How to get more FSBO listings

I was reading an article that I found particularly applicable in Broker Agent News. The article, How to Get More FSBO Listings, Without Pressure covers a basic approach to FSBO prospecting that will generally lead to a listing. The article review a few of the techniques that you should use when speaking to prospective FSBO’s, but it all comes down to a very basic premise; be nice, sincere, and offer benefit.

Many real estate agents aggressively prospect For Sale By Owner leads to get new listings. As a result, most FSBO prospects hear from multiple agents with the same pitch on a daily basis. Unfortunately the pitch is usually “Let me list your home and I will get it sold for you.” Now we all know that this is where the prospect usually ends up, but most FSBO prospects want to legitimately try to sell their home before they shift to using the services of a REALTOR.

Instead of starting your relationship with your prospect the same way all of your competitors do, start your relationship with your prospect under the premise “Let me help you sell your home.” There are a number of tools that a REALTOR can offer a FSBO prospect to help them market their home. These tools are generally well appreciated by the prospects who still eventually still end up giving an agent their listing. An example is a simple FSBO website that the prospect can use to create a presence on the internet.

Regardless of the tool, differentiate yourself from your competition when prospecting FSBO leads. Approach your prospects with a sincere offer to help them reach their goals. Statistics say that they will list with a REALTOR. Odds are they will list with the one that has tried to help them most.

How does the local agent cover the cost of their marketing?

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague the other day regarding the calculation of their return on investment for their marketing activities. The conversation started because of the observation that one of the most media present agents in the area has ads appearing on every sign post, bus stop and street corner. Both my friend and I are doubtful that the agent is making a decent return on investment, but it was worth some time to do a few rough calculations.

This may or may not apply to you own investment in marketing, but here is my rough assumptions and calculation.

Assumptions:
- Average take home per sale $10,000 (hey, it’s San Diego County)
- Monthly rent for space on a bus stop: $700
- Monthly mailing of postcards or letters: $2000
- Monthly cost of local media advertising: $1200
- Monthly online marketing: $200
- Area farming: $600
- Miscellaneous marketing activities: $2500
Total monthly marketing costs $7200

Now in general your marketing cost should be between 10% and 20% of your revenue; with some businesses investing as much as 50% of their income in marketing their real estate businesses. If we assume that due to the new shift in the market the agent has more listings than sales and is pushing around 40% of his revenue into attracting new clients; the agent should be collecting about $18,000 per month. Given the average commission of around $10,000, it should just take the sale of two homes to cover that agent’s investment in marketing. The agent has a lot of listings in the area so I have no doubt that they are at least selling two homes per month.

My math is most likely wrong, but it was an interesting conversation and analysis.

Human communication is key to REALTOR Marketing

Jen Blackert posted an interesting article this week on Broker Agent News on ten easy ways to attract clients with your email newsletter. The article points out a very basic tentant of online advertising that is well worth repeating…. Humanize your communication. Whether it is online through podcasts and email REALTOR marketing tools, or off-line through flyers and introduction letters, humanize your communication to your target client. In this world of instant and anonymous communication, your most successful real estate marketing endeavors will be those that help you create a human connection to your target clients.

For Jen, her advice follows the basics of relationship building. Tell your client about yourself and educate them about who you are and the value that you offer. Share your interests with them (can anybody say real estate blog) and show that you care by asking for and responding to feedback. Clarify your communication and use terms that most lay-people would understand. Be genuine (first rule of blogging and online communities) and relate to your client’s interest, fears and concerns. Finally…. And this goes back to prospecting engines…. Stay in touch. Once you have a prospect, keep your brand equity high. Here’s the link to Jen’s article.

Real Estate Flyers and Organic Search Traffic

It’s amazing where organic online traffic comes from. I have been doing a fair amount of analysis lately and the highest traffic key word for the 4MySales blog is actually free real estate flyers The second keyword that drives most of my non-long tail traffic is free real estate letters. I, much like most in the blogsphere, am not sure why these specific terms are showing up in the first few pages of google and yahoo. I have tried to gear this blog toward exploring marketing tools for REALTORS and have spent a great deal of time discussing more abstract concepts such as prospecting engines, online social networks, and really using your computer to attract real estate sales leads. Well, I think it is safe to say that SEO is still an enigma.

Increasing search engine ranking using real estate flyers

I am trying a little experiment in search engine optimization to evaluate how blogging and different blog topics and entries show up on search engines. I am using popular search terms such as real estate Arizona and broker leads to evaluate search engine traffic. Here’s an overview of the experiment.

1) I have gone to Google Adwords to find the most well searched search terms that are related to broker leads and real estate marketing tools. According to google, real estate agents that are searching for leads, flyers and marketing tools search most often under the following search terms: real estate leads and leads real estate, marketing for real estate, real estate agent marketing, real estate internet marketing, direct mail leads, leads for realtors, realtor promotion, realtor promotional items and realtors leads.

2) Now that I have identified these highly visible search terms for real estate marketing, I simply add these terms to the vernacular of various blog posts. Over the next few months, look for these strategically placed realtor marketing terms. I will gradually be placing the terms and measuring traffic results through hittail and mybloglog.

I’ll let you know how it turns out. If the experiment is successful, there will be a bit more organic search traffic to the 4MySales blog

Real estate farming letters are just the beginning

Real estate farming letters have been the mainstay of most agent’s marketing programs since the industry began. These, coupled with other online and off-line initiatives can be a great resource in the continual fight to differentiate yourself from the competition.
A lot of agents search for free real estate farming letters, or templates that they can modify to suite their own needs. This approach may have some benefit, but if you are trying to differentiate yourself from every other agent out there, I would recommend approaching your farming letters and your entire marketing plan from a completely different direction.

Most agents do not realize that it takes more than five exposures to their name and offer before a mail recipient will even recognize their name. If you don’t believe me, just think about how you answer most of your junk mail. In order to stand out from the crowd, take a much more strategic approach to your direct mail and incorporate it into a much larger marketing campaign. If you have an area that you are farming, try to find a way to expose every target client to your message at least five times in a relative short period. A simple way to do this is to send everybody on your list a direct mail message in an envelope. I recommend including a piece of candy or something in the envelope to ensure that it gets opened. The next week send out a postcard with an offer or raffle as your call to action. Next place signs at the entrances of the communities that you are farming (be sure to get the proper permits, or plan to have you signs taken down by the city.) For the next week, send out another round of envelopes and place your flyers on the bulletin boards of the local grocery and library. Follow that week with door hangers that have another call to action and offer.

This is a very basic approach to marketing, but it will start the ball rolling. The goal is to get everyone in the community that you are farming with your letters to recognize your name. After that, you just need to remain active enough in the area to maintain your brand awareness in the minds of your target client. By maintaining a top of the mind awareness with your prospects, you will ensure that you will be their first phone call when it is time to call upon the resources of a REALTOR.

Ten steps to a great podcast

So back to blogging and making posts. I still am struggling with getting enough time to pen something meaningful, but I did find a great article on how to create a great podcast. This article http://www.marketingprofs.com/7/collier6.asp was of specific interest to me since we are having great success with the 4MySales.com podcasting tool and helping real estate agents podcast their message to their waiting clients.

Stop in and create your own podmail in under five munites at http://www.4mysales.com/record_a_podcast.php

Okay, back to the article. It was posted on Marketing Profs and details the top ten steps to creating a great podcasts. I have repeated them below in an extremely abbreviated format, but read the entire article to get a better idea of the rationale behind each step.

So um…. Step 1:
DO RESEARCH – I am sure that we are acutely aware of topics that turn us on and topics that turn us off. Make sure that the topics that you choose to broadcast are of interest to your listening public. As an example, very few people are excited about hearing a list of current homes available for viewing. However many people are interested to hear about the current market, any planned buildings or re-zoning activity in their community, school updates, etc. Before creating a podcast, spend some time at Starbucks listening to what people in your community are talking about.

Step 2
Determine the format of your show: Is it a talk show, interview, general commentary. Will it be raucous or generally subdued. Plan the format of your podcast the same way you plan the format of your blog. Make it real and make it genuine, but make it entertaining.

Step 3
Determine what equipment you will need. Seriously, just try the 4MySales.com podcasting system. We put a pretty heavy investment in place to make it easy and user friendly.

Step 4
Select the program that you will use to create your podcast. See step 3 above.

Step 5
Write the layout of the show and begin rehearsing. Rarely will you be able to pull off a podcast in one take. For me, even voicemail is a challenge.

Step 6
Record the main body of the show: My take on this is break it up into specific segments for ease of editing and recording.

Step 7
If applicable, select beginning and closing music.
Step 8
Select a podcast host.. So the article makes this point number nine, but step 8 in the article is related to step 7. With regard to a podcast host, dare I say 4MySales.com?

Step 9
Promote your podcast. I recommend announcement emails (included in 4MySales) along with other means of direct promotion.

Overall, my advice is to read the article and learn about the value of podcasting. When you are ready to get your feet wet, visit us at 4MySales.com. Podcasting is only one of the many features that are included for less that $20.00 per month.

The hittail is getting longer

I’ll be the first to admit that I have not had a great deal of time to make posts this year. However, previous blog entries and other, less time intensive, marketing activities have managed to carry 4MySales through this period of inactivity. In looking at my hittail report this morning, I am pleased to announce that long tail keywords such as free real estate flyers, real estate marketing tools, real estate follow up letters as well as real estate agent online have contributed to over 62.6% of all of the generic search traffic to this real estate blog and the 4MySales.com Real Estate Marketing website. Hopefully I will have time over the next few weeks to start posting about real estate marketing again, however, it is still nice to see that blogging works as a marketing tool.

Repetition & Marketing Metrics, Are You Measuring Up?

What is known by all marketers, but not realized by many small business owners is repetition and measurement are the keys to running a successful marketing campaign. The primary focus of any marketing program is to get your target customer to purchase your product. However, many small business owners do not effectively utilize repetition to brand their product, and very rarely do they utilize any form of metric to measure the success rate of a program.

Statistics vary, but it takes the average person at least five exposures to a brand name or product before he or she will make the commitment to purchase it. In addition, it usually takes more than thirty exposures to a marketing piece before the customer can remember it at will. The simple lesson from these facts are that you must run advertisements multiple times, and consistently use the same or similar images to market your product. Run the same advertisement in multiple mediums, with the same logos, images, and themes as it has been proven to be the best mass media approach to marketing your product.

Repetition is the key to creating a successful marketing program, but how exactly do you measure the success? A successful marketing campaign develops awareness of your product which translate into larger sales volumes, but what part of the campaign has had the greatest effect on awareness and increased sales? To answer these questions, you must approach your marketing program with some pre-defined ideas on how you are going to measure results, and how you are going to differentiate the results of one marketing medium from another.

To define exactly how you are going to measure the results of a specific marketing program, you must evaluate the message of your campaign. You must determine exactly what is going to close your customer, and if anything in the message can be echoed back to you in a quantifiable form. Many times, you can include an offer, coupon, or discount in the advertisement which can be documented at the time of sale. This provides an easy metric for tracing the effectiveness of an advertisement. If a traceable coupon or discount is not available, you may need to rely on measurements of increased sales and statistical analysis to quantify the results of your program.
The two fundamental themes in marketing are repetition and measurement. A marketing program will be ineffective if it does not provide sufficient repetition and exposure. In addition, the program will be useless unless it can provide a quantifiable response. Both provide the foundation with which to build an effective marketing campaign.

FSBO Leads are Available Now

It’s been a month full of challenges and I have been asking all of my colleagues for a do-over for 2007. So far nobody has taken me up on the offer. In spite of the challenges, we do have some great news to share. Our FSBO system has been upgraded and expanded to provide even more leads. In addition we have set our new FSBO lead system up so that all our visitors need to do is request that the For Sales by Owner leads be emailed directly to them on a weekly basis.

The new tool is pretty slick. Just sign up for your weekly FSBO emails on the home page of http://www.4mysales.com/ Now on our home page you can create your own podcast to email to your clients and get a weekly list of FSBO leads.

Expired Listing Leads… Everything Must Go Regardless of Loss, Cost, or Value

It’s the new year and everybody is having a sales. In real estate this applies to many of the vendors of different services; including those that help identify expired listing leads. I am of course speaking of the RedX expired listing lead service that interfaces with your MLS to provide a daily list of expireds that have been screened through the do not call registry. My friends at the RedX contacted me with a great offer and an invitation to let everybody know. For the time being… (February 15 to be exact) They are waiving both the setup fee (this saves you $150 right off of the bat) and providing a 30% discount off of the first three months worth of service. Essentially this means that their existing service which is usually priced at $150 startup plus $56.99 per month can now be enjoyed for only $39.99 per month with no setup fee. Not a bad new years sale with over $200 in savings for trying out their service.

If you are interested in signing up, here is the link to their offer: http://www.theredx.com/signup/4mysalesexpiredsale.html
It’s branded with the 4MySales logo as part of my agreement with them.

No what do I know about The RedX? I have worked with them for about two years and used to include their product in the 4MySales service offering. Logistically it was a nightmare getting customers signed up and serviced through both 4MySales and RedX so we eventually ended that arrangement. Anyway, their system consists of a contact management software that interfaces with your MLS. I believe that their system is set up so that you login to your local MLS, specify the search parameters and the returned data is uploaded into the RedX software where it is screened by the Do Not Call list and then compared to previous versions of the listing. Those listings that have had the information changed (telephone number modified so that the listing agent can protect his listing) are restored.

In essence the remaining call list is a clean list of expired listing prospects with the CORRECT contact information.

I am sure that there are many nuances that are included in their system, but I have not delved that deep into their software.

On a final commercial disclaimer note: I do have a commercial and affiliate relationship with these guys. They have a great product, but please do your own due diligence.

Does this worry anybody?

I was over on mashable.com this morning reading their predictions for 2007, and it is amazing how rapidly online social networks are taking over the online and mobile communication space. The site has reviewed hundreds of online social sites over the past year and the number of online social properties is growing at a phenominal rate. Online social networking is the newest .com boom. The only question is, how does the average real estate agent effectively leverage the phenomina to maximize their business?

Optimize Your Real Estate Blog for Google

I recently had a conversation with a gentleman who claims to be a specialist in viral marketing. We discussed the benefits of the new online social networks, but he pointed out one of the biggest mistakes most professionals make when they launch a blog is that they start writing, but never take time to optimize their blogs tags, title and descriptions in the html code. This often results in a poor ranking and index on Google, Yahoo and other engines because the basic title and phrases are missing.

It seems like a minor point, but I am sure that it is one that most of us overlook. When you create a new blog, please be sure to enter the proper meta tags into the HTML so that they can be indexed properly. This may require a small amount of additional text in the template, depending on who is hosting your blog. I am not sure how to do it for WordPress, but for blogger, you simply need to add the tag directly into the template html. To give you an example, this blog has the following HTML tags that are indexed by different engines (I pulled out the > and the < to allow blogger to publish the code):

title>Real estate marketing tools from 4MySales.commeta name="robots" content="index,follow" /
meta name="googlebot" content="index, follow" /
meta name="description" content="Real Estate Blog Marketing and Lead Generation" /
meta name="keywords" content="real estate blogs, realtor leads, real estate marketing letters, flyers, real estate marketing tools, real estate farming, realtor license, automated, podcasts, capture leads" /
meta name="author" content="Real estate marketing blogs for REALTORS" /
meta name="language" content="English" /
meta name="country" content="United States" /


A usesfull tool to see how effectively your blog is tagged is the Meta Tag Analyzer found at Widexl which evaluates your URL and gives you a green, orange, or red statement regarding how well your title, description and keyword tags are optimized. The tool is a great starting point to optimize your real estate blog.

13 Biggest Wastes of Your Real Estate Marketing Dollars

I’ve been a little lax in the real estate blog this week…. But hey, it’s the holidays.

I was reading this article in Marketing Profs this week on the 13 biggest wastes of money in your budget. The article is for general marketing purposes, but there are two specific points that bear mentioning as they apply to most real estate agents. The points that the article brings up are:

1) Marketing Waste No. 3: Failing to follow up on leads
2) Marketing Waste No. 4: Killing the conversation
3) Marketing Waste No. 5: Overemphasizing new leads

There are a number of other great points that are made in the article, but I feel that the three that I mentioned are some of the most important. I’m too lax to look up the specific NAR statistic, but I believe that between 70-80 percent of new leads received by REALTORS do not receive timely follow up. My only response to that is create a prospecting engine to automate the follow up. Use autoresponders and click to call features and take advantage of the latest technology to make sure that when a lead is captured that it receives the attention that it deserves.

In conjunction with the follow up statement, I feel that the topic of killing the conversation needs to be mentioned. When a prospect (some people call it a lead, but my version of a lead is a qualified target client) contacts a real estate agent, the conversation should revolve around serving the needs of the prospect as well as qualifying them as a lead. We all love to tell people about what we are selling, and you can quickly kill a conversation with a prospect by jumping right into the features of your most current listings. Use your first conversation to identify the needs and wants of the prospect as well as ask questions that will help you to qualify them as a client. Save the detailed list of properties for when you have them face to face.

As I said before, the article has a number of great pearls of wisdom… 13 to be exact.. but the third plays right into the explanation about the need for a prospecting engine. As I have said many times; out of 100 current home owners, 1 needs your help right now, 20 will need your help within the next two years, and an additional 50 will need your help within the next seven years. Instead of spending all of your money trying to find that one new lead, use your prospecting engine to convert those leads that you have into ready and waiting clients.

------
On a completely separate note, my hittail says I need to write more about free real estate flyers. I’m not sure how to effectively incorporate the text into my real estate marketing blog. However, I’m up for the challenge.
4MySales.com

Back to Real Estate Marketing Basics

I have been babbling about social networks and abstract marketing ideas for the past month, and it is time to get back to my real estate marketing roots. For the next few posts, I will be talking less about the use on flickr, youtube, and other Mashups and focus more on the basics of marketing that every real estate agent can use; tools such as real estate flyers, real estate signage, realty advertising, and the basics of marketing your small business.

This holiday season has been great because I have had some time to catch up on my reading. I got caught up on reading Ardell’s SeachingSeattle as well as The Real Estate Tomato and Sellsius all of whom are prolific real estate writers (I think Jim is on the same technology kick as I was with his recent posts about new comment bookmarking.)

After catching up with the commentary of my peers, I spent a great deal of time reviewing the most recent articles in Marketing Profs and found some great advice that I would like to share. The specific article is entitled Ten Key Questions for Your Web Copy and it details a number of questions that you should keep in mind when developing your online presence. Click the title to read the full article, but if you don’t have time, here are the items that the article discusses:

1. Is your homepage empathetic to your visitors?

2. Is your site organized on your customer's terms?

3. Are your offers easily accessible?

4. Is your content distributed properly?
Use testimonials and reports across all of the pages of your real estate website instead of having a single dedicated page.

5. Do you offer print-friendly pages?

6. Is your contact information complete and easy to find?
I can’t tell you how important this one is. Many realtors buy websites that have contact forms as part of the offering. However, when you visit their website, there is no telephone number, not address, and the only way that you can get hold of the agent is filling out a form and sending it into the web abyss. Please make sure that your phone number and contact information is on your home page and make it as easy as possible for your clients to contact you.

8. Does your homepage have a place for timely announcements or news?
Can anybody say Blog?

9. Do you have a retention device?
We all know the value of real estate newsletters and auto-responders. Use them continually.

10. Do you regularly check your Web stats?
I would have finished at nine, but the point on the article is well stated.

More marketing commentary to come…. Viva Real Estate!

A Sense of Community and Opportunity

I have been involved in the real estate and online industries for about six years now and I must tell you that over and over I see the most traffic online invariably comes from the communities. Chat rooms and forums used to rule the online traffic, and if you wanted to find a group of active target customers, you would simply search for a forum, Yahoo Group or chat room that served your client’s niche. With the advent of the new online social networks this truism is becoming more and more pronounced.

So as a marketer and real estate agent, how do you capitalize on this phenomena to drive people in your community into your office?

Thanks to the proliferation of standardized community tools you can create your own online network to serve your local community. As the host of this network, you can drive a lot of traffic through your front door. In addition, because of the new and emerging networking platforms, the cost is minimal, and the opportunity for customization is immense.

I have been researching the different platforms that you can use to create your network, and there are a variety of platforms to suit your needs. If you have no access to a programmer, there are a few such as Me.com, CommunityServer and Bryght.com which are primarily turnkey networks. If you do have access to a programmer, there are a lot of open source packages that can be customized to serve the needs of your community. The few that I have looked at are: http://www.joomla.org/, http://www.drupal.org/, http://www.plone.org/, http://www.phpfox.com/, AROUNDMe and DZIOC which I will most likely use for my new online project. Finally, if you want to go big, there are a number of platform providers and integrators that you can use to create a completely customized platform. In addition to Pluck Sitelife and Select Minds, here are the Google Picks.

With the advent of all of these online tools and the adoption of MySpace by individuals over the age of 35, people are moving online to find ways to connect. We all lead such busy lives that many of us miss the day to day interaction with friends and have given up social outlets in favor of longer work days and too many demands on our time. For the real estate agent or firm that can capitailize on this movement and connect with their neighbors online there is great opportunity. By extension, for those agents that can connect with others online and bring those connections into the brick and mortar world, through the use of meetings, mixers, and social events, the opportunity to become a fixture in your community is immense.

Time’s Man of The Year is you…. So What Does This Mean to Real Estate?

Time magazine recently announced that due to the explosion of online social media, its man of the year is all of us that participate and contribute to online content on the web. What this means is that unlike previous history, today’s western world provides an individual voice to every man, woman, and child with an internet connection. Now there are a ton of social, caste, and class implications about that statement, but for those of you who use the internet to promote your real estate services, this revolution may have some drastic implications on how you approach your business.

Over the past few years we have all read that Real Estate Agents need a good REALTOR blog and that if you promote yourself online, a static web site is just not enough. We have also been encouraged to use our real estate blogs to differentiate, provide value, and drive interest in our business. By embracing these new tools, many of us have been able to carve a deep niche into the long tail of our market and attract quite a few clients. However, the man (or woman) of the year announcement is a harbinger of a much deeper wave that is sweeping the tide of human communication. Much like the dot com bubble of the late 90’s, online social networks and YouTube mimics are popping up everywhere. SE's are servicing specific niches and the MySpaces of the world are being subverted by specific media networks that serve very narrow niches and industries…. Let’s remember that ActiveRain is a great example of this phenomena. The wave of social media is overwhelming, but the implication for real estate agents is that their voices may soon get mired and lost in the overpowering static that is created by billions of online blogs, networks, posts, forums, and video sites. If a new blog is created every two seconds and that number is accelerating, it won’t be long before having a voice online will just not be enough to get noticed.

I like this time in online development to the initial introduction of the internet to the public. In its initial stages, the net was used primarily by universities and academics to share studies, papers, data, and researched-based facts. As more and more people jumped online thanks to AOL, Prodigy, and later by NetZero, the use of the net to share data shifted to more of a commerce-based platform. This resulted in the volumes of academic data becoming dwarfed by the explosion in commerce-related activity, and the land grab of every business to have a presence online. After the bubble burst and the dust settled, we had a few mega corporations, a number of bankrupt start-ups, and a society that new how to buy Christmas gifts online. Just to reiterate the point, the landscape had shifted to where it was a lot easier to find content generated by business than it was to find content from academia from a volume of data point of view.

Now we jump to the current age where blogging and social media has given a voice to the average user. Those real estate agents who have been the early adopters are much like the early commercial sites on the net who were competing against the established real estate that was owned by academia. The obvious difference is now it is the voice of the individual which is competing for space against the traditional click and mortar websites. However, the wave is coming in once again. Everybody is jumping on the social media band wagon and the VC’s are funding investment into its growth.

As a result, I predict a very similar wave will hit us within the next few years. By 2008, most people online will subscribe to some form of online expression. Some people may blog, some may post and chat, a few will even create videos and share visual media, but most individuals with an internet connection will express their views online. (The takeaway is that your real estate blog is going to get a lot more competitive) In addition, a multitude of niche-serving social medial sites will pop up to compete with each other for access to the voices of the individual. (Just spend a few minutes on Mashable.com to see how many social networks pop up on a daily basis.) Finally, the business model for the social sites will prove itself in a handful of industries, and those sites that do not generate revenue will eventually fade away.

So what are the lessons to be learned from the past? For the real estate agent, be an early adopter of technology. Create your blogs and podcasts and generate a following while the landscape is still sparse. Also, plan for the future. Include online media as a way to promote your business, but don’t forget the more traditional methods of marketing as well. Finally, look for ways to tie your online community into your off-line world. Connect with the readers of your blog over coffee (in person) and take online social networking into the real world.

The $500 Cancellation Fee

Walter Sanford had a great article this week about small ways to improve the profitability of your real estate business. One of the items that he pointed out is that for a listing cancellation, not to be mistaken with an expired listing, he charges $500 to cover his time and investment in marketing. This approach resonates with me because I take the same approach with tenants in my rental units where I charge a $65.00 service fee if the tenant requires me to come out and replace a light bulb or un-clog a toilet.

Back to the point, your time is valuable and although you need to give your clients the flexibility to get out of a listing contract if their expectations are not being met, you also need to be covered and compensated for the time and money that you invested in this client to help them sell their home. Many agents will spend a few hundred dollars on real estate flyers, real estate letters, marketing tools, listing letters, real estate advertisements and other marketing resources to help your client’s listing sell. If your client chooses not to use you after you have made this investment, but well before the listing agreement has expired, you should be compensated for your time and investment.

When putting together your listing agreement, agree on the duration as always, but negotiate the cost of cancellation with your client. Explain during the sales process that you will be investing X dollars into print advertising and that if they choose to cancel the agreement early they are only responsible for that initial investment in marketing materials and your time. Modify the explanation to describe your specific approach, but overall the message is that your services have a high value and that there are costs associated with selling the home that the client will have to absorb if they choose to back out early.

It’s Not The Length, But The Thickness That Counts

Okay, get your mind out of the gutter. I am talking about the application of the long tail theory to the 4MySale SE traffic. Using Hittail, I have been including a variety of different (suggested) search terms in a multitude of different blog entries. As a result, I am proud to say that I have significantly shifted how searchers end up on the 4MySales Real Estate Marketing blog. When we first started using HitTail, which was just two months ago, 83% of our search traffic came from the top ten search words. I am now pleased to tell you that thanks to the random placement of words such as free real estate marketing letters, free flyers, realty leads, real estate offers, house values (not to be mistaken with the company,) REALTOR License (and lisense) this real estate blog now receives 54% of its traffic from the top ten key real estate phrases.

Over the next few weeks I will see if we can’t get “free real estate farming letters” and “real estate flyers” into a few more blogs to increase exposure for those terms as well.

On a final note, I googled 4MySales this evening and it came back with 30,000 hits. This is not bad, but a far cry from the 100,000 that I am aiming for by the end of the year. Therefore, I have a challenge for you:

I CHALLENGE YOU!!!!

Blog about 4MySales.com and send me an email with the link to your blog. I will both reciprocate by reviewing your blog and placing a few links back to it on this site. In addition, I will give you a free copy of the IP Ware Real Estate Investment Analysis Software which retails for $40.00. Send your links to me at b@ trainers.zzn.com, or just add the link in a comment on this blog.

(Remember to remove the space after the @ when typing the email address. I included the space to avoid a little spam.) I'll email you the download link to the software and start discussing your insights on this and the ActiveRain Blog