Unfortunately, though, with all those different sites it can be easy to lose track of what you’ve done.

I’ve created a Marketing Checklist for New Listings, which makes it easy to ensure  you’ve posted your property on all the sites you normally use, and easily keep track of what has been done. It also makes it easy to pass off to an assistant, since all the steps and sites are laid out. Plus, it serves as a handy sheet to use in marketing to sellers – they can see that you’re actively promoting their property.

Feel free to download and use in your own marketing! To download just “right-click” on the link below and Save to your computer.

Marketing Checklist for New Listings

With the right applications, a real estate agent in the field can be just as productive as one in the office. You have the ability to network and communicate with clients, fax documents, look up listings, find local area resources, calculate mortgage payments, and even shoot video!

If you have an iPhone, their app store is currently the biggest out there, and offers lots of apps to make doing business on the go easier and more convenient, so check out this list. These are just a small group of what’s available, but this list alone could probably save you hours of time versus running back and forth to your office!

Realtor.com – Search over 4 million homes with this app from REALTOR.com. Find property details, pricing, photos, open house information and more on homes for sale.

Home Buying Power – Determine how much house your client can afford by plugging in desired payment or income percentage, down payment, loan term and interest rate information to calculate buying power.

Dictionary of Real Estate Terms – Convenient and user-friendly reference tool for real estate professionals and consumers on the go.

Mortgage Calculator – Helpful tool for making quick calculations such as monthly rates, loan options and adjustments for down payments, insurance and taxes.

Zillow – Get access to the popular search site that many real estate clients are using.

Yelp – Search for places to eat, drink, shop, relax. Become an expert of your neighborhood.

Walk Score – Calculates the “walkability” of any location and shows you a map of nearby amenities; helps clients find walkable neighborhoods.

LoopNet – Get access to commercial listings around the country.

Documents To Go – Create, view and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files from your smartphone.

Mobile Phax – Use the camera on your iPhone to take a photo of a letter-sized document and then send as a PDF to any email address.

Vlingo – Send a text message, call a friend, search the Web or update your Facebook or Twitter status using voice commands.

Qik Live– Shoot and share live video from your phone and send to a client.

Smarter Agent – Search homes for sale or recent sold, and apartments for rent.

Expensify – Import expenses and receipts and submit paperless expense reports from your phone.

Foursquare - Foursquare on your phone gives you & your friends new ways of exploring your city.

There are also lots of apps for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and instant messaging – giving you lots of ways to quickly and easily connect and network with your clients.

Credits: Originally published by Stephanie Sievers, Illinois Realtor Magazine

There are great examples for other types of local businesses, but what really caught my eye is a tool Nathan mentioned called TwitHawk. Maybe I’ll do a more in-depth post on using it later (after I play with it for a while), but check out the full post. Twit Hawk looks like it has a lot of potential for you to find local people discussing

• how tired they are of their apartment
• considering looking for a home
• recent job transfer/new job in your area
• needing more space
• etc.

Now remember, you are not going to see positive results if you jump in and try to sell them on using you as a Realtor®. At best, they’ll ignore you, and at worst they might block you, or even tell their friends. BUT, if you have some tips for them (maybe in the form of a blog post, free ebook, etc.), it would be acceptable to say something like “Hi @twitterperson, I have a blog post at www.myblogposthere.com with some good info for first-time homebuyers – feel free to check it out.” Low pressure contact like this is acceptable, or you could even just give them a warm welcome to the area, or recommend a listing you just listed that sounds perfect (but make sure it really does!).

So check out the post, see what you think of TwitHawk, and I’d love to hear how it helps your biz!

If you have one of the 80 million accounts that got upgraded to the new look on February 4th, and are struggling to figure it out, today’s Web 2.0 post will be great for you!

It comes from Nik Nik at MyTechOpinion, called 10 Tips for Getting Reacquainted with Facebook’s New Layout.

If you can’t seem to find ANYTHING, or just feel like you’re missing some of the old navigation links, check out her post. She provides screenshots that make it easy to figure out what’s what.

And if we haven’t connected already, look me up at www.Facebook.com/RichRogala.

Read the full post to get the full picture of how Yelp has grown by creating an iPhone app.

You may not have thought about trying to get clients to provide a review of you as a real estate agent on sites Yelp, Google and Yahoo, but why not? It gives you more credibility if they’re doing a simple search for real estate agents. It gives you more spots to be found in the search engines. And since these are public review, you can probably take them and use them on your site if you like (haven’t checked into the legality of this, so don’t hold me to it, but if they left you a good review, they’d probably be happy to have you use it on your site, so just ask).

Now, I’m no mobile marketing professional, so if you are looking for more info on reaching potential and current clients on their cell phones, you can read more about it at “What is Mobile Marketing Anyway?”

But our Web 2.0 Wrap-up for today is actually a post from MyTechOpinion on a brand new iPhone app from Realtor.com. As NikNik mentions,

Agents that already utilize Realtor.com to post their listings will be able to sync with their account via the app. Branding and contact information is carried over so that interested buyers can easily reach out to the agent, or even add the agent to their iPhone address book. In fact, an interested buyer can contact the listing agent in a number of ways with a single tap: ask a question, call agent directly, visit agent Website.

If you are already using Realtor.com to post your listings, I can’t see why you WOULDN”T take advantage of this new app. So many people access the internet via their cell phone, you want to be able to be the agent that gives them the ability to view listings and share with friends on Twitter and Facebook through their mobile device. So check out NikNik’s post, then go sync your Realtor.com account, and pass the word along to your clients and friends!

If you are going to the trouble of creating special YouTube videos, audios, blog posts, etc. to help solve a problem or answer a question, don’t make it hard for them once they’ve clicked through to your site. Your site should actually give them more of what they’re looking for. Whether you set up an individual pages/post for people to land on for each video, or just make your search button very prominent on your site (and have it display real results, not broken links), follow the process.

Be sure to read his entire post so you really understand the steps a true consumer took hoping to go from social media to a real solution to his problem, then think about where you could be losing potential clients.

Technorati Tags: Rich Rogala, online real estate marketing coach, social media tips for Realtors®, how to engage visitors from social media, Real Estate Tomato

1. It’s a VERY good thing to have your listings dynamically updating straight from your MLS, as it keeps the property search on your site fresh and up to date without you having to manually input your listings onto your site all the time.
2. From what I’ve seen, IDX has been somewhat hard to implement on Wordpress, especially if you don’t have a tech person.

But Diverse Solutions, a provider of IDX services, has just launched a new plugin for Wordpress users. Very cool!  Jay over at the Geek Estate Blog goes into lots of detail, and it looks like they’ve really got things figured out (especially for SEO purposes). So if you’ve been wanting to add a real-time property search to your site, head on over and read the full post. And if you’re already using Diverse Solutions and Wordpress, run (don’t walk) and grab that plugin! It looks like it will make your life a lot easier and your site a lot more Google friendly.

“…the cumulative traffic gained from dozens of these sorts of micro-topic articles will easily outweigh the gains from high-demand search terms. And, more importantly, this traffic will target and attract more read-to-act buyers.”

Check out his post, then think about ways you can talk about not just your city, but how you can answer potential clients questions about your neighborhood, your housing specialty or any specific topic you know concerns the people you want to connect with.

Local search is a competitive and increasingly critical space of the web that local businesses need to take seriously.

So today’s Web 2.0 Wrap-Up post is from Bill Gassett, Free SEO Through Google Local Business Pages. It’s a great post that offers lots of handy info on using Google Local business pages to improve how often and where you show up in Google’s local listings.

Check it out, and then take advantage of the free tools that Google offers. After all, if you want to be found online, a great place to start is through local listings. And Google gives you lots of tools to help you do just that!

Technorati Tags: Rich Rogala, online real estate marketing coach, local search for real estate agents, SEO for Realtors