The Modern Real Estate Agent Pitfalls That Will Bust Your Bottom Line
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How would you feel if you woke up broke and looking for a job a year from now?
Believe it or not, you could be a lot closer to that reality than you think!
In today’s digital era of real estate, a few false moves and your real estate career could die faster than a fruit fly.
Most of the time, the mistakes that are being made, like the ones I’m about to share with you, could have been easily avoided.
Buying Your Leads
These days there are roughly a million and one different companies that will sell you real estate leads.
Some of them are pretty good. Most of them suck.
Either way, neither are a good idea if you want to thrive in the digital era of real estate.
Buying leads reminds me of the old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to catch his own.
I’m not saying that you won’t be able to convert some clients out of purchased leads. All I am saying is that there are better ways to get the job done.
Instead of paying for every single client, wouldn’t you rather invest a fraction of that money to learn how to get people to chase after you?
Wouldn’t you rather have clients that you actually enjoy working with and require less maintenance on your part?
Watch How To Avoid Becoming Another Broke Real Estate Agent
Wouldn’t it be easier to grow your business if all of your clients loved you so much that they ranted and raved about how amazing you are to all of their friends and family?
Buying leads is tempting because it offers an illusion of instant gratification. It can even become addicting. Yet, it is just as toxic to your career as booze is to your liver.
Take the money you are pissing into purchased leads and invest it into building a real estate website that attracts and converts leads for you. It will cost you far less and pay for itself a million times over in both passive and earned income.
Abusing Social Media
Much of all business today is done via social media.
Entire multi-billion dollar companies have been built with these online platforms.
In fact, using social media today is more of a requirement than an option.
However, most people still don’t understand the first rule of using social media for their business. If I have said it once, I have said it a thousand times; stop constantly trying to sell on social.
Your social media platforms are nothing more than a medium for you to share valuable content and create invaluable connections and relationships with clients, prospects, and referral partners.
The fastest way to shoot yourself in the foot with any social media platform is to start using it as your own personal platform to talk about how great you are.
Watch How To Make Sure Your Social Media Is Ready For Millennial Home Buyers
It’s fine to share the occasional promotional post, as long as the majority of your content is UBER valuable to your ideal clients and in their best interest more than your own.
Follow-Up Failures
With every passing day, the competition for clients grows steeper and steeper!
Not only are there more people entering the industry than ever, but companies like Amazon, Zillow, and Redfin are dumping billions into stealing your clients away from you.
While there are many implications to this rise in competition, one of the biggest is that you can’t afford to fuck up on following up.
A Harvard Business Review study showed that in most cases, you have only 30 minutes to follow up with a lead after they express interest. Yet, 71% of you fail to do that!
Real estate leads are not only tough to earn; they’re expensive. Please stop wasting them by failing to follow up and stay in touch with them.
I know this can be hard to do with all of the other tasks you have on your to-do list, but there are plenty of ways to automate the majority of your “touches” and stay on their radar until they are ready to pull the trigger with you.
Attempting It All
I hate to break it to you, but you can’t be a real estate agent, graphic designer, copywriter, digital marketer, admin assistant, accountant, photographer, and everything else you are trying to be to save a buck or two.
Odds are you are pretty good at one or two of those things. However, that doesn’t mean you should be doing them.
Rather than pouring all of that energy into being super mediocre at 15 jobs, pour it into becoming a master delegator and outsourcing those tasks to those that are sensational at them.
You are a business owner now. It is time to stop trying to be a jack of all trades and start acting like the king (or queen) of all the jacks.
You can’t expect to be an effective leader of a profitable business if you continue to act like an employee or grunt man.
Spend your time and money on being the best at your actual job and leave the rest to the people that are pros in each of those other areas.
Copying Content
This is one of the most tempting pitfalls that I see allllllll the time.
I can’t express strongly enough how much of a mistake it is to copy, repost, or use any piece of content that you (or your real estate content writer) did not create!
Here are just a few ways that copying real estate content WILL cost you:
- Search engines like Google will ban you from appearing in search results
- You can be sued for plagiarism
- Your SEO will take a huge hit
- Your web traffic will disappear
I could be wrong, but I’m guessing you would hate to have any of those happen to you.
There is no question that creating real estate content for your website and blog can earn you millions, but you must make sure that none of it is copied or being fed from other content sources.
Paying For Everything
You would be surprised at how many things you are paying for, or overpaying for, that you don’t have to.
Marketing is one of the most common items I see people overpaying for.
Take my real estate copywriting services for example. You could certainly pay for them on your own, and expect a handsome return. However, you could also partner with other real estate referral partners like lenders and title companies to have them pay for my services in exchange for business.
In fact, many of my clients are actually charging their referral partners more to be featured in the content I provide, than I am charging them to write it!
Think about that! You could actually get paid to hire me to write for you AND get more clients AND earn passive income.
That should make you think twice about how much you are paying to who and for what.
My guess is that a closer look at your expenses will identify more than a few bucks you can reinvest back into building a bigger, better, more modern real estate business.
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