What would your business be like if you were able to attract and only work with “ideal clients”?  You know, those clients that you really gel with.  The ones you enjoy helping, and they enjoy you!  The type of clients that you look forward to speaking to when they call, and you almost hate to see the deal completed, because they were so much fun to work with!

Sound like a pipe dream?

What if I told you that you CAN attract your ideal clients to your business?

Think about the marketing that you do.  Are you focusing on one particular type of client, or are you spreading your marketing out to the masses – doing everything that every other agent is doing – hoping to catch anyone that comes along?

In my last post, “Jack of All Trades”, I talked about trying to be everything to everyone.  Well, your marketing is probably doing the same thing.

Most real estate advertising is not set up to attract specific prospects.  It’s the same old, tired listing information.  Travel across this Country, and pick up a real estate magazine in ANY town, and you will see a lot of the same thing.  Page after page of listing ads, with photos of agents, and lists of their “hype” (like We’re the Best, or Our Service is #1, etc).

Isn’t it any wonder that the average consumer thinks we’re all just the same?

Now, what if you could create targeted marketing pieces that resonate with the specific type of client that you are wanting to attract?  What if your marketing could speak to that particular client – could address their concerns, fears, aspirations?  How do you think that could change the response you get on your ads?  Do you think that would make a difference?

I challenge you to really think out a new process the next time you are preparing your marketing.

• Is it going to be the same that everyone else is doing?
• Is your piece going to stand out, or are you going to blend in with the crowd?
• Are you focusing your wording to attract prospects to you, and your services, in a way that puts attention on THEIR concerns (and doesn’t focus on you)?

I believe that if you take this approach, even on just one piece in your marketing, you will see an amazing difference in the response you receive!

You’ve heard the saying “A Jack of all trades, but a Master of none”.

Is this what you are in your real estate market?

It never ceases to amaze me how many real estate agents think that being everything to everyone, everywhere, will get them the most money.  They believe that casting a larger net will bring them in more buyers and sellers, when in actuality, the larger you cast your net, the bigger the holes are.

I had this same philosophy when I first started as a real estate agent.  I had myself spread between two states, since I only lived 8 miles from the state line.  I would run here, there, and everywhere, dealing with whatever prospects I could get.  I cannot tell you the amount of hours (not to mention gasoline) I wasted.

It wasn’t until I decided to narrow down my business and focus on one niche, and one area, that my business started to explode.  I became a “specialist”, and I made more money.

So where are YOU with YOUR business?  Does this scenario sound familiar?

Are you spreading your marketing (and yourself) all over the place?  Do you “handle” more than one area?  Are you running all across a metropolitan area, and into additional markets, grasping at straws just to grab what business you can get?

We’re in the final quarter of 2011, and if your sales aren’t where you want them to be, then you need to take time to sit down and really evaluate your business.  What are your strengths?  What area of real estate do you love?  Where are you getting the majority of your sales?

It’s time to take a cold, hard, look at your business.  2012 is right around the corner, and you need to get your business focused to start the new year out right!

What area of real estate gets you fired up?  What clients do you love to work with?  Is there a particular niche that you enjoy, that you can really help clients with?

It’s important to focus on your CLIENTS.  These are the people that you will be working with, so they have to be ones that you WANT to help.  If you focus your business on SERVING your clients (focusing on their needs, fears, desires), you will be amazed at how easy the sales will come.

Make it a priority to get your business really “focused” this coming year!

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Michelle has over 16 years of internet marketing experience, and has recently developed a program to assist other Realtors in learning how to set up and grow their business utilizing the tools that today’s technology provides.  Secret Agent Blueprint teaches Realtors how to harness the internet to create a lead generation system that will generate quality leads for themselves, without paying some high-priced lead company for leads that don’t ever amount to anything.  Using today’s technology, Realtors can easily dominate their market.

Be sure to check out Secret Agent Blueprint to find out more about this step-by-step program.

Marketing Your New Real Estate Business

What’s A New Agent To Do?

Help Getting Started

12 Steps to Launching Your Real Estate Business

Easy Steps

I wanted to touch today on the Top 5 Misconceptions that agents have about marketing online.

1.  Just having a website gets you leads.

2.  Having IDX search on your site is the most important item.

3.  Making people log in to search will get you quality leads.

4.  Just giving prospects basic information will make them call you for more.

5.  Your site needs to be all about how great an agent you are, and why they should chose you.

Let me cover just a few notes about each of these misconceptions:

1.  Just having a website gets you leads.

Back in the 90′s to early 2000′s, most real estate agents didn’t have an online presence, so just having a website (which was more like an online brochure) was sufficient to gaining leads online.

Search engines didn’t have a whole lot to pick from, and they were in the rudamentary stages of search capabilities, so having a website loaded with basic terms and information could get you a good standing in the search results.

Today, search engines, like Google, have extensive algorithms that they use to find the most relevant results for the keywords that people search for.

Your site must not only contain the most prevelant keywords within it’s meta tags, it must also contain great content that is focused on those key terms.

2.  Having IDX searc on your site is the most important item.

Early in the first decade of 2000 came the age of IDX search.  This was a wonderful feature which made it possible for agents to have a database of listings available on their websites.  At that time, giving prospects the ability to search properties on your site gave you the edge over your competition.

Now days, there are so many companies and agents who have websites offering search capabilities, that the agent sites start all looking alike to prospects.  IDX is no longer a limited thing, so if your site doesn’t give prospects something unique that they can’t get on other sites, you will lose them.

3.  Making people log in to search on your site will get you quality leads.

As mentioned above, IDX search is commonly available on a multitude of other sites.  Requiring information about your prospect before allowing them to search will either get them to click off to another site, or enter bogus information in order to get past the “gatekeeper”.

MLS data is no longer the coveted information that it once was, so requiring a long list of information from prospects before they can look for properties is a guaranteed way, today, to get them to leave your site.

4.  Just giving prospects basc information will make them call you for more.

Again, IDX search is available on so many other sites, and every site seems to pull a little bit different data from the MLS, so the information they are searching for will probably be available somewhere else.

5.  Your site needs to be all about how great an agent you are, and why they should chose you.

I know this is going to come as quite a shock to most agents – - but how great you think you are, and how many awards you have received, is irrelevant to online prospects.

This information may have a few agents recovering on the floor, so let me tell you WHAT your prospects really want to see on your site.

Prospects today want to know what’s in it for THEM.  What can you offer them that they can’t get anywhere else??

• Information about your area
• Free reports on how to . . .
• Videos about how to . . .

In order to really connect with prospects, get the attention of the search engines, and gain quality leads from your site, you have to provide great content.  You have to offer them something of value, in return for their email address (and only their email address, to start with).  You then have to cultivate a relationship and build rapport, before they ever care about who YOU are and what you know.

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If you are interested in finding out more about how to capture quality leads, be sure to check out my free video “7 Secrets to Dominating Your Real Estate Market” at http://leadgenerationforrealestate.com

This past week RISMEDIA sent out an article that had a feel of a re-purposed article of advice from the 1990’s – “8 Tips for Designing A Great Website” by Ivana Katz.

I wanted to take a moment to comment on this article because it really is missing concepts for marketing today.

“Select a color scheme and stick to it”

Anyone who has been through my training will note that I recommend using a blog format for sites these days not only for the ease of use, functionality, and portability (you can access controls from any computer, anywhere), but also for the great templates that are available to use.  You don’t have to be a web designer to create a great site.

It is important to choose a color set that is appealing to the eye of your visitors, and has a clean layout.

“Provide an easy-to-use navigation system”

Most blog templates will give you an option of where the page navigation can be placed.  You ened ot make sure that it shows up either along the side or at the top of the layout – above the fold.  That means in the area that shows in the screen without having to scroll down on the page to see it.  This menu buttons should stand out and be noticeable.

“Don’t go overboard on special effects”

This is a great point.  Back in the 90’s it was popular to have animated clipart, blinking buttons, and scrolling words throughout your site.  Stay away from creating a site that has a lot of movement, and is hard to read.  Today’s marketing is about simplicity.  Don’t distract your prospects from what you really want them to do at your site.  Video should be the only animation, and even then it should be informative and focused on the call-to-action.

The article also talks about using link colors that don’t blend in or contrast too brightly with the background.  This is important because your links are subtle calls-to-action and you want them to stand out, but not be obnoxious.

Another thing to think about, when creating links, is what your link actually says.  Never use “click here” as the words in your link.  Have keywords in the link to describe what the prospect is clicking to, and be sure to include an “ALT” tag for the link that is keyword loaded, also.  This is the verbiage that appears when you hover your mouse over the link.  These link tags will help you tremendously in the search engines, because they help describe what your site is about.

The final point of the article is that “Content Is King”. I can’t agree more.  Content is what keeps people coming to and staying at your site, and it’s what the search engines are going to read to determine if it fits the phrases and keywords that prospects are searching for.

Does a business HAVE to use Social Media?  Gary Vaynerchuk says NO . . . BUT . . .

Having a WordPress blog is definitely the most recommended, but if you aren’t using the right tools, you may be missing out on a lot of traffic that your blog could be generating for your Real Estate Business.

I just finished a report that I wanted to share with you about the Top Plugins that I use for Real Estate WordPress Blogs.

There is no opt-in for this, so head on over to http://secretagentblueprint.com/topplugins.pdf and take a look.  There is a downloable .zip file at the end of the report with all of the plugins for you, and the report contains videos/tutorials for most of the plugins.

I’d be happy to answer any questions you have about using these.

Happy Blogging!

Many real estate professionals work under the false assumption that just having a website is going to assure them traffic, leads, and sales.  Most brokerages provide a “user portal” and template for their agents, which gives them a web page and internet presence, but many agents stop at that when it comes to marketing online.

While it’s important to have a presence online (and I’m continually amazed at the amount of agents that DON’T even have a static web page in today’s technology-driven market), real estate agents need to understand the difference between a company-generated template and a site of their own.

When I started in real estate back in 1998, internet marketing was a new game.  Rarely did you see real estate agents with web pages, let alone web sites.  Even large companies had not yet realized the importance of online marketing.

Being a web designer before getting my real estate license, I was able to take advantage of my skills and was the first agent in my area with a full website.  This gave me a competitive advantage over my competition, and in my first year I did over 1 Million in sales volume, and was Rookie of the Year.

The marketing game has changed drastically over the past 12 years, and if you aren’t online today, prospects wonder about and question your knowledge and professionalism.

That being said, it IS important to be online some way, somehow, but if you are serious about online marketing (and dominating your market) you need to understand why that template site you got through your Broker is NOT doing YOU any good!

Oh sure, that website might have lots of bells and whistles that you think your prospects are looking for, but what you need to understand is how search engines view those pages, and what information is being given that affects the way that consumers find your site.

Here’s an example of a template page that is created for agents to utilize:

On the surface, this site looks like it has the things tools that will bring people to your website, but from the “back end” that the search engines read (the html code written to produce your page), the information looks a lot different.  You see, search engines look for relevant information about specific search terms that prospects are typing into their search bars.  In order to get the attention of the search engines, which drive traffic to your site, you need to have relevant KEYWORDS on your site.

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at the terms that have been pre-programmed on these templates, you will see that they are not set up to be niche specific to the agent or even the area that the agent specializes in.  Here are the search terms that are on the site I used as an example above (I’ve covered the broker name with astericks):

new orleans real estate, prudential *******, new orleans, Metairie, Super search, best mortgage, realestate, realestate, relocate, relocation, homes for sale, open house, orleans, jefferson, st tammany, st bernard,  mandeville, covington, hammond, folsom, picayune, laplace, jefferson, ormond, kenner, prudential ******** realtors, *************, ***********, la, ms, mississippi, gulfcoast, gulf coast, bay st louis, gulfport, biloxi, long beach, condominium, condos, home, house, sell, buy, waterfront, townhouse, relocation parish, corporate relocation, property for sale, property management, realtor, residential, seller, real estate agent, real estate broker, mls, buyer, commercial, french quarter, Garden District, waterfront, listings

Here you see that there are a lot of mentions about the brokerage itself.  There are also very generic terms that have something to do with real estate, but are not specific enough to tell the search engines exactly where this agent does business, or what this agent specializes in.  This particular list of keywords even lists areas in at state that this particular agent is NOT licensed in! How in the world are the search engines going to know that this agent would be a perfect fit for what prospects are looking for?

The problem with these templates is that they were set up by the brokerage, through website designers, and NOT marketing specialists.  The brokerages also want to make sure that these sites drive traffic back to THEIR main pages, because many of these companies work to generate leads that they can sell back to their agents for a “referral fee”.

So keep in mind that even though you have a website, your site may be doing you more harm than good.  My suggestion is to get out there and start working on your OWN sites, separate from your company’s.

This information, and more, is covered in my free video “Top 10 Mistakes Realtors Make When Marketing Their Business”.  Be sure to enter your email address to get instant access to this free video!

Inman News wants you to pick one individual who you think has made an impact on the real estate industry.

One individual will be recognized as the “People’s Choice” based on a popular vote of Inman News readers. That individual will be announced in the annual Inman News 100 Most Influential Real Estate Leaders list, also known as the Inman 100, which will be published later this year.

Click here to see the list, and cast your vote.

By KERRY LUCASSE – Your Intown Atlanta Real Estate Consultant

Have a case of “Blogger’s Block”?

Sometimes it can be extremely difficult to break through our “Block” and come up with new things to write about.  I thought it might be fun to come up with a list of 101 ideas that we could refer back to in the future and keep our blogs fresh, interesting and helpful…

101 Ideas for Your Blog

1. Metro Area Quarterly Market reports
2. Neighborhood Market Reports / Sales Data
3. How’s the Market in XYZ Neighborhood?
4. Home buyer incentives
5. Interest rate changes (or forecasted changes)
6. Changes in current legislation (that would be important to home buyers or home owners)
7. 10 Things to Consider When Buying a Condo
8. 10 Things to Consider When Buying Your First Home
9. 10 Things to Consider When Buying a Short Sale
10. 10 Things to Consider When Buying a Foreclosure Home
11. For Buyers – 10 Reasons Why to Buy a Home this Year
12. For Buyers – What Expenses to Expect When Purchasing your Home or Condo
13. For Buyers – Tips for Interviewing a REALTOR
14. For Buyers – The importance of hiring a home inspector
15. For Buyers – Improving your credit score / preparing for homeownership
16. For Buyers – Checklist for home ownership
17. For Buyers – Financing options (Conventional Loans, FHA, 403b Streamline, HomePath, etc)
18. For Sellers – Tips for Interviewing a REALTOR
19. For Sellers – Avoiding foreclosure
20. For Sellers – Staging your home to sell
21. For Sellers – Pricing your home to sell
22. For Sellers – What NOT to do when selling your home
23. For Sellers – Preparing the FRONT of your home for sale (clean windows, doors, lights, etc)
24. For Sellers – 10 Most important marketing tools when selling your home
25. For Sellers – De-personalize your home before putting it on the market
26. For Sellers – Home improvements that will increase the value of your property
27. For Sellers – Is this the right time to sell your home?
28. For Sellers – Why isn’t my home selling?
29. For Sellers / Listing Agents – The importance of using a professional photographer
30. Why Buyers and Sellers need a real estate professional
31. Just Listed home
32. Just Sold home
33. Under Contract home
34. Success Stories (i.e. Toot your own horn!)
35. Marketing Tips – Promoting your business and listings on Facebook
36. Marketing Tips – Using new techonology to promote your listing… or your business
37. Deal of the Week (highlight best buys in your area)
38. Condominium Complex of the Week
39. Subdivision of the Week
40. Neighborhood of the Week
41. Townhome Community of the Week
42. For Homeowners – Reminders to apply for Homestead Exemption (in Georgia)
43. For Homeowners – Updates on County or City Property Taxes and Milage Rates
44. For Homeowners – Going Green
45. For Homeowners – Rebates on energy-efficient items for the home
46. Hyper-Local – Neighborhood of the Week
47. Hyper-Local – Suburb of the Week
48. Hyper-Local – Things to do in your neighborhood (parks, playgrounds, etc)\
49. Hyper-Local -Highlight a local business in your neighborhood
50. Hyper-Local -Promote a special event in your neighborhood
51. Hyper-Local -Promote a special person in your neighborhood who is committed to helping others
52. Hyper-Local – A tour of your neighborhood (using photos or video)

WHEW — I made it to #52!

If you have any blog ideas you would like to add, PLEASE DO!

I will post them all in ”Part Two” of Let’s Get Blogging later this week.