086 – 10 Ways Realtors Can Use LinkedIn for More Listings and Buyers

Karen Yankovich  0:00  

You’re listening to the good girls get rich podcast episode 86. 

Intro  0:05  

Welcome to the good girls get rich podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are girl, stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies and make the big bucks. 

Karen Yankovich  0:23  

Hello, I’m Karen Yankovich, the host of the good girls get rich podcast. And we are brought to you by up level media, the proud sponsor of the simple relationship and heart based LinkedIn marketing system that gets you on the phone consistently with your perfect people, people who you can’t wait to have the opportunity to chat with and the conversation around LinkedIn. And this simple LinkedIn marketing system is always happening over at Karen Yankovich. com slash Facebook group, we would love to have you over there. 

So today’s episode, we are talking to our real estate friends. So if you are not a real estate agent, and you’re listening to the show, number one, I’d love for you to refer this to your realtor friends because there’s lots of great behind the scenes and, and you know, little known tips for real estate agents and how they can very simply use LinkedIn. You know, there’s a lot of overwhelmed with the tools available to you real estate agents. So I want to make this really simple for you. But who doesn’t love simple LinkedIn tips, right. So even if real estate is not your jam, I think you’re still going to want to listen in because there’s lots of good things here that will be able to be applied no matter what industry you’re in. So you know that if you have listened before, you know that as much as I love to connect with you, digitally, there is nothing better than connecting with you personally. So go check out Karenyankovich.com/events, and see what we’ve got coming up. And maybe we can meet in person at an upcoming event. 

And if you’ve listened before, or if you love what you hear today, I love to hear from you. So make sure that first of all, make sure you’re subscribing to the good girls get rich on Apple podcasts or wherever you’re listening to the show, so that you don’t miss an episode. But leave us a review, we’re on your podcast player of choice, because that helps us really dive deeper into the kinds of content that we do for you. It gives us a sense of what you want to hear from us. So you can either either leave us a review on the podcast player that you’re listening to, or go to Karen Yankovich. com slash speak pipe, or in the show notes. There’s a link for speak pipe in the blog associated with this at Karen yankovich.com slash 086. And you can leave us a review so that we can hear your voice may be played on the show. We love to do that. 

And of course, I’d love for you to share this episode on social media, use the hashtag good girls get rich tag me, I’m at Karen Yankovich. So that we’re sure to see your post, and we can share your post with our audience. And then we get more visibility that way, right? We both get more visibility that way. And remember, if you want to see the if you want to kind of quick synopsis of this or read the entire transcript for this episode, go to Karenyankovich.com/086. So let’s dive in to the episode today.

I have been doing a lot of speaking at Real Estate conferences lately. And I love my real estate friends, you guys are so hard working and such hustlers. It’s so amazing to kind of get to know a little bit about behind the scenes of your businesses. What I also know is there’s a ton of competition in real estate, right? I mean, some of the small towns, there’s 1015 real estate agents in that town. So you’ve got to stand out from the crowd. And also, sometimes I’m hearing that also sometimes feels like a hamster wheel. 

There’s just so much to do. And if you listen to some of our recent episodes, about productivity, you know, to do lists are the bane of our existence, right, they’re not really helping us. So I like simple processes, because I want to get you off the hamster wheel. I know there’s also an insane amount of tools available to you, oh my gosh, my private real estate clients, they’re sharing with me all the time, all of the amazing tools that are available to them. And, you know, what I do sometimes is help them simplify it, let’s strip it down to what are the tools that are going to be the most impactful for you. Because while we love visibility, we want clients, right? And I teach visibility. So I love that you are seeing that you understand the value of all of these great tools that are available to you, and the visibility that it gets you. But there needs to be a plan to drive that to profitability. Right? That makes sense.

So you’re seeing that, can you relate to this? Can you relate to just the competition that you’re focused that you’ve got in your world, that you feel like you’re on a hamster wheel sometimes? And just how do you weed through the insane amount of tools available to you. At the end of the day, you know, let’s strip this down, it comes down to sales, right? It comes down to listings, and buyers. And if you check out Episode 76. On this podcast, we talk a lot about what the point is of LinkedIn. And really, it’s what the point is of digital marketing, the point of all of these tools that we have in the point of everything that we do from a marketing standpoint, and with all these tools, and all this visibility is listings and buyers. Right.

So how do you get listings and buyers? Well, here’s the deal.

You know, I talked a little bit already about how much I love meeting you and person, because there’s nothing no matter how many amazing digital tools are available to us. There is nothing like relationships to get you the business, right? I mean, listen, I love it. When people come to contact me from Twitter and said, I want to buy something. And I bet you love it. When people say I saw your Facebook post, can you go share? Can you show me a couple houses today? I bet you love that. But at the end of the day, I bet that most of your business is coming from the relationships you build, right the people that you actually have talked to, and built relationships with. 

That’s where the businesses and those relationships, no matter how much we love social media, no matter how much we love, visibility, and Twitter, and Facebook, and all the Instagram and all this cool stuff. The relationships are happening on LinkedIn. So let’s talk about some ways that you can leverage LinkedIn to build those relationships. 

So the first thing we need to talk about is the foundational stuff, the stuff you have to take care of once and then just tweak. And that is your profile, you have got to do a good job on your profile. And we’ve done a ton of shows about your headline and your summary and things like that. But you’ve got to take time to do this. And as a real estate agent, I want you to think about what are people searching for on LinkedIn that you want to come up as the search result. 

And we did a whole episode on this actually, just a couple episodes ago, Episode 84 was all about how to use keywords in your profile. So I’m not going to dive deep into that here on this episode. But know that for you keywords or geography, right, if people just put in real estate agent, people are going to be coming from all over the world that doesn’t help you. But if you live in Princeton, New Jersey, and and you sell houses in Princeton, New Jersey, then Princeton is a keyword for you. Because if people come on LinkedIn, and they search Princeton, New Jersey real estate, you damn well want to come up for that for that search, right? 

So you need to be using those words, the geography, the communities that you sell in the communities that you serve, you need to use that geography in your profile. You want to have a headline that makes you stand out. Do you have a niche? Right? Do you serve millennials? Do you serve the luxury market? What market Do you mainly serve? And you want to speak directly to that market? Because we already talked about the insane amount of competition that you have, right? You know, if somebody says, Hey, I need a real estate agent in, you know, Bergen County, New Jersey, or in Ridgewood, New Jersey, there’s probably 100, right? So you’re going to be like, whatever name pops up first. But if they say, I need a real estate agent in Ridgewood, New Jersey that focuses on the millennial market, and that’s you, they’re going to say, you know what, I hear that Sue Smith does a great job with that market, you’re going to get more referrals if you have a niche. So we’re not going to dive deep into that right now. But just know, if you have a niche, claim that own that in your profile, okay, create a profile that really stands out from your competition.

This, I can’t emphasize this enough, you have to you have to do a great job on your profile. 

And that means you have to make the profile Tell me about you and your profile, but make it about your clients. Right. Like you can say, I’ve you know, I’ve helped over, you know, 50 millennials get into the real estate market with their first house. It’s you telling me about me, but you’re making you but you’re making it about me, right? Hey, I’m a millennial, and I want my first house. And I know it’s hard to get into my first house, you can help me with that. Right? You see what I’m saying? So tell me about you. But make it about me? Are you talking about the profile for 16 entire shows. So I don’t want to dive deeper do that. But know that you’ve got to take some time and do a great profile. 

The next thing, tip number two that we’re going to talk about here today is create a company page for your business. Now, we also talked about company pages, and Episode 71. So Episode 71 was Rebecca for to cheat, she actually works for LinkedIn, and we talked about the LinkedIn company page, you need to create a company page, even if you are working under somebody or have it you know, like no matter what stage you’re at, in your real estate business, create a LinkedIn company page. Okay, create a LinkedIn company page, put every last detail about your business, on your company page, fill in all the information about your company at page just as you would any other social media search service, right. So put the URLs to your website, you can post links in there to your listings, add your bio, create areas that you specialize in, right, that niche we talked about, talking about your agency, talk about the successes, talk about your certifications, this is all about numbers, your profile is about you, this is about your business, okay? 

Once you have that, make sure that you’ve just like on your personal profile, I want you to have a banner, make sure you have a great banner on your company page. Now the banner for you is simple, because you can just take a picture of some gorgeous landmark in the community that you serve. Right?

That is, that’s all you need to do, you don’t have to have, you know, hire a graphic designer to do this. It can be simple, right? Create the things that make you stand out from the crowd. You know, make make it stand out from all of the other agents make it look distinct. You know, if you’ve got videos, want to talk a little bit about videos, add the videos, if you’ve got like a an explainer video or an overview video, this is where you want to add that, okay, any visual content you create will help this so you can upload that right to your front company page. 

So don’t overlook the value of your company page. Because just like we talked a little bit about the importance of keywords, this by the way, your LinkedIn content and your company page content also come up in Google. Right. So the more content and LinkedIn brings high and Google, if you put put my name in a Google search, I think my website and Twitter may come up first.

But LinkedIn is in the top three, always. Okay, so you want to have like 10 pages of Google, LinkedIn is high, you want to make sure that it’s that you are taking advantage of this. Because this is the stuff while you’re spinning your wheels with all these other tools that are available to and creating more visibility and all this other stuff. You’re overlooking the foundational stuff, right, and that is your profile and your company page, take care of this stuff. This is a half a day’s work that is going to pay off for years to come. 

The third thing I want you to do once you have these two things done is connect consistently with your potential buyers and sellers. And let’s make this micro targeted. I do not want you connecting with 100 people a day, I don’t want you connecting with 100 people a week, I want you to be thinking about connecting consistently. 

Now you’ve got this great profile on LinkedIn. Right? Think Don’t, don’t worry about cold leads right now. It’ll take you so long to get through your warm leads that if you’re connected with 20 people a week, and that’s always my recommended starting point, right? That might actually be too many, if you’re doing a really good job at this, because you’re doing a really good job with this. Connect with 20 people a week warm leads, I am sure that almost everybody that’s listening to this podcast, that’s a real estate agent is in a chamber of commerce. Or if you’re not, you should be right. Have you ever opened up that directory, and you’ll need to get everybody in there? Right? You don’t need to go you walk into a chamber of commerce meeting, there’s 100 people in that meeting and you you don’t really know who the buyers or sellers are. But if you have a niche, right, or if you’ve got you know if you know people that are the movers and shakers in your industry, or if you know are in the business industry or in the community, cherry pick, go through that directory and cherry pick the people that are the movers and shakers in your community, in the chambers of commerce in the in the other associations and the other local business associations. I know here in the US There are tons of local business associations Connect consistently with the movers and shakers, with the people that are most influential in business in the community.

These are the people that know people micro targeted connecting warm leads. It’s not like hey, I’m a real estate agent in the community. I’d like to get to know you the the connection request is we’re both members of the Hackensack New Jersey Chamber of Commerce. And I’d love to get I’m looking to get to I’d like to dive deeper and get to know a little bit more about what you’re, you know what the people are who the people are in this chamber, okay? That’s the connection request. You’re not saying, hey, you’re looking to buy a house or sell a house, here’s my business card. You’re not saying that at all. You’re building relationships, actual relationships? Do they know what the real estate agents? Sure they do. 

But remember, you’ve already taken the time to make yourself look like a freaking rock star with a great profile and a great business page. This is something many real estate agents are not doing. This is why I’m doing this podcast. Because I it drives me crazy when I can enter the room full of real estate agents. And let’s say there’s 100 real estate agents in the room. And 20 of them have LinkedIn profiles that they’re using drives me crazy, because this is the slam dunk. This is the easy stuff. This is where the relationships are happening. Not all the churn and the hamster wheel stuff, the actual relationships, micro target those relationships, micro targeting, have lunch with them, right actually get to know them, you know, stand out from the crowd. Do this consistently. 

We did an episode also where we’re looking to a lot of episodes in the show about what you need to do, you know, consistently Episode 80 was what what you need to do no matter what on LinkedIn, and the connecting piece is the piece that you absolutely need to be doing consistently. 

The fourth tip I want to share with you is video. LinkedIn has recently started to roll out live video. So if you’ve got live video, man, you better be using it because it is hot. It is getting remember you’re connecting consistently. 

So now you are intentionally building a network full of valuable people not reactive. Full of people trying to sell you something right, you’re building a network intentionally now you want to stay in front of them, you want your content to be in front of them video is shown and engaged with by more people than anything else. 

Okay, you’ve got to be using video on LinkedIn, you can do some you can create a pre recorded video as well, that’s absolutely fine. and upload that. But upload it natively. I don’t want your YouTube links in here, because they’re not going to get shown as consistently as the native video you upload. 

So what I mean by that is, let’s say you record a video, all right, and it’s going to go to YouTube, and you upload it to YouTube, that video before you upload it to YouTube. That’s your native video, I want you to upload that to LinkedIn, you can add captions to your video. And that way people if they’re scrolling down the feed, they don’t have to actually click play to listen, they can watch it, they can see you I’d love you to be on camera if you can, and they can read what’s going on on the captions. Okay, you can go to my profile, linkedin.com such in such Karen Yankovich. And you can see some of the videos I’ve done. And you can see what I mean by the captions really easy to do. 

Okay, the fifth thing, I want you to do the fifth tip for real estate agents, and this is a big one. This is a big one that is so it’s such a slam dunk for this industry. And so few people are doing it that my clients that are doing it are killing it. Connect with the local media and journalists on LinkedIn. Remember, you’ve done the point part of looking like a rockstar, right? Connect with the local media and journalists go to I mean, you probably know who they are. But like I live in New Jersey, so I would go to nj biz.com. type in the words real estate into the search and see what comes up. And then see who the journalists are that are writing the articles about real estate in your state and connect with them on LinkedIn. And don’t connect with them and say, Hey, use me next time you have an article, connect with them and say I loved your article about this or that. 

Okay, you want to you want to find an article that they’ve written first, and then connect with them reference the article. Remember now this is that while it’s still kind of a cold lead, you’ve just warmed it up, right? Because you you’re stroking them a little bit with talking about the article that they’ve written. And then share that article, tag them in on your LinkedIn profile. I mean, this is a slam dunk, the media and journalists are looking for you news is 24 seven. Okay, news is 24. Seven, they need your help. So connect with the media connect with the journalists that write about real estate in your community.

Heck, I had real estate agents get national media coverage, which Listen, I get at the end of the day, if you’re published in the New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal, or realtor.com, or NBC news.com. It might not get you that necessarily get you that local business, it sure as heck is going to get you lots of visibility. Right. But it’s also imagine what you can do if you connect with somebody, and this happened for one of my clients. Aaron, if you’re listening, I’m still bragging on you. This happened to one of my clients, where he reached out to a journalist on NBC News. com and did exactly what we talked about found an article that they wrote, shared it on his wall look like a rockstar connected with them on LinkedIn, share the article tag them that started a conversation within a week with the journalist on you know, thank hit first. Initially, they thanked him for sharing it. And the journalists started asking him a couple questions asked if he could interview him turn into a full page article on NBC News. com, which is seen by I don’t know 65 million people a month.

So talking about visibility. But that’s not where this is most valuable. Where this is most valuable for him is he can print that article. And when he goes out on listing appointments, and everybody else is talking about whatever they talk about on listing appointments to try to get the business, he drops a copy a printed copy of that article on the table and says, Well, when I was featured in NBC news.com this year, about housing prices, like talk about standing out from your competition, right?

This happened within a week because he did not even the dive deep stuff that I teach LinkedIn, realtors on LinkedIn, the simple stuff here the profile, he did you know, and he did the keywords, he looked like a rock star, he connected with the media found an article and within a week and a half was featured in NBC News. com. I mean, it happens that quickly.

So let’s talk quickly about those first five tips. Again, tip number one is your profile. Don’t overlook the geography don’t skip this part, you’ve got to do a great have a great profile for everything else to be valuable. Tip number two, make sure you create a company page, you want to do this for yourself, this is really going to be valuable for you. Tip number three, connect consistently. Don’t skip this piece, 20 people a week micro targeted number for video, video video, do some videos, upload those babies to LinkedIn and you’re going to see your engagement is going to explode. This is so simple, you’re probably doing some of this video already. 

Don’t overlook the value of it has on LinkedIn, this is where the business is happening. This is where the relationships are being made that are making the real are using this an incredible amount of money and connect with the media connect with the journalists, okay, people are vetting you, before they hire you. LinkedIn comes up high in Google search. If you’re getting media, by the way on all of these things, that’s going to make you now like I mentioned you I have 10 pages on Google, imagine what that does for your business. If you have 10 pages on Google, and people vet you, right, and you use LinkedIn to develop these relationships. 

Now I know I promised you 10 tips. And this is only five tips. There’s a link, I don’t want to I don’t want this podcast to be a two hour training. So I there’s a link to download a bonus with the additional five insider tips on that real estate agents can use to get more buyers and get more listings using LinkedIn.

Okay, so go to Karen Yankovich.com/086 download to get that link to the bonus download. And you can you’ll have the additional five, come to the Facebook group,

Karen yankovich.com/Facebookgroup, if you want to, if you want, I’m in there doing live Q and A’s on a regular basis. Or if you drop a question in there, if you have a question about the additional five, because you know that we didn’t cover here in this, I’m happy to dive deeper into any of that in the Facebook group. 

So download the bonus. Okay, don’t miss that because the extra five or ones you’re going to want to check out. download that. And if you want me to talk more about any of those come into the Facebook group, let me know. And I’ll dive deeper, I’ll answer your questions there. whatever questions you have. Okay, so I hope that I’ve inspired you to just at least looked at look at LinkedIn, some of this work is up front, and I know you’re slammed with a ton of work, but you’ve got to do this part, you’ve got to do this part. Because if you do this part, and and again, it’s a half day’s work up front, right? If you do this part, and then you build this consistent connecting in with the with the people that are influencers in your community, within the journalists, you know, there’s lots of other people we can connect you with. And we can talk about that in the LinkedIn group.

If you If you want, we can totally talk about that there. And the Facebook group about LinkedIn, okay. This is where this happens, this is where the business happens. So so so maybe cut out an hour to have some of the stuff that is not really getting you what you want, maybe take some of the money you’re spending on buying leads from places I don’t like to call out places, but starts with a Z. Maybe take some of that money and you put it into somebody, you’re hiring somebody to help you with this. Because this is where the business is happening. This is where relationships are happening. And by the way, if people are searching, you know, Princeton, New Jersey real estate, those are people that you know, are interested in what you’re doing. If you are not doing that piece, you’re giving that business to somebody else, while you’re spending money, and all this other crazy stuff. Don’t skip this, okay, don’t skip this. 

At the end of the day, I want to reduce your overwhelm. This is not just something that’s another thing on your to do list, I want you to be using this powerful platform to its max, this is where the relationships are happening. This is where businesses happening. If you notice, even if you just look at social media in general, right? You know, every there’s crackdowns everywhere on bots and all this crazy stuff that’s happening. LinkedIn is not in the news about this stuff. Because LinkedIn has always been about authenticity, it has always been about relationships, they have always been shutting people’s profiles down for this. And by the way, if you’re using tools on LinkedIn bots, to spin if you’re hiring people to get you 100, or 200, leads a week on LinkedIn, today’s a day to stop because LinkedIn is shutting down the profiles of the users that are doing this, you need to be using LinkedIn on a micro level, you need to be connecting consistently with five or 10 or 20 people a week, that can make amazing changes in your business people that if you get them on your calendar, because my goal is for you to be on the phone with them not just be connected to them, I want you actually on the phone with them, you’ll be jumping up and down that you have a call with these people. Okay?

Most of this work is done up front doesn’t need to be looked at on occasion. But it just needs to be done up front, you just have to incorporate the simple systems after that into your processes into your world. And some of it doesn’t even need to be done by you, you’ve got some help is it can be that simple. You know that I want to support you in this. That’s why I do this podcast, we have the download. So don’t miss the download at KarenYankovich.com/086download. We’ve got the free Facebook group, Karen yankovich.com slash Facebook group. We do pop up live strategy sessions there and so much more. So join us there.

And don’t forget, if before you go, if you can help me out, take a quick screenshot of this episode on your phone and share that on social media. Okay, share that you’re listening to this episode, share this in your real estate groups, because that would help me out. Right if they are if this has helped you out, I’d love for you to help me out and share this episode with the groups that you’re connected to.

And if you want some help, we do have private strategy sessions and masterminds that we run that we can support you in this with go to Karen yankovich.com slash apply. And you can get an application to a no obligation application to for a quick chat with somebody to see what that looks like. Maybe it’s something that you’re interested in, maybe it’s not conversation is just so we can both kind of vet each other, no obligation whatsoever. The bottom line is I want this to be simple for you. I am here for you in whatever way that looks like the free Facebook group. Or if you want you know to to take a look at what some private strategy or masterminds might look like the end of the day. I want this to be simple for you. So let’s let it be simple. See you back here next week with another great episode of the good girls get rich podcast.