Your Marketing Dude

Mike Cuevas
  • 4.7 (88)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Monthly

Mike Cuevas has scripted, edited, and distributed over 2,000 videos for small business owners across the country. He builds full‐service video marketing systems — handling message strategy, editing, ads — so business owners don’t need large teams to grow.His mission is to help people amplify their voice with authenticity and consistency, turning video marketing from overwhelming to manageable.

  1. 1d ago

    Why Your Real Estate Marketing Isn’t Working: Fix Your Message & You’ll Stop Competing On Price

    The Bottom Line Why is real estate marketing not working for most agents? According to Holly Chantal, high-ticket offer specialist and brand messaging strategist, the answer is almost always the same: the message is too generic to mean anything. Saying you will take great care of your clients, get them the best deal, and provide exceptional service is not a differentiator. Every agent says that. When your message sounds like everyone else’s message, the only way a client can choose between you is price. The fix is not a better logo or a more polished headshot. It is getting specific enough about who you serve and what you uniquely understand about their situation that the right people immediately recognize themselves in your content and feel like you are already speaking their language before you ever meet. Why Your Real Estate Marketing Isn’t Working: Fix Your Message, Stop Competing on Price An agent hires a photographer, gets new headshots, redesigns their website, updates their logo, and launches a new social media presence. A few months go by. The phone is not ringing any differently than it did before. So they do more. More posts. Better graphics. A new tagline. Still nothing meaningful changes. Here is what nobody tells you. The problem was never the design. I sat down with Holly Chantal on this week’s episode of Your Marketing Dude to talk about the real reason most real estate agent marketing does not work. Holly is a high-ticket offer specialist and messaging strategist who has built a multi-six-figure business working 20 hours a week. She knows what makes the right people say yes and what makes everyone else scroll past. The answer comes down to one thing. Your message is probably saying the exact same thing as every other agent in your market. Generic Messaging Makes You a Commodity Here is a test. Read your current marketing copy out loud and then ask yourself: could any other agent in your market say the exact same thing? If the answer is yes, you have a commodity problem. Most real estate agent marketing sounds like this: I provide exceptional service. I will fight to get you the best deal. My clients are my top priority. I have deep knowledge of the local market. Every single one of those statements is true for most agents. And because they are true for most agents, they mean nothing to a potential client who is trying to figure out who to call. They cannot tell you apart from the 47 other agents they could call. So they do the only thing they can do when they have no other way to differentiate: they ask about commission. You did not create a price war by being bad at your job. You created it by making your message so generic that price became the only variable left. The Surface Level Want Is Not Enough Holly makes a point in the episode that is worth sitting with. Most agents think they know what their clients want. They want to sell quickly. They want to get the best price. They want the process to be smooth. Those are real desires. But they are surface level and every other agent is already promising those exact things. The deeper question is what is really driving this client. What is underneath the desire to sell quickly? Is it a job relocation with a hard deadline? A divorce where they just need this chapter to close? A move closer to family? Equity they need to fund something they have been waiting years for? When you understand the real thing underneath the surface want, your message changes completely. You stop talking to everyone who wants to sell a house and you start talking directly to the person who is living the specific situation you actually understand. That specificity is what makes someone feel like you read their journal before you wrote your marketing. Use Client Problems as Your Content Strategy Holly’s most practical framework in the episode is about where marketing content actually comes from. You do not have to invent topics. You do not have to guess what your audience wants to know. Your clients have already told you. Every question they asked before they hired you. Every concern they raised during the process. Every mistake they made that you wish you could have prevented. Every time they said I wish I had known that earlier. That is a content calendar. Right there. In your head and in your inbox. The questions your ideal client asks before hiring an agent are exactly what they are searching on Google and asking AI platforms. When you write content that directly answers those specific questions in the voice of someone who has lived it with dozens of clients, you are not just marketing. You are demonstrating expertise in a way that claiming expertise never could. Demonstrate Value Instead of Claiming It This is the difference between saying you provide great service and showing it. Any agent can write I provide exceptional service on their website. It costs nothing and proves nothing. A story about a specific situation where your judgment, experience, or process made a measurable difference for a real client is something completely different. Holly talks about this in terms of how stories help people see themselves in your marketing. A story about a couple who had a hard deadline because of a job relocation, how you navigated a complicated offer situation, and how they made it to their new city on time, tells a future client with a similar situation everything they need to know about whether you are the right agent. They are not reading a list of credentials. They are seeing their own life in your story. That is what builds trust before the first conversation. And trust is what ends the price competition before it starts. Specialization Is Not a Shrinking Strategy One of the things that holds most agents back from niching The post Why Your Real Estate Marketing Isn’t Working: Fix Your Message & You’ll Stop Competing On Price appeared first on Your Marketing Dude.

  2. Sep 12

    Are Short Sales Making A Comeback? | What Real Estate Agents Need To Know In 2026

    The Bottom Line Are short sales coming back in 2026? Yes, and the data confirms it. Short sale transactions jumped 16% year over year in Q1 2026, foreclosure filings hit 227,548 US properties in the first half of the year up 21% from a year ago, and FHA delinquencies reached 11.88% while VA delinquencies rose to 4.99%. According to Cristina Gaspar and JD Summa, founders of Mr. Short Sale, approximately 80% of their current files involve FHA or VA loans, and they are seeing activity in Florida, Texas, California, and Arizona. For real estate agents, this is a niche most agents avoided for the last decade because short sales are complex. That complexity is exactly what makes them an opportunity. Agents who learn the process now, or partner with a team that handles the back end, can serve a growing population of distressed homeowners while other agents walk away. Are Short Sales Coming Back? What Real Estate Agents Need to Know in 2026 A homeowner in Florida bought their house in 2022 with an FHA loan and a 3.5% down payment. They stretched to make the numbers work because rates were still low and they wanted in before prices climbed further. Then rates went up. Their income got squeezed. And now the house is worth less than they paid for it when you factor in what they would owe to sell it. They need to sell. They cannot cover the gap. And they have no idea what a short sale is or whether their agent does either. That story is playing out across the country right now at a scale agents have not seen in years. I sat down with Cristina Gaspar and JD Summa of Mr. Short Sale this week to get the full picture on what is happening, where the opportunity is for real estate agents, and how to serve distressed homeowners without getting in over your head. The Numbers That Tell the Story This is not speculation. The data is already in. Short sale transactions increased 16% year over year in Q1 2026, according to Realtor.com. That follows a 10% increase from 2024 to 2025 and a 4% increase the year before. Three consecutive years of growth, accelerating each time. Foreclosure filings hit 227,548 US properties in the first half of 2026, up 21% from the same period last year and up 28% from the first half of 2024. Completed foreclosures, meaning homes lenders actually took back, rose 33% from a year earlier. The driver is clear. FHA delinquencies reached 11.88% in the first quarter of 2026 while VA delinquencies rose to 4.99%. The conventional loan delinquency rate was 2.75%. Government-backed loans from 2022 and 2023, many with debt-to-income ratios above 50% at origination, are showing the most stress as borrowers run out of runway. This is not a housing crisis. ATTOM CEO Rob Barber called it a gradual return toward more typical foreclosure patterns. But for real estate agents, gradual is still enough to create a real niche. And most agents are not prepared for it. Why Short Sales Are an Opportunity Most Agents Ignore Short sales have a reputation problem. During the last housing crisis, they were slow, complicated, and often fell apart after months of work. Agents got burned. Buyers got frustrated. And the industry largely moved on when the market recovered. That reputation is partly earned and partly outdated. The process has improved. The technology has improved. And the teams that specialize in back-end short sale processing, companies like Mr. Short Sale, have made it possible for agents to stay in front of the client while someone else handles the lender negotiation. The opportunity is this: most agents in your market will say no to a distressed homeowner or refer them out entirely. The agent who can say yes, who has a process and a team behind them, picks up a transaction nobody else wanted and creates a client relationship that lasts. Cristina put it plainly in our conversation. Solving a problem other agents refuse to touch is how you create a niche. What Is Actually Driving the Short Sale Activity in 2026 Cristina and JD are seeing about 80% of their current files involve FHA or VA loans. That tracks exactly with the delinquency data. These are borrowers who got in with minimal down payments, built little equity, and are now caught between a purchase price that made sense in 2022 and a market that has softened in many of the same markets where FHA and VA lending was heaviest. The states with the most activity right now are Florida, Texas, California, and Arizona. Florida in particular has the highest foreclosure rate in the country at 0.27% of housing units with a filing in the first half of 2026. The VA loan situation has an additional wrinkle. The VA discontinued the Veterans Affairs Servicing Purchase program, which had provided a payment reduction option for struggling borrowers. With no equivalent replacement fully in place yet, more VA borrowers are running out of options before the next loss-mitigation waterfall takes effect in November 2026. That creates a window where short sales may be the best remaining option for some veterans. How a Short Sale Actually Works For agents who have not done one, here is the core framework. A short sale is not a traditional sale. The seller owns the home but owes more than it is worth. They cannot sell it through conventional means without covering the difference out of pocket, which most cannot. So they ask their lender to approve a sale at a price lower than the outstanding balance. The lender determines whether to accept less than what is owed. The seller remains the owner of record throughout the process. The agent represents the seller. But the real work, gathering documentation, submitting the short sale package, negotiating with the lender, tracking the file through their loss mitigation department, is what most agents are not equipped to do. The timeline is The post Are Short Sales Making A Comeback? | What Real Estate Agents Need To Know In 2026 appeared first on Your Marketing Dude.

  3. Aug 29

    Build A Referral Power Team With BNI Groups with Michael Winter

    The Bottom Line How do real estate agents build a referral network that consistently sends warm, pre-sold clients? According to Michael Winter, Associate Broker at 1st Class Real Estate SD with over 25 years of experience, the answer is a structured combination of BNI groups and intentional power teams. NAR data confirms 66% of sellers find their agent through referral or past relationship. BNI member data shows referred leads convert at 4x higher rates and close 38% faster than cold prospects. The key distinction Michael makes is that you are not selling to the people in the room. You are selling through them. Each member of your referral network represents an entire sphere of people who already trust them and who they can introduce you to. Build the right network and other people become your most effective salespeople. How to Build a Real Estate Referral Network with BNI and Power Teams There is a deal in this episode worth paying attention to. Michael Winter, Associate Broker with over 25 years in real estate, got a $1.7 million listing not because he marketed himself to the seller, not because he cold called them, not because he bought a Zillow lead. He got it because someone in his referral network knew the seller and made a phone call. One relationship. One conversation he was not even part of. One listing. That is what a real estate referral network actually looks like when it is working. Michael joined me on Your Marketing Dude this week to break down exactly how he builds and maintains referral relationships through BNI groups and intentional power teams. The framework is practical, the stats behind it are compelling, and the shift in thinking it requires is something most agents never make. Why Most Agents Are Playing the Wrong Game Here is the reality most agents live in. They generate leads, they chase those leads, they convert some percentage of them, and then they repeat the cycle. It is exhausting and the margins are getting worse every year as lead costs go up and conversion rates stay flat. The agents who are quietly outperforming everyone else are not running bigger ad campaigns. They are showing up to the same rooms every month and being remembered when somebody finally decides to sell. NAR data backs this up. 66% of sellers find their agent through referral or past relationship. Not a portal. Not an ad. A person they trust told them to call you. And when that happens, you are already most of the way to a signed agreement before the first conversation. That is the game Michael is playing. And it is a fundamentally different game. What a Real Estate Power Team Actually Is Michael starts with the power team concept because it is the foundation everything else is built on. A power team is a carefully selected group of professionals who all serve the same type of client at different points in the transaction journey. For a real estate agent that typically means a lender, a title rep, a home inspector, an attorney, a financial planner, an insurance agent, a contractor. People whose clients are your clients and whose clients you can serve back. The key word is carefully selected. This is not about collecting business cards. It is about building relationships with professionals who are equally committed to giving referrals as they are to receiving them. The wrong power team partner is someone who takes every referral you send and never sends one back. The right one is someone whose clients they send to you and whose name you can give to every buyer or seller you work with. When you get that right, the referrals flow in both directions without anyone having to ask. What BNI Is and Why It Works BNI, Business Network International, is a structured referral organization with chapters all over the world. Each chapter meets weekly and is built around one core rule that changes everything: one seat per profession per chapter. There is one real estate agent seat. One lender seat. One attorney seat. If you hold the real estate seat in a chapter, no other agent can join that chapter and compete with you for referrals from those members. The structure creates accountability in a way that casual networking never does. Attendance is tracked. Referrals passed are tracked. Closed business generated from those referrals is tracked. Every member knows whether they are contributing or just showing up to collect. Michael calls it a power team on steroids. You are not just building relationships with a handful of professionals you chose. You are inside a structured system designed specifically to generate referrals, with built-in accountability and a room full of people who all showed up because they understand how referral-based business works. Sell Through the Room, Not To the Room This is the reframe that most people miss when they first look at BNI or any referral group. The people sitting in the room are not your customers. A lender does not need a real estate agent. An attorney does not need a home inspection. You are not there to sell your services to the members. You are there to access their networks. Every person in that room has a sphere of influence. Clients, friends, family, colleagues. People who trust them. People who ask them for recommendations. When a member of your BNI chapter tells a friend who is thinking about selling their house that they know the best real estate agent and they should call you, that introduction carries a weight that no marketing campaign can replicate. You are not the one selling yourself. Someone else is. And that someone is a professional the prospect already trusts. BNI data shows referred leads convert at 4x higher rates and close 38% faster than cold prospects. That gap is not a coincidence. It is the trust that came pre-loaded in the introduction. Why Your Sphere Alone Is Not Enough Michael makes a The post Build A Referral Power Team With BNI Groups with Michael Winter appeared first on Your Marketing Dude.

  4. Aug 22

    Build Your Real Estate Personal Brand With Client Events You’re Excited About

    The Bottom Line How do real estate agents use client events to build their personal brand and generate referrals? According to Nathan Schiess, personal branding strategist and founder of RE Personal Branding, the agents who get the most out of events are not the ones throwing generic client appreciation parties. They are the ones who build community institutions around something they genuinely care about, a whiskey society, a youth soccer league, a homesteading class, a couples date night, and they connect that institution to their personal brand in a way that makes them memorable and referable without ever talking about real estate. The goal is not to sell everyone at the event. The goal is to become the person people think of and refer when someone they know needs an agent. Build Your Real Estate Personal Brand with Client Events People Actually Want to Attend Picture this. You spend $800 throwing a client appreciation happy hour. You send the invites, book the venue, show up early to set up. Fourteen people come. You talk about the market. Everyone eats the appetizers. They leave. Two weeks later not one of them has sent you a referral. You chalk it up to the cost of doing business and start planning the next one. Here’s the thing. The event was not the problem. The strategy was. I sat down with Nathan Schiess this week on Your Marketing Dude to talk about what actually makes events work for real estate agents. Nathan specializes in helping agents build what he calls community institutions, things people genuinely want to be part of, that put the agent at the center of conversations without ever making the event about real estate. It is one of the more practical reframes I have heard on this topic in a long time. The Problem with Generic Client Events Most agents host events the same way. Holiday party. Summer BBQ. First-time homebuyer seminar. Client appreciation lunch. The people who show up are already in your database. You talk about the market or just make small talk. Everyone goes home. Nothing wrong with any of that as a relationship touchpoint. But it is not a growth strategy. The people attending already know you. You are not meeting anyone new. And there is no reason for them to tell their friends about it because there is nothing remarkable to tell. Nathan’s point is that generic events produce generic results. If you want events to actually grow your sphere and generate referrals, the event itself has to be worth talking about. Build the Event Around Who You Actually Are Before you plan anything, Nathan says you need to answer three questions. Who are you? Who is your ideal client? And what makes you different from every other agent in your market? The event has to come from those answers. Not from what you think a real estate agent is supposed to do. Nathan works with agents who have built whiskey societies, youth soccer leagues, homesteading and canning classes, couples date nights, social clubs, fundraisers, and community podcasts. None of those are real estate events. All of them are built around something the agent genuinely cares about. And all of them put the agent at the center of a recurring community experience that has nothing to do with buying or selling a house. Here’s why that matters. When the event connects to something you actually love, it is easy to talk about. It is easy to maintain. And it is believable to the people who attend. You cannot fake that kind of energy and people can tell when you are trying to. Create an Institution, Not Just a Party This is the reframe that changed how I think about this whole strategy. A one-time event is a touchpoint. A recurring event that people look forward to, talk about, and bring their friends to is an institution. And an institution has a life of its own. Nathan talks about his real estate investor association as the example from his own career. He started it as a way to bring people together around a topic he was genuinely passionate about. Over time it became something the community recognized and associated with him. People started introducing him as the guy who runs the investor group, not as a real estate agent. And when anyone in that group needed an agent or knew someone who did, he was the obvious first call. That is the goal. Not to sell everyone who walks through the door. To become so woven into the fabric of your local community that being referred to you feels natural. The Event Does Not Have to Be About Real Estate This is the part that makes most agents nervous. And it is the most important part. A homesteading class where you teach people to can their own vegetables has nothing to do with real estate. A whiskey tasting society has nothing to do with real estate. A youth soccer league has nothing to do with real estate. And that is exactly why they work. When your event is a first-time homebuyer seminar, everyone who attends knows they are being sold to. That is fine if that is what they came for. But the ceiling on that event is limited to people who are actively thinking about buying right now. When your event is something people want to attend because of the experience itself, you get a completely different room. You get people who would never have come to a real estate event. You get their friends who tagged along. You get local business owners who want to sponsor it. And you get a reason to stay in touch with all of them that has nothing to do with asking if they are ready to buy or sell. Events Are Your Best Content Strategy Nathan makes a point about content that I think most agents need to hear. One of the hardest things about content marketing is The post Build Your Real Estate Personal Brand With Client Events You’re Excited About appeared first on Your Marketing Dude.

  5. Aug 8

    Google Business Profile for Real Estate Agents | Get Found in AI Search

    The Bottom Line How does a Google Business Profile help real estate agents get found in AI search? According to Bobby Kerr, serial entrepreneur and local market authority expert with nearly $500 million in revenue generated across real estate and related industries, your Google Business Profile is no longer just a local SEO tool. It is the primary data source that ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini pull from when someone asks for a local business recommendation. Research from Whitespark confirms the AI citation threshold sits at 150 or more reviews. Below that number AI platforms rarely name you. GBP signals now account for 32% of all controllable local ranking factors. And ChatGPT has become the third most popular source for local business recommendations behind only Google and Facebook. Your profile is not an afterthought. It is the foundation. Google Business Profile for Real Estate Agents | Get Found in AI Search A buyer opens their phone on a Saturday morning. They are thinking about selling their house and they want to know who the best real estate agent in their area is. They do not Google it. They open ChatGPT and just ask. The agent who shows up in that answer is not necessarily the one with the best website or the most Instagram followers. It is the one whose Google Business Profile gave the AI enough confidence to make a recommendation. That is the shift that most agents have not caught up to yet. I sat down with Bobby Kerr this week on Your Marketing Dude to talk about why your Google Business Profile has quietly become the most important piece of your online presence. Bobby has generated nearly $500 million in revenue across real estate, lending, home inspection, and insurance. He has been COO of a top-producing RE/MAX team, VP of Business Development at Summit Lending, co-founded Diamond Heritage Inspections and a Goosehead Insurance franchise. And if that is not enough, he is also the lead performer of Bob Jovi, the world’s premier Bon Jovi tribute band. When someone with that much ground-level experience in this industry tells you that your Google Business Profile matters more right now than it ever has, you should probably listen. Your Google Profile Is What AI Reads First Here is the thing most agents do not know. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity to recommend a real estate agent in their city, those platforms are not crawling your website. They are not reading your social media. They are primarily pulling from your Google Business Profile. The research backs this up hard. GBP signals now account for 32% of all controllable local ranking factors, more than review signals, on-page SEO, and link signals combined. And the AI citation threshold, the minimum you need to even be considered for a named recommendation by ChatGPT or Perplexity, sits at 150 or more Google reviews. Below 150 reviews, AI platforms rarely surface you as a recommendation at all. ChatGPT is now the third most popular source for local business recommendations behind only Google and Facebook. And AI algorithms are 30 times more selective than Google search, which means ranking on Google does not guarantee you show up in AI recommendations. The businesses that do show up are the ones whose profiles are complete, consistent, and actively maintained. The Free Marketing Asset Most Agents Ignore Bobby makes a point early in our conversation that I want you to sit with. Your Google Business Profile is free. Completely free. And most agents either set it up once and never touch it again or never fully set it up at all. Meanwhile that profile is often the first impression a potential client gets of your business. Not your website. Not your social media. Your Google profile. Because when someone searches for a real estate agent in your city, Google shows three results in the map pack before any website listings appear. If you are not in those three spots, a huge chunk of potential clients never even know you exist. Bobby calls it your digital storefront. I call it the thing most agents are leaving wide open for their competitors to walk through. Reviews Are No Longer Just Social Proof This is where the conversation gets really interesting and where most agents are thinking about reviews the wrong way. Reviews are not just there to make new clients feel comfortable calling you. In 2026 they are a ranking signal, a trust signal, and an AI training signal. AI platforms read your reviews and extract themes from them. An agent with 200 reviews that mention specific neighborhoods, specific types of transactions, and specific outcomes is an agent that AI platforms can confidently describe and recommend. An agent with 12 reviews that all say great agent highly recommend is essentially invisible to AI. The math is not complicated. 150 reviews is the floor to get named in AI recommendations. Getting there requires making asking for reviews a systematic part of how you do business, not something you remember to do every few months. Bobby walks through the right way to build review velocity, which is consistent monthly volume rather than seasonal spikes. A competitor gaining 10 fresh reviews a month will outrank an agent sitting at 200 stale reviews from three years ago. Recency matters because AI pulls fresh data. Consistency Is the Trust Signal AI Cannot Ignore Here is a concept that Bobby covers that most people miss entirely. AI platforms build what is called entity validation before they recommend a business. What that means in plain English is that before ChatGPT or Perplexity names you as a recommendation, they need to see your business information show up consistently across multiple sources. Your name, address, and phone number need to match on your Google profile, your website, your Facebook page, your LinkedIn, your real estate portals, and every directory that lists you. If the information conflicts across platforms, AI models cannot confidently recommend you because they cannot verify who The post Google Business Profile for Real Estate Agents | Get Found in AI Search appeared first on Your Marketing Dude.

  6. Aug 1

    Tax Deductions for Real Estate Agents | S Corp Tax Write Offs That Save You Thousands

    The Bottom LineWhat tax deductions can real estate agents actually take? According to Leland Gross, CFP and enrolled IRS agent and founder of PeaceLink Financial Planning and Accounting, most agents are overpaying by thousands every year not because they’re doing something wrong but because nobody ever showed them what they’re allowed to do. The S corp structure alone can save you 15.3% in self employment tax on your profit above your salary. The QBI deduction gives you 20% off your taxable business income and you don’t have to spend a single dollar to get it. Your home office, mileage, cell phone, and marketing expenses are all deductible. Pull up your 1040 right now and look for the QBI line. If it’s blank or less than 20% of your profit you’re working with the wrong CPA. Tax Deductions for Real Estate Agents: S Corp Tax Write Offs That Save You Thousands April hits and the number shows up on the screen and your stomach drops. You made good money last year. Really good money. And somehow you still owe the IRS more than you thought was possible. You pay it. You move on. And then you do the exact same thing next year. Here’s the thing. That’s not bad luck. That’s a system problem. I incorporated my business six months into my real estate career back in 2002. Got some advice from a guy we used to call Shady Jay and I never looked back. I have never once experienced what most agents go through in April because I set up the structure right from the beginning. Most agents never do that. And it costs them tens of thousands of dollars a year. This week I sat down with Leland Gross, CFP and enrolled agent of the IRS, founder of PeaceLink Financial Planning and Accounting in Virginia Beach. Leland works specifically with real estate professionals across the country and he gets genuinely nerdy about this stuff in the best possible way. Here is what he told me. You Are a Business Owner Whether You Think So or Not This is where most agents go wrong before they even get to the tax conversation. You are a 1099 contractor. The IRS considers you self-employed. That means you are a business owner whether you have ever thought of yourself that way or not. And if you don’t treat your situation like a business owner, you are going to miss out on every advantage the tax code was designed to give you. Leland put it plainly. He had just walked out of a meeting before we recorded where someone was overpaying by $40,000 in taxes purely because they hadn’t set up their business properly. Forty thousand dollars. Just sitting there on the table every single year. The IRS code, and I know this sounds crazy, is actually written to reward you for being self-employed. You can legally avoid taxes. You cannot evade them. Avoiding is legal. The IRS literally built the code to give business owners advantages because self-employed people generate more income and that’s good for the economy. But you have to know the game to play it. Why the S Corp Structure Changes Everything When you are just a straight 1099 filing a Schedule C, everything you earn as profit gets hit with federal tax, state tax if your state has it, and self-employment tax at 15.3%. That last one is the killer. It goes toward Medicare and Social Security and you pay both halves because you are both the employer and the employee. When you incorporate as an S corp, something changes. You split your income into two buckets. Your salary and your profit. You pay yourself a reasonable salary for the work you do and you pay self-employment tax on that amount. The rest of your income comes out as profit distributions and that profit is NOT subject to self-employment tax. Leland walked me through the math. Say you earn $100,000. You set your salary at $40,000. You pay self-employment tax on the $40,000. The other $60,000 comes to you as profit with no self-employment tax. That is 15.3% on $60,000 that you just kept in your pocket. That is $9,180 a year. Just from the structure. The salary has to be reasonable. You cannot pay yourself $5,000 a year and claim you made $200,000 in profit. But reasonable in real estate is often lower than agents think and your CPA can help you find that number. The QBI Deduction: The One You Should Check Right Now Pull up your 1040. The front page. Go to around line 13. It might move slightly by tax year but look for something that says QBI. That stands for Qualified Business Income deduction. And Leland calls it his favorite deduction because it is the only one in the tax code you do not have to spend a single dollar to receive. You get it purely because you are a business owner. Here is how it works. It is 20% of your business profit as a straight deduction. If you made $200,000 in commissions and had $100,000 in deductions so you were getting taxed on $100,000 of profit, your QBI deduction should be $20,000. That comes right off the top after everything else. If that line on your 1040 is blank, you are working with the wrong CPA. If that number is less than 20% of your profit, that means there was no proactive tax planning happening. It is very easy to get to the full 20% with the right structure in place. The fact that it is not there means someone was not doing their job. The Real Estate Agent Tax Write Offs That Actually Work Once you are set up properly, the deductions are where the money really starts to add up. Here is what Leland covers with every real estate client. The obvious ones: MLS fees, licensing costs, marketing expenses, accounting fees, professional development. Every dollar you spend running your The post Tax Deductions for Real Estate Agents | S Corp Tax Write Offs That Save You Thousands appeared first on Your Marketing Dude.

  7. Jul 25

    How to Rank on ChatGPT as a Real Estate Agent

    The Bottom Line: How do real estate agents rank on ChatGPT and other AI search platforms? According to Robb Fahrion, CEO of Flying V Group and one of the leading voices in generative engine optimization, the answer is not more content. It is more trust. AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini do not rank pages the way Google does. They pull answers from sources they consider authoritative. That means agents who have consistent reviews, expert-led video content, a real presence on YouTube, and a content strategy built around answering specific questions are the ones getting cited. The agents who have been quietly building their personal brand through podcasts, video, and genuine community presence are already positioned better than they realize. A buyer sits down at their laptop on a Sunday night. They are thinking about selling their house and they want to know who the best agent in their area is. A year ago they would have typed that into Google and scrolled through a list of websites. Tonight they open ChatGPT and just ask. That shift is happening faster than most people in real estate realize. And the agents and businesses that show up in that answer are not necessarily the ones with the best Google rankings. They are the ones that AI platforms have decided to trust. Which means the rules changed, and most people have not caught up yet. That is the conversation I had with Robb Fahrion on this week’s episode of Your Marketing Dude. Robb is the CEO and co-founder of Flying V Group, a digital marketing agency that has worked with over 450 companies from startups to Fortune 500 brands. He has been deep in this shift longer than most, and he breaks it down in a way that is actually practical for a real estate agent or service business owner who wants to know what to do about it. What GEO Actually Means GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It is the practice of structuring your content, your online presence, and your trust signals so that AI platforms choose to cite and recommend you in the answers they generate. Traditional SEO was about ranking on page one of Google. You optimized your website, built backlinks, and tried to get one of the ten blue links that showed up for a given search term. GEO is different. When someone asks ChatGPT a question, there are no ten blue links. There might be two or three sources cited in the answer. Maybe none. The AI synthesizes information and delivers a response, and the sources it draws from are the ones it considers the most credible and authoritative on that topic. So the question is no longer how do I get on page one. The question is how do I become the source that AI trusts enough to recommend. Trust Is the New Ranking Factor This is the central idea of the whole episode and it is worth sitting with. Keywords mattered in traditional SEO because that was how search engines matched pages to queries. Stuff enough of the right words onto a page and you had a shot at ranking. AI platforms work differently. They are trained to recognize genuine expertise, authentic authority, and real credibility signals. Think about what that actually means for a real estate agent. The agent who has been putting out consistent video content for two years, who has 150 Google reviews with real responses, who shows up in their community and has their name mentioned across multiple platforms, that agent looks very different to an AI platform than one who has a nice website and a few keyword-stuffed blog posts. Robb explains that AI platforms are pulling from a much broader picture of who you are online than Google ever did. Your YouTube channel, your podcast appearances, your LinkedIn activity, the way people talk about you in reviews, it all feeds into whether an AI platform trusts you enough to recommend you. The Story of the Agent Who Was Already Ahead Here is the thing that should actually be encouraging for anyone listening to this show. The agents and service business owners who have been building personal brands through content, the ones who have been showing up consistently on video, nurturing their database, building community trust, they are already positioned better than they know. The work you have been doing to build your brand is the exact work that GEO rewards. You were not just building a following. You were building the trust signals that AI platforms use to decide who is worth recommending. The agents who are going to struggle are the ones who have been playing the old game exclusively. The ones whose entire online presence is a real estate portal profile and a static website from 2019. YouTube Is Now an AI Search Engine Robb makes a point about YouTube that most real estate agents have never thought about. YouTube is already the second largest search engine in the world. But it is also increasingly being used by AI platforms as a source of authoritative video content. When a well-optimized YouTube video from a credible creator exists on a topic, AI systems take notice. The practical implication for agents is that YouTube content is no longer just about views. A video that answers a specific question, with a clear title, a well-written description, and genuine expertise on screen, is a trust signal that feeds both traditional search and AI search simultaneously. Robb is not talking about production value or subscriber counts. He is talking about showing up consistently and answering the questions your audience is actually asking. That formula has not changed. The distribution has. One Piece of Content, Everywhere This is probably the most practical framework in the whole episode for agents who feel like they do not have time to create content for every platform. A podcast episode is not just a podcast episode. It is a YouTube video. It is three The post How to Rank on ChatGPT as a Real Estate Agent appeared first on Your Marketing Dude.

  8. Jul 18

    Real Estate Agent Burnout? Hustle Isn’t The Problem, Alignment Is

    Real Estate Agent Burnout? Hustle Isn’t The Problem, Alignment Is The Bottom Line Why do real estate agents burn out? According to Deborah Stellingwerff, a leadership coach, former award-winning REALTOR and bestselling author, it starts with something most agents never think to work on: leading themselves. Before you can build a team, lead clients through major decisions, or grow a business that runs without consuming your life, you have to get clear on your own values, your definition of success, and the daily habits that either move you toward the business you want or quietly pull you away from it. Agents who skip that inner work tend to build businesses that look successful on the outside and feel hollow on the inside. The ones who do it tend to build something they actually want to keep. You already know this feeling even if you have never said it out loud. The calendar is full. The phone keeps going. You are closing deals. From the outside the business looks fine. And you are completely running on empty. You took the weekend off and came back just as tired. You tried a new morning routine. You pushed through. And the exhaustion is still sitting right there waiting for you. That is not a hustle problem. That is an alignment problem. Real estate agent burnout almost never comes from working too hard. It almost always comes from working hard in a direction that was never quite right for you in the first place. The clients who drain you instead of energize you. The hours that leave nothing for the rest of your life. The version of success you are chasing that somebody else defined. Deborah Stellingwerff has been inside this problem from two directions. She built a successful real estate career, became an award winning agent, and then stepped back and asked herself an honest question: is this actually what I want? The answer changed everything. She has spent the years since helping other agents ask the same question before they hit the wall she did. That is what this episode is really about. Who Is Deborah Stellingwerff? Deborah Stellingwerff spent years building a successful real estate career and became an award-winning REALTOR before she made a pivot into coaching. What she kept noticing in the agents around her, and eventually in herself, was that the ones struggling were not lacking drive or hustle. They were lacking structure. Not systems structure, though that matters too. The kind of inner structure that comes from knowing what you actually want, what you will and will not accept, and who you are trying to become. Today she works as a business and leadership coach, speaker, and bestselling author helping real estate professionals and service-based entrepreneurs build profitable businesses without losing themselves in the process. She also runs the Aligned and Prosperous Real Estate CEO Quiz if you want to see where you actually stand. Burnout Is Not a Hustle Problem Here is the reframe Deborah makes early in the conversation that changes how you look at everything that follows. Most real estate agents who burn out are not lazy. They are the opposite. They work constantly, follow up on every lead, stay available, and say yes to almost everything because they care about doing the job well. And they still hit the wall. Which means hustle is not the variable. Alignment is. When the work you do every day matches what you actually value, the hours feel different. The clients feel different. Even the hard parts feel manageable because they are in service of something that genuinely matters to you. When there is a gap between what you are doing and what you actually want, every hour costs more than it should. Not because you are tired. Because you are spending energy on something that was never quite yours. That gap is where burnout lives. And no productivity system, morning routine, or motivational content will close it. You have to go back to the source and get honest about what you actually want. What Self Leadership Actually Means Deborah is careful not to make this sound like a meditation retreat or a personality quiz. Self leadership is practical. It shows up in the choices you make before anyone else is watching. It is the decision to end your workday at a specific time and actually do it, even when there is more to do. It is the willingness to have a hard conversation with a client instead of avoiding it and letting the situation fester. It is the ability to sit with uncertainty instead of filling every quiet moment with more activity so you do not have to think. Deborah talks about confidence in a way that cuts against most of what agents hear about it. Confidence is not something you accumulate enough of before you take action. It is something that gets built through the actions you take while you are still uncertain. Every time you do the hard thing, every time you hold the boundary, every time you have the conversation you were dreading, confidence grows. Not the other way around. Your Clients Feel Your Energy Whether You Want Them To or Not This is a point Deborah makes that most business coaches skip over entirely. Leadership in a client-facing business is not just about what you say and what you do. It is about the state you are in when you show up. Think about the last time you were in a listing appointment when something in your life was genuinely off. When you were exhausted or anxious or preoccupied with a deal that was falling apart somewhere else. The client in front of you felt it even if you did your best to mask it. They may not have been able to name it, but they felt it. And it shaped how they experienced you. Contrast that with a version of yourself who is settled, clear, and genuinely present. Same market The post Real Estate Agent Burnout? Hustle Isn’t The Problem, Alignment Is appeared first on Your Marketing Dude.

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About

Mike Cuevas has scripted, edited, and distributed over 2,000 videos for small business owners across the country. He builds full‐service video marketing systems — handling message strategy, editing, ads — so business owners don’t need large teams to grow.His mission is to help people amplify their voice with authenticity and consistency, turning video marketing from overwhelming to manageable.

Information

  • Creator
    Mike Cuevas
  • Years Active
    2015 - 2026
  • Episodes
    267
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 Your Marketing Dude
  • Show Website
    Your Marketing Dude

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