Everybody can do something...

“Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something!” as seen on a t-shirt recently and likely a quote by some one notable. I might change the last part to read “Everybody can do something different.,” as I have opined here recently. The key here is to act, to do something and not be frozen into inaction by circumstances, whether they be the economy or anything else.

There is a tendency when times get tough to pull back, to hunker down, to crawl into a hole and hide, until it is over. While it is certainly prudent to review one’s spending on advertising and other marketing expenses in these tough times it is literally impossible to save one’s way out of the mess that we are in right now. In fact a case might easily be made that now is the time, more than ever, to increase spending in some of those areas. As the markets concentrate down (I used the analogy of a pond drying up recently), it is more important than ever that the fewer buyers who are out there be able to find you. That doesn’t happen if you’ve become “invisible” in the market, with no ads, no mailings, nothing to get or keep your name out in the market.

So, what are you to do? I’ve given up the full page ads in any of the local booklets or papers, but find that the agent-shared pages or ads will keep my name out there. I still do my monthly newsletter to my SOI base and I manage to get a quarterly farming postcard mailing out. My Web sites ( I run four real estate Web sites that I maintain myself) are still paying off with 1-2 leads a month and even these SN networks are starting to generate some leads – I participate in Facebook, Twitter, Activerain and LinkedIn.The key word there is “participate”. If you just sign up but never post a Tweet or a Blog entry and never comment on anyone else’s Blog entries, then you’re just wasting your time. You have to be active.

After a long hiatus, I got re-started doing open houses this weekend and met 20 people that I didn’t know before, so open houses pay off (as they always have). I haven’t done floor for a while and probably need to get back to that, too. In these times none of us are “too good” to do some of the things that we maybe stopped doing or just felt that we didn’t have to do any more. Let’s face it, that’s where the public is these days (along with being on the Web) and the public is one of the best sources for new business. I don’t have a 20-year tail of referral business following me around yet; so, I can use all of the new business that I can get.

Maybe I can't do everything, but I’m determined that I will do something and maybe something different that hopefully will work for me. What are you going to do?