RE/MAX Preferred: 6 Profile Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make

Someone recently brought a Tumblr blog to my attention, the sole content of which is headshot after headshot of real estate agents – no text or commentary at all. The blog features nothing but photo after photo of agent pics that are apparently supposed to be funny in a laughing at you, versus laughing with you, sort of way.

Of course, we’ve all seen agent photos on an ad, sign or bus bench that make us cringe. But as I was flipping through this particular blog, that wasn’t the general flavor of the photos I was seeing. Sure, some of them were silly, and a few were definitely ill-advised. But others were clearly an isolated element of a bigger picture branding campaign made absurd by taking them out of context, and still others were pretty compelling conversation starters – like the agent who substituted his face for McCauley Culkin’s in a parody of the Home Alone poster.

Truth is, when it comes to marketing yourself as a real estate agent, I can think of many things worse than being branded as a light-hearted, creative marketer with a great sense of humor.

In fact, you know what’s worse? No one noticing your marketing at all.

In service of optimizing your own Profile’s power to get noticed in the right way by the right people, here are a few of the most common glitches, faux pas and plain old mistakes that we see agents make on their Trulia Profiles – and my suggestions for avoiding them:

1. Outdated or inaccurate.

Times change, and so do the basics that go on your Trulia Profile, like:

your headshot

your brokerage name

your contact information

your web address and social media handles

your areas of specialization.

More importantly, what also tends to evolve over time is the way that you describe what you do in a way that is compelling – even magnetic – to the sorts of buyers and sellers you want to draw into your business. Imagine, if you will, that a buyer searches our Agent Directory, reviews your Profile, thinks “hmmm, that chap looks interesting!” and picks up the phone to call the number you have listed, only to get a “this number is no longer in service message?”

Not good.

Ensure that your Profile is updated and all the information on it accurate, at the very, very minimum. And this includes your picture, folks. I’ll say no more on that.

2. Generic.

Have you ever known an agent who has ads everywhere, really bad ads, like with animals or cheesy puns in them – and who just so happens to sell what seems like every other house in town? That’s because marketing your personal brand is largely about creating a singular message that buyers and sellers can’t forget, and staying in the fronts of their minds on all things real estate. That’s why, a “bad” but memorable Profile can – in some cases – actually be more effective than a plain vanilla, generic one.

That said, there’s no reason your ads must be bad to differentiate your marketing from the masses. When it comes to your Profile, standing out is largely about seeding your About, Experience & Skills, Specializations and other sections with messages that speak to the specific wants and needs of a sub-segment of local buyers or sellers that you want to build your business around, and that let this group know that you are uniquely qualified to relate to and serve them.

Call out things like:

Personal and professional interests and skills that might be relevant or relatable to your target group of buyers or sellers, like the fact that you own horses, are an urban gardener or were an accountant, attorney or professional marketer, in a prior life.

Geographic areas you’ve worked extensively in – and want to in the future – narrower than just your city or town, like a district or neighborhood

Whether you work with primarily buyers, sellers, investors, women, seniors, second home buyers, first-time buyers or some other niche population

Specific property types you have particular skill or experience with, like Victorians, new builds, condos, entry-level homes or multi-million dollar estates

Data points that prove why you are uniquely qualified, compared to the other agents in your area, to do whatever it is you claim you are uniquely qualified to do! (See #3, below.)

Do a gut check on this – put yourself in the mindset of the target clients you most want to attract. peruse other local agent Profiles, then take a look at your own and ask yourself this question:

After a 3-second glance at this Profile, would I call me versus the other agents in town?

If your honest answer to yourself is ‘no,’ keep working on precisely how to message your differentiators in your Profile.

Look at every single character you enter as an opportunity to differentiate. Even the Profile form fields for your Headline and website address(es), for example, create opportunities for you to deliver one of these messages. For example, a local agent in my area who specializes in properties with ample acreage maintains her website on the url estatesandranches.com; another agent friend of mine in South Carolina goes under theheadline “The Fixer Upper Specialist.”

3. Fluffery sans substance.

This is your shot to strut your stuff, so feel free to be aggressive in how you promote yourself. But a Profile that is full of fluffy marketing claims, like “Best” “Number 1” “Top” “Million Dollar,” etc. with absolutely zero data points, hard numbers or specific examples to back it up will instantly trigger the average real estate consumers’ malarkey detector.

Consider including unique angles on your professional track record to back up your boasts, if you make them, like:

My average listing sells for X% over asking

My average listing gets 8 offers

My average buyer client gets a 10% discount off list price

I represented 75% of the buyers of homes on Magnolia Lane last year

Even Trulia Pro Josh Altman, who is actually on a show called Million Dollar Listing, devotes ample website real estate to photos and data points of his recent sales that prove his expertise at selling multi-million dollar luxury properties in Beverly Hills.

There are a handful of other ways to add proof points to your Profile, which also do double duty at bringing buyers’ and sellers’ attention to your Profile in the first place:

answering questions on Trulia Voices

writing blog posts, tagging them appropriately for your local markets and the subject matter

asking your happy buyer and seller clients to add a quick, rave review, and even

checking into the listings in your area of specialization as you visit them on caravans, broker’s opens, or while showing them to your clients.

4. Incomplete or lacks the basics.

I know this is obvious. But the fact that it’s obvious is irrelevant, as long as there are still Profiles that go uncompleted. I like to think that most of us know how essential it is to make sure our Profiles and every single internet presence we have contains the most basic contact information, like our phone numbers, websites and email addresses. So, maybe the reason Profiles are left incomplete is that right after starting the Profile, our cracker-jack agent got distracted or pulled off onto one of the million urgencies that fill up our days, and then simply forgot to come back to it.

That’s what I like to think.

Even if you *think* your Profile looked fantastic when you looked at it, oh, in the last millennium (which, btw, wasn’t that long ago!) humor me and click here to check it out again – just to make sure it’s complete and up-to-date.

5. Not responding to leads your Profile generates.

We agents go to the ends of the earth, around a few times and then circle back to generate leads. Yet time and time again, the data shows the ugly truth that we often fail to respond to incoming leads in a timely fashion – especially online leads. Here’s the deal: the buyers and sellers who come to Trulia and participate in the discussions on Trulia Voices or search the directory to find an agent are serious, and they often sort through, find a few agents who seem like they might be a good fit, review their Profiles and then reach out to a handful of agents at a time.

If you don’t respond to such incoming leads quickly, that’s the same, in this internet age, as not responding at all. You’d be surprised at the number of times I’ve heard buyers, in particular, say that the first agent who responded to their email was the agent they picked, primarily on the basis of their responsiveness. That said, it’s never a bad idea to use an hour of downtime on a slow day of the month to go back through old leads in the My Leads section of your Trulia dashboard, and email or call a few of them to see if you can be of any help.

6. Not having one.

If you don’t have a Trulia Profile, you are simply missing out on a completely free opportunity to get in front of masses of real-live home buyers and sellers in your area who are coming to Trulia to look for homes – and agents. Need I say more?