A couple weeks ago my business partner Lewis Howes and I co-hosted an event in San Diego. The emcee of the event asked the audience “Who here has purchased any of Sean & Lewis’ products?” The majority of the crowd had purchased at least one of our products. He asked several people for feedback on their experience with our products…. There were lots of compliments coming out and good feedback, etc. and then the gentleman pictured below stood up and told the story of the $1,000 brownie.

EMCEE: So you have purchased one of Sean and Lewis’ products – what did you think of it?

ATTENDEE: I think it is a great product – but can I talk for a minute about the real reason I even went through the product in the first place?

EMCEE: Sure – please do

ATTENDEE: Ok – So I originally attended a webinar with Sean & Lewis. I thought the webinar was great and ultimately decided to buy their $1,000 Social Media Training “500 Million Strong” at the end of the webinar. A few days after I purchased it my mailman delivered a small package. Inside that package was a nice card from Sean & Lewis and 3 gourmet brownies! It was totally unexpected and I thought it was a nice gesture.

I proceeded to devour the brownies that day. And then about 60 days passed and I had yet to spend 5 minutes looking at the course I had paid so much money for. I was gonna ask for a refund and thought to myself – “These guys were kind enough to send brownies, I should spend at least 5-10 minutes reviewing the content to make sure this is something I dont want.”  So that’s what I did – and several hours later I decided this was one of the best investments I had made for my business. So I did NOT ask for a refund!

I was quite simply blown away. To think that a $10 gift was the catalyst to save a $1,000 refund simply blew me away. Even better at the next break another person approached Lewis and said he had the exact same experience. He too was going to refund but because of the brownies he decided to dive into the product first.

What’s funny is that this idea was that of a new person we had hired last year. She proposed we do it and I thought it was completely unnecessary but it seemed to make her happy so I decided to go along with it. I am so glad I did. At that conference there might have been 20 people who had purchased our $1,000 course and if 2 of them were motivated to keep the product from the brownie – how many others out there had the same experience?

Thanking the people who buy your products and showing them some appreciation can go a long way. This lesson will for sure stick with me as our business grows and now I am looking for creative ways to show some appreciation to folks who pick up our lower priced products. What are you doing to show your customers some love?

How a realtor should be using Social Media – Top 7 tips for Realtors & Social Media

I do many coaching calls for our 500millionstrong clients. Many of them are Realtors and I get a lot of the same questions about Real Estate & Social Media.

So I thought it might be helpful to the Realtor community to give this advice on how to use Social Media.

Here are some of the best ways to use Social Media as a Realtor.

Top 7 ways for a Realtor to use Social Media.

(*in no particular order)

#1 Facebook - Facebook is great for Realtors. Most Realtors get a ton of referral business from friends and family – and primarily this is exactly who your connected to on Facebook. This is also who you clients are connected to The trick is to not be selling your services all the time.

No one goes on Facebook to be sold, so updates like “I am taking new clients” never work.

How do I use Facebook then? Simple, Take the “Top of mind/awareness” approach.

Post updates like “I am grateful to be blessed with so many great clients.” Or post photos of your listings with comments like “Super excited for this new listing – isn’t it beautiful?”

Then get ninja and tag your sellers in those photos. This is a great way to get in front of their network ALWAYS add your clients on Facebook. Communicating with them on “their wall” is a great idea as well. Just keep it classy and don’t sell using this approach – ever”

Be sure to leave an update on their wall once you close. Example – “I just wanted to say thanks for your business. You guys were a treat to work with” or something along those lines.

#2 YouTube – This is often times the most overlooked of all the networks. Hands down YouTube is one of the best things you can do to get more business as a realtor online.

How? Simple – start filming all of your listings and throw them up on Youtube today.  I did this, I kept it real simple (as you can see here) and just turned on my camera and then proceeded to walk and talk. My buyers loved it – My agents loved it as the buyers they showed homes to who had seen the videos were 5x as likely to sign.

1 quick tip when it comes to YouTube:

Make your title “Keyword rich” – Example: If your listing is in Santa Barbara – Make your title “Santa Barbara Real Estate – 1234 hight st” Most of my videos ended up on Google as the first result. This in turn drove a ton of targeted traffic to our website.

If you want more information on how to get your videos to show up on the first page of Google for popular terms like ” Denver Real Estate” go get www.VideoTrafficAcademy.com – I guarantee if you get it – your videos will be all over Google for the best keywords. The course is that good.

#3 Twitter – I honestly think Twitter might be one of the least useful ways to use Social Media for a Realtor. Actually I take that back. It can be useful, but is very time consuming. BUT – if you enjoy Twitter and use it currently – make sure you are focusing on building a local following. If you live in Miami Florida, a follower in Denver probably will never lead to new business.

To build a local following I would look at the followers of News Celebrities, Radio DJ’s, Local Restaurants, Rotary Clubs Etc. These kind of profiles will almost always have a local following. I would then go and follow all of their followers as many will follow you back. Using this tactic – it works as a virtual handshake. Most people you follow will wonder who you are and why you followed them – they in turn will look and your profile and many will click on your website link.

If you don’t want to do this following – you can use a tool like Tweetadder to do it on auto pilot. Tweetadder can be your best friend if you value your time. It’s not cheap – but it’s worth it.

#4 Linkedin - This is the diamond in the rough of Social Networks. Take full advantage of LInkedin I promise you will thank me later. The best thing you can do first is to optimize your profile. My business parter Lewis Howes has a great post here explaining exactly how to do that. The second thing I would do is get active in groups. I would start my own group, and also get active in others that are local.

Start a group – this is a great way to get more referrals. We have a Realtor student in who started a “Young Professionals” group on linkedin. He then invited all of his local friends and the group took off. After 2 months He held a happy hour mixer/get together for the group. The first time he did it – 25 people showed up – not bad! The second mixer he through over 100 attended. As you can imagine – as the head of the group, and the host of these events – he got & gets a ton of referrals! Literally over 2 million dollars in business came from this one tip for him.

#5 Ads – Linkedin & Facebook – As a Realtor, personal branding is everything. Ads can be an amazing way to build your personal brand. There is probably no better tool than Facebook ads to build your personal brand. The targeting options on Facebook are ridiculous. Do you know your customer? If you do you can laser target them on Facebook. Categories for targeting include – Sex, Education levels, Zip Code, City, Marital status, Interests etc.

#6 Blog / Website – While a blog is not a necessity, you should definitely have one. This can be the hub of all your online marketing efforts. A great place to drive Social Traffic to turn it into leads. WordPress is the only platform I would recommend. There a million great themes specifically for Real Estate. I used a WordPress site for my listings. WordPress is super easy to use.

#7 Email Marketing – While not social – A good email marketing campaign should be your #1 priority.  If you set up a decent site with a good email capture in place – you can expect to convert 5-15% of your traffic to your email list. This was vital to my success in Real Estate. Every time I sent an email – my phone immediately rang off the hook. in 1 year my list quickly grew to over 10,000 people. People loved getting my listings by email.

Hopefully this will spark some ideas on ways you can use the internet and Social Media to drive more traffic to your listings. I could have easily written an entire post about each of the 7 ways mentioned above. If you liked what you read or would like more on a specific network or method – let me know below.

On Wednesday March 30th Lewis Howes and I had the honor of hosting Peter Guber on a webinar to discuss the topic of story telling. Peter just came out with a new book called Tell to win – Connect, Persuade and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story.

This webinar was one of top 3 favorites of all time. It’s not everyday you get the opportunity to talk to someone as accomplished as Peter.
To give you an idea of peters success – he is the Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment. Films he personally produced or executive produced, including Rain Man, Batman, The Color Purple, Midnight Express, Gorillas in the Mist: and many more. He is a minority owner of the Golden State Warriors, has been the CEO of Columbia Pictures, etc. The list goes on and on – if you care to see more check out Peter Guber’s Wikipedia.

The book is fascinating and really explains the power of story to win (for lack of a better word . After reading the book and talking with Peter On the webinar I had a personal revelation that confirmed the true power of story. For now watch this replay and let me know in the comments if you want to hear about my personal experience with story telling to sell.

Enjoy.

Today I was on Facebook when a scammer hit me up via chat asking for money. This is the third or fourth time this has happened to me in recent months, so I thought I’d share this video with you so you can see how this scam was orchestrated and what to do in case it happens to you.

A few month’s ago I decided to download Twitter’s iPhone app. One of the first things I noticed was that when you viewed a profile you could see the date they signed up & the account number.  

To verify that is what the number represented I checked Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey’s account and it showed the number 12. (Supposedly the first 10-11 accounts were junk accounts created to test the system.)

You can clearly see from the image his account was one of the first and by the date it looks to be the month and year Twitter launched.

To track Twitter’s growth I initially began clicking on Twitter profiles that were spam targeting me using the @reply method.

Since these accounts usually only last for a day or so I started looking at their sign up date and number. By doing this I could keep an eye on Twitter’s growth as spam accounts were almost always brand new.

I then later began to create new accounts so I could track more accurately.

To track Twitter’s Growth you will need an iPhone and the Twitter app.

You can then repeat the what I did to accurately gauge it for yourself.

Side note – It wouldn’t surprise me if this feature disappears soon from the iPhone app as Twitter has saved their growth numbers & reports for big announcements or conferences in the past.

Here’s a video with me from the first time that I ever spoke live on stage. It was at Than Merrill’s Info Empire event in february of 2010. I was just watching it and I had the same nervous butterflies as if I was back on stage. It’s so strange. . . I’ve done webinars for tens of thousands of people and rarely do I ever get nervous.

I’ve now spoken a bunch of times on stage and I don’t get as nervous; but man, that first time was such a rush! Anyway, this is just a snippet from the first few minutes of my speech. I actually tell a pretty funny story about how I first got into Twitter. Enjoy.

Interview with David Siteman Garland

Smarter, Faster, Cheaper Book Review

About a year ago I had the pleasure of virtually meeting David Siteman Garland (@TheRiseToTheTop) on Twitter. The more I learned about him the more impressed I became with what he was accomplishing online in such a short period of time. I noticed he was interviewing and featuring some of the top pros in the marketing / blogging / new media industry. He hosted interviews With big names like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, Gary Vaynerchuk, some guy named Sean Malarkey,  Tim Ferriss, etc.

Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-Free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business Get the book on Amazon here.

What impressed me the most was how smart his approach was. He was networking and forming alliances with all of the top people in our space and doing it at a rapid pace. His hustle & drive was inspiring. Needless to say I was excited to read his new book Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-Free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business.

Here’s my honest review:

Get this book if you have a business, brand or product. Smarter, Faster, Cheaper is full of practical advice that works. I know it does, because as I read through the chapters I kept relating his experiences and advice to things I had been doing myself online for the last couple years.

What I really like about this book is David doesn’t say “this or that strategy” is what you “have to do”. Instead he exposes you to what he has seen work for himself personally and also what’s has worked for all of the brilliant people he has interviewed. He did a good job of introducing  a ton of good ideas that work well to cultivate relationships and business using mostly free tools available online.

David’s explanation of how the business mindset has drastically changed in the last few years is spot on. He talks about the power of collaboration with other business’s that may share the same customer base. He dives deep into video marketing and using online video to build your brand, which (chapter 7) is a must read.

This book  should be required reading for any college student getting a degree in business or marketing.

For me personally, there weren’t any major light bulb moments but it was  a good refresher and reminder of a plethora of great ideas to build my business online. It was a fun read and time well spent.

It was inspiring and I found it hard to read more than 20 pages at a time without wanting to put the book down and work on the ideas that kept racing through my head. David does a great job of inspiring you to take action which in my opinion is the mark of a good business book.

If you enjoyed “Crush it“, “The Four Hour Work Week“, “Un-Marketing“, “Purple Cow” or “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” — you’ll love this book.

Side note: While searching for photos of David for this post, I came across this and couldn’t resist sharing it with you. David is gonna kill me for posting this but whatever – enjoy.

Caption Contest: Leave a comment with your caption to this photo to win.

The 5 funniest captions will win a copy of David’s new book:

Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-Free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business

I will pick the top 5 funniest captions and announce a winner this Sunday night. Enter as often as you’d like.

Tell me what you’re thankful or grateful for and win an Ipod touch.

When I was younger I used to keep a gratitude journal. I had heard there were benefits to being grateful so I thought ”why not?” I would try this exercise for 30 days.

I would spend 10 minutes a night writing down the things I was grateful for that had happened that day. I got some enormous benefits from that exercise that have lasted throughout the years.

The most important benefit I got from it was a habit of being grateful. I take the time daily to think about things I am grateful for. I do it because it makes me feel good and I truly realize how blessed  I am.

Some new research has been done that proves being grateful or thankful is beneficial to your well being. I did some research for this post and found an interesting article that provided some evidence on the benefits of being grateful.

Heres an excerpt:

So on this Thanksgiving I ask – what are you grateful for?

Leave a comment and let me know. I will be awarding the Ipod in the next few days.

::UPDATE::

After much debate I awarded the ipod to Ellen Crimi Trent. I read and re-read each and every entry and it was damn near impossible to pick a winner. I even tried asking my friends on Facebook for numbers  to randomly pick a winner. I then got lost in the calculation and trying to make sense of those numbers, so I went back to reading the comments and finding one that I felt really moved me.

It was tough picking a winner as there were many that stopped me in my tracks and made me think. So I picked 3 and then asked 2 of my employees to read them and tell me their 3 favorites. Ellen’s came up with both of them. So boom you have your winner.

The reason it moved me? Well I can relate to almost every sentence in her comment. I too feel like I am lucky, I wake up everyday thankful for my life and what I do. I too am thankful for the hardships and crazy negatives that have happened in my life as most of the time they were catalysts to bigger and better things. Finally like Ellen I am grateful for all the amazing people I have met through social media. Most of our employees have come through relationships built using social media and beyond that I have made many great connections, friendships, etc using social media. So that is why I picked Ellen.

Thanks again for everyone of you who took the time to post a comment. I hope it was as beneficial for you as it is to me to take the time and stop and think how grateful I am for everything.

Last week Lewis Howes and I held one of the best webinars we have done to date. We put in many hours planning the flow of the training, gathering facts, designing new slides (over 100 in total). When all was said and done, with promoting & creating this webinar we had well over 40 hours of work put in. Not including all of the hard work our staff put in to help make it a reality.

We ended up having around 1600 register and over 900 show up live for the training. On the webinar we shared a lot of  tips, tactics, theory, and advice. It was almost overwhelming for a lot of folks. We had one person comment that his fingers were bleeding after typing over 6 pages of notes. The instant results were incredible.

We had over 100 people respond via chat on the webinar that they were getting some pretty impressive instant results. Watching the feedback roll in was exciting. It motivated us to see the audience’s results & feedback come in live. As the webinar progressed we were fueled by the positive comments that were pouring in.

At the end of the training we offered people the opportunity to learn more on the topic and buy one of our training products. Many did, and lots more thanked us for the content we gave and asked some good questions. We finished with a round of  Q&A and called it a wrap. We spent a few minutes responding to feedback and made sure our new customers were taken care of and then went for Sushi!

In the days that followed, we got hundreds of positive comments via email, Facebook, LinkedIn, & Twitter. It was exciting reading through the messages, mostly of attendees saying thanks for the training and even a few that had generated monetary gains as a result of what they learned.

Then I got to this one. It wasn’t really negative, per se, but it really affected me.

His email was short and to the point.

“Someday Sean I would really like to attend a webinar by you
or anyone else for that matter that didn’t end in a sales pitch.“

Normally I would dismiss this but I thought about it for 5 minutes and decided to respond. Here is my response:

___________

Rap artist 50 Cent went on a Twitter tirade last night, spewing profanity and an endless stream of obscene photos after  apparently discovering for the first time that he has a Twitter account with over 2.9 million followers. Surprise! The rapper’s account is usually run by a PR rep, but at some point yesterday 50 Cent decided he wanted to have some fun/shoot himself in the foot/vent to his 2.9 million followers.

While it might not have been his greatest move, it did score him a new nickname: Twitty Cent

Sorry Fiddy fans, this was not a hack.  After numerous X-rated posts, Twitpic stepped in and blocked his account. This may have stopped him from posting any more Kim Kardashian burger buns pics, but it certainly didn’t slow down the stream of f-bombs and irreverent slams about pretty much everyone else on his record label (Kat Stacks, Fat Joe, Allhiphop, Soulja Boy, and Miss Info, to name a few).

Is this career suicide? Or a dude from the streets just being real? Check out the full train wreck and then let me know your take on this below.