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Because face-to-face communication is being rapidly replaced by email and web browsing your writing ability has become increasingly vital to your success. You cannot send body language in an email, nor can you get away with poor grammar and spelling or boring text on a webpage. Email and web text must be concise, engaging and error free. People may listen to a dull speaker on the phone or at their door, but they won’t tolerate boring superfluous text on a webpage.
Running your text through a spell checker is certainly not enough. Editing is relatively easy, while choosing content is more difficult. Your focus should be on getting your point across in as few words as possible without trying to sound fancy. Customers will be more impressed with your brevity than with your vocabulary.
Communication is about trust. If you can communicate well then customers will trust you. They will turn to you for help; they will give you their business. Here are a few tips for improving your email and web text.
Understand your goal: Rule number one in writing is that you should only write about what you know. If you don’t understand a topic yourself, how in the world are you ever going to write about so that other people can understand it? However, in addition to knowing your topic it is important to know your goal. If your writing has no purpose then you’re wasting everyone’s time. Writing without a goal is like baking without a recipe. Unless you know what you want to end up with, all the ingredients in the world won’t become a loaf of bread.
People will appreciate highly detailed, well thought out writing that gets to the point. Your job is to decide what your point is and build your writing towards it. It’s a good idea to narrow your objective. Ask yourself: “What am I trying to do for the reader? Am I trying to teach them something? Do I want to build a relationship? Am I trying to drum up contacts? Do I want them to keep coming back to my website?” Likely you are interested in doing all these things. And you can, but it will take more than a simple paragraph.
Begin by summarizing your point in a few sentences. Once you have a clear understanding of where you’re heading, it is much easier to stay on track. If you have trouble starting out, try free writing. Think of it as therapy and your computer is your doctor. Just start typing about what you’re trying to do: “I’d really like to help my clients understand the selling process and I think…” The key to free writing is to let yourself type without thinking too hard. The object is to get all the jumbled thoughts in your brain out onto the paper where you can see them and begin to put them into some kind of meaningful order.
Pay attention to your layout: Do you remember the recipe analogy? Well it’s not only important to know that you want to bake a loaf of bread, you also need to know the steps necessary to bake it. Similarly, it’s vital that you know your point in writing, but it’s equally vital to have an outline of the steps that you will take to get there. Outlines can seem tedious, but they work wonders for clarity and organization.
As part of your organization, it is important to begin your piece with something that will hold your audiences interest. Try a question, or an important fact, or even a quote. The trick is to get the reader to want more. If your first sentence is boring and lifeless, your audience is not going to want to continue. Give them a reason to keep reading!
Write like you speak: Web text and email is no place for showing off your extensive vocabulary. Keep your words short and simple. A good rule of thumb is if you feel like you’re using a big word, you probably are. You will be much more successful if you stick to conversational English. That doesn’t mean your grammar should be lazy, but it does mean you should choose words that you use on a regular basis. That means no technical real estate terms!
Avoid colloquialisms and clichés like the plague. Of course you want to sound casual and friendly, but you don’t want to sound like a cheesy greeting card. Be simple, be original, and be brief.
While I mentioned that your grammar shouldn’t be lazy, it also shouldn’t be overly formal. There is a difference between bad grammar and creative grammar. Bad grammar is what little kids use. Creative grammar is what good writers use. You will be okay as long as you stick to the basic grammar rules that make your writing clear, but feel free to write like you talk. Sounding genuine will impress your audience and encourage them to trust you.
Focus on your audience: In all that you write, whether it is a personal introduction, or a service guarantee, keep your audience in mind. After all they are the reason you are writing. Your goal is to assist them to understand and be excited about what ever it is you are writing. You should always be thinking: “How will this sound to my reader?”
A good way to judge how much you are focused on your audience is to look at your work and decide how much of it is about them and how much is about you. The more you write about them the better.
Give your audience what they want: You must understand that your clients have many concerns about the real estate business and that they are coming to you for the answers. If you don’t write with those concerns in mind then you are doing your clients a disservice. If they come to you for answers and you’ve got them, they’ll come to you with their business later.
You can use your clients’ concerns to keep them interested in what you have to say. If in your writing you continually surprise them with really helpful information they’ll want to keep reading. They’ll tell their friends about you. They won’t go anywhere else. On the other hand, if your writing contains nothing new or important, it is very easy for potential clients to toss your flier, delete your email, or close your web page. So focus on your audience and give them a reason to keep on reading!
Know the benefits of written communication: You have probably already figured out that one of the greatest benefits of writing is that you can control exactly what you say. Unlike in talking, where all of your words and ideas must be organized instantaneously, in writing you can revise and rewrite as many times as it takes to get it right. And the best part is no one will ever know.
You should make the most of the fact that you can reword your ideas into a clear, concise message before your clients ever read it. Never simply type something up and put it out there for your clients until you’ve reviewed it several times. By patiently reworking your ideas you can develop exactly the message you want your clients to receive with exactly the right style and structure.
Know the drawbacks of written communication: While writing has many benefits, there are some drawbacks. When someone reads what you have written, they don’t have the luxury of seeing your facial expressions and hand gestures that they would if you were speaking directly to them. Therefore you have to be cautious in your writing that your meaning is very clear. Be careful using sarcasm and other forms of expression that rely heavily on body language and facial expression. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t joke around and be yourself in your writing. It simply means that you must be cautious with your word choice and expression and recognize that readers will only have your words to go on.
Another drawback to writing is that while most people wouldn’t simply walk away from you while your talking, there are few people who would give a second thought to throwing away a flier or deleting an email if they don’t like what they read. It is much more difficult to hold a person’s attention with writing than it is with words. That is one reason why your writing must be flawless.
The final drawback to writing is the lack of instant feedback. In a conversation with someone you can tell how interested they are by their body language and responses. However there is no way to tell how interested someone is in an email you sent them unless they write you back. So if you want feedback you have to provide your reader with a way to tell you how they feel about what you have written.
Don’t leave your reader asking: “So What?”: Unless you request some type of reply from those who read your work, you are unlikely to see any of the results that you labored so hard to get. You ought to ask them to email you with further questions or comments, or invite them to contact you with suggestions for improvement. Ask them for any information that you think they might want to give you. People like to be asked their opinion.
Whether or not people respond to what you have written can be a good indicator of the effectiveness of your writing. If people have lots of questions and want to know more than you are doing well. However if no one ever responds to your work, it’s a good sign that you probably need to change some things.
For most of us writing is a very difficult task. But I hope that you have begun to realize how important it should be to you as a realtor. A concise article or flier written with the client in mind can mean the difference between success and failure.
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