Important Features of Google+

• Circles are groups of friends you organize by topic: Friends, Family, College Buddies, Roommates, etc.
• Hangouts are virtual rooms where you can video chat with people in your circles
• Huddles is group messaging for people within your Circles.
• Sparks is like Google Reader, except it brings content to you automatically based on your interests. Each topic gets its own “Spark” page and provide links to related articles, videos, photos, etc.
• When editing your profile, you have the option to show your profile info only to certain circles if you like, giving you complete control over what info people see
• Add the Facebook Add-In to have your Facebook stream within Google+ – go to crossrider.com/install/519-google-facebook to get it
• Get your own vanity url for Google+ – go to gplus.to

A Realtor® handles one of the largest transactions most people will make in their lifetime. Clients often want to know more about the agent they’ll be working with, and it’s important to manage the info that  is available about you.

Reputation.com  allows you to take control of your online  information

• Protect yourself by finding and removing your personal info from the websites that sell it
• Define yourself by promoting a truthful online image that you can control
• Defend and Monitor your reputation – know what’s being said about you online, so you can address and fix any problems or errors that come up

With Mailchimp, you can…

• Build your email list by offering a free report or video to encourage people to sign up, and deliver a follow-up sequence of emails
• Send regular email newsletter to stay in touch with your list
• Automatically broadcast new blog posts to your list. This encourages traffic to your blog, makes it easy to send valuable free information to your list, and helps readers get to know, like and trust you
• Create multiple sub-lists to send different information or follow-up to different groups of people
• Share your email newsletter with your social network, increasing your reach

Important thing to know about Zestimates™

According to Zillow’s website (http://bit.ly/zestimates) their Zestimates estimated market value can vary widely. For example, in Chicago, only 23% of Zestimates are within 5% of the final sales price. So be sure to educate your clients!

How to make Zillow & Trulia work in your favor

• These sites rank very well in the search engines, so fill out your profile completely. Add your listings and Open Houses, and put links to your website, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn & Facebook account on your profile.
• Answer questions in Trulia Voices & Zillow Advice to showcase your local knowledge.
• Request a review from clients that you have developed a relationship with. Many agent profiles don’t have these, so this helps you stand out in a competitive market.
• Take advantage of the different tools these sites offer to create more value for clients. Send clients stats or Local Real Estate Trend Data, and put their informational widgets on your website or blog as a resource for clients.

A success strategy that makes a lot of sense to me is Jim Rohn’s philosophy on wealth. He believes if you make a sale you make a living. If you make an investment of time and good service in a client, you can make a fortune.

It is one thing to understand this concept and quite another to actually implement it. Are you still struggling with how to implement proven referral strategies in your business? If so, it’s not your fault and it’s more common than you might
think! Frankly, once we push through the necessary licensing and paperwork process, most of us are left all by ourselves to muddle along trying to build a successful real estate business. Real estate is a challenging career and I offer tools that can help you maximize your efficiency and profits. Read on to see how my coaching strategies will help you increase your success.

As my gift to your referral generating success, I share five sample success strategies that are key elements of the real estate business and will help you advance in your career. By training hundreds of real estate professionals, providing one on one coaching and giving valuable strategies to create lead generating processes, I realize this information is needed in order to grow your real estate business. Because the demands of Realtors® are so great, you can

probably relate to being so busy that it becomes hard to find time to focus on referral generation.

The good news is, now you can systemize how you effectively reach your target audience and easily incorporate specific strategies that will make all the difference in the world. And don’t worry… you don’t need a business degree or ten years of sweating in the trenches to get there.

You can grab my free ebook, The 5 Key Principles of Inner Circle Lead Generation, along with the other ebooks in my Resource Library, at www.consistentclients.com/resources

I recommend to the agents I coach that they don’t just put it in writing, but put as much care into the presentation and design of it as they would a flyer or newsletter. Just the fact that you take the time to do that shows sellers that this is an important piece to you, and you take the marketing of their property very seriously.

Then, no matter what other information you choose to include, I recommend you include the following 2 items:

Your standards for communication - That is one of the most common complaints that people make about their agent – “I never heard from them, and had no idea what was going on with my property.” So write that into your marketing plan. How do you communicate, and how often? What can they expect from you? Will you follow up once a week by phone, regardless of whether there was activity or not? Or, will you email them regularly, but only call if feedback or answers are needed from them? Every client (and agent) is different, so whatever way you work is okay, but with that written into your marketing plan, you’ll usually attract clients that are better fitted to you. So if you make phone calls every week, but they’re really busy and don’t want that much contact, it’s not a good fit, and you’ll know that from the start.

Your standards for accountability – different agents have different ways of marketing a property, so it can be confusing on the sellers end if they’re not even sure what you’re doing for them. By providing them a list of most of the precise tasks you’ll be doing in order to sell their property (open house, posting their listing on certain websites, etc.), they can see the impressive amount of work you’ll be doing on their behalf and feel confident in their choice of you as their agent. Plus, it often means that less follow-up is required on your part, since they can often see a lot of the work being done. So it can save you time, while improving the client experience.

Finally, think about updating the plan every 30 days or so, and sending it to them. This allows you the flexibility to adjust the plan if needed. Plus, you can include past items as completed, crossed off or with a checkmark, to remind them of the work that’s already been done. This helps cement their confidence in you during the process, even if the property hasn’t sold yet.

You work hard for your clients, and adding these items to your marketing plan helps to show them that! Plus, it makes it easy to set them up for referrals, because they’ll know exactly what their friends and family can expect while working with you.

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!

One tool that I used, and recommend a lot here on my blog, is sending unexpected gifts to your clients. Rather than spend my marketing budget on newspaper ads and other things that were industry standard, but didn’t seem to consistently generate business, I spent those dollars on treating past, current and potential clients like gold.

Here is another gift idea that can be used  as a gift for clients that have just closed with you, and is really appreciated: People who buy a home (or sold with you and will most likely be moving into a new home) almost always have the desire to turn this house into a home. Whether they ever decorated or remodeled in a previous house, most unconsciously have big plans for their new home. So a 1 or 2 year subscription gift to a high-quality magazine like Architectural Digest gets them excited.

This does several things:

• You’re surprising them with a gift, so you’re front of mind again
• The gift is related to their home, and offers value by giving them ideas, tips and information they can use for their home
• Most people will put this magazine on their coffee table, where they’ll see and be reminded of you. In fact, if you’re able to get the publisher to put a gift label on the magazines – something like “Compliments of Rich Rogala, Realtor®”, they’re likely to tell their friends and family about you as well.
• Finally, this gift will land in their mailbox every month, and they’ll continuously be reminded of you. If you’re keeping in touch in other ways too, you’re very likely to generate a lot of referrals from this one client, and will be the Realtor® they think of the next time they’re ready to move.

“…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.