My guess is that you're somebody that gives back to the community. Now, you might do it in small, subtle ways that people may not notice. But what if you could give back to charity in a way that helped you, the charity, and also helped your business at the same time?

It's a true win-win situation.

How could you do that?

Well, one of the ways is to pick a charity that you really care about, that you're passionate about, and then secondly, tie that charity to closings in the new year.

So here's an example:

What if you sent out an email, a text, social media post, and you said something like this:

"Hey, in 2023, I've set a goal of selling 30 homes. And I want to help that number of families achieve their real estate goals. But I want to go bigger and also help my favorite charity achieve their goals. So for every closing I have between January and March of this year, I'm gonna donate [fill in the blank: $100, $200, $500] for every...

Five things to do in the first quarter of the new year:

1. Refresh your brand

Refreshing your brand means getting new photos taken. Why? Because you are first and foremost your brand. So you need to get a new, fresh photo. You should do this every year, maybe twice a year. But that new photo is not just a straight headshot, it's multiple photos in different settings. Why? Because your photo is the most used branding element in your marketing arsenal.

But what happens when you don't do this? What happens is people then meet you and there's an immediate brand disconnect. There's an immediate feeling, at least at a subconscious level, that they've been deceived. If they can't trust you with your branding, what else can't they trust you with?

It's more important than you think it is. So get that brand updated and refreshed.

Also, look at your bio. So once you get this new photo, you're gonna update your bio for the new year. And...

If you were to go back in time for the last 24 months and look at every closing you had, would all those people you closed a transaction with have given you a recommendation or endorsement online?

In other words...

If you closed 20 transactions, do you have 20 endorsements on realtor.com, Zillow, Facebook, or Google Business? Or are you missing a lot?

If you're missing a lot, you're missing opportunities. Here's why:

If you look at a couple of agents in your market, you might find this, I see this all the time. You might have an experienced agent that's crushing it — doing 30-40 transactions a year. Then you have this brand new agent who just started their business a couple of years ago and only closed 10-12 transactions each year.

But... online, they're getting a recommendation or endorsement from every single client. And sometimes clients they didn't even close a transaction with, but just had a good experience with them. So...

If you want a quick way to generate conversation through text with your Sphere of Influence, here's a great message that's resonating with a lot of my coaching students.

Look at your Sphere of Influence. Pull 5 or 10 people you're going to text today. And here's what you're going to say:

"Hey, have you ever looked at what your home is worth on Zillow? I'm curious as an agent, do you think it's sort of close, wrong, or right on the money?"

Watch what happens when you put this out to your Sphere of Influence.

Now, you can do it through a text or you could post it on social media. It's a great social media post and I guarantee you're going to get into a lot of conversations with people.

The end result of these conversations should be that Zillow is wrong 95% of the time.

In other words, 95% of the time, they don't get within 5% of their eventual sales price of the property. That Zillow's own data.

By the way, if you haven't looked at it,...