| I took my family on a trip to Hawaii last year. I told all the kids that they could create a bucket list of things that they wanted to do and places to go. Did you know there is an animal shelter in Hawaii where you can adopt a pet for a day?!? And you guessed it – that was the number one thing on my kids’ list for our trip to Hawaii. Yup, I paid my hard earned-money to walk, feed, and pick up after a rented dog. Keep reading because there is a valuable lesson here…Whoever set this program us was a brilliant marketer – the dog was delivered to me with a huge vest that read ADOPT ME on both sides. I unwittingly became a spokesperson for the animal shelter. The dog was literally a walking billboard!As we were walking our rent-a-dog, tourists kept coming up to us asking me to break down the program for them. I became their salesperson-for-the-day! These people in Hawaii are pretty brilliant and I love that story so much because that was totally out of the box thinking and they used what they had and made It work. This week I shared my story about Barney Zick with you and I can’t help but hear his words saying “real estate is a BUSINESS!” One of Barney’s pet peeves was that most people don’t treat their real estate endeavors like a business, and even fewer apply the single most important activity to their real estate business. What activity is that? It’s getting your message across to as many qualified prospects as possible. And how do you do that??? It’s called marketing! But just because you engage in marketing doesn’t mean it’s always gonna be a slam dunk. There are a few ways to get it right and a whole lot of ways to get it really, really wrong. One will get you the exact results that you are looking for and the other is usually the reason that people leave this business like a dog with its tail between its legs. So to start let’s establish one thing and that is that first and foremost you are a marketer. A marketer who, by the way, is in the real estate business. Over the years, I’ve literally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and more time than I can count learning from some of the smartest and brightest marketers in the world. Using what I’ve learned, I’ve put together a checklist of 10 rules every real estate marketer must prioritize to make sure their marketing becomes a “top dog” and I’ll be sharing and explaining these rules to you starting next week. And there’s a crazy ending to the Hawaii story that I want to share with you, but this email is long enough and Kathy is giving me dirty looks so I’d better go help her with the kids and breakfast. I’ll fill you in on the crazy ending next week… |
| Committed to your success, Ernie “the Aloha Dog Whisper” Vargas | The Probate Fox |
