Pulse: Readers share the worst marketing advice they've ever received

Kick off the fall with Marketing and Branding Month at Inman. We’re going deep on agent branding and best practices for spending with Zillow, realtor.com and more. Top marketing executives drop by to share their newest tactics, too. It’s all you need to take your branding and marketing game to the next level.

Pulse is a recurring column where we ask for readers’ takes on varying topics in a weekly survey and report back with our findings.

Sometimes, when approached with career-related questions, your broker, colleagues, mentors and other industry contacts give you good advice — solid words of wisdom that you hold onto and follow for years. Other times? Well, not so much.

Last week, we asked you to tell us the worst marketing-related recommendations and tips you’ve ever heard in this industry. From offering steak knives to entice buyers to neglecting the internet when marketing your business, here are all the bad, bad tips you’ve shared with us.

• I had a broker tell me I was wasting my time marketing my business on the internet.
• Knock on doors for a listing.
• Taking your own photos.
• Not to door-knock. I’ve received wonderful leads that led to closings by door-knocking.
• I started selling real estate a few months after graduating from college when I was 22. I was young, lacked professional work experience altogether and needed to figure out where my business was going to come from. I was given the advice to target first-time homebuyers and buyers searching around the university area of town because those buyers would also be younger, and to host open houses in that area, at houses that would appeal to more entry level buyers.
• I had a client who worked in marketing during the housing crash who wanted me to offer a set of steak knives as a way to entice buyers.