With only 10 publishing days left in the year, we're counting down our most popular articles of 2013. This article was posted back in January and is #10 in our countdown.

How balanced is your business? If you're a buyer's agent with few or no listings, the strength of your real estate practice may be suffering.

A healthy real estate strategy includes cultivating both buyers and sellers. After all, the two groups have a symbiotic relationship with each other. A robust pool of buyers to market to enables you to sell listings faster, while a set of solid listings helps you attract higher quality buyers. Growing both sides makes for a stronger, more well-rounded business.

With the housing market making a recovery, plenty of buyers are searching for homes while interest rates and prices are still low. This can be a double-edged sword, though. While there's no better time to be a seller's agent, competition for listings is fierce.

And it's no wonder—listings take only one-third of the time and effort of working with buyers! Fortunately, Market Leader's free Listing Agent Guide has outlined four strategic steps you can take to attract listing leads, convert them into clients, and sell their homes.

Read on to learn more.

Step 1: Understand Sellers

Understanding buyers? That's easy. It's not difficult to identify them on your website and learn what type of property that they're interested in—just look at their search behavior. It's much harder, however, to know who potential sellers are. Unlike buyers, they're not searching for homes online.

So how can agents reach out to potential listing leads without an easy way to identify them? Market Leader suggests turning your attention to another type of website user—those searching for home values.

Homeowners may be looking up property values for a myriad of reasons—contemplating a move or possible refinancing, or maybe just wondering how they compare to the neighbors. By considering all the reasons a potential seller may be searching, you can craft a strategy for reaching out.

Step 2: Generate More Listing Leads

Before you can reach out, you must first generate leads. Market Leader suggests implementing marketing campaigns on channels like Craigslist, social media, direct mail, and more.

Whatever your method, be sure to always communicate your unique value, like your experience and customer service skills. The goal here is to invite potential leads to find their home value, with assistance from you.

Step 3: Create a Winning Listing Presentation

Once contact takes place, you can begin the conversion process. Your first major hurdle to winning your new lead's business is a strong listing presentation. The Listing Agent Guide outlines eight do's and don'ts for ensuring your presentation is successful.

While you should certainly highlight your strengths—your years of experience, success stories, and statistics like time to close—the listing presentation should ultimately be about the seller. Listen to your prospect's questions and concerns. Let them know that you care about selling their home.

Step 4: Turn Listings into Sold Homes

Market Leader's Listing Agent Guide next details two strategies for selling a home. First, you must increase exposure by driving as many potential buyers to your website, and therefore your listings, as possible. This can be done a number of ways, including paid advertising, listing syndication, single property websites, open houses, and more.

The second strategy involves leveraging your already existing resources. If you've been a strong buyer's agent, for example, you already have a pool of qualified buyers that you can market your listings to. This is where building a balanced business comes in handy!

Next Steps

These are just some of the tactics Market Leader covers. For more in-depth strategies, download the Listing Agent Guide for free from Market Leader's website. To learn more about Market Leader, click here.