Diagnosis:  Your email drip campaigns are not effective.Symptoms:  The recipients of your drip email campaigns delete them, or -  worse - they ask to be removed from the campaign, causing you a loss of direct contact with your potential clients.  You fear you may be losing your potential clients to the competition.

One of my favorite activities is to watch salespeople develop rapport and secure a client. As an outsider, who is basically a fly on the wall, watching these interactions I am always interested in these salespeople’s skills and how they go about their business.

It all started when I added a comment to a post about the amount of website traffic a site receives. The comment stream had a very good discussion on how to gage someone else’s website traffic. I threw out Alexa as one resource to compare websites. Admittedly, I have not done much reconnaissance on my competition but I have used Alexa in the past to compare sites. And while I would never trust the numbers (because even I know ways to exploit the data) I have used it to look at trends between two sites. That is, until Jeff Turner came back with an interesting post about Alexa.

Sure, you’d probably admit that you should manage your time better.  Most of us would!  The actual statistics on wasted time, though, are really shocking. Time management is a critical issue facing businesses and individuals alike.

Within your business is a million dollar system. Perhaps you have several million-dollar systems. Now when I say system, I am referring to a clearly documented or replicatable way of doing things that has been proven and OH did I say, “Documented”. Unless your work or idea or way of doing things is documented, it’s really not a system. It is merely an idea of “how things get done from time to time”. Maybe it’s an excellent way of getting things done and it happens regularly in your business but if it’s not replicatable, other than one mouth to another, then you do not have a system dependent environment. You have a people dependent environment.

We all work hard to make the best possible profit. A high profit means you’re running a successful business. Your commission, minus your expenses, equals your profit. Simple, right? But wouldn’t you like to take those profits and increase them? Everyone would like to make more money with the resources they already have, but very few people know how, or worse yet, don’t even realize that the tools to increase their profits are right at their fingertips.

The other day someone asked me. “If you could only make one edit to a website to achieve better search engine optimization, what would it be?” After clarifying that the edit had to be on the site (meaning link building wasn’t an option) I responded by saying that tweaking the Title Tag would probably be the first place to start.

You work hard. You make the sale. You’re successful. You’re a leading agent. You eat, breathe and sleep real estate. So why doesn’t your bank account and your attitude reflect those characteristics? Have you ever wondered why your even in the business? Or do you wonder why your competitors and co-agents are happier and wealthier and don’t work nearly as hard as you do?

In the scheme of life, we all tend to make mistakes. It’s what we learn from those mistakes that will ultimately alter the future for better or for worse.