One of the best (and least expensive) ways to increase your sales and your business is to have a stream of leads coming in through referrals. There are various types of referrals out there. The most common being from friends and family as well as past clients. But if you want to get serious about referrals, get a constant stream of referrals, you should create a referral network.

I’m not talking about referrals from other agents across the country. I’m talking about people who will actively help sell your service and be happy to do so. But where do you start? First you must think of the type of people or businesses you want sending you referrals. As a real estate agent, you might think this is obvious. Mortgage brokers, insurance agents, home repair businesses and anyone else who is associated with home ownership.

But let’s think a little differently.

Ask yourself. What is the best type of customer you like to work with? Before you answer, let’s look at a different profession to more easily explain where I’m going with this.

Let’s say you’re a fitness trainer and you’re looking to set up a referral network with other businesses. You might think about talking to owners of:

Fitness clubs
Physicians
Massage therapists
Health food stores
Hospitals

The reason you might think this is because they are in a similar industry as you. But when you’re asked “What’s the type of customer you prefer to work with?” you may answer, male CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Now look at the characteristics of these customers:

They usually travel a lot.
They usually own pets and pay a lot for pet products.
They usually are willing to pay for services.
They like luxury type items.

In order to get referrals of these types of customers, you need to network with people in businesses that male CEOs use. Here are some referral network partners you might now consider.

Travel agents
custom clothing shops
Luxury car dealerships
Financial advisers
Pet stores
Jewelers
Hotel staff

This list is quite different than the one mentioned above.

We can do the same thing as a real estate agent. Instead of trying to network with businesses in the same industry as you, network with businesses that your customers use. Once you make contact with these businesses (or the people within these businesses), you can start a dialog of how you can help refer customers to them the same way they will help refer customers to you. Soon you’ll be getting a stream of leads of customers that you prefer to work with.

Adding text to graphics is a must for real estate agents, and Adobe Photoshop does a great job of it. But if you dig deeper into it’s capabilities, you’ll be surprised how much you do.

Photoshop allows you to easily add drop shadows, bevels, gradients and more with the simple click of a button. The following tutorial will give you a basic knowledge of the type tool and will show you some of the cool things you can do to your text….some of which you may not have thought of.

Working with Text in Photoshop from Mike Martin on Vimeo.

One of the problems with real estate logos (either as a .jpg, .tiff or .bmp file) is that it’s usually surrounded by a white background. Sure it doesn’t matter if you’re adding it to a newsletter or letterhead because it’s usually by itself on white paper. But what about when you try to place that logo on top of your website headers, photos, or other graphics? You end up with something that’s usually not very pleasing.

Photoshop can easily remove that white background so your logo looks clean on whatever graphic you’re creating.

This video tutorial will show you how to get rid of the background and only leave your logo on top of your graphic image.

I’m making some changes at The Creative Agent Club site.  I’m going back to a traditional blog format that’s easier to read and maintain. The previous service I used started to become too expensive to use (over $50.00 per month) and since this is a free site, I just couldn’t keep it with that service. It had a lot of nice features…actually too many for me to even use…but I should be able to include similar features with this blog.

I will be allowing comments on all of the articles but you must be registered before posting them. I know, I know, you already registered over at the old site, but unfortunately, I’m not able to bring that database along with me here. So if you could please bear with me and re-register to make comments, I’d greatly appreciate it. Plus, making registration a requirement will limit the amount of spam that gets posted.

I plan on creating more tutorial videos and using YouTube to host them. I’ll also be creating a separate YouTube channel to keep the videos organized. This should increase the activity here and help promote the site to everyone.

As always, I’ll be more than happy to entertain suggestions for the site, so please let me know what you’re interested in or if you see something cool, let everyone here know about it.

That’s it for now. I hope you like the new look.

Mike

Well, the bridal show is now behind us and I must say it was a success. At first I thought our booth placement wasn’t going to be good (we were on the end near an exit route), but it ended up being a blessing.

I knew some of the other vendors in the show and asked them how it was going for them (most were in the middle of all the activity). They said it was busy, but people just pushed themselves along like cattle and they weren’t able to actually talk to anyone.

Since our booth was at the end, we didn’t get huge amounts of traffic, but the people that did come by stopped specifically to see us and talk about our services. And since we wern’t in a super busy area, we had time to actually talk to people about buying and selling homes. All in all, I received 12 good leads and the other agent that was with me received around the same amount.

We had a fairly attractive booth and gave away gifts to people who signed up for our property search service. In the next few days we’ll be getting the mailing list of all the brides that attended the show and I’ll be able to do some direct marketing as well as email marketing to the list.

I believe there’s another bridal show in a few months and I’m considering setting up a booth at that one too. My goal is to become “THE” agent that brides and grooms go to whenever they are looking for their first time home together. It will take some time, but I believe it could work.

Today I received a call from our mortgage rep and she confirmed that she’s going to help pay for and participate in the upcoming Bridal Show…in two weeks.We’ve done a few in the past with some success, but at this one, I’m going to pull out all the stops. I hope to have our Homebuyer Seminar DVD finished and copies made by the day of the show. I will also be giving away more reports, flyers, gifts (for signing up for our Free email listing service) and of course, the Newlywed Homebuyer Survival Guides.

This particular show usually attracts over 1400 brides and grooms…or first time homebuyers as far as I’m concerned After the show, I’ll be getting the mailing addresses and email adresses of all of the attendees. This is a great list to start a marketing campaign with through newsletters, postcards, coupons, or whatever else I can think of.

Having a mortgage rep on site will also be beneficial because a lot of questions that brides/grooms have are financial ones. She’ll be able to answer them right there on the spot.

I’ll also be bringing my laptop which will be attached to my Palm Treo700p. This will give me broadband internet access so I can quickly search our MLS for listings or sign people up for emailed listings immediately.

I’m grabbing this newlywed niche by the horns and hopefully will become “The Expert” when it comes to brides and grooms purchasing their first homes. I’ll keep everyone posted with the progress and upload photos when it’s over.

Mike

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A few nights ago my wife was working so I decided to take the kids out for pizza. About 30 minutes away is a place called CiCis Pizza. They are a national chain so there may be one in your area.If you’ve never heard of them, it’s an all-you-can-eat pizza buffet where they have salads, soups, pasta, and at least 10 pizzas ready at all times. The cost is around six bucks per adult (including a drink) and around four bucks for kids. It’s a great place if your funds are low but you still want to stuff your face with food.So anyway, there I am with my two kids and after a couple of trips to the buffet line, I was fairly stuffed. But I figured I’d go up one more time for some dessert. When I got up there I changed my mind and started to walk back to our booth. Then from behind the buffet in the kitchen, one of the workers asked if I needed anything. I politely declined but he insisted “Really, what do you need? I’ll make it for you now.”Again, I thanked him for the offer but declined. I went back to my booth and a few minutes later, the same employee (who I discovered was the manager) apologized for not being able to make me something special and proceeded to hand me 4 “free buffet” coupons that I could use the next time I came in.

Wow, what a surprise. This manager went above and beyond normal customer service making sure I was happy. And even though I thankfully declined his offer of making me whatever I wanted, he still saw it necessary to do whatever it took to make me happy.

Once again, I see an example of great customer service. And once again I can take away ideas on how I can give my customers great service too.

Mike