There are items in our real estate lives that are killing deals right now!  I don’t consider myself a newbie in this game but I was not around during the Hay Day (read: everyone gets a loan and every person has a relative that is an agent) and even I see the process of closing a loan getting harder and harder.

Sometimes the people with iffy credit and coming up with funds at the last minute have it easier than someone who got gifted the 10%.  Sometimes even easier than the people putting down 20% because that 20% down person is buying a condo that is in a new construction building but not approved.

So let me share with you the 7 Items that are killing real estate deals right now and how you can avoid them.

That felt good to write — a little frustration, dropped a little knowledge, and used a little sarcasm.

Ryan is a Realtor®, Speaker, Fitness Junkie, and “Real Estate Helper” living in MA

You can get free access to his Social Media Training School HERE

Or click the link for Free Access to Social Media School at optimizedrealestateagent.com

In April of 2010, she was laid off from her job and did not know which move to make next.  Personal Training is her passion and she decided that she was going to go for it.  She got her certification, and a job as a personal trainer.  Next she started a blog, a Facebook Fan Page, Youtube Channel and Twitter account.

She was just featured on www.lauraroeder.com (Laura is a top social media expert) for her success in the past 12 months and we came up with a plan to share how she did it.  Below are the 12 Steps to Leverage Social Media in the Next 12 Months.

1. Who are you? What are you writing about? This is your niche. You should be writing to your niche and also be a part of your niche to prove your passion for the topic.
2. Who is your audience? I was writing to people who wanted to live a healthier lifestyle and wanted to share ideas and success stories.
3. HAVE Patience – This is not going to happen overnight. It is going to take time to get a following. Be comfortable with the having approx 50 or so fans after the first month. Treat followers and fans with great respect and get to know THEM.
4. Provide Valuable Content – Only re-posting recipes or others content is not going to get a following. Write from the heart, write posts that will help, inspire, heal and motivate.
5. It is not about YOU – Being a blogger is about serving the community in which you occupy, not promoting yourself (that will come organically). Do as much as you can for others with no expectations besides knowing you may have helped someone.
6. Have a free item to give away. Having consistent viewership is great but it is a one way street. (They come to you) Creating a free report or a newsletter will get people to sign up to your email list and you now can reach them with your content, programs, or services. Mine was www.thegetinshapebooty.com
7. Do some Pro-Bono work – Not only good for your karma, this will help you build social currency. I have a personal training site. Before we launched it, we gave away free memberships to get the community engaged. Those people were also required to provide photos, testimonials, and leave positive feedback on their social media pages.
8. Show you CARE – When I was getting started I would write a thank you email to everyone who signed up for my free give-a-way just introducing myself and asking how I could help.
9. Follow up –People need reminders that you can help them; Also be consistent with your blog, failing to write a post for a couple weeks will kill your viewership before it gets going.
10. Do Free Challenges to get community involvement – I have created a free challenge for people on my Facebook page and people I am involved with on many different forums.
11. Ask your audience what they want, don’t assume you know – You are probably at a level of knowledge for your niche that is ahead of your viewers. Don’t assume they are there with you. If they are asking for the basic of basic steps, make sure to show them how!
12. Find people you want to be like and follow them! Get involved on their page, provide great content and posts and let them know you are also an authority figure in that space. Doing it once won’t cut it. Be a regular on their page helping THEIR viewers remain engaged. I bet you they will make their way over to your site in time!

The first is AgentPress by Studio Press.  This theme is great and super customizable.  Check it out here:

StudioPress Themes for WordPress

You have to a quick search for AgentPress but it is very easy.  This theme allows you to do so many things:

StudioPress Themes for WordPress

If you need some help with how to get this going do not hesitate to ask me.

Next is OptimizePress

This theme was developed by James Dyson — it is geared for online business (think squeeze or landing pages) you know what, go here to check out what I did with it.  http://www.movesouthboston.com.  I get tens of people signing up for my reports each week through this page.  It is simple, to the point and effective for people to opt in.

What I did with this theme just scratches the surface of what it is capable of.  If you are a more advanced marketer, you can create launch pages (good for open houses), membership sites, (do you have a coupon book for your community) and a generally sweet looking blog.

Again – check out OptimizePress

**Full disclosure — I use these products and have purchased these products.  If you end up buying one or both of these, the owners will throw me a commission.  The product price is not increased because of that.  So be a friend and order them here.

Ryan is a Realtor®, Speaker, Fitness Junkie, and “Real Estate Helper” living in MA

You can get free access to his Social Media Training School HERE

Or click the link for Free Access to Social Media School at optimizedrealestateagent.com

Well let me tell you it is not that hard and you get the links to get going below.

To become the most search engine friendly with your blog you need to do the following:

That’s all folks!

Now it is time to bring great, laser focused content about your niche and the followers will come.

You have already written your blog posts but you are not getting the visibility you hoped for.  That is ok, Rome was not built in a day.  You have to work for it now.  (I know, it adds to your already overwhelming workload…If this is the case then you need to re-assess where you spend your time because blogging is the NOW, not the future)

Here are some tips to get more of a following:

There is 6 right there.  Do those consistently for a month and then you can/should be able to move on.

The hard part is starting and here are the steps above.

Get step by step instructions by clicking the “HERE” below

Ryan is a Realtor®, Speaker, Fitness Junkie, and “Real Estate Helper” living in MA

You can get free access to his Social Media Training School HERE

Or click the link for Free Access to Social Media School at optimizedrealestateagent.com

Of course you have – and I am sure you have heard of forsalebyowner.com, a website marketed towards homeowners to sell their homes on their own.  (I think this is a genius “concept” but all homeowners should hire a realtor when buying or selling property, especially now)

You would think a man who created this company would stand by his product by using it to sell his own home, right?

I know you already know the answer — he in fact used a real estate agent to sell his property in NYC.

Thanks to Agentgenius.com for the tip and this goes to show you to never stay away from FSBO’s because we know they all end up marketing their property with a real estate agent!  Go after it!

Here is the link to the story

http://locationindependent.com/an-introductory-guide-to-creating-selling-digital-products/

So here we go…

These are the basics and of course you can go further.  This takes work and if you are up for it, you will be rewarded.

Ryan is a Realtor®, Speaker, Fitness Junkie, and “Real Estate Helper” living in MA

You can get free access to his Social Media Training School HERE

Or click the link for Free Access to Social Media School at optimizedrealestateagent.com

I had a few things about facebook and blogging I wanted to talk about today but since I have not posted since last week, I think it is a good time to address the battles of inconsistency. (I will get to those other items later in the week).  What happens?  Why do we run into inconsistency?  Here are a few items that have affected me with consistency or, inconsistency.

Some of the items above may border on being redundant or a derivative from the first bullet point — Time Management.  I know I am full of useful information to the readers of this blog and I know that I KNOW more than other Real Estate and Mortgage Professionals — I am not trying to pump my chest — I am lucky enough to speak on these topics.  So lets address the bullet points above and how we/I can fight through them.

A great tool is hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com)  You can schedule your blog posts for the week or month.  instead of taking the time to write one post, sit down and do a few and be on autopilot for the rest of the week or month!

Do you struggle with inconsistency?  What do you do about it?  Try some of the suggestions above and let me know how you do!

Ryan is a Realtor®, Speaker, Fitness Junkie, and “Real Estate Helper” living in MA

You can get free access to his Social Media Training School HERE

Or click the link for Free Access to Social Media School at optimizedrealestateagent.com

• Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and Seth Godin‘s idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends^[3] that marketers “earn their way in” (via publishing helpful information on a blog etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy, beg, or bug their way in” (via paid advertisements, issuing press releases in the hope they get picked up by the trade press, or paying commissioned sales people, respectively). Brian Halligan, cofounder and CEO of HubSpot, claims^[4] he coined the usage of the term in this sense.
• Antonym for this usage: Traditional marketing (outbound marketing) is a marketing strategy that focuses on finding customers by building brand awareness through advertising and promotion. In contrast to “permission marketing,” a pejorative term for this type of marketing is “interruption marketing.”

Taken straight from wikipedia.com

As you probably know (I mean you are reading a blog…) you choose the content you want to receive; whether it is radio, print, TV, online….As recently as 10 years ago, the way we market ourselves and our businesses was different.

We painted in much broader strokes so to speak.  An ad was taken out in the newspaper and companies crossed their fingers to see if they would get results.  Sure, newspapers had demographics of who their readers were.  Age 25-60…and that was about it.  Not much more on salary, High School or College education, or likes.

No for example, I can put an ad on Facebook that has billions of users and narrow it down to Class of 85 from Wilmington, MA who are college educated and like “farmville”. Crazy right?  If I had a product for that age group in that location, I could market to them directly and know I was not reaching a class of 67 graduate from Austin, TX who hated Farmville.

I digress…a little…because the aforementioned is inbound marketing on a micro scale.

Most of us start a search for something, anything on Google, Bing, or another search engine.  That person searching KNOWS that if they search for Blue Thing a ma jigs they are not going to get a result for red hair pins (I apologize for the terms, but you know what I mean)

The customer is finding them.

Apply it to real estate.  Say I am looking for a house in Wilmington, MA, I am not going to put in another town. I may put in “housing market wilmington ma”  Look what I found:

1. Wilmington, Massachusetts Real Estate Market – AOL Real Estate

   realestate.aol.com › Real Estate Markets › Massachusetts – Cached

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   Find Wilmington, Massachusetts housing market conditions and real estate market trends in Wilmington, MA all at AOL Real Estate.

   ►

2. housing market in wilmington ma – ActiveRain

   activerain.com/…/housing%20market%20in%20wilmington%20ma – Cached

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   All the blog entries on the ActiveRain Real Estate Network tagged with housing market in wilmington ma by Northeast RealtyPartners.

3. Wilmington MA Real Estate Market Recap :: Ryan Covino & Co. Real …

   ryancovinorealestate.com/…/wilmington-ma-market-recap-and-short… – Cached

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   Jun 20, 2011 – Learn what happened this week in the Real Estate Market in Wilmington, MA.

4. Wilmington, MA Market Statistics and Real Estate Trends

   www.movoto.com › … › Middlesex County › Wilmington Homes for Sale – Cached

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   Jul 1, 2011 – Research real estate market trends and housing statistics for Wilmington, MA. View historical market data for Wilmington such as median …

I am number 2 and 3.  I did this by optimizing my web pages with the use of Blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

2 things need to happen-

One, I need to get clicked on and Two, I need to have some compelling info to have the viewer stay and contact me or have an opt in form to subscribe to my newsletter about Wilmington.

From there they will be in my database and I can email (drip) on them with valuable content about Wilmington.

How are you using Inbound Marketing?

For more information – contact Ryan

Ryan is a Realtor®, Speaker, Fitness Junkie, and “Real Estate Helper” living in MA

You can get free access to his Social Media Training School HERE

Or click the link for Free Access to Social Media School at optimizedrealestateagent.com

There are so many benefits from this plugin that you can implement into your site/blog right away.  I really like the fact that I would go searching for each individual benefit they offer and now I do not have to…because they are all there!

Take a tour of this plug in here

Ryan is a Realtor®, Speaker, Fitness Junkie, and “Real Estate Helper” living in MA

You can get free access to his Social Media Training School HERE

Or click the link for Free Access to Social Media School at optimizedrealestateagent.com

Let’s start there — I am friends with my mom on Facebook but not by Dad….he doesn’t know the difference between facebook and a cookbook.   Facebook was not around while I was in college — I graduated in 04 — so I couldn’t be friends with my parents but I am sure I would have.

That is probably the simplest way I can break it down.  I don’t have it, I have just been reading about it, mostly from this guy – Padday (@padday; thinkoutsidein.com/blog)

It ‘s cool though – say if I have a few different groups – friends, family, colleagues, friends of friends…etc.  I can have status updates and post pictures to all or one of these groups.  I may want to ask other Realtors  (colleagues) what type of Contact Management System they are using.  So I would just ask my colleague group –  the answers will be coming strictly from the resource I want it to.  If I asked all of my groups, I could a whole slew of responses that could potentially devalue the one good response I was looking for.

I thought Facebook had something like this but I believe you can just offer different levels of privacy to different people not actually segmenting your list.

This is pretty advanced social media stuff but it is based on some of the simplest principles that have been around for ever – like you can only handle so many connections with people, and social proof from trusted friends helps people make decisions.

Even this roll out process is genius and simple at the same time….just like a club, always have people in line.

Ryan is a Realtor®, Speaker, Fitness Junkie, and “Real Estate Helper” living in MA

You can get free access to his Social Media Training School HERE

Or click the link for Free Access to Social Media School at optimizedrealestateagent