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”.
The following is an excerpt from “How To Market Your Handyman Business” (a 1 hour and 41 minute free training course download available to our visitors).
Jassen: Right and the Joint Venture For Profit download really worth listening to if you’d be interested in doing that sort of thing. So, the next item here on the outline is you’ve talked at length about this whole know, like and trust concept which is very, very important for building business relationships because people do business with people they know, like and trust it’s almost become a kind of a mantra within the business world now kind of like total quality management used to be a decade ago you know things like that but the thing is the core of business it really is true you are only going to do business with somebody that you have some sort of rapport with or some sort of a relationship. Can you go into some things real quick again about how to manage that relationship and use it to build repeat and referral business for our listeners?
James: I definitely will and I want to point out something that just occurred to me while you were saying that and it was this idea of how do you build a quality relationship with somebody and what occurred to me was a lot of people go I want to go spend quality time with my kids so I’m going to go spend an hour with my kids because I don’t see them a lot to try to do that and it’s kind of a misconception because really where quality comes from is quantity, you need to spend a certain amount of time, you need to have face time you need to be exposed to somebody a repeated number of times before that guard comes down and you get an overall impression you know where someone says “yeah, I know him and I met him 5 years ago and he emails me every single month, really nice guy, sends testimonials out and lots of people like his work” and that’s very different then trying to get to that level in one meeting so you can’t go in -and some people argue with me and say “Yeah, I can develop a really strong relationship in 15 minutes” yeah ok – but you’re going to end up developing a much stronger relationship with lots of repeated contact and if you can develop those strong relationships in short periods of time combine long periods of repeated exposure with those really high quality meeting face to face time where you combine both of those together and so some ways to do that number one is you have to have a monthly newsletter and I strongly recommend that you guys mail it, I think I talked about this earlier but get it in the direct mail-
Jassen: Several times.
James: Yeah, put it in the mail you’re going to be tempted to save the $50.00 or whatever it’s going to cost you in order to send out the physical mailing don’t do it, put it in the mail.
Jassen: Or, you can have someone else do it.
James: Yeah, the US postal service has a service where you can upload your mailing list, you can upload your newsletter and print it in Word, Microsoft Word and upload it and they will actually do the printing for you, they’ll do the postage, they’ll give you a discounted rate for the postage and they’ll get it off for you in the mail as a mail merge and so they’ll put “Dear John, here’s a newsletter for the month” and have like a couple articles some testimonials and maybe some pictures of jobs you’ve done and they’ll do all the printing and all the mailing for you and it’s dirt cheap so go ahead and use those guys if you don’t have one in mind or hire someone to do it, outsource it or have a high school kid help you with it. Second thing is occasional emails with updates, promotional offers, special reports and important announcements if you go out and you’ve created a special report great go ahead and send an email out to your list “Hey, I wanted to make sure that you guys all got this already since you’re already on my list here’s a special report on “15 things you need to know about remodeling your kitchen, if anyone is thinking about remodeling their kitchen, I do have space available next month to do a remodel call me and we’ll coordinate it and if you know of someone that’s thinking about remodeling their kitchen I would really appreciate it if you referred me to them just give me their number or give them my number or both and I’d be happy to send you guys out for a nice dinner on me if they end up doing the job with me so, if I could do that for you let me know” and that could be your newsletter ok or that could be your email and just get that out to do the special report or any important announcements you may have, or your “100th client”, “the 50th basement you’ve refinished”, “the first house of the Spring to be painted”, you know all these different things you can put in there as like announcements as a way to contact people and be friendly. You can also give them access to your social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn which we talked about before and then the other one which is really tacky and that is you can give them a summary of the articles that you’ve written to your blog, using a very technical term it’s called an RSS feed basically it takes your articles and sends them out from your website automatically via email to your email list and if you need help setting that up let me know I can definitely do that for you or your webmaster could do it to but I’ve done this before so I know exactly how to do it but you can actually have that done for you and have your articles sent out automatically to them and so that’s another way to keep in touch with people.
Jassen: OK.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want access to our full 7 hour training course? Upgrade to “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” today to get instant access and take your handyman business to the next level.
The following is an excerpt from “How To Market Your Handyman Business” (a 1 hour and 41 minute free training course download available to our visitors).
Jassen: Right, ok so we were talking about offline marketing now let’s talk about some ways that you can build your handyman business online but kind of you know do it without blowing a ton of cash.
James: Oh, there’s no ways to do it online at all (Laughter)
James: There are no ways to market online at all-
Jassen: Yeah, there’s no ways to market online at all for some reason James I can’t buy that coming from you.
James: Ok, I’ll tell you seven ways then – I’ll try to restrain myself to only seven ways.
Jassen: Well, because in reality how many ways do you know – a few hundred maybe?
James: I don’t know if it’s that many but it’s a lot I mean there are a lot of ways to market yourself online so let’s talk about seven of the most practical ways and number one right off the bat is you need that list -
Jassen: Right
James: -and so be focusing on growing the list a lot of the strategies we’re going to talk about are going to be strategies for you to grow your list not necessarily to do a direct conversion to a sale up right up front so number one focus on getting your list whether that’s an email list or an offline list that you can mail to them I think you should be doing both but I would at least do the offline one and you’ll notice I emphasized offline not online so don’t go for the cheap way out and do email – you’ve actually passed me a video recently and in the video they had a really interesting statistic and I’m going to be testing this very soon but the statistic they have and usually I either do online of offline but the statistic they had was that a combination of the two with an emphasis on offline, offline tends to perform 20 times better.
Jassen: Isn’t that incredible?
James: That was really incredible so if you’re wondering what’s better for you to send an email or for you to put a postcard in the mail ahh postcard 20 times better. So,
Jassen: And that is from Gary Halbert
James: Gary Halbert did that?
Jassen: Yeah, that was from Gary Halbert and he is one of the most I’d say he’s probably one of the most five or ten you know most highly respected marketers of all time.
James: So, advice from Gary do a direct mail piece, snail mail and you’ll have 20 times the response then if you just do email. So, what’s it worth in order to spend .50 cents in order to get something in the mail?
Jassen: Well, you know what – Ok it’s going to depend on what the job is that comes back right?
James: Sure.
Jassen: But if you’re doing a 20, 30, 40,000.00 dollar basement finishing that comes back off of mailing out a few hundred newsletters, then you’re doing pretty good or even if it’s not a $40.000 dollar job even if it’s a $2,000.00 exterior paint job, you know or a couple hundred bucks even for doing some wiring, you know all of those no matter how small it is if you’re mailing out to a few hundred people even one small job can pay for the entire mailing.
James: Or more than the entire mailing.
Jassen: Or more… easily… so yeah,
James: It is something you need to do, you need to do direct mail but let’s get back to the online stuff. Because I was joking when I said there was no way to market online.
Jassen: Yeah I know.
James: There are lots of ways to market online in fact-
Jassen: Yeah, let’s talk about one of your favorites actually.
James: Yeah, one of my favorites is writing articles and this get’s back to the whole thing about… you know… different skills. So, as a handyman you may not feel you’re qualified to write articles. Easy solution though… you can have someone else do them. Having that article, that content on your website that is what attracts people to your site, you know having a website that has just you know “I offer handyman services; here are my rates, here’s a couple pictures on there” that does not attract people to your website guys.
Jassen: Right.
James: What you need on there is content you need to give people a reason to come there so a lot of times when I talk about articles I’m talking about seven tips for finishing a basement yourself, why would you as a handyman who wants the job of finishing a basement want to give away tips for someone on how to finish their own basement?
Jassen: Because the people reading that article may not know all that is involved in a project of that magnitude so when they’re reading that article, they’re going to first of all learn maybe some things that they weren’t thinking about that they weren’t taking into consideration that may either increase the cost or increase the complexity of the project, it’s going to make them think. The other thing it’s going to do is it’s going to engage them in the thought process of “Ooh is this really something I want to do myself?”
James: Yeah, what do we know about someone who has come to your website who has seeked out an article that has seven tips on how to finish the basement yourself? Well, we know they want to finish their basement.
Jassen: Exactly.
James: So, if they have to give you their email address and their name, telephone number and mailing address in order to get that report maybe you’re physically going to mail it to them but if you get their contact information and then you send it to them, you know maybe they’re not planning on finishing it this week they’re in the really early stages, they’ve got two months out or three months out, they’re going to do it over the summer well maybe you actually give them the report which highlights some of the easy things they probably knew about but some of the more difficult and challenging things on why you might want to hire a professional maybe it’s some of the licensing stuff and the permits or maybe it’s something else completely you can go and then sell your service or the benefit of using you in that same report or outside that report and have lots of different information in there about why they should use you and you get them upstream from the other guys before they even decide to call a handyman you want to get them to know, like and trust you.
Jassen: Absolutely.
James: Ok… so we’re talking a lot about articles on your site but really there’s two ways you can use articles you can put articles directly on your website which attracts readers to your site from search engines makes people want to stay on your website once they get there which helps with search engines as well I won’t get into the details of how time on site works or bounce rate works but basically you want to have that the other way you can use articles is that once you write an article and you post it on your site you can also take that article and put it out on what is called article directories and article directories are places that you can take articles to allow other people to take that same article with your contact information on it and publish it out on lots of other websites so you may find your article on 5, 10, 15, or 20 other websites locally maybe the other local real estate agents, maybe local mortgage brokers, insurance guys who are going to reference you and your content to their clients and then they have a chance of contacting you and joining your mailing list so that’s what the benefits of using article marketing are.
Jassen: Right.
James: Ok… so that was basically the first step of online marketing and I know we’re going to go over time but this is great I want to give you guys some great information so number two is you can do pay per click marketing I’m sure everyone’s heard of Google AdWords where you can go and pay Google a certain amount of money every time somebody clicks on the one of their ads in order to have them go to your website it’s that same model there’s Google, there’s Yahoo search, you can put ads on Facebook and some other sites if you really want to but basically you pay a small amount of money every time somebody clicks on your ad and that takes them directly to your website. Now, how much do you think it’s going to cost somebody in order to have someone click on an ad and go to your website because you’re bidding against all the other guys that are doing it? How much?
Jassen: You know for local search, I’ll bet it’s under a dollar,
James: Yeah? I’ll bet you it’s in the $1.00-$2.00 range… it’s going to depend on your market but let’s say it’s a dollar ok?
Jassen: OK.
James: An article that you write on your blog should generate… for a well marketed website, for a well done article should get you about ten unique visitors to your website per month.
Jassen: Right.
James: So, an article has a value of about $10.00 in advertising per month… you spend $10.00 in advertising and you’ll get the same amount of traffic to your site per month but realize you only have to pay for the article once.
Jassen: Exactly.
James: So, when you really want to compare what my total cost is writing articles is a much more cost effective strategy and a lot of people miss that. They see that Google is this great thing and I can go and put money in the machine and I get traffic instantly but you’ve got to realize you’ve got to keep putting quarters in that machine to keep playing.
Jassen: Right.
James: With the articles you pay upfront but you have that long term benefit of having 5, 10, 15, 20… hundred articles on your site.
Jassen: And they stay out there on the internet forever.
James: That’s right and you want to build up that content long term and really build some value for people and you can hire people to do this articles are relatively inexpensive to do so it’s not unusual for people to pay you know $5.00-$10.00 per article if you really search hard you can get them for cheaper than that.
Jassen: OK.
James: Alright… so that’s pay per click which we’ve talked about… the other thing is create or show informative how-to videos and market them on YouTube -You know if you’re going to teach someone to do a little fix up job on their house you can say you know here’s how to turn off your sprinkler, here’s how to blow out your sprinkler system, or here’s how to turn on your sprinkler system or here are five things to check on your dishwasher when it stops working or here are five things you want to check out when you’re considering redoing your bathroom or your kitchen or redoing a basement or painting the interior or exterior and you can make these little tiny video clips with a handheld camera, you can upload them to YouTube and make sure you put your contact information and your website on those and then when people go and search for them provided they’re local you’ll be able to get some business from that and also gain popularity to your website which helps your local search as well.
Jassen: Definitely… you know I’ve got to say there are some industries that I believe different marketing methods you know are better geared then some others for handymen in particular doing video I personally believe is incredibly powerful because if people are searching on Google or Yahoo for you know do- it yourself tips for how to do anything around the house YouTube results are going to show a really, really high on those search results and it’s going to be a incredibly valuable content for people because repair work and this sort of stuff, instructional items involving fixing things and parts and tools they’re perfect for video-
James: I would agree.
Jassen: I mean it’s a match made in heaven.
James: And I will give you a tip about doing the videos and that is you want to make sure that you are very clearly defining who you are and where you are in the video title so you can maximize the localized benefit so “Denver handyman teaches you how to prepare your house for painting.”
Jassen: Right.
James: And then people looking for Denver handymen have a chance of finding that video but prepare your house for painting also have a chance and anyone who happens to be in Denver seeing that video may find you and want to do business with you as well.
Jassen: Exactly and as another aside you were telling me I think a week or two ago about an interesting statistic, you told me that the YouTube.com search function was actually the second most commonly used search engine behind Google.com.
James: That is correct.
Jassen: That blew me away.
James: Yup it is the second most search site so they use the search engine on that site is second only to Google and Google owns YouTube so basically Google has one and two.
Jassen: Right and then Yahoo I assume is number three right?
James: I would assume although I did not see the list like that it was a news article that said it.
Jassen: OK, so fascinating especially for handymen.
James: Yeah, and I think video is going to grow so if you’re like looking to get in on the ground floor video is where it’s at right now.
Jassen: Yeah.
James: So go make videos and you’re going to have some really nice good videos that have long term long shelf life that they can find you with so I would definitely go on there and you know just like videos the same idea holds for the next one which is special reports about very specific niches so you can make a special report on “ten things to do to prepare your properties for new tenants” and then you could focus and target on finding landlords, what’s great about focusing on landlords as a handyman?
Jassen: Because rental properties more often than not are going to need some extent of work done after a tenant moves out and before a new tenant moves in.
James: I think that’s only half of it-
Jassen: OK.
James: -that’s one big part of it the other part of it is who usually owns more than one house?
Jassen: Landlords.
James: Yeah, so you find one guy you treat him right and now all of a sudden you’re not just doing service on one house you’re doing service on five and then if they go to their local real estate investors group they can talk another investor and that investor could have ten.
Jassen: Yes.
James: So, I mean you’re getting referrals of like multiples the only other one that I can think is comparable is real estate agents.
Jassen: Right I would also maybe throw in apartment managers into that pool.
James: Well, landlords or apartment managers I’m kind of grouping those all together.
Jassen: OK.
James: But yeah, you’re right any person who owns any type of income property where they need maintenance done I think those are key and so if you focus on making special reports and focus on working with them I think that’s a great niche to serve but then there’s a lot of money to be made in a lot of these other niches too you know basements and painting outside and painting inside and flooring and you know all the normal things you need I mean you can focus on age demographics you could focus on new homeowner crowd you can focus on the older homeowner crowd you could focus on the homeowners with kids or whatever I mean there’s lots of different ways to target this and then you speak directly to them with your marketing you need to create what’s a unique selling proposition for each market you are focusing on.
Jassen: Right and you just hit a key point there you can focus on more than one major market.
James: Oh yeah, I think we said that multiple times because it’s really important you can be in multiple niches -
Jassen: Right.
James: – you can be the real estate investor guy and also be the guy that you know helps out the elderly maintain their home as well you can be both those guys.
Jassen: Right.
James: And you don’t have to be just one so…
Jassen: I totally agree.
James: Yeah so we had special reports let me cover two really quickly you can become active in discussion forums dealing with your particular niches or dealing with your particular target audiences so you could go to real estate investor group discussion boards and talk about repair issues and how you handle that as a contractor or as a handyman and guess what they’re going to go and start respecting and think you’re and expert there and they may contact you when they have a project that they don’t want to do themselves or they may refer you to someone else like I’ve got this guy who constantly answers all these questions on this board that I’m on and he’s here locally in Denver and he’ll help you or he’s locally in Miami or wherever you’re at and you can become active in those localized groups and the last one which is very similar is become active on social media websites like Twitter (follow me on Twitter) and Facebook and LinkedIn and any of those where you have local contacts and then you can post up pictures of your job that you did or projects that you participated in, things you are doing personally to kind of build that personal connection you want to do anything you can where people know, like and trust you so that when they have a – when they are ready for a project themselves they think of you or if they need to refer you to somebody they think of you first.
Jassen: Definitely, quick comment on the social media aspect real estate agents and real estate investors are both extremely active groups of professionals on Facebook. There are tons and tons of groups on Facebook I won’t get into what groups are and what fan pages are and all of that stuff but there are tons of pages and groups where real estate agents gather either within specific niche categories or geographically. So, Facebook I personally believe if you are going to try to establish relationships as a handyman with real estate agents one of the best places for you to be online is on Facebook and seeking those people out.
James: OK, you know I just looked at the clock and it’s hard to believe but we are further behind this time then we were last time and I mean we knew we were over last time.
Jassen: Well you know what people are just going to get a greater value out of this than aren’t they?
James: OK, fair enough.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. Want access to our full 7 hour training course? Upgrade to “The World’s Greatest Handyman Marketing Course” today to get instant access and take your handyman business to the next level.
In some other recent posts I’ve been discussing selling your house in a weekend. This continues that discussion by talking about using your buyers list.
Step number nine is to contact your existing buyers list. We talked about this a little bit when we went over voice broadcasts, about being able to voice broadcast to all the people that have ever called in before on your properties. But let’s say you have a list of names, addressses and telephone numbers. You could do several different things; you could do a direct mail piece, where you actually send out postcards or a letter or something to people on your list to let them know that you have this property for sale. If you’re collecting email addresses, you could do an email blast to them to let them know you have this property for sale. If your list is small, you can go and look through and see the people that are in this price range that wanted houses before and call them specifically to let them know you have this house for sale, and you could do a personal call that way. I do not usually do ALL that stuff.
I use lots of simple tools to leverage my time. I use voice broadcasts; I would do a postcard mailing, because it’s easy for me to take my list, export it to the US Postal Service website, put together a quick postcard and have it sent out without having to worry about it. I can get all that done within 30 minutes to an hour. So it’s very time effective, and I can just get it done and put it out there. Make sure you contact your existing list in order to let everyone else who has ever worked with you looking at buying a house that you’ve got another house for sale.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. If you have not yet seen the special free downloads page for real estate investors, check it out now.
In some other recent posts I’ve been discussing selling your house in a weekend. This particular post is a continuation of that discussion focusing primarily on using direct mail to sell your house.
In step number 7, we’re going to discuss doing direct mail or flyers. Normally, I love direct mail. And direct mail is great; however, because you’re on such a confined time frame in order to sell this house, you really need to consider the benefits of direct mail versus having someone go out with flyers or the other type of marketing we talked about.
Let me just throw out some ideas of ways you can use direct mail in order to get your houses occupied. If you get enough lead time, you can actually go and send postcards or flyers out direct mail saying that you’ve got this house for sale, here’s the address, here are the details, here’s how the bidding process is going to work, call our 24-hour recorded information line for additional information. And you can mail that out to all the houses within a quarter mile or a half mile of your particular house that you have for sale.
How do you get that list? Well, a lot of the comp programs, like the comp program that we have used is RealQuest, you can actually go and pinpoint an address and say, “I want all the addresses of the houses in this area – within a half mile radius of this particular house.” You can also call on major list brokers to give you a list.
You tell them, “I want all the addresses of homeowners within a half mile or quarter mile of this address”, and they’ll give you a list which you can then upload to the US Postal Service website, and you can upload your letter and the list, and then you can have it automatically sent out for you to all the people that are in those areas.
Now you’re not necessarily looking for your buyer in there, but you could also be looking for them to refer a buyer. Birds of a feather tend to flock together. So if you’ve got people living in that area already, they know other people that are probably in that same income bracket that would probably want to live in that neighborhood, and they may refer someone to you. Now, I’ve heard of offering a cash reward if they find your buyer. They’ll come there and you’ll say I’ll pay you a $500 cash reward if you refer to me a buyer and they eventually buy the house. So you can do that if you want in your letter. I do not usually do that. I usually just advertise, and I make it a great deal – tell your friends if you want them to live here that this is the deal. And then I give them all the information about the house and they do it. Now that’s doing it via direct mail.
The other way to do it is you go and your print up flyers and you go door-to-door around your neighborhood putting out flyers and getting people interested in your house. I have sold houses this way. People come and look at houses and are interested in houses by getting flyers. We have tracked this; I know I have sold more than one house this way. You can be very effective by bringing flyers out and letting people know that you’ve got houses for sale using flyers. So between flyers and direct mail, either going door-to-door and getting the message out or using the US Postal Service to go door-to-door for you and getting the message out is a great way to sell houses.
Until my next post,
James
P.S. If you have not yet seen the special free downloads page for real estate investors, check it out now.
Late last week, I got a probate mailing list. For my county, there were just over 100 people on it in the last quarter. So, it is a relatively small list compared to the thousands of postcards I might send out to Absentee Owners or other home owners in my market to purchase properties.
Earlier this week, I put together a personalized letter and get a mailing out to this list to offer to purchase any houses they may be interested in selling. With most mailing lists I would send a postcard (or hand written yellow letter in some cases), but with this particular list I am trying something a bit different based on the recommendation of the company that I got the list from.
They recommend a personalized, typed letter with a hand address envelope so that is what I will use as the baseline to compare future tests.
The feedback I have gotten in the past is that the probate mailing list is typically an extremely responsive list. We will see how this particular mailing goes.
Until my next post,
James
