Hello Yellow Book? Um — You’re Fired!

If I looked in your area’s yellow pages, would I find a full page or half page advertisement with your information in it?   If so, how much business has that ad brought you over the past two years?   I have a very small business card style ad in my local yellow pages, and I think it’s garnered me two phone calls over the past year.   I’ll be canceling that service this week.

The beauty of your blog, micro-blogging tools like twitter, and networking sites like ActiveRain, Face Book and LinkedIn is that they function best for folks who put “sweat equity” into them!   These sites are not turnkey solutions by any means.   In fact, they’ll remain quite plain and uninformative if you set them up and then do nothing with them.

The thing Realtors and Loan Originators who spend tons of money on postcards, door hangers, paper newsletters, and donuts (I have this hangup against the donut delivery thing… sorry fellow Mortgage Brokers) need to understand is that Money Really Can’t Buy You Love! — My Personal Musing

I really enjoyed reading the success story some time ago of a blogging, twitter-using Realtor in one of Simone Baribeau’s Washington Post articles entitled “Web 2.0 Creates New Ways for Agents, Home Shoppers to Find Each Other.” In this article, Baribeau relays the story of Realtor Danilo Bogdanovic:

Danilo Bogdanovic, a real estate agent with Market Advantage Real Estate, says he uses a wide array of social networks to draw potential clients to his blog and its copious information on the Loudoun County real estate market, but he also attracts clients by getting them interested in him personally. Potential clients can follow him using Twitter, a micro-blogging service where users write short updates about what they’re doing at any given moment.

Interspersed with updates on his blog, Bogdanovic gives personal updates (“Back from a long bike ride — hungry and ready to make some dinner”), comments on news articles (“Is everyone in the DC metro area too busy to date, not want to get hitched, crazy or all of the above?”) and keeps his followers abreast of his real estate business (“On the way to Alexandria for a closing. Looks like my short-sale listing may finally be settling after 3 months of negotiations.”) .

“This type of personal information spurred Dan Shields, 41, to contact Bogdanovic.”

“It came down to these other two agents. I didn’t know anything about them,” Shields said. Bogdanovic “was the only one you could get a personality from.”

“Bogdanovic recently helped Shields and his wife, Brenda, close on the purchase of a Leesburg house.”

How are potential clients finding you? If you’re already out there… what’s your blog saying about you right now?

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• What Is Social Marketing? (goodtreecompany.com)
• …in a Meaningful Way (activerain.com)
• Social Media: It’s About the Contact, Not the Conversation (activerain.com)

I hope you found this post useful! As always, if you or anyone you know is in need of a local Florida mortgage broker, I’m your guy. Call me at 863-604-3019 or apply online for your Florida mortgage. We’ll keep you posted and let you know when it’s time to pull the trigger!

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