Let’s talk about multiple streams of prospects. A lot of what this course is going to cover is a variety of ways to put out marketing in order to get prospects inquiring about your business where you’re going to add to your contact list and then follow up over time. Even if you don’t convert a prospect on that first contact to a job or a paying client, over a period of time they may become clients for you six months down the road, three months down the road, a year down the road or they may refer someone to you. Maybe they hired someone else or decided to do it themselves, but then a friend of them says, “Hey, I noticed you refinished your bathroom. Tell me about that.” And they say, “You know, I wouldn’t do it myself again. It was a pain, but I have one guy who gave me a bid. Great guy, and he’s been following up with me ever since. He’s got a lot of testimonials. I’ve seen a lot of the projects he’s done in the newsletter, and I would definitely recommend that you call him and have the project done.”
So, you want to be following up with these guys who inquire about things over a period of time.
I want to tell you a story that I learned from Dan Kennedy. I don’t remember the exact details of it, but I have the concept down really well, and I’ll share it with you. Dan Kennedy, a direct response marketing expert, he tells a story about a doctor who basically goes from town to town starting up a new medical practice and gets it to a certain point and then he goes and sells it. He’s been doing this for a while.
A group of other doctors come to him and say tell us your secret. How do you build up all these clients? You go into this new town, you have no contacts, and you have no relationships established. How do you go and build up a practice of 72 new clients per month just coming in fresh, and we’re struggling to keep our practices going? We have contacts here and we’re established here. What is the marketing method you’re using to build your practice?
The wise doctor who has been going from town to town starting with nothing says, “Well, I don’t know one marketing way in order to generate 72 new clients per month, but I do know 72 ways to generate one new patient or client per month, and I use all 72.”
There’s a really important lesson there for those of you that want to use it.
The lesson is #1: You’re going to need to use a variety of marketing methods to generate multiple streams of prospects into your business. The more you have coming in the better.
#2, and it’s kind of a hidden message in there, and that is what happens if you decide to use one marketing method, but then all of a sudden that one marketing method changes or goes away or significantly decreases and you have not been using multiple marketing methods and relying on lots of streams of prospects coming in?
I’ll tell you my story. One of my businesses, I was relying heavily on search engines in order to get traffic to my website. On the front end, generating the leads portions of it – basically having people come to the website and having some ads on the websites that were generating revenue from us… I can tell you that that went from about $8,000 a month in just the ad revenue to about $3,000 a month in ad revenue just because the search engines decided to change the way that they were ranking websites and this cascaded across a large number of websites for us. So instead of generating $8,000 a month on the lead generation side, not taking the leads and working with them – that was something totally different. And our leads numbers went down by about that same number. We reduced by $8,000 a month to $3,000. Our leads went down from that same ratio – less than half of what we were getting in. Could you survive if you had 1/3 of the leads coming in that you were used to having because you were only using one marketing method?
That’s the danger in focusing on only one type of marketing method. You really want to have 5, 10, 15, 20 different ways that you have a couple prospects coming in each week or each month, whatever it works out to be for you. So that if any one of those significantly declines, you have a wide variety of other ones coming in so that it’s not a significant decrease in your business. You can go in and tweak that one or eliminate it completely and add a new one to it.
The idea is to have more prospects coming in than you can handle, because the demand for you is going to increase your confidence and allow you to increase your pricing.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. If you want to learn how to have a diverse series of steady streams of prospects for your handyman business setup and coming in every month then check out “The World’s Greatest Handyman 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: 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”.
Jassen: So, the next step is this whole mental thing. Staying focused, motivated, you know, working on; you know really keeping with it…
James: Oh, come on this is all touchy, feely kind of stuff; this doesn’t really matter, does it?
Jassen: Oh, yes it does. Hey, what was it you said on the inner game call, something about if you’re not touching, feeling now, you’ll come around eventually?
James: That’s right.
Jassen: Isn’t that what you said, James.
James: I did, I think I did say something like that. A lot of people, they hear this stuff and they immediately just turn us off so, if you’ve zoned out because we’ve started to get all philosophically on you and stuff sorry to hear that, but you know, listen to the CD again, and maybe in a few months maybe you’ll come around by then. But, it’s a hugely important part of being in business.
Jassen: It is and you know, in the interest of time, I only want to touch on one thing in relation to this.
James: Okay.
Jassen: And we do have bonus downloads and you know, entire CD’s to talk about…
James: Yeah, what section is the bonus download for this? Is this under…
Jassen: That is a good question; I need to look that up.
James: Oh, Goals and Personal Development.
Jassen: There we go.
James: Okay.
Jassen: Goals and Personal Development actually covers this step and the next step.
James: Okay.
Jassen: So, you know, that’s where the inner game stuff is, we have another CD called Inner Game where we talk about this in depth, but the big thing here is this whole thing called the law of attraction.
James: Yeah, this is really hot right now.
Jassen: It is because of a DVD and a book called, The Secret, a lot of people are… There’s this huge buzz about the law of attraction and I’m curious to see how long that’s going to last…
James: Yeah, you know, it’s so funny because this stuff has been going on for hundreds of years, there’s been authors writing about it there’s you know, all of the self help and personal development type people have been talking about it, but they haven’t’ been pulling it out and saying, okay, law of attractions the big one…
Jassen: Right.
James: …it’s all been part of this process and, you know, people want to talk about it, but now that this one book has come out there’s been a lot of buzz about it and yeah, I’m curious to see how long it’ll stay in the limelight as well.
Jassen: Yeah, so just to define the law of attraction, it says that you attract into your life that what you think about most.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: So, if all you ever do is worry about your bills, then you’re just going to get more bills.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: Whereas, if you kind of change your mindset and this has been an ongoing process for me…
James: It’s ongoing for everyone.
Jassen: Even for you?
James: Yeah, everyone. Yeah.
Jassen: Well, you’re saying you’re not perfect and you’re not there yet?
James: I’m constantly improving. So, even where I was five years ago I feel like I’m a lot better off now, but I’m still trying to make better improvements.
Jassen: Okay, the core of that is, and I like using the debt versus the wealth mentality to give you an example, but if you think about debt you’re just going to get father in debt, whereas if you focus and concentrate and dwell on building income, you know, generating an income, building wealth, then that’s what you’re going to attract into your life.
James: Okay, now that’s like the philosophical way of approaching it…
Jassen: Exactly.
James: …I’m very, you know, if you don’t want to get into the philosophical feely stuff then look at it purely from a practical sensible point of view.
Jassen: There you go.
James: If you start looking at what can I do in order to get myself away from this situation, focus on where you want to go, well guess what, you’re going to take action and to do things that are positive.
Jassen: That’s right.
James: If you focusing on woe is me I’ve got bills, then guess what, you’re not taking action toward a solution. So, I am personally the touchy, feely, you know I believe all that stuff, but at the same time I used to be like, you know that’s such a… just give me some practical stuff to implement.
Jassen: Right.
James: Okay? Well, it’s both and I’m showing you how to look at it, that if you can’t get into it on a touchy, feely level then go for it on a practical… Listen, if you look at where you want to go and you say, okay, now what can I do to get there and you start taking action toward that don’t think about the negative side of it, don’t worry about the debt, just move forward and practice that then I think that’s a very practical way of thinking of the law of attraction.
Jassen: Yeah, I mean, in a practical sense it’s like you’re saying, basically to what I’m hearing is what you focus on is what you’re going to take action on.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: So, you’re better off taking action on building a business and generating income and wealth than you are to focus on debt and generating more debt…
James: That’s right.
Jassen: …through either activity or inactivity.
James: Alright, you got bills? Stop spending, and start focusing on earning more money.
Jassen: That’s right, a pretty simple equation.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: Okay. Step six is all about personal development. You know, the first the majority of this CD was steps one and two talking…
James: Hold on one second.
Jassen: Okay.
James: Do we have two steps sixes?
Jassen: What’s that? Yeah that’s right, I forgot I mis-numbered them.
James: Oh, okay so we really had seven steps. Lets do this we’ll have six steps and we’re going to give you a bonus step.
Jassen: There you go the bonus step.
James: Yeah, so this is the bonus step we’re talking about, which if you’re keeping track is step seven.
Jassen: I’m sure we’ve complete confused listeners by now.
James: I’m sure. So, this is the bonus step.
Jassen: The bonus step; personal development.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: You know, the first two steps talked about setting up your business and that’s when we talked about the majority on this call because it’s kind of the real meat here, but once you’ve got something set up don’t just stop, keep learning. Learn how to improve things. You know, we talk a lot about continuous and never ending improvement.
James: Yeah, that’s from Tony Robbins, he calls it CANI, it’s based on the concept of Kaizen.
Jassen: Okay. The, you know, continuous systems improvement, learning more about business and you know, I talk a lot about this…
James: Yeah.
Jassen: …the most important thing you can learn about business is probably marketing.
James: Oh, yeah, marketing, focus on marketing first, yeah.
Jassen: I mean, once you understand marketing, a whole new world opens up to you.
James: It does.
Jassen: Now, there are many schools of thought about marketing, there’s a lot of stuff out there, but I personally believe that for an online business what people should focus on from, you know, if they have limited time, a full time job, you know, family responsibilities, etc…
James: Go where the fish are.
Jassen: Exactly.
James: I mean, doesn’t that make sense?
Jassen: Yeah.
James: You don’t really have time to really learn marketing and get traffic to your website…
Jassen: That’s right.
James: …go to websites where there already is traffic. Go to Ebay, go to Amazon, go to Google Base, go to a Yahoo Store…
Jassen: Right.
James: …go to these different places that already have people that, you know, you already have eyeballs on the website now you just want to put your pay job where eyeballs are going to be looking at your thing.
Jassen: Right, and once they do have the time to work on their marketing, education, and self knowledge; this is kind of my list, direct marketing…
James: On the internet?
Jassen: Yeah.
James: Okay.
Jassen: Well, okay, let me ask you, James, is internet marketing any different than regular direct marketing?
James: You know, I think I mis-heard you. When I heard direct marketing I immediately thought of direct mail.
Jassen: Oh, okay.
James: Are you talking about direct response, like you know…
Jassen: I’m talking direct response to marketing.
James: Okay. Okay.
Jassen: Which is what internet marketing is.
James: I would agree, it’s measurable, you know, if you want to put out something and find out what your results are and hold it accountable.
Jassen: Right, and you know we have an entire marketing CD. Another individual that puts out a lot of incredibly great information and about direct response marketing is Dan Kennedy.
James: Oh, don’t tell everyone his name, he’s too good. 
Jassen: Oh, come on.
James: Yeah, Dan Kennedys’ got great stuff he’s got some really inexpensive books and some very expensive boot camps…
Jassen: Right.
James: …and full courses and stuff, so start with the books and I think you’ll like what he has to say.
Jassen: Yeah, and another area where I think people can really help them boost the response rate in ratios on their listings is copywriting.
James: Yeah.
Jassen: Learning copywriting is a really great skill to learn.
James: Now, let me just give a quick example because I know we’re running low on time, but here’s the idea of copywriting. If you have, you know, you put up an auction on Ebay and it gets, you know, twenty-five viewers, if you’re converting one out of twenty-five well then you’ve got that sales ratio.
Jassen: Right.
James: If you can change what’s written on that page and not convert one out of twenty, well, now you’ve improved what you’re getting from the same auction.
Jassen: Right.
James: So, that’s a good way to improve it. You don’t have to bring anymore traffic, you’re now trying to convert more people for that particular page.
Jassen: Right, and by copywriting we’re not talking about, you know, the “c” with the little circle around it…
James: No.
Jassen: …and the next to it.
James: Yeah, we should just call it something else. We should just, you know, writing advertisements.
Jassen: Yeah, that’s what copywriting really is, it’s kind of the psychology and the science of how to write advertising.
James: Yeah, write sales letters, writing sales copy, yeah, we should try to differentiate that in the future.
Jassen: Sure, we should. Now, I do want to put in a plug for one of our other projects.
James: Which is?
Jassen: We have a blog where we do all kinds of marketing tests and we test all different kinds of headlines and you know, a lot of what we do is really testing different marketing messages…
James: Yeah.
Jassen: …and different marketing media.
James: And that’s the video, audio stuff that we have on the…
Jassen: Yeah, we have all kinds of audio visual stuff, text on the blogs and you can access that, it’s completely free and you can access that at ruthlessaccountability.com
James: Okay.
Jassen: Last thing I want to talk about before I sign off.
James: Okay.
Jassen: Once you have started building a business, you know, you’ve got some things out there and you’re starting to set some goals, work on your inner game, the whole, you know, mental stuff, you’ve got your record keeping, you’ve got an entity formed, and you’re kind of chugging along. Start looking at ways to grow your online business. We talked a lot about this with the niche selection thing, but look at related niches, different products within your existing niche. Look at additional market platforms…
James: Yeah.
Jassen: If you’re making $500.00 a month on Ebay, well, why not carry that same thing over to Amazon?
James: Yeah, I would agree. You may not do $500.00 a month on Amazon, you may only do $300.00 a month, but it’s $300.00 more.
Jassen: Exactly, and all of a sudden you’re at $800.00 a month…
James: Exactly.
Jassen: …with really not a lot more in fixed expenses.
James: Yeah, now, you know, for people that are having a hard time with some of the numbers we’re using, lets say its $100.00 on Ebay and now you can go to Amazon and make $50.00.
Jassen: Right.
James: Okay. So, use those numbers.
Jassen: Yeah, so, you know, expand into different niches, products within a niche, add, you know, an additional market place by which I mean sell stuff on another website, you know, learn more about marketing, lets see learn more about marketing, learn more about marketing…
James: Let me sense a pattern here. Do you maybe want people to learn a little bit more about marketing?
Jassen: Yes. Marketing is where it’s at, there’s a reason, James, where I always say marketing is our favorite topic to talk about.
James: We always end up talking about it.
Jassen: You know, it doesn’t matter what we’re talking about, we can be talking about starting an online business, we could be recording a real estate CD, we always come back to marketing and there’s a reason for it.
James: So, you mean the accounting and finance calls about marketing and the business selection calls about marketing…
Jassen: Actually, I think we did spend quite a bit of time on the accounting call talking about marketing.
James: Well, that’s the thing, we have to try to like get ourselves back on track and so I say ‘ok lets talk about accounting again’ because marketing is so important and it’s related to all these things .
Jassen: It is and, you know, a lot of people that start say a local business, you know, take an electrician; an electrician can be incredibly great at being an electrician.
James: He could be the best.
Jassen: He could be the best electrician in town and by background I’m an electrician…
James: Really? Oh yeah, okay.
Jassen: Yeah, I was an electrician in the Navy for five years.
James: That’s right.
Jassen: And that’s why I use that example all the time, but by trade, I’m trained as an electrician. Well, you can be the best electrician in the world and you can have the best service, you can have the best rates, you can have the quickest response time, but if you can’t put out marketing to get clients to call you…
James: You’re going to starve.
Jassen: You’re going to starve.
James: Yeah, that’s true.
Jassen: So, no matter what business you’re in everything comes back to marketing eventually.
James: I agree.
Jassen: So, have we hammered that home hard enough, you think?
James: I think so and I think we’re way over time.
Jassen: We are we are. James, I appreciate your time, thanks for joining me on this call.
James: You’re welcome, I had a great time.
Jassen: Yeah, this was a great call and I look forward to talking with you in the future, probably about marketing.
James: That sounds good, alright thanks, Jassen.
Jassen: Thank you, James, bye, bye.
Until my next post,
James
From time to time I am asked what I am reading, listening to or studying right now, so today I will be sharing that with you.
Right now, I am in the middle of several things. While I prefer to focus on one thing at a time, each one really occupies one type of situation.
My car is one of the rare places that I still have an audio tape player and so I am listening to “Psycho-Cybernetics” with Dan Kennedy and Maxwell Maltz. I have listened to this program several times and I am about halfway through it again right now. I only listen to it while I am driving that car.
On my iPhone Kindle, I am re-reading Anthony Robbin’s “Awaken the Giant Within”. I usually read this at lunch or while waiting for folks to show up for appointments (I am almost always early). I’ve read this before and I am re-reading it to implement more and make better distinctions this time around.
When I do the hot tub, steam room or sauna and I do not want to risk taking my iPhone Kindle into those environments, I am reading the paperback version of “The Magic of Thinking Big” by David Schwartz. This is my first time reading this book, even though I’ve owned it for many years and it has been recommended to me several times. I am only a couple chapters in, but so far it seems like it could be very helpful.
And finally, I do quite a bit of hiking and walking (I do live in Colorado you know) and on those I have been listening to the new Richard Roop course “Free & Clear Cash Machine” as well as some other Richard Roop material from my iPhone. I do have two private money real estate courses (the “Private Money Blueprint” with Trevor Mauch, Partrick Riddle and Susan Lassiter-Lyons and “Private Lending Made Easy” with Alan Cowgill et al) that I have queued up to listen to as well.
So, I hope that helps and gives you an idea of what I am listening to and focusing on right now.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Download some of our free real estate courses now.
