtual tours (previously there were only 3) and have created new marketing services beyond just virtual tours at a lower cost. My hope is that the majority of you will agree with the survey group that the business upgrades warrants these much needed price points.

These new packages and prices will go into effect for any tour orders coming in after 06/08/09. We would love to hear everyone’s input and comments (the good and the bad).

To review the new packages on our website click here.

June Special
This is my birthday month. For good birthday cake karma I’m keeping the package prices for 5 standard tours at the old tour prices. So if you get a package of 5 tours now, you will be saving $150! I’m basically giving you $45 and a free virtual tour.

Click here to get this special.

Keep up the great work everyone! Your hard work is helping this economy get back on track.

May Newsletter

New Recruit
Tally Tours welcomes new photographer Amy Lewis. Many of you have already met Amy. She has been training with Kevin for about a month. What some of you may not know is that Kevin is finished with his Graduate Degree and is moving back to Arizona (I know, seriously... what's in Arizona?). A friend is throwing Kevin a going away party (otherwise I'd invite all of you to come along), and I'm going to be there! Which means I'm returning to Tallahassee and I'll be around for an entire month shooting tours with Amy. I hope to see all of my favorite Realtors while I'm in town, so make your appointments between May 4th and the 29th. If your due for a new package soon, or are looking to start buying at a discount, this is a great month to start. To get through this transition, we need as much help as we can get, so help us by helping yourself to one of the great summer specials below. Be sure to tell your friends about us (or just forward them this blog!)

Summer Tour Special
Only five of each special is available. If the link does not work, both specials have been filled. Also, 10-tour packages specials are only available one or two times a year, so if you are looking to save a bit more, this may be a good time to try one out.

5 tours for $450 (saves $75) or 10 tours for $850 (saves $200)
Click Here for the Summer Special

Tally Tours goes social
Many of you have been exploring social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc... I have added many of you to my friends list this past year. Well now your Tally Tours virtual tours are compatible with your favorite social networking sites. You will find icons for all the popular social networking sites at the bottom of every new tour. Simply click on the one you'd like to use and this will add the tour to your Facebook Wall, Myspace Page, Twitter feed, etc... If you have an older tour and you are not seeing the icons but you would like to, just send us a list of your active listings and we'll update the tour for you.

Marketing tips, discounts, and news can be found in our new Tally Tours Facebook group. We encourage everyone to join. It's a great place to post your tours and discuss listings. This is separate from my personal facebook page, so weather you are my Facebook friend or not, Join our group by clicking here.

Your Free Virtual Tour Gallery Page
Did you know that all Tally Tours customers automatically have a free website showing their current virtual tours? You can easily link to your tour gallery page from your personal site or any social networking page. Best of all, this gallery page is search engine optimized, and in-turn it optimizes your personal website and all of your virtual tour listings. You don't have to understand the details of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to take advantage of its benefits. Just make sure to give us your current website address, and contact info if it is not already updated on your gallery page. We also encourage all of our customers to send us a one sentence tag line to include on their gallery page (for example, "For the best service in town, call me today!"). The tag line will also appear on your weekly tour stats (which most of you forward to your sellers). For a Gallery Page example, take a look at Bonnie Fowler's page by clicking here.

To access your own gallery page, simply click the "view my tour gallery" on any one of your virtual tours (or shoot me an email and I'll send you the link). Your tour page's web address can be used to link anywhere! Put it in your email signature, link it on your own website, share it on your social networking pages. The more you use it, the more it works for you.

Click Here for the Summer Discount Special

To subscribe to our newsletter Click Here.

Feng Shui, St Joseph, and other "Woo-Woo" Vendors

Some Realtors pump up their marketing packages with lower cost, highly visible marketing tools (e.g. Virtual Tours). However, some are using techniques that are slightly more unconventional.

The economy may be to blame for the current "slump" (I hate that word), but some are looking for a alternate explanation. Specifically one that involves evil vibes that must be coming from the lower quality home next door. In his blog "Swift" magician and skeptic James Randi tracks claims of the supernatural and debunks swindlers. In todays Swift, Randi talks about a swindler (or as he calls him, a "woo-woo") that runs a business offering "home clearing" to real estate agents who find their listings to have those "negative vibes" and just aren't selling.

Randi also mentions the common use of St. Joseph statues and Feng Shui consultants in real estate. As someone who has spent his life studying magic and mentalism (something most of my customers probably don't know about me), I would like to put the warning out there to be weary of such claims. Services like these can cost a lot of money; money that could be going towards quality marketing. In times of desperation we often turn to explanations that would otherwise set off our "logic alarm." Personally, if I had a Realtor come into my home with a "home clearer," that Realtor would be fired and replaced with one who could show me that their commission is being earned with a real marketing plan.

There is an excellent debunking of Feng Shui done by the magicians Penn and Teller on their Showtime Television Series "B.S." The episode aired in Season 1 and you can rent it at any local video store (or watch it here - beware it's rated R for language).

James Randi's article on the "home clearer" can be found here.