Realty ONE Group Inks Exclusive Partnership with Coach and Speaker Dr. Eric Thomas
Realty ONE Group has inked an exclusive partnership with one of the most sought-after coaches and speakers in the world. Best-selling author and motivational speaker, Dr. Eric Thomas, signed with thereal estate brand to provide hours of online coaching through its proprietary ONE University (ONE.U) business coaching platform. "E.T. delivers the type of coaching and motivation, in a power-punched way, that our real estate professionals need to take their careers to a whole new level," said Kuba Jewgieniew, CEO and Founder of Realty ONE Group. After speaking at Realty ONE Group's ONE Summit International events, Dr. Thomas saw an alignment in the purpose and values of the modern real estate franchisor, and agreed to provide exclusive content that will help coach real estate professionals to achieve greater success faster. Working in collaboration with the ONE.U Learning & Development Team, E.T. produced "Extreme Execution," a coaching program designed to take Realty ONE Group professionals' businesses and lives from great to exceptional. Realty ONE Group was just named a Top Recession Proof Franchise by Franchise Business Review and also claimed the No. 1 spot for real estate franchisors for the second year in a row on Entrepreneur's highly competitive 2023 Franchise 500® list.

Top 6 Ways to Make Your Sales Team the Best 'Athletes' They Can Be
What's the key to being the BEST at what you do? Natural talent helps, but the difference between a good athlete and a GREAT athlete is CONSISTENT discipline. Olympic athletes train EVERY day, usually two or three times more than their peers. They do whatever it takes to get a competitive edge and they do it regularly. Michael Phelps, 28 time gold medalist, is credited with training harder than any of his peers – 365 days per year for six years, including holidays, weekends and even after swimming meets. So, as a broker what can you do to help hone the skills of your sales athletes? Here are the six steps to success according to Michael Phelps from a great article in Entrepreneur Magazine:

Top 5 Ways to Transform Your Office Managers into Sales Success Coaches
None of the brokers we’ve worked with believe that their office managers are doing what they are supposed to be doing — sales training. Instead, they act more like den mothers. When they could be working on sales coaching or recruiting, office managers are consoling agents who lost big deals, troubleshooting broken printers, or retrieving lost MLS passwords. It’s too easy for office managers to spend the day putting out a series of small fires. Its easy to use all of those daily tasks as excuses for not focusing on the most important roles that managers are responsible for. The path toward a more profitable office

The Value of Your Value Proposition
How do you recruit new agents? How do you keep the ones you've got? Just as agents need to prove their worth to their broker, brokers needs to prove their worth to the agents. Here are three ways to you can use back-office data to strengthen your value proposition: 1. Insight Show your agents how much money they've made this year compared to last. Email them their expense statements so there are no surprises. Show them how much money they can make by following your brokerage's standards. In doing so, you'll give your agents vital insight into how your brokerage fosters their success.

Two Effective Strategies for Increasing Agent Motivation and Revenue
Real estate is an industry where human capital is a brokerage's most valuable asset, with agents working as independent contractors holding the power to drive a firm's success--or failure. Since success sits squarely on agents' motivation, a key question becomes how to inspire them to perform optimally in volatile and fiercely competitive real estate markets. By understanding the underlying reasons that drive performance, brokerages can harness new opportunities and reach their revenue potential. Building and maintaining a team of agents committed to continuously slam-dunking the deal presents a tough challenge that brokers have generally addressed with traditional extrinsic motivational initiatives. Yet, time and again, research worldwide has proven that these extrinsic motivators do not work. Rewards, contests, prizes, and recognition programs amount to nothing more than carrot and stick strategies. While they may produce short term results, they fail to be sustainable, as agents lose their sense of creativity, vitality, and inherent self-value. The result is suboptimal sales performance and higher agent turnover. Try Aligned or Integrated Motivation The good news is that there are proven and effective alternatives: aligned motivation and integrated motivation. With aligned motivation, agents are empowered to link their work to something of significant personal value such as financial goals, self-worth, or even just an intense interest, which inherently improves productivity and dedication.

Invest in Your People: Real Estate Coaching as a Retention Technique
Within the real estate industry, there is a constant struggle of attracting and retaining top talent. No longer can you expect an agent to stay on board year-after-year, simply for the sake of it. Firms must offer various perks and opportunities to maximize their agents' earning potential while also supporting their professional growth. The best way to show an agent that your firm is truly invested in their future and concerned about their overall growth is to offer coaching as an onboarding, developmental and retention tool. According to realtor.com, "A great coach will help you eliminate limiting beliefs and guide you step-by-step to a higher level of profitability. Whether you are a new agent or an experienced professional, it doesn't matter. The right coach can get you to your next level faster and more efficiently than you can going it alone." Coaching is an extension of traditional training methods that includes close observation of an individual or group, offering periodic in-depth assessments of their needs, weaknesses, strengths and accomplishments, while tying goals to what motivates them and offering guidelines and exercises to help them achieve success.

4 Ways to Dodge the Dreaded Summer Slump
Are you maximizing your summer productivity? You know that summer means more clients buying and selling, but Coach Tom Ferry reveals something many real estate professionals overlook: the Summer Slump. Use his actionable strategy to plan out your summer business and continue profiting into autumn. Watch at 7:05 for Tip #4. Outstanding!

Mentoring Turns Low Performing Real Estate Agents Into Super Stars
Don't like the real estate industry's current reputation? Change it! With the right real estate agent management techniques, you can boost agent quality from mediocre to mind-blowing. Identified in the NAR's "DANGER" Report, action is necessary to prevent the continued decline of the industry's reputation. How can you help new agents succeed and fight against this widespread issue? Understand where agents are coming from The 90 hours and entry exam required for licensure do not equal a successful agent. Current educational and testing requirements have an abysmally poor reputation when it comes to preparing new agents for the reality of life in the industry. Add to the industry misrepresentation in "reality TV," and it's easy to see why many agents are unprepared and unrealistic. Aid in the fight against ignorance Mentoring and training are key for new agents. Is your real estate agent management team investing in new agent growth – or simply in their brand name? To protect your reputation – and grow your bottom line – additional effort will be necessary to curtail issues and bad habits before they start. This means reviewing every communication before its delivery: Contracts, email, addendums – everything. Agents who want to be successful will appreciate the coaching, and their success will reflect in your brokerage's success.

4 Steps to Build New Habits and Hit Your Goals
We’re now a solid month into 2016. A new year, and conceivably your fresh start, right? If you’re among the masses, you most likely made a lofty New Year’s Resolution when the clock struck midnight because this was the year you would hit those goals and actually hold yourself accountable to them. Wouldn’t that be nice. 45% of Americans make a New Year’s Resolution each year, and only 8% of them are actually successful in achieving those resolutions. The odds are not in your favor here, unless you have steel willpower, or an incredibly simple resolution. But what’s the fun in a simple resolution that won’t challenge you? Before you lose all hope of attaining your resolution, we’re sharing some of our tips and tricks on building powerful (and healthy) habits and hold yourself accountable on all those goals you set for yourself, from the simple to the lofty.

Six Philosophies Winning Companies Share
As part of the Better Homes and Gardens® Real Estate monthly talent attraction discussion series for network brokers and managers, Eric Post, VP and co-owner of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Realty Partners in Oregon, shared a considerable amount of valuable insight with our network into what it takes to build a winning company. I was really excited to speak with Eric; I admire his energy and passion and I knew he had a lot to share with our network, and the timing seemed perfect. Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Realty Partners has achieved many accomplishments over the last year. After many months of trimming the budget and committing to a campaign that would "organically and aggressively" grow the company, Eric agreed to share his company's strategies and philosophies that he believes all winning companies share. Creating a Balanced Life If you happen to friend Eric on Facebook or follow him on Twitter, you will see a man who understands the value of balance. He works hard to play hard and this attitude seems to play a considerable role in his many achievements. Whether it is hanging off a snow-covered mountain, smiling on a school bus with his daughter or the pictures involving his Father's Day Spartan Race, it is apparent that Eric is a man with drive, determination and a very big heart. When I asked him how he juggles personal and professional activities, Eric shared one of his biggest success secrets. He schedules appointments with himself, not only professionally, but personally as well. Time with his family, time at the gym and time spent building his business all go on the calendar. In an industry where it is easy to put in 80 hour weeks, Eric knows that the key to success is setting aside personal time. For him, the happier, healthier and more balanced he is, the better business partner he will be.

Create a Disclosure Policy in 5 Easy Steps
Guest Contributor Ricardo Bueno of Diverse Solutions Says: Everyone needs a disclosure policy. By disclosing the purpose of your blog/website, you’re letting readers know more about the information that they will be reviewing. With DisclosurePolicy.org, it’s never been easier to create a disclosure policy for your site. If you’re a Real Estate Agent for example, you might create a policy to disclose your relationship to your Broker.  

What’s driving the changes in the real estate market and how will they impact your business?
What’s driving the changes in the real estate market and how will they impact your business? Ian Morris of Market Leader, Inc. and Steve Murray of REAL Trends, Inc. are industry leaders who answer this question and offer valuable insights in their new book, Game Plan: How Real Estate Professionals Can Thrive in an Uncertain Future.Ian Morris will share “The 10 Trends That Will Drive the Next 5 Years,” featuring key findings from Game Plan on the evolving real estate environment and the trends you need to watch.When:                                            Friday, August 5Time:                                             10:00 AM Pacific / 1:00 PM EasternCost:                                              NONETo Register:                                   https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/538866571 Who should attend:                       Real estate brokers and agents You’ll learn about: 10 trends that could affect your business Factors affecting brokerages and sales professionals Real estate challenges and opportunities Steps to thriving in the ever-changing industry You’ll learn how to create your game plan for the future and help your business thrive for years to come! Your questions are welcome in this live Q&A format.  

So you are giving Agents lots of leads and they aren't working them. Why?
Ok, so after 9 years of using the Internet to generate business, and doing a pretty successful job at it, I've learned a few things. Over the past few years, we have had a very good run of success with our online marketing. Our systems work and work well. However, no matter how well they work, I'm never satisfied. I've been trying to figure out why. Well firstly, I know that most of my Agents are mediocre at follow up. This has been an ongoing frustration for me yet I built my systems knowing Agents will be mediocre. Over the past few weeks I've really been digging into the psychological reasons that Agents won't do the work. What I've found is that most Agents will convince themselves through a multitude of excuses why they are not successful and none of it has anything to do with themselves. I've had numerous meetings in my office to try to help Agents raise the bar and bring themselves to the next level. However, this hasn't worked like I had expected. They are all very comfortable being who they are and having the limited success they currently achieve. Interesting I think. Why would someone not want more out of their business?

Tuesday Tech Tip with Maya Paveza of TheHipRoof.com
It's Tech Tuesday! We're excited about this week's video. In it, social media guru Maya Paveza will cover important topics such as: How to respond to negative comments on social media. Whether or not real estate professionals should start a Myspace account. Search engine rankings for social media posts. Are you ready to learn more? Click to the next page to enjoy her tip and video! 

Real Estate Marketing Online: Building Your Online Community
When you take a look at your broker website analytics, take a peek at Referring Websites. You are likely to find that one of the top referrers to your website is facebook.com. Your broker marketing efforts should include a presence in the world of social media. Now take a look at your company Facebook page. If you don’t have one, create one today. It only takes a few minutes. With a little effort, you should be able to get 500 people or more to “like” your page. As a result, this will help you generate about 5% of the overall traffic to your real estate website. If you do more, your percentage of referring traffic will be even bigger. The strategy here is to stay connected to your agents and your customers. Many brands fail at this because they take a corporate approach rather than an individual or entrepreneurial approach. The advantage that individuals and entrepreneurs have is significant. They know people personally and connecting to them on Facebook is a natural extension.  

4 Things Smart Brokers Say to Agents
A few days ago, we noticed a blog post about things managers should say to their employees. Many of these concepts are relevant to brokers in their relationships with agents. We’ll share a few of them here. You can find a link to the blog post at the bottom of this article.

Breaking Through Mental Barriers to Drive Success
Have you ever sat down to write a to-do list? Sure, who hasn't? The better question probably is, how many of us actually are able to: Write a realistic to-do list Execute the full list on a regular basis It's hard, and those of us who do write lists probably focus more on the day-to-day short-term lists of "have-to's" and stray away from anything too far down the road. What about long-term lists? That can be even more intimidating because it's not just setting down goals for growth; it's having to think through the actionable steps required to get there. Even with a game plan, why do so many motivated people feel like they hit a wall?  

CoreLogic Blasts NAR for Overstating Home Sales
The “most popular measure” of existing home sales, the National Association of Realtors’ Existing Home Sales, has increasingly overstated home sales for ten years as measured by five other sources, and reached a level in 2010 that is 15 to 20 percent higher than actual sales, according to data provider  CoreLogic, which made the charges in its US Housing and Market Trends Report. CoreLogic reported sales totaled only 3.6 million in 2010, down 12 percent from 2009.  By comparison, NAR reported sales fell only 5 percent in 2010 after rising in 2009, and were flat relative to 2008.  CoreLogic said sales did not actually rise in 2009

Twitterstate: Twitter for Real Estate Professionals
I started using Twitter again recently because of some blog posts that I read by some pretty influential people. What is Twitter? Twitter is a very easy-to-use, real-time messaging system for groups and friends. Another way to think of it would be text messaging (or instant messaging) from one person to many people at the same time. The length of each message is about 1 sentence (140 characters). Twitter is free and easy to use. When I got started with Twitter in June of 2007, it was a relatively new thing. The company launched in March of 2006. My first reaction was "interesting waste of time." Now Twitter has grown up, but is still in the early adopter phase, and can still be a waste of time. Those using it "bend" toward technology professionals, and it is popular among real estate bloggers. Today, I see the following uses which can make Twitter valuable for real estate professionals.

What are You Building? Relationships or Barriers?
When it comes to technology and the real estate agent, I believe agent want to use technology to its fullest extent to serve customers better and in the most cost-efficient way. But they have been overrun by technology. Some real estate agents are are searching for a technique, tool, software or system that will eliminate the task of prospecting, when in fact it will only eliminate prospects. It’s time to get back in touch with some real, fundamental principles about the reality of prospecting. Tip #2: Build realtionships not barriers! This is still a people business, so the ultimate goal of prospecting is to secure a face-to-face meeting. Too many agents use the wrong contact methods at the wrong time and the misuse of technology has hurt the business as much as the proper use of it has helped. Technologycan build a barrier between the agent and the client. Are you properly handling your technology?

Part 1: Looking to Improve Your Prospecting Skills? Be There!
What’s the world coming to? Doesn’t it seem that most businesses today actually are looking for ways to avoid talking to customers? The airlines are a classic example. Want to make an airline reservation by telephone? Good luck! Just to accomplish this means spending several minutes going through an elaborate push-button menu. Then you are on hold for who-knows-how long. Really, the airlines would rather you go online, make your own reservation, get an e-ticket and print out your own itinerary and receipt. I don’t think companies intend to avoid customers. I think they want to use technology to its fullest extent to serve customers better and in the most cost-efficient way. But they have been overrun by technology. Some real estate agents are doing the same thing, especially when it comes to prospecting. They are searching for a technique, tool, software or system that will eliminate the task of prospecting, when in fact it will only eliminate prospects. It’s time to get back in touch with some real, fundamental principles about the reality of prospecting.  

One Thing Hackers Do Not Want You To Know
Technology has spawned some interesting terms like phishing and spamming. The latest conversation in the privacy world is about ‘history sniffing’. What is history sniffing and why do we care? When you click on a link on a website, the color changes from blue to purple (by default). Browser history sniffing compares the colors of links in your history folder to a master list of links (and their default non-visited colors) maintained by a website operator, who accesses your computer without permission. A color mismatch indicates a particular site has been visited. Why is this important?

Wait on These 4 New Years Resolutions and Prepare for Failure in 2011
Just after welcoming in a new year, there are a couple of Digital Life Clean Up items that you need to consider. We are all in the process of going through 2010 and looking as objectively as possible at what worked and what did not. Here are three digital strategies that will bolster not only your image but expand your reach online! Don't let the beginning of 2011 pass by without taking inventory about your business and creating new goals.  Take ground this year!  

Lifestyle Search – What is it?
So what is lifestyle search? It’s the ability for consumers to find their “best places to live.” It enables users to submit lifestyle criteria and importantly allows them to prioritize the most important factors for their individual family’s needs. Once they submit the data the search will return results that highlight areas that best match their criteria based on the lifestyle priorities they defined. Using simple sliders they can also adjust the priority of their preferences to see how it changes the neighborhoods recommended. Let’s use the Online Dating industry as an analogy here. Many of these sites claim to help singles find their ideal match, but they are unsuccessful. Why? Because they are using only superficial measures to gauge compatibility and ultimate happiness. Sure, everyone would like to date or even marry the best looking guy or gal in the room, but that doesn’t usually work. Ultimately it takes more fundamental compatibility about the values you possess and the activities you enjoy to create a long-term match. Much like dating sites that only use superficial measures like number of bedrooms and baths are not going to satisfy a consumer’s need to find the right long-term “match” for their home selection. Lifestyle search can help find the right home match for a consumer by using factors that are more fundamental to the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of the homeowner.

How to Maximize the New LinkedIn Share Button
The online world just got more social! Facebook and Twitter led the way making share buttons available for inclusion on blogs, websites and online content. By doing so and stacking up “likes” and “retweets” on almost every page on the Internet the popularity and business value of using Facebook and Twitter to saturate social networks has grown exponentially. In the last year a number of social sharing buttons have popped up, but noticeably missing has been LinkedIn. As of this week, LinkedIn will now have share buttons available to professionals looking to share information with their network. By adding the LinkedIn button, (as seen on the right), content creators can invite online readers to share their article, press release, listing, or social profile with their LinkedIn network and more importantly their groups.

7 Ways to Avoid a Tax Audit for 2010
The Internal Revenue Service audits about one percent of US Taxpayers each year. As a real estate professional, you are likely to have an independent contractor relationship with your broker. Although your chances of being audited are pretty slim, there are basic principles that will reduce the likelihood of being part of that one percent. A few items to avoid are significant deductions for automobile expenses, home improvements, or outrageous meal expenses. By following these 7 steps, you can lower your chances of being audited.

What Is the Right Keyword Density for My Real Estate Blog Posts?
Take a look around real estate blogs and you’ll see nuggets of wisdom posted that look similar to this: The Phoenix real estate market is a mess! If you want to buy a home in Phoenix, then you should consult with a Phoenix realtor who knows and understands the Phoenix real estate market. Never buy a Phoenix home without utilizing a Phoenix realtor! Feel free to search for Phoenix homes on our Phoenix real estate blog, but be sure to call your Phoenix realtor before you go too far! Yeah, they’ll even bold all those keywords because some “SEO guru” told them that helps Google understand that those words are important.

Laughter the Best Medicine
You don't stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop laughing. - Michael Pritchard Happy Monday! I hope you woke up today jazzed to start a new week. I attended a comedy night fundraiser this weekend with a group of friends. It was great to kick back and watch 5 or 6 comedians for a couple of hours. But as usual it made me start thinking.... It might just be me, but it really seemed like people had more energy and were friendlier after the show. So I started doing a little research. While the data is sketchy, it appears that infants start laughing at about 4 months. In the younger years, estimates say kids laugh anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand times a day! As we age, this number apparently declines to anywhere from 0 to a couple dozen times a day. Basically as we get older, we don't laugh enough!

How To Launch a New Broker Website
I have always admired Pacific Union. It is a storied company that has held a prominent position in San Francisco Real Estate. An agent once told me that she knew she had “arrived” as a REALTOR® when she was asked to join Pacific Union. It was like being invited to join an exclusive club of successful, professional, experienced agents. Pacific Union suffered some challenges over the years with leadership changes and company sale to GMAC. But many of the top agents hung in there, and new agents arrived. Recently the company was purchased by a local Marin real estate broker, Mark McLaughlin. Under McLaughlin’s leadership, Pacific Union has returned to its old ways – ONLY THE BEST. Run over and look at the Pacific Union Website today. Tomorrow it will be different. They have a new website that was rumored to be constructed by Terabitz. They have supplied websites to other leading brokerages like Amelia Bullock, @Properties, MetroBrokers, Intero, Gary Greene and more. They also built the neighborhood search for Front Door, which I think is a key strength of that site over Trulia and Zillow.

Stop Thinking Tick-Tock and Start Thinking Cha-Ching!
When I am talking to real estate agents about social media one statement comes up over and over again. “It takes too much time.” The statement is usually made by an agent who is not using social media so I probe further by asking them how much time should it take and how much time is too much? Usually this forces them to reconsider the statement before answering. Social media can be a huge time commitment, if you make it one. For a real estate agent the key is to determine your purpose and focus your activities in the social media world. If you try to be everywhere all at once you will have some difficulty with time constraints, but if you identify the platforms that are of most interest and you are the most adept at then you will find it is a lot easier and you are far more successful. During my presentations or classes I recommend six different sites or platforms to use and the order does actually have an impact.

Beyond Baseboards & Crown Molding: What Matters in Listing Photos?
We get emails like this on a very regular basis: Hello, I am interested in the house at “123 Main St”. Do you have any additional photos of the kitchen and master bedrooms that you can send? (Ed note: Street address changed to protect the guilty). The vast majority of the time these come from someone already working with an agent, and they have Googled a home’s address. Finding our site at or near the top of the Google results, they assume we are the listing agents. We will typically respond along the lines of, “Sorry, this isn’t our listing. But if you aren’t already working with an agent, we’d be happy to try to help… blah blah blah”. So off I went to the MLS, where I found the home in question. It’s a lovely home, listed for almost $650,000. If you aren’t from around here or are not familiar with the Phoenix real estate market, a $650K home is definitely a top-end home. Here are a couple of photos that were in the listing:

How to Drive Sales with Customer Service
As business owners, you all know that customer service plays a significant role in the delivery of your products and/or services, and an even bigger role in building the loyalty and satisfaction of your clients after a purchase is made. Is there a role for customer service even before the selling cycle begins? What might that be? How do you offer service to people you haven't met and build a personal relationship that will lead first to a sale and then to a testimonial from a raving fan? How do you leverage what you know about customer service to drive sales and increase customer commitment? On Wednesday, September 15th at 1:00pm EST we will be sharing the answers to these questions.

How to Leverage Customer Service
As business owners, we all know that customer service plays a significant role in the delivery of our products and/or services, and an even bigger role in building the loyalty and satisfaction of our clients after a purchase is made. Is there a role for customer service even before the selling cycle begins? What might that be? How do we offer service to people we haven't met and build a personal relationship that will lead first to a sale and then to a testimonial from a raving fan? How do you leverage what you know about customer service to drive sales and increase customer commitment? On Wednesday, September 15th at 1:00pm EST we will be sharing the answers to these questions.

Sharing is Caring: 5 Top Entrepreneurs Share Success Stories
Due to overwhelming requests, Strategic Coach will rebroadcast last week’s live teleconference call with five highly successful Strategic Coach® clients. On the call, these five entrepreneurs from the financial services, consulting, and manufacturing industries spoke freely with Shannon Waller, coach and Strategic Coach® Program designer, about their experience in the Program. Now you have a chance to be a part of this highly enlightening and inspiring one–hour call. Transformational results. On this call, you’ll hear the entrepreneurs' personal success stories and how they’ve used the Program’s tools and concepts to achieve exceptional growth. Here are just some of the breakthroughs they talk about: How they’ve made record revenue and profits, while having the freedom to do what they love and are best at. How they are supported by highly motivated, productive, and happy teams. How they enjoy more time away from their business than they could ever have imagined. How they achieve balance between their work and home lives. Schedule this call today! If you’ve been thinking about joining Strategic Coach or would like to hear first–hand how the Program has worked for other successful entrepreneurs, don’t miss this call. To register and to receive your call access details, email Strategic Coach at [email protected]. There are limited spaces on this call, so please secure your spot early. Webinar details include: Date: Wed., Sept. 8, 2010 Time: 1:30 p.m. ET To learn more about Strategic Coach, please click here.  

Does Your Brand Have Mobile Integrity?
As the Rye Town Hilton in Westchester County was home to RISMedia’s 2010 Leadership Conference and “The Real Estate Social Media Summit,” the whole placed buzzed of blog-posts-in-the-making for the nearly 1,000 in attendence—as there was an overwhelming amount of information to soak up in 48 hours. Being that it was “The Real Estate Social Media Summit,” much of the focus was on just that, however, throughout the conference, industry experts and icons such as john Featherston, president, publisher and CEO of RISMedia and Allan Dalton, president of The Top 5 in Real Estate Network® and chief marketing officer for RISMedia, also greatly emphasized the importance of Mobile Technology. In fact, during both the opening general and closing session, Featherston championed the cause of Mobile Websites by utilizing an Android emulator to show the hundreds in the audience what a truly Mobile-Enabled Website should look and function like on a Mobile Device. During the Top 5 luncheon, which played host to dozens of top-producing real estate professionals, Dalton invited mobile expert John Lim, founder and CEO of Mobile Card Cast, to speak to honored guests. Not about product, but about importance.

5 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Experience
As more and more businesses gravitate to the high reach-low investment medium of social media, there are far too many jumping in with both feet that really don’t have any business even dabbling their toes in it. MLMers, real estate agents posting “another hot listing” or endless Facebook fan pages of nothing but listings, get-rich-quick gurus, and newbies that expect instant results after 2 Tweets about how great their product or service is: none of these have any place in social networking, and all will have a negative experience using it. Lisa May Huby, of Realty Sites PLUS recently penned five tips on how to improve your social media experience. 1.) Stop and strategize before you do anything; 2.) Understand the networking element; 3.) Position yourself as an expert and engage; 4.) Be consistent; 5.) Evolve. To learn more about these tips, continue reading...

Got Content?
Just like the "Got Milk?" campaign that’s run for years, the question of "Got Content?" is everywhere. And, it’s as good for your website’s health as milk is for your body. Website content – not just well-composed webpages, but helpful articles, blog posts, photos, videos, and more – is a must for today’s businesses, and real estate’s no exception. Content marketing isn’t just a new buzz term, fad or idea, it’s a proven, viable tactic.

Is Your Team Working Hard or Just Burning Out?
Ellie Mirman from www.EllieMirman.com posted a great article about the rules for maximizing productivity of work teams. I think there are some great lessons to be learned from a presentation from a blog called The Chief Happiness Officer. Working more than 40 hours leads to decreased productivity. You can get a short-term boost by working more hours, but the team will require a recovery period that counteracts the seeming short-term productivity boost. Working on Sundays and evenings can be helpful in the short-term to provide support to a potential client, but the team will required to recover from long hours can actually be longer than the short-term increases in productivity. For agents that consistently work long hours, burnout can be faster and potentially more severe.

5 Tips for Using Landing Pages
With a growing emphasis on serach engine optimization (SEO) technology, real estate agents and brokers can be tunnel visioned, buying the latest and greatest technology to drive traffic to their landing pages, or webpages. Certainly SEO technology and other lead generating services are invaluable to marketing real estate websites, virtual tours, property listings and other online landing pages. However, in a recent blog post on Search Engine Land, Christopher Wallace addresses a common problem he sees today: the inability to convert site visitors into leads. Instead of merely pointing out the obvious problems that lie with driving thousands of visitors to your real estate websites and then sitting back while they move on, Christopher offers five tips to keep your online visitors around. 1. Simplify your content 2. Shorten your lead forms 3. Use your analytics to drive decisions 4. Keep the conversion path in mind when using images 5. Leverage landing pages for extended user engagement Instead of wasting time trying to get more people to click on your site in search engines, focus your efforts on ways to better convert the traffic you're already getting. *Editor's Note: A landing page is any online webpage that generates and drives traffic for marketing purposes. For example, if you advertise your real estate services online with a Web banner that if clicked on will direct online visitors to your website, that is a landing page. If you have an active blog and you use it to provide useful information to potential clients, this is a landing page.

Twitter Marketing Tips
Social media is all the buzz in the real estate space. Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more are commanding a lot of attention in the real estate space. Twitter is now talked about in the mainstream media, and is one of the fastest growing and most heavily trafficked website on the planet.But where does the real estate agent start?