This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Real Estate Agent Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: I agree. Okay, good, well we got through it.
James: And we’re less than two hours.
Jassen: And less than two hours we did not set a new record.
James: No, we did not. Although, I have a feeling we need to change this from a one hour call to obviously at least ninety minutes.
Jassen: At least, yeah.
James: Okay.
Jassen: Well, you know, and especially when we’re talking about stuff that we do on a daily basis to market our own businesses and things we’ve had great success with and we’re obviously passionate about them. I hope that that shows through to our listeners and because this stuff works! It works that’s all I can say is it works.
James: You know, I’d like to put together an audio program where we list everything we did that didn’t work. That’d be a full day seminar.
Jassen: Well, no, James, the thing is, is that and you know this, but even if something doesn’t work you still get feedback off of it because you should be actually measuring everything that you’re doing. Okay, we’re already overtime I’ll delve into this. We, here at, you know, my tax resolution firm we just did a two-thousand piece mailing to a very, very specific audience for a very, very specific service and out of those two-thousand pieces we got, what we got back were six phone calls and others here at the company were, they were like, that sucks, that was a complete waste of money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and this actually happened today, this conversation and I was like, guys, no this was not a waste of time and money. What this was, was we now have something, we have a baseline for this new service offering that we’re introducing.
So, what we do now is we have to make some choices about what we’re going to do with this information. It’s not just a, it didn’t work so then we throw it away, it’s what are we going to do to this to improve from there? And so, we sat down and put together a plan, but the initial reaction from everyone else was, that didn’t work lets not do it again and so if that’s your attitude, then, I don’t mean to make this an inner game kind of thing, seriously if that’s your attitude, then that, it is what it is and you’re going to get, you know the subsequent results.
Whereas instead if you look at that as a learning opportunity and you know, there’s no such thing as failure, there’s only feedback, I don’t remember who said that, but I’m sure you do. You take that feedback and you implement improvements to make it more effective and that’s really all it comes down to, so.
James: Yeah, some of my biggest breakthroughs have been something I tried that didn’t quite work and then I had to go test something slightly different and I realized it did work. So, just realize that you’ll go through testing things and find opportunities by your test. You know, you might take some of the things that you heard on this call and implement them and find out that the way you heard something being said wasn’t exactly what you thought we said or wasn’t exactly what we said, I guess is the way I would describe it, so you are misinterpreting exactly what we’re saying and you may hit on, you know, some major improvements of what we were doing or you may find out that what we said to you didn’t work the way you thought it was, you have to tweak it and you discover something amazing.
You know, part of the reason why I can very comfortably give you all the detail I could possibly think to possibly remember to give you and yet, still have people come to me for consulting is because there is a difference between what you hear and me actually showing you how it’s actually done.
Jassen: Right.
James: And, you and I have had this problem a lot of times is that I will share with you exactly what I’m doing, I’ll even show you numbers and examples, and you can see everthing going on, on the surface and then you try it and you’re like, you know, I’m not getting the results that you are getting. I tried the same thing and, you know, I ended up negative $500 when I did it and you ended up positive $2,000. I mean, what are you doing differently? And then we go through step by step and I’m like ‘Oh did you do this’ ‘No I never even thought to do it that way’ Oh, well, you know, that makes the biggest difference. I mean that’s a 400% difference in response right there and so there’s all these like, little details…
Jassen: Well, there are, we could just go on forever about this. In the past 48 hours alone you and I have had three separate instances where we read, listened to, or thought about the exact same thing and got something completely different out of it.
James: Really?
Jassen: Yeah, the Dan Kennedy Information Marketing Boot Camp that section that we both listened to…
James: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jassen: …Remember that? That page out of The Ultimate Marketing Plan, you and I both got something different out of that even though we read the exact same words and then earlier today, something you called me on you know, having to do with the law of attraction, you know, so we were looking at the same scenario and I was looking at it from one perspective, you were looking at it from one perspective, you know, your perspective and you were like ‘you know that’s the law of attraction thing?’, and I like, yeah good point. So, the same material can be presented, but it is what you hear, how you hear it and I guess, how you process it. So, I guess I don’t know where I was going with that, but…
James: No, I agree, I think that it’s really important concept in that you can have 500 people listen to this same audio presentation, 90% of them are going to take absolutely no action whatsoever because that’s just the way the numbers are and it’s not just me so I don’t take personal offense to it, but I worked for a test preparation company when I was in college and I was shocked when I saw the number of people who would register and pay $1,000 for a test preparation course in order to, you know SAT, the ACT, the graduate exams LSAT, GMAT, MCAT… you know all those different exams you have a very large number of people that pay the money and then you have a very small percentage of people that actually attend class and I am always amazed at the difference between those two numbers and so, it’s not just my stuff, it’s not, you know, there’s statistics on the number of people that read books that actually buy the book. It’s some very small percentage. So, if 500 people listen to this audio a huge number are never going to do anything with it.
Jassen: Right.
James: A very small percentage of people are going to take one or two nuggets and apply those things or at least think about those things when they’re doing their new changes or anything like that. Then you’re going to have a very small number, maybe one, or two or three people that actually take it and say ‘Wow these guys really know what their talking about, they’ve done it, their showing us the way’ and their going to try to implement the challenges. Sometimes their best intention of implementing and modeling what we’re talking about is going to reach, because there’s certain points when you’ve got to go from step one to two, but there really is a couple of choices you need to make from going from step on to two that we didn’t specifically address, you know, email out your guys, well, what is actually in the email?
Jassen: Right.
James: What’s in your signature file, what’s in the subject line?
Jassen: Right, that’s a whole five hours itself.
James: Yeah, well, you know, what software program are you using to send out the email, are you doing color or are you doing non-color, you doing HTML or are you doing text? Alright, how are you doing your links? Are you using a link tracking code or are you using the straight up link? What’s the web address of your link, are you doing to the homepage or are you doing to a specific page? Are you testing headlines? Are you testing headlines? How is your page laid out? So, there’s like hundreds of things that we have not discussed not to like deceive you or you know, try to hide anything from you. If they come to my mind I will talk about them and if I’m talking to someone in the consulting environment and they ask me specifically, I’ll share with you, it’s not like I’m trying to hide it, it’s just that for the sake of time, we’re already 50 minutes over, but I can’t go into all that detail and so having someone do consulting with you or say ‘I’ll do it for you’ like for instance the web site set-up. If you don’t know how to set up your website, I can walk you through those steps, I can give you a check sheet that’s got 39 different steps, do this, do this, do this, but there’s still things that I, when I do it for you that I already know how to do it that you don’t have to make any decisions about that it will be set up right.
Jassen: Right.
James: And so you can pay me to do that for you or you can try to work through the best you can with the 39 steps that I do even if I show you in a video.
Jassen: Right.
James: Because there’s just differences so, I think that’s what you were getting at.
Jassen: Well, yeah, I mean everything that we talked about tonight is stuff that you and I have talked about endlessly for, you know, months, years kind of thing, but out of even me being here being on the call with you tonight I actually have here, you know on post-it notes in front of me on my desk I actually got down on paper eight things that I need to do in my own business based on what we’ve talked about for the past two hours. You know, even though this is all in theory, all stuff I already know, right? But, I was just able to think of things in a different light and go hey I need to do that so that I can get this. So, you know, even though I’ve heard it before I still got new stuff out of it.
James: Yeah, totally. I can give you two examples from the call that I learned. I mentioned the one before about YouTube, that link in the beginning. I heard you say that so many times before and I’ve actually used it, I mean, I put my link in the YouTube thing, but it just never dawned on me to have it be the first thing in that description.
Jassen: Right.
James: I don’t know why it didn’t dawn on me and that’s, I have a feeling that’s going to make a big difference in the number of click throughs I get from my YouTube videos, and I’ve done YouTube videos, I mean I’ve use YouTube all the time to promote my stuff and I think it’s going to have an impact.
Jassen: I guarantee it will make a difference.
James: Yeah, and so that’s one of the things the other thing is the way you actually described people self-selecting not to work with you by having AdSense ads on there. I hadn’t heard it explained like that before so, it was a slightly different way of you explaining that if people click on the ads their opting not to work with you anyway you might as well get paid and so I though that was great. I wrote it down I’ve got two notes, so it’s like the weirdest thing to like, you know we could have the same conversation over and over again and other people can hear it over and over again and you know something, if they listen to this thing a second time they’re going to hear different things.
Jassen: Right. Right. And you know, another thing that you and I talk about this a lot about that a lot of our conversations that we have, you know, just privately between us are things that we should, you know, record because they’d be great material or whatnot. For the people listening what we have basically had for what, the past 20 minutes plus, this Webinar, I didn’t mean for it to, but it’s kind of broken down into the kind of conversation that you and I would have privately anyway and so I really encourage people, listen to the whole thing again, you know, once the recording is available on the website, but personally, I would, I’ll probably go back and listen to this section again, but listening to the last 20 or 30 minutes about how you and I are engaging in thinking and, does that make sense, how we’re looking at the problem in order to pop out solutions? Does that make sense?
James: That is one of the biggest differences between going and buying a book or a CD or a course and being able to have live consulting and ongoing back and forth conversation. Is that you; If I had published a book on all the theory on how to do something and you actually read it you would not be able to implement that nearly as well, even though I tried my hardest to give you exactly the information that you need, all the detailed steps as if you can come to me and say ‘How did you actually handle this part of it when you were doing it?’ and that’s part of what you get when you do consulting or you do some type of ongoing question and answer relationship and I offer that, by the way. I mean, we offer it, any of our Bronze Membership guys at the end of calls like this or at the end of calls for, you know, the real estate we do as well, they can ask questions and say, you know, ‘How did you actually handle this?’ or ‘How do you talk to people this way?’ or whatever it is that you’ve got questions about that’s part of what you get and then I also offer one on one consulting if you want to have it more private. So, I mean, that’s the real benefit in my mind.
Jassen: I agree. I mean, I write, you know, on my blog, I write blog posts about, you know, step one, step two, step three, step four, you know, for, you know specific scenarios for dealing with certain things with the IRS and I can explain it, you know, so somebody else can do it, but it really, really is different. You know, I can explain it to somebody but they’ll, once I get on the phone with that client they’ll be like, ‘I read it and I get it, but I really don’t want to do that myself’ just because, I don’t know if it’s an experience factor, a fear factor, a, just some sort of mental processing loop factor or something, but it’s the exact same thing in honestly any business I’ve ever been involved in be it a real estate broker, being a real estate investor, you know, being a tax resolution consultant all of these things, it’s having that one on one relationship is, it makes a profound difference.
It’s kind of like having, I’m a figure skater and I don’t like doing group lessons because I don’t get as much out of it. If I did not have the one on one coaching with my coach I wouldn’t, there’s no way I would be where, you know, where I am skill wise. I’m still not where I want to be of course, but I wouldn’t be this far along at all, so having, and I think any athlete, any business executive, you know, anybody’s pretty much going to say the same thing, that having that brain to bounce ideas off of that makes all the difference in the world.
James: Yeah, I would agree. Alright, lets end this call if people need to get a hold of me they can go the the LearnToBeRich.com website you could sign up for consulting packages or get access to our Real Estate Investor Wiki if you’re into real estate investing or you can get access to our Business Wiki if you’re interested in that as well and then we also have a webinar coming up. I believe we’re going to do it next week on The World’s Greatest Real Estate Agent Marketing Course and so we’ll talk about that all next week you can definitely go and register for that as well.
Jassen: Right, and that’s going to be, is that a full day event?
James: It’s going to be, we’re going to try something different, usually we do them as full day events, the last one we did we did it as a full day, for the next week we’re going to do two hour segments a day of course if you sign up for any of them you’ll be able to go and listen to the recordings. We’re going to do two hours a day for five days, so it’ll actually be 10 hours over the course of five days.
Jassen: Okay, so breaking it up, give you some time to digest some of those chunks each day.
James: Yeah, it is better for me if I’m not speaking for 8 hours in a day rather than, you know two hours a day, even though I like to talk, you know, talking for that long is a little hard on me. So, yeah we’ll do it that way and if you’re listening to this significantly after next week, by the way, next weeks going to be the, let’s see 22nd of February through the 27th of February, so…
So, if you’re listening to it significantly after that we’ll have the course available for purchase outside that (see The World’s Greatest Real Estate Agent Marketing Course for more info). We’re going to try to have it transcribed and be audio recorded as well and maybe even do video this time, so stay on the look out for that you can purchase that right from the LearnToBeRich.com website and it’s going to be taking a lot of the stuff that we talked about tonight and taking it even one step further with additional detail and I’ve got 150 PowerPoint slides outlined that we use for this, so it’s pretty good stuff.
Jassen: Yeah, I’ve seen it it’s a lot of material and it goes kind of like, with the website building thing that you were talking about where, you know, you’ve got your checklist and then additional things you would do if you do it yourself. You’re going to be going into some of the more in depth things that you think about and do in terms of more marketing systems as they apply for real estate agents, you know, just that much, you know, nitty-gritty depth that we obviously didn’t have time to go into tonight, right?
James: That’s exactly it! So you get ten hours five times of what we did here tonight, so… even with going over.
Jassen: Right.
James: Yeah, it’s going to be really good, so.
Jassen: Awesome!
James: Hey, I really appreciate it, I mean, you know.
Jassen: Hey, hey, you know, I love doing these especially when we’re talking about real estate stuff, I just, you know, coming from the business obviously as you do and just having a passion for the, for the topic. Can I throw out there if people want to get a hold of me?
James: Yeah, absolutely, please do.
Jassen: Okay, if you have, again people don’t like talking about this of course, it’s one of those stigmas I understand, but if you have any kind of tax issues, IRS back tax liabilities, unfiled returns, I actually work with a lot of real estate agents, I’d say about a fourth of my clients currently are real estate agents and brokers so, if you have any IRS or state tax issues that you can use some help with, you know, I do free consultations, that’s not a problem and you can find me at SixFigureResults.com or if you’d like to telephone me directly you can reach me at toll free (866) 627-7654. So, we’ve covered a lot of stuff tonight.
James: We sure have. Hey, I really appreciate it and let me end the webinar here so we can stay under two hours.
Jassen: Okay.
James: But, if anybody has any questions, stick around and we can definitely answer those, but I’m going to stop the recording now. I really appreciate Jassen, thank you so much and to everyone else, good night and thanks again for listening.
Jassen: Good night.
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 Real Estate Agent Marketing Course”.
This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Real Estate Agent Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: Not for the faint of heart. There’s something kind of similar that’s kind of in an online medium, which is Ebay, where obviously you have more room than just a business card, but in my mind it’s kind of a similar Guerrilla tactic. Can you explain using Ebay to generate prospects?
James: Yeah, and there is a great tool for Ebay and by the way, I should have mentioned this much earlier in this particular call for real estate agents, but I will wait until the very end so that anyone who skipped out early and decided not to listen to it and doesn’t get this benefit, but basically that is that whether you realize it or not if you accidentally generate leads outside of your local market as a real estate agent, you always have the benefit of doing paid referrals to agents in the local market.
Jassen: Yeah. Yes.
James: So, one of the keys has… Ebay happens to be a global market place, if you happen to be putting special report up there, maybe this is one of your getting paid to generate leads ideas, you create a audio CD and you sell it on Ebay, and you happen to get a lead, you live in California and you get a lead in New York, well, somebody calls up and they order that course, you follow-up with them, turns out they are looking for investment properties, you tell them I happen to know an agent there I met at a conference in New York, because when you went to your national franchise’s yearly meeting, you happened to meet a guy there in New York and you know he works with investment properties, you contact that guy, you do a referral, and if they close on the deal you get a referral fee, you know, somewhere between twenty or thirty percent. That’s typically the range, twenty-five is pretty common. So, you can definitely… What’s that?
Jassen: I was just saying, note to our listeners, you actually did this, you went to your brokers national convention, you know, conference and you met people and you made these connections and you were referring people out.
James: Oh, yeah, I was fanatical. When I was at the national conference I think I collected like, 250 business cards. So, yeah, I was referring out to tons of people nationally. I mean, we were doing national lead generations so my, the overwhelming majority of my model was referring out; in fact, I switched over at one point and stopped working with anyone local. I only did referrals, I even referred out locally.
Jassen: Yep.
James: So, yeah there’s definitely models where you can do national lead generation and if you understand everything we talked about tonight, you have the overwhelming majority of what you need in order to replicate my entire business. All of the lead generation stuff we just talked about you can take that and run your own national lead generation business and refer out nationally.
Jassen: And it was a six figure business, right?
James: On the front end?
Jassen: Yes.
James: Yes. So, you know, without any commissions or referral fees or anything like that it was a six figure lead generation business and I’ve done it twice. So, it wasn’t a fluke. So, yeah, you can definitely go and do this model, you don’t need to do it nationally, you can do it locally, but if you happen to get guys, Ebay’s one of those cases where you put up an ad, and I think you can actually put up service ads on Ebay, you were telling me about that before, you can put up service…
Jassen: Yeah, it was revisiting the Ebay concept for my tax resolution business last week, actually and I haven’t been on Ebay in a while and there is now a services category, specifically for, you know non-tangible deliverability of services. I was like, oh, okay. So, I spent the dollar fifty or whatever it was and put up an ad on there.
James: And you know that could have been around for years and I just never used it so it could not be new for all that we know, but I never noticed. Yeah, you can put up services on Ebay, you can also put up those product special reports, audio downloads, audio CD’s, courses if you happen to be publishing a book or put together a book you could do that, you could create packages of, you know, products and services that are mix and put those up there so, there’s lots of ways to do it, to market on Ebay and Ebay is just one small part of this whole bottle. I mean, it’s one of those streams of lead generation. Now, if you can generate an extra couple of leads a week or a couple of leads a month even, you know, just from having the stuff on Ebay and autopilot, automatically relisting and things of that nature, it will be helpful and help you supplement your leads well.
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 Real Estate Agent Marketing Course”.
This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Real Estate Agent Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: Exactly. Exactly, so in the interest of time, if you don’t mind, I’d actually like to skip the next section and talk about the business card tactics because…
James: Sure.
Jassen: …I think that this is something, I’ll be giggling like a school girl if you talk about it because like, it’s hilarious, but it is so incredibly effective and it’s one of the things that can be particularly effective specifically for real estate agents. You know, working a farm or some, you know, doing a general marketing and it is so cheap. How cheap is it?
James: Yeah, it is really cheap and that is what you’re talking about is business cards, right?
Jassen: Exactly.
James: Okay, I will talk about business cards and the reason why it’s effective is it’s so in-expensive however; as far as like, overall effectiveness of marketing goes, business cards are not effective. The only reason they are effective is in relation to price. Does that make sense?
Jassen: Yep.
James: Okay, so, you know, as far as what like the most effective things are we can talk about that another day; however business cards are a great way because they are so in-expensive you can get them out almost as if they are free, I mean, for 250 business cards from, you know, this to print it or something what does that cost? Six bucks, eight bucks, something like that?
Jassen: Something like that you pay for postage basically.
James: Yeah, and so they’re dirt cheap in order to print and I believe even local companies are starting to get in on how cheap business cards really should be and they are starting to discount their prices too. So, you can get these things for almost nothing, and by business cards I want to point out too, that I am not necessarily talking about the traditional business card that you would imagine having, you know, your photo or your company logo on there, your name, address and telephone number and email address and website. I’m not specifically talking about that. A lot of the business cards I would recommend have a marketing message on them almost as if they’re like a really tiny flyer.
So, you’d want to have something on there talking about a benefit you could offer to people and give them a reason to either go to your website, call a certain telephone number, preferably with an extension so you can measure the marketing results or take some other action that’s measurable and has value to them and can get them ideally on your mailing list because giving out a business card is really not what you’re after you’re after somehow getting them from the business card to raise their hand and say ‘I’m interested’ and getting them on that mailing list again. But, there’s lots of ways to use business cards. Business cards can be used for door-to- door marketing, you can put them out as little mini flyers on bulletin boards, you can leave them at restaurants when you go out to eat if you happen to be someone like me who goes out to eat a lot, you can leave them there and by the way, there is a relationship between the size of your tip and leaving a business card as to whether or not they’re interested in contacting you.
Poor tippers tend not to get nearly as many responses, but yeah, if you put that out there then that’s a great way to do it and then there’s a whole bunch of these, like gray area, a very aggressive, guerrilla marketing business card tactics, which I’m assuming is what you’re so interested and giggly about and the reason why you’re so giggly about this is because you know that this works and you know that there are people that use it, and it’s very aggressive.
Jassen: I know that you used it.
James: Well, I will admit to having seen it done up close and personal, but yeah, you could do some of these things and I’ll tell you some of these I have not done, but I know other people that have done them. I did some consulting for a network marketing company and I know they were being very aggressive about doing like pull tabs, or the equivalent of business cards on ATM machines or for you know, work at home opportunities, or weight loss opportunities to do some consulting, technology consulting for those guys many years ago. I know that they were using that effectively, but there’s all sorts of other ways to do this.
For instance, I was in the book store the other day looking through some business books and happened to flip open a book and sure enough there was a business card of somebody offering business opportunities right there in the book. So, if you happen to be in your book store or your library and you happen to be in the real estate section, and maybe it’s a book on first time homebuyer stuff and you happen to be flipping through it and you happen to bookmark your page with your business card and the book somehow magically makes it back on the shelf.
I’m telling you its gray, but you know, if that’s your persona, not everyone wants to do this and I totally understand that and some people will think ‘Ah, I was wondering how those business cards kept getting in there’ or you know, ‘I work in the library part-time’ and ‘Or, so you’re the guy that keeps doing that’ however, you know, somebody goes and they take that book home and they’re reading through it and you volunteered, donated your bookmark to them, bookmark that has your information on it and you know, they happen to want some information on that and they contact you, great. The transaction size in real estate happens to be such that you can do it for a lifetime, get one client; it probably wouldn’t be worthwhile for you.
Jassen: Right.
James: It’s not going to be super effective you know, don’t think that you’re whole marketing strategy is going to be I’m going to go stick 500 business cards in the 500 real estate books in Barnes and Noble or Boarders or whatever other place you’ve got in your local market.
Jassen: Right. All over town.
James: Yeah, not recommended. You’ll get a call.
Jassen: You will.
James: I’d be surprised if you did not get a call, but you know, if you have one or two in there I don’t think they’re going to call you. They could, but I doubt it. But, yeah, if you happen to do that, if you happen to really be in… I’m really into books, I’m in to book stores and libraries a lot so occasionally you have, you know a business card in there and you know what, when I’m actually reading at my house if I go get a book from the library, I do use my business cards as bookmarks and I do not take them out when I return them.
Jassen: Right. And you use your current real estate offer business cards, right? That’s what you do?
James: I do.
Jassen: Are you using those?
James: Yeah.
Jassen: Okay.
James: Whatever business card I have at the time is, because I tend to cycle through different things, but yeah, right now I’ve got a business card for raising funds for investing in real estate deals and that’s what I use.
Jassen: Okay. I think it’s great, I love it I’ve actually thought about starting to do it myself.
James: It’s not for the faint of heart.
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 Real Estate Agent Marketing Course”.
This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Real Estate Agent Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: On the next topic we can’t end this without talking about newsletters. Share with the listeners your take on newsletters particularly the postal versus the email aspect and what the purpose of the newsletter is, frequency, and content.
James: Okay.
Jassen: It’s actually a lot.
James: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, remember that list. Okay, so, so basically newsletters are ways for you to consistently keep in touch with your client base and a trick question for you, Jassen. How often do you send out a monthly newsletter?
Jassen: Monthly?
James: You know, you’d be surprised at how many people get that question wrong by their actions. I mean, most people know the answer when asked, but I know a lot of people that have a monthly newsletter that I get maybe a couple times a year.
Jassen: I understand.
James: So, if you’re going to do a monthly newsletter realize it’s easy to do guys. All you do is to outsource the writing of the articles and you can do all the articles for the year in advance, go hire someone to write twelve articles, and lets say it costs you $5 dollars an article, so it’ll cost you $60… go ahead and have them format it in Microsoft Word or you’ve got like the headline for your newsletter a couple of little sections for you to write, things about things going on in your business and then all you need to do is take your mailing list, upload it to the U.S. postal service website, they’ve got a site called Click2Mail and once they get on Click2Mail they upload their mailing list to that, they upload that Word document and they can send out, they’ll do all the printing, all the postage, all the addressing and you just put in your credit card number. They will do all of it for you and it is dirt cheap.
It is cheaper than you doing it yourself, trust me. They give you a discount for first class mail because they’re going to do their pre-sort standard whatever it is they do to get the lowest possible rate and their printing is extremely reasonable on par with going to your copy shop and getting it copied yourself. So, go ahead and upload it and by the way, do you need a full color high fancy graphic oriented type of newsletter?
Jassen: No, you’re better off if you don’t.
James: Yeah, actually there is statistical studies’ showing that higher cost newsletters are more effective if they’re black and white on paper, no fancy graphics text.
Jassen: Right.
James: So, you’re not trying to become newspaper, a magazine, you’re trying to become a newsletter where you’re just giving out really good information to people almost as if it’s a black and white letter that happens to be to you going out to your group of people and sharing that.
Jassen: Exactly. I recently, like literally for the past few days found out that the Gary Halbert letter… Gary Halbert is a copywriter and marketing expert and he published a newsletter a least a decade if not two through the seventies and eighties I believe and he charged somewhere around $200 a year for it initially and it went up from there and it was usually a three or four page, typed out on a typewriter and copied, you know, letters stuffed in an envelope that people paid for. You know, black and white, nothing special, I’ve seen some PDF copies of some of the old ones, it looked terrible. You know, in terms of a quality production piece it looked terrible. But, people, you know, back in the seventies were paying $200 dollars a year for that because it contained incredibly valuable marketing information for helping people build their business and so the presentation didn’t matter nearly as much as the content did.
James: Right, and you can go, if you really want to go high end and do and do a high end graphics and things of that nature, it doesn’t cost that much more, but I’m telling you, you need to get it out monthly and if what that takes is you putting out a black and white plain newsletter with one article, two articles or something like that a couple of little boxes for resources, calls to action in there saying ‘call me if you have a house to buy or sell’ or whatever your message is for that particular group then if that what it takes to do it make sure you get it done and you can get that all ready to go and upload, upload the letter it will get all done for you and it’s really inexpensive to do, so.
Jassen: Right. Well, you know that reminds… Do you remember the flyers that first round of flyers that I put together when we were at our brokers together and you know, I had the resource boxes on the back for, you know, like a mortgage broker…
James: Sure.
Jassen: … insurance guy, home inspector and I mean they were, I slapped them together, you know, for a listing, I think each one probably took me no more than ten or fifteen minutes to put together. It was just a Word document, they were black and white. They were not pretty by any stretch of the imagination. We got calls off those. I mean, it was just incredible.
James: You act surprised. Well, you don’t need to do anything fancy, guys. All you need to do is give great value. So, it’s not a matter of, you know, how expensive the graphics were to put together, they’re not rating you on that. In some ways if you don’t do it well and you go for that then you’re going to come across worse than if you try to just do a plain black and white one and just get the information out and they realize it’s the information that’s of value, not the graphics.
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 Real Estate Agent Marketing Course”.
This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Real Estate Agent Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: Exactly. Do you want to talk about joint venture opportunities?
James: Yeah, I will briefly talk about joint ventures and, you know, the basic for real estate agents is, you know, you have business alliances with other people so, you make another contact with another business owner who’s got a mailing list. Well, you can go cross promote to your list and then allow him or her to cross promote to their list on your behalf. Whether that’s exchanging a flyer or you know, writing an article for their newsletter and you write or they write an article for your newsletter or you write an article for their newsletter whatever it happens to be. There’s a whole variety of ways to do joint ventures. If you want to hear a whole hour of presentation or very close to an hour presentation I have on joint ventures I’ve got an entire download for that it’s free just go onto LearnToBeRich.com. On the right hand side there’s a like that says downloads and I believe it’s right up there and of course it’s free to use just go ahead and download it and you’ll be able to listen to what I have to say about joint ventures.
Jassen: Awesome! And by the way, I just listened to that myself the other day. It’s well worth listening to.
James: I appreciate that. Thank you.
Jassen: Yeah, and it’s just you so it’s a lot shorter, I think it was forty, forty-five minutes or something like that. A lot of really good information in there.
James: Okay.
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 Real Estate Agent Marketing Course”.
This is just one tiny excerpt from “How To Market Your Real Estate Agent Business” (a 2 hour audio training course) that you can download for free.
Jassen: Right. Exactly. Alright, you mentioned earlier that you are a fan of outsourcing and this is something I’ve, one of the things I followed in your footsteps on and have recently been embracing as well, but you already mentioned article writing, but what are some other things that a real estate agent can outsource to help them grow their business?
James: You know, as in a side I just want to point out that “fan” means fanatical of and I really am fanatical about outsourcing, so.
Jassen: I know you are.
James: Yeah, I am, I am a huge fan of outsourcing and delegating and there are a couple of things I think you can do right off the top. Number one is definitely hire someone to write articles, we talked about that, it’s probably much more cost effective and probably better quality articles if you tell them the topic you want to write about or the title that you want to write about and let a professional actually craft it. So, you can definitely do that and it doesn’t in any way devalue you or your knowledge level if you are not the writer of the article. If you hire someone to do the presentation and you help them with the input of what they need and then you have your market knowledge and that’s really what you are good at, your negotiation skills, your ability to help them fill out the paperwork to buy or sell their property, I mean, that’s where you add value. So that is one thing you could do, write articles the other thing is you can help, you can outsource having people keep your advertising up.
That is a major thing that I outsource because I was not interested in keeping all of my advertising up when I was doing my national lead generation stuff and so I would outsource that a lot as well. I also outsource writing articles and still do. You can also hire someone to coordinate placing your articles or ads on other people’s websites and online newsletters and things of that nature. Realize that once you write this article it should definitely go on your website, but that you should also put that article out to other people so that you can get your name, because you’ll have a little resource box with your information on there. Excuse me, out to other websites so, that is the really important thing to do and that’s very time consuming so you can outsource people to do that. And one thing I do want to point out about outsourcing, I know, I’ve got two more really quickly, but one thing I do want to point out is a lot of people think of outsourcing they think of hiring someone, you know, locally for ten, twenty dollars and hour or whatever it works out that they, and I’m not talking about that necessarily. If you’ve got a good person that you can hire to do that, great and I’ve done that.
I plan on doing it again, however; one of the things that I’ve discovered is that we are now in a worldwide economy and that if you can put up jobs and if the jobs can be done remotely via a virtual office, you can have people bidding on those jobs and if it happens to be, you know, a stay at home house husband, house wife whatever it is, whoever wants to do that job and they want to do it between caring for their kids and the hourly rate is not as important as just knowing that they’re going to make an extra $50 dollars that month to help out and have spending money, then so be it and if they want to bid against somebody in the Philippines or India or Pakistan, or wherever they’re bidding from worldwide, China, Singapore and they happen to want to do that and they want to compete in that market place that’s fine with me. I will look at overall quality of the candidate with little regards to where their located. If they can do the job they can do the job. So, I am all about giving a worldwide economy a boost.
Jassen: And for, people may be familiar with the concept of the virtual assistant… the remote, usually… somebody in India working for a firm that they contract with that’s helping them with their office work or whatnot remotely. You don’t need to go to a firm and pay the firms fee to do that and it doesn’t need to be somebody in India, like you already mentioned. We use websites like what guru.com, elance.com, odesk.com, to find people to outsource various project base work to and we get bids that are comparable to, you know, from someone, you know, maybe in India, and we’ll get a comparable bid from somebody in California. I see it all the time, so.
James: Yeah, I’ve got two bids right now on a job I have up and there are like one or two lower bids, but bids number three and four are from the United States and Australia.
Jassen: Okay.
James: So, of like twenty bids the second and third ones are, the third and fourth ones are actually U.S. and what I consider relatively common to the U.S. relatively similar to the U.S. as far as the economy goes, Australia, you know, bids, so. It is not always that.
Jassen: Yeah, I get bids from Australia, United States, Canada, the U.K., Spain, Eastern Europe, just literally, like you said it’s the global economy and you can outsource to somebody down the street or somebody half, you know, the planet away. But, what matters is, obviously the quality of the work and you’re actually doing it. We were talking about action earlier, for if you don’t do any of this stuff, then it’s all for naught anyway.
James: That’s right.
Jassen: Yep.
James: So, you know, here are the two other things that I recommend people outsource and that’s you can hire someone to contact other blog owners about posting on their website so that you can get more popularity of your exposure out to additional websites and things of that nature. Guest blogging.
Jassen: Right.
James: And the last one is, and it kind of goes against the whole model of social media, but you could hire someone to take care of your social media network, you know, Twitter, and Facebook and things of that nature and some people who are involved on it, this is like shocking to them, but do you really think that Brittany Spears and Donald Trump are actually updating their Twitter and Facebook profiles? No.
Jassen: I doubt it.
James: So, yeah, so realize that, you need to step back and say is this a business activity for me or is this something that I really enjoy personally and I really want do personally. And then make your decision based on that.
Jassen: Right. It’s like, you know, I incorporate Twitter into my daily life, in fact, the other day I wrote a blog post about how I do it, it’s kind of a shortened version of Laura Roeder’s “Ten Minutes A Day Plan”, I do it more of a four minute a day plan, because I don’t…
James: I got to tell you I’m thinking about “There’s Something About Mary”… seven minute abs and the guy comes up with and then he recommends five minute abs, “No, no you can’t work out your abs in five minutes it’s too short.” I’m sorry; go ahead that was a little distraction of mine.
Jassen: Oh, man! We’re already overtime, so it’s all good. I spend up to four minutes a day on Twitter because Twitter’s one of those things, I’ll be honest, I don’t get it. I don’t really, I don’t know, it’s not really my thing. Unlike Facebook, I love Facebook. I spend hours on there, but Twitter’s just one of those things that’s, it is what it is and it’s not me and so, but you know what I have three thousand four hundred something followers on Twitter and I’m sure most of them don’t really care what I have for breakfast or what my swim workout was or whatever, but you know, I put that stuff up there a couple of times a day, you know, if people are conversing about something else I’ll jump in and, you know, usually from me it’s a snide remark, but you know, I’ll participate in that conversation through some of my brand of humor and usually I’ll make one quip somewhere in a trending topic, which I won’t get into, but you know, again it’s usually something snarky, hilarious, you know that fits my sense of humor and that’s my participation for Twitter for the day and it’s worthwhile to me, in my mind, to do that in order to engage with people for whom that is their chosen method of engaging with me. Does that make sense?
James: It does and I opt out of Twitter. I mean, I have a Twitter account and all it is, is really automated post to about new content that’s on the blog or new content that’s elsewhere.
Jassen: Right.
James: So, you and I have similar outlooks on Twitter and by the way, I think that Twitter at some point is going to have to change what its doing or it’s going to be, it’s going to be pushed aside.
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 Real Estate Agent Marketing Course”.
