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10 Tips for Getting Traffic Through Social Media Sites

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 02:00:08 +0000

Web 2.0 sites and social media are already here (and have been for some time). Experts predict that this trend will only grow. That means if you don’t start using social media now – today – you’ll be left behind.

Here then are 10 tips for using social media to drive traffic to your sites…

1. Complete your profile.

When you first open your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media site account, fill out your profile (including a picture). Doing so makes it easier for people to get to know you and build relationships with you, which will make it more likely they’ll click through to your site.

2. Interact.

Social sites are, by definition, social. They’re two way streets (not monologues). That’s why you shouldn’t just post content and move on. Instead, spend a few minutes each day interacting and getting to know people in your network.

3. Include a link to your site on your profile page.

This tip is simple but effective: Give people a reason to click through from the social media site to your blog or web site. A promise of a free report usually makes for a good enticement.

4. Ask your followers to “re-tweet” and repost.

If you create a “buzz worthy” post (such as a post on a hot or even controversial topic), as your Twitter followers to “re-tweet” it and ask your other social media networks to repost it.

5. Spend time each day growing your network.

Commit to spending at least 10 minutes each day growing your network. You’ll see big results by the end of the month. And you’ll be amazed at the size of your network in six months or a year from now.

6. Link your social site pages together.

Link your Twitter account to your Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media pages. And vice versa.

7. Use your real name so that you’re easy to find.

People who want to do business with you won’t respond well to working with “TopAgent.” Instead, build trust by using your real name. Doing so also makes it easier for others to find you on Facebook and similar sites.

8. Post good content.

Social media is not just about networking, it’s also about sharing information. If you share some of your best information with your network, you’ll get respect, trust… and more sales. Plus you’ll establish yourself as a niche expert.

9. Optimize some of your content.

Some social sites (such as Yahoo! Answers and Squidoo) get crawled and indexed regularly by the search engines. As such, you may consider optimizing some of your content for the search engines by including relevant (longtail) keywords two or three times for every 100 words of content.

10. Get the most benefit for your time.

Instead of trying to interact and build relationships with thousands of prospects, consider building a relationship with a handful of partners. That’s because just one good partner can send you lots of prospects and customers.

In summary: Social media is only expected to grow in the future – and now is the best time to get involved if you’d like to grow your business right along with it. You can start today by applying the ten traffic-generating, relationship-building tips you just discovered!

And don’t forget to “Like” this post and “Share” it with your network, too!

Realtytechbytes.com by Jerry Kidd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.Realtytechbytes.com. Did you know that I have arranged for readers of my blog to receive licensed software for free? And that there is something new everyday? Click on the link to go to the blog and look for Give Away of the day in the sidebar.

10 Tips for Getting Traffic Through Social Media Sites

Solve wireless network “blues”!

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 02:00:40 +0000

So, I had this problem. My wife loves to watch movies on the TV. Recently we were fortunate enough to come into a big screen, flat panel TV that has taken her movie watching into a whole new dimension of entertainment. I am a member of NetFlix, but since my taste in movies tends to run to anything where people land on Mars or where things blow up, and her taste runs to Jane Austen, my choices from NetFlix were inevitably wrong.

One day I saw that the Wii console we bought for our grandsons to use could also be used to get movies on demand from NetFlix if I just got a special DVD from them to put into the Wii. The only catch was that the Wii had to have Internet access.

I wasn’t too concerned as I have two wireless networks in my house. One, on my over 15 year old PacBell DSL line (I still have a static IP address!), and the other on our Comcast cable system. I just “knew” that one of those networks could reach the family room from our home office. Wrong! The Wii could “see” both of them, but neither signal was strong enough to allow it to connect.

So, I went in search of ways to get a strong and reliable wireless signal into the family room. Although I could have crawled under the house and strung a network cable, I am way too lazy for that. Then I remembered reading about something called HomePlug™ networking. This is a networking standard that uses the wiring in your house to move the Internet connection around.

Click on the picture or go to http://budurl.com/WGXB102 to go to the page on Amazon that will show you the product that I bought. Be sure to click on the “Watch” button under the picture to watch a short Flash video that explains how it works. It won’t take long and it explains the process better than I can.

So, I bought the kit and shortly there after, I have a strong wireless signal in the family room that the Wii can connect to, AND that I can also use with any of my WiFi devices like the iPhone, Netbook, Laptop and my grandson’s Nintendo DSi XL game systems.

You don’t have to use this with a Wii. It could be very useful if you wanted to have a strong WiFi signal anywhere in your house. Just plug the second unit in anywhere you want. The first unit stays near the Router in your house. (Watch the video for details).

Once you have this set up, it’s truly plug it in and forget it. If you have a power failure, the network comes back up right after power is restored. It consumes very little power and comes in a variety of configurations. For instance, you can get models that have ethernet plugs at both ends if you didn’t want wireless. And some models are “green” in that they stop consuming power if there is no activity after a certain period of time.

From where I sit, this is an elegant solution to the issue of how to have the Internet available wherever I happen to want to use it. What do you think?

Own your own AT&T cell “tower”!

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 02:00:14 +0000

On June 27th I told you about a solution that I was using to solve the almost non existent AT&T coverage in my office. Here is the link to that article in case you missed it: http://realtytechbytes.com/solve-poor-att-reception/

It actually worked quite nicely, until you picked up the phone. Once you did that, and took the phone out of the zPocket Wireless Range Extender YX-110 the signal would drop off to nothing and the call would drop.

The following week I told you what my solution was to that problem…a bluetooth adapter that allowed me to use a regular desk top telephone via my iPhone’s bluetooth adapter. That works very well too. If you missed that article, it is at the following link:
http://realtytechbytes.com/use-your-cellphone-with-your-home-or-office-phone-system/

But, I was intrigued with a new product from AT&T called the 3G MicroCell™. Here is what AT&T has to say about what it is: “AT&T 3G MicroCell acts like a mini cellular tower in your home or small business environment. It connects to AT&T’s network via your existing broadband Internet service (such as U-verse, DSL or cable) and is designed to support up to four simultaneous users in a home or small business setting.”

Essentially, you plug this device into a. power outlet, connect a network cable between it and your router, and it becomes your own private cell tower. There are some detailed steps to take to get it activated, but the instructions are clear and detailed enough so that the average user could get it done. The part of the activation process that you are involved in only takes a few minutes. But, it takes the device about an hour to finish the process in the background as it communicates with the AT&T network

It has to know where it is, so it needs to be a able to “see” a GPS satellite in order to get a GPS signal. This was of some concern to me as I have an inside office with no windows facing outside. Across the hall from my office is an office with outside windows and there was sufficient GPS signal getting to me that the device could get enough of a GPS signal to connect.

Here are some additional facts from the AT&T web site:

Device Features:
Enhanced coverage indoors – up to 5000 square feet.
No required additional monthly fees – just use the wireless minutes and data from your existing plan.
Available minute voice feature.
3G handset compatible – unlimitedworks with any AT&T 3G phone.
Supports 3G data services for customers without Wi-Fi capable handsets*.
Device is secure – cannot be accessed by unauthorized users, easy and secure online management of device settings
Seamless call hand-over – start calls on your 3G MicroCell and continue without interruption, even if you leave the building.

Device Requirements:
3G wireless phone
Broadband service over U-Verse, DSL or cable
Computer with Internet access for online registration

Additional Information:
Installing your device near a window is strongly recommended to ensure access to Global Positioning System (GPS). A GPS link is needed to verify the device location during the initial startup.

The 3G MicroCell is portable and may be moved, provided the new location is within the AT&T authorized service area and properly registered online.

Additionally, it can have up to 5 devices connected to it at once. When you set up the device, you tell it which phones are allowed to connect. Those are the only phones who will be able to use it, so you will be able to feel secure in using it.

The phone seamlessly connects to the MicroCell when you enter it’s range. If you are on a call that is routed through an AT&T cell tower when you enter the range of the MicroCell, you unfortunately stay on that tower. In my case, this means a dropped call. But, if I begin a call on the MicroCell, and then leave my office, it is handed off to the nearest cell tower seamlessly. So, I can start a call in my office and hit the road with the phone and keep the call alive. I just can’t do the reverse.

Here is a screen shot of my iPhone 4 connected to the MicroCell. (Click on the picture to see a larger picture) Notice that where it normally says “AT&T 3G” that it now says “AT&T M-Cell 3G”. Notice all of those lovely bars!

I’ve been using it with my iPhone 4 for a few weeks now with no problems, and with 5 bars of signal too. Which means I can get rid of my zPocket device. Any one want to buy it from me?

Can I offer you One Facebook tip?

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 02:00:35 +0000

I sure hope that you’ll say yes, because the problem that this tip will solve is starting to look like an epidemic.

Facebook is built on connecting with people and becoming their “friend”. Once you are friends with someone you can start to share your life stream with them and they can share theirs with you. Works really well and we gain a deeper understanding of the other person. As a bonus, when we interact with their posts, their friends have the opportunity to see the interaction and “chime in” with their thoughts, which can lead to us making new friends. It’s awesome how well it works.

But, with all of the hysteria about privacy, I think that some of us have thrown out the baby with the bath water.

It seems like every friend request that I get is sent to me with just the Facebook standard request message of “so and so wants to be your friend”. Unless I really know you (in other words we have actually met face to face more than once) I am going to click on your name to see what I can learn about you. When I do that lately, I end up at your profile which has been configured in such a way that I cannot get information about you! Facebook tells me that “so and so only shares some of his/her profile information with everyone”. In other words, I have to accept the friendship to find out if I want to be friends with so and so! And that my friends is absurd! When I see that, I simply choose to ignore the friend request.

Here is a way to solve the problem. When you send a friend request to someone, take a few minutes to personalize the message. Let the person know how you come to be asking to create a friendship. Maybe you have friends in common, if so, be sure to tell them. Maybe you went to the same schools, or worked for the same companies in the past. Maybe you like what they have written, maybe you just like the way they look. What ever it is, please take a moment to let the object of your friendship request know who you are and why you are asking for the connection.

Maybe I am getting old and cranky, but it seems to me that this could solve the problem and get the new friendship off to a great start by identifying the common ground that you stand on right from the beginning.

What do you think? Am I on track or should I just go chill out?

Are you a pro at technology?

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 02:00:00 +0000

I spent all of the week of June 21^st through June 25^th presenting “Introduction to ePro” workshops. I was at 9 different REALTOR® Associations around the San Francisco Bay Area. If you attended one of them and wanted to sign up for ePro and were not able to do so, here is another opportunity for you. Read on, please.

If you were not able to attend, but would like to take advantage of the discount that I offered at the workshop, then you should read on as well.

For everyone else reading this, you may want to click on this link: http://JerryKidd.CertifiedeProTrainer.com and watch the short video to get a good understanding of what ePro is.

Many of you know that my business these days revolves around training and coaching small business owners (that’s REALTORS® too!) on how to use Social Media and Social Networking to find new customers and to make more money. Although most people that I talk to are eager to use the new tools, they get bogged down on the simple things that EVERYONE needs to know these days. Things like how to register a domain name and how to have your own branded email (It really IS time to ditch that AOL or Yahoo account).

Or they have no idea how to upgrade the software on their computers, or even to do more with a computer than just surf the Internet or send and receive email.

The time is now for you to upgrade your skills. Because when you do decide to really learn how to use Social Media and Social Networking, you do not want to have to back up and learn the basics of connectivity, computers, and all of the other things that ePro teaches.

Click on the link or picture above to learn more about ePro. Or, if you are ready to sign up and get the discount and the two additional months to complete the course, just go here: http://jerrykiddevent.epronar.com/ or click on the picture below.

As an added benefit, you get the new NAR Web 2.0 course at no additional charge. This is free to any REALTOR® signing up for ePro, there is a charge to non-REALTORS®.

Don’t you owe it to yourself to get your skill set brought up to date? If not now, when?

Solve poor AT&T Reception

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 02:00:54 +0000

AT&T is the company that people love to hate. It seems like I read at least one negative review of the iPhone for every positive one that I read and all the negative ones are generally based on the poor signal quality of AT&T.

I find that interesting because with the exception of one location, I have had zero reception problems, zero call quality problems and zero dropped calls in the 2 years that I have been an AT&T customer. And my business takes me all over the San Francisco Bay Area as well as parts of Central California.

But, I feel the pain of the complainers because the one area where I cannot use my phone is my office at 111 Deerwood Road, in San Ramon, California! I get absolutely no service at my desk whatsoever. I have an internal office on the second floor and I am just about in the center of a 3 story office building. So my guess is that the building’s construction and the location of my office within it is the culprit. If I step outside of the building, I’m back to 5 bars.

So, since I don’t want to give up my iPhone and since I don’t want to find a new location for my office, I was resigned to no cell phone service at my desk (That’s actually not a bad thing as it gives me a “cone of silence” to work in…) until I found the subject of this week’s post.

Enter the zPocket Wireless Range Extender YX-110 for $99.00. This is a device that has two parts connected by a 20’ cable. The receiver is in a plastic case that attaches by suction cups to a window. Although my office does not have an external window, it does have a window that fronts on the hallway, across from an office that does have an external window. If I stand in the hall way, I can get 1~2 bars on my phone. By attaching the zPocket device to my office window with it’s included suction cups, it can pick up that very weak AT&T signal.

The other part of the zPocket is a rubber base that is tethered to the main portion by the cable. The instructions said to position the two parts 20’ away from each other. I’m not sure why, but since the rubber base portion is the transmit antenna for the device, it may be to avoid any signal interference.

So, how well does it work? Actually, it works quite well. When my phone is sitting in the base it gets 5 bars where before it got none.

Once I take the phone out of the base however, reception drops off to zero bars immediately making it impossible to make and receive calls by holding the handset. Next week I will tell you how I solved that dilemma. But in the meantime, if you are getting poor reception at home or at your office, you just might want to check into this nifty solution.

How to choose the cell phone that is right for you!

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 02:00:56 +0000

Ever since Apple announced the 4G iPhone earlier this month, I have been doing some research on which phone I might want to buy when my current contract runs out in early July.

And, with the huge assortment of really capable phones available, it’s been an interesting process.

To start with, I took a look at a post that I wrote about how to choose a cell phone a few years ago. It turns out that what I wrote then is still valid now. (Either click the link above or here: http://realtytechbytes.com/what-cell-phone-should-i-buy/ to read it.) As it was then, choosing the right carrier for your needs is still the most important factor to consider.

To further aid the review process, I discovered that PC World Magazine’s current news stand issue (July 2010) has a great review on the top 5 phones at AT&T, SPRINT, Verizon and T-Mobile on page 38 to page 42. If you are considering a new phone, it would be worth picking up a copy.

If you don’t want to buy a magazine, you could go to http://www.pcworld.com/products/phones.html where PC World provides a ton of info on buying a new cell phone, along with many reviews.

Having done all of my research, when it comes time to replace my nearly 2 year old iPhone 3G, I’ll be going with the new iPhone 4G. Even though AT&T is not my favorite carrier (that honor goes to T-Mobile), I am such a fan of the iPhone that I will sign up again.

I use my current phone to manage my calendar, pick up email from 5 different accounts, set appointments, record audio (It’s surprisingly good at this), surf the web, interact with with my Google Voice Account, check time zones (family and friends worldwide), check weather around the world), track flights, do presentations, retrieve information from my Evernote account, listen to music and much, much more. Oh yeah, I occasionally make and receive phone calls with it as well. I have had very few calls that were dropped or garbled, contrary to what others tell me is their experience.

To all of that, the new iPhone 4G will allow me to record and edit HD video, organize files into folders, multi-task some applications, find my way around with the compass, take 5 megapixel pictures as opposed to the 2 megapixel pictures my current phone can do, use my Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard and much more.

It’s your phone, and it will be a part of your life for two years, so spend the time upfront in doing the research or you’ll be spending a long two years with the wrong phone.

What resources or criteria do you use to choose a phone?

Realtytechbytes.com by Jerry Kidd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.Realtytechbytes.com. Did you know that I have arranged for readers of my blog to receive licensed software for free? And that there is something new everyday? Click on the link to go to the blog and look for Give Away of the day in the sidebar.

How to choose the cell phone that is right for you!

Facebook – your best friend or your worst nightmare?

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 17 May 2010 02:00:05 +0000

As I travel around teaching real estate professionals how to use the new social tools to grow their businesses, I continue to get questions about Facebook. More specifically, I get the question “Should I be friends with other real estate agents?” (Substitute whatever industry your competitor is in).

The concern seems to be that the competitor will learn what they are up to and more importantly, who their friends are. In other words, if I friend another real estate agent, can they steal my clients? My initial reaction is that if your client can be “stolen” that easily, then they were never really your client in the first place, but that’s a topic for another discussion.

Realizing that my initial reaction is not helpful and borders on the disrespectful, I usually answer that yes, you do want to be Facebook friends with other real estate people. After all, we need them to sell our listings and we need their listings to sell to our buyers. I also believe that transactions are smoother with agents that I know. Being in a professional friendly relationship with other agents is also helpful in enabling great transactions for my clients.

There is a way to set up Facebook so that you can you can stay in relationship with your clients and with your competitors and keep everybody separate. It all starts with creating Facebook Lists for your competitors, family, clients, and friends and so on.

By separating people into lists, you can control what they can see and what they post on your wall. Each List remains unaware of the other List’s existence…if you will use them. Although it is possible for your friends to see your lists, they can’t see who is in the lists. I suggest using names for your lists that won’t embarrass you!

To create and customize your own Friend Lists, please follow these steps:

Click the “Create New List” that appears beneath the filters on the left side of your home page or your Friends page. Or, click the “Create New List” button from the “All Friends” tab of the Friends page.

Type the title of your list and hit enter.

Add friends to the list by typing their names into the “Add to List” field or selecting them from the list.

Select “Create List” to store your changes.

Once your lists are created, you now have to go to your privacy settings and make a few changes as well.

You can use Friend Lists to create different privacy levels for different groups of your friends. This allows you to selectively open more of your profile to the people closest to you. From the Profile Information section of your Privacy Settings page, clicking “Customize” will open a field for “Hide this from these people.” Adding a friend or Friend List name here will hide the information in question from these people when they view your profile.

If you add a user to more than one Friend List, and those Friend Lists have conflicting privacy settings, the more restrictive of the privacy settings will always be respected.

If you enter three or more friends as an exception, you’ll have the option to create a new Friend List to group these people. You can create, edit and delete Friend Lists from your Friends page.

You can have up to 100 lists with 1,000 friends in a list.

Once you have done this, you will able to control who sees what. For more reading on this topic, please see this page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=768

So, to answer the original question, if you put all of your competitors into a “Frenemies” list and set up your privacy like I have in the picture above, then they won’t see anything you do, or anything your real friends do. Then when you want to announce that open house or that new listing or that price reduction, go ahead and post it, but this time, change the settings for that one post so that the only people who see the post are your Frenemies!

As always, I am available to help you set this up. That’s part of my business.

Facebook can be a powerful business tool if you set it up correctly and use it intelligently. It can be your worst nightmare if you don’t!

Realtytechbytes.com by Jerry Kidd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.Realtytechbytes.com. Did you know that I have arranged for readers of my blog to receive licensed software for free? And that there is something new everyday? Click on the link to go to the blog and look for Give Away of the day in the sidebar.

Facebook – your best friend or your worst nightmare?

Get new clients using social tools ~ Part Two

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 03 May 2010 02:00:35 +0000

Last week I talked about your need to have a prospecting plan that brings you the customers that you want to work with, instead of always having to work with whoever shows up! Wouldn’t it be nice if we always had a steady stream of prospective clients moving towards us as we move towards them? Well, wouldn’t it?

Why is it important to have clients that we like? Because life is too short to put up with people that grind our souls. You know who they are…you’ve even had a few in the past. You may even be working with one now.

Time to get off of that bus, now. Fire the turkeys and look for the eagles.

Here’s how I suggest that you go about it. First, let’s start with the premise that in order for people to want to do a transaction with you (assuming that they have choices) they have to TRUST you. They have to trust that you are the right person for the job, that you have their best interests at heart and that you will help them get to the goal they are seeking.

In order for people to trust you, they have to LIKE you. I can hear some of you say that you have trusted people that you didn’t like. Really? Really trusted? Maybe so, but for most of us, trust comes from liking.

In order to like you, people have to get to KNOW you. How do we do that in everyday, face to face life? By finding them, meeting them and interacting with them. By sharing things about our lives and being interested in their lives. And over time this leads to liking … or not. Liking leads to to trust and trust, for us, leads to transactions.

The good news that I bring you today is that the new social tools make all of this a reality and do it in a way that hits everyone of last weeks points.

Here are the social tools platforms that I think a REALTOR® should consider adopting:

Have a website or a blog. The blog is preferred over a website because it gives you the ability to update it with current information, showcase current listings and past transactions, solicit feedback, have private areas for clients where you can provide information relative to a transaction and more. You could do that on a website, but you’d be contacting or paying a webmaster every time you wanted to make a change. You’d also miss out on the fact that blogs generally rank higher in search engines than do static web sites, the fact that a blog can be totally free or trivially inexpensive, the fact that blogs can be subscribed to and the fact that blogs can foster community by eliciting comments and feedback. On the downside, you have to continually “feed” a blog…it needs fresh content to remain relevant and to keep people interested.

Have a presence on Facebook. Facebook has two faces. It has the personal profile and it also offers a business the opportunity to create a business (fan) page. The personal profile is where you can connect with family and friends, to share items of personal interest and to reconnect with people that you may have drifted away from. The business or fan page is where you connect with customers and potential customers. It operates much like a personal profile page in that it has a “wall” where you can post things that spark conversation and where others can contribute to the conversation. You can do so much more with a Facebook business page. Things like share listings, showcase past sales, describe your services, show videos and photos and much, much more. Think of your business page as your blog or website inside of facebook.

Build out your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn started out as a place for headhunters and job seekers to connect with each other and has grown from there to be a place where professional people congregate. If you imagine Facebook personal profiles to be a backyard barbecue, then you can imagine LinkedIn to be a Chamber of Commerce Mixer. LinkedIn gives you the perfect venue to showcase your past accomplishments (think very detailed resume), as well as a place to search out people that you’d like to meet…like the HR Director of that company who is moving people in and out of your market area.

Start using Twitter. Twitter offers you the opportunity to have short conversations with many people in a very compact period of time. There are tools available that allow you find and connect with people based on demographic criteria that you choose. You may wish to find people in a zip code, or community. Perhaps you’d like to find people who are talking about moving or buying or selling a home. Twitter gives you that ability.

Right about now, some people start squirming over the issue of privacy. Rather than go into that here, go read what my good friend, and social media maven, Ginger Wilcox has to say about privacy. While you are there, sign up for her updates and you may even want to register for the webinar that she and Amy Chorew are putting on about privacy issues.

The next thing that comes up is time. Where do I get the time to do all of this? I’d like to trivialize this, but the truth is that you will have to expend some time. But, instead of dismissing these tools because of time constraints, why not take a good hard and honest look at how you allocate your prospecting time now. What is working for you? What is not working for you? Take the things that are working and continue with them. But stop doing that which isn’t working and start looking for ways to fold these tools into whatever you are currently doing that is producing results.

And if after you have honestly evaluated your time expenditures and find that you really aren’t consistently prospecting for new business, why not start now? The social tools that I outlined here can all be used, or you can select the ones that resonate for you. Anyone one of them can fulfill the criteria that I laid out last week. If you can do them all, I believe that you will be able to be selective about the clients you work with sooner rather than later.

If you need help in setting these up, strategizing how to utilize them, or just need some help in getting your business up and running (or back on it’s feet), feel free to contact me. It’s what I do these days!

Get new clients using social tools ~ Part One

Jerry Kidd — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 02:00:13 +0000

I have long held the belief that in order for me to be happy in my business life, that I really need to work with people that I like and to avoid those people who seem to make it their mission in life to grind down my soul.

I discovered that working for other people as an employee makes it difficult to avoid the people I don’t like. After all, if I become an employee, then my employer gets to dictate who I work with. When I became an employee in the real estate business, I soon discovered that I needed to be a manager, in part because I could then hire the people that I wanted to work with or at least compartmentalize the ones that I didn’t like.

As an independent contractor though, this process can be very easy…or extremely difficult. The choice is yours. The path to easy lies in a solid, effective plan for prospecting for the type of client that you want. Such a plan needs a few components:

It needs to be actionable
It needs to be realistic
It needs to be done with reasonable frequency (Everyday!)
It needs to be effective
It needs to be enjoyable
It needs to be inexpensive or free (Especially if you are starting out)

If you can implement such a plan, finding the right people to work with can be an easy and enjoyable process. If you don’t have a plan, then you get to work with whoever shows up wanting to work with you! And that will bring you turkeys as well as eagles!

So much for your side of the story. But what is it like for the prospect trying to choose someone to “hire”?

If they are looking for a REALTOR®, they can look at magazine and newspaper ads, they can ask friends for a recommendation, they can visit open houses, they can rely on past transactions, they can visit web sites or they can use social tools.

Although all of the above methods work, the one that I believe benefits both the REALTOR® and the consumer is the social tools method. And here is why:

For the REALTOR®, the social tools method covers every one of the requirements of a good prospecting plan (see above).

But the consumer also benefits if the REALTOR® has done a good job of filling out their social graph. (More on that next week).

The consumer can interact with the REALTOR® long before they are ready to transact. That interaction will give them the time to study the REALTOR’s® past performance, response time, marketing plans, resources and other tools that a REALTOR® uses to practice their craft.

You as a REALTOR® also get to examine the potential client as they interact with you! You can spot a turkey a mile off by using the social tools to look at them as well! Over time, birds of a feather will flock together!

So what are the social tools I recommend using? That will be next week’s topic. If you want to be sure to not miss that post, go ahead and look at the top right of the sidebar on my blog and subscribe via email. (or click here) Or use your RSS reader to subscribe by clicking here.

And in the meantime, be sure to let me know what your thoughts are; am I on track or way off base?