We’ve tested these techniques with the top agents from around the country and are glad to share them with you below!

7 Productivity Boosting Tips for REALTORS®

1. Evaluate your effectiveness.

Write down EVERYTHING you do and how long it takes. Don’t skimp on the details. Then categorize your tasks into the following areas: Income generating activities, Administrative, Health and Wellness, Family, Fun, Other. What percentage of your day is spent on income productive activities? The results may scare you!

2. Schedule income producing tasks first.

Never have enough time for prospecting? Schedule it every day. Generating new business is one of the most important jobs for a real estate agent and yet it is often the first item that slips off the daily schedule. Prospecting earlier in the day is better while you are fresh and before your day gets away from you.

3. Outsource Non Dollar Productive tasks.

Outsource unproductive tasks so you can focus on items that will make you money. Virtual assistants can be a cost effective solution for agents looking to outsource administrative tasks. Listing management, transaction management and marketing are just a few of the tasks a skilled assistant can take off your plate to make you more productive.

4. Delete non income-producing tasks from your day.

Go ahead, delete them- I’m not kidding. There are some tasks that we should simply just delete – they have  no value. If it can be deleted – do it and don’t feel guilty.

5. Manage your Inbox and your Smart Phone.

Don’t let them manage you. It’s important to be responsive to clients but many emails and phone messages are unimportant. Use filters to help you focus on the important and delete the rest.  Control your schedule by setting expectations as to when you will check messages and respond. Set pre-established times to update clients that fit your schedule. Close your email when you are doing your most important tasks to make sure you don’t get distracted.

6. Don’t multi-task.

We used to think multi-tasking was a productivity booster yet studies have shown that multi-tasking actually decreases concentration and productivity. Focus on your task at hand, finish it and move on to the next item on the list. TIP: Do your least favorite dollar productive tasks first and get them off your plate. You’ll save time by not having to worry about them later and the rest of your day will feel easier.

7. Systematize.

Without systems, we spend time reinventing the wheel time and again. Repetitive tasks can be simplified to save you time. Create document templates for questions you frequently get asked. You can save all of your frequently used phrases, pages, scripts and more in evernote.com and easily pull them up later.

For help implementing any of the steps above, contact Certified Real Estate Coach Steve Gutstein for some free advice and inspiration!

Steve Gutstein

Certified Real Estate Coach @ REIC

Subscribe to REIC Connect » Blog

How to Invite Facebook Friends to Become Fans of your Real Estate Facebook Page.

1. Log-in to Facebook and go to your page ( NOTE: do not “switch” to your page, just go to your page by typing the name of your page into the search bar and click on it).

2. Click “Invite Friends” on the right-hand side of your page.

3. Click “Search All Friends” or if you just want to invite friends from a specific list, select that list.

4. Select the friends you want to invite to become Fans of your page by checking the box next to their name. You can select as many as you want. Then hit “submit”.

Depending on the notification settings of each individual friend, Facebook will send them as message with an invite to become a fan of your page.

**Note: this does not guarantee that the friend will become a fan of your page…it simply gives them the option to.

For most real estate agents, using this process to invite Facebook friends to become fans of your real estate Facebook fan page will, of course, result in more fans for your business page.

Jarred Alexandrov

Social Media Architect @ REIC

Subscribe to REIC Connect » Blog

Many REALTORS© feel like they save time by setting up feeds that automatically post to their Facebook fan page.

While you may be able to save 5 seconds here or there, the overwhelming evidence shows that you should NOT be auto posting to your Facebook page from an rss feed, blog, or by using Hootsuite.

Why You Need to Stop Auto-Posting to Facebook Now

• Facebook penalizes 3rd party plug-ins because they want you to spend as much time as possible on Facebook.

• Facebook hides or “bunches” posts that come from the same auto-posting service.

• Facebook knows the content is auto-posted and assumes it is generic, spam, out-dated, and not interesting.

I first tested this in October using the Facebook page for The Parsons Real Estate Team, one of our clients.

Look at the number of impressions when their blog was auto-posted from Posterous:

Even though this was GREAT content, the number of impressions was very small because it was auto-posted.

Now look at the number of impressions when I took the extra 2 seconds to copy and paste the link to their next blog post directly on to the Facebook fan page.

Though the content was better for the first post, this post received a much higher number of impressions simply because it was not autoposted.

The bottom line is you are making a huge mistake by auto-posting content to your Facebook fan page for real estate. Your content will simply not appear as frequently in your connections Facebook news feed.

You might save 2 seconds but you will are dramatically decreasing the effectiveness and reach of your Facebook fan page.

Find more evidence here: http://edgerankchecker.com/blog/2011/09/does-using-a-third-party-api-decrease-your-engagement-per-post/

Jarred Alexandrov

Social Media Architect @ REIC

Subscribe to REIC Connect » Blog

One Simple Technique to Close More Business on LinkedIn:

Are you going to start using this one simple technique to close more business on LinkedIn?

Jarred Alexandrov

Social Media Architect @ REIC

Subscribe to Facebook Fan Pages for Real Estate » Blog

3 Ways to Get Your Real Estate Business on the 1st Page of Google:

1. Be listed in the Google Places directory (very easy).

2. Dominate when someone Google’s your name or the name of your team/brokerage (pretty easy).

3. Blog as often as possible with content and keywords related to your local area (difficult).

*BONUS* Buy Google Adwords to appear at the top and on the right-hand side of the organic results.

Which of the 3 ways to get your real estate business on the 1st page of Google do you think is right for you business?

Jarred Alexandrov

Social Media Architect @ REIC

Subscribe to REIC Connect » Blog