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1. Click Here to Listen to a Business Coaching Tip from Jim

2. How Doubt Affects the Real Estate Warrior Spirit

3. How to Identify a Great Real Estate Technology Expert

As a real estate coach it's an absolute thrill for me to work with people and completely transform their real estate businesses. To be able to make this kind of contribution to people's lives is something extremely wonderful to experience. Just this past week a client of mine told me it looks like he's going to make over a million dollars this year in his real estate business. When we first began working together a few years ago he was making at that time about $200,000.00 a year.

The reason I'm mentioning this to you is because after having coached agents full-time for about six years now, I feel I have a great understanding of the typical agent who is right now in a great position to completely transform his or her real estate business:

This agent is someone who has an unyielding, burning desire to become a huge success in our industry, and all they want is to be pointed in the right direction and taught how to do it. These people are also extremely coachable and completely willing to take direction from another person.

Over these past six years there are also a few people I've worked with who wanted to make big changes in their real estate businesses, but they had major doubts about their own ability to make it happen. And when an agent is coming from a place of doubt, they can be working the most perfect system for real estate success in the world, but their doubt will completely override any success that this system can bring them.

Doubt in your real estate career will completely permeate all of your presentations to your clients and prospects . And your clients and prospects will sense that you're not sure of yourself also. Doubt will cause you to withhold the best you've got to give in your presentations, and will also cause you to drop out important aspects in your follow-up, too. Nobody wants to be represented by a real estate agent who doubts his or her ability to be successful.

If you have any doubts about your ability to be the top real estate agent you want to be, you need to do whatever you must to take care of this situation and get it completely out of the way for you. Once you do, it will pay you huge dividends in your real estate business for the rest of your career.

You can practice affirmations, you can consider spending time with a therapist, or you can try acting throughout your day as if you already are the person who has the total confidence in real estate sales that you've always wanted to have. Sometimes this approach can really be very effective. Just pretend that you've already become the real estate agent you've always wanted to be, and feel the power and confidence that you exude when you carry yourself as if you're already that person right now.

You have the power to choose who you are at any moment in time in your real estate career. Why not just choose to be the most powerful and confident real estate agent that you could ever imagine? If this seems like a bit of a stretch for you just give it a try. I can almost guarantee that when you do this for any extended period of time you'll find yourself continually approaching becoming this person in reality.  What we're talking about here is genuinely coming from a place of complete service to your clients, and having total confidence in knowing that you are right now the real estate agent you've always wanted to be. Take a few moments and get into the mental and emotional state of already being the powerful, confident real estate agent you've always wanted to be. It will only take you about 10-30 seconds to do this. And when you're there, doesn't it feel like you can make things happen in your real estate career with much more ease and confidence right now?

If any of those old doubts start creeping in again, just tell yourself that was the old you, and once again replace those thoughts and feelings with the thoughts and feelings of already being the powerful, confident real estate agent you've always wanted to be. You'll feel different about yourself, people will begin responding to you differently, and you'll also find yourself successfully enrolling a higher percentage of people in working with you exclusively.

Knowing that you always have the choice to feel powerful and confident about yourself as a real estate agent at anytime, doesn't it just make more sense to continually choose the state of mind that empowers you, has you feel great about yourself, and leads you to the most successful results in your real estate career that you could ever imagine?

The choice is once and always completely yours!

3. How to Identify a Great Real Estate Technology Expert

With technology having become a very important component of  real estate brokerage, I've noticed a lot of people now in our industry holding themselves out to be real estate technology experts. What's really sad to me about this is that a number of these people seem to know very little about real estate technology, but they do know a little more than the average real estate agent does. As a result you could end-up hiring someone to teach you about real estate technology who might point you completely in the wrong direction.

Along these lines, a few months ago I was a bit stunned to find that someone claiming to be a real estate technology expert had taken the title to an article I had written, and used it as the basis to name one of their real estate products. The product was educational in nature and revolved around teaching real estate agents about technology. 

Upon talking with another technology expert in our industry that I have an extremely high regard for, I found that this same person had taken information from him also, and later gave people the impression of being its originator.

So you really, really have to watch yourself when you hire someone to help you to take your technology to the next level in your real estate business. You want to make sure that the person you're working with is authentic, congruent, and really knows what they're talking about.

With this in mind I have a few recommendations for you. If you're thinking of hiring someone to teach you or your company about how to best implement technology in your real estate business, take a look at how that person is currently implementing technology in their own business. Doesn't it make sense that people holding themselves out to be technology experts should also be experts at implementing new technology in their own businesses, too? It's always been my feeling that when choosing an expert, it's always best to choose someone who is already walking their talk.

So how do you determine if someone is effectively implementing new technology in their own business? Well, here are four simple, objective ways I've outlined to quickly determine if someone is truly a technology expert and is walking their talk, or not:

1) Find out if the person is sending out an E-newsletter to promote their business one or more times a month.

An E-newsletter is one of the greatest marketing tools one can utilize in the real estate industry, or in any industry for that matter, to promote your business. If someone is proposing to help you grow your business through technology, and they're not even using this extremely basic technology in their own business, how much of a technology expert do you really think they are?

2) Take a look at their E-newsletter. Is it HTML with attractive color designs and images? Or is it just plain text?

If the person is truly a technology expert, shouldn't they be utilizing the much more advanced E-mail technology that's already been available now for years?

To me, someone claiming to be a technology expert in our industry while sending out only plain text E-newsletters, is like an agent claiming to be a real estate marketing expert while sending out plain text flyers in black ink only for all of their their listings. Utilizing different colors and photos makes your property flyers sing and dance with much more pizzazz. And, like HTML technology in E-mail, the technology to print and E-mail color real estate flyers has been around for years now, too.

3) Find out if the person is utilizing their spoken voice on their Web site and in their E-newsletters.

Technology has gotten to the point where adding sound to your Web site and E-newsletters is now very easy to do. And the impact in doing this on your clients and prospects can be tremendous. From my perspective, anyone proposing to be an expert who can teach you about technology should already be utilizing the most advanced technologies in their own business. Once again, if they're not, how much of a real estate technology expert do you think they really are?

4) And finally, ask the person a technology question you already know the answer to.

OK. Let me help you out on this one. Ask the person, "How important are meta tags in having my Web site appear at the top of the search engines?"

In case you're not already familiar with meta tags, they are lines of HTML code in your Web site design that basically describe what the content is on your Web site to the search engines. For several years these meta tags were very important in helping you to get your Web site to the top of the search engines. But for months now, top search engine experts have declared that meta tags are now completely irrelevant in helping you to obtain great search engine rankings.

Despite the fact that those of us who regularly follow search engine technology know that meta tags are now irrelevant, there are many, many "technology experts" out there who still talk about how important meta tags are. These people are operating off of old, outdated information, not really knowing how far behind they are in understanding today's technology. But if you don't have a simple question like this to ask them, you could easily fall prey to how impressive their information about technology may sound to you.

So if you ask someone the meta tag question I suggested above, and if the person responds by telling you that meta tags are an important component in getting you to the top of all the search engines, you may just want to turn immediately and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. (May, 2004 update---Google and Yahoo! are now utilizing meta keyword tags once again as a component in determining their search rankings. Knowing this, other search engines may begin to do so also. However, meta tags continue to be by far a much smaller component in search engine rankings then they were just a few years ago.)

In today's real estate industry, technology is an extremely vital component for top agents and companies who want to continue growing their real estate businesses. With this in mind, you now have some simple tools to ensure that you'll always hire a technology expert who will deliver the best service imaginable to you.

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