Imagine what it would be like to be the top listing agent in your market. What if you got to the office and did nothing but talk to sellers and negotiate sales? What if you actually listed two or three homes every week, without fail?

I know it sounds like a lot of listings, and it is, but think of the freedom you’d have! And if only half of those listings were to sell, (which, by the way, is the national average) you would close over 50 transactions this year just from your listings! How cool is that?

When I finally realized how nice it was to be a listing agent, I was on vacation with my family to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. While on vacation, I did absolutely no work. I left my laptop computer at home, as difficult as that was to do. Okay, I’ll confess that I did take a handful of calls from my office during that week while I was gone.

But check this out: While I was playing, I had two of my listings sell. Now how cool is that?! There’s nothing quite like the feeling of your business running itself, making you money, while you’re lying on the beach in the sun, listening to the waves crash in and catching up on your reading.

Well, if you do what I did, it’s not that hard. Most agents I know could do it — if they would do, step-by-step, exactly what I did. There’s nothing I did that can’t reasonably be duplicated by any intelligent agent with the motivation to learn something new and the willingness to work hard. Nothing. So let’s pick up where we left off.

Lee Iacocca, when he was head of Chrysler Corporation, made an amazing statement. When asked about advertising, he said he was convinced that half of the millions of dollars that Chrysler spent each year on advertising was wasted. Half! But then he added that, if he could only figure out which half was being wasted, he could save the company a lot of money.

As REALTORS®, we’re told by the “experts” to spend 20% of our GCI, or gross commission income, on advertising. Magazines, newspapers, business cards, fliers, direct mail, websites, radio and television spots, billboards, and every promotional gimmick that comes down the pike.

We sink tons of money into all of these advertising ideas in a frantic attempt to generate enough customers to keep our businesses rolling. And the sad thing is that we know deep down in our hearts that much of what we spend our hard-earned advertising dollars on is utterly wasted. Just like Lee Iacocca, if we could only figure out which half was wasted, we could save a lot of money.

Well, I have good news. By using lead capture gateway technology, it’s not only possible to know which ads are pulling and which are not, but it’s also possible to know exactly where each customer came from and how much each lead cost. Let me give you an example from my own real estate practice.

Currently I split my Internet advertising between two sources: Google and Yahoo (formerly Overture). My cost with Google is slightly lower per visitor, but my CR (capture rate) is slightly lower as well. With Yahoo, my per-visitor cost is higher, but the actual CR is also slightly higher.

I’m able to monitor each of those advertising expenses in real time. No more waiting until the end of the month to see how the magazine did. No more wondering if an ad is working. I have the answers in real time. And here’s how I know.

I assign each ad its own unique URL (web address), and the server log tracks how many visitors and leads have come in for each URL. I then take this information and make a quick calculation to determine exactly how effective each campaign was. No guesswork! This is a business.

Let’s say that, in a week, you had 110 visitors who came from your ad in Google. Of those, you had 32 leads. Your Google ad cost was $124. During the same week, you had 98 visitors from your ad in Yahoo, resulting in 30 leads. Your Yahoo bill was $125.

Then let’s say that your yard signs sent you another 20 visitors, and, of those, 10 registered online on your LCM gateway. (You’ll learn that your yard signs will have a higher capture rate than typical web visitors.) The total cost for sign leads: ZERO! Here’s how it all breaks out:

This is a “typical” example. What would 72 leads every week do for your business? They would probably force you to start recruiting! Either that or you would log in and put your ad campaigns on hold for a while. Either way, your business would be forever changed.

But then what if a particular source of advertising was costing you $125 per lead? (When I quit doing direct mail, that’s what it was costing me.) What if sitting an open house cost you half a day (on the weekend) plus $100 in promotional stuff, and you picked up 5 leads?

If your time is worth $100 per hour (and it should be), your ad cost was $500. You captured 5 leads. Your cost per lead is $100. Or what about spending a day passing out fliers? Do the math. Or spending hours a day cold-calling? (Forget the risk of violating the Do-Not-Call laws and the potential $11,000 fine!) What do those leads cost you?

What if you could generate hundreds of your own leads for only a few dollars each, and then stop when you had enough business? You can. This is how mega-agent teams have begun to spring up around the country. One agent figures out how to produce more leads than he can handle, and, before you know it, he has a dominant team taking a huge slice of the local business.

Well, that mega-agent could easily be you, if you want it to be. First you get the leads, then you get the listings. The listings bring you more leads. Before you know it, you’re “forced” to build your own agent team, and in a year you have a dozen agents working for you. That’s exactly what happened to me, and I was still trying to figure it all out.

Matt Jones is the founder and CEO of FavoriteAgent.com and nationally syndicated author of LCM: The Secret to Success in the New Age of Real Estate, The Ultimate Listing Presentation, Traffic: How to Sell Fast and Net More, Becoming a Mega-Producer, and 20 Questions: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Real Estate but Were Afraid to Ask. Jones’ North Carolina-based company has been profiled by major media outlets as an innovator and a pioneer in the industry, and CNN’s Pulse on America claimed FavoriteAgent.com is “changing the way real estate is being done in America.” This content is cross-posted in the following locations: BlogMattBlog.com, RealBlogging.com, NewsGeni.us, TheCommissionCheck.com, and now Amazon Kindle.