Online Lead Generation for Real Estate Investors

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Hey, it’s Mike Hambright, flipnerd.com. Welcome back for another exciting VIP interview. We interview successful real estate investing experts and entrepreneurs in our industry to help you learn and grow. Today I am joined by David Corbaley. He is a venture entrepreneur that is a pretty amazing background including real estate investing, and he is now focused on helping others generate leads for their businesses. It’s going to be a great show. David is going to show us some lessons on how to generate both inbound and outbound leads for your real estate investing business. So don’t miss it. Before we get started though, let’s take a moment to recognize our featured sponsors.
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Now let’s start today’s show.
Hey, David, welcome to the show.
David: Hey, thanks for having me, Mike. I appreciate it.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. So I understand you’re a little bit of a nomad right now, just traveling around, living the actual Internet entrepreneur life, where you don’t even have to have a home.
David: I’m sitting in my hotel room on the floor with a couch behind me. I have the light from the window shining in so you can see my dirty dishes in the kitchen.
Mike: Yeah. Hey, whatever works, man. Everybody wants to have that life of freedom to do what they want, when they want. So congratulations on that.
David: Yeah, thank you.
Mike: Yeah. Well, it’s an exciting topic that a lot of people don’t talk a lot about. A lot of people that are trying to learn about real estate investing, there is often a piece missing, which is leads. You and I both know leads. If you don’t have leads, you don’t have a business. And so I’m excited that we are going to talk about that today. Hey, before we get started though, why don’t you tell us your background? I know you’ve got a really interesting story and we’d love to hear some more about it.
David: Yeah, absolutely. So you are spot-on on that leads part, though. I mean, we’ll get into that but without leads you don’t have a business. I’m excited to talk about that too. I got into real estate in 2002, but before that I was in the military and I was a Seattle firefighter as well. So I joined the military right out of high school. I was bored with high school, just had a different mentality. Sitting in a classroom all day, being forced to learn X stuff that just drove me nuts. I didn’t like it. I guess it’s just everybody beats to a different drum or whatever but that’s what I do. So right out of high school, I just joined the military. I wanted just try something else, move on and get out of dodge, basically. I just was done there.
So I joined the military, went to boot camp and all that good stuff and then went straight to Germany for three and a half years. I had never been away from home, so that was kind of a shocker at first but ended up being great for me while I was there. Whenever I would see a military helicopter fly by I would just watch it and sometimes the pilot would look down and kind of acknowledge you. I was like, “I want to do that.” So I went and I applied. After a couple of years in, I went and applied for flight school, warrant officer flight training.
I started going to the prerequisites, started doing all of the things that I was supposed to do and, unfortunately, they didn’t do the class one flight physical first. They did it last, and my eyes weren’t perfect. Obviously, you have to have perfect vision to fly in military aircraft so that you don’t blow up the wrong thing I guess. So that didn’t work and it was disappointing, but it’s okay because there were other things in store for me.
So I went back stateside. Again, I just I think a lot of people have this, where especially if you’re a business owner or things like that, there is a reason that you do what you do and it’s because you just want something more. I didn’t realize that it was in me back then, and I realized it more and more as time went on. I’ll talk about that, but I kept searching for something else other than just being in the regular military. It was great but I kept searching for other things.
One day I was at the gym and I saw this picture on the wall. It was these dudes in this really cool looking rubber boat and they had al these cool weapons and camo and that’s really cool. So I actually called the number on the poster and I talked to a recruiter. He was a Special Forces recruiter, and he came and interviewed me, put me through some physical qualifications and all this other stuff. When I went through the selection process, which is about three weeks of not fun. You’ve seen videos and stuff like that, grueling things. So I went through three weeks of that and qualified for Special Forces training. So they moved me to North Carolina and I spent two years going through all of this incredible training and I popped out the other side as an Army Green Beret. Good stuff.
And I spent the rest of my military career doing [inaudible 0:06:45] things with the most incredible people you could ever imagine. It’s just a whole different caliber of people. So that is were I learned the art of doing things unconventionally, where you look at things. We were just trained to that. You look at things in a different perspective than a typical person does. So you find a side door, a back door or a different way to move past an obstacle or problem in your life. That’s were I learned to think that way.
So spent 10 years in. I got out after 10 years because I didn’t want to do 20. So my buddies getting out at 20, they’re 40 years old, having to start from scratch because with our resume, back then not a whole lot you could do with a resume like ours that was legal. So I got out at 10. I was a jack of trades for a couple of years. Then I found the fire department. I joined the Seattle Fire Department as a professional firefighter. Did that for seven and a half years. Great thing, great camaraderie. It kind of replaced part of the military stuff but not completely, so I kept looking, even though I had a great job in the fire department.
I kept looking for something more in me, and again you just have that feeling. You don’t realize what it is but we are entrepreneurs. Sometimes you don’t understand that until you learn enough about yourself. “Well, that’s what’s wrong with me. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m an entrepreneur and it’s awesome.” So I started looking for different things I could do business wise. I didn’t really know anything about business. I have never done any business type stuff. I found a “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” course and I started learning about that. I can’t buy a Subway. I don’t have the money for a franchise. I can’t do these different things that he talked about. But real estate, I’ve heard about this, no money down type real estate and stuff. I can probably do that.
And that takes us to the whole thing where people, you just mentioned earlier how leads are so important. I think I have started out doing what all of us do. I started learning about real estate. How to invest in real estate with no money or whatever it is, I started learning how. And that was probably mid to late 2001 that I started learning how. I didn’t get my first deal until I think it was April 2002. Doesn’t have to be that way. I mean, it’s probably six to eight months before I even got my first deal. I was kicking tires and talking to some agents and stuff and feeling it out. So anyway, I’ll go back to that.
But 2002, I bought my first house. It was a lease option deal. Then I did one or two more of those and realized that I was doing everything that I was taught in the courses and books and everything that I was learning from, sending out direct mails, putting ads in the Thrifty Nickel, putting ads in newspapers, putting up banner sites. I was doing all those things and I was getting some leads, but what I found was not everybody wanted to do my lease option deal.
So I started learning about different ways to do real estate, and I got into subject to the existing financing and did a few more deals that way. Okay, this is cool. But now I know two ways. Not everybody wants to do one of those two ways. So I kept running into the same situation where I need to keep learning more methods, learning more methods because the leads I had coming in were limited. So I figured, well, if I can learn more in methods, I can make better use of this leads and have some kind of fit for more of them.
Mike: That’s the path that most people take. “Well, in order to make this work, I must need to find more ways to monetize these deals.”
David: Absolutely. So it was a roller coaster. We have a high of we’d get a deal or two, this is great and we would be so focused on maximizing that deal and making it work that our marketing efforts would kind of fall to the side. We’d get our deals done and then fall into a lease option. You get an option payment but then you get a monthly payment on that hopefully with the spread. Sometimes, not so much of one. So you would have a bump in revenue but then it would even out, and not a whole lot. Then you would have the furnace go out or you need to replace a roof and take a big bite out of anything that you had in your bank. So there was this vicious up and down cycle and I’m like, “Something has got to change. This is not the business I envisioned.”
So I want to back up to the leads part being so important. And I think what a lot of people do is they get into how to do deals. How can I do this deal? How can I do that deal? How can I do rehabs? How can I do wholesales? Who cares? It doesn’t matter until you have a seller on the phone and a contract in your hand. None of that stuff matters because you’re never going to do a deal without those two things. And people don’t realize that so they get into this repetitive learning mode, learning how to do real estate. We’ve all have been there and I think if things were done a little bit differently, you certainly need to know how to flip a house or whatever it is. But get that one basis down and focus 100% on lead regeneration because if you have the leads you’re going to find a way to close the deals.
We get stuff all the time. “How do I get money? I need money to do real estate.” If you had a contract in your hand, you would find a way. If you had a contract in your hand where you get to sign it or do whatever with it and there was $10,000 on the line, you’re going to find the money or you’re going to find somebody to sign it or you’re going it find a solution. But people don’t realize that.
Mike: Yeah. I think it probably goes hand in hand with a lot of the educations out there that say you can be successful with no money. But the reality is you need money to be able to advertise or you need to be able to hire somebody to do it or do it yourself or whatever. That’s where, at least initially, everybody thinks of the money part of financing the deal but you’ve got to have money to operate your business.
David: That’s key. I mean, I think that’s another issue people forget. Even though this is a real estate business, it is no different than a Subway or, on a high level, a McDonald’s, some big franchise. It’s no different. And people, I think mindset wise, “I’m going to try out this business. I’m going to buy this course and try this out.”
Not realizing that you know this is a business and if you invest your mental focus and your entire focus of your business on, “This is a business. What’s it going to take actually build and run a real business?” And if you look at it like that, it’s going to take some capital to fund my advertising. It’s going to take some systems. I think a lot more people would have results a lot quicker if they went about it that way instead of haphazardly.
Mike: Yeah. And that’s interesting how most of the folks that train out there, they teach more on the how to do the deals or how to get creative. But they don’t teach on the how to run the business side of it. Unless you do that, if you have anything you have a hobby at best.
David: Yeah. Well, that’s exactly what happens too. Because people will stumble through a deal and get one done. “Wow, I got one done.” And then another and another, just like I did. I don’t know. That might be what you did too. And in the beginning, that’s what you are doing is stumbling through and then you realize, “Wow. I’m making some money here. Maybe I need to get a business entity. I’m going to have to deal with taxes.” All of a sudden, it becomes a business instead of going in first with, “This is my business,” it becomes a business and then you have to backtrack and make up for all of the business components that you didn’t have in place before. Because all of a sudden, you realize, “I have a business now.” But either way you get it done, but it would be nice to start out as a business. You’ll be a lot more successful.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. So let’s kind of continue on with leads. So you obviously understand how critical it is and ultimately evolved to helping other people generate leads for their business.
David: Yeah. So for us, we were in that space, doing direct mail and banner signs and all that stuff. And it works. It still works to this day. It’s a little bit different now because what has happened is, and I think there’s probably been one or two cycles since I’ve been an investor since 2002, but you’ll have real estate trends just like any market. So when the trend is down, oh real estate is no good, market is bad. Nobody wants to do real estate investing because it’s not pretty. But when you hear in the news or things like that, “Oh, man, real estate is hot right now,” or there’s low inventory or the media drives this stuff, so you might hear that real estate is the place to be, just like stock market or whatever. People want to invest in stock because they heard it’s hot. Same with real estate.
So what happens is that they hear the real estate market is great, so people think, “Well, I’m going to start investing in real estate. I’m going to become a real estate agent,” or whatever it is. They get involved in real estate. What happens is everybody else is too, because they’ve seen the same media or they heard the same information. So people want a business, so they think, “Oh, real estate, I have heard that’s a great medium.” So they start getting invested in real estate, start learning about real estate.
What do they do? They go online and they start doing searches and they find some teachers, who teach real estate stuff, and they buy a course or they get in forums and they start learning. Here’s a course on how to flip houses or whatever it is. What do you learn? Here’s the kind of mail you need to send out. Here is whom you need to mail it to. Here is where you get the mailing list. Here are the letters. Here is the envelope. All this stuff. So everybody is doing the same thing, and now you have homeowners that are being targeted by the same people, getting five, 10, 15, 20 exact same or very similar letters.
The homeowner’s like, “What the heck is going on here?” It’s confusing to them. Using the methods we use, we’ve talked to homeowners like that and they’re just like, “It’s the weirdest thing. I get all these postcards that look exactly the same,” especially in the foreclosure market or something like that, or absentee owner. So what we found is that everybody is kind of fishing in the same holes. And that stuff still works, the direct mail and things like that, but you have to do it in a specific way that everybody else isn’t doing too. Because otherwise, you have competition and now you’re fishing in the hole that everybody else is. The homeowner knows that.
Now a homeowner now has a commodity versus being motivated, “I’ve got to get rid of this thing,” he’s got a lot of people that are interested and know that he has got a commodity. Now it changes. Now you’re chasing him and trying to outbid everybody else. That’s not real estate investing that I want to be in.
So that stuff works fine but what happens with us is we were finding a challenge getting enough lead volume to be able to do enough deals to grow our business and not just kind of sustain it. So I started learning about online marketing. And I realized back then, this was like 2004, I realized that you know all this Google thing and all this is new but I’m using it. If I want to find something I’ll go to Google and I’ll search for it, whether it’s a local business or whatever. Things were pretty new back then because it was 10 or 11 years ago. But I knew that there’s got to be a market out there for it.
So I started digging into it and I realized that, wow, there are companies out there that you can pay to be a member of their site and get leads. So we did that for a while. I wasn’t happy with the results, so I decided I’m going to figure this out myself. And we just spent two years digging in and figuring it out. I went to these online marketing boot camps and stuff like that and learned how to market online.
So 2006 was our breakout year because we put everything to use that we had learned over those two years and we had our first seven-figure year in real estate in 2006. Eighty percent of that was driven by online marketing, which back then was unheard of. So from there, I was in peer groups. A lot of us were in peer groups or masterminds or whatever you want to call them. Great place to be. They’re very beneficial, but when I was in one of my meetings it came my turn to talk about my business and my challenges. I basically told my group, I said, “I don’t really have any. Everything is going great. Can I share with you what I’m doing?” They’re like, “Yeah.”
So I plugged in my laptop into the overhead or whatever and I showed them how I was doing stuff online. I get done and all of their jaws were on the table. I’m like, “What?” They’re like, “Dude, this is amazing. Will you do it for us?” That started my teaching and fulfilling of how to do online marketing. So it was great. So the big thing is you have outbound marketing, and this is where I want to make a good point. You have outbound marketing, which is what we’re all taught. You have direct mail and banner signs and newspapers and all that stuff.
What we’re doing when we use that is we’re chasing. We’re chasing the homeowner. And just like, guys, if you want to get the girl, or girls, if you want to get the guy, when you’re chasing them they’re not really interested. But when you’re like, “I’m not interested,” what do they do? “No, no, come back.” It’s no different.
So when we’re chasing them, think about this. And I get reminded of this every week. There are those one or two days of the week that are junk days in the mailbox, and so you go to check your mail and there is the coupon book and the newspapers with all the junk and all that stuff. I’m like, “God, here we go. I’ve got to recycle the stuff again. I’ve got to carry back to my house and hopefully not drop it on the street on the way.” And then sometimes you get one of the checks or whatever, the fake checks that have your name and address in the window. I can’t just throw this away. Now I have to open it up, tear my name out, shred my name and stuff because I don’t want to throw it out in recycling.
It’s frustrating. And I feel like you’re imposing. I don’t know if that’s the word. You’re infringing. That’s what it is. You’re infringing on my space. Get out of my mailbox. You’re bugging me. I just want to get my mail that’s important and it’s my mailbox. Get out of it. When you think of it that way, it’s no different that when somebody has an issue that they want to resolve they don’t go to the mailbox looking for the issue. They don’t go drive around, looking on telephone poles or banner signs or whatever. They go to Google. That’s what we all do now because we’ve been trained to do that.
It’s huge and that’s inbound marketing. So that’s when the homeowner, they are in that spot, whether they wake up at 2:00 in the morning or they’re at work or whatever it is, they’re going to pick up their phone and they’re going to type in “how to sell my house fast,” or whatever is. That’s the key because they’re ready. That’s why outbound marketing, I’ll send five, six, seven pieces of mail to the same person. Why? Because you’re trying to hit them at the right time. And eventually you do some, but that’s why you have to do it repetitively, where this is only once.
If you’re there when they search, you win because it’s timing and it’s their timing. So instead of our timing, we do it on their timing. They’re ready. We’re there when they search and that’s when they pick up the phone and call. So it’s a completely different mindset, completely different game because now that they’re calling you not from a mail piece or something, the ball is 100% in your court. They think that you are the only game in town or one of them. So totally different.
Mike: And even inbound marketing, online marketing, that’s changed dramatically over the past few years where seemingly everybody and their brother, anybody could pop up in a bedroom somewhere and at least look like they’re a dominant player based on the quality of their squeeze pages and marketing and their website. So they could literally look like they’re as big as anybody but they may be the smallest guy in town but they don’t look that way. So talk about kind of the evolution of Internet marketing for real estate investors over the past few years.
David: Yeah. So you have a lot of different platforms out there that you can use. With online marketing, there are a couple of different things you can do. You can also do outbound online marketing in the form of craigslist and things like that where we can actually go look for motivated sellers and things on craigslist. That’s a method that certainly works. You have to be diligent about it but you can get leads that way for sure. For us, we like to position ourselves as a local business because people think about when you need a dentist or an auto repair person or whatever it is, you go online and you do a search and you’re looking for a specific thing.
Well, we’re trained to see specific links now that we search for solutions, especially like a business, and if you appear that way when somebody searches for “how to stop foreclosure” or “sell my Denver house fast” or whatever it might be, you win by looking like that local, trusted business. There are multiple ways that you can show up online. One is obviously you need to have a website. I remember even back when I first started, I probably went to my first event in maybe 2003. Some guy was selling websites onstage. Back then, they were probably useless because, “Well, how do I get people to see my website?” “Well, you put your website on your business card.” Remember that? You put your website in your direct mail.
So nobody knew how to find your website unless you sent them a business card or told them about it. So it was basically a big business card online. Nobody knew that because it sounded great from stage. So you need a website. It needs to be functional, not too busy. We used to work with local businesses a lot and the challenge is you have these professionals that are very educated that to see their competitors having these really pretty, flash animated sites. “Oh, I need one of those.” I’m like, “No, you don’t.”
We tested this many times, and here is what works. It’s a nice, clean site that looks professional, that doesn’t have a ton of distractions and bells and whistles. So you can have way too much pretty on a website and people don’t understand that. You need to have a very clear, crisp website that’s consistent with what they’re searching for. An example is if somebody does a search on how to stop a closure in Denver. Your result is one of the searches that show up, and we’ll talk about how to do that.
But your website shows up in their searches and they click on that result and they end up on your webpage that says, “We buy houses.” Well, you might do that, but they aren’t necessarily looking to sell their house just yet, especially in the foreclosure market. We were in that market for years and you learn that you have to ease some people into the realization that, “Gosh, I guess it is best for me to sell my house.”
So if they’re searching for “stop foreclosure” type of stuff and they end up on your site and your site is “We buy houses,” there is an immediate disconnect because that’s not what they’re looking for. They’re looking for a solution for foreclosure.
Mike: It’s kind of a bait and switch, right?
David: Right. Not in your mind, but in their mind. So they’re going to click the back button and you’ve lost them forever. So the biggest thing is to have it correlate. Have what they’re searching for correlate with where they land. So that would ideally be they need to land on a “how to stop foreclosure” page and a little bit of education about that. So have the page match what they’re searching and then have definite calls to action on the page.
Definitely have a phone number at the top, some branding at the top with your logo or at least a name of your business or something so you look professional. And then we love to have a call to action in the form of a form, like a fast response form or something like that. So have that all that stuff at the top, the phone number on the top of the site and the fast response form up there.
And then, if they scroll down, that stuff is all going to disappear. Because they’re reading, have it down below as well so that it’s always in view. Those are a couple of tips, website wise. A website needs to have a minimum of five to 10 pages, even if it’s an “About us” page, a “Contact us” page, or “What we do.” Because Google just doesn’t like sites that are one or two pages. They won’t even acknowledge them a lot of the times. So you need a real website with content on it. That’s a big piece.
So step one for online marketing is you need a website. You need a website that makes sense, like I just talked about. And then you need to get that website to rank because this isn’t 2003 anymore, and you can get your website to show up when people search. There are ways to do that with search engine optimization. We can get into that. Pay per click. You can do it with local listings, which nobody even is touching yet in the real estate space, a very powerful way. So do you want to chat about some of those?
Mike: I’m not sure if we have enough time to go into the any of these in detail. But tell us a little bit about how do people differentiate themselves. You can kind of see there’s this evolution of online marketing, and it’s not too different from direct mail. Now there are canned templates for websites out there that get customized a little bit for SEO optimization based on your market. A lot of the sites start to look the same.
It just comes down to most of those people, most real estate investors probably rely . . . you know this better than me, probably rely more on pay per click versus SEO because they don’t want to spend their time creating content. “I’ll throw money at it and try to generate leads.” And then it just comes down to who is willing to spend the most and duke it out the most in terms of pay per click. So how do people differentiate themselves? How do you see this kind of evolving over the next couple of years where it isn’t just a matter of who is willing to pay the most for clicks?
David: Well, there are a couple of pieces to that. You’re right about the templates and sites and stuff like that. So there are some great providers out there that have websites that are SEO optimized and things, and they are templated. But the thing to remember about that I forget how many thousand counties there are across United States. So even if a lot of people have the same websites, most of the time the person in the area isn’t going to see more than one. They might.
So let’s say a person does a search for “sell my house fast in Denver,” and there are two investors in Denver that happen to have the same website. And they’re both doing pay per click. So the guy or girl clicks on site one and they end up on their site. “Okay. Eh, I’m going to check the next one.” We do that. A lot of times, people check the first and second, sometimes the third, and then they’ll decide to make a call or whatever.
So they go back and click the second one. “This kind of looks just the same, but it’s a different name.” We’ve found that for the homeowner, a lot of times they realize that there are multiple companies out there that do what we do and it doesn’t deter them. It’s just about timing. Are they are going to call on the first one or they are going to call on the second one? That’s why we calls go for the top two positions. If we’re not one or two, we’ll do some adjustments to do that.
So having a template is okay as long as it’s branded to you in the calls to action because you’re still going to get the results. But as far as pay per click goes, that’s where you can really be different because people think that with pay per click . . . and if you are not familiar with that, people listening, it’s Google AdWords. There are a lot of different platforms that do it, but Google AdWords is the 75, 80% big dog. They have all of the traffic.
So when you do a search on something and you see the top three links at the top, right now-it changes-but it has a little yellow thing next to it that just “ad” for ads. So those are ads, and you can actually pay to be placed there. So you can write ads for your site, “Hey, we buy houses fast.” “Sell your house fast for fair price,” whatever, “call us today.” You can get your ad to show up there. So when somebody clicks on it, you basically to show up in those top positions you bid. You say, “I’ll bid $5 for somebody to click on my ad.” Or, “I’ll pay $6,” so your ad will show up.
What most people think is it’s all based on what I am willing to pay. That’s partly true but the big thing is it’s all about a quality score. Google is really focused on quality score. So what we do is we break things down, and I don’t want to get too technical but what we do is we break things down to where what most people do is . . . keywords are what most people use. You use them if you search for a dentist. You might say “best dentist in Denver” or “dentist with good reviews in Denver”. Those are keywords. They’re keyword strings.
Well, everybody types in different things. Every person’s different. So I might type in “sell my house fast Denver,” “how to sell my house in Denver,” “how to sell my Denver house without an agent”. So those are keywords. Now what most people do when they go after pay per click is they’ll take hundreds of keywords and they will dump them all into one campaign and put one or two ads. Those one or two ads, if somebody clicks on them, they go to the same web page.
So remember I talked about relevance earlier. You have, say, 100 different keywords all with one or two ads that all have the same exact web page. That will provide a super low quality score from Google because it’s all about relevancy. Google’s customer is not the people paying for the pay per click. Google’s customer is the searcher, and they are determined to get that searcher a good user experience, which means relevance.
Now if you keep all that in mind, what we do is we break it down to one keyword gets three to five ads and one landing page. So literally “sell my house fast Denver” would have three or four different ads because we’re always testing different ads. And that “sell my house fast Denver” would go to a web page that’s all about “sell my house fast.” And that gives a much higher quality score. What happens is we can go against somebody who’s bidding $10, and we can outrank them for $4 a click. So now we can afford basically a lot more traffic than they can, so we get more leads in the can for less money than they will. That’s the secret behind the whole pay per click thing.
Mike: Yeah, because Google is measuring how long somebody stayed on the page when they hit there, or they bounce out, all those things that basically ultimately is dependent upon the quality of your site and the quality of your pages and your content.
David: Yes, and Google knows it all. They don’t only know did they click on the ad, did they stay on the page four seconds. They know how far down the page did they scroll, what links in the page did they click. They know all of that stuff, and so all of that stuff is part of how Google ranks pages and makes them relevant.
Mike: Yeah. Well, David, I think we can probably talk about this for a few more hours but unfortunately we don’t have much time. Maybe you can take a few minutes here and just talk about people that are kind of hearing this that maybe are thinking, “I need to have a bigger presence and generate leads online,” and they’re maybe not technical and don’t have the time or resources and can’t create tons of content. I mean, how do they get started? What do they do to just kind of start to dip their toe in the water or dip it in a little bit deeper than it is now?
David: I think there is definitely a lot of online research to do, but again you’re going to end up with so much noise and you’re not going to be sure where to go. It’s like searching for a solution to foot fungus or something. You’ll find so many answers. What’s relevant and what’s not? You have it dig through that a lot. So I think find a relevant company or business that does that.
A big tip is to stay away from companies that provide online marketing to dentists and doctors and stuff like that because they’re used to charging a very high price because that market will sustain that. I mean, we would charge a couple of thousand dollars to set up a website and things like that, and $1000 to $1500 dollars month to do SEO for them. So that market is a high price market. So if you try to talk with people that service that market, you’re going to be surprised at the cost.
For us, I mean we definitely have resources if you want to share with people. I’ll be happy to give some info on what we do. We have a lot of different trainings and stuff like that for people to get started with. We have programs and things like that, but go with a company that knows what they’re doing in the real estate space.
I think a big tip is don’t try to figure it out yourself because your objective is to run your real estate business not run your Internet marketing business. Now marketing is your business but if you have an expert or experts running your marketing strategies both online and offline, you can focus on what is making your revenue, which is talking to sellers getting the deals done, etc. And that was the big thing that rolled us over, was starting to focus on the big picture and having other people do what was important. That’s why we built a team. We built a marketing team.
Mike: Yeah. Well, David, I know you have a couple of resources available to share with people to learn more about it. Can you share those with us?
David: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s see. Let me provide a free resource. We have a great resource kit, a real estate investors resource kit, where you can find motivated sellers leads online for free. You can do that without a website and things like that but definitely some great resources there. Why don’t we just have people go to the themarketingcommando.com/flipnerd, and there will be free resource kit there that they can download. So it’s the themarketingcommando.com/flipnerd.
Mike: Oh great. Okay. We’ll make sure we add that down below the page for the folks that are listening and didn’t get to write that down either. I don’t want to be responsible for any car accidents. I know a lot of people listen to them while driving. Okay. themarketingcommando.com/flipnerd. We’ll put a link on the page as well so that will be great. David, we might have to have you back for part two sometime soon.
David: There’s a lot of info to cover.
Mike: Yeah, it’s a lot to cover but I think the point is that the market has changed. Your cheese has been moved probably for a lot of real estate investors. If you’re used to relying on old school tactics, which still work, but just look at how you, if you listen to this, just look at how you research things. Any time you buy something of any sort of significance or want to look anything up, you’re probably Googling it or doing a search online to help you with that. That’s what your prospective sellers are doing too.
David: Absolutely.
Mike: Well, David, any kind of final words of wisdom there? I guess I just gave some of my own final words of wisdom, but if you want to share with everybody.
David: No, you are spot on, and I think going back to the very opening when we started this conversation, is leads are your business, whether you’re a sandwich shop or a dentist or real estate professional or investor I mean, think about the sandwich shop. If you have great sandwiches and all the best ingredients and all the stuff and you just opened your doors and you put a sign out front that says, “Great sandwiches. Come on in,” your store is probably going to remain pretty well empty until you start getting the word out there with marketing and letting people know about your awesome sandwiches. Because people might want awesome sandwiches but they didn’t know exist.
So it is all about lead generation so make that a core of your business, not just how to do real estate business but how to start marketing your business and make that one of the core focuses, if not the core focus of your business and watch it grow.
Mike: Awesome, awesome. David, thanks so much for your time today. I appreciate your sharing.
David: Mike, I appreciate being here. Thanks so much.
Mike: All right, my friend. Have a good day.
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