Many people are feeling the budget crunch, not to mention being tired of their 40-60 hour a week job. Because of this, they are looking into other ways of making a living, such as real estate investing. Real estate investors can sometimes make tens of thousands of dollars per month working only ten hours a week! But whatever business is right for you, there are several principles that will make the difference between success and failure.

1. You have to find customers. In real estate investing, these are your prospects – people who have the right kinds of homes they want to unload, or people who want to purchase the kinds of homes you can find. You can be an expert in the real estate business, but if you don’t find these prospects, you won’t be making any money.

Similarly, in any other business, you have to generate awareness of your services and find those people who want what you have to offer. This is why virtually every business expert stresses that you must plan for at least some investment of time and money into marketing, advertising, public relations, and similar activities.

Fortunately, with email, auto-responders, and the like, you can be contacting several hundred people a week, but without doing the actual grunt-work of dialing phones, stuffing envelopes, and the like.

2. You need to screen your potential customers so that you don’t waste gobs of time on people who will never do business with you. There is no reason to feel bad about this screening process. If they are not really potential prospects, they will be wasting their time, too. Consider that of all the people who contact you with real estate to sell, probably less than 5% of them are genuine prospects. Think of the rest of them as “suspects.”

If you learn to screen prospects, you can save yourself hours of valuable time. Good ones will work with you on a deal. Bad ones will want everything their own way, and they will want all of the money. Learn to avoid these customers.

3. The third step is to create and present your offers. Good prospects often do this for you. It is a good idea to simply ask a potential real estate seller how much is the least they will accept. If they name a price, then they have created the offer.

4. The fourth principle of successful business dealings is follow-up. Many people underestimate the value of following up on your prospects. The internet and email have made follow-up simple. Keep in mind that a full 82% of business revenue has been found to come from the second to seventh contact with the prospect. You don’t have to spend all your time following up, though. Even contacting three or four people a week can make a big difference, especially if you have screened those prospects.

5. Finally, close the deal quickly. In most cases, you do not have to actually attend closings anymore. There are other experts who do this for a living, and the signing of a contract is often carried by Fedex and done long distance. A smart entrepreneur knows when to delegate a job and when their time can be spent better on another task.