The slow days around the holidays are the perfect time to catch up with your Agent Insight submissions and position yourself to make the best use of this strong marketing tool in the coming year.  Remember a goal of Agent Insight is to attract leads by presenting yourself as a knowledgeable real estate professional who is an expert on your community.

The agents who do the best with Agent Insight submit regularly. The most recent posts are shown first and the agents making them are at the top of the Local Experts roster. Take this time to stockpile written insights on your community. Make them conversational and use first person whenever possible. An informal, breezy writing style is more memorable and more readable than dry statistics. Tell your reader what you like about the town, what your kids like, and what your friends, neighbors and clients like.

After you have a collection of articles, plan to send them weekly or biweekly throughout the new year. Again, the most recent insights are the ones that are at the top of each Agent Insight page.

Spend some time taking some good winter photos of your area, too. While it may be too chilly to dilly dally outside for long, please stop your car and step out to take the picture. Spending a quick minute to frame the shot greatly increases the quality of your photo. Finally, make the captions count. A caption can be about 15 well-chosen words that can be another excellent place to catch the attention of a potential client.

Many thanks to all for your fine contributions to Agent Insight this year. This has been a productive year with thousands of submissions from hundreds of dedicated RE/MAX agents. From this mighty collection, we have selected four festive photos celebrating the season as the final illustrations from 2014 of your excellent work.

Photos by Mary Shelsby, RE/MAX Realty Group, Pittsford, NY; Donna Fitts, RE/MAX Advantage South, Birmingham, AL; Martha Thompson, RE/MAX Legacy Realty, Oxford, MS; and Steve Strawn, RE/MAX Boone Realty, Columbia MO.