jonwashburn

"Do you know any good real estate agents in <your market>?"  

That is the money question. The conversation we all wish we could be a part of.

These type of conversations are increasingly taking place online, and with this shift comes a new way to prospect for business.

Below is a screenshot of a tweet from a venture capitalist looking for an 8 bedroom home in Palo Alto. He made this tweet less than one hour before I published this blog post. (Talk about a hot lead!)

So my two questions for the ActiveRain community are:

1. How can you find these type of tweets?

2. Once you are aware of a tweet like this, what steps should you take to earn their trust and their business?

All of these suggestions are free to implement and will generate very high quality incoming links and a pretty healthy amount of traffic.

You can use your ActiveRain profile just fine with each of these items but you will likely generate the best results with your own Individual Blog. (If you don't have an Individual Blog yet click here to get one.)

Please note that pretty much all of the items below require that you have a free account with the applicable website.

1. Submit yourself to Google Local. Make sure to put in your blog or profile URL in the website entry form field.

2. Add your blog to Local.Yahoo.com.

3. Submit your blog to Yelp! 

4. Create a blog post for everyone of your listings and submit the URL to Google Base.

5. Create a blog post for everyone of your listings and submit the URL to Craigslist.

6. Add links to your website, ActiveRain profile, and your Individual blog, on your LinkedIn profile page.  Your LinkedIn profile is second only to your ActiveRain profile in terms of Google Juice.

7. Add yourself to YellowPages.com. The search engines tap this database to populate their Local search results.

(The cow above looks very dominating; similar to the way you will look to your competitors if you implement these strategies.  In case you were wondering, that is why I chose it as the picture for this post.)