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Ways to Market Yourself As a Real Estate Agent

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Congratulations on passing the state licensing exam and getting placed with an agency! Now it’s time to find your clients – and to have them find you. Some agencies will provide assistance for marketing, but they might not give you all the tips you need. Read on to learn more about tips to market yourself as a real estate agent.

Your new agency may give you some leads to get started with. But those are not going to expand your business very well. You can also start with marketing to your so-called warm market – your friends and family. It’s the least expensive type of marketing, and you know that your audience will be receptive, or at least polite and hear your message. They can also give people they know a referral to you, and that kind of marketing is both free and invaluable. Your warm market paired with your agency’s leads will be a solid place to start.

Adding on to that, there are traditional types of marketing like newspaper ads and local city magazines. But in today’s digital age, these marketing formats don’t yield very strong results. Here is where you can let your creative talents shine. Think of ways to make digital videos that not only make your clients’ home look dazzling, but get you noticed.

Viral videos can take off and get people watching them for reasons other than their original purpose. Even if 90% of people viewing your clip are doing so for reasons other than buying a home, your name is getting out in front of all of them. One clever agent in Northern California did a parody of “YMCA” and garnered so much business, he was named by the Wall Street Journal as the top real estate agent in the country.

You should also have a robust website that invites people to click and contact you. Use those clicks to collect e-mails for your newsletter that you can also use when you get a new property to sell. Having good topics like ways to get stubborn grease off of your range hood or quick fixes for a leaky toilet will keep people coming back for what you have to say and build loyalty to you.

Keep up with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, too. These are the two most popular social media sites. If you have the time, you should maintain Google+ and Instagram accounts as well to broaden your horizons.

Lastly, know your market and use that knowledge to your greatest ability. There are all kinds of things people from out of the area need to know about schools, traffic patterns, and shopping, just to name a few things. Your local market guide will be a great asset to them – and lead to you getting more business. People want an agent who knows his or her stuff about the area. Your market guide shows potential clients that you are that expert.

Remember, a comprehensive marketing plan is not inexpensive. You will have already paid for your license and your testing fees, so be sure to factor marketing into your starting budget. While your agency might give you some tools like a set of personalized postcards or business cards, you will still need to have your own personal marketing set of tools as well.

Social Marketing for Real Estate Agents

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Maximizing Profits Using Facebook for Real Estate

There is hardly a person living in this day and age who hasn’t at the very least heard of Facebook and how it brings everyone together. The fact of the matter is that social networks are becoming an increasingly integral part in the lives of many people out there and it is only logical that they should be used for marketing and advertising. As it happens, there are ways to use Facebook for real estate agents who want to give their career a little boost.

First of all, how can using Facebook for real estate marketing benefit the agent? Well, for starters it should be mentioned that it is estimated that in August 2012, Facebook will hit the 1 billion subscriber mark. Put that together with the fact that one these networks news travels almost as the speed of light and you have yourself a nice potential way of spreading the word about yourself. You can do all the run-of-the-mill stuff such as making a profile page where they can pretty much do whatever they want. However, that is far from being the best Facebook can do for you.

Facebook allows the creation of fan pages and group pages to which people subscribe. When they “like” your page, every single thing you are going to post will become visible in their news feed, meaning that you are going to be reaching to thousands of people potentially only because they clicked a button on your page. Of course, using Facebook for real estate marketing consists of more than simply creating a page because after all, you need to give people a reason to join and like it. And it’s not like you just need anyone liking it; it is better to have a hundred people interested in what you are selling them like your page than a thousand who has no idea what you are doing there. So here is a little guide for how to use Facebook for real estate marketing.

How to Use Facebook for Real Estate Marketing

To start things off you are going to create a landing page which will give your visitors just a little taste of what you have to offer, encouraging them to click the like button and see the page in its full splendor. You should give them some incentive to click the like button, such as some kind of exclusive information about the housing sector, an ebook, or really any kind of little offer you can think of. The aesthetic of your landing page is extremely important so you should definitely work with a professional designer on it if you can afford to.

In any case, once they “like” your page they will be taken to second landing page where they can actually get what they clicked the button for. This is a very effective method of promoting your brand and getting your name out there as the people who will have gotten what they wanted from you will spread the word to their friends, who will hopefully give you a visit and do the same.

There is a great way to get more people to your Facebook page which consists of setting up good Facebook ads, which are basically the advertisements displayed on the side. All you need to do is simply click on the “create an ad” link which can be found right next to those advertisements, and you will be taken to the creation page. There you make your ad by simply choosing a picture and typing a quick sales pitch that goes to its right. You can choose to either run a cost-per-impressions or a pay-per-click campaign, whichever is more suitable for your current situation.

The best part with these ads is that if you are promoting a Facebook page those who are looking at it can “like” it instantaneously without even visiting it. If you can manage to make your advertisement enticing enough, you will see no shortage of unique visitors everyday who are looking to see what your brand has to offer them.

So how exactly do you get started and use Facebook for real estate marketing? Well, there is nothing complicated to the process as all you need to do is install an application which allows you to easily create landing pages. There are many applications which allow you to do that, and you can find them using your search engine of preference. Once the application is installed, use it to put your landing page into place, and get started with the steps above.

Check out my recent blog post for tips on growing your Facebook fan base.