How to Be Innovative in Your Real Estate Business

In order to bring innovation to your business, you must learn...

To study other successful businesses OUTSIDE of real estate and apply what they’re doing INSIDE real estate.

Please take a minute and read this sentence again – it’s critically important.

This is easier said than done because we have a tendency to look inside our industry and copy what we see. When you first get into real estate, you look for agents who appear to be successful and you copy them – right? I did it! Hell, every new agent has done it, too.

The problem with this approach is zero innovation happens in your business. To make more money, sell more homes and dominate your market, you need to be innovative. You need to stand out by doing something different.

A great example of finding something successful outside your industry and applying to your industry would be fractional jet ownership. This style of ownership wasn’t invented by companies selling smaller jets. They simply copied it from the real estate timeshare industry and applied to it to jet sales.

Several years ago, I copied something I saw outside of real estate and used it in my real estate business, and it had a dramatic impact on my business. I was participating in several memberships and coaching programs designed to help me improve my business. Each month, I paid a membership fee for access to information. This fee was charged directly to my credit card.

It was obvious how powerful this recurring monthly income was to the businesses offering these memberships and coaching programs. My goal was to do something similar in my real estate sales business.

My plan was to create a club of real estate investors and charge members a fee to participate. Each month, we would provide special expert interviews, a lengthy detailed newsletter with investing tips and strategies, special classes and more. I launched my membership in November of 2004 and had over 100 paying members by the end of 2005. When I sold my business in 2007, we had well over 400 members paying $29.95 a month. This membership provided over $12,000 a month of recurring income and doubled our home sales annually.

Some people have called me a genius for what I did. But in reality, any agent could have done the same thing simply by copying what they saw outside of real estate.

I’ve included this little story to show you the power of what’s possible when you look outside of the real estate industry instead of inside the real estate industry. The topic of this special report is Advanced Online Marketing strategies, and to be innovative with online marketing, we must look outside of the real estate industry.

So where do you go to find innovative online marketing strategies that you can apply to your business?

Internet Marketers

Internet marketers make their living online by selling information products. They live and die by their websites and follow-up marketing.

Internet marketers are constantly testing new strategies. More importantly, they’re tracking their results. This tracking allows them to see what works and what doesn’t work. It’s very powerful.

By copying internet marketers, you leverage their testing, tracking and knowledge of online marketing. And when I say copy, I don’t mean to copy their copyrighted or trademarked material. I mean to copy their process for selling. Their process for selling online can be very, very valuable to your business.

Here are just a few things Internet Marketers track in their online marketing:

1. Every advertisement they run and how well it drives traffic to their website.

2. The conversion percentage of every web page they have online. (The number of people visiting a web page vs. the number of people who fill in their contact information)

3. Which email subject lines work the best?

4. What time of day is best to send emails to get them opened.

5. How many people watch videos they post vs. how many take action after watching the videos.

Do you track these things in your online marketing?

Probably not.

The good news is you can leverage their testing and tracking by copying their online sales process in your business.

This article is continued with detailed examples in my new report titled "Advanced Online Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Agents" which can be downloaded for free at http://www.OnlineStrategiesReport.com

How to Use Sales Letters to Automate Lead Conversion

Sales letters have been my most valuable marketing tool in ALL of my businesses. The reason why is because they are automatic sales machines that work 24/7. They are extremely valuable assets that can be leveraged simply by generating more leads. Sales letters are powerful lead conversion tools and should be used by every real estate agent to automate their lead conversion.

A few weeks ago, I released a free report titled “Advanced Online Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Agents.” In this report I suggested copying businesses outside of real estate. A sales letter is something I watched other businesses outside of real estate use and decided to copy this strategy inside real estate.

I decided to write a sales letter for my real estate business. The goal of my sales letter was simply to convince my prospects that I was the best agent for them. I wanted to eliminate my competition and pre-sell prospects on my real estate services. This sales letter ultimately generated millions of dollars of commissions to my real estate business. Needless to say, I’m a BIG fan of sales letters and use them extensively today.

The good news is you don’t have to be a great marketer to write a compelling sales letter for your business. Winning sales letters follow a proven template and you can easily write a compelling sales letter for your business, if you follow this proven template.

Here’s the proven template you should follow when writing sales letters for your business:

1. Grab the readers attention with a compelling headline.

2. Highlight the big problem the person faces.

3. Agitate the problem further.

4. Provide a solution to the problem. (This solution would be your services!)

5. Present your expertise and why you’re qualified to provide the solution.

6. Show the prospect what they’ll receive when using your services.

7. Provide testimonials to back up what you’ve promised.

8. Include a clear call to action to get the prospect to respond.

9. Add scarcity to create urgency.

10. Reverse the prospect’s risk by adding a guarantee.

This sales letter template is proven throughout history in almost every industry and is something you should copy in your marketing.

How to Use Content-Driven Marketing

You probably heard the buzz in the news recently when President Barack Obama made a commencement speech at Hampton University in Virginia. The president made headlines in the media, which portrayed him as anti-technology because of something he said about a handful of electronic gadgets. Here is the part of his speech everyone’s talking about:

“You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter. And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations – none of which I know how to work – information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it’s putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.

Class of 2010, this is a period of breathtaking change, like few others in our history. We can’t stop these changes, but we can channel them, we can shape them, we can adapt to them.”

Now, if you’ve followed the president at all you’d know that he is not anti-technology. Much was made when he was elected about his giving up his precious Blackberry. He also gave the queen of England the gift of an iPod on a visit there. He wasn’t saying the devices are the problem.

What he was saying about messages in the media, however, was underscored by how the media seized on that part of the message. What he was saying to the graduates was that education should help them sift through the distracting messages, that the “spin” put on information out there needs to be processed thoughtfully. As if to prove his point, there were dozens of “Obama hates Apple” headlines that followed.

Technology has re-shaped information for centuries; the printed word did, radio did, TV did and, more recently, the Internet has. With each change has come a challenge for the audience, which is increasingly asked to believe more subjective, even contradictory, information.

For example, I recently read on a news aggregation website two headlines about the same story. One said: “No ‘frenzy’ to beat homebuyer tax credit deadline.” The other headline said: “Selling frenzy as homebuyer tax credit nears end.”

What is a reader supposed to believe?

The way consumers have been bombarded with information has changed the way marketing works. The messages that were once sent to consumers to “buy, buy, buy” aren’t received the same way. The sales pitches are hitting an audience that is mistrustful and skeptical of information, and so they are often ignored.

It’s why content-driven marketing has become so important. The best marketers are the ones who are providing less-overt, information-driven messages to their prospects. They are the ones who are able to package their marketing in a manner of delivery that is helpful to their customers – or prospective customers – and also builds the trust factor. It’s why we have blogs, Twitter accounts and do article marketing. We want people to get to know us.

Content-driven marketing is effective because:

• It gives you the ability to be timely, to capture the “buzz” surrounding current events
• It can be constant and consistent because it’s not a hard-sell
• It allows you to shape your message in the context of the news
• It can be delivered in a number of ways
• It builds your credibility

Actually, content-driven marketing is not any big leap from the old marketing adage “Don’t tell them; show them,” it’s just that in this day and age, we have to “show” them the benefits we provide in the form of content they can digest and appreciate in this day and age of information overload. They don’t want to hear you say “I can find your dream home,” or “I can sell your house,” they want you to SHOW them that you’re the expert, and the person they can trust.

Prospects and clients are starving for a reliable source of information they can trust; it’s up to YOU to be that source. It’s a mistake to let other media shape your message.

Just ask President Obama.

Words of Wisdom From a Multi-Millionaire

Two years ago, I read a book titled “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis. Felix Dennis is a multi-millionaire and shares his journey to wealth throughout his fantastic book. In one of the final chapters, he wrote the following:

“Ask me what I will give you if you could wave a magic wand and give me my youth back. The answer would be everything I own and everything I will ever own.”

Here’s a man who dedicated most of his life to building wealth who is willing to trade it all to be young again. This is very powerful and has had a big impact on me over the last year or so. In real estate, we tend to work 7 days a week, week-after-week.

He wrote:

“Seeking substantial wealth is almost always a fool’s game. The statistics show that very few people ever succeed. Most of them should never have made the attempt in the first place….the search will take up a great deal of your waking life for many, many years….Time is finite. Which is a fancy way of saying that you only have so much of it – then it will run out.”

Felix is saying that the price he paid with his time to accumulate wealth was too high. In other words, he overpaid and is suggesting that we be careful of overpaying, too. Felix has realized that TIME IS MORE VALUABLE THAN MONEY. I’ve been fond of saying “Time is Money.” This is actually incorrect.

Back to Felix…

“If you are young and reading this, then I ask you to remember just this: you are richer than anyone older than you, and far richer than those who are much older. What you choose to do with the time that stretches out before you is entirely a matter for you. But do not say you started the journey poor. If you are young, you are infinitely richer than I can ever be again.

Money is never owned. It is only in your custody for a while. Time is always running on, and the young have more of it in their pocket than the richest man or woman alive…And yet you wish to waste your youth in the getting of money? Really? Think hard, my young cub, think hard and think long before you embark on such a quest. The time spent attempting to acquire wealth will mount up and cannot be reclaimed, whether you succeed or whether you fail.”

Here’s another great quote from Douglas Adams:

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

An incredibly wealthy man has said that he would trade every dollar he owned to get his time back. Will we learn from his experiences?