Marketing With A $0 Budget With Referral Groups Part 1

January 21, 2010

It seems everyone is after our money these days.  Of course, we have a finite amount of money (well, most of us anyway), and so we’re very careful about what we spend on our real estate business.  We’re especially careful in slower times like the winter where relatively little money is coming in with our businesses.  But you don’t necessarily have to spend ANY money to get new prospects coming your way!  All you really need is time for a particular strategy I’m going to talk about in this article, and I’m sure you’ve got lots of time on your hands, especially during the winter months.  And this strategy can REALLY work well for you with some time, persistence and creativity.  In fact, you can very easily even have it making money for you while delivering more listings!  And it doesn’t even need to use computers.

Starting A Networking Group

Some of you may have attended a networking event in your area.  Most of the chambers of commerce in the Toronto area have these events regularly as do quite a few private groups.  These are basically mingling events.  Attendance ranges from 5 to 350.  People show up to whatever venue, eat some hor doerves, and randomly chat with people in the room.  Usually there will be a period during the event where everyone is given 30-60 seconds to introduce themselves and their businesses.  These events can bring prospects, but it’s usually a very hit and miss affair.  Based on these introductions you’ll probably never know if any of these people are buying or selling their home in the near future.  That, coupled with the fact that these events can cost upto $50, can make attending these events a great but expensive social opportunity, and not a very good way of getting new business.

Many people who attend these mingling type events have realized this.  They’ve spent far too much time and money at these events and don’t get new business, so they swear them off.  But some people either start their own referral based networking club or join a very established one like BNI.

BNI has pros and cons.  On the pro side, it’s the largest business network group in the world.  It has some very impressive stats:

Number of Chapters: over 5,400 (as of 2009)
Number of Members: 120,000 (approximate)
Number of Referrals Given To Fellow BNI Members: over 3.3 million (2006)
Total Value of Referrals Given: $2.4 billion (U.S.) (2006)

Filed under: Networking Tips,Using Email For Attracting Buyers/Sellers

Tags: BNI, email inquiries, email newsletter, email prospects, email subject line, email training tips, network, networking, networking event, referral group