How many times have you had to deal with another agent who doesn’t return your phone calls or doesn’t know what their doing?
How many deals have gone south because of an appraiser incorrectly valuing a home?
How many loans have been messed up because the lender was slow and didn’t get things completed in time?

It’s pretty hard to get paid when we have to deal with so many other people to get one home sold.

A few months ago, I participated in a special meeting with agents here in Cleveland. During the meeting, we were brainstorming different ideas we could implement. I’ve detailed some of the findings from this meeting and how I evaluated each opportunity in a new report, which you can download below. In the meeting, one of the agents shared how he helped a seller that couldn’t sell their home. He created a $3,000 fee and recurring income of $99 a month. More importantly, the seller was extremely happy and absolutely loves him.

It’s a very unique way to create income from sellers who can’t sell their homes. This is something you should definitely study and contemplate for your business.

In the report, you’ll also see how to eliminate dependency in your business and how to create recurring revenue.  You can download this report right now by clicking on this link:

Listing Income Report – PDF

I shared this report with my Master Marketer club members a few weeks ago and have received a ton of feedback. Download it while it’s still available!

One of the best strategies any business can use to get new customers is to offer a “Free Trial” of their product or a “Free Test-Drive” of their service. If you pay attention, you’ll see these offers in almost every industry. Here are a few examples for you to consider:

1. Buy a new GM car and try it for 60 days. If you don’t like the car, you can return it for free. Pretty compelling offer, don’t you think?

2. Netflix trial membership. You can test-drive the Netflix membership for two weeks and watch movies instantly.

3. Most computer software now is sold via free trial. You can get Microsoft Office simply by using their trial offer.

4. Sirius Satellite radio offers a free 7-day trial subscription.

The list of businesses using free trial and free test drive offers is extensive.

Why do these businesses make these offers in their marketing?

Because free trial and test-drive offers deliver new customers and clients. In other words, they work! The reason why they work is because the offer reverses the risk to the buyer. The buyer can try the product or service without obligation. If they like the product or service, they’ll continue using it. If not, they can cancel and move on with their lives. Believe it or not, several people do end up canceling during their trial period period. However, many don’t and the business profits going forward because it now has more customers than it did before the trial offer.

Why don’t we copy these free trial and test-drive marketing campaigns in our businesses?

If you think about it, we actually do the opposite. We make it harder for a prospect to use our services when we force them to sign an exclusive representation agreement. The prospect has all the risk, because they have to agree to work exclusively with us. After everything we’ve been through over the last few years in the real estate market, do you think it makes sense to make it harder for a prospect to do business with us?

I don’t.

Offer sellers an opportunity to test-drive your listing services for 7 days without risk. This gives you an opportunity to work your magic and get buyers through their home. If you don’t get buyers through their home in the first week, they can cancel their listing with no questions asked.

You can use test-drive offers in your marketing or in your listing presentation. I’ll bet you get more listings and sell more homes!

(Photo by hapal)

How hard would it be to catch one of these fish?

Probably not too hard!

What would you say if I told you that you could sell homes as easily as you could catch these fish?

Would you believe me?

Wikipedia defines “shooting fish in a barrel” as:  an idiom, describing an effortless or simple action, with guaranteed success.

Is it possible to sell homes in an effortless or simple action, with guaranteed success? If asked, most real estate agents would answer NO to this question.

Well, I would disagree with most agents. I learned how to sell homes with guaranteed success in a  a closed door mastermind meeting with Dan Kennedy, Bill Glazer, Yanik Silver, and several other top marketers. Here’s what I learned, in this meeting, that helped me sell homes with guaranteed success:

“You can shoot fish in a barrel in your business, if you focus on solving your CUSTOMER’S biggest problem.”

We have a tendency to focus on our problems, don’t we? Right now, we all have various personal and business problems. Our time and attention is focused on solving these problems. This means our time and attention is focused on us – not our clients.

Zig Ziglar has a powerful saying which highlights the shooting fish in a barrel strategy. Here it is:

“You can have everything you want in life, IF you help enough other people get what they want.”

Amazing things happen when you focus on your customer’s biggest problem.

In my business, we helped beginning real estate investors find, acquire and manage single family home investments. We spent a lot of time teaching our clients how to become landlords. We held special classes for our clients to teach them how to:

• Advertise their rental properties
• Handle renter calls
• Group rental showings
• What to say during showings
• How to get rental applications
• How to screen prospective tenants
• How to handle the lease and other related paperwork

Even though we did all of things to help our clients, some of them still struggled getting their homes rented to quality tenants. This was their biggest problem. After hearing this little lesson in the closed-door mastermind meeting, I began to focus on solving this big problem and what I ended up doing had dramatic results in my business. In fact, we began to sell multiple homes to the same clients and created an entirely new revenue stream for the business.

I shared exactly how I solved our client’s biggest problem in last week’s Automated Short Sale Machine Teleseminar. You can listen to this teleseminar right now at:

Automated Short Sale Machine Teleseminar

HINT: You might want to listen to this teleseminar recording to hear exactly what I did, because it may help you in your business. I’ve never shared this story in public before and I can assure you, it’s very powerful. You’ll be blown away by what I did. Check it out!

I absolutely love Seinfeld and made a point to watch this interview. I was blown away by how Jerry thinks about his work. Here’s a 51 second video from the interview you might find very helpful in your business. (Note: The video seems to hang for a few seconds, but the audio works fine and it’s the most important part!)

Jerry specifically said he didn’t want a TV show that required him to be there all of the time like Oprah’s show does of Oprah. He wanted a TV show where he could work when he wanted to work and not be required to work night and day like Oprah does for her show.

I found this fascinating and thought about real estate agents and our businesses.

Our businesses are exactly like Oprah’s business, because we have to be the lead sled dog. Nothing happens in our businesses unless we do it ourselves, right? What would happen if we could re-engineer our businesses so that they were more like Jerry’s new TV show where we didn’t have to participate in every single aspect of our businesses?

The reason Jerry’s comments hit home to me was because I’ve been working on a new program designed to help real estate agents automate short sales so they don’t have to be the lead sled dog or paddle a one man canoe! This program includes strategies to automate seller lead generation, listing appointment lead conversion and the negotiation and processing of short sale transactions.

Yes, I wrote “short sales!”

I believe short sales represent a great opportunity for your business for many reasons. However, you have to set things up properly so that you can handle dozens of short sale deals at the same time by automating as much of the process as possible.

I’ll be sharing the details of how to automate short sales and more information on my new program in a special teleseminar I’ll be hosting on Thursday, March 18th at 3pm EST. You can register to attend this telesminar at:

http://www.AutomatedShortSaleMachine.com

In the teleseminar, I’ll be covering the following:

- a secret I learned in a closed door mastermind meeting to drive sales and revenues through the roof. I’ll also show you how I used this secret in my business with massive success.
- business building lessons of Henry Ford and how you can apply them to short sales.
- 3 ways you can automate short sales in your business.

During the call, I’ll be releasing my new short sale program, which includes many “Done-For-You” marketing tools you can use to automate the entire short sale process. However, I’m only going to release 100 copies of my new program and they’ll be available on a first come, first served basis! If you’d like to learn how to automate short sales in your business and would like to have access to my new program, register to attend now at this link:

http://www.AutomatedShortSaleMachine.com

A few weeks ago, I released a free report titled “Advanced Online Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Agents.” In this report I suggested copying businesses outside of real estate. A sales letter is something I watched other businesses outside of real estate use and decided to copy this strategy inside real estate.

I decided to write a sales letter for my real estate business. The goal of my sales letter was simply to convince my prospects that I was the best agent for them. I wanted to eliminate my competition and pre-sell prospects on my real estate services. This sales letter ultimately generated millions of dollars of commissions to my real estate business.  Needless to say, I’m a BIG fan of sales letters and use them extensively today.

The good news is you don’t have to be a great marketer to write a compelling sales letter for your business. Winning sales letters follow a proven template and you can easily write a compelling sales letter for your business, if you follow this proven template.

Here’s the proven template you should follow when writing sales letters for your business:

1. Grab the readers attention with a compelling headline.

2. Highlight the big problem the person faces.

3. Agitate the problem further.

4. Provide a solution to the problem. (This solution would be your services!)

5. Present your expertise and why you’re qualified to provide the solution.

6. Show the prospect what they’ll receive when using your services.

7. Provide testimonials to back up what you’ve promised.

8. Include a clear call to action to get the prospect to respond.

9. Add scarcity to create urgency.

10. Reverse the prospect’s risk by adding a guarantee.

This sales letter template is proven throughout history in almost every industry. I must admit that I’m not the one who figured out this winning template.  I simply followed the template I found in a little software program called http://www.OnlineSalesLetter.com. This sales letter software program forced me to follow the winning template and gave me suggestions for how to structure my sales letter. Looking back, this software was probably the best investment I’ve ever made. And believe it or not, I still use it today!

Photo by  Chris Denbow

In order to bring innovation to your business, you must learn…

To study other successful businesses OUTSIDE of real estate and apply what they’re doing INSIDE real estate.

Please take a minute and read this sentence again – it’s critically important.

This is easier said than done because we have a tendency to look inside our industry and copy what we see. When you first get into real estate, you look for agents who appear to be successful and you copy them – right? I did it! Hell, every new agent has done it, too.

The problem with this approach is zero innovation happens in your business. To make more money, sell more homes and dominate your market, you need to be innovative. You need to stand out by doing something different.

A great example of finding something successful outside your industry and applying to your industry would be fractional jet ownership. This style of ownership wasn’t invented by companies selling smaller jets. They simply copied it from the real estate timeshare industry and applied to it to jet sales.

Several years ago, I copied something I saw outside of real estate and used it in my real estate business, and it had a dramatic impact on my business. I was participating in several memberships and coaching programs designed to help me improve my business. Each month, I paid a membership fee for access to information. This fee was charged directly to my credit card.

It was obvious how powerful this recurring monthly income was to the businesses offering these memberships and coaching programs. My goal was to do something similar in my real estate sales business.

My plan was to create a club of real estate investors and charge members a fee to participate. Each month, we would provide special expert interviews, a lengthy detailed newsletter with investing tips and strategies, special classes and more. I launched my membership in November of 2004 and had over 100 paying members by the end of 2005. When I sold my business in 2007, we had well over 400 members paying $29.95 a month. This membership provided over $12,000 a month of recurring income and doubled our home sales annually.

Some people have called me a genius for what I did. But in reality, any agent could have done the same thing simply by copying what they saw outside of real estate.

I’ve included this little story to show you the power of what’s possible when you look outside of the real estate industry instead of inside the real estate industry. The topic of this special report is Advanced Online Marketing strategies, and to be innovative with online marketing, we must look outside of the real estate industry.

So where do you go to find innovative online marketing strategies that you can apply to your business?

Internet Marketers

Internet marketers make their living online by selling information products. They live and die by their websites and follow-up marketing.

Internet marketers are constantly testing new strategies. More importantly, they’re tracking their results. This tracking allows them to see what works and what doesn’t work. It’s very powerful.

By copying internet marketers, you leverage their testing, tracking and knowledge of online marketing. And when I say copy, I don’t mean to copy their copyrighted or trademarked material. I mean to copy their process for selling. Their process for selling online can be very, very valuable to your business.

Here are just a few things Internet Marketers track in their online marketing:

1.  Every advertisement they run and how well it drives traffic to their website.

2.  The conversion percentage of every web page they have online. (The number of people visiting a web page vs. the number of people who fill in their contact information)

3.  Which email subject lines work the best?

4.  What time of day is best to send emails to get them opened.

5.  How many people watch videos they post vs. how many take action after watching the videos.

Do you track these things in your online marketing?

Probably not.

The good news is you can leverage their testing and tracking by copying their online sales process in your business.

This article is continued with detailed examples in my new report titled “Advanced Online Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Agents” which can be downloaded for free at http://www.OnlineStrategiesReport.com

Why you might ask?

Because an investor is always an investor. What I mean by this is an investor is ALWAYS interested in good deals. Take a second and think about this…

If you have investors in your database and they’re always interested in good deals, you have the ability to sell property anytime you want. All you have to do is find a great deal and market it to your database. It’s virtually impossible for a “real” investor to walk away from a great deal. I know because I’m one of them. Every time I hear about a great investment opportunity, I automatically start thinking how I can grab it for myself.

There are several ways for you to leverage this finding in your business and it might make sense for you to focus on larger investment properties because you’ll earn a great deal more for your efforts. Compare the commission earned on the sale of a 30 unit apartment building to the commission earned on the sale of a single-family home. Which commission check would you rather have?

The good news is that it might actually be easier to sell a larger investment property to your database than it is to sell a smaller deal. I’ve sold several larger investment properties to my database over-the-phone without a single showing appointment. You can see exactly how to do this yourself in a 12-minute video.  Here it is:

Photo from h.koppdelaney

One of the easiest ways to double-end more sales and dramatically increase your commission income is to have synergy throughout your business. The definition of synergy is:

The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.

Synergy is about maximizing your efforts in such a way that they leverage each other for additional profit. Unless you really plan things properly, it’s hard to achieve maximum synergy in your business. Most real estate agents cast a wide net when marketing their businesses. They go after sellers, buyers, investors, renters and folks looking for almost every type of property available. A sale is a sale, right?

Well, this strategy has zero synergy because one prospect cannot be leveraged into two sales.

To explain, let me share a little bit from my business. Most of you know that I worked exclusively with investors. Every lead generation advertisement attracted investors. In fact, I built a rather large database of investors. These investors were looking primarily for a specific type of single family home that worked well for the investment strategy we specialized in. As time rolled on, the top listing agents in my area would call us when they listed a property meeting our client’s investing criteria and we were able to sell their listings rather quickly.

Sounds good on the  surface, doesn’t it?

What would have happened if I had started to market to attract sellers who owned the specific type of single family home my clients were interested in acquiring? Do you think it would have been possible to double-end most of our sales? Of course it would. This is because I would have had synergy between prospects responding to my marketing.

This could have been easily accomplished by splitting my lead generation advertisements between investors and sellers meeting our investing criteria. In essence, I would have built two different “targeted” lists of prospects with 100% synergy.  Think about how easy a meeting with a seller would be…

“Mr. Seller, I have a very large database of pre-approved investors who are looking for homes meeting your specific criteria. In fact, we typically can sell a home such as yours with one email to our database. If you’d like us to setup a tour of your home this weekend sign here”

How could a seller say no to this? They couldn’t and that’s the point. Had I used synergy in my business, I believe we could have completely controlled both sides of a majority of sales for homes meeting our specific criteria. This would have provided more revenue and income with less work because we would have doubled our revenue on each and every sale.

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought?” Henri Bergson

When you take time to think about this, you’ll see it’s very powerful.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If you watched the entire video, you probably heard Ron Insana say now is the absolute best time to buy a home. His comments were for both buyers looking to buy their primary residences and investors looking to buy foreclosures.  You might consider using this video with your database to help get buyers and investors off of the fence and into action. The reason why is because Ron Insana, a recognized financial expert, is saying now is the time to buy. This is much different than you telling your prospects now is the time to buy. Always remember, showing is better than telling.

Here are a few ways you can use this same video in your marketing:

1. Sending a link to the video via email to your database. In the link, offer a free list of the best foreclosure deals in your market place or the best buys in your area.
2. Embed the video on you website or blog and direct prospects back to your site. You could make a special offer in your blog post offering a special tour of the best priced homes on the market now.
3. Or you could use this video to help market a free class for home buyers and investors. Put the video on your blog and then make a special offer for a free class on how to buy a beautiful home below value.

Whatever you decide, I strongly encourage you to use this video in your marketing. It’s good, it’s free, it comes from a credible source and it will help move more of your prospects into action.

TIP: If you’re not familiar with how to embed a video on your site, simply click the share button on the video and copy the code provided. Paste this code into your web page and the video will instantly appear when your page is published! It’s pretty easy!

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)