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: