Welcome Home Active eZine Upgraded

We have seen a lot of success from our Welcome Home Active eZine product. Occasionaly stories are shared with us regarding how clients are using the Welcome Home Actice eZine magazine to generate leads and maintain a healthy book of business. One such user had this to say…

“I gave them a list of my contacts to begin sending the magazine to, and within an hour, I had emails coming back, thanking me “for thinking of them” and how impressed they were with the presentation and information provided. Your contact list is populated on your personal page, so you have control for future editing.”

“Many of my contacts said they had never seen anything like this and thought it was a wonderful idea “I had”…. But the kicker was, I received a New Customer within that first hour! She is now looking at homes on my site! She was a lady in an insurance and financial planning office, so I had met her briefly, but had no idea she was thinking about a new home at this time!” … -Doug Patterson, Park Place Real Estate (http://calldougnow.com)

(Read Doug’s entire story on our blog…here)

After receiving tremendous feedback from clients such as Doug, we continued upgraded the Welcome Home Active eZine. To date we have incorporated the following features:

• Easily turn on | off your custom message with an on/off switch
• Select up to two different phone labels for clients to contact you at: (office | cell | direct | toll free | home)
• You can now easily change/update your account email address and password
• When typing in your profile or custom monthly message you can now see how many rows you have left
• You can now preview your current magazine right from the dashboard
• When previewing changes, you are now notified that you will only preview pages that are affected by the change
• All email to your clients now goes out from your emaiil address instead of admin@activeezine.com
• Your photo is now incorporated into the unsubscribe page…

We also noticed that some of you signed up for a free Active eZine – Lite account, but got busy. So busy in fact that you never added any contacts to your Active eZine magazine! We will now remind you on a monthly basis to add contacts to your magazine if you haven’t added any. As long as you have at least one contact added, you won’t be receiving this email. This is our way of saying, you signed up for it, so please use it. You’ll be glad you did.

If you haven’t signed up for an account, get yours for FREE today by visiting Welcome Home Active eZine today!

The following is an article written by Doug Patterson of Park Place Real Estate regarding his Welcome Home Active eZine experience.

WELCOME HOME ACTIVE EZINE FREE MONTHLY REALTOR MAGAZINE

Realtors!   For a “Free” monthly Realtor based magazine to send out to your Sphere of Influence by email automatically, I’ve found a terrific source!   It’s called “Welcome Home Active eZine” and provides monthly updates for Recipes/Household and Organization tips for prospects, customers and clients.  Here’s a preview  LINK.

I read over their offering and decided to give it a try. It was quick and easy, hardly any set-up on my part, and WHAM…it was up and running in just minutes.

The final ezine is 18 colorful pages in total.  There is a page to talk about your services and provide current news.  Each month, you have the opportunity to change your sections before it goes out again.

I gave them a list of my contacts to begin sending the magazine to, and within an hour, I had emails coming back, thanking me “for thinking of them” and how impressed they were with the presentation and information provided.  Your contact list is populated on your personal page, so you have control for future editing.

Many of my contacts said they had never seen anything like this and thought it was a wonderful idea “I had”…. But the kicker was, I received a New Customer within that first hour!   She is now looking at homes on my site!  She was a lady in an insurance and financial planning office, so I had met her briefly, but had no idea she was thinking about a new home at this time!

During the set up, I had some difficulty sending my contact list (purely my lack of tech knowledge).  I sent them an email for help.  Within an hour, I received a telephone call from Kurt Sundquist who set me up straight away!    Later that day,  Brian Jambor, General Manager, called to thank me for subscribing and asked if I had any questions or feedback.  Both Brian and Kurt were appreciative, friendly, and supportive.  What great service! They also offer other services such as website assistance, but there were no sales pitches.

The Ezine is published by U.S. Cybertek, Inc. (Houston, Missouri). The reason they are offering it for free is to introduce themselves to 3 Realtors that you know who may be interested in receiving an email from them offering the same opportunity for the Ezine for their contacts.   Sign up here.

Doug Patterson ABR®

Hope you get some others contacting you!

Thanks,

Doug

Doug Patterson, ABR®

REALTOR®

Broker-In-Charge

HUD Approved Broker, SFR

Tele:     (336) 710-1108

Fax: (336) 602-2580

Blog:       Doug’s Blog®

One of the most time consuming and difficult activities for a Broker is technology training. According to the 2009 NAR Technology Report:

• 48% of agents surveyed would like their broker to expand the technology provided. (Several suggestions include: training on technology tools and blog hosting.)
• Only 28% of agents are comfortable using social networking in their business despite the fact that 84% of agents are using it.

What can a broker do to provide great tools and technology training for their agents while saving them time, money, and effort? Think Agency Success. Agency Success is a complete agency solution designed to train agents about technology, and give them leading industry tools to succeed in todays social media landscape. How does it work?

Agency Success is based on the popular Agent Success platform by U.S. Cybertek, Inc.  (Watch the Video or visit http://agentsuccess.uscybertek.com)

Agency Success includes a Custom CMS (Content Mangement System) agency website integrated with:

• IDX (Where Available)
• Listing Management
• Automated client follow-up
• Lead generation
• Buyers and sellers guides
• Agent roster
• and more.

A custom templated agent site for each agent in your office located at a sub-domain of your agency website (ie. realtorbob.myagency.com). Each agent template includes the full features and functionality of our Agent Success marketing system including:

• IDX integration (Where Available)
• Listing management
• Automated client follow-up via a monthly Active eZine magazine branded to each agent
• Lead generation
• Buyers and sellers guides
• A personal blog (We can even import their active rain posts to their blog automatically!)
• Online technology training
• and more.

So what are the benefits to you as a Broker?

1. Save time by letting someone else train your agents about real estate technology and social networking

2. Increase brand awareness by encouraging all agents to send clients to their website @ your domain (ie. realtorbob.myagency.com instead of realtorbob.com)

3. Utilize this as a recruiting tool (Work @ my agency and we’ll provide you with your own website, facebook and twitter training, etc.)

4. Each agent receives a blog which leads to better search engine placement for your website

5. Everything that your agency and agents need to dominate your local real estate market is included in one cost effective monthly fee.

To find out more visit: http://promo.uscybertek.com/agencysuccess and get started today.

Is Your Profession Real Estate or Sales?

If you are an individual whose income is derived from the listing and selling or leasing of real estate you might think of and visualize yourself as being in the real estate business.  However, this is not correct.  You are a sales person and real estate is your product line.  The sooner you recognize and accept this, and act accordingly, the sooner you will start to become more successful and your income will begin to increase.

The real estate industry has traditionally preformed poorly when training new agents to be effective sales people.  Most agents getting licensed and into the business, have little or no sales background or training.  Once licensed, they usually rely on their agency trainer or broker for their training. 

You have probably received lots of training about real estate and the laws and rules you must follow.  Every sales person needs to be thoroughly trained about the product or service they sell.  You were also trained to get a listing, show a property and write an offer and follow the process through to a successful conclusion, and you need to know how to do this.  All sales people need to know how to present their company and product or service to a potential customer and how to finalize the sales process.

But actual sales training, from goal setting to proper planning, to consistent daily prospecting, the actual sales process and proper follow-up after the sale, including getting referrals, is poorly taught, if at all.  Little wonder the high failure rates and low incomes of many in the business.

Sales training is much too extensive to cover here, but I will pass along a few thoughts on what successful sales people do.  Many of you do some or all of these things already.  Some of you do them without even recognizing what you are doing.  You are the successful people within this industry.

There is an adage in the sales world that says “If you don’t plan to succeed, you plan to fail”.  Do you take a few minutes at the end of each day to plan the next day and is it in hard-copy (written down, in your PDA, or on your computer)?  Do you have a list of everyone you need to contact the next day, the purpose of the contact and are you prepared for that contact?  Do you know, as a result of your goal setting and long term planning, how many new prospects you need to acquire each day and how you are going to find those prospects?   Do you know how many people you need to contact for each new prospect acquired, for each prospecting method you use?  Do you recognize that you have or need different prospecting methods to reach different segments of your market?

 If you don’t know how many contacts you need to make for each new prospect acquired, how do you know how much work will be required and how much time to allot to that activity?

Sales people are some of the highest paid and some of the lowest paid of all professionals.  If you learn good sales skills, take advantage of the available productivity and marketing tools, plan daily to reach your goals, then you will become one of the highest paid.  If when you got out of bed this morning, your plan for the day is to sit in the office and wait for the phone to ring, have no idea of where or how to find the number of new prospects you need today or don’t know how many you need and don’t know who you’re going to talk to, then you will be one of the lowest paid.

If you day is well planned, based on your short and long term goals, if you have studied and learned good skills, if you have multiple defined prospecting programs in place and work those programs to make sure you reach your daily goals, have a good program in place to stay in contact with your past and future clients, you will always have clients to work with and you will be one of the highest paid.

We all have the same number of hours in a day.  How are you going to use yours?  Sitting around being bored, worried about bills?  Or being productive and successful?  It’s all up to you.

Richard Green is President/CEO of U.S. Cybertek, Inc., an eleven year old technology company supplying marketing services to real estate and other industries.  He has more than 35 years of experience in sales training and management, motivational speaking and real estate.

Posted via email from uscybertek’s posterous

Posted via web from uscybertek’s posterous

There are several things you can do to boost your search engine placement.  Gone are the days of meta-tags and keywords… as there are more effective things you can do to boost your search engine rankings.  Some of the best things are getting other outside relevant websites to link back to your website, updating your blog on a weekly (daily is better) basis, etc.  Here is an article that was posted in Website Magazine in November 2008, which we are re-posting as a reminder that google made over 450 changes to the way it indexes websites in 2008.

“Matt Cutts and other prominent Google folk recently held a live Q&A session, aimed at addressing important questions from Web professionals. The full discourse is extensive. What follows are some points of interest, including dedciated vs. shared IPs, article directories and 301 redirects. You can see the entire conversation here. I think what’s important to look for, aside from concrete answers, is the tone of the answers. That can give you a good idea of how Google feels “behind the scenes.”

Does getting a lot of comments in a blog help in being well indexed/ranked by Google?

Having a lot of enthusiastic users commenting on your posts and doing so generating content on your site, certainly does not harm your rankings Furthermore, a large fan base gives the webmaster a bit of independence from search engine traffic, which is the reason why generating original and compelling content in order to nurture a group of committed users is something I would highly recommend to any blogger.

How often does your search algorithm change?

We change the algorithms all the time – last year we had over 450 changes.

What weightage is given to the links from social networking sites and blogs?

I would treat social sites and blogs the same as any other site.”

We just read this today at http://www.engadget.com…

“We know you’ve been losing sleep just wondering how on earth General Motors plans to get OnStar users to keep on using once their free year is up, but apparently someone up top has been doing a bit more than just mulling. Gearlive received quite the interesting survey from OnStar this week, with a paragraph clearly explaining how Twitter integration would work should it come to the in-car alert / communication system. Essentially, the system could be programmed to read back tweets directed at you and convert your voice to text in order to upload new tweets. Envision this: you tweet that you’re headed to Forks, Washington, and you ask your thousands of followers to name a good place to buy garlic. Magical, no?”

As a side note…  all of our new Real Estate Blogs utilize Wordpress with a Twitter.com plug-in to help you utilize this growning social network to connect with buyers and sellers.  If you have any questions, give us a call or send us an email.

U.S. Cybertek, Inc. has provided email services to thousands of agents across the United States for several years now.  We are happy to announce that we have a mobile version of Show Me Mail which you can access for FREE from your PDA, Blackberry, or Smartphone of choice.  For busy real estate agents that need to access their email on the go, login to Show Me Mail from your smartphone at www.showmemail.com/pda.  If you aren’t using email at your domain (ie: myname@mywebsite.com), you are missing out on a Powerful marketing tool!  We highly recommend using your email address @ your domain to help market your website to those you correspond through email.  If U.S. Cybertek, Inc. has built you a website, we provide FREE email services for you @ your domain.  Send an email to webmaster@uscybertek.com to have your email setup.  If you would like email services @ your domain, but U.S. Cybertek, Inc. hasn’t built your website, let us know and we will work with you on a solution.

Many of our customers have asked us for a “Hot Sheet” emailed to them.  While we have always offered the ability to see new listings added to our Multi-list system via our Multi-list blogs, “feed my inbox” has come out with a service that will email you the updates every day!  Follow these easy steps to receive new listings in your inbox as they are entered into our system:

Step 1.  Visit the “Feed My Inbox” website located at www.feedmyinbox.com.

Step 2.  Enter in the website you would like to receive updates from (ie: for the Missouri Multi-list type in www.morealestate.net).

Getting Started with Feed My Inbox

Step 3.  Select the Real Estate Multi-list Feed and click on the Confirm button.

Select the feed you want to subscribe to

Step 4.  Check your Inbox (Note:  It may end up in your spam folder) for a message from Feed My Inbox with a confirmation link.  Click the confirmation link in the email.

Step 5.  Check your inbox tomorrow (Note:  Unless you add “updates@feedmyinbox.com” to your address book, the new listings updates will likely be sent to your spam folder) and you will see ALL of the new listings added to our State Multi-lists.

“As the Christmas Season is upon us, we find ourselves reflecting on the past year and on those who have helped to shape our business in a most significant way. We value our relationship with you and look forward to working with you in the year to come. We wish you a very Merry Christmas and a New Year filled with peace and prosperity.” – From the Staff at U.S. Cybertek, Inc.