If you are reading this, it's pretty obvious that I haven't been actively blogging. A total of two blog posts a couple of years ago doesn't really count as much experience in the blogging arena.

Truth is, I didn't have a direction back then. I was writing some stuff that I felt strongly about and had personal experience with, and I guess I was hoping that someone would find it and maybe buy some of the real estate courses I was selling at the time, or perhaps use me as their agent.

I understood a few things about blogging back then - I knew that having a blog on an authority site could help my visibility online. I knew that having other sites and blogs link back to mine would boost my Google ranking.

What I didn't really know was content, or keywords and keyword density, or about h tags or syndication strategies or a myriad of other things that are very important in getting the most bang for your buck while marketing online. That ignorance, combined with a lack of direction or clear goal for my blogging efforts, made blogging some vague sort of manual labor that really didn't have an endgame for me.

So I didn't do it.

Fast forward a couple years and the real estate market has hit the skids, particularly in Las Vegas. Most real estate agents I know are supplementing their income with other avenues of making money, whether that is a part time job for some stable income or branching out into other projects.

As for myself, I took a job working three nights a week in one of the big nightclubs here in Las Vegas. Good money in tips and full insurance only working 18 hours a week. Not too bad a deal, really but not something that I look forward to at all. Like most real estate agents, one of the most attractive things about getting into real estate was the ability to set my own schedule, be my own boss and NOT punch a clock.

So as I was looking at my different options for supplementing my income, my mind kept going back to blogging. There are a lot of people making money at blogging, whether it be in real estate or in other online marketing niches. I like to write but what I didn't want to do was just write a bunch of stuff and HOPE that it made me money somehow.

Generally speaking, hope is not a great business plan.

I ended up stumbling across a company called The Empower Network. They specialize in blogging training and online marketing. I know, I know - this is a real estate blog - but the stuff I've been learning has reinvigorated my desire to start blogging for real estate and any other project that I'm doing.

Marketing online, whatever business you are in, in absolutely critical in this market. I was always a huge fan of cold calling. I prospected every day for more years than I care to remember and I'll be the first to tell you - it ain't fun. Effective, yes. Fun? No.

However, when people are coming to you, wanting want you have because THEY FOUND YOU online, that is a ton of fun!! Instead of trying to sell them on you, they could be knocking down your door wanting your services. I've been blogging daily as CoachSteveD on the Empower blogging platform and the results have been great so far. My list of contacts/prospects is growing hourly.

The training provided is mind blowing - it's a whole world out there that I didn't even know existed. I watched a training video tonight that had a way to automate syndication is such a huge way, it's absolutely stunning. It explained exactly how you can get literally thousands of back links to your site from various social media sites and individuals, literally within minutes of submitting.

I'm not talking about "black hat SEO" or any BS like that. I had never even heard of Onlywire.com or some of the other sites and syndication strategies that serious online marketers are using to promote their sites and products, not to mention the actual strategies for using them. And it's all directly applicable to marketing yourself as a real estate agent.

It also made me realize how valuable an asset the REW blogging platform is to real estate agents. This type of community, plus an authority site, plus the knowledge that these guys bring to the table is a great combination. As I learn more about the powerful strategies for writing correct content, syndicating it, and getting a ton of good traffic, you can bet that I will be using this blog a lot more.

It's all a process. Motivation is not enough. If you motivate an idiot, all you have is a motivated idiot. Educating yourself is key to getting the best possible results from your blogging efforts.

Blogging is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal... If you're gonna do it, do it right!!!

Happy blogging!!!

Steve Didier

Organization

One of the most important aspects of your work environment is your personal organization and one of the key items to organization in real estate sales is your contact management system. There are many quality products such as Goldmine, ACT for Real Estate and Top Producer. These cutting edge programs do much more than simply store the names and phone numbers of your contacts when used correctly they become the organizational hub of your real estate business.

In addition to storing and organizing your contacts and keeping your schedule, good programs like ACT and Top Producer can help coordinate your listings and escrows, manage drip campaigns to your sphere and pipeline, incubate your prospects, generate letters and emails for use in advertising, and greatly help reduce the amount of time used in lead follow up. Lead follow up in real estate is one of the leading causes of lost business for most agents programs like these can help streamline the process and create more time for you to generate new leads and new business.

A clean and orderly work space is mandatory for maximum efficiency. One of the keys to maintaining focus and working on a schedule is not having any distractions. A messy desk with the clutter of different projects, listings or escrows can distract you with “urgent” things that need to be done and take you away from the “important” items. Working efficiently means eliminating those potential distractions from your line of sight so you can get done what you are working on in the shortest amount of time and then move on to the next task.

The Importance of a Schedule in Real Estate

I feel that having a daily schedule and developing the discipline that it takes to stick to that schedule is one of the first things that you need to learn as a real estate agent. It is the one thing that makes what you are doing an actual business instead of a glorified hobby. Its also the only way that you can ever do a high volume of transactions. If you only have one deal in escrow and a listing or two, its easy to wander through your day with no real direction and still make it happen. On the other hand, if you have forty listings and 8 escrows, a team to manage, a website and blog to maintain, and all the things that go along with being busy and productive you will fail without a schedule. Things will fall through the cracks and your clients will not get the service that they deserve.

All of those things become manageable if you have a time to complete each task (and a good assistant!). The other thing that becomes available to you if you follow a schedule is free time. Without a schedule, you are at the mercy of whatever comes along. I know agents with two deals going who are pulling their hair out and working over 60 hours a week. I also know agents who routinely do 100 deals per year and work four days per week.

Since everybody has the exact same amount of hours in the week, how is it that top producing agents seem to have more free time and enjoy themselves more than agents who are only doing a deal a month? The answer is that the top producing agents make better use of the time that they have. They are more productive when they are working and accomplish more in each hour than most agents do in a day. One of the reasons that they are able to do that is their schedule. They know exactly what needs to be accomplished each day and get it done quickly and efficiently.

Surrounding Yourself With the Right People

Surrounding yourself with positive, enthusiastic and successful people is one of best ways that you can fast track your way to the top. The benefits of this one thing can not be overstated. When you make an effort to associate with top producers in your chosen field, you can emulate what they do and shorten your learning curve tremendously. If you associate with the agents who hang out in the break room all day complaining about one thing or another, you will pick up their work habits, mannerisms and negative attitudes. Those are the agents that are generally doing just enough deals each year to scrape by and love to justify their lack of production by blaming the market, or their company or whatever. I am not implying that they are bad people far from it but they will kill your attitude and your mindset.

When you associate with positive, enthusiastic agents who are producing at high levels, you will learn what it takes to become successful. You will carry that energy and positive outlook with you everywhere you go on listing appointments, on showings, and while calling your leads. You will enjoy going to work every day and the results of your efforts will amaze you. People will be attracted to your energy and naturally want to do business with you and fall over themselves to give you referrals.

You can only sustain this kind of energy and mindset if you are constantly feeding your brain with positive input. This applies not only to your work environment, but to your personal life as well. Its an unfortunate fact that many people are very negative and will try to drag you down or even try and make you feel guilty about becoming successful. Certain people will try and fill you with doubt and uncertainty, and whether consciously or unconsciously, try and undermine you in your efforts to succeed. It can be hard, but you need to stay away from that kind of negative input. It can be especially hard if some of those people are friends that you have known for a long time, but it is a choice that you have to make and a part of creating an environment that allows you to thrive.

One of the best things that you can do to ensure that you are constantly feeding your mind with positive material is to listen to educational and other personal development CD's whenever you can. A great place to do this is in your car while you are driving around. Instead of listening to the radio, pop in your CD's and use that time on the road to better yourself and keep yourself in a positive state of mind. One of the absolute best places to get that material is Nighingale Conent. They have one of the biggest selctions of personal and professional development material available anywhere.

Hard Numbers

Remember that the environment in which you work is in a large part completely up to you and one of the things that you can control. It is also the foundation from which you will grow as a real estate agent. Without right environment, you may not last in this business. Real estate has one of the highest attrition rates of any industry with almost 60% of all new agents out of the business in two years or less. The US Department of Labor reports that the median income of a real estate agent was $39,760 in 2006 and the National Association of Realtors reports that the median income of an agent in the business for two years or less was $15,300.

Real estate is not an easy business. If you want to have a shot at making it or if you are looking to make more than the average agent, you have to give yourself a fighting chance. Having an environment that helps you rather than hurts your chances is a key component to your success.

Prospecting, sometimes referred to as cold calling, is one of the best ways to generate new business in real estate. Its absolutely free and the results can be immediate. Many of the top producing agents in the business include prospecting as a major part of their lead generation activities.

So why dont more agents use prospecting as a tool to increase their sales? There are as many reasons as there are agents lack of motivation, fear of rejection, and a bad attitude toward cold calling are some of the most common. Despite whatever reason they give, many agents know deep down that it is something that could dramatically increase their business if they actually started and stuck to it as part of their daily business plan.

One of the most powerful things that you can do as a real estate agent and one of the crucial factors in your overall success in this business is controlling your work environment. There are many things that are out of your control in life, but the environment that you work in is completely in your hands. This is critical in every aspect of the business, but increasingly so if you are committing to prospecting as part of your daily routine. Your environment can make or break you especially if you are a newer agent trying to learn the ropes.

I am going to discuss five factors that you need to address in creating the correct work environment in which you can thrive.

Home or office which is better?

One of the choices that you have to make is whether you are going to work primarily out of your home or if you are going to work from an office. There are many pros and cons to each but it boils down to you and your personality and tendencies.

Some agents feel that working from home can be detrimental because they are unable to avoid the distractions that can be part of being at home. They can get caught up in doing little household chores that just have to be done, or have to catch a particular show on T.V. or any number of things that distract them from actual work. Many agents new to the business are used to a particular routine at home and find it difficult to switch to work mode while in the area in which they are used to relaxing.

In reality, the average real estate office doesnt offer much more in terms of a quality work environment. A casual stroll through many offices will reveal that most agents spend their day chatting in the break room, socializing with somebodys assistant, designing flyers for their listing, toying around with their website, or talking to other agents about how bad the market is and not much in the way of quality money making activities.

Despite the potential negatives, my advice for a newer agent is to plan on working out of the office for at least two years before considering working out of home. The reason is that you need to learn the business of real estate be exposed daily to the vocabulary, the situations, and the discussions so that you become proficient in the basics of the business. The trick is to join an office or a team that provides an environment where work is encouraged.Im not talking about a dry boring place where everyone is just trudging through their day, but a high energy, enthusiastic office that fosters an environment of achievement and learning. This is the first step you can take in proactively creating your ideal work situation.

It does not matter if you are in a private office or in a bull pen type of area as long as the agents around you are highly motivated and have a genuinely positive attitude. For my team, I leased out a large space in the office and set up open cubicles that are adjusted to the height of the stomach or lower chest to encourage standing while on the phone with prospects. Standing while prospecting or while talking to ANY client on the phone creates great energy and naturally helps you project your energy while speaking to them. Stand up and move around! Motion creates emotion! People are always attracted to and want to work with people who are highly enthusiastic and project positive attitudes.

Being in an environment like that will get you in the mindset to work hard and expect great results when you get in to the office. If you are having a bad day that kind of environment will also help you shake it off and get back in to a positive state of mind, which is critical to your success in sales. Real estate can involve a lot of ups and downs and it is good to have a support network to help you through when things get rough. Another advantage especially if you are new to the business is that you always have people around to answer questions for you when you encounter situations that you dont quite know how to deal with.

The Correct Equipment

There are certain things that a real estate agent needs in their environment to be successful. First, a good cell phone is as necessary as air to breath in this business. Preferably a PDA type that allows you access to the internet, has a quality camera, and of course, gets good signal over the entire area that you work. It is the information age and when clients want information, they want it yesterday. Be prepared to communicate via phone, texts, multi-media texts and e-mails in real time if you want to keep up with todays high pace information society.

A good laptop computer is critical as technology becomes more and more a part of the real estate business. You have to be able to send and receive information about properties, access and maintain your website and/or blog, create and build your database, maintain communication with prospects, work your pipeline with automatic drip campaigns, and keep up with the latest developments in your community so that you can be knowledgeable when assisting your clients just to name a few of the many tasks that your laptop computer will be needed for.

If you are doing a lot of calling from the office, whether it prospecting, lead follow up, or any other type of client communication, you will find it beneficial to have a quality headset for your office phone. If you are in a loud, high energy environment you should consider getting a noise suppression headset. This will help you focus on the conversation you are having as well as blocking any noise from getting through to the person on the other end of the phone. Everybody on my team, including me and my partner, invested in noise cancelling headsets from The Boom. We can have music blaring, people yelling, phones ringing and still hear as clear as if there was nobody in the room. The person on the other end of the phone can hear what we are saying and hear none of the background noises, no matter how loud.

The one other piece of equipment you need for this job is a vehicle. When you are starting out, get something you can comfortably afford that is clean and in good condition. Four doors is a must you dont want to be showing homes to a retired couple and expect one of them to try and slide behind the front seat to get in the back. Believe me, I had a two door sports car when I started in the business and it didnt take too many times seeing the contorted faces of clients trying to get in and out of the back seat to realize that four doors is mandatory.

As you progress in this business, you are going to need to upgrade your vehicle. There are many people who are going to fight me on this point, but the fact remains that image is a part of this business and if you want to succeed at a high level you have to project an image of professionalism and success. Whether you like it or not, showing up to a $3 million listing appointment in a Saturn is going to get you no where. Period end of story. Im not saying that you should live above your means or engage in a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses sort of mentality. What I am saying is that if you want to be a highly successful, top producing agent and do business with other highly successful people, you have to project the right image and in this business, your vehicle is part of your image. It is a highly competitive business and if you are going to compete with the top agents, you need to utilize all the tools that you have available.

Coming soon…

Keep checking back in the second of this two part installment on your work environment, we will be covering organization in the work place, routines and schedules that help you stay on the fast track to success, and the most important factor of all in terms of your work environment… the people and attitudes that you surround yourself with on a daily basis and how it affects every facet of your success.