When was the last time you followed up with your sphere of influence? Successful real estate agents not only send regular (e.g. monthly) newsletters, but also make personal contact with their best referral partners and past clients. It’s a tough real estate market right now. There’s no better time to position yourself as a specialist in your local market by helping your family, friends and colleagues navigate through these murky waters. Here are six ways to get back in touch with your sphere of influence.

1. Publish a monthly newsletter – If you don’t offer a monthly newsletter, commit to starting one. Put yourself in your readers’ shoes – what would they be interested in reading about? Mortgage rates? Securing a loan? Major construction in your neighborhood? New zoning laws? Problems with pests? Ways to increase the value of their home? Promotional offers from local businesses? There are so many ideas you can use, but you have to commit to getting started and taking action.

2. Invite one past client for lunch or coffee each week – NAR statistics show that 83% of clients say they would use their real estate agent again but only 11% do. Why? Because agents aren’t keeping in touch.

3. Determine who your best referral sources are – who has sent you the most referrals? Have you thanked them and shown your appreciation recently?

4. Establish business referral partners – Who in your sphere of influence is in a position to send you referrals but hasn’t yet? Look for people who aren’t direct competitors (e.g. other agents) like movers, appraisers, mortgage brokers, attorneys, etc. Now, how can you start building relationships with them so they do refer you business? Can you invite them to golf? Monitor the local paper for articles about their company? Send them a “saw this and thought of you” gift/article?

5. Hold an event – You don’t need to wait until the holidays to hold a VIP party for your best clients and referral partners. If you talk with your sphere of influence and find many have similar questions, can you create a conference or tele-seminar event to answer their questions?

6. Connect with inactive prospects – Check back in with all those people who dropped off your radar. Send them an email or leave voice mail. Are they still interested in buying or selling? Have they moved yet? Do they have any real estate questions?

Real estate agents face a stiff completion in the world of real estate. Using the right marketing techniques can certainly enhance the chances of an estate agent staying ahead of the others in the business. The efforts and hard work put in by the estate agent is the most powerful tool but there are other methods that can boost the career of an estate agent.

The competition in the real estate market is immense as there are hundreds of agents vying for the same clients. Creating a website to create awareness of your services is a very good tool to separate yourself from the rest. Display helpful information for the customers on the site in order to elicit a positive response from them. People are also turning to the internet for almost everything so it only makes sense to get your real estate business site up and running.

Starting a real estate blog is an ideal way to release information that is relevant to the potential home buyers. This will enhance your position as a very good agent working for the benefit of the customer and automatically create more leads for you. This is a great to create a mark in the web community through along with the help of other tools such as press releases and other online marketing tools. A huge client based can be built by interacting with people online by helping them out in matters of real estate such as the right house price in a certain location and mortgage plans that would be suitable for them.

Handling your clients with the the best care is vital in order to build a relation of trust. This will help you get more clients through the referral system. If your clients are not happy with even one aspect of your service they might not refer you to someone else. Always provide the best services and offer as much help as you can to get the benefits of referrals through your old clients.

Conduct seminars on the aspect of buying new homes that will feature an audience of potential home buyers wanting to know the tricks to get their desired home as easily as possible. This is one of the best marketing techniques as you get the leads without searching for them.

While sitting down to write a real estate business plan might not seem like much fun, the reality is that an hour of planning can be worth a month of hard work. By “business plan,” I don’t mean a 40-page document you will never look at again. I mean a review of your business that outlines your top 3-5 key goals for the year as well as your main action steps for achieving those goals. By spending some time planning, you can take control of your daily activities and schedule to get far more done than you ever imagined.

Where do agents go wrong when writing a business plan? Here are six key mistakes.

1) Not creating a written plan – Spend a full day to detail how you want your business to look a year from now. You must schedule this time; it won’t just magically appear.

2) Not conducting an annual business review – Collect all your numbers from last year. What were your key metrics? This is more than how much you made or how many transactions you did. Here are some questions to answer:

- How many listing appointments did you close?
- How many transactions did you complete?
- Where did each transaction come from?
- What was your ask price vs. closing price for each listing?
- How much money did you spend marketing each listing?
- Which marketing activities were most effective?
- How many people did you add to your mailing list/sphere of influence?
- Which people refer the most business to you?

3) Not setting goals – Setting goals may sound cliché, but if you don’t decide in advance where you want to go, you will never get there. What do you want? Now, why do you want it? What is the main reason why you want to reach that goal? If you don’t identify your motivation for wanting to achieve your goals, you won’t achieve them. What is really important to you?

4) Not factoring in buffers – Once you have set your goals, plan for setbacks. You won’t practice optimum time management 100% of the time. It will probably cost you 20-30% more than you budgeted. Things will go wrong, so plan accordingly.

5) Not planning time off – When working for yourself, it can be easy for your job to take over your entire life. Set boundaries so you have specific time to devote to yourself, your family and friends and your hobbies. How much vacation time do you want?

6) Not scheduling monthly reviews – The only way you will stay on track is by reviewing your progress each month. Are you moving towards your goals? If not, you may need to course correct.

Your business plan should outline exactly what you plan to do to make your business a success. Keep it simple and refer to it regularly to make this year your best year in real estate.