Have you ever been to a Trader Joe’s store? You owe it yourself to get to one, and not just for the grocery chain’s foods.

For the business lesson.

Maybe you don’t have a Trader Joe’s near your house. There are, after all, less than 350 stores in only about half the U.S. states, part of the company’s plan of exclusivity. If you haven’t been to one, let me borrow from a fantastic recent Fortune article to explain the experience:

“It’s an offbeat, fun discovery zone that elevates food shopping from a chore to a cultural experience. It stocks its shelves with a winning combination of low-cost, yuppie-friendly staples (cage-free eggs and organic blue agave sweetener) and exotic, affordable luxuries — Belgian butter waffle cookies or Thai lime-and-chili cashews — that you simply can’t find anyplace else.

“Employees dress in goofy trademark Hawaiian shirts, hand stickers out to your squirming kids, and cheerfully refund your money if you’re unhappy with a purchase — no questions asked. At the Chelsea store opening, workers greeted customers with high-fives and free cookies. Try getting that kind of love at the Piggly Wiggly.”

You can also subscribe to a Trader Joe’s newsletter, which is almost as quirky and unique as the in-store shopping experience. Whether it’s in person or via newsletter, your experience with Trader Joe’s will be completely absent of at least one thing: The Curse of Sameness.

The Curse of Sameness is a marketing phenomenon that dooms many businesses. Grocery stores a great example. There are thousands of them across this continent. Yet aside from the rare cases, such as Trader Joe’s, how do any of them differentiate themselves from any other ones?

Do you know many grocery stores that do things much different than any other? You probably don’t. They all market the same way – weekly sales flyers, mostly – and carry the same kinds of products. They tout their huge selection, their low prices or their outstanding service, or blah, blah, blah.

They all seem to want to blend in rather than stand out. They doom themselves to the Curse of Sameness.

The real estate industry is almost exactly the same. It’s not entirely our fault; we don’t learn much about effective marketing as we plow through the material we need to get our licenses. We learn by watching what everyone else is doing, then doing that. “It’s worked for years,” we tell ourselves. “Why change?”

So we pay for expensive print ads in homebuyer magazines to showcase our listings, which, not accidentally, are written just like everyone else’s listings. “This lovely, 3BR, 1.5BA home … etc.” We take the same ads that are written like everyone else’s and also put them online, on listing sites that – you guessed it – look like everybody else’s.

We send out postcards with lame slogans and our smiling picture, both to possible buyer leads and to farm an area where we just had a listing or found a buyer for somebody else’s listing. We concern ourselves with getting “Pending” and “Sold” added to the yard sign of the contract we just got signed.

Agents do what they see every other agent doing. Just like the grocery stores that simply do what every other grocery store is doing. In this day and age of real estate, however, the Curse of Sameness is particularly diabolical.

You want proof? At the end of 2006, there were 1,357,732 Realtors in the National Association of Realtors membership. At the end of July this year, there were 1,088,703. That’s almost 270,000 agents who have dropped out of the game in three-and-a-half years.

You can blame the market for their plight, but you can bet that most of those more than quarter million people didn’t leave the business because they were standing out from their competition.

The big question is, if people’s real estate businesses are dropping like flies, why is it that so many agents are STILL copying what they did?

In today’s market, those who stand out – the Trader Joe’s of our industry – are the ones who thrive. Not long ago, I wrote a great blog post about agents copying tactics that have been successful in other industries.

In the blog post, it specifically mentions Internet marketers. If you think about it, there were successful Internet marketers well before real estate agents recognized the importance of online marketing (we were late to that game, too). Yet, what most agents have done is simply copy the good old model that’s always been used in print and attempt to transfer it online. Wouldn’t it make more sense to take what we’ve already seen working online and adapt that to our real estate businesses, rather than the other way around?

The reason most agents can’t see the benefit in this is because of that stupid curse. The sooner you recognize it, the better off you are. To succeed in the game nowadays, you must rid yourself of the Curse of Sameness.

Stand out. Be different. Don’t blend in.

Maybe even try a Hawaiin shirt.

There’s an extensive report that shows how real estate agents can differentiate themselves from their competition with one simple lesson. To get a copy of this report for free, visit www.FreeFarmerReport.com.

1. To learn how to turn your hobbies into income by merging your passions. (I absolutely love why he made the movie Titanic!)

2. To learn how to craft a powerful story.

Story telling is a something every marketer should study because it helps engage your prospects and keep them interested in you and your business. Cameron is undoubtedly the world’s best story teller and this is proven by his track record.

Here’s his presentation:

This is significantly different than a banner advertisement on someone’s website. A banner advertisement is reactive because it waits for someone to come to the website and then click on the banner. Solo emails are proactive because they are actually delivered to the person’s email address. Because they are proactive, they are very effective in generating low- cost leads.

To give you an example of what I mean, think about a news-related website like a TV News station or a local newspaper’s website. In some of these websites, they offer to deliver news updates to their newsletter subscribers for free. Visitors can sign up to receive these emails and have access to up-to-date news. Below, I have included a screen shot from the website of a local newspaper in my area. You can see easily see that this newspaper is capturing email addresses of website visitors. I could contact my advertising representative and ask what it would cost to send an email to their email list of subscribers.

You can search the websites of your newspapers and TV news channels to see if they are capturing the email address of visitors. If they are, you might be able to send a solo marketing email to their list!

Imagine what would happen if you paid to have an email delivered to their list of subscribers? It would generate lead-after-lead.

How do I know?

Because I use solo marketing emails extensively in my business. An agent that I coach used this strategy with his local newspaper and generated 130 leads from one email. His cost per lead was under $3.00.

The best option would be to have one full email sent to their list.  In your email, offer something of value to the subscribers and have a link for them to click through to your website. Require the prospect to give you their name and email address to get the free item you offer. If you are unable to have a full email sent, than test a text advertisement within the articles included in the newsletter. These text advertisements pull very well and you might be surprised at how many new leads you generate using this strategy.

To get started with this new marketing strategy, I would suggest leveraging your best lead generation advertisement. You can do this by turning your advertisement into an email or text advertisement to be placed within a newsletter email. The reason I suggest  using your best lead generation advertisement is because you already know it works.  Leverage success!

In marketing, if an advertisement works in one place, it will more than likely work in other places too.

To learn a great way to find pretested email subject lines for your solo marketing emails, download my new report titled “Advanced Online      Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Agents” right now for FREE at:
http://www.OnlineStrategiesReport.com

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.

Hint: It's a fast-track guide on how to understand and communicate with your prospects.

Early in the book, he summarizes the typical day of an average person. This little study is very revealing from a marketing perspective. As an example, he found that most people begin their day in the dark because they have long commutes to work. More than 3 million people travel 50 miles or more to work. He pinpointed this as being a great opportunity for connecting with your prospect because you may have their uninterrupted attention.

He also found that most people now go online within minutes of waking up to see what's going on in their community, the weather and to get updates from their friends and family. This finding indicates that you should try to deliver some of your marketing messages, newsletters or other client communications so that your prospects have them first thing in the morning. My testing has shown this to be true. My email open rate tends to be higher when the emails are delivered at 6:30 a.m. This doesn't mean you have to personally send the email at 6:30. It simply means you have to program your email to be delivered at 6:30 a.m.

In fact, most people have checked their email before leaving their home for work. Dr. Luntz even found that if someone is under the age of 30, they've probably received a text message, too.

On surfing the Internet he wrote:

"Only a handful of people acknowledge surfing the Web at work for personal content, even though it is well-known that website traffic spikes when people first get to work, during lunch hour, and again right before they leave for home."

Seems to me these three time zones might be very helpful for delivering your marketing messages or driving traffic to your website. They tell you when and how to deliver your marketing messages. Simply by engineering your marketing around how people live, you'll notice an increase in your response rates. More emails will be opened. More people will visit your website. And you'll ultimately sell more homes.

"My database has around 500 prospects. Every now and then I send them deal alerts but very few respond. I've only been able to generate a few appointments and a few offers to date. At what point (1,000? 5,000?) can I expect people to make offers and actually buy?"

This is an excellent question, isn't it?

In marketing, 50 interested prospects isn't a very large number.

This doesn't mean that you won't sell, it just means that you're not going to generate huge results through email marketing, unless you build a larger database. With 50 interested prospects, you can assume that 5 percent to 10 percent of them might respond to your offer. This would translate into two to five responses, depending on what you're marketing and how you're marketing it.

Imagine how your marketing would change if you had 10,000 prospects in your database? One email would be opened by 1,000 prospects (10 percent) and 50 to 100 (5 percent to 10 percent) would respond to the offer made in the email. The game changes dramatically.

Everything gets easier.

As you start to think about 2010, make sure your marketing focus is on building your database. It's the best investment you'll ever make. If you need a little help, I strongly suggest downloading my program titled "31 Days to a Larger Database" for just $12.95 available at:

http://www.31daydatabase.com