1. Entering (and preferably winning) awards programs = free publicity and credible media opportunities. But you know what, entering, being nominated or being a finalist and not winning also has the fabulous benefits of the networking opportunities and in many cases it gives you an ability to sit down and do some very cathartic thinking about your business.

2. Perform a survey and put out a press release on the results. We just did one recently on the real estate industry here: http://kirstydunphey.blogspot.com/2008/09/real-estate-agents-trustworthy-is-new.html using a free online survey program and having 500 people respond. The results give journalists some statistics to work with and help get your name out there when you’re published as a source.
3. Subscribe to HARO (help a reporter out www.helpareporter.com/)! There are lots of journalists / bloggers out there looking for great sources

Follow Me on Twitter:

Follow Me on Twitter:

Follow Me on Twitter:

There are lots of ways that Twitter  can help you in the day-to-day running of a real estate agency, but one way is by creating a Private Twitter account.

And the great news is that establishing a ‘Private’ Twitter account takes only a couple of minutes to create & it”s Free.

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows you & your team to post messages up onto the web in real time but with a ”Private” account you can decide who sees your tweets.

Rather than sending out a bulk text message to your team, you could send out a Tweet that is broadcast out to anyone who has access to your Private Twitter account.

It could become an important part of your messaging system. You can also upload photos or videos and tweet them privately through the account to any member of your team.

You could also use it for a secured Brain Storming session where you can have people tweeting their thoughts or ideas in real time and all the data from this collection of thoughts remains up their on your ‘Private’ Twitter account to recall whenever you need it.

It will also provide a way that people can tweet their thoughts & ideas well after the Brain Storming session.

All you need to do is decide on a name for the Brain Storming session, say genyre. Then insert a #hashtag in front of the tweets, to make them #genyre & then all of your tweets will be grouped together & can be found very easily on Twitter in the future.

To give you an example of how a ‘Private’ Twitter account works I currently run a couple of ‘Private’ Twitter accounts.

One for the attendees of my Twitter for Real Estate Workshops & the other one is an account based around a marketing strategy that I’ve developed called ‘The Area Monopoly Strategy’.

As a part of launching this concept I decided to create a ”Private & Strictly Real Estate Agent Only’ Twitter account.

I did this because there are some parts of this strategy that I needed to be able to share with agents exclusively & weren”t for public viewing.

Now, if you are an agent & you’d like to join in then you are most welcome to send through a request for access, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. This is just a live example of how one of these ”Private” Twitter accounts works for me.

Here’s how it works.

To join in go to http://www.Twitter.com/AreaMonopoly and send me a request as seen in the picture below. Then once I”ve confirmed that you’re a real estate agent I’ll manually go in & authorise your access to the account.

Note: To see the Send Request button in the image above you must be logged into your Twitter account.

Now if you don’t have a Twitter account, then this may provide you with a good excuse for why you should go to http://www.Twitter.com & register your Free Twitter account right now.

Once I have approved your request you don’t have to wait for me to send a Tweet. You will be able to go in & read all the previous Tweets that have been sent out via that ‘Private’ Area Monopoly Twitter Account.

I recommend you go into Twitter & set up a ”Private” account for your company & give it a go. You”ll be amazed at how simple & effective it can be.

Follow Me on Twitter: