Turn Your Active Rain Blog Into A Listing Machine
Turn Your Active Rain Blog Into A Listing Machine!
Yes, you read it right. We get
at least 2 listings per week from our Active Rain blog and SO CAN YOU.
Would knowing you can add another $100,000 to your gross income just
from your Active Rain blog be of any interest to you?
If you get 2 listings per week that is 8 new listings per month. That
is 96 new listings in a year.
If only one of those sells each month for an average price of 300K; do
the math! See how much that will change your bottom line?
Now look at your expense column. How much
money are you spending on fishing for listings?
Compare that to how much money you spend when you blog on
Active Rain. The investment is time.
The catch: It has to be you, not a paid assistant who does your
blogging for you! You must walk the talk!
As for me, I would much rather be spending my time blogging and
networking on Active Rain than any other form of marketing for
listings. We do not have an outside blog. Active Rain is our main
source of listings from online marketing.
How would you like to turn your Active Rain blog into a listing
machine?
Here are some tips to help you
get listings from your Active Rain blog:
Know Your Target Market
You must speak with your audience not at your audience.Hold a
conversation with your sellers. Even before
that you must know who your audience is. If you want to get listings
stop writing to attract the buyers. That is the biggest mistake I see
from those that email me or call me and ask me why they are not getting
listings from their Active Rain blog. Most members are writing Localism
posts that attract buyers not sellers. What does a seller want to know
about? Read
Who's Your Audience for more information.
Be Ahead
Of The Curve
Blogging for listings on Active Rain is a very under served market.
Agents who are online are usually targeting buyers and trying to
capture those prospects who are looking at properties on line. So that
means you are ahead of the curve since few, under 2% of real estate
bloggers are really focusing on blogging in order to get listings.
Find
The Pain and Offer the Relief
Write posts that address the 'pain' the seller is going through. Is
your market full of short sales, foreclosures, overpriced homes?
Address the pain, write posts about these issues and then given some
options for relief. Read
through our Localism posts and see some of the
subjects that are of interest to sellers.
Build
the Relationship First Online
Sellers who are looking for an agent to list their property with
typically read more than one post before they call the agent.
99%
of all the listings that we get from our Active Rain blog call us. They
do not email us, they are calling us and it is like they are a long
lost friend because they already know us. People do business with
people they know, like and trust. The know, like and trust is built
over time as they read your blog. So you better have content on your
blog that will engage the seller and make him/her connect with you.
Remember always that even though members on Active Rain comment on your
blog, consumers very rarely do. That does not mean they are not
reading. To find out more about who is reading your blog, use
mybloglog
stats.
Show Some Transparency
If your blog if filled with Vflyers, Postlets and Market Reports you
may end up getting a couple of buyers but most certainly you won't be
getting sellers to call you to list their properties. Where's the beef
in these posts? Sellers don't care about your other listings and
although market reports are relative to their situation they are not
going to build a relationship. But testimonials from other sellers and
endorsements from other agents will make a difference. Testimonials
are very powerful. Documentation beats conversation. Show
your
personality on your blog. Talk about your family and your hobbies.
People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Share real life examples of your work in your community.
Here
are some real life examples of how a few sellers connected with us:
- A mother was searching for information about
homeschooling
her children online and my Active Rain blog came up on her Google
search. She started reading my posts about homeschool and noticed I was
an agent. After reading our blog for 2 weeks, she called us to list her
house because she connected with us through homeschool. This is just
like going to a chamber of commerce meeting or some other networking
event and you start conversing with people in hopes to get some
business one day.
- 98% of our calls are for short sale listings. We
come up
first on Google for short sale information in our area. But
I also
wrote a series of posts on what you need to know about short sales.
This is a great niche for us because we have experience and great
success with short sales. Most of these sellers were told by their
attorney or financial advisor to do a short sale and then
they
google the terms that cause our blog to come up. We address their pain
and give them hope.
- A woman was searching on the internet for an
agent to list
her house. Our Active Rain blog came up in her search. She began reading
our blog every day. She noticed that I wrote posts not just about
selling houses and listing houses, but that I was writing posts to help
my fellow Real Estate agents and mortgage brokers in their businesses.
Allison was very impressed. Her comment to me was that she chose to
work with us because of my helping other agents. She said that spoke
volumes of the kind of person that I am and that is why she chose us to
be her agents even before she called us.
These examples are just a sampling on how property
owners have connected with us. When you want the phone to ring with
sellers on the other end of the line; follow these tips and see what
happens. This post is not about being found on Google, I have written
lots of posts to help you with your Google placement. This is about the
strategies we use to turn our
Active Rain Blog into a listing machine.


Katerina Gasset, CIPS, Realtor ®,
Business and Life Coach, Speaker and Author. Reach Katerina at:
561-753-0135
Disclaimer:The information provided herein is supplied by several
sources and is subject to change without notice. Wellington Homes Blog
does not guarantee or is any way responsible for its accuracy, and
provides said information without warranties of any kind, either
express or implied. Entries on Wellington Homes Blog represent the
opinions and ideas of the author(s). Wellington Homes Blog does not
express the views of International Properties and Investments, Inc or
those of the broker.
Copyright © 2008 By Katerina Gasset, All Rights Reserved.. *Turn Your Active Rain Blog Into A Listing Machine**
Contact Katerina Gasset for Customized Business and Personal Coaching.
Nice -- post and intersting since I work only with buyers -- I think some of these ideas can be adapted to that audience... any suggestions?