A real estate business is essentially a small business. As a small business owner, there are several things you can do to effectively build your business while keeping yourself from financial debt or from losing yourself in your business and neglecting other areas of your life.

Last  week we discussed the importance of having a business plan in place, of creating a budget and of keeping life-work balance.

Here are three more business tips for realtors:

1. Find a mentor. If you’re just staring out in the real estate space, you could learn a lot – and avoid making costly mistakes – if you can find an experienced agent who would be willing to teach you and help you survive the first year.

2. Add everyone you know to your contact list, and keep in regular touch with them. Your goal is to be top of mind when it’s time for them to use a realtor. An automated email drip marketing tool can be very helpful and enable you to keep in touch with prospects and with former clients easily.

3. Explore cost effective ways to be visible in your community. You should definitely have an agent website. In addition, a great, affordable way to build a name for yourself is to use social media tools, including a blog, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

One of the most important things you can do to build your real estate business is to keep learning and developing as a professional. Read books and publications, attend seminars, and then share your knowledge via social media. Over the course of a few months, this is a great way to build a name for yourself and to establish yourself as a real estate expert.

Building a real estate business is tough these days. We should know! We are in the real estate business too. Competition is fierce – fiercer than it’s ever been it seems, and the number of realtors seems to be growing by the minute. Combined with a prolonged recession, these are tough times for realtors. But a business, any business, should be built for the long term. And if you do it right, you should e able to survive the tough times and benefit from the good times.

Three tips for building your real estate business (three more in the next post):

1. Create a business plan. Very few realtors do this, but creating a written business plan is vital. This need not be complicated – your plan can be fairly simple and short. You should basically see where you are now, where you want to be, say, ten years from now, and list the steps that you need to take in order to get there (such as taking classes or starting a blog).

2. Create an annul budget. Include your projected marketing costs, any additional costs you expect to incur such as education, and your projected income. None of this will be 100% accurate, but you should still have at least a general plan.

3. Remember work-life balance. Just like any other small business, your real estate business could easily take over your life. Any small business owner will tell you that if they are not careful, they can find themselves working around the clock. Don’t let it happen to you! Make sure to spend time with your family and friends, and to have some alone time too.

Please stay tuned for our next blog post, where we will discuss three more business tips for real estate professionals.

These days, a big chunk of your real estate marketing activities is done online. Savvy agents are using agent websites, single property websites, blogs and social media to market their services and their listings.

But offline marketing is still important. In fact, marketing is never about just one medium. A good marketing campaign utilizes many different mediums to generate many different leads, then nurtures them until they are ready to become clients.

Which brings us to the topic of real estate flyers. No doubt, real estate flyers, when done right, can be a low-cost and highly effective real estate marketing tool. Follow these tips to get the most out of your real estate flyers:

1. Full color flyers on a glossy paper look significantly more professional than black and white flyers. It’s also important to use high quality images in your flyers.

2. When designing the flyer, try to convey the look and feel of the house through the flyer’s design and colors.

3. Each flyer should include easy-to-read bullet points highlighting the benefits of each property. You should always highlight benefits rather than features. For example, instead of “large grassy yard” say, “the large grassy yard is great for children and perfect for outdoor entertaining.”

4. A single-page flyer is almost always preferable to a multi-page one.

5. Make sure your contact information is easy to find, and include a way to directly track flyer performance, such as a specific phone number or a code.

One of the best ways to distribute real estate flyers is to print them in bulk and insert them into local newspapers. This is more affordable, and at least as effective, as direct mail.

An agent website is one of the best tools available to you for establishing yourself as a real estate expert.

Think about it: as more and more people are starting their search for a home online, and as more and more people expect professionals to have a web presence, you simply can’t afford NOT to have a website.

If you don’t have a website, or if you have a poorly designed agent site, many potential clients will immediately dismiss you as “not serious,” “unprofessional” or as a non-savvy realtor.

In fact, this is true for any small business these days. Regardless of how small a business is, it should have a website if it is to be taken seriously by customers.

The good news: creating a website today is much easier, and certainly more affordable, than it used to be just a decade ago. Reputable real estate website providers such as Properties Online enable you to create a professionally designed, affordable agent website with all the tools you need in today’s technology driven market, including SEO tools, social media tools and more.

Think about your real estate site as your digital business card, or your online portfolio. An agent site provides you with an excellent way to prove to prospects that you are everything they’ve been looking for in an agent – that you are savvy, experienced, knowledgeable, and not afraid of leveraging technology as a marketing tool.

At RealEstateSites.com, we are very aware of how busy you are. In order to make the important task of marketing your listing significantly easier, we have made it our goal to include as many useful tools and features as possible in our agent websites.

One of the best features we have included in our agent websites is the ability to create beautiful craigslist flyers. Our flyer builder will generate a snippet of html code that that will dynamically pull all your listing details, photos and your contact information. This html snippet enables you to easily cut and paste your data into online classified sites such as the very popular Craigslist, Backpage or Ebay.

We Maximize Your Clicks!

There are literally hundreds of ads every day for real estate. You need to get your message across quickly and effectively. The ads we create for you fit the bill perfectly because we use HTML to format them. Your property will stand hand and shoulders above the competition.

You can expect anywhere from 5% to 10% of people viewing an effective ad on Craigslist to click-through to your website. This is considerabily higher than the adverage click thru banner advertisement rate of just 1.9%.*

Tracking Your Results

Another fantastic tool related to our craigslist flyer campaigns is the ability to track your results. With our ad campaign stats you can see exactly how many views your classified ad received, and how many people clicked thru to your website.

Don’t forget to take advantage of this free service. Craigslist can be a powerful tool for generating free traffic to your property website. It is one of the most popular websites in the world, with millions of daily visitors.

Regularly posting relevant Craigslist classifieds that point to your listings and include a link to your single property page have the potential of driving significant amounts of highly targeted traffic to your property websites. Get in the habit of using our handy html snippet for each listing and you can see a real difference in the amount of traffic your site receives.

*Average accross all Properties Online users in 2009. According to a study of more than 10 billion banner inquiries across Europe from ADTECH the average click-through rate fluctuates between 0.11% and 0.19%

The following statistics are provided by the National Association of Realtors (NAR):

• 90% of consumers did online research before they bought their last home.
• 36% of buyers found the home they ended up purchasing on the internet, while only 2% of buyers found their home in the newspaper.
• 63% of Agents marketing budget still goes to offline advertising (newspaper, flyers, etc).
• Consumers’ looked at an average of 12 homes over a period of 12 weeks before purchasing.

Are you staying in touch long enough to capture a relationship with an online lead?

• 89% of consumers said that response time was very important when choosing their agent.
• 56% of consumers expect a response from their agent within 30 minutes.

Online Consumers understand that the internet is an immediate medium. Are you succeeding with your online leads? Do you have a hole in your business model? What is your average response time?

• 88% of Buyers said they would use their agent again or recommend their agent to others (66% said definitely, 22% said probably).
• Only 10% of Buyers used an agent they had used previously.
• 81% of Sellers said they would use their agent again or recommend their agent to others (59% said definitely, 22% said probably).
• Only 24% of Sellers used an agent they had used previously.

The vast majority of consumers — 66% of buyers and 59% of sellers — say they would “definitely” use their real estate agent again or recommend that person to others. Yet only 10 percent of buyers and 24 percent of sellers say they used the same real estate professional that they worked with for their previous transaction. Why is there a disconnect? One reason, undoubtedly, is a lack of consistent communication.

Your day is busy and your time is important.  Make sure that you aren’t letting your clients fall through the cracks.  If you don’t have the time to maintain these high levels of contact, let a drip email system lend a helping hand.  Consumers need constant reminders of who you are, what you do and what does that mean for them.

Make sure you provide the right level of contact.

With all their rich features and professional looking interface, you would think that property websites would be expensive and only suitable for top-performing realtors. But property websites are actually very affordable, and can easily be employed as an online marketing tool by every real estate agent, across all their listings.

A professional-looking property website, filled with unlimited images, text, audio, video and more, costs just $60 for an entire year. There are no monthly fees, no hidden costs of any kind, and the website stays up – and serves as a great testimonial to the agent’s marketing abilities – for a full year. The top-level domain name makes it easy for buyers to find the site, and makes sellers extremely happy, and more likely to recommend their agent to future clients. Since, according to the National Association of REALTORS®, referrals are the top way for people to find a real estate agent, making sellers happy is of course a big priority.

Another major plus is that each Listing Domains single property website includes a custom sign rider for the property, so agents who use single property sites don’t have to order those separately. The combination of the sign rider and the property website works beautifully to market the home. The property’s URL is clearly depicted on the lawn sign rider located at the property itself. Homebuyers can drive by a property they like, then go directly to the URL listed on the rider to find a wealth of information about the home prior to scheduling a private tour. Yard signs remain an important real estate marketing method that complements online marketing. According to the National Association of REALTORS®, 82% percent of sellers in 2009 used a yard sign.

The ROI on single property websites is high not only because agents pay a one-time fee that includes a sign rider. Property websites also pay them dividends in the form of gaining them new clients, who see the sites they’ve created, whether through links on the agent’s main site or through friends and acquaintances, and want the same marketing for their own home. Existing property websites provide valuable long-term positioning for real estate professionals as tech-savvy marketers and demonstrate their marketing capabilities to potential clients.

Glenn Gephart did a great job branding  with the youtube plug in feature @ http://GlennGephart.com

Lu Anne Finlayson is so smart to use ListingDomains for commercial sales like www.DanceStudioForSale.com because the buyers can get so much more info then any other type of advertisement 

We have already discussed the importance of using social media in marketing real estate. Today we’d like to add that an important part of any real estate social media marketing campaign is using property widgets.

Property widgets are dynamic buttons that you can place online to showcase and promote your listings. A property widget is an excellent teaser – it shows just enough to entice people and make them want to click on the widget, which then takes them to your agent website.

At Real Estate Sites, we deeply believe in utilizing social media marketing as much as possible. Therefore, we automatically create an RSS feed for your listings. This enables you to build property widgets and post them to your blog, to micro blogging sites such as Twitter, and to social networking sites such as Facebook.

Because RSS is dynamic, and changes whenever you change your listings or add a new listing, your widget will automatically reflect that – the widget gets updated whenever you add or remove a listing.

By adding a property widget to your various social media outlets, you can create more awareness around your offerings, strengthen your brand, and drive highly targeted traffic to your agent website.