I can’t emphasize how easy this marketing method is, nor the effectiveness per minute spent compared to other marketing venues.  Here’s the formula… get ready because it’ll really blow your world away… it might scare you…

1. Set up a free blog for your mortgage business
2. Set up free accounts on Twitter and Facebook (at least)
3. Set up a free account on TwitterFeed
4. Within TwitterFeed, create RSS feeds for your blog to automatically post to both your Twitter and Facebook accounts
5. Blog blog blog!

The idea here is quite simple:  harness the power of modern web technology to broadcast your message from a single place that reaches three key high-traffic sources (search engines, twitter, facebook) automatically for you.

There are a TON of ways to do the actual marketing portion (i.e. post topics, etc), but if you can’t figure out what messages you want to send to people you are probably in the wrong business.

Feel free to post questions and your blog, facebook and twitter info in the comments and MBL will be glad to be friends and follow you!

MBL on Twitter

MBL on Facebook

Everything in the mortgage industry seems to be in electronic form, loan applications, closing documents, etc.  The benefits of having electronic forms can be taken even further by utilizing them beyond the loan process.  You may not realize it, but nearly every document that you work with can be converted into an electronic form.  Maybe your office still utilizes a paper form for employment applications.  Or maybe you are using post it notes to let the secretary know you need more #2 pencils.  Regardless of the task your old paper form is performing—an electronic form can do it better.

Electronic forms can also help you perform new tasks as well.  You could use a form on your website to capture information from potential customers, perhaps offering them a free appraisal for filling the form out. You could send existing customers a form to pass on to their friends, offering a reward for each form that is returned to you.  All of this can be done with a PDF.  The form can be tracked, and even an email button inserted into the form to ensure that the form comes back to you.

Regardless if you need a paper form converted or a new form designed from scratch, electronic forms are the way to go.  Get rid of the paper, post its and Word docs and utilize an electronic form.

If you are like me, you try to automate anything you can in order to boost productivity. One great tool I’ve recently been playing with is the iMacros add-on for Firefox, which is also available for Internet Explorer if you prefer IE.

It’s a free download that plugs in to your browser and allows you to record things you do in the browser and replay them anytime you like. You can even set the “macros” to loop as many times as you want if you have a task that needs to be repeated over and over again.

The sky really is the limit in uses for this tool.  Here are a few ideas for boosting productivity, all potentially requiring only a single click:

• Pull up your favorite lender websites each morning, login and go to your preferred rate sheets.
• Pull up your personal website/blog and login to view your daily statistics.
• Pull up webmail (if you use webmail), login and go to your inbox.
• Post an ad on Craigslist.
• Run a search on your county assesor’s website for ARMs that will convert soon.  It’s even possible to set up a macro to extract data and prepare a list for you.

Have you tried this yet?  If not, here’s a nice tutorial for getting started.

There is a new feature here at MortgageBrokerLand – a mortgage wiki.  Wikis are community-driven collections of pages that anyone can add, edit, or nominate for deletion.

The purpose of the wiki here at MBL is to provide a place where any of our growing 1,800+ members can provide easy to find industry related information for anyone’s benefit.

Why add a wiki to a site that already has forums?  Good question.  Wikis are different in that you can edit a page over and over and over again while forums simply allow you to create new posts.  So forums are good for conversation while wikis are good for refining and perfecting valuable information.  You can liken the value of a wiki to that of the wisdom of crowds.

You know what flash drives are.  But do you know the power of the new U3 smart technology with which many new flash drives are equipped?  If not, you may want to find out because this combo can be huge for mobile professionals who are tired of lugging around a laptop.

U3 is basically a way for you to take your programs and your files with you on your flash drive, thus giving you the ability to transform your flash drive into a finger sized portable PC (and you can password protect your flash drive!).   All you need is a computer at your destination with an open USB slot.

There is a fairly extensive list of programs for U3 available for download from their website including email, web browsers, OpenOffice (which I recommend for regular office document and spreadsheet needs as well) and there is a synch tool that allows you to synch up your changes made on the road.

Hopefully the big boys in loan origination software (Calyx Point and Encompass)  will make U3 versions of their respective software to complete the potential for loan officers who want to carry their laptop in their pocket.

There is tremendous flexibility and opportunity for LO’s who become early adapters of this new technology, and at prices as low as $20 for a 2 GB U3 flash drive… how can you go wrong?  I’m using mine right now.