Reader Q&A: How New Agents Can Break Into Real Estate on a Shoestring Budget

Mike asks: I am new to the business, and I have about $2500 to spend on getting my name out there. Where do you get the most bang for your buck in marketing? Thanks for your question, Mike. It’s a question I get pretty regularly from new agents who are trying to break into real estate, so I wanted to take a few minutes to answer the question. Unfortunately, while I wish I could give you the...

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The Benefits of Building Relationships with Prospects

In my last post, I made a case for building relationships with prospects by creating a series of contacts with prospects rather than asking them to hire you right off the bat. This system has a number of benefits over the standard approach of mass marketing or bombarding prospects with mailings they don’t want and don’t find useful. These include: It’s cheaper. Because...

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Does Your Advertising Ask Prospects To Do Too Much?

Most advertising and promotion is a waste of money. Instead of applying tried and true direct response advertising methods and asking prospects to take a series of baby steps, most advertisements ask prospects to take a giant leap of faith and call for a free consultation. To your prospect, this is a risky ordeal. They think that if they do call, they’ll end up sitting through a long, high...

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Real Estate Internet Marketing – Focus on Traffic and Conversions

I’ve talked previously about why you should use direct response marketing – specifically, because with direct response marketing, there is no guesswork. You can test everything, measure your results, and choose the methods that get the best response. Internet marketing is no different – it’s just direct marketing on the web. There are two fundamental components to any...

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5 Steps for Planning Your Marketing Campaign

In a previous post, I talked about How To Create Your 2008 Business and Marketing Plan. In this post, I want to break that down a bit further and discuss marketing campaigns. What is a Marketing Campaign? A marketing campaign is a series of steps designed to achieve a specific result. Think of it as the big picture that includes detailed, step-by-step guidelines for one particular goal you want...

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Do Your Advertisements Make Sense to Readers?

In my last post, I talked about how easy it is to assume you know what your prospects and clients need. In this post, I’d like to talk more about assumptions in advertising. For most people, advertising is a waste of money. I’ve gone over some of the reasons why your advertising might not be working and how to use direct response advertising to generate more leads in previous posts....

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