You hold the keys to connecting your clients.

From a service stand point, often what agents provide buyers and sellers is, at times, dangerously similar. It’s not just in the way agents advertise their services (which can sound monotonous and interchangeable), but in the similarity of the tools and approaches used to research values and market properties.

So the question is this: What can you provide that truly differentiates you from other agents? The answer isn’t necessarily in what you know, but who you know.

If you’ve been in business at least a few years, you probably know a wide range of people across many different professions. From school teachers to museum curators to plumbers and bank managers, real estate agents touch lives across a tremendous spectrum.

One way you can make a difference in the lives of your clients is by connecting them with other people in your network. Let’s say you know a school teacher who just bought her first 2BR/1BA home. Now, let’s suppose you do know a curator or director at a local museum, someone who you helped sell their home a year or so ago. Wouldn’t it be worth introducing the teacher to the museum curator? Maybe there’s an opportunity to set up a field trip, or at least get a private tour of some of the exhibits.

More often than not, one side of your client list would be more than happy to help you help someone on the other side of your client list. The more often you’re able to make these connections, the more thoughtful and valuable you are as a resource in real estate and your community.

Start looking for connections you can make. You might be surprised how many happy clients you can create with a simple introduction. It’s enough to say, “I thought you two should know each other.”

Photo credit: Stockerre

The pursuit of perfection can be a real house of cards.

“A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.”

John Henry Newman, Doctor of Divinity (February 1801 – August 1890)

There is nothing quite so costly to our productivity as the idea of perfection.

Do I believe in self-improvement? Of course. Do I advocate learning, testing, and refining our knowledge to help us become better at what we do? Always, every week. But this idea of “perfection” actually comes with an incredible price.

Ask yourself the following:

• Have you ever missed a deadline because you were paralyzed by doubt over your decisions?
• Do your projects slow to a crawl because you feel the final product must be perfect?
• Would you rather do nothing than do something you know will have some flaws?

If you’ve had these feelings, you’ve likely felt the pinch of perfection compromising your productivity. On one hand, the drive for perfection sounds like a noble pursuit, that we are engaged in the search for excellence at every turn. But it could be that our urge for perfection is actually a convenient self-sabotaging strategy.

You see, when we force ourselves to “find perfection,” we’re more or less giving ourselves an excuse to delay action indefinitely. It’s only when we try our ideas, “ship our products,” and provoke response that we learn, adapt, and invite change. But when we refuse to take those actions, we protect ourselves from change. We remain in a comfort zone of inaction, all in the name of “a better outcome.”

Give it your all, but learn to recognize when you’ve given it. There’s a point at which you must let go of perfection in the interest of results, risk, and learning. Pick one thing today and get it out the door, even if it falls short of your ideal. You might just find the process liberating and the results better than you expect.

(Photo credit: gibbons)

Don't let email mistake puzzle your clients.

Here at Tuesday Tactics and Oakley Signs & Graphics, we see thousands of emails every week. From your basic text message to over-the-top HTML email newsletters, we see a huge cross-section of how real estate agents communicate.

Now, we’re not pointing any fingers, but we’ve noticed a variety of common mistakes and faux pas when it comes to email techniques. Below our My Real Helper team has put together a checklist of common email mistakes to avoid. Read these through and see if you can use any of the recommendations to tune-up your communication!

13 Common Professional Email Mistakes from My Real Helper

1. Never automatically email your entire contact list with property/listing information without express permission. Use a professional list management tool like MailChimp to segment your lists.

2. When requesting people update your email address, always include your OLD email address so they can quickly find the old address in their system.

3. Never send email newsletters only using images. If your recipient doesn’t have “images on by default” you’ll end up sending them an annoying, blank email.

4. Avoid excessive font changes within a single email. (Script for “signatures,” multiple font faces, giant & tiny font sizing). Fonts have a direct impact on how professional your message looks.

5. Never, ever send white text on a black or dark background. Many times background colors will not be displayed, thus making your message completely invisible.

6. Do you need massive signatures attached to every message? If you have a one word response, does it merit a 60k signature? Use short signatures for short messages– just the essential contact info.

7. Don’t set an email autoresponder to automatically reply to every message that comes in. It’s no longer necessary to robotically confirm your message “was received.” In fact, it’s not really received until you read and understand it.

8. Beware of contextually inappropriate autoresponders, for example: “Thank you for searching for a home with us!” when in fact, someone has just emailed you a question.

9. Careful about over-sharing personal/private information in an autoresponder: i.e. “We will be out of the country for three weeks for experimental medical treatments.” etc.

10. Avoid short, abstract responses when the original message has been deleted. I.e. “I will.” as a response without previous email messages in the chain. Will what? People need context & reminders.

11. This is a big one: Don’t CC:everyone in your contact list when you send out a message. It exposes others’ in your list to spam and the dreaded “Reply to all:” when someone replies “LOL!” If you don’t use a list management software, send the email to yourself and BCC: your contact list.

12. Hey, when was the last time you verified the accuracy of the contact information in your signature? It’s very easy to overlook this, especially when it’s automatically appended to your messages.

13. Forgetting to include social media contact methods. But only list the ones you actually use / respond to!

There are others, but these are the big offenders. Sometimes the decision to choose one agent over the other is made in the tiniest details. Don’t let questionable communication habits knock you off the top of the list.

Photo credit: Horia Varlan

Securely manage your passwords this year.

If you have a yellow Post-it note on your computer screen right now with your “all purpose” password written on it, this article is for you. It’s time to get serious about your security.

Gone are the days when a hacked password meant a little embarrassment. A weak password these days can mean a compromised bank account, exposed health records, income tax information, and private family media.

Password Facts:

Luke Wroblewski of Luke W Ideation & Design offers the following enlightening facts about password usage and security:

• The average person has between 7 and 25 accounts that they log into every day.
• People report authenticating about 15 times in a typical work day on average.
• 86% of U.S. companies use password authentication.
• 70% of people do not use a unique password for each Web site.
• Around 82% of people have forgotten a password used on a Web site.
• 4.28% of Yahoo users forgot their passwords over a three month period.
• Password recovery is the number one request to help desks for intranets that don’t have single sign-on portal capabilities.
• The top 5 passwords at Gawker (based on released records) accounted for roughly 1 in 4 passwords. The top password, 123456, came in at over 3,000 uses within the dataset of 188,279.
• A survey of 34,000 MySpace passwords revealed that the most common were “password1″, “abc123″, “myspace1″, and “password”.

(For a complete list of sources for the above facts, visit Luke W’s blog.)

Generating Strong Passwords

Want to make your passwords virtually unhackable? Well, stop making up passwords yourself. One option is the free Strong Password Generator:

http://www.strongpasswordgenerator.com/

You can customize the length of the password as well as whether or not the password can include symbols.

Naturally, the password generated will be very hard to remember. So how to keep track of these new bulletproof passwords?

Never Forget a Password Again

Don’t write down your new passwords on Post-it notes! Why not use a secure password management application to remember your passwords for you? 1Password by Agile Bits is worth every penny. Not only will it keep your passwords safe, but you can also use it to login to your sites. It works on almost every operating system and mobile device, too:

Learn more about 1Password today.

The action at 212 degrees.

“At 211 degrees, water is hot. At 212 degrees, it boils. And with boiling water, comes steam. And with steam, you can power a train.”

S.L. Parker, Motivational author

We’ve all watched a pot of water at one point or another in our lives. Nothing much happens until we turn our attention elsewhere. Suddenly, a rolling boil.

Keep the idea of a pot of water front and center in your mind when it comes to your business. As S.L. Parker says in his quote, it’s a one degree difference that turns hot water into steam. While you may not be able to see the effects of the “heat” you’re putting into your business, place a little faith in the idea that everything can change in an instant.

This is especially true of your efforts in social media and online marketing. Much stock is given to the idea that in the digital age we can track every click, understand the source of every lead, and “drill down” into our metrics to tell us what the magic formula is to make that one-degree difference.

In fact, the online world is much like the real world. Like those molecules of water haphazardly bouncing against one another as the heat rises, the element of chance is as much in play online as it is offline. Sometimes the best we can do is follow our instincts–remain human, remain helpful, and listen carefully–and hope that one day the steam comes rising off our water.

And that old cliche about the watched pot that never boils? I think it applies here, too. Spend more time building the fire and less time taking the temperature. Don’t try and evaluate every Tweet, Facebook update, or blog post. You’ll know when you’ve crossed the crucial degree. Steam will rise. You won’t be able to miss it.

Photo credit: Svadilfari

Agents: How has the beginning of 2012 been for you?

Hey Real Estate Agents: What’s going on right now in your market?

Have you seen a better January than last year? What’s it look like going into the rest of Q1 2012?

Brett Levitt of Oakley Signs & Graphics (Scott Levitt’s brother), sent in the following from a recent Keller-Williams show:

Talking to agents today at the KW show, we hear that the housing market is getting better, but the results are still mixed in the news.  However, we heard from a lot of people who had record years in 2011 and 2012 starting off even better.  Maybe you could ask the questions to people of how the market is in their area and how 2011 ended and 2012 is starting?

What’s the story, agents?  In the comments below, tell us:

1. Your city / state / market.
2. If you see improvement and if so, where you see it.
3. If you expect the rest of Q1 2012 to be BETTER or WORSE than last year.

We want to share the news with our Tuesday Tactics readers and Facebook fans!

Get incredible new insights into your web traffic with Google Analytics.

Do you really know how people find and use your website? For as much talk as we hear about how important an effective website is for generating leads and marketing both your services and the clients you represent, it’s surprising how few agents take an active interest in vital information you can gather about your website with Google Analytics.

First off, if you don’t have Google Analytics on your website, be sure to get your webmaster or IT person to help you install it this week. By adding a tiny snippet of code to your website’s footer, you can begin gathering crucial information about your site’s visitors.

The most recent update to Google Analytics last year provided a bevy of new tools to provide you with insights. From the November, 2011 article on Mashable, this includes:

Ten New Features in Google Analytics

1. Custom dashboards to help you see information that’s most important to you up front

2. Keyword clouds for an at-a-glance idea of your most popular search terms

3. Real-time data to see who’s on your site right now

4. Site speed to help you understand how fast/slow your website is performing (and the subsequent hit your visitors and search engine rankings might experience as a result)

5. Search within Google Analytics to access reports quickly

6. Google Webmaster Tools integration

7. Social engagement with your site, reporting Google+, Facebook data, Twitter, and more

8. Visitor flow to see how visitors enter, experience, and exit your site

9. “Event” tracking to understand when people download reports or meet certain time-on-site goals and benchmarks

10. Multi-channel funnels to show every interaction a visitor had with your site up to 30 days prior to a conversion

While some of this may range outside of your technical expertise, ignorance of the tools available is no defense against the competition! For sophisticated teams, an assistant or webmaster with some Google Analytics chops can help you convert more visitors, capture leads, and follow-up effectively with those leads.

For a detailed look at each of the 10 features above, read the Mashable article here.

Download Oakley Signs & Graphics free iPhone/iPad app.

We’re very happy to announce that Oakley Signs & Graphics has just released its first iOS app, and you can download it for free today:

Download the Oakley Signs & Graphics App:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oakley-signs-graphics/id497801618?mt=8

The first version of the app allows you to quickly and easily schedule an appointment with our customer service reps and sign artists, call Oakley Signs directly, and browse the store. The app will also integrate any appointments you make with our staff right into your calendar and send you an email confirmation.

We have enhancements planned for the future, but right now you have one more easy way to remind you where you buy your signs and a direct line to get in touch.

Please download the app if you use an Apple iOS device and let us know what you think. If you like the app, please write us a nice review and share the link to the app with your office!

Thanks to all of our loyal Tuesday Tactics readers.

Download the Oakley Signs & Graphics App

With self-respect, you have the strength to carry the world on your shoulders.

“Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.”

Clint Eastwood

Pride and confidence in one’s self; a feeling that one is behaving with honor and dignity. That’s one concise definition of self-respect that I think we can all understand. What I find interesting about Clint Eastwood’s quote is the connection between self-respect and self-discipline.

For entrepreneurs and real estate agents, a tremendous amount of self-discipline is required. Running a business means being a self-starter, and at times the discipline it takes can seem to wane with our energy and our doubts.

But is it possible that some internal lack of confidence or pride holds us back? If we are failing to maintain self-discipline, perhaps it is a call to examine our actions and the accompanying internal monologue which evaluates and judges our actions. Are we being too hard on ourselves? Are we perhaps guilty over some decisions we know were not on the up-and-up? Do we know that in a situation recently we could have acted more honorably?

Self-respect leads to self-discipline, and rigorous self-discipline leads to momentum. We accomplish one thing and it leads to our next accomplishment, and before we know it, the momentum of our action ensures right actions, right thinking, and dignified forward motion in our lives.

This is a tremendously powerful cycle to harness and reinforce in your life, and if you’ve never made the connection between self-respect and positive momentum, perhaps these tough-love words of wisdom from Clint Eastwood will stick in your mind today. Do not attend merely to the cause of self-discipline, but go deeper and consider the health of your self-respect. It may be the key to getting the big picture in line.

Photo credit: downhilldom1984

An interesting new app for journaling on the go.

An intriguing new mobile application has been drawing a lot of attention recently from people who enjoy apps like Instagram, Foursquare, and Twitter. It’s based in San Francisco and it’s called Path.

From the Path.com website:

“The designers and engineers at Path have dreamed up and realized the Smart Journal–a journal that’s with you everywhere you go, posts entries without your effort, combines photo, video, music, people, places, and text, and most importantly, includes your loved ones. Path upholds the expectations for privacy of both the mobile phone and the journal with its limited, intimate, more personal network.”

Path’s interface is intuitive and pleasing, and the app allows you to selectively share your updated with people on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, or simply keep the information within your Path network.

In many ways, Path is an intriguing app for those who feel that they would like a more “private” social network compared to the more public face of Facebook and Twitter. It’s a great tool for your inner circle, because by default, all posts to Path are private.

If you’ve felt the pinch of balancing a public and private life with social media, you might want to explore Path. It also seems like a great way to selectively share your community with public networks, from charming neighborhoods and listings to local haunts and businesses you support.

Path is available for both iPhone and Android.

Explore Path Today.