Working on a powerful keyword search to support my next video post.

This is a test

This is a test to see if blog is working.

Real estate friends: I’m in a class about short sales. This is must know stuff!

“All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them.” – Walt Disney

The key to blogging is making it YOUR voice.

RE friends: Great response to request for internet marketing questions. Will go one more week Get ur answers for free!

Real estate friends: In the process of finishing internet marketing E-Book. Any questions you need answered about online marketing? Contribute and save 25 percent off ebook list price and get your answer free!

Its amazing how much work you can get done at a Barnes & Noble Starbucks.

A List of My Top 5 Mistakes for Growing a Business in 2009

My list of 2009 Top 5 Mistakes for Growing my Business

As an entrepreneur of any type I think it is important to look back over the previous year and learn from the mistakes that were made and the key factors that deterred growth. For the sake of argument, an entrepreneur in this case is anyone who writes their own paycheck or determines through their own efforts what they will be paid.

I try not to dwell on external factors. It is too easy to blame the sour economy. To do so has become cliché. And since we can’t control those factors we must really examine what internal factors we can control and go from there. I can blame others for telling me “no” or “you can’t do that” or “no one ever does it that way”.  But I refuse to blame those people and know that just because no one does it that way doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

So here is the list. Since I called it a “Top 5” each item needs to be numbered, but they are not ranked in any particular order.

#5: Spending too much time on getting ready to get ready.

This is a habit I have always had and while I have learned to limit the “getting ready”, I still fall into the trap and it sponges up a lot of valuable time. What did I do to overcome the habit? I scheduled out my day leaving room for “getting ready” time.

I recognized the “getting ready” for what it is: procrastination. I have learned to put it at the end of the day. I now procrastinate my procrastination and find myself excited to get to the next day’s work and hit the ground running when I sit down at my desk.

#4: Spending too much money on stuff that sounded good, but didn’t work.

When I started my home based business this year I looked at a lot of different so-called solutions. I listened to a lot of sales pitches and gave too many of them consideration and then bought some of them that provided mediocre results. I did this in real estate and did it in stock trading and do it today in my home based business.

In the end, a couple of things were true money wasters. I’m not saying they wouldn’t work for anyone. They just didn’t work for me because I didn’t utilize them. I’m not going to identify them here, but here is what I will do differently: I will do more research on the product I buy. I will ask for referrals and ask more questions and refuse to give into the pitch.

One of my favorite sales movies is “Boiler Room”. There’s a great line in that movie that is delivered by Ben Afflect’s character. “A sale is made on every call you make. Either you sell the client some stock or he sells you a reason he can’t. Either way a sale is made, the only question is who is gonna close? You or him?”

Keep in mind…whoever tries to sell you something, no matter how nice they are or how convincing they might be, do your due diligence before saying yes. A Google search can save you thousands of dollars on a service or product. You can be the one who closes that sales person.

#3: Not giving myself enough quiet time everyday.

I used to do this. I got away from it when my kids came along (See #2). The irony is that you need quiet time most when you are too busy to find time to be alone. I suggest reading or listening to Earl Nightingale on this subject.

Here is what quiet time can be:

• A time of reflection. It is a period of time with eyes closed and your mind open to any idea that comes.
• It includes a note book or pad of paper to write down thoughts for future reference. I don’t mean a journal, but rather a brainstorm book. I look back on mine and look at some of the goofy stuff I thought up and some of the gems. There is nothing too goofy to write down. Don’t be self conscience. In a field of goofy stuff you will find the gems. What is goofy today might be a gem tomorrow.
• Also, I visualize how the day is going to go and I am usually not disappointed when I compare my visualization to the actualization.
• It could be prayer… If I have plans to meet with or talk to someone I pray for them, the conversation, their heart and mind.

#2: Letting my family get in the way of work.

OK. I know this sounds cold and why did I decide to work from home if I can’t be with family? To be a leader, to be successful, one has to set priorities and schedules and have the discipline to stick to them. I am talking more about using family as an excuse not to get stuff done. I love my family to death and they have their demands that I am willing to accept. But they also know that I have a job to do. If the demands for attention are too much at home, I pack up my laptop and find my favorite coffee shop to pilfer wireless access from.

#1: Not showing up!

I spent most of December pretty much checked out. You know what I found out? I’m not alone. Most people check out in December. I learned a long time ago that December can be hugely successful if you just stay in the game.

When I sold real estate in Michigan, the market would grind to a halt after Thanksgiving and stay in a deep valley until January. Most of the agents checked out, either mentally or geographically. When the leaders took off for the winter I would dig in and make sales. I became a sales leader for a few months out of the year for that reason. I didn’t apply that this year and I am suffering for it now.

What to do now? Dwell on these things? No. I will just shake my head and not look back. I will print this out and keep it posted above my desk so I don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. I will keep moving forward and follow the examples of Robert Kiyosaki and Dale Carnegie and keep an eye on the fundamentals of an internet based business.

Dave Noyes is a recovering real estate agent who now has time to eat breakfast with his kids. He enjoys teaching others strategies to fill their sales funnel with leads using inexpensive and free solutions offered on the internet. www.davenoyesblog.com



Web 2.0 for Real Estate

WARNING: The information in this article will help you capture more leads and win you more sales!

“The more buzz you create the higher up you rank in Google search. It’s like going to an amp’d up chamber of commerce meeting and having everyone’s attention. This is Web 2.0.”

As a lot of my friends know I love the real estate business. One reason I left was for promises of greener pastures… but I didn’t find that pasture until recently. Actually, after months of time and money invested I eventually found my pasture.

This article isn’t necessarily about the business I’m currently in, but more about a week or two of brainstorming about what I would do if I got back into real estate.  Sure it is easy to brainstorm, but I have learned these strategies and put them to work in my business.  As expensive as “traditional” advertising has become it is reaching a smaller and smaller market segment.  The New Tradition of marketing has to work for most of us on a budget.

It’s important to look at your lead gathering as it flows into your sales funnel. Imagine a number of pitchers dumping water into a funnel. Each pitchers is a source of leads you need to fill that funnel so that customers and clients spill out the narrow end.  As you evaluate your business at the end of the year it’s important to examine where your leads came from and how successful each channel is in providing leads. Is floor time contributing to your business? The relocation department? Print ads? Cold calling? A web page?

Of course, the internet is the New Tradition that I am referring to above and it has leveled the playing field for so many purposes.  As a real estate agent, you must understand that your client or any potential lead has more information at their fingertips than ever before.  As Google has become a verb in the lexicon of the internet so has most of your real estate customers have become experts in your market (or so they think).

Old online tradition: Realtor.com ™ was the first to lure agents to the internet while charging exorbitant fees just so you can have your face on the internet and your listings and they could charge you more for virtual tours and additional pictures. That was the 1990’s when we were thrilled just to have some sort of presence on the WWW. The downside was that you were stuck in Realtor.com’s world. Adding your expertise to the equation was more along the line of putting up your best pitch on your profile page and hoping someone would call you directly.

One thing about the pitch…Its days are over! You need to know more about attracting new customers rather than pitching them like the Sham-wow guy.

I have to admit. I sold houses from Realtor.com. I even had someone call me because he liked my picture.  And I still don’t know how I feel about that! I’m not saying they are evil and they probably have a position in most online real estate marketing strategies, but hold on…

Let us talk about free. What is available to me for little or no cost that is a huge lead generator? And for Goodness sakes! How do I get my hands on it?

By a show of hands… (Not really…you’ll look silly if there are other people in the room) …How many of us think that MySpace is for 15 year-old teenage girls?  Or if you think YouTube is just for posting videos of your rad skateboard moves?  Or how many think LinkedIn is just for stuffy office cubical types? And then there’s Twitter, Facebook, etc, etc.

How many of us think that we don’t have time for all of this nonsense? I would say if you don’t have time, you really need to pay attention to the rest of this article.

All of these Social Media out lets can be managed very easily and provide you with a great flow of leads into your sales lead funnel. I will quickly show you how these can work in conjunction to make you look like a star.

First of all I would sign up for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. I would fill in all of the profile information. Keep it professional. Upload a picture…A professional one. No party pictures, nothing with a drink or a smoke in your hands. You don’t need to wear a tie, unless you are a tie person. This is the first impression that you are giving a potential client.

For instance, when you are filling out your profile on Facebook, there is an entry for “interested in”. I see so many people put in “Men” or “Women”.  If you are there to date and you want to give that impression, then go for it. If you are there to conduct business then keep it professional.

Build your social media lists from your email lists. Please tell me you keep track of all your email addresses (on your computer…and not on a post-it note on the monitor). Almost all of the social media platforms have an “Invite” tool that will comb your email list and invite them to that platform, saving you a lot of effort in the meantime. Pretty cool, huh?

Because some of you know her I will use only an initial to tell the following tale: My wife, we will call her V, has collections of stuff. What I call a pile, she calls a collection. As I write this, I am sitting in a room hearing the hum of 3 computers. Anytime I try to thin down “the collection” it seems there is a valuable phone number, email address or date that has been scribbled on something (an envelope, a post-it, etc) that disappears. Try as I might to convince her to put it in her phone, palm pilot or one of these humming computers when she receives said information, she just can’t bring herself to do it. She doesn’t have a Blackberry even though she should. As a professional, you should have some sort of smart phone too.

So please keep in mind: Anyone who has emailed you or who you have emailed before is a potential customer. In today’s world we have to think in these terms. All that contact information costs money, one way or another. Or it can turn into money. I’m not talking about spamming ANYONE. Like John Cleese: “I hate spam!”

Hold on…The real powerful stuff is on its way.

You don’t have time to post to all those different websites? What if you can just make one post that goes to all your social media accounts?  You can do that. You can use a simple utility from your computer’s browser and just type in your useful thought de jour…

Have a blog? No? You need one. I had my first real estate website about seven years ago. My account rep at the company that managed my site said I need to blog. First, I didn’t know what a blog really was and I never thought of myself as the blog kind of guy. I thought a “blog person” would be the nerdy type who lived with their mother and couldn’t get anyone to listen to anything he had to say so he used it as some kind of therapeutic outlet.

A blog makes you look like the expert. Don’t know what to blog about? Find something from your last license continuing education. There are a lot of real estate related newsletters for agents. You can borrow a subject from Broker Agent News and expound on it or even quote it. At the end of your blog post have a call to action. This is critical. “Call me…” “Email me… for more information.”

Now that you have written 4 or 5 paragraphs of very helpful information, how do you get people to it? This is where Twitter, Face book, LinkedIn all comes in to play. You send a quick summary sentence and a link to the blog out to your network.

Let’s think for a moment about how we use Facebook. I am friends with a lot of agents on Fb and I can tell you most are doing it wrong. I don’t want to upset anyone. More importantly, I want to show you how to make this tool work for you. Think of Fb as a free platform to reach your clientele or future clientele. What is their perception of you and your life as they see your posts? Are you a stuffy business only expert agent or a silly social butterfly? There is a balance. People do business with people who they know, like and trust. All of your social media should build all three of those factors.

An example post: “Now that the purchase contract is signed, what are the 3 deadly pitfalls you MUST avoid? Find out at davesblogthing.me”.

See how that worked? You wrote your blog and pointed to it with your social media platforms. Anyone with interest will go read your article. Assuming you have a convincing call to action you will have interested prospects calling you, the expert, for information.

Have you ever Googled your name? In today’s world I would do just that if I was calling an agent on a floor call. I would want to know who I am talking to and use the information I find as part of the interview process when selecting my next agent. If I didn’t find anything about this person I would want to know why. If I found some coherent articles about real estate with that agent’s name on them I would be suitably impressed. If I found links to their website or the opportunity to follow their (informative) tweets then I would be ready to rock.

What you are doing is generating BUZZ. Buzz about you and your business. The more buzz you create the higher up you rank in Google search. It’s like going to an amp’d up chamber of commerce meeting and having everyone’s attention. This is Web 2.0.

In real estate your brand is YOU. YOU build your brand and it is this internet-based world that YOU need results in.  Think about what you want your brand to be. Sure you can get by on your good looks and charm, but you have to balance that with expertise and knowledge.  If you aren’t found in an internet search, then your brand isn’t strong enough.

Want to look like a real estate rock star in the web? I can help.

Here are a few other ideas:

• Video tape yourself in front of your new listing and a helpful buyers or sellers tip included in the script and post it to YouTube.  “Hi my name is Jane or Joe the Super Agent and I am in front of a beautiful 5 bedroom home in Biltmore Park. Living in this home you will be walking distance to dinner and a movie and the YMCA. As a seller, have you thought about how important a prelisting home inspection can be…?”

• If you have some money to invest get a website with an opt-in form on the front page.  Real estate customers are willing to trade some contact information for your valuable information.  They want to know what their home is worth, area foreclosures and see your listings.  A name and an email address is cheap currency for this information. I can direct you to a really good company that has a handle on the Real Estate business and knows what agents need to get in front of the right internet market.

• Put all of your business online. Left stuff in the home computer? Left stuff on the office computer? Are you traveling and need the information? Lets talk about options.

Need more information about where to blog, where to post videos, or setting up your social media platforms? I can help you assess your needs and get a strategy set up for you! I can help you fill your sales funnel with valuable leads.

Dave Noyes is a recovering real estate agent and big idea guy that has spent a lot of time and money figuring out what works on the internet and how to best market goods and services using proven strategies. He is available to speak to groups and offers one on one consultations to get you in front of and capture the market you are trying to reach. Dave Noyes 828.490.1020 davenoyesonline@gmail.com