It's fast becoming that time of year again when you should start thinking about doing your Business Plan for 2008. An important part of that Plan includes activities with your database. Have you looked at yours recently? Does it need to be updated and/or purged? Are you afraid to do an update because it might leave you with too few contacts? Well, why not develop a plan of adding two contacts per day? It just takes discipline.

There's one more catch to this idea; you need to offer something to the people you want to put there. How about a monthly newsletter or a monthly real estate update? Take note: you're not asking them to buy or sell real estate through you. You're just building your database.

So here's how you get started:

1. In one of my previous columns, I gave you lots of suggestions as to where you could find prospects. Go back to that list of ideas and seek out two people per day.

2. Call these people, email them, or write to them and ask if you could send them your new monthly newsletter or your new monthly real estate market report. Give them reasons why they should want to receive this correspondence from you. Remember, you just want them to say "yes, add me to your list."

3. After they say "yes," send them a letter thanking them for joining your "first to know" list. Tell them you would like to have complete information for your database and ask for current mailing addresses, fax numbers, cell phone numbers, email addresses, etc.

4. Once you do that and you start sending out your newsletter or your market update, you'll start to develop relationships with these people. Become the friend to the people in your database. Every so often, send out something in addition to the newsletter or market update report. Flower seeds are easy to send through the mail. Forget-me-nots work well, along with a short note that says something like: "Here's a gift for you so you won't forget about me. Hope these flowers will brighten your day." In sum, keep the commitment, add two a day, stay in touch, be their friend, send small promotional items throughout the year, and slowly, but surely, they will come to know you as their REALTOR^®. See you next week.

See you next week.

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