Craigslist Scary? + Protect Your Agent Commission + much more...

885,391 daily readers and growing! July 2, 2016 Is Craigslist scary? Is it a waste of time? Can serious agents generate real clients from it? Does Craigslist only appeal to shoppers in the bottom income bracket? I answer all these questions and more in today's training blast. -- Matt Craigslist Scary? Dear Reader, Over the past 18 months, I have convinced countless agents to begin to take Craigslist seriously as a source of customers. Some agents have moved their entire focus to Craigslist, while others have simply used it to supplement their other traditional online campaigns. But all of them have produced astonishing results, and they’ve done it without spending any money. Craigslist is and always has been a great place to capture tons of customers, if you know what you’re doing. However, during the past 18 months I’ve discovered that the single greatest hurdle to overcome in convincing an agent to place his first ad on Craigslist is the negative stigma. For whatever reason, Craigslist has gotten a bad name among agents. Maybe it’s the “Craigslist killers” splashed across the headlines. Maybe you talked to a colleague who ran an ad on Craigslist once and didn’t get anything except for emails from spambots. But whatever the case, you need to forget about what you’ve heard and try it yourself. The truth is, it is relatively easy to capture 2-3 inbound buyer or seller leads from Craigslist every day, but again, only if you know what you’re doing. In this article I’m going to share the easy four-step formula I use in my own practice. The beauty is that it’s easy to learn -- by the end of this article, you’ll know it inside and out -- and it’s easy to repeat again and again. Best of all, it doesn’t cost you anything. If you follow these steps, I guarantee that you’ll be working with a new customer by the end of the week, possibly 3-4 new customers. Step One is procuring the perfect listing for your ad. What!? Yes, you heard me right. The first step to fully exploiting Craigslist for lots of buyer leads is to procure a great listing. After all, we are advertising on a real estate classifieds website. You’ll get nowhere without a property to list. But this is the first place that agents go wrong. Most agents I train on this method don’t have any listings, or else have very few. But here’s the secret: you don’t need to go out and take a new listing in order to follow my Craigslist formula. In fact my formula is exactly the same for agents who have lots of listings and agents who have none. You are going to borrow a listing. What do I mean by “borrowing” a listing? The best way to explain this concept is to describe exactly what I do when creating a new Craigslist ad from scratch. Again, all of this can be done for free and in a single afternoon. I recommend that you start today. I start by picking up a recent copy of the local Homes magazine or Real Estate Book. I flip through the pages until I find a listing suitable for my ad. What I’m looking for is always the same: Maximum curb appeal in my market’s average price range. Here’s why. Curb appeal ensures that my listing on Craigslist will generate lots of clicks. Buyers are attracted to beautiful homes far more than ugly ones. Duh. But you can’t simply pick the most beautiful home in the magazine, because chances are, for the majority of buyers, it’s out of their price range. The average home price in my market is $152,000. I usually choose an attractive but modest listing that is approximately $20-30K above average because I’ll attract a higher end customer and earn a higher commission. But this home price is still affordable for a large percentage of home shoppers. I don’t pick the million dollar mansions just because they are nice. Very few people are in the market for such a property, so I would capture few if any customers. Once I’ve chosen my “mark”, I contact the listing agent. I send a quick email just like this one. In fact, you can use this as template: Hey Joe, I was looking through the homes magazine... really like your listing at 123 Elmwood and would love to sell it! I’m putting together my ads for the month and I have an open spot. Would you mind if I included 123 Elmwood? Thanks, let me know. -Matt Just like in fishing, if you want to attract the best customers, you use very specific bait. When I was a kid we would use a piece of stale bread and hang our line over the drain pipe to catch catfish. And it worked every time, but if you wanted to catch something worth eating, then you had to save up and buy a better lure. It’s the same in real estate. If you advertise bottom of the barrel listings, just because you happen to be the listing agent, then you’re going to attract bottom of the barrel customers. Low income shoppers don't come from Craigslist. They come from low end listings. For that reason, I recommend my “borrowed listings” strategy even to listing agents. Look, I am the author of The Ultimate Listing Presentation, I’ve taken as many as 114 listings in a single year, I’ve never had a shortage of solid listings to advertise, and I still borrow listings in order to create the “perfect” Craigslist ad. Take your ego out of it for a minute and ask yourself, what is going to generate me the most business? Probably not that $59,000 probate listing you took as a favor to a friend. [Note: Do this now. Use my email as a template, but put your own spin on it. This approach really works and only takes a few minutes to complete. Just think, by the end of the day you could have several beautiful properties in your arsenal.] Wait, what if they say no? When I teach this practice, agents look at me like I’ve asked them to do something sneaky or unethical. But let me ask you this. What if an agent approached you with the same question? Remember your fiduciary obligation to your client. Would withholding that listing from a free source of advertising be upholding that obligation? I can honestly say that in 10 years my request has never been turned down. Most agents are thrilled that I’m helping them move their listings. But of course I’m fully prepared for the possibility that one day the listing agent will decline my request. So what. There’s an entire book full of beautiful listings. Why would one “no” stop you? Step Two is creating the perfect ad. Writing a great ad shouldn’t take a lot of time and doesn’t require years of copywriting experience. In fact, when it comes to real estate listings the best ads say very little. Plus, I’m about to share the exact ad formula that I use to write all of my ads. If you follow this formula, creating a new ad from scratch should only take about ten minutes. Previously I have only shared this ad-writing formula with Ultimate Website users, but I believe this is a skill that any agent can learn very quickly and that all agents need. So here goes. Here is an actual ad that I posted on my local Craigslist: This ad alone brought in over fifteen new customers per month. (And that was just one ad. I typically recommend that you run at least five to ten simultaneously.) Here’s the simple formula I followed to create this ad: MY CRAIGSLIST AD FORMULA A. Write a short, plain description of the home in the title. In my example, I give the bedrooms and the neighborhood. B. Identify five selling features of the home. Study my example above and use it as a template. Selling features could include a pool or any special amenities, recent additions or upgrades, or the location. Limit yourself to only the top five selling features. The ad shouldn’t outlast your visitor’s attention span. C. DO NOT INCLUDE THE PRICE. This is the most important step of the formula. Many agents see this as heresy, but remember, our goal is to maximize curiosity, not maximize the information. D. In a large font, add a footer that tells your visitor where they can get more information about the property. I recommend that you use my footer exactly. It is professional, no-pressure, highly tested, and it works. Yes, that’s my entire formula. Go ahead and write your ad now. You might still be waiting to receive permission from the listing agent, but I can almost guarantee that you’ll get it. And on the off chance that he says no, you’ve only wasted about 10 minutes and it’s good practice. Don’t put it off. Do it now, and you’ll see how incredibly easy writing a great ad should be. But wait, I don’t have a website or a property hotline or a text messaging service, so how can I write an ad? Don’t worry, this problem is completely normal and I address it in step three. Step Three is lead capture. You’ve written the perfect ad. You are now holding the attention of an interested buyer who, statistically speaking, will be making a purchase within the next 90 days. How are you going to turn him into a client? The answer is you need some form of effective lead capture. Obviously I use my Ultimate Website, and you can get your own (it’s relatively inexpensive). My Ultimate Website includes three separate forms of lead capture, and I believe that they are each essential to your advertising. Customers have widely disparate preferences when it comes to searching for homes online. A few will prefer to make a quick phone call (these will result in the warmest leads). Some will be mobile and prefer to send a text for more information. The majority will prefer to continue their search on your website, so it’s necessary to have lead capture technology there as well. I strongly recommend all three. And you can get all of these technologies separately from different companies for a few hundred dollars a month. (My Ultimate Website includes all three for about $83/mo. but that's enough sales pitch for now.) It’s more important to me that you have these technologies than whether you get them from me. However, I recommend that you at least take a look at my Ultimate Website because it’s available at a fraction of what it would cost you to buy them separately from other companies. Anyway, that brings us to step four. Step 4 is the easiest. Sit back and wait for the customers to come to you. I expect to capture about one customer per ad that I place, so I recommend placing more than one at a time. Craigslist will allow you to renew the ad to the top of the listings every 48 hours. So if you post five ads and renew them each fifteen times per month, that’s approximately 75 customers every month -- without spending a dime in advertising and very little time maintaining your ads. Not bad. That’s my entire approach. If you complete these four steps you can be guaranteed that you are exploiting your local Craigslist for all its worth. The best part is, because very few agents know what they are doing on Craigslist, there are lots of customers and very little competition among agents. If you haven’t yet tried my Ultimate Website (with LCM technology), I’d encourage you to check it out. Agents who use it are generating an average of 2-3 new inbound leads every day without spending additional money on advertising. It costs less than most websites and there is no long-term commitment or activation fee. Here is a link: http://GuerillaRealty.com. Or if you want to check to see if it's available in your market click here. Get My Ultimate Website Now » As always, thanks for reading. Matt Jones Broker/President/CEO FavoriteAgent.com Matt Jones is the founder and CEO of FavoriteAgent.com, nationally syndicated columnist, broker, and best selling author. He has been profiled by major media outlets as an innovator and a pioneer in the industry, and CNN's Pulse on America claimed he and his company were "changing the way real estate is done in America."

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