On the first day after the holiday my VA prepared for me:
an SEO ready website
On the second day after the holiday my VA prepared for me:
two ghostwritten articles
and an SEO ready website
On the third day after the holiday my VA prepared for me:
three personalized databases
two ghostwritten articles
and an SEO ready website
On the fourth day after the holiday my VA prepared for me:
four booked speaking gigs
three personalized databases
two ghostwritten articles
and an SEO ready website
On the fifth day after the holiday my VA prepared for me:
five social media campaigns
four booked speaking gigs
three personalized databases
two ghostwritten articles
and an SEO ready website
On the sixth day after the holiday my VA prepared for me:
six months of blog posts
five social media campaigns
four booked speaking gigs
three personalized databases
two ghostwritten articles
and an SEO ready website
On the seventh day after the holiday my VA prepared for me:
seven research projects
six months of blog posts
five social media campaigns
four booked speaking gigs
three personalized databases
two ghostwritten articles
and an SEO ready website
On the eighth day after the holiday my VA prepared for me:
eight formatted reports
seven research projects
six months of blog posts
five social media campaigns
four booked speaking gigs
three personalized databases
two ghostwritten articles
and an SEO ready website
On the ninth day after the holiday my VA prepared for me:
nine transcribed audios
eight formatted reports
seven research projects
six months of blog posts
five social media campaigns
four booked speaking gigs
three personalized databases
two ghostwritten articles
and an SEO ready website
On the tenth day after the holiday my VA prepared for me:
ten new client info packs
nine transcribed audios
eight formatted reports
seven research projects
six months of blog posts
five social media campaigns
four booked speaking gigs
three personalized databases
two ghostwritten articles
and an SEO ready website
On the eleventh day after the holiday my VA prepared for me:
eleven article submissions
ten new client info packs
nine transcribed audios
eight formatted reports
seven research projects
six months of blog posts
five social media campaigns
four booked speaking gigs
three personalized databases
two ghostwritten articles
and an SEO ready website
On the twelfth day after the holiday my VA prepared for me:
twelve months of bookkeeping
eleven article submissions
ten new client info packs
nine transcribed audios
eight formatted reports
seven research projects
six months of blog posts
five social media campaigns
four booked speaking gigs
three personalized databases
two ghostwritten articles
and an SEO ready website
Remember, the virtual assistants at REVATS can do all this and more for you! Add to it 13 listings, 14 new leads processed, and 15 updates to TopProducer 8i! What a way to get your real estate business rolling!!
Last week Congress extended the tax credit that was set to expire November 30th. The tax credit of up to $8,000 is for qualified first-time home buyers purchasing a principal residence. The extension also authorized a tax credit of up to $6,500 for qualified repeat home buyers.
This video explains the credit in a way we all can understand.
I will shamefully admit that I only recently started using Twitter. Of course I recommended it to clients, attended different webinars on using social media for marketing yourself and your business, but I personally never used Twitter. I did sign up for an account, tweeted once, then thought it was pretty weird. Why would anyone want to follow me anywhere? I imagined my tweets being something like this:
‘I am heading to the kitchen to cook some mac n cheese because I forgot to grocery shop yet again’ or
‘Getting ready to call the doc because I still am not convinced dog food is harmless to an 18 month old’ or
‘Sitting here trying to think of something entertaining, important and informational to blog about’
However twitter is more than just announcing the mundane aspects of your day. I just learned this and am quite possibly addicted. I decided to log in after being told numerous times that I could get late breaking news from other Tweeps before it is ever on the TV news or internet news sites. I read up on how to use twitter (more info to come), and logged in. I started searching for hashtags related to my interests. All of a sudden these tweets start popping up with vast amounts of information, including links to the articles. I was in information overload!
So I started reading, re-tweeting some, posting articles of my own. Then in the blink of an eye (well, one week to be more accurate), I had 100 followers! I did not solicit people, or try to obtain followers, but evidently things I tweeted about were interesting to some people, so they followed me. It was then I realized the power of twitter!
Now I log in a couple times per day to read late breaking news that I mainly get from people I follow. In just a month I’ve built up a huge network of people with related interests as mine. Yet every day, I still get at least five more followers. Who would have thought a 10 second blurb and a link to an article or blog I just read would generate the amount of traffic and new contacts that I now have?
How does this relate to your real estate business? I will answer that tomorrow. Right now, I’m going to go tweet.
Once a seller lead turns into a seller-with-an-active-listing, be sure to add the listing info to TopProducer when you add it to all your listing locations.
The listing will be linked to the seller if set up correctly. It will be available to pull into flyers, post cards and letters. You can track showings and link them to other contacts.
You can also set up unique action plans specifically for current sellers. Tailor these to remind you or your assistant of all of the steps you typically take with a new listing and maintenance.
Be sure to set up emails or letters to send to your active sellers on a regular basis, just as you do with your leads. These emails are specific to individuals selling their home and preparing to move.
As you probably know, a virtual or in-house assistant can handle the posting of your listings to all of your websites, the tracking of your listings in TopProducer, etc.
Why spend your “spare” time uploading your listings when you can hand it off for an affordable fee? Wouldn’t you rather spend that time either pursuing more business or enjoying your life?
We have barely scratched the surface of what you can do with TopProducer. Just about every aspect of it can be customized to fit your needs. What do you do with TopProducer?
REVATS is a team of independent virtual assistants working together to bring comprehensive virtual services to real estate agents around the USA. Contact us today for more information!
Managing a mailing campaign can be a full time job. Don’t even bother trying to send a different email or letter to a handful of your leads or contacts every day! That is unless you have TopProducer as your database.
TopProducer is not only a lead management tool, it also is the perfect tool for setting up, maintaining, and implementing mailing campaigns to all of your leads and other contacts.
You can use the standard action plans that come with TopProducer, personalize these in minor or major ways, or even develop your own 100% unique plans. Within the action plans are not only to-do lists and reminders for you, but also emails tailored to specific types of campaigns.
Let’s say you have three new leads that come in to you today.
The first one is a seller lead that looks pretty promising. After contacting her and doing everything you typically do, you can set her up in TopProducer with an action plan specifically for your “best” seller leads.
The second lead is a buyer that gives an email address, but no phone, not even a last name. Chances are this lead is just window shopping, but hey, window shoppers are dreamers who do eventually end up buying…and you want them to call on you when they are ready! So you set this lead up with a drip email campaign that will last for a few years, sending them an email every month or two.
Your third lead is a buyer that claims to be pre-approved, has a decent down payment, knows what they are looking for, and has even sent you the links to some houses they like. So you jump on this lead, and in the meantime you get them set up with your best action plan for buyer leads. And while TopProducer works behind the scenes…you do your thing on the front line!
These email campaigns aren’t your typical long list of call me, call me, call me emails. Most of them are a series of educational notes about various topics of interest to home owners or home buyers. Sporadically throughout them are emails emphasizing why they should use you as their real estate agent. The idea is to build their trust in your expertise and knowledge.
I would recommend that you go through the campaigns you use the most and update them for the current market situations, your local market’s quirks, and even your own personality. They are standard emails and while written well and in a personal tone, they might seem very out of place or totally “not like you.”
When its time to send out holiday greetings or open house notices, you can do that from within TopProducer as well. Simply create your email or letter, choose the individuals or groups you want to send it to, and voila!
If you do choose to do actual snail mail campaigns on some of your action plans, TopProducer has another service, LivePost, you can subscribe to which will automate the actual mailing of these letters for you. The cost isn’t much more than your actual cost would be, including postage, paper, and time.
Best of all…no matter what action plan or type of mailing you choose, every completed task, email, and marketing piece is attached to the lead you sent it to. So later on you can look back and see just what you have sent to this person. And you can keep detailed notes of all your interactions as well.
For all of your TopProducer needs, a virtual assistant is the perfect choice to “manage your management software.” A virtual assistant can enter your leads, keep your database clean, personalize your action plans, perform many of your daily tasks, and mail any physical letters that you don’t submit to LivePost.
If you are looking for someone to help you get started with or maintain TopProducer, give us a call. REVATS specializes in TopProducer related tasks and can get your leads in tip-top shape.
REVATS is a team of independent virtual assistants working together to bring comprehensive virtual services to real estate agents around the USA. Contact us today for more information!
Any real estate agent with at least several hundred leads or other contacts needs to be using a comprehensive database of some kind. While there are several on the market, my personal favorite is TopProducer.
Of course, I am simply assisting real estate agents with their TopProducer systems, so I don’t have a truly personal experience, but I still think TopProducer “does” just about everything you could wish it to do.
The primary usage of TopProducer is as a database for storing, accessing, and contacting your current, past, and hopefully future clients. (But it is so much more!)
TopProducer allows you to store your leads’ information, whether entered automatically via web forms the lead has filled out, or manually by yourself or your assistant. This information includes not only basic contact information, but also lead source, referral source, spouse’s name, employer details, personal website information, contact birthdate, etc.
You can organize your leads by one or several custom contact types and set them up in one or more action plans which will not only remind you to contact them directly, but will also send them regular pre-determined emails or letters. Many useful action plans come with your subscription to TopProducer, and you can modify these to suit your own personality or create your own completely unique action plans.
Managing your leads in TopProducer can be a daunting task at first, but given time and training, you will find your lead management efforts are paying off.
Need some help with TopProducer? Finding a virtual assistant who knows TopProducer isn’t as hard as it might seem. There are many great assistant who are experienced with it and some are certified. (We even have an assistant on our REVATS team who is certified in TopProducer!)
Are you using TopProducer? What do YOU like about it?
REVATS is a team of independent virtual assistants working together to bring comprehensive virtual services to real estate agents around the USA. Contact us today for more information!
If they are blogging simply to bring in and retain clients with community and real estate information or to increase the SEO of their website, then there is really nothing wrong with it. Everyone needs at least a little of this anyway, and let’s face it, some people just have no ability to write or no desire or time while still seeing the value in it.
If a blogger blogs because they love it, because they see their blogs as a tool to be themselves and to touch their readers in a unique way (isn’t that the real purpose of a blog?), and if the blogger is good at maintaining their blog on a regular (daily or even more often) basis, then there is little need for a ghost writer. In that case, a virtual assistant might come in handy to edit for grammar, to research supplementary information, or to take the finished piece and push the necessary buttons to post it on the site.
Should a ghost writer, usually a virtual assistant, pretend to be the person they are writing for and create a false relationship with others on the site? Hmmm…that’s where it gets sticky, huh? I would personally not choose to do that, although I know some who do. I might post a comment now and then in order to increase a client’s network (or to earn them some coveted points on a site like ActiveRain), but it would be rather generic sounding…something like “in MyTown, USA there are x number of houses on the market and the average selling price is…” in response to a blog post about nationwide numbers perhaps. But would I say “Hey Sally, I sure hope to see you around at such-and-such conference. We could hook up for lunch!”? No, to me that would be deceptive in every way. But, at what point is the line between those two crossed?
At REVATS we do offer a blogging package and a social media package for our clients. But we encourage them to do the “personal stuff” themselves. We see our role in ghost-writing as simply a supplement to a real estate professional’s interaction with their online network.
What exactly do we recommend? Well, if budget is no issue, we would recommend that a virtual assistant write and post 2 to 4 blog posts a week on general topics that would be of interest to the online community in one respect or another. At the same time the agent would be encouraged to write their own blog posts and to comment and network. This would be a win-win for the agent. The posts we would write might require a great deal of research, which the agent probably doesn’t have time to do, but it is research that we are doing on a regular basis. So by simply carrying on with the networking and expertise type of items in their blog network, the agent would be enjoying their time, creating connections that would (hopefully) build their business and freeing up a few hours a week to pursue that business!
This can also carry over into the rest of the social media world. A virtual assistant is a good source for regularly scheduled informative Twitter or Facebook posts, which would free up the agent to post their daily happenings while still knowing that their network was getting a regular feed going, even if they happen to have a day where they are just not in the Tweeting mood.
Afterall, your business is selling real estate. Our business is doing the things that increase or support your business, especially when those are things you don’t want to or can’t do.
REVATS is a team of independent virtual assistants working together to bring comprehensive virtual services to real estate agents around the USA. Contact us today for more information!
Are you ready to delegate those tasks that keep you from focusing on what you do best? Is management of TopProducer one of the tasks you need help with?
Each year real estate agents use more and more technology to market themselves and to help them stay organized. TopProducer is the industry’s top sales productivity system, and qualified virtual assistants are in demand. Allow our team to help you.
Members of our team are TopProducer certified, which means they have industry recognition of their practical TopProducer 8i know-how in relation to REALTOR objectives like contact and task management, prospecting and marketing, and listing/closing coordination.
We offer a comprehensive service to Realtors needing to delegate so they can focus on what they do best. Contact Kim, Stephanie, or Michelle with REVATS to get started!
I will shamefully admit that I only recently started using 
Managing a mailing campaign can be a full time job. Don’t even bother trying to send a different email or letter to a handful of your leads or contacts every day! That is unless you have 
Any real estate agent with at least several hundred leads or other contacts needs to be using a comprehensive database of some kind. While there are several on the market, my personal favorite is 
There has been some talk about whether or not some real estate agents, or any bloggers for that matter, should or do use ghost writers.