How to use Social Media To Grow Your Business

The only advertising that's really working effectively these days is permission or attraction marketing.

People are being bombarded with messages every day, if they don't know you already, it's doubtful that they'll remember you from a bus ad or yet another piece of junk mail in they're mail box.

To really remember your message, and to get it at the right time, they need to be one of your subscribers. Here are 10 ways that you can develop an attraction marketing strategy that will have clients coming to you, instead of you always chasing them.

Start by joining existing social networking sites and creating a profile on them.
Some examples would be:

• Facebook
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

Or some real estate specific ones like

• activerain
• brokeragentssocial
• inman

Next, establish your "web turf" decide what your expertise is going to be.

Are you trying to attract first time home buyers?
Property Investors?
Maybe you're the king of foreclosure properties?

Are you trying to attract other agents and become the king of all referrals in your area?

• What can you do to attract other agents to you?
• Make your referral fees generous and clear to them
• Offer perks for sending you business (gift cards? trips for certain quotas?)
• Tell them how well you will treat they're clients and all the extra perks you'll give them (maybe the use of a free moving van? Comp Hotel Stay for the weekend while you look at homes if they're relocating?

The point is to pick a specialization, and then base your whole web persona on it. Be consistent across all channels. If you're "Santa Monica Short Sales Specialist" then ... make that the title of your profile.

• Set up your own groups on all these sites, call it "Santa Monica Short Sales"
• Set up a channel on YouTube called "Short Sales in Santa Monica" and do regular reports about short sales that are coming available on the market, and ones you just closed.

Creating content for these groups is something you'll want to get good at. Start making videos, recording calls, writing reports ...

Get good at combining media to make many versions. Maybe you find making a video easy, but writing is harder for you...

Then make a video and have it transcribed on one of the free lace sites, you can have your video transcribed by a freelancer on Guru or Odesk for very little money, as little as $10 or $20 some times by people off shore who can transcribe what YOU are saying no trouble.

Pamela is a free tool that is in the "TOOLS" section of Skype. It lets you record your calls... how easy is that to make some content from that.

• Call 3 experts you know in short sales
• Get then to talk about what a short sale is and how to make money from them
• Get them to tell you 1 story about a short sale that they made
• What advice would they have for other people just getting started in short sales?

Now have those calls transcribed. Break them down into Introductions to short sales, 1 story each, then their advice you could easily turn those 3 recorded calls into multiple products.

• A 3 to 6 part mini course that gets emailed to your clients regularly
• A series of 3 Calls that are delivered separately
• Use those calls to create a podcast and upload the podcast to iTunes so people can subscribe to it.

Now record your own introduction and put all the calls together, WITH the transcriptions
You've just made your first e-product series.

Use the different single calls and individual transcriptions to create blog posts to be delivered to your groups on on Active Rain, Facebook and other sites.

See how 3 free Skype calls have turned into a mountain of content for you, making it easy for you to put out valuable content with little effort on your part for very little money.

How long do you think that will last? 1 week like your flyer run? Or do you think that content will keep driving leads to you for months, even years to come?

The more you put out there, the better people get to know you, the more they want to follow what you have to say ...

When they are actually ready to do business, they know you already, they've built what they feel like is a long term relationship with you.

• Do you have a blog on your website? If not fix that
• Do you submit your RSS feeds to blog directories and other sites? You should.
• Make yourself known on social bookmarking sites by following other peoples stuff and commenting on their links and blogs.
• Sign up for a Twitter account and tell people what you're doing regularly.

Get out there and get known... the more breadcrumbs you have leading back to you, the more likely it is that you'll get found, get known, be followed, grow your reputation and attract more business.