Invest in Yourself Before Spending Another Dime

By Burke Smith, HSA Home Warranty Chief Communication Officer

In the real estate world, there is often a choice for every decision. For potential buyers, that means anything from home size to style and renovation ideas. Not only can this be overwhelming for homeowners, an agent’s job is made that much tougher through trying to find their client’s perfect home.

As agents, we are also subjected to many choices: lead generation companies, marketing ideas and brand elements. These initial stages of the buying process often cost you more in the long run, and probably don’t convert as many buyers as you’d like.   For me, as a broker, the only thing that mattered was “conversions.”  Whether I met someone outside of church, or on email, if I didn’t convert them into a buyer, seller or AGGRESSIVE referral for my business, than my time was wasted.

In order to actually grow your business, you need to first invest in yourself. Throwing your money and attention at these ideas, and then hoping it’s going to work is never going to help grow your business. You need to first take action to ensure that you can convert whatever traffic or leads are sent your way.

Here are 5 steps to building your real estate business to WIN more listings and convert more buyers:

1. Own a niche to get rich. Identify your niche.  You can’t be all things to all people.  Whether it is a specific demographic niche (type of buyer or seller) or a geographic niche (neighborhood or subdivision)
2. Separate your personal and professional life on social media.  The easiest ways to do this would be by developing a Facebook business page, a YouTube Channel and building your LinkedIn profile to as close to 100 percent as you can get.
3. Determine WHO your message is for and WHY you are putting it out here before you ever send a blast email to your database or post to your Facebook page.
4. Fill your website and social media pages with clear calls to action.  Use power words and phrases like “Learn how” or “Find out more” to entice the user to take action and connect with you.
5. Everywhere on the planet where your phone number appears at the very minimum should say “call or text me” because we live in a mobile savvy world and when you can create a text dialogue with a customer they are typically more serious.

BONUS TIP: Use the “10 minute rule”—If you can’t update your social media or deliver a listing presentation in 10 minutes, you need to evaluate your foundation. Do you have a social media foundation so that updates only take 10 minutes? Could you deliver a “winning” listing presentation if all you had was 10 minutes? (Use the stop watch feature of your smart phone to time yourself.) This also goes for all of you managers and brokers out there—if you can’t recruit someone in 10 minutes time, you most likely won’t get them in 60 minutes either, so reassess your value proposition and your pitch.

This is your ticket to success. Don’t “spray and pray” by donating your money to online companies and hoping they do all the work for you, and somehow you will get a deal. You won’t until you at least have done steps 1 through 5. Getting traffic, impressions or leads is easy. Converting that traffic is hard. And remember, we only get paid on conversions! 

Reprinted with permission from RISMedia. ©2014. All rights reserved.