Craigslist Lead Generation for Real Estate in Your Pajamas
By Keith Cuddeback, Real Estate Consultant and California Broker
Copyright 2011 Keith Cuddeback
Smashwords Edition
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Lead generation for Realtors the easy way
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this ebook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Foreword
When you become a Real Estate agent, your job description can be boiled down to one fundamental activity; lead generation. You are now in the lead generation business, congratulations. It is now your job to find people, who want to buy a house, sell a house or invest in real estate.
Years ago, when I got into the business, lead generation meant networking with my sphere of influence (SOI), farming, door knocking & cold calling. These ways all still work today but they are expensive, time consuming and inefficient ways to find your prospects.
I know a better way. With the technology available to us today there is a much easier and less expensive way to generate leads for your business. Some Realtors embrace and understand how to leverage technology while, for most, change is hard and they stick with the old ways. But how can you ignore the fact that 92% of homebuyers are now online searching for their new home and fail to have a significant presence online to capture your share of them? Having a website alone is far from adequate. What Realtor's need today is a proven, effective, efficient and easy way to generate leads consistently and effortlessly?
Any Realtor, from any franchise, can generate leads almost effortlessly now. This eBook will show you how. Keller Williams agents, I feel, possibly have the advantage now over other franchises because of the new eEdge System that was launched in March. The part of the eEdge system that works so well for lead generation is the website provided by Market Leader in Seattle, WA. Every Keller Williams agent is provided with the highly effective and optimized website that is made for one purpose only: to capture leads.
Preface
At Family Reunion this year, Keller Williams rolled out eEdge. The vision for eEdge is a complete lead-to-closing system built around The Millionaire Real Estate Agent model. The main components of eEdge are: a website, customer relationship manager, marketing center, and a paperless transaction manager with electronic signature module. It is the most ambitious piece of technology for real estate ever attempted by a major real estate franchise. It rocks.
Gary Keller wants every one of the 80,000 plus Keller Williams Realty agents across North America to have the tools & technology that real estate has never known before. It's a tall order. Even before eEdge rolled out three months ago, Gary Keller reminded us that there would be an adjustment period. The agents would need to adjust to some new ways of doing things. The massive new technology behind eEdge would surely need tweaking along the way as agents learn to use the systems, suggest enhancement and bugs are fixed. We were told that it could be up to a year before eEdge is fully ramped up and perfectly purring along.
Change isn't easy. The average real estate agent, according to the National Association of Realtors is 54 years old and is happy doing things the way they've always done them. "What worked for me 20 years ago is fine and I have plenty of business; they say, so why am I now being forced to use this eEdge?" I'm talking to you.
A few brave souls embrace change and welcome the innovation of eEdge. We are the ones who are diving into the technology to see what is possible. We're pushing boundaries and exploring the good, bad and the ugly components of the eEdge system. The ugly is reported and much of it has already been fixed. The bad is being enhanced and integrated into the flow of the way we do business. The good, we are finding is actually GREAT! That's what this eBook is about.
Every Keller Williams agent now has an eEdge website. Yet less than 30% of those websites have been activated because agents just don't understand eEdge yet. Remember, we resist change? We are going to look at just how powerful the eEdge websites are. I am going to show you how to easily generate homebuyer leads by using your eEdge website and almost effortlessly drive prospects to it with FREE Craigslist advertising.
Today I'm averaging more than three leads a day coming into my contact manager from my eEdge website at SanRamonRealEstateSales.com. That's more than 90 brand new leads per month! The time I have to spend to generating this volume of leads is only about 2 hours a week or less. Do you think that having 90 or more leads a month to work with will help you do more business? How much door knocking or farming do you do now to generate 90 leads? Considering the minimal time involved generating these 90 leads this is the highest leveraging of our time we've ever enjoyed in Real Estate!
In the following pages I'll show you step-by-step how to setup your own lean-mean-lead-generation-machine! eEdge and Craigslist are the best of friends and I want to help you join this amazing inner circle of high producing agents.
Dedication
For Mai, my coach, my champion, my inspiration.
Everybody should have a little Mai in his or her pocket:
Table of Contents
Measuring The Effectiveness of Your Ads
What Does Click-Through-Rate Mean to Me?
What Do You Write in Your Ads?
Let's Talk For a Minute About Flagging
Some History
Craigslist and I go way back. In the 90's I began posting my listings on Craigslist the same way most agents today post theirs. Craig Newmark of San Francisco started this website as a freebie public service. It really caught on! Everybody here in the San Francisco Bay Area knew and loved Craigslist and who can argue with the free advertising it allows everybody, including Realtors?
After I joined Keller Williams over 6 years ago, Craigslist was getting pretty crowded with ads from other Realtors. I realized that I needed to stand out better so I started spending a lot more time and effort writing & formatting my Craigslist ads in HTML (no worries, I'm not going to make you do that). Craigslist was getting crowded and, do be effective, I needed to get noticed. Compared to the plain text ads that are the Craigslist default, my ads were Madison Avenue slick and they took me a long time to make. I had to figure out lots of things to get my system set up. Like how to host pictures for my ads on a server somewhere and how to write the entire HTML code to make them bright & shiny. Not to scare you off here... today I don't need to spend much time at all writing my ads and there's no geekyness to it. Any agent who uses a computer can do this. The best part is, no more getting dressed up to go door knocking, you can do this in your pajamas!
Tools You Need
There isn't much you need in order to do this. The first thing you need is an account on Craigslist. We're going for efficiency here. A Craigslist account is free and having all of your ads on a dashboard makes it so much faster to post ads and to manage them once they are posted. So go to https://accounts.craigslist.org/ and sign up for an account. Go ahead and do that now. I'll wait for you to get back.
If you've never seen one, here's what my Craigslist account dashboard looks like: