This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Mortgage Broker Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: Ok, we are through the outline, but what we have covered in the past hour and forty minutes or so, there is so much stuff that we can talk about in marketing that we can’t cover it in an hour, obviously, we didn’t, we never do, not even in two hours, so what you have got coming up is a, I think it is awesome that you are willing to do this, by the way, just to take time out of your life from your family, because I know how heavily family oriented you are, but to take time out of your day, and you are going to be doing a series of live events over the course of an entire week. I believe, correct me if I am wrong, but I believe you are doing two hours a day over the course of a business week. Is that correct? Yes, we are doing from 8 until 10 in the morning from March 1 through March 5 for the “World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course”, and, yes, we are doing it two hours a day for five days, and there is a ton of stuff to cover. I did this recently for a group of handyman business owners, and I did it all in one day and my voice was just killing me at the end of the day. I did seven hours straight.
James: Wow!
Jassen: And I couldn’t get through everything in the seven hours, and I was speaking really, really, fast so we are spreading it out over a little bit, and we are going to record them so you should be on their live, because if you need to ask questions it is much better to get it live and kind of be involved in that. However, if you miss the deadline, and it is coming up on March 1, 2010 through March 5, 2010, if you need to register you can do that on the LearnToBeRich.com website, but if you happen to miss it, I am recording it, and you will be able to go download the five two hour training sessions, plus I have some additional marketing audio CDs. On very specific topics that are so general in nature that if I explain to you what a unique selling proposition is, you will understand that regardless. So I have additional training with that too, and we have the transcript. We are going to have all of them written out, so if you are more of a skimmer rather than listening to two hours of audio, you kind of want to do that, you can also skim through the text transcript and that is also included as well.
James: Awesome.
Jassen: So, I mean you are just going to go in extreme nitty, gritty, technical detail and depth about obviously everything we covered here tonight, but also a bunch of other topics that, honestly, I can’t even fathom, but it is really going to be the course for mortgage brokers that are really looking to explode their business. Right?
James: Yes, it is the implementation course of how to do a lot of what we talked about here and then I go into a lot more detail, and I go into a very specific strategy. We take a whole section and go over a variety of marketing media. That is how to get your message out to the public and how to implement that and the pros and cons of each one and how I would recommend you actually do that stuff, and in case you are wondering, I have done lead generation for over 1,200 industries so I know how to do lead generation. If you can convert them once they call in, because I am not going to each you that… I am not going to teach you how to be a mortgage broker, but I will teach you how to get people to inquire about whatever it is that you are doing, whether it is new home buyers or real estate investors or commercial properties, things of that nature. I can get your phone ringing. I can get people inquiring via e-mail and then it is your job to convert them. So it is not a sales course on how to convert people on the telephone or how to do that part. I am not going to spend any time on that. I am just going to teach you the part about getting business in the door, and then you need to be able to go in and convert them over time, and I will focus on some strategies to make that easier by doing newsletters and things of that nature, but I will not tell you how to actually talk on the phone to a client.
Jassen: Ok. So for folks that want to get registered for that again it is coming up here in a couple of weeks, so if you want to register for that, how do they do that?
James: If they go to “The World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course”. If you happen to be registering before the live events you will actually get access to the live events, if you are registering after the live events you will get access to the recording of that plus all of the bonuses and everything else on a password protected website for you to access.
Jassen: Alright. That is going to be a pretty intense class, I think.
James: Yes, I mean, I always have fun teaching this stuff because I get really excited about doing lead generation. Lead generation for me is where it is at. If you don’t have business coming in the door, you don’t have client’s calling you up saying, “Hey, look I want a loan, what can we do” or “Can I qualify?” or “How does this work,” and you don’t have several of those guys calling you each day, I mean you are just sitting around the office not doing anything and so you need to have that part of your business solved and that is what I specialize in. That has been my focus, lead generation with an emphasis on ways to make money when you do lead generation. So I will teach you all of the strategies on how to do that whether or not you decide to implement that part or not is totally up to you. Some people will not. Some people will say, “I am not willing to put ads on my website,” or “I am not willing to do promotional offers to my list,” or “I am not willing to sell articles and information products in order to build my list either. I just want you to teach me the normal lead generation,” and I do that all the time. If you do the one where you make some money on it, you have a much larger budget to work with and that could really get your leads way up. I mean it is totally up to you as to how you want to do it.
Jassen: Well, and too, like you said, this is an implementation course, not a theory course, so what you really are going to be going over is, I like to call it, step by step procedural stuff because that is how I think because of my background that you know of, and so for people that are looking for a plan, something that they can walk away from the course with, ok I need to do this, then next I need to do this and next I need to do this, that is what you are going to be doing, right?
James: Yes, that is exactly it, and I will tell you this, because I come from the mentality of, I can’t manually be touching everything every single day because I am doing this for 1,200 different industries, a lot of what I teach are systems, so it is a system for you to be able to set up and then you manage the system from a distance so that you are not in there every single day doing every little thing yourself. I am really big on outsourcing. I am really big on implementing scalable models so that if I want to do this for one business, I can do it. If I want to replicate it out over 1,200 businesses, I can do that. If I want to do it in one city, I could do it in one city. If I want to replicate it out over thirty thousand cities, which I did, you can do that as well. That is how I think. I am a big system guy and in order to be able to do it for 1,200 industries, 30,000 cities, you are not touching every little part of this thing every single day.
Jassen: Exactly. And having been a user of your systems, I can attest to their effectiveness and doing what you do basically replicating the things that you do is incredibly effective, and it makes you money. That is all I can say. It makes you money.
James: Here is what I can’t guarantee. I can’t guarantee that you will convert the people that inquire about doing loans because I don’t know your sales skill. But if you know your sales skill, and if I am only given the chance to talk to someone on the phone that I can convert people, well I can help you get people on the phone. I know I can do that, but I can’t say what you do with them after you get them on the phone, because I don’t know you. I don’t know if you are going to be able to go and convert people. But if you know your numbers and you are confident in that part of it. I can tell you that you will be able to generate prospects and leads and get people on your mailing list from the strategies I teach.
Jassen: Alright, well if you haven’t already just in the course of us talking about this, be sure to visit James’s website LearnToBeRich.com and take a look at the mortgage broker marketing course information there. There are resources available as well as description and registration options for “The World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course” to be presented live March 1 – 5, 2010 by the six figure lead generation man, James Orr, and James I really appreciate you taking time out of your evening away from your family to be with us on the call tonight. I think our norm has now become two hours because we are now at the two hour mark, and so I definitely appreciate you staying on long with us and really sharing your experience and this valuable information with our listeners.
James: Hey, well, I appreciate you doing the helpful presentation here as well. If people need to get a hold of you, because they have got a tax problem, or they know someone who needs someone to negotiate their debt with the IRS, or help them work through an issue with the IRS, how do they contact you?
Jassen: Thanks for bringing that up. If you have got any type of tax matters that require some intervention on your behalf, or if you have a business associate or friend that could use such assistance, feel free to visit my website which is at sixfigureresults.com or feel free to give me a phone call as well. I have no qualms picking up the phone and discussing your issue with you. My direct number is toll free 866-627-7654. Is there anything else that you wanted to go over before we close it out for tonight?
James: No, I think that is it. I think we gave a lot of information out so hopefully we will get these up as articles and people may be reading them online or they may be listening to the audio or the video, but if you are interested in taking the next step and really implementing these strategies in your business and learning how to do it, I would definitely upgrade to “The World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course”, whether you get on live or whether you listen to a recording afterwards, and there are advantages to doing the recording afterwards where you can listen to it over and over again, pause things as you implement it, all those benefits to. I would definitely do it and upgrade at LearnToBeRich.com.
Jassen: Thank you, James. I appreciate you being on the line with us, and I hope you have a wonderful night.
James: Alright, thanks, Jassen, I appreciate it.
Jassen: Alright, take care.
James: Alright, bye, bye.
Jassen: Bye, bye.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. This is just a small part of what you’ll learn in the full training: “The World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course”.
This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Mortgage Broker Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: Thanks, I appreciate the correction, actually, because that is a really good point. Even people that do own their home free and clear actually, with reverse mortgages if they hit retirement, things like that, there is still a potential customer. Now, I know it is not on the outline and I know we are already way over time, but you know how much I love talking about the business card thing.
James: You noticed that was missing from the outline?
Jassen: It is funny because I was scrolling through my PDF copy of the outline notes, and I am like, “Wait a second, where is the business card thing.”
James: That was the secret surprise for you. Come on, James.
Jassen: Please!
James: Ok, I will tell you about the business card marketing. However, I will also tell you that it is not highly effective. You could generate business from it, but it is not going to be nearly as effective as you getting face to face or nearly as effective as getting somebody to inquire in other methods. So I will tell you about how to use business cards.
Jassen: The reason is I think it is important to discuss it is, it goes back to exactly what we were just talking about, because so much of the population is a homeowner or perspective homeowner, and, therefore, a prospective client for our mortgage broker. The business card concept is a lot more applicable to mortgage brokers than it is to a lot of other industries. The business card thing is not something, yes, I will probably do it just for fun because I am that way, but it is not something that I expect I will ever, ever get a client from, but whereas a mortgage broker, I think there is a higher likelihood that they would.
James: Yes.
Jassen: Does that make sense?
James: It totally does. It is similar to when I am a real estate investor getting those cards out because the transaction size is going to be so large. It is worth doing it even if I only get one in a lifetime. I totally understand that. So let me talk to you a little bit about business cards.
I did some technology consulting primarily for a very large multilevel marketing company and those guys were extremely aggressive about guerrilla marketing tactics, and what I am about to share with you is not necessarily for everybody, it is for the very specific person that is over the top in marketing and self promotion, but these guys would go out, and you probably have seen them… on the ATM machines, they have cut the envelope in half and have a whole bunch of business cards and take me flyers in there. They will go around to all the different bulletin boards around town and post up flyers and their business card, and by the way, when I say business card I want to point out that I am not necessarily talking about a generic here is my name, here the title of the company, here is my six telephone numbers and my e-mail address, my website and my normal mailing address. I am more talking about a little mini flyer, three inch or two inch by four inch flyer of here is the benefit that I can offer to you. Something with our unique selling proposition on there or your unique target audience message so that people can inquire about getting a unique special report or downloading a widget or going to your website and getting articles or calling you up and getting a rate quote. Whatever it is that you are offering as your pull to get people in there, and I encourage you to test those different things, you put those out there at ATMs you can leave them when you go dine out, and I always mention this, and that is the size of the tip you leave, if you leave it with a business card, actually that has an impact as to whether or not they are going to contact you, so the bigger the tip the more likely they will be to contact or look up what you do.
The other one that I think you like hearing about most is getting aggressive with related books. If you happen to be in the library and you are looking at some real estate investing type of books, and there is a huge section in the library if you haven’t been there for real estate investing books, and you happen to have a business card fall in there as a place holder, and the book happens to find its way back on the shelf, and a real estate investor might pick that up and see that you are a local broker and at least call you up for a quote. Now is that highly effective? Is that a really good use of your time where you should go to the library and do that? No. Should you do 200 books in the library like that. No. But if you happen to be there for other reasons, or you happen to take a couple of books out from the library, and you return them, and you are using your own business card as a book mark, and you happen to leave it in there, and it goes back on the shelf or something like that. Ok, so you have the effectiveness of that. Then you could take it to another extreme and actually go into a local book store and do similar things. However, be realistic with it. It is not going to generate a ton of business. It is not something where if you need business tomorrow that would be something that you do. You just happen to like it because it is pretty aggressive and you think it is fun.
Jassen: Right. Really, and this for you more than me, but you are at the library all the time. You are at Barnes and Noble or Walden books or whatever all the time because you are a book guy. You like being around books. You are always looking for new marketing ideas or real estate investing ideas. You are always out there in the book world looking for new information. It is just part of your personality. If you are somebody that is like that, and you are going to be at the book store or the library every day any way, in my opinion, you might as well have a few of those business cards tucked away in your back pocket, and when you are flipping through books, stick one in before you stick it back on the shelf. If it is something that you are going to be doing anyway, I think that you might as well. That is my take on it.
James: Yes, I would agree with that. If you would happen to want to do business card marketing you could definitely do that. But, yes, it is not going to be… if you had to list the number of five top ways you get clients, I wouldn’t list business cards as one of the top five.
Jassen: No. But it is an example of and hopefully, I think more than anything actually I hope that it is an example that makes people think “outside the box” and look at some alternative guerrilla marketing strategies, especially if they have more time on their hands than money for marketing.
James: Sure.
Jassen: So it is just, even if you don’t do exactly that, use it as a starting point for coming up with some of your own ideas for just some dirt cheap or almost free things that you can do to get your name out there and, you know what, if something like that does land you a client then all the more power to you.. So find things that you can integrate into your lifestyle and your hobbies and your habits like this that you can take advantage of. That is really the point.
James: I would agree.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. This is just a small part of what you’ll learn in the full training: “The World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course”.
This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Mortgage Broker Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: Now there are a couple of kind of straggler topics that I want to talk about real quick, before we close out tonight. One, during the very beginning of this webinar you mentioned the offline marketing and using meetup.com to do some offline networking. Could you go a little bit more into what Meetup is, what you are going to find there and kind of how you find it of value.
James: Sure. Meetup is a website where you can find local groups that are meeting for a variety of topics, both personal as well as business related. You are going to be able to go on there and say, “I am interested in dog training,” and you are going to be able to find meet up groups that are interested in dog training. If you happen to have an interest in dog training, you can go down to that group. There are going to be other people there that have that similar interest. They are going to be talking about dog training, but eventually someone is going to turn to you and say, “So what do you do for a living.” You could say whatever your 30 second elevator speech is and then you could say, “Hey, can I get your card or give you my business card,” and they hand you theirs and now you get them onto your mailing list. They get your newsletter and over a period of time you develop a relationship with them and can do business, whether it is directly related to business or if it is one of these side personal interest type things as well. You use Meetup for more of the personal side, I tend to us it solely for business. But is it effective in the personal side for generating business?
Jassen: Just to explain what you are talking about, I am divorced so I participate in some of the singles events on there here in the front range of Colorado. Because I like the fact that I can meet women that are outside of my normal social circles because my normal social circle to be honest is really hard core marketing people such as yourself, and people I work with, and so in order for me to get out of that I can use a place like meetup.com in order to go have fun, meet up with people for drinks or to do interesting activities, like here coming up in a week or two there is this thing where a bunch of people are getting together to go to one of those vertical wind tunnels where you get to fly, stuff like sky diving without the sky diving. Fun things like that. You meeting all kinds of interesting people, and in my business we estimate that as an aggregate across the country one in twenty people have a significant tax problem, and by meeting enough people it is inevitable, like I said earlier, especially this time of year, people are always asking me tax questions once they find out what I do for a living and so, yes it is for personal, but it generates business inquiries. It does turn into clients, like I am doing a tax return for somebody that I met this way. In my opinion it is a great way to have fun and meet new people and everything but to also expand your SOI, your sphere of influence. To go from the old saying of everybody knows 250 other people, well expand that out, and I think that is incredibly powerful to do.
James: You are finding that going out there and using more of the personal networking side, you are finding new people to add to your mailing list and stay in contact with who may have a problem or may need your service or may have a referral for your service, and the same thing is true for mortgage brokers. If you are going out there and you are just meeting new people, whether it is a hobby or something fun or if it is strictly going to more business networking type events which there are on meetup.com. You can go and establish relationships that way. I strongly recommend that you go out there and do that and expand your sphere of influence like Jassen says.
Jassen: It is even more important for somebody such as a mortgage broker because, I think, nationwide something like two thirds of Americans own their own homes and the other third are renters. With that many people being homeowners it just makes sense to know as many people as you can. It is very different from my industry where I have got to meet twenty people in order to meet one that is a potential tax client. If you are a mortgage broker you meet three people and two of them probably will need a mortgage sometime in the next four or five years. The numbers are definitely in the favor of a mortgage broker. Just because of the nature of their business.
James: Yes, your analysis there I think was off a little bit in that you said one third of the people were probably renters and two thirds were homeowners. I would actually say all of those are candidates for the loans because the renters are probably going to be buying houses, especially if you have programs directly related to that. However, the other side of it which your numbers were right but your description of it isn’t necessarily wrong is that one third of all people who own houses own their houses free and clear, and so those guys might not be good candidates for loans, but they are good candidates for referrals because they know people that don’t own their homes free and clear or that need loans, and so they can be great referral sources for you especially if you meet those guys and they know, like and trust you.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. This is just a small part of what you’ll learn in the full training: “The World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course”.
This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Mortgage Broker Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: Ok, very awesome. Now you have talked, obviously, this whole discussion is anchored by your house list, your prospect list, your client list, so mortgage brokers are in a unique position. If they are in the business for a long time to generate repeat business from their list, contrary to myself, I am in an industry where we fix tax problems, to be completely honest, we don’t want you back as a client. Once your tax problem is resolved, you don’t want to come back to me, and I don’t want you coming back. Otherwise, it was why did we go through it in the first place, right?
James: Right.
Jassen: So clients coming to us to have tax problems fixed, it is hopefully a one shot show which is not good for business continuity, obviously, so we are constantly having to acquire new customers. Well, mortgage brokers can build lifelong relationships, literally lifelong relationships with their clients and have somebody, just an individual or a family, not even talking about real estate investors here, that purchase themselves properties, buy themselves properties all the time, but just families that are just moving every five six seven years, based on the need of their family, kids or come and go, what not. So you can build a lifelong relationship with them and get repeat business over the years. So what are some ways that a mortgage broker can take advantage of that awesome phenomenon in their industry?
James: I will focus on some things that I have been talking about throughout this entire presentation and four things that I can think of, number one is you definitely want to have a monthly newsletter, and the trick question I tend to ask you is how often do you send out a monthly newsletter, Jassen?
Jassen: I am going to want to do that at least once per quarter.
James: Wrong answer. You want to do a monthly newsletter every month. The problem is there are a lot of people that have monthly newsletters that they get out a few times per year and that is kind of the problem. You want to consistently send out your newsletter once a month, and I have a really easy solution for you, if you are not able to get out a monthly newsletter regularly, and that is outsource it. Hire someone else to do it for you. Go on one of these outsourcing type websites and hire someone to do your monthly newsletter. Commit to paying them four hours a month in order to do it, and they will get it all done for you. You want to get your monthly newsletter out. What can you include in your monthly newsletter. You can include any of the articles you have been recently adding to your website. Any offers for any new special reports or downloads or audios or whatever you put in there. You can request business specifically, you should always have a call to action in your newsletter. You can put in there request for referral, testimonials, recent loans you have closed and people being happy with those loans and congratulation notices to real estate notices who have referred you business or other people that have referred you business. You can put in there updates on the gift certificates you are giving out to people who have sent you referrals to encourage more referrals. Lots of different things like that you can get into your newsletter to keep people excited and reading it. I tend to keep newsletters really light, more fun stuff, rather than really dry stuff, but your own personality will come through. The other thing you want to do beside the monthly newsletter, and I think you should mail that by the way and not e-mail it.
I am not sure if you caught that. But use the post office not your e-mail provider, and I talk a lot about that during the full week mortgage broker marketing webinar, especially how to set that up and all the services you can use. It is real easy to do, you just need to know how, someone to walk you through the process. Then the other thing you can do besides those monthly physical newsletters you mail out is you could do occasional e-mails with updates and promotion stuff and special reports and important announcements and get those out via e-mail. I think you should definitely do that as well.
That is not a replacement to a monthly newsletter. You still need to use the physical paper one. There is a lot more perceived value for someone who mailed something to you than someone who e-mailed something to you, just so you know. Actually, there is a really great stat on that. You told me that it was twenty times more effective to do something in the mail. Did you tell me a stat like that recently?
Jassen: Gary Halbert, that is where that came from.
James: Twenty times more effective for you to put something in the mail, so just consider that when you are trying to save yourself a couple of shekels and a couple minutes of time doing it through the e-mail. It is not worth it.
Jassen: Well, especially, being a mortgage broker the commissions in this industry are high enough that it is well worth it to spend the 60 cents or $1 per month to send your newsletter to your list of a few hundred to a few thousand people. The return that is going to come boomeranging back on that is more than sufficient to justify the cost.
James: If someone is not worth spending seven to ten dollars a year on to have them on your list, get them off your list.
Jassen: Right.
James: Just think about it that way. You should be willing to spend $10 per year on staying in touch with somebody if they are on your list. Besides the e-mails and special reports and things like that, you can also give them access to your social network. If you are on Twitter or Facebook and you keep it clean, then you can definitely have them follow you on Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin if you are more of a business minded person. Then the other thing you could do is definitely summarize articles with an automatic RSS feed, and I don’t know if we really have time to go into what that is, but there are certain services out there where you can automatically have any new article you ad to certain types of blogs that you set up automatically e-mail to them once a week. Any new content you add to your website they are automatically being get hit once a week with those articles, just by opting into that site for you.
Jassen: I agree. What is really all this about? It is not really maintaining communication, maintaining top of mind awareness and building that relationship so that people what?
James: Know, like and trust you.
Jassen: The whole, actually I think some people have started referring to it as, KLT, which is kind of sad that it has been reduced to an acronym now, but it is true. It always has been true and always will be true. People do business with people they know, like and trust and so anything that you can do to build that ongoing relationship I think is valuable to your long term existence in the industry. Wouldn’t you agree?
James: I totally agree. To comment on that abbreviation thing, the “KLT” thing. Why don’t we just abbreviate the whole concept as RM. Call all of it relationship marketing and not even talk about any of the details.
Jassen: Well, then this webinar would have been over an hour and twenty-eight minutes ago.
James: Yes, you just say, use relationship marketing and lead generation. We will call it RM and LG and just say that is all it is and that is what is silly about using some of these acronyms. You really need to talk about what they are. You get to the point where everyone is talk in abbreviations and no one remembers what it was.
Jassen: Right. I will be honest, that is one of the downsides to being a big Twitter guy. There are so many acronyms on Twitter because you only have 140 characters for everything. Sometimes it feels like, “What does that mean?”
Again, the whole focus of everything we have been talking about here is, you are right, it is relationship marketing and lead generation, so everything that we have been talking about is to focus on those two big things, is getting people into your pipeline, that is the lead generation and then building the relationship by marketing to that pipeline, and it really galls me when I am on somebody else’s list, and I must be on a dozen or two dozen people’s list just because I am interested in this sort of stuff, and the vast majority of them make no effort to build a relationship. It is sales pitch, sales pitch, sales pitch. What do you think I do after a while when I am on someone’s list like that.
Jassen: I can tell you what I do.
James: I am off those lists pretty quickly. I don’t need to have sales pitch. I am looking for information or I am looking for a relationship. I don’t want to just be sold something, or I can go to their website if I am interested in being sold.
Jassen: Exactly. I hope that we have hammered that point into people’s brains that everything that we are talking about is, to be summarized, you are doing lead generation to build a list so that you can develop a relationship with that list that will then grow your business. I think that is about as simple as the flow chart can get.
James: I think so. I think that is a pretty good summation of it.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. This is just a small part of what you’ll learn in the full training: “The World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course”.
This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Mortgage Broker Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: Only. The joint venture world is something that is fairly new to me that you have been a little bit more involved in, and there are some interesting things that you can do when it comes to joint ventures, and, again, I will be the guy that says this. A listener on our call might be saying, “What! I am a mortgage broker, how on earth can I joint venture with anybody?” But there are some incredibly effective things that a mortgage broker can do in terms of lead generation, for their business that revolves around the concept of joint venturing. So could you go into some of your suggestions for how a mortgage broker can do joint ventures effectively?
James: Sure, I am going to try to keep this one relatively short to try to reduce our time going over it, but I will give you just one really good example, and that is, if you go find another person that understands the value of their newsletter. They have got a regular newsletter going out, and they have got a nice size client base of people that know, like and trust them, you could agree to do a straight up exchange where you will allow them to put a flyer inside your newsletter, and you could put a flyer inside their newsletter, and if it were me I would want to be offering some type of special report or widget or free download to members of that special group. Let’s say you have a real estate agent friend, and they have got their farm, and they are doing a traditional farm (farm in the marketing sense not agricultural sense). They have got 500 people on their mailing list. Well, you could say, “Look, I have got 300 people on my mailing list. I will tell you what I will do. I will go ahead and allow you to take a flyer and insert it into my next mailing to my mailing list, and I will take the flyer, and I will insert it into your mailing list and my flyer will say I will give you a two hour audio CD on everything you need to know in order to get the lowest rate and the best term on your loan and qualify the easiest, whatever it is that you are doing a special report on, and all you need to do is call up and request it. It is a free service I offer when you work with Jill the realtor. You can go ahead and just do a joint venture where she puts in something in your newsletter, you put in something in her newsletter, and next thing you know, you have now essentially doubled your mailing capacity with no additional marketing costing, except for printing up whatever it is 400, 500 flyers and getting it in there. She is already going to pay for the postage. She is already sending out the newsletter. You are already paying for the postage because you are going to send out your newsletter, and both of you guys have a win-win doing that. Now can you do that with five other real estate agents? Sure.
Jassen: Definitely.
James: Yes, you could go around and find five or ten different real estate agents that are all doing some type of mailing list and doing that with it. You could also go and seek out your local real estate investor group or club and offer to do something like that. You could go and talk to electricians or plumbers, anyone who is doing some type of newsletter that they have some regular contact with their client base and offer to do some type of joint venture where you do that. Just some ideas there on how to do joint ventures and why they are so powerful. You could really expand your network very quickly by doing stuff like that.
Jassen: I like it! Again, you will go pretty in depth on the joint venture opportunities for mortgage brokers in the full week mortgage broker marketing course.
James: I believe I do go into that in a little bit more detail, but it is not something I tend to focus a ton of time on because we go over a lot of different strategies, and really it is just a matter of personal networking and finding those people that have other lists that you can tap into. So I don’t think I go into it a ton, but I do go into it.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. This is just a small part of what you’ll learn in the full training: “The World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course”.
This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Mortgage Broker Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: The next thing I want to talk about is the outsourcing concept that you have mentioned several times throughout our webinar here tonight. You have talked about some different things that you can have outsourced, but how does somebody, first of all, go about deciding what they are going to outsource, and then how do they find somebody to outsource it to. Could you kind of describe some of our processes for that?
James: I will tell you very briefly my process for determining whether or not I should outsource something. I will talk a lot about what I think you should outsource just in general. My general rule, the very brief version of it, is you need to know what your hourly rate is. So you need to calculate our how much you need to make per hour in order to meet your income levels. Then anything less than that if you can outsource that particular task that you are about to do for less than what your hourly rate is, you need to outsource it so that you can keep your hourly rate above that minimum. Ok?
Jassen: Ok.
James: So if you need to make $100 per hour in order to meet your income goal you know licking stamps to put on envelopes could be outsourced easily for $5, $10 per hour, something like that. So you should not be doing that. So that is one of the quick rules I have for determining whether you should outsource stuff. Let me give you some very specific examples as it relates to marketing.
You could definitely hire someone and outsource the writing and posting of articles for you. So if you are not a writer, if you hate the idea of writing this content, and I have been telling you a while that writing articles is extremely effective, very costs effective, very good at getting people to your website and then converting them, because you become an expert, to prospects. If you are not that type of person, you could easily outsource it. It is relatively in expensive to do. Do you have an idea of what it would cost to have articles written? My numbers are real low because I am pretty cheap, but do you have any idea what it would actual have to…
Jassen: Yes, I know you somehow magically get them for lower than I do. Right now I am paying somewhere around $4 to $6 per article to be written for something short.
James: I think that is a reasonable range. So let’s say you had to pay $5 dollars in order to have a 500 word article written for our website. We talked about before that the value of it to you at a nominal level. The minimum level would probably be about $10.00 a month in traffic. So you are going to invest $5 in order to have an article written that is going to return you $10 per month, that seems like a pretty good investment to me.
Jassen: Very good.
James: So you can outsource the writing of articles. That is one thing. The other thing is that you can outsource keeping your advertising up on classified ad type websites. I mentioned before Kijiji and Backpage and Craigslist and those guys. Those are one of the sites that you can actually go put your marketing up on a local basis, follow all their guidelines, just don’t do anything crazy. But you could hire someone. Think of it as a personal assistant who makes sure that your add is up and running. It is in the correct position and they actually replace it every so often for you to keep it fresh and updated for you. You could outsource things like that.
You could also outsource taking your articles and your ads and putting them into newsletters and to other people’s ezines and kind of getting your information out and expanding your reach. So that is something that can be outsourced as well. Two last things I will mention, just some ideas about things you can outsource and that is you can contact other website owners, other real estate agents about being able to blog content to their website. So let’s say you go write a really good article that would be helpful to real estate agents to help them get business. Well you could offer to have you write an article for their website then you go have that article posted on there and you could have someone go around and contact those website owners for you and they could just say they are your virtual assistant, they are your assistant doing it for you, and if they want to talk to you directly have them give your number and do that.
You could also have someone do the same or similar things with social media, and I realize there are some people gasping when I say that because social media is supposed to be you personally interacting with stuff, but I will use the same example. Trump and Britney Spears are probably not updating their own Twitter pages all the time themselves. They have got managers and staff doing it, so just consider that if that is not you personality style. If you would otherwise ignore social media, I think it is probably better for you to hire someone else to take care of some it for you rather than just ignore it completely.
Jassen: Yes, my social media coach would be cringing at hearing you say that.
James: I am sure as most people would. But you know, social media really is not my thing.
Jassen: I noticed.
James: I automate a lot of it myself. But you know occasionally I get on there and I do something for myself. You don’t have to be really adept at social media in order to succeed in this business.
Jassen: Well, right, and that is a good point. Social media is getting a lot of attention these days in the internet marketing world in particular, but social media is nothing but a fancy term for really stuff that has been going on for well a decade anyway. There has always been websites where you could have a profile with pictures and you could interact with people or where you could gather together based on certain interests or what not. It is really nothing new, just like blogging. People kept chronological journals of their lives, their businesses or what not years before the phrase blogging was even created. So it is nothing new, it is just the evolution of the technology to make it look prettier and make it easier for the user, but in reality the concepts at the core are the same whether you are talking about, well honestly, whether you are talking about going to a Chamber of Commerce meeting, or volunteering at an event or if you are hanging out on Facebook. You know a lot of the concepts really are the same in my opinion.
James: Yes, I have a slightly different opinion, but it is not worth going into, but it is all good.
Jassen: Well, and it is really what you are comfortable with. As a case in point, I will point out, James, you had me a few hours before the webinar, you sent me a quick note saying, “Hey, could you put something out to Twitter about our webinar tonight.” And you did that because you wanted obviously to make this available. This event we are doing tonight available for the folks on Twitter, but it is not something you are going to go do yourself because it is not part of your tool set, I guess that you embrace. Right?
James: Right, it is not something that, I mean I put it out on my Twitter account, but I don’t focus on Twitter, and you could see. You could go to my Twitter site, I have gotten a couple hundred followers, whatever it is, but I am not actively pursuing it. Those guys have voluntarily came on the site and followed me. It is not like I was following them.
Jassen: Right, whereas I like Twitter. I engage on Twitter. I have got somewhere around 3,500 hundred followers or something like that. I am amazed that many people could possibly care what I have to say, especially when half of it is about figure skating, but it is something that I have fun with and utilize. The only reason I mention that is because people in general when it comes to their marketing they have to do stuff that they are going to stick with first of all which means that it has to be stuff that engages them. So if social media is not your thing, then either don’t do it or, like you said, outsource it. That is totally an option and others may disagree with me on this, but I feel the same about blogging. If blogging is not your thing at all and you are not going to do it, then either outsource it or figure something else out.
James: I would agree with that. Outsource it.
Jassen: Right. Yes, probably outsource it more so than not do it.
James: It is so inexpensive to do, to hire someone else to do it.
Jassen: Exactly. So for anybody listening tonight who says I don’t want to do this or I don’t want to do that or that sounds too hard or I can’t write or any of those things. They are just excuses. That is really all they are.
James: Yes, because you could outsource all of it and have it done for you. You don’t have to do it yourself. If you really want to focus on serving clients and doing the brokering of loans and talking to client that you are working on getting their loans for, outsource everything else. You are paying a little bit to do it. It is not a lot of money. Just have someone else do it. You just need to be able to tell them what they need to do.
Jassen: Alright, sorry about that little tangent, but I felt that was important for people to understand especially on the social media aspect. Next thing to talk about, and you know what, we are actually doing pretty well on time, we are only twenty minutes over.
James: Only. 
Until my next post,
James
P.S. This is just a small part of what you’ll learn in the full training: “The World’s Greatest Mortgage Broker Marketing Course”.
