Welcome to www.shiftcreek.com this is our “think tank” loaded with ideas from people who are beating the pavement and making it happen. Most have not gotten news that it is a bad real estate market.
So SHHHHH!
In honor of KW’s Shift we are send the book Shift to the next agent that submits an idea that is approved by the shift creek comity. Happy Selling.

Remember don’t go up the creek without a paddle!!

Through the years we have used several different website providers. All have been great for one reason or another, but one thing most have lacked were good analytics. One of the most important things with any marketing is to make sure it is measurable. See over and over my team leader says find out what is working and DO MORE OF IT!!!
Recently I began using a FR*EE Tool that I love Google Analytics. All you have to do is create a free account with google and click on analytics. You will need to take the HTML coding that is provided and add it to your website. (note: when adding HTML to the back end of your site you will need to switch from visual mode to HTML mode, each site this is done in different ways but typically is pretty easy) Now all of the text added will not be seen from people viewing your site.
Some of the information that is provided is
Location
was it referred from another site
how long did they stay on the site
number of times they returned and how long they spent on your website.
So don’t get taken by the sales pitches from web designers because this can be used with any site at no cost……it even works with the KW template!

var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-5845763-2″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();

Coming to Keller Williams in Atlanta Georgia was an experience that probably saved our career. While we were making it, we wanted to move to the next level. Our weekly consult sessions with our team leader helped us with epic proprtions. Before this everything was truly a “Hobo Shack” a hodge podge of just listed cards, sold cards, truly things that did not earn us any market share. Until now our guidance was sounds like a good idea, give it a try. Sadly it was our marketing dollars that was flushed away with little to no return. Do “just listed” cards and “sold” cards create business? Maybe for us there was no retern.

In our first meeting to transform our job into a business our team leader asked to see our touch program. It was just as she expected, some cards in the mail here and there. See adresses are easy to get by using tax records, but a pure mailing campaign is just plain expensive and sadly when the market fluxuates at all the most important tool gets put away……your prospecting tool. Plus as your have mets grow so does the cost of your marketing budget. So how do you create a system thatis affordable, easy to manage and once in place can do most of the work for you????

EMAIL!!! The cost of one email is the same as a thousand!!! The best part of email compared to a card is they have an easy way to respond to you any time of day! Plus you can write one email and personalize it to each person. Imagine this, it is 7pm and you just remembered it was a friends birthday, but you are cooking dinner and even if you were able to get to the store to buy a card could never get it to them in time….. what to do. In no time at all you can grab your computer and send over an Ecard.

But how do you get information like email and birthday? I can tell you a very expensive way that saw minimal return….. you guessed it mail them OR go green! Out of all of these networking websites such as www.myspace.com or www.linkedin.com we found one that provided email adress and birthday!!!

You can even upload your database. From experience though I want to warn you to only do lists of about 100 at a time any more and your account may get frozen.

When the market started to shift our marketing dollars had to closely be watched. After chatting with our team leader we decided it was best to “Go Green” and so our client touch program went to the web.

 The first thing we did was designed a branded look. While you may think this is expensive our email template designed and first year was only $200. for that just click on this link http://www.mlxjet.com/?rpc=RC5946 

email template

Here is where it gets creative and saved us a ton, we then used our email template to help match and brand our blog. For the blog we used wordpress.com, we LOVE this because it is FR*EE! Once the blog and email mirrored each other we then start posting our articles that we wanted in our newsletter as blog posts.

From there we would cut the first couple catch sentences from the blog post with the title and paste it into an email, the hyper link from the title allows the viewer to click on the title to see the whole article and become a splash page. The content of the newsletter would be like this

2008 Consumers’ Choice Award!!!!

NOW you can see what articles people are viewing so that you can see what really interests your viewers and continue to focus on what people want the most!