I was listening to an audio interview recently featuring marketing expert Jeff Paul, and he said something during the interview that I felt was both simple and quite profound. He said, "No matter what business you think you're in right now, you're only in the business of marketing yourself, your product, or your service."

Truer words have never been spoken about your business as a real estate agent. The better you are at marketing yourself so you stand out clearly as the agent your clients and prospects want to work with, the more money you'll make. It's that simple.

This means that everything your clients and prospects experience about you needs to be truly outstanding. Your mailers, your Web site, the people your prospects interact with on your team and in your office, the way that you dress and present yourself, and the appearance of the automobile that you drive, all give an impression to the people you are hoping to do business with. When you look at each of these individual components, are you sending the signal you want to send to your clients and prospects in each of these areas, or are you sending a very different message?

One thing you should always remember as a real estate agent is the fact that you're constantly being compared to your competition. And if you don't watch out, it can be easy to tune out to how good your competition really looks compared to you. If your competition is projecting a sharper, more impressive image of themselves on an ongoing basis throughout the year, what chance do you really have when you go head-to-head against them for exclusive assignments? In situations like these, the image your competitors have already been projecting to your prospects for months or years can have you be lagging behind them before you even make your formal presentation for the business.

The good news is that you can become the agent your prospects continually perceive as the best choice they could ever make in a real estate agent if you're willing to do what it takes to make it happen. With this in mind it may be time to take an inventory of yourself and the image you're continually projecting to your clients and prospects right now. For starters, how many of your ideal prospects even know who you are right now? And if they don't know who you are, or can't remember you, you may really want to begin stepping-up your marketing. There are many different ways you can do this, but I feel that sending out marketing pieces through direct mail probably offers the best way to continually brand yourself in the minds of your clients and prospects every single month.

In addition to this, are your competitors projecting an image of themselves that's better than what you're currently projecting to your clients and prospects? If so, how are they doing this and what must you now do differently in order to project the best image of any agent doing business in your marketplace? You may want to make a list of the different areas where your competitors are projecting a better image than you and then write down what you need to do in each of these areas to outperform them.

And here's the bottom line...How willing are you to do whatever it takes to brand yourself as the one agent who stands out above all the others in your market? Once you become committed to doing whatever you must to be the best agent imaginable, your prospects will start lining up to give you their business.