Rob Minton - Renegade Millionaire Real Estate Agents

Robert De Niro & the movie "Heat"

I'm still working on my new report titled "How Real Estate Agents Can Eliminate Negative Cash Flow in their Businesses" and just included a lesson about cash flow I learned from the movie "Heat."

Can you find the business lesson in the "Heat" movie trailer?

Robert De Niro, who plays the leader of a bank robbing gang, says:

"If you want to be making moves on the street, allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat, if you spot the heat coming around the corner."

This is actually very valuable business advice to apply if you want to have a business with zero negative cash flow. To show you why, I've re-written De Niro's line for us to be:

"If you want to be profitable in business, allow no expense in your business that you cannot cancel in 30 seconds flat, if you spot a market slowdown around the corner.

Side Note: My new report on how to eliminate negative cash flow in your business will be released on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010. Join the pre-release list and have advanced access to this report at http://www.NotificationList.com

Are you swimming naked?

The Simplest Marketing Test of All

I have a good marketing test for you. It’s the most basic, fundamental test you can run on the marketing for your business. In fact, it involves asking yourself one simple question…

“Would I buy from me?”

Be honest. If you launched your marketing campaign on yourself, would it compel you to work with yourself?

I’ve learned over the years that selling homes is not as much about sales skills as it is about relationship-building. Don’t get me wrong; it is very important to be able to sell, but think about your best sales experiences, your best clients, and I’ll bet you’ll see that you built great relationships with them, whether they were buyers or sellers.

This is an important aspect about our business that many, if not most, real estate professionals completely miss. It’s not entirely their fault – we don’t learn about relationship-building in our licensing classes, and our whole industry is in a “that’s-way-we’ve-always-done-it” mindset when it comes to marketing.

We mail postcards, send business cards to our spheres of influence, maybe email our latest listings to a group of people. Does any of this truly seem like relationship-building stuff to you?
Not long ago, I wrote an article titled “12 is the Magic Number.” In it, I cited statistics compiled by the National Sales Executive Association, which recently reported the following:

2% of sales are made on the 1st contact
3% of sales are made on the 2nd contact
5% of sales are made on the 3rd contact
10% of sales are made on the 4th contact
80% of sales are made on the 5th - 12th contact

Aside from not generating enough leads for their business, the single-biggest mistake I see agents make is the lack of consistent follow-up. If 80 percent of all sales are made between five and 12 contacts, it obviously requires follow-up to achieve any real level of success.

So many agents invest good money to generate leads, then make a phone call to each prospect, mail a postcard maybe, and if there’s no immediate sale -– poof, they disappear from that prospect’s radar. This is a huge mistake, and it leaves massive amounts of money on the table.

What I have found is that you must have consistent, constant contact with the prospects in your database. And not just your business card or a generic greeting card at the holidays – I mean real content, information they can use. Articles. Resources. Even entertaining stories about yourself and what’s going on in your life. This is the stuff that builds trust, fosters real relationships and leads to sales and referrals. This is the stuff that gives you loyal clients for life.

In my business, I sent out a monthly, hard-copy client newsletter full of advice, tips, educational articles, funny stories, etc. It got to the point where I would get it out a couple of days later than usual, and I’d get calls and emails, “Where’s my newsletter?”

When you have prospects and clients like that, THEN when you send an email with your latest listings or your “deal of the week,” you will get a response. I have seen it first-hand in my business. You must build the relationship first. Don’t you prefer to do business with those you trust? Wouldn’t you rather work with someone you know?

Your prospects are no different, which leads us back to the all-important first question: Would you buy from you? In other words, is your current marketing building the relationships required for sales success?

To learn how to lock clients to you for life, download my Farmer Report for free at www.FreeFarmerReport.com

A lesson on FOCUS by Arnold Schwarzenegger

I've coached hundreds of agents over the  years and I can honestly say the biggest mistake I see most agents make is...

Lack of FOCUS

We seem to get easily distracted by other agents, the news, interest rates, our brokers and hundreds of other outside influences. Allowing yourself to get distracted from your goals is a recipe for disaster.

Several years ago, I watched an older documentary on Arnold Schwarzenegger titled "Pumping Iron." This documentary highlighted his training for the 1975 Mr. Olympia Body Building Championship. I was blown away by Arnold's complete focus. You'll probably be shocked by Arnold's comments in this video footage. Fast forward to 7:15 for Arnold's comments and his thought process on focus:

When I first watched this documentary, I was blown away by what Arnold said. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how critical focus was for success. It doesn't matter what your goal is. If you're not 100-percent focused on accomplishing your goal, you're doomed. I went back and made notes detailing Arnold's comments word-for-word. Here they are:

"If you want to be a champion, you cannot have any outside negative influence coming in to affect you. If I get emotionally involved with a girl, it can have a negative effect on my mind and destroy my workouts. Therefore I have to cut my emotions off and be cold in a way. Do this with the rest of things. If someone steals my car right now, I don't care. I can't be bothered with that. All I can do is call the insurance agency and they'll laugh about it. I trained myself for that and not to let things go into my mind.

When my father died, my mother called me on the phone and said, "Your father died." This was two months before a contest. She asked me to come home to the funeral and I said "No - It's too late. He is dead and nothing can be done.Sorry I can't come home."

Most real estate agents change course in their businesses every few weeks. Every time you change course in your business, you lose momentum. We've all experienced this at some level. One week, we want to focus on referrals. The next week, we change our minds and decide to go after seller prospects. A week later, we decide to go after buyers because we didn't get a new listing.

Not only do we change our target market of prospects often, we also change how we market from week-to-week without much consistency. We try classified advertisements, and then we skip to Craigslist. Then we get frustrated and decide to mess around with Twitter for a few weeks. Then we go to Facebook. And then we move on to the next big thing.

Zero focus.

The next time you think about changing your focus in business stop and think about Arnold. Ask yourself the following question:

Would Arnold allow himself to be distracted by what I'm considering?

NOTE: On January 6, 2010 I'll be releasing 100 copies of a new report titled "How Real Estate Agents Can Eliminate Negative Cash Flow in Their Businesses." I've been working on this report for several weeks and it's sure to change the way you think about your business going forward. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that selling more homes could lead to financial disaster in your business. I'll detail exactly why in this report. If you'd like to receive special advance access to this new report, join the Pre-Release email notification list at http://www.NotificationList.com

Automatic Lead Conversion - Part One

I was recently interviewed by Dean Jackson about how I built my business. The interview was transcribed and I've included part one for you in this blog post.

We’ve got a very special Marking Monday for you this week. Recently I interviewed my friend Rob Minton.

Some of you might be familiar with Rob, he was able to build a very successful real estate practice in the Cleveland, Ohio market and he was subsequently able to sell that business recently for more than a million dollars.

Rob has some great insights on choosing a very specific niche market and then applying direct response marketing to that business to build it in an incredible way so that clients were actually applying to work with Rob and his team.

So we’ve got some great insights for you today and I hope that you enjoy this interview and tell all your friends.

——-

Hey Rob, thanks for joining us.

You’re welcome Dean.

Hey, where in the world is Rob Minton today?

Rob Minton is calling from his home office in lovely Cleveland Ohio, and I always say lovely before I say Cleveland, little, supposed to be a little joke because it’s not really lovely here.

Cleveland Rocks.

Go Browns baby, right?

There you go. Well Rob I really appreciate you taking the time to spend with us today, and I know you’ve got an interesting story about how you built your real estate business, so can you share a little bit about your career in real estate sales?

Yeah I’d be happy to, and just kind of a quick warning, I’m struggling with a little bit of bronchitis, so if I, I’ve got cough drops and all kinds of stuff, so I will do my best not to cough up a lung as we go forward. I got my real estate license in the mid 1990’s and I was working for a small company, you know this small brokerage, and I was working with buyers and trying to get listings, and I did what everybody else did, I was out there copying other real estate agents that I thought were successful, and at some point I started to read some books on business, and I decided to open my own brokerage, and this was about near 2000. My main strategy at that point was I’d run a lead generation advertisement offering a free report, and a prospect that would be interested in that free report would call and leave a message, or maybe they’d go to my website and request it, and then I, the idea was we would return the phone call and in that phone call try to set an appointment with the person who requests the report and, so that was kind of the main approach, and…

Did you start right out of the gate, using direct response like that? Like were you familiar with it, and you started immediately applying it to your real estate business?

No actually, no. My original broker was old school, so we weren’t doing any direct response advertising whatsoever, but when I made the decision to start my own company and I started to hire agents, I realized that I needed to do something to be able to have new clients coming into the business on a consistent basis, and when I started research marketing, direct response seemed like to be the best approach to use going forward. But the problem is once you generate the lead, what do you do with it, right? How do you get that lead to become a client? I recruit a couple of agents and the idea was “Okay I’ll generate the leads, I’ll hand these leads off to my agents and then my agents will make these phone calls” – you’re laughing.

Well I laugh because we always joke that it’s like, you expect and you think that you can generate all these leads and hand somebody the ball on sort of the fifty yard line and they can take it from there, but the reality is you’ve got to, you’ve almost have to hand it to them on the goal line and push them over the edge.

That it, nobody told me that right. I’d hand them the ball and they’d fumble it like Cleveland Browns would do, and so what ended up happening was, because I own the business, I’ve got to pay for all the expenses. In addition, I ended up being the one making the phone calls because I couldn’t get them to do it. So I’m on the phone in the evenings, I’m on the phone on the weekends, I’d set the appointments, then I’d hand the appointment off to my agents. When they had the appointment they would do fairly well. But at some point, I realized this strategy is not sustainable going forward. I can’t be the one driving every sale for my business. Sure if I'm working by myself – yeah that would work – but to try to feed your agents that way is not a really good business strategy. I didn’t have the cash flow in the business to hire like an outbound call person or a telemarketer. Ihad to figure out a different way to handle lead conversion. Calling prospects to set appointments just didn’t work for me. Maybe it does for other agents, but the way you laughed is probably saying that it doesn’t.

I just think that was funny because it’s so, you know I work with a lot of agents who have teams, and the dream is that you can generate the leads and hand them off, and agents will turn them into sales but it just doesn’t work out that way.

They don’t appreciate it I guess if they’re not paying for it, I don’t know. But, so what ended up happening was I’m like “Okay this doesn’t work, what do I have to do?” I went back to books and I started studying sales letters and long copy sales letters which my original broker told me if it’s, if you’re writing something long people won’t read it, you’re wasting your time, and it turned out he was wrong. If you have a good sales letter with a neat story, people will read it even if it's long.

The same thing applies to ads though, like a lot of times the advertising sales people, and your brokers, and people who aren’t trained in direct response think you got to have a lot of white space and you got to have short punchy things because people don’t read, but you know I always get a kick out of, our mutual friend Dan Kennedy always says “Nobody reads white space”. We know that for sure.

It would without a doubt, and actually Dan Kennedy, some of his books helped me a lot. One of his books was The Ultimate Sales Letter. This is where I started to learn how to write sales letters. I simply sat down and wrote a long copy sales letter for my business. The goal was to lead a prospect to the conclusion that I was an expert and the best agent for their real estate needs. I put a call to action in the sales letter by adding “If you’re interested in becoming one of my clients, fill out this application and fax it in to my office.” The goal was to pre-sell the prospect, get them to raise their hand and come back to us again. I began advertising a free report, but the free report I sent was the sales letter that I wrote. Slowly but surely, we started to get people sending in these client applications. They would come in via fax, some would come in via mail and some people actually would drive to the office and hand deliver them. This was a huge turning point in my business, because I was able to then hand off these applications to my agents and my agents were able to convert 50-70% of those client applications into exclusive buyer contracts. One sales letter eliminated outbound phone calls and believe it or not, it actually doubled my home sales from 2005 going forward each and every year. The end of my story in selling real estate is that I sold my small real estate brokerage for seven figures in 2007.

Wow. That’s some pretty impressive growth numbers, but what do you think drove the increase in the number of homes that you sold?

Well a couple of things. First off, to touch back on what we just talked about is once I realized I could run a direct response advertisement, generate a lead and then mail them a sales letter and have an application come in, I had a predictable lead conversion type strategy in my business. If I wanted to sell more homes, all I really needed to do was generate more leads. Because the sales funnel worked so well, more leads meant more client applications, which turned into more home sales. Once this was in place in my business, I could leverage it further just by running more lead generation advertisements.

The second was targeting a specific niche in the market. This is different than what I think a lot of agents do. A lot of agents want to be everything to everybody. This is virtually impossible. By selecting a niche, you’re saving a lot of time. You’re able to offer some compelling benefits to your specific niche, and when you do you’ll see an increase in response rates.

How would you describe a niche? I’d love to hear how you would describe what a niche market is for people who maybe not have a crystal clear understanding?

… It’s a gap, a possible gap in the marketplace where other real estate agent’s aren’t necessarily paying attention to that you can dominate. In my business, I decided to niche with real estate investors. Back in 2004 – nobody was really paying attention to investors. I’m not saying working with investors today is the best niche because of all the problems with financing here in the States, but at that point in time no one really wanted to work with investors. In fact, most agents felt investors were a pain in the neck to work with. I decided to make investors my entire business. Basically a niche is a pocket in the market which you can excel at.

Yeah, like a definable market rather than just saying anybody who wants to buy or sell a home – that’s pretty broad, but when you can narrow it down to investors would be a niche, or first time buyers would be a niche, whatever. A segment of the market like that.

Definitely segment of the market. The hard part is letting all other opportunities outside of your niche go. A couple of other things real quick on what I think helped drive the number of home sales is I finally learned the real value of a lead. When I first got into real estate, I didn't see this value. Next was lead conversion systems like the sales letter. The sales letter helped to automatically convert prospects into clients. I viewed this as a very powerful sales asset for the business. Those would probably be the high points which drove our increase in home sales.

Now isn’t it amazing though, because we talked about a lead conversion system and for me, that’s what’s so, that’s why I believe we have so much in common, I like everything that you’re doing because everything that we do is really based in systematic results and the value of system is knowing with predictability what’s going to happen. Like you know if you generate a bundle of a hundred leads and you send out this sales letter, the start of your lead conversion process, and I love how you call them sales assets, because that’s exactly what it is. If you’ve got an add or a postcard or any type of lead generator, or a website that predictably creates a result when you drive people to it, that is an asset. You don’t have to, you put in the work, you’ve done the, you’ve done all the hard work about it, and it can continually be deployed.

Oh without a doubt sales assets are probably the most valuable thing you can have in your business. I had one advertorial advertisement that I referred to as my million dollar ad. When I ran this ad, I would generate three hundred leads. I’d mail three hundred sales letters and would have twenty five new clients – clockwork.

Like clockwork, exactly.

Month after month, month after month, month after month.

Well based on what you’re saying in the market place today, what do you think is the best niche to be in right now? We’re talking here in the fall of 2009.

You know, I know probably listeners aren’t going to want to hear this, but I think foreclosures have to be something everyone has to pay attention to. Even though the media’s saying “We’ve hit the bottom” and you’re hearing all kinds of competition, and foreclosures in certain areas, I still firmly believe foreclosure home sales are going to be a major opportunity for many years to come. There are many reasons why I believe this niche is one to exploit. Obviously our unemployment rate is continuing to escalate, which means more people are losing their jobs. More homes are going to be foreclosure. I think we have a pretty big issue headed our way with all the option arms that are going to be resetting. From what I’m reading, 94% of the people that have pay option arms are only paying interest. This means they’re going negative in their monthly payment - on top of the decrease in value. So I think we will continue to see a large number of foreclosures coming into the market over the next two or three years. Even though you might not be excited about foreclosures, I think that’s where the majority of the home sales are going to come.

Either, it’s certainly, you see all of the, like you said it’s all over the news, you know it’s got, it’s coming. There still continues to be more and more of them, and that’s way, I guess there’s some momentum in it, in that the buyers who are buying, it seems like that, to them seems like they’re getting a deal. I mean it seems like that’s what they, that’s what the buyers are really interested in, is buying <crosstalk>

Oh yeah, no. You said the media has trained everyone to want a foreclosed home. This means it's a lot easier today to attract foreclosure buyers. Prospects are already trained to want a foreclosed home by the media. This has dramatically reduced the cost per lead for agents marketing to foreclosure buyers.

Well there’s momentum.

… Yeah because you’re riding in the wave of what the media’s telling everyone. The media attention  drives your marketing cost down dramatically. To give you an example - when I was running my business, my average cost per lead was probably about fifteen dollars. Today agents who market to foreclosure buyers are generating leads sometimes for 30, 40, 50 cents. And in many cases, they're generating free leads  onCraigslist.org. Or if they’re running an advertorial style advertisement, they’re generating high quality leads for a dollar, two dollars, three dollars. I used to pay fifteen dollars, on average, for a lead. This simply means the media exposure on foreclosures is a huge benefit to real estate agents.

See it’s kind of interesting too that you, when you have an asset like your system, the conversion system that you were talking about, you don’t, you’re not afraid to spend money to generate those leads, even though, you talked about generating two, three, four hundred leads a month, and on an average cost of fifteen dollars, you’re spending four, five, six thousand dollars in generating those leads, and a lot of people just don’t have the confidence to do that because they don’t have a system that would convert.

And rightly so. If you don’t have a lead conversion system, you may be wasting your money.

That’s exactly right, but here you are, you knew that you’re going to spend that money, but then at the end of the day you’re going to have twenty five new clients, and you’ve got the value of that is way higher than the money that you spent to generate those leads.

You know it’s funny you bring this up because I honestly believe buying leads for your business is the single best investment you could possibly make. Especially if you have a lead conversion system that turns prospects into clients. It beats every other investment opportunity available by a wide margin. 

Stay tuned for part two of this interview coming soon!

12 is the Magic Number...

The National Sales Executive Association recently reported the following:

2% of sales are made on the 1st contact
3% of sales are made on the 2nd contact
5% of sales are made on the 3rd contact
10% of sales are made on the 4th contact
80% of sales are made on the 5th - 12th contact

This means 90% of your sales will come after your fifth follow-up with a prospect. This is very important information for you to consider in your marketing plan.

When I first started selling homes, I would write off a prospect if I couldn't set an appointment with them after one or two phone calls. I simply moved on to the next lead. What a mistake this was...

I left a tremendous amount of money on the table.

My guess is that you might be making a similar mistake in your business, too. How many times do you follow up with leads generated for your business? Really. Be honest. Are you following up with every prospect at least 12 times? If not, you're definitely losing sales.

I actually think the number of contacts required to make a sale may be increasing. This is because of something I read in Dr. Frank Luntz's book titled "What Americans Really Want...Really."  In his book, Dr. Luntz writes about a dramatic shift in what consumers want. This shift has occurred because of the recent economic recession, stock market and real estate market crashes.

He has found, through surveying thousands of people, that "consumers are less happy, less secure, less confident, and less trusting than any generation since the Great Depression."

Did you "see" it? Consumers are less trusting than any generation since the Great Depression. This means we must work harder to build relationships with our prospects because they do not trust us. Relationships take time to develop. You won't be able to make one or two phone calls and sign a new client. Those days are over. To be successful today, you must have a long-term follow-up campaign, providing multiple touches to your database.

The Best Time to Send Marketing Emails to Your Database

Dr. Frank Luntz recently released a new book titled "What Americans Really Want... Really." It's a great book for those of you who are serious about marketing. Dr. Luntz has conducted over 1,500 surveys and has studied how people live and what they really want in their lives.

Hint: It's a fast-track guide on how to understand and communicate with your prospects.

Early in the book, he summarizes the typical day of an average person. This little study is very revealing from a marketing perspective. As an example, he found that most people begin their day in the dark because they have long commutes to work. More than 3 million people travel 50 miles or more to work. He pinpointed this as being a great opportunity for connecting with your prospect because you may have their uninterrupted attention.

He also found that most people now go online within minutes of waking up to see what's going on in their community, the weather and to get updates from their friends and family. This finding indicates that you should try to deliver some of your marketing messages, newsletters or other client communications so that your prospects have them first thing in the morning. My testing has shown this to be true. My email open rate tends to be higher when the emails are delivered at 6:30 a.m. This doesn't mean you have to personally send the email at 6:30. It simply means you have to program your email to be delivered at 6:30 a.m.

In fact, most people have checked their email before leaving their home for work. Dr. Luntz even found that if someone is under the age of 30, they've probably received a text message, too.

On surfing the Internet he wrote:

"Only a handful of people acknowledge surfing the Web at work for personal content, even though it is well-known that website traffic spikes when people first get to work, during lunch hour, and again right before they leave for home."

Seems to me these three time zones might be very helpful for delivering your marketing messages or driving traffic to your website. They tell you when and how to deliver your marketing messages. Simply by engineering your marketing around how people live, you'll notice an increase in your response rates. More emails will be opened. More people will visit your website. And you'll ultimately sell more homes.

Large company, small company or your own company?

Do I have to work for a large real estate company to be successful? This is a question I'm asked a lot by real estate agents. Here's my two cents...

No!

I'm sure others may disagree with my answer, and that's to be expected. I never worked for a large real estate company and seemed to do just fine. The key to your success isn't the size of the real estate company you work for, it's the effectiveness of your marketing.

If you can generate and convert leads, you can be successful in any size company. In fact, I'd argue that you should start your own company and build some equity in the process of building your business. Why not get paid twice from the same work?

Now when an agent asks me about where they should work, I ask them the following question:

Are you a good marketer?

If they hem and haw with their answer, I usually tell them to work for the largest company and try and secure as many deals from the marketing of the company or other agents in the firm. However, it's important to remember what business this large company is in. They're in the "agent" business. Their goal is to recruit and retain agents. This goal is significantly different than your goal to sell homes. I know they run image advertisements on TV. I know they provide great training programs. The purpose of these advertisements is to make the company look attractive to new agents. Buyers and sellers don't care very much about your company name. They care about what you're able to do for them specifically.

If the agent responds to my marketing question indicating that he or she is a good marketer, I usually tell them to look for the company with the most favorable commission splits. Use the additional commission income to invest back into your marketing to buy more clients. The company name doesn't matter; the amount of commission you receive does.

The one thing you should definitely avoid at all costs is thinking that your real estate company is going to provide you with sales. More than likely, they won't. It's best for you to learn how to generate and convert leads on your own. This eliminates your dependency and makes you a better overall business person.

Becoming a good marketer is how you eliminate dependency in your business. Once you've obtained the skills, they cannot be taken away from you. You can use your skills in any market, any company or in any business. These skills can provide income to you for the rest of your life.

Who to hire first - a buyer's agent or an administrative assistant?

I’m often asked whom to hire first – a buyer’s agent or an administrative assistant?

My suggestion typically is to hire a buyer’s agent first because you don’t have to pay them a salary. They are free to your business and may help bring in additional commission income. The price you have to pay for a buyer’s agent is your time. You’ll have to invest time to teach and train them how to handle leads and clients for your business.

The problem with hiring a buyer’s agent first is you still have to deal with a great deal of administrative “stuff” that isn’t income-producing. This is definitely not a good use of your time. My first hire was a buyer’s agent. My second hire was a part-time administrative assistant. This was back in the 1990s, before virtual assistants were around.

Had I to do it over again, I would probably hire a part-time virtual assistant. I absolutely love virtual assistants for many reasons:

1. You can find someone with a ton of experience, which adds tremendous value to your business. This is because you’re able to hire anyone from anywhere. You’re not stuck looking for someone with experience who is living in your home town.
   
   
2. You can hire them for two hours a week or 10 hours a week. You have complete flexibility and don’t have to be locked in to a certain number of hours a week. This will help you save a great deal of money.
   
   
3. You don’t have to provide any employee benefits, such as medical insurance. This is very big savings!
   
   
4. If you don’t need them or they aren’t performing, simply stop sending work to them. You don’t have to “fire” anyone and have an ugly situation in your office.
   
   
5. You don’t have to set up payroll and deal with payroll taxes. This will save a great deal of time and money.

A virtual assistant offers so many benefits to small businesses. It’s like having your cake and eating it, too!

My assistant, Trish Lewellyn, recently decided to offer virtual assistant services to other real estate agents. I notified a few of my coaching students, and two or three of them quickly hired her to help with their businesses. I believe she can handle a one or two more agents. If interested in hiring her as your virtual assistant, send her an email at:

[email protected]

I’ve worked with Trish for over five years, and she has a ton of experience. She tracks leads, maintains my database and has processed home sales for my agents. She already understands how we operate and what’s important in our businesses.

How to Work Less & Sell More Homes

In a previous article on my blog titled "Use Sales Assets to Build Your Dream Business" I wrote about creating "Sales Assets" for your business. Since this article, I've received a lot of questions about "Sales Assets" and why they're so important. I decided to create a video highlighting how I learned the value of "Sales Assets."

In this video, you'll learn how to work less and sell more homes at the same time. This is accomplished by implementing an idea Robert Kiyosaki taught in his best selling book The Cashflow Quadrant

Other related articles:

How real estate agents can get rich

Andrew Carnegie's Business Strategy

The "Farmer" Report

I just completed a new 15-page report that you can download right now. I call this new report the "Farmer" Report because it includes a simple lesson from two farmers that helped my business dramatically. I honestly didn't "see" this lesson. My mentor, Dan Kennedy, opened my eyes with a short story. I've included Dan's story in the report.

You can download the PDF right now at:

The "Farmer" Report (PDF)

After Dan shared the farmer story with me, I vowed to make a big change in my business. I share exactly what I did in the report. I continue to use what Dan recommended in my business today. Dan does, too! Many real estate agents "see" this operating in my business but don't copy it in their businesses. Hopefully this new report may motivate you to do something similar in your business. 

You'll find a lot of great stuff in this new report. In fact, you'll read about...

- How to lock clients to you for life

- The only 2 things you need do have a successful real estate business

- How to insure your database

- 6 questions you must answer about your business

What I've shared in this new report is extremely valuable. It's not a new secret by any means. As soon as you figure it out, you'll probably think "Oh, that's nothing new. I've heard that a million times." And you would be 100-percent correct. The problem is the majority of you aren't doing this in your business even though it's one of the most important things you can do. Or if you're actually doing this in your business, you're not very consistent with it.

Download this report now at:

The "Farmer" Report (PDF)

Is a database of 500 prospects enough?

Last week, I received a great question from one of my Renegade Report members. The member asked the following question:

"My database has around 500 prospects. Every now and then I send them deal alerts but very few respond. I've only been able to generate a few appointments and a few offers to date. At what point (1,000? 5,000?) can I expect people to make offers and actually buy?"

This is an excellent question, isn't it?

First off, if you're marketing to your database of 500 people via email, you have to understand that only a small percentage of people will actually read your emails. This is because of spam filters, dull email subject lines, and competition over your prospect's inbox by other marketers, friends and work-related issues. Let's assume that only 10 percent of those in your database read your emails. A database of 500 prospects would indicate that 50 people read what you've sent them.

In marketing, 50 interested prospects isn't a very large number.

This doesn't mean that you won't sell, it just means that you're not going to generate huge results through email marketing, unless you build a larger database. With 50 interested prospects, you can assume that 5 percent to 10 percent of them might respond to your offer. This would translate into two to five responses, depending on what you're marketing and how you're marketing it.

As you can see, marketing is all about numbers. The larger your database, the more responses you'll receive. You shouldn't expect 100 people to respond to something you offer via email if your database has only 500 prospects. It simply won't happen.

This is why building a large database is so critical for your success. I constantly preach that you should generate 100 leads a month for every full-time agent on your team. My monthly lead-generation goal was 400 leads. Throughout a year, my database grew by 4,800 prospects. Unfortunately, not many agents are listening. In fact, I get negative comments from agents who say 100 leads a month is too many for one agent to handle. Simply not true! In fact, it's a major limiting belief.

Imagine how your marketing would change if you had 10,000 prospects in your database? One email would be opened by 1,000 prospects (10 percent) and 50 to 100 (5 percent to 10 percent) would respond to the offer made in the email. The game changes dramatically.

Everything gets easier.

As you start to think about 2010, make sure your marketing focus is on building your database. It's the best investment you'll ever make. If you need a little help, I strongly suggest downloading my program titled "31 Days to a Larger Database" for just $12.95 available at:

http://www.31daydatabase.com

Oh and don't wait for January to start implementing new strategies for your business. Let your competition blow off November and December waiting for the New Year to start.

Begin implementing your 2010 goals now and get a head start!

4 Ways You Can Use Video in Your Marketing to Sell More Homes

Video has become an incredible tool that you can use to generate more leads, convert more prospects into clients and use as a retention tool for your existing clients. You've probably noticed marketers in other industries using video in their businesses. This is because video is a very powerful marketing tool.

There are four main strategies for you to use video in your real estate business.

1. To generate new leads: You have unlimited options to use video for lead generation. You could post a video on YouTube and use this video to move prospects to your lead generation website. Or you could create a video and offer it in your marketing for free. The free video should be targeted to your desired prospect. If you were looking for luxury home buyers, create a video summarizing the three biggest mistakes luxury home buyers make when buying a home. In order to watch the video, a prospect would have to give you their contact information.

2. To systematically convert prospects into clients: Let's assume your goal is to get new listings. You could turn your listing presentation into a video and market this video to your database. At the end of the video, include a special offer that draws prospects to you. A special offer might be a 14-day Listing Test Drive where the seller can see your listing plan in action for two weeks before committing to a longer-term listing agreement. This video could be leveraged over and over again to systematically generate new listings.

3. To sell homes: "Showing" is 10 times better than "telling." You can create an awesome video showing prospects one of your listings. I've created a sample video for you here to give you an idea of what's possible:

Believe it or not, I created this video for free in about five minutes using pictures from my MLS and free video software. You don't have to be a computer geek to create these videos. You could create a new video like this one and email a link to your database. Oh, and if you don't have any listings, you could create similar videos on other agents' listings and market these videos to your buyer's list. Go find a fantastic home and turn the pictures into a cool little video!

4. As a client retention tool: Real estate sales is a relationship business. This means that we must constantly focus on building relationships with our clients. You could create short videos highlighting what's going on in your life or summarizing what's going on in your real estate market. You could talk about the average days on market, how quickly homes are selling or what the average selling prices are for different cities in your marketplace. Think "video newsletter."

Videos have become one of the best marketing tools available, and real estate agents don't seem to be using this opportunity to their advantage. Sure agents use visual tours, but there are many additional strategies for videos in your marketing.

The good news is that every video you create becomes a "Sales Asset" for your business.Once the video is created, you can use it over and over again. Imagine having your listing presentation turned into a video. You could send this video to new leads generated using email auto-responders and systematically convert new prospects into clients. Priceless.

If you'd like to learn the details of how create videos for your business, I highly recommend Renegade Traffic, which is available for instant download. This program was originally priced at $77, but was recently reduced to just $14.95. More information is available at http://www.RenegadeTraffic.com

Use "Sales Assets" to Build Your Dream Business

Most real estate agents do not focus on creating assets within their businesses. They simply focus their time and attention on trying to sell homes to generate income. This is fine, but it's not the best long-term strategy for your business because it forces you to continually sell, month after month. You have zero leverage.

A better strategy to consider would be to focus your time and attention on creating what I refer to as "Sales Assets." I define a “Sales Asset” as a sales tool that can be used to generate sales without your day-to-day physical involvement.

My very first “Sales Asset” was a sales letter that compelled prospects to apply to become one of my clients. Once the sales letter was written and tested, it could be relied upon to deliver a certain number of new clients each and every month. This sales letter transformed my business. The best part about the sales letter was that it wasn’t dependent upon me or didn't require any of my time. I simply hired a part-time high school student for a few hours a day to mail the sales letters and client applications magically appeared in our fax machine. These client applications were given to my agents, who then met with the prospect, signed them to an exclusive agreement and then sold them a home.

The next “Sales Asset” I created for my business was a free class presentation that compelled attendees to become our clients. This included all the marketing to get a prospect to register and attend the class, as well as the actual presentation for the class. The class presentation was designed to motivate the attendees to become our clients. In other words, it was a tool to convert prospects into signed clients.

This was a lot of work, but the work had a large payoff because once perfected, it was another “Sales Asset” for my business. I personally taught the first few classes and worked the bugs out of the system. Then after the “Sales Asset” was providing predictable results, I delegated the class to one my agents.

At this point, my business had two powerful “Sales Assets” that could be significantly leveraged. As an example, if I wanted more clients, I could simply run more lead-generation advertisements that would put more compelling sales letters into play. Or I could schedule and market additional free classes
that would be taught by my agents.

Both of these assets operated without my direct involvement. My responsibility was to generate leads and then make sure the "Sales Assets" delivered the expected results. I was able to work from home in a T-shirt and shorts. My agents worked with our clients and I was able to enjoy complete control over my schedule.

The reason is because I focused on creating "Sales Assets" instead of selling homes. Your role shouldn't be to sign clients or sell homes. Your role should be focused on creating and leveraging "Sales Assets" for your business.

It’s far more profitable to build “Sales Assets” for your business than it is for you to sell homes yourself.

These assets give you the ability to create new clients (income) at will. They can be engineered to provide a consistent flow of new clients from week-to-week, eliminating the roller coaster income we’ve all experienced. More importantly, “Sales Assets” give you complete control over your time
because they don’t require your manual labor after they are created, tested and in place.

Here are two questions for you to ponder:

1.    What “Sales Assets” are you using in your business right now?
2.    What “Sales Assets” are you testing or experimenting with for your business for the future?

6 Steps to Generating FREE Leads on Craigslist

This is a guest article by Josh Schoenly.

After years of trial and error using Craigslist, I finally created a system for consistently generating quality leads for my business, and I’ve decided to share the steps in this article. 

Step 1: Create An Account
This is the easiest step by far, but it is critical to getting the best results and to track your results as well. All you need to do is go to Craigslist.com and click on the login button. Then on the next page, if you don’t already have an account, you’ll click on the area that says “Don’t already have an account.” You just fill in your information, name and email, and you’ll be sent an email to confirm. Once you receive the email, click on the link in there and, voila -- you have an account you can start to use. 

Step 2: Pick Your Campaign
Here is what I mean by picking a campaign: If you are going to generate leads on Craigslist, you need to do it with a purpose. You must choose the kinds of leads that you are looking to work with. Here are some ideas: foreclosure buyers, lease option buyers, apartment building buyers, luxury home buyers, first-time home buyers, buyers in a particular school district -- you get the idea. 

Step 3: Create Your Campaign
This step can be a little time-consuming (really only 30-60 minutes), but the good thing is once you are done, it’s done for good. You may want to go back from time to time and tweak, but most of the work is complete. Here is how to create a campaign for Craigslist lead generation. Once you have picked your campaign, you then need to create several different ads to post and generate traffic. Craigslist doesn’t allow you to post the same ad over and over, so you’ll need several different posting titles and posting descriptions (you’ll also want variations for the location and price boxes as well). By creating different titles and posts, it allows you post frequently, which allows you to consistently drive traffic to your landing page or squeeze page (never send the traffic to your main Web page) or to e-mail or call you. 

Step 4: Implementation – Posting Your Ads
Here is where the rubber meets the road. Now that you have your campaigns created, you need to start posting. I recommend to post twice daily during the week and at least once a day on the weekends. You will want to be posting when there is a lot of traffic to Craigslist because the longer your ad is up, the farther down the page it goes. So you probably don’t want to post at 5 in the morning, as it’s not likely that many home buyers are surfing Craigslist at that time. Now, it is critical to be consistent posting your ads. This literally takes just a couple minutes a day, but it will become one of those things that after some time becomes a bore to do. If you really can’t stay diligent with it, have your assistant (if you have one) do them for you or you could even hire one of your kids to do it. I know I am stating the obvious here, but if you don’t post, you won’t get leads, so make sure you stay consistent. 

Step 5: Follow Up
Here is where it starts to get exciting. Depending on the information you collect from the leads you may be able to follow up in several ways. If you are just collecting name and e-mail, obviously that means your only form of follow up will be through e-mail. If you are collecting phone numbers, which I would recommend, then you can make outbound phone calls. If you are able to collect full contact information, including address, I would highly recommend sending a sales piece, ideally a sales letter, enticing them to work with you as a client. Your follow-up must also be consistent and scripted. If you are offering a free list of homes, whether they be fixer-upper or foreclosures etc, make sure you are regularly sending out the list. For example, in my business I send my free lists to my leads every Thursday morning. This does several things -- keeps me on a schedule and creates an expectation from the buyers that they’ll be getting their new list each Thursday. In order to get maximum response from your list, you need to make different offers to them. Here are some ideas for offers you can be making to get them to raise their hand to work with you: teleseminars, homes tours, group open houses, live seminars, etc. 

Step 6: Track & Improve
The last step is the least glamorous, but might be the most important of all. You need to be tracking your ads and results from the start. If you don’t track, you’ll have no idea what’s working and what isn’t. Here are some of the things you need to track: which ads are getting the most response, how well your landing page is converting, how many leads you are getting daily, how many leads turn to clients, how many leads open your emails, and more. Now this part of the business isn’t much fun, but you can only improve what you track, and if you aren’t tracking this information you have no way of improving your results. 

Josh Schoenly has literally cracked the code to lead generation on Craigslist. Over the last 3+ years he has generated over 7,000 leads using his own system. For a limited time you can download Josh’s Craigslist Marketing Matrix and accompanying 30-minute video explaining exactly how he does it at www.CraigslistMarketingMatrix.com.