In today's Agent Insights post, Ryan - a Realtor in Raleigh, North Carolina - offers agent advice about best ways to generate real estate leads online.

Here's Ryan:

Struggling to generate real estate leads?

Generating leads takes a lot of time and effort, and you won't see immediate results. However if you stay with it, the results will pay off handsomely.

How does a couple new leads per day sound? If you aren’t already using these strategies for generating leads online you should consider starting today.

6 Strategies for Generating Real Estate Leads Online:

Not all metrics are created equal. So, while online marketing continues to promote an ultra-competitive environment for real estate agents, it’s becoming increasingly important for you to gain every advantage possible from data-driven marketing metrics.

Many real estate marketing metrics are too narrowly focused and miss the big picture. I’ve put together five unique metrics that supplement for this lack of clarity and are designed specifically to help you grow your business.

Table of Contents:

1. Effort by Lead Source
2. Time Per Engagement Activity
3. Average Time Spent to Gain a Face-to-Face Meeting
4. Percent of ‘Active’ Database
5. Days Since Last Touch

In today's Agent Insights post, Patricia Kennedy - a Real Estate Agent at Evers & Company Real Estate in Washington DC - shares her take whether it's worthwhile to hold on to real estate clients if they want out.

Here's Patricia:

Does it ever make sense to try to hold sellers to an agreement when they want out?  

There are usually more than one of several factors that cause sellers to want out of a listing or buyer agency agreement:

• The agent has been unsuccessful at finding a buyer.
• The agent is not doing what he said he would do to market the home.
• The home isn't getting showings.
• The listing agreement was for an unusually long period of time - longer than the sellers want to wait to make a change.
• The agent has made some mistake in their handling of the listing, and the sellers don't like the way the clean up operation got handled.
• The agent has been generally incompetent or unethical, and the sellers want to start over.

You get the drift.  

Negotiating is part of everyday life. In business effective negotiating is absolutely critical to your success as a real estate pro. Poor negotiation can cripple you by losing valuable real estate clients to other agents. While most negotiating strategies seem like common sense, it's not uncommon for people to get caught up in the emotion of the moment and ignore the foundations of negotiating.

Here are 7 steps to successful negotiations:

If you want your clients to return, good service is not good enough. Even if your clients are happy at the time of the transaction, that won’t guarantee repeat business in the future.

If you want clients to return - better yet become advocates for your business - you need to take a more proactive approach. It’s all about planning and executing on a daily basis.

Want to know how to keep your clients forever? Follow these 5 steps:

Halloween is not complete without Jack O'Lanterns. Here is a gallery of our favorite ones (kid friendly):

As a real estate agent you are used to hearing the word ‘No’. You can’t escape rejection.  But you can let it go. Fear of rejection is not a helpful emotion in business as it’s not personal. Have confidence in your approach to business and your industry expertise. View every rejection as an opportunity and not as an attack on your personal character.

Real Estate Agents: Face Your Fears!

Here are 5 steps to overcome your fear of rejection:

In today's Agent Insights post, Dusty Baker - a Real Estate Agent in Santa Barbara, California - shares how he got over fear of being obnoxious by adopting the pleasant persistence approach.

Here's Dusty:

I entered real estate with a very bad stigma in my head about real estate agents. They were all obnoxious overbearing cheesy salesmen that belonged on a used car lot. In response to that stigma (which of course was an overblown stereotype), I conducted my practice on the far other end of the spectrum. I gave respectful distance to a fault. And it bit me in the butt; in countless ways.

My sheepish business practices lost me upwards of $3,000,000 in sales - multiple buyers and sellers that went in the direction of whichever real estate agent was around them when they decided to make their move. However, after some frustrating trial and error, I found a comfortable medium where my business practices were strong but not obnoxious.

The "I'm not ready right now" Myth

Halloween isn’t limited to those who sell candy corn and costumes. You can scare up real estate leads over Halloween if you’re willing to be creative and engaged with your community.

Put these 5 Halloween marketing tips to good use:

Boosting aesthetic appeal of your client’s home is the best and easiest way to attract potential buyers. Home staging is an important part of enticing buyers – it’s all about the first impression. There are a variety of staging options that are inexpensive and easy too. The beauty of home staging is that it does not have to cost a lot of money to achieve an amazing transformation.

Here are 5 top home staging tips for real estate agents: