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So… You may ask yourself, why should you buy or invest in real estate in the First Place? Because it’s the IDEAL investment! Let’s take a moment to address the reasons why people should have investment real estate in the first place. The easiest answer is a well-known acronym that addresses the key benefits for all investment real estate. Put simply, Investment Real Estate is an IDEAL investment. The IDEAL stands for:• I – Income
• D – Depreciation
• E – Expenses
• A – Appreciation
• L – LeverageReal estate is the IDEAL investment compared to all others. I’ll explain each benefit in depth.The “I” in IDEAL stands for Income. (a.k.a. positive cash flow) Does it even generate income? Your investment property should be generating income from rents received each month. Of course, there will be months where you may experience a vacancy, but for the most part your investment will be producing an income. Be careful because many times beginning investors exaggerate their assumptions and don’t take into account all potential costs. The investor should know going into the purchase that the property will COST money each month (otherwise known as negative cash flow). This scenario, although not ideal, may be OK, only in specific instances that we will discuss later. It boils down to the risk tolerance and ability for the owner to fund and pay for a negative producing asset. In the boom years of real estate, prices were sky high and the rents didn’t increase proportionately with many residential real estate investment properties. Many naïve investors purchased properties with the assumption that the appreciation in prices would more than compensate for the fact that the high balance mortgage would be a significant negative impact on the funds each month. Be aware of this and do your best to forecast a positive cash flow scenario, so that you can actually realize the INCOME part of the IDEAL equation.Often times, it may require a higher down payment (therefore lesser amount being mortgaged) so that your cash flow is acceptable each month. Ideally, you eventually pay off the mortgage so there is no question that cash flow will be coming in each month, and substantially so. This ought to be a vital component to one’s retirement plan. Do this a few times and you won’t have to worry about money later on down the road, which is the main goal as well as the reward for taking the risk in purchasing investment property in the first place.The “D” in IDEAL Stands for Depreciation. With investment real estate, you are able to utilize its depreciation for your own tax benefit. What is depreciation anyway? It’s a non-cost accounting method to take into account the overall financial burden incurred through real estate investment. Look at this another way, when you buy a brand new car, the minute you drive off the lot, that car has depreciated in value. When it comes to your investment real estate property, the IRS allows you to deduct this amount yearly against your taxes. Please note: I am not a tax professional, so this is not meant to be a lesson in taxation policy or to be construed as tax advice.With that said, the depreciation of a real estate investment property is determined by the overall value of the structure of the property and the length of time (recovery period based on the property type-either residential or commercial). If you have ever gotten a property tax bill, they usually break your property’s assessed value into two categories: one for the value of the land, and the other for the value of the structure. Both of these values added up equals your total “basis” for property taxation. When it comes to depreciation, you can deduct against your taxes on the original base value of the structure only; the IRS doesn’t allow you to depreciate land value (because land is typically only APPRECIATING). Just like your new car driving off the lot, it’s the structure on the property that is getting less and less valuable every year as its effective age gets older and older. And you can use this to your tax advantage.The best example of the benefit regarding this concept is through depreciation, you can actually turn a property that creates a positive cash flow into one that shows a loss (on paper) when dealing with taxes and the IRS. And by doing so, that (paper) loss is deductible against your income for tax purposes. Therefore, it’s a great benefit for people that are specifically looking for a “tax-shelter” of sorts for their real estate investments.For example, and without getting too technical, assume that you are able to depreciate $15,000 a year from a $500,000 residential investment property that you own. Let’s say that you are cash-flowing $1,000 a month (meaning that after all expenses, you are net-positive $1000 each month), so you have $12,000 total annual income for the year from this property’s rental income. Although you took in $12,000, you can show through your accountancy with the depreciation of the investment real estate that you actually lost $3,000 on paper, which is used against any income taxes that you may owe. From the standpoint of IRS, this property realized a loss of $3,000 after the “expense” of the $15,000 depreciation amount was taken into account. Not only are there no taxes due on that rental income, you can utilize the paper loss of $3,000 against your other regular taxable income from your day-job. Investment property at higher price points will have proportionally higher tax-shelter qualities. Investors use this to their benefit in being able to deduct as much against their taxable amount owed each year through the benefit of depreciation with their underlying real estate investment.Although this is a vastly important benefit to owning investment real estate, the subject is not well understood. Because depreciation is a somewhat complicated tax subject, the above explanation was meant to be cursory in nature. When it comes to issues involving taxes and depreciation, make sure you have a tax professional that can advise you appropriately so you know where you stand.The “E” in IDEAL is for Expenses – Generally, all expenses incurred relating to the property are deductible when it comes to your investment property. The cost for utilities, the cost for insurance, the mortgage, and the interest and property taxes you pay. If you use a property manager or if you’re repairing or improving the property itself, all of this is deductible. Real estate investment comes with a lot of expenses, duties, and responsibilities to ensure the investment property itself performs to its highest capability. Because of this, contemporary tax law generally allows that all of these related expenses are deductible to the benefit of the investment real estate landowner. If you were to ever take a loss, or purposefully took a loss on a business investment or investment property, that loss (expense) can carry over for multiple years against your income taxes. For some people, this is an aggressive and technical strategy. Yet it’s another potential benefit of investment real estate.The “A” in IDEAL is for Appreciation – Appreciation means the growth of value of the underlying investment. It’s one of the main reasons that we invest in the first place, and it’s a powerful way to grow your net worth. Many homes in the city of San Francisco are several million dollars in today’s market, but back in the 1960s, the same property was worth about the cost of the car you are currently driving (probably even less!). Throughout the years, the area became more popular and the demand that ensued caused the real estate prices in the city to grow exponentially compared to where they were a few decades ago. People that were lucky enough to recognize this, or who were just in the right place at the right time and continued to live in their home have realized an investment return in the 1000′s of percent. Now that’s what appreciation is all about. What other investment can make you this kind of return without drastically increased risk? The best part about investment real estate is that someone is paying you to live in your property, paying off your mortgage, and creating an income (positive cash flow) to you each month along the way throughout your course of ownership.The “L” in IDEAL stands for Leverage – A lot of people refer to this as “OPM” (other people’s money). This is when you are using a small amount of your money to control a much more expensive asset. You are essentially leveraging your down payment and gaining control of an asset that you would normally not be able to purchase without the loan itself. Leverage is much more acceptable in the real estate world and inherently less risky than leverage in the stock world (where this is done through means of options or buying “on Margin”). Leverage is common in real estate. Otherwise, people would only buy property when they had 100% of the cash to do so. Over a third of all purchase transactions are all-cash transactions as our recovery continues. Still, about 2/3 of all purchases are done with some level of financing, so the majority of buyers in the market enjoy the power that leverage can offer when it comes to investment real estate.For example, if a real estate investor was to buy a house that costs $100,000 with 10% down payment, they are leveraging the remaining 90% through the use of the associated mortgage. Let’s say the local market improves by 20% over the next year, and therefore the actual property is now worth $120,000. When it comes to leverage, from the standpoint of this property, its value increased by 20%. But compared to the investor’s actual down payment (the “skin in the game”) of $10,000- this increase in property value of 20% really means the investor doubled their return on the investment actually made-also known as the “cash on cash” return. In this case, that is 200%-because the $10,000 is now responsible and entitled to a $20,000 increase in overall value and the overall potential profit.Although leverage is considered a benefit, like everything else, there can always be too much of a good thing. In 2007, when the real estate market took a turn for the worst, many investors were over-leveraged and fared the worst. They could not weather the storm of a correcting economy. Exercising caution with every investment made will help to ensure that you can purchase, retain, pay-off debt, and grow your wealth from the investment decisions made as opposed to being at the mercy and whim of the overall market fluctuations. Surely there will be future booms and busts as the past would dictate as we continue to move forward. More planning and preparing while building net worth will help prevent getting bruised and battered by the side effects of whatever market we find ourselves in.Many people think that investment real estate is only about cash flow and appreciation, but it’s so much more than that. As mentioned above, you can realize several benefits through each real estate investment property you purchase. The challenge is to maximize the benefits through every investment.Furthermore, the IDEAL acronym is not just a reminder of the benefits of investment real estate; it’s also here to serve as a guide for every investment property you will consider purchasing in the future. Any property you purchase should conform to all of the letters that represent the IDEAL acronym. The underlying property should have a good reason for not fitting all the guidelines. And in almost every case, if there is an investment you are considering that doesn’t hit all the guidelines, by most accounts you should probably PASS on it!Take for example a story of my own, regarding a property that I purchased early on in my real estate career. To this day, it’s the biggest investment mistake that I’ve made, and it’s precisely because I didn’t follow the IDEAL guidelines that you are reading and learning about now. I was naïve and my experience was not yet fully developed. The property I purchased was a vacant lot in a gated community development. The property already had an HOA (a monthly maintenance fee) because of the nice amenity facilities that were built for it, and in anticipation of would-be-built homes. There were high expectations for the future appreciation potential-but then the market turned for the worse as we headed into the great recession that lasted from 2007-2012. Can you see what parts of the IDEAL guidelines I missed on completely?Let’s start with “I”. The vacant lot made no income! Sometimes this can be acceptable, if the deal is something that cannot be missed. But for the most part this deal was nothing special. In all honesty, I’ve considered selling the trees that are currently on the vacant lot to the local wood mill for some actual income, or putting up a camping spot ad on the local Craigslist; but unfortunately the lumber isn’t worth enough and there are better spots to camp! My expectations and desire for price appreciation blocked the rational and logical questions that needed to be asked. So, when it came to the income aspect of the IDEAL guidelines for a real estate investment, I paid no attention to it. And I paid the price for my hubris. Furthermore, this investment failed to realize the benefit of depreciation as you cannot depreciate land! So, we are zero for two so far, with the IDEAL guideline to real estate investing. All I can do is hope the land appreciates to a point where it can be sold one day. Let’s call it an expensive learning lesson. You too will have these “learning lessons”; just try to have as few of them as possible and you will be better off.When it comes to making the most of your real estate investments, ALWAYS keep the IDEAL guideline in mind to make certain you are making a good decision and a solid investment.

There are various ways to promote your website online, some of which just need a bit of your time, while others burn a small hole in your pocket. Needless to say, if you can own and build a website, promoting and marketing for it online won’t be much of a pain.So basically, my online marketing strategy revolves around these few points:SEARCH ENGINE MARKETINGSearch Engine Marketing (SEM) refers to an internet marketing technique that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages. It basically involves two methods:a> Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisingb> Search Engine Optimization (SEO)Pay Per Click is a method of paying a search engine to show your website more frequently in search results as a user searches for a content, while SEO is the method where you actually modify or rewrite your websites’ content manually to achieve higher rankings in the search engine result pages.CONTENT MARKETINGIt is a form of marketing where media and contents are created and published in order to communicate with and acquire prospective customers. The content may be in the form of images, newsletters, how-to-guides, case studies, etc. The main aim of content marketing is not to sell a product directly, but to keep in touch with existing and to-be clients and provide them with needed and helpful information so as to earn their loyalty. The most common and traditional way of content marketing is to write descriptive articles or ad-content on sites like EzineArticles, Squidoo, ArticlesBase, GoArticles, etc. Some of them even pay for writing articles.SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETINGSocial Media Marketing is a way of popularizing an event, product, service, brand or a company with the help of social networking sites. It is an unpaid marketing method because it depends upon the quality of the content and the how much the readers share it. The most common platforms of social media marketing are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, MySpace, etc. Most of these sites offer a dedicated page for your business that can be used to promote your company, product or service. Furthermore, words of mouth and shares by the users play important role in doing the same.MOBILE MARKETINGMobile Marketing, as it’s obvious from the name, is the form of marketing where cell-phones are the bridge between a company and their clients, or future clients most of the times, where customers are provided with personalized and customized information, offers, or deals about the product or services. There are quite a lot of ways of mobile marketing, but we will keep it just to the most common and most effective methods here.a> SMS: There are a lot of bulk SMS providers that, unlike the telecom companies which have a cap on the maximum number of SMSs sent, allow users to send a large number of SMS and guarantee a delivery. So this bulk SMS service may be used to send messages related to products and services to a large number of users in a very short time, plus, it is highly cost effective.b> App-Based Marketing: As the usage of smartphones increases, use of mobile applications have also increased proportionally. So the concept is to make mobile applications for iOS, android and symbian platforms and distribute them free over the online apps market. Sending Push notifications adds to the advantage as the users receive alerts and notifications on new products, services or information instantly.E-MAIL MARKETINGIt is a method of direct marketing where commercial messages are sent to a group of people using e-mails. The mails may be sent to a database of existing or potential customers with a view to promote a new or old service or product, or to provide a deal or offer so as to solicit repeat business, or instant business. Most of the times, companies send out promotional e-mails where a deal is provided for a limited time and the customers get a discount if they avail of the services or products within that period. Sending online newsletters at periodic intervals also brings a sense of loyalty into the existing customers.ONLINE CLASSIFIEDSThere are a number of online classified sites where we can post advertisements about our products and services for a very small or no price at all. The classified sites may be recognized or active on a local, national or international level. Keeping in mind the Indian online market, the ones that come to my mind are Quikr, Click.in, Olx… and the list never stops. Locanto and Craigslist are two of the giants in international online market, needless to mention that there are a lot more in this category. Each of the ads that you publish in these sites remain active for a certain period and then you have to either renew/repost them, or publish another ad if still required.LINK EXCHANGE PROGRAMSLink Exchange refers to the method where the administrators of two(or more) websites agree to display each others advertisement or link on their own site for their mutual benefit. The method also implies to the process where a number of administrators, or Webmasters register their site on a central website that serves as the host and provides reciprocal links to the participating websites to show on their pages, So, if you register yourself for link exchange programs on such a site, the link to your website will be placed in a number of other similar ranked websites, and in turn, you need to place their links in your own site, simple, isn’t it? Generally, this service comes free of cost as it runs on the principle of reciprocity, both of the parties benefit mutually and almost equally, but at times it needs a bit of your fortune if you opt for premium and fast services.FORUM DISCUSSIONSDiscussion forums are a great way of advertising yourselves to a group of targeted customers. Online discussion forums/boards are present for almost every topic you can think of, so at this place you get a group of people that are actually(and only) interested in the same topic, product or services that you are offering. Thus, all the people present in that discussion are your potential customers, pitch high and bang at the right moment is all you need to do. Google and yahoo also have their own dedicated discussion/Q&A forums, writing and promoting your articles where can fetch good results.VIDEO UPLOADWritten, printed or messaged media are good ways of marketing, but short videos on your services or products are great way of marketing. Here, people just need to look at your video for a few seconds, or maybe minutes, and understand what they are actually meant to. In this way, they quite easily omit the traditional and comparatively boring way of reading the advertisement, newsletter, or promotional messages. The most common platform is YouTube where you can upload your own custom made videos for free, or opt for paid promotion where very short promotional videos are inserted(by YouTube) between other videos which may already be a bit known to people and thus there are more chances of people seeing the promotional videos.DIRECTORY LISTINGWeb directories or link directories are the directories on the world wide web(www) that link to other web sites and categorize the websites according to their content. In simple words, directories are not search engines, but just an online directory showing the list of websites based on categories and sub-categories. There are a large number of web directories that offer free, paid, reciprocal and affiliate linkings depending upon your choice. If categorized correctly, directory listing is a great way of online marketing. DMOZ, Yahoo, Digg are some of the most famous directories online.ONLINE DEALSDiscounts always attract customers, even if they have not much to do with the product. They stop to have a look on what is being offered. Sometimes this paves the way for the person to think deeply and consider availing the deal just because they are getting it at a great price. There are a lot of websites where services/products are offered at discounted rates. Consider visiting Snapdeal, Groupon, Timesdeal and few others.AFFILIATE PROGRAMSAfter all these efforts, if there is still a hitch left in the sales process, affiliate marketing is always there to promote direct sales of the product or services where a small share in the profit is given to the publisher or vendor that promotes sales. It is a performance based marketing system and the affiliate gets a percentage of profit for selling or helping in selling an article by applying any of the above listed or his/her own marketing techniques. One of the common ways is to place advertisement links or banners on others’ sites upon their permission, and if a sale occurs from their website, we need to pay them a definite amount or percentage.Having a bit of experience in publishing and promoting websites, I hope these factors may be actually helpful when you try to do some marketing for you new website. Forgive me if I forgot to mention something important, of course you can comment and rectify if I have committed any errors. Good day.