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Best WordPress DIY Builders to Build Your Real Estate Website In 2024Discover the top WordPress page builders for real estate websites in 2024. Transform your online property showcase with ease and style.

Are you ready to take your real estate website to the next level in 2024? Uncover the most powerful WordPress page builders tailored to showcase properties effectively. Learn how these cutting-edge tools can enhance user experience and boost engagement on your site. Dive into our video now and start building a standout online platform for your listings!

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:15.690] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail-Right podcast. Today’s episode is number 428. Is that right, John? Yeah. Okay. Today, we will discuss the best WordPress do-it-yourself builders to build your real estate website in 2024. It’s a fantastic subject. It plays so profoundly to my partner’s expertise. I’m incredibly excited about what I hope all of you will be excited about because I know I will learn from John today, and I’m super duper into it because this is not my expertise. I have some knowledge, but nothing compared to John. So, John, without any further ado, for those people who may not know your qualifications on this subject or who you are in general, why don’t you go ahead and do an introduction?

[00:01:13.580] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mail-Right.com, and we build fantastic WordPress websites. We also provide a CRM landing page text and email lead generative platform all in one bundle. Over to you, Robert.

[00:01:41.770] – Robert NewmanAll right. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to We’re going to look at John’s notes. For those of you who are new to the show, John does the production on the show, and I act as an industry influencer host. Now, I’ve been doing this for 16 years. John is slightly newer into it. But John has been a WordPress entrepreneur for a long time and has built quite a few websites. He has another company that creates learning management systems on WordPress. He has a podcast that is incredibly, incredibly, incredibly popular called WP-Tonic, which is about WordPress, essentially. Is that correct?

[00:02:23.800] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, it’s aimed at the WordPress professional and SaaS bootstrapper.

[00:02:29.610] – Robert NewmanOkay, so definitely. And John’s guest list, some of the people that John has had the chance to meet and talk about on this other show, have literally made my mouth drool. It’s just a male writer, specifically for real estate professionals, whereas WP-Tonic has slightly brought our audience. So having said all that, just getting into this, I’ve never even heard of the first person that you put on here. And you also took the time to put in the notes, Gutenberg-based page builders. So before we get into that, will you please do us all a favor, myself included, and explain what Gutenberg is?

[00:03:06.880] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah. About six years ago, six to seven years ago, WordPress ran it. Matt Manweg, who’s the joint founder, has a commercial company called Automatic. They have managed to get quite a large investment. I think it’s around $900 million into Automatic. But WordPress is a strange hybrid where it’s open source, but it also has a lot of reliance on this company called Automatic. And Matt Manweg said that WordPress has to move forward. They developed this internal page website builder, which is called Gutenberg, which has been an ongoing project. Based on this core technology called Gutenberg and blocks, blocks are like sections that you can drag off. Based on this technology, third-party plugins build on this Gutenberg technology. And why you should care is that it’s much quicker than many of the other solutions out there. And I think Rob would confirm this, that one of the major… It’s only one thing, but it’s a significant thing that Google looks for is a very speedy website. So if you’re looking to build something that’s your real estate website, and you’re looking for something that is based on core WordPress, and that’s also speedy, looking at a Gutenberg-based solution probably might be a good idea.

[00:05:35.450] – Robert NewmanYeah, I agree. So, ladies and gentlemen, I also build on WordPress and create a real estate website like John, but I use WordPress as my base platform. I’m just not as familiar with the… I have a developer team that I work with, and I focus on SEO. So yes, speed is important, things like that. Page builders are essential, but here’s how I view for their importance. It’s ease of use. It’s like the CRM conversation. Websites and CRMs are only as good as the people and their ability to use them. I use page builder plugins that build on top of Gutenberg. I know that sounds confusing, But it just makes everything easier. The easier that something gets, but unfortunately, some of these paid builders, like the one I use, Elementor, slow the site down a little bit. So you lose some of the speed but gain ease of use. One way or the other, though, Gutenberg is of many, many different decisions that Matt has made. Gutenberg is another good one. Execution with so many things in tech is another question, in my opinion. It’s not that he isn’t doing the right thing, it’s just how he’s executing it.

[00:06:51.280] – Robert NewmanIt’s a little bit shaky, in my opinion, just my opinion. John’s much… Again, I got to keep in mind, this is definitely somebody else’s expertise. Let’s talk about the number one. Again, for those guys who are listening to the show, we’re doing a show that we’ve never done before. If you want to go ahead and build your own website, these are some On WordPress, these are some people that you might consider. Number one on the list, put there by John, is CadenceWP. I don’t even know who these guys are. John, why don’t you tell us a little bit about them?

[00:07:26.700] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, Cadence. It’s owned by a hosting company, actually. Cadence started off with a very talented developer called Ben, and he lives in Montana with his family. And he built a very large theme-based business. And he got into Gutenberg early and built this framework, this theme, based on Gutenberg technology, and he built a really fantastic business. Then he was offered to come to Liquid Web. Liquid Web is quite a large hosting company. It’s actually probably larger than WP engine, actually. He sold his business, but he’s the head of Cadence, and he’s the head developer. I know Ben, he’s very talented, and he’s built on Gutenberg technology, and it’s a FAB framework. One of the attractive things is it comes with a very large library of predesign templates. I think they do have one or two that are designed for real estate agents. I would have to confirm that. In the near future, we’re going to be offering about six to a dozen themes that have been specifically designed for real estate. Sure. That is based on Cadence technology at Mailright. We’re in the process of developing them and testing them. But you probably could take one of their general themes and and adapt it.

[00:09:32.620] – Jonathan DenwoodAnd as long as you weren’t attempting to do a lot of customization with the IDX feed, as Robert utilizes and recommends, so does Melright, we recommend IDX Broker. And as long as you’re not attempting to customize what IDX Broker produces, or you’re going to have to hire somebody to help you do that. I think you could produce a really nice website, even if you weren’t utilizing a directly designed starter theme, which is the wording that Cadence utilizes. And it’s going to be very unreasonably good quality hosting. It’s going to be super quick. So I like it. Beautiful.

[00:10:29.680] – Robert NewmanI know nothing about them, so I’m not going to say anything. I love all the history. I’m a big fan of it. So thanks for sharing what the background of Cadence is. I will say this just to add a thought. For those of you who are on the show or listening to the show, in my experience only, and once again, John, you can jump in if you have a definitively different opinion, but I think that Even though there is a tremendous amount of advertising that says that just anybody can build a DIY WordPress site. I’ve built plenty myself. I’ve never found that just anybody can do it. I’ve usually found it to be a big learning process, no matter how simple it was to unpack the theme, no matter… I never found it to be… It’s not a novice’s game. There should be some in my opinion, because without it, there’s all sorts of questions that come up. You got to upload it to a hosting place. I built a site on WordPress, the hosting environment, wordpress. Org. That was a whole learning experience for me, John. I didn’t know that you need to do any of that.

[00:11:47.630] – Robert NewmanWhen you unpack the theme and then discover that there’s all the stuff inside the theme, and then you get introduced to the idea of plugins. I’m like, What’s a plugin? What’s a bloody slug? WordPress has created all this language around their specific website build that’s actually not standard. They’re making it industry standard, but if you don’t know it already, I found it to be a huge amount of learning, even to do the Unplug It, Do It Yourself product. Do you disagree or do you agree, or are you just so deep in the trenches, you just have no idea what I’m talking about?

[00:12:24.210] – Jonathan DenwoodOh, everything you’ve stated. I think utilizing a modern framework like Cadence or one or two of the others we’re going to talk about. And there’s non-Gutenberg WordPress-based. You’ve mentioned one, Elemator. I’m going to discuss that. I actually think Apart from the hosting side, I think utilizing something like Cadence or one of the other solutions isn’t really that much more difficult than utilizing Wix or Squarespace, who are SaaS competitors, software as a service competitors. Really? But no, I don’t honestly think utilizing one of these is a lot more difficult apart from setting it up and getting the hosting side of it. Okay. Besides setting it up. Pardon?

[00:13:18.340] – Robert NewmanI said besides setting it up. That’s a huge disclaimer.

[00:13:22.340] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, a lot the hosting, the specialized WordPress hosting, have a one-click install, and then you just upload the theme. I can tell you for a fact that certain elements of Squarespace, certain elements of Wix aren’t as easy as their advertising makes out, because we regularly get people that utilize these platforms and they decide to go to WordPress. In some ways, I think it swings and roundabouts, Robert.

[00:13:53.640] – Robert NewmanOkay. I’ll keep saying it, you’re definitely the expert in this space. I I can only speak from some limited experience, and then what am I going to say?

[00:14:05.090] – Jonathan DenwoodIf you’re going to be really challenged to get something up on Squarespace, or you’re going to be really challenged to get something up on Wix, your You’re definitely going to be a bit more challenged with WordPress, but utilizing Cadence or one of the others is, I’m comparing what it was like five or six years ago, and it’s definitely moved on and easier easier to do than it was five or six years ago. But like I say, if you’re going to be challenged with something like Squarespace or Wix, you’re definitely going to be a little bit more challenged getting it up with WordPress.

[00:14:44.210] – Robert NewmanOkay. I’m going to say, and our challenge as host, ladies and gentlemen, is that I’ve got an ever-increasing number of people that are calling me, John, I’m thrilled to say, after I’ve seen years of doing this, that more and more of them have some technical knowledge. But the amount of calls that I’ve taken from inside the real estate space where somebody even struggles to check their email is like, there are way more than I think many other industries, way more. And so when you’re like, Oh, it shouldn’t be… And you’re not really saying it that way, but it’s like, Yeah, for some people, just the idea… I the word content management system, and they go, What are you talking about?

[00:15:34.070] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, but beggers can’t be choosers. If you haven’t got the budget to hire something like Melright or hire Robert or hire, you’re really tight. But you know you need to get, and you haven’t got the money to spend a load of money in IDX customization, but you need to get something up because you know it will be beneficial, but it’s got to look really decent These are cost-effective solutions. Like I say, beggers can’t be choosers. If you haven’t got the budget and you feel there’s a need to get your own website, this is one of the more cost-effective ways where you can get IDX also if you want to pay for it. But obviously, I think hiring a professional, hiring Robert, or you to look at the Melright platform, which is all based on WordPress technology, is a really good idea. But there’s a market for the DIY, isn’t it?

[00:16:43.660] – Robert NewmanThere really is. Let’s put a pin in it. We’re going to come back. John is going to continue to share some of his brilliant thoughts with everybody. When we come back from break, we’ve got three more recommendations on our list for you. John is going to walk you through them and list the pros and cons as it relates to some of these other platforms. We got a lot of great content. If By the way, if you are in the position that John just said, you’re really tight using his language, listen, this is the show for you because you don’t have a lot of options. You don’t have a lot of content producers like us trying to explain to you what you’re really really beginning low cost budget options are. We’re super excited to get into it. Stay tuned. Three, two, one. All right, welcome back to episode number 428. John has really decided to be of service to the world at large today, and he’s sharing his years and years and years worth of WordPress knowledge. And he’s running through some of the do it yourself builders that are very low cost, how to put up WordPress, and he’s doing a review on them.

[00:17:44.390] – Robert NewmanThis is strictly for those of you who might be at the beginning of your career, low budget, not yet in a place where you can recommend using a vendor of any kind, this would be a place you can go to, theoretically, number one, get a website up. And Number two, this is the one thing I agree with strongly. Why would somebody do this? In my opinion, it’s about you train and condition yourself to use a good content management system. Because later on, you can always hire a guy like, John might be the first person you consider, and then maybe a while later, you might consider me. Because we’re just doing different types of products. We’re both using WordPress, though. We’re both using this platform. If you’re already used to it, it is actually going to be easier easier and easier and easier to hire other people in the WordPress world to work with you. You’re going to find it simple. John, without any further ado, that you’ve got a remaining three people to talk about. What’s number two on the list?

[00:18:44.310] – Jonathan DenwoodI’m going to go through all three of the Gutenberg, and then you can remark, and it hopefully gives us enough time to go through the non-Gutenberg quickly. So quick, Spectra. Spectra is a bit cadence. Specter is owned by a company called ASTRA. Astra are big in Alimator and Gutenberg. They provide… It’s very similar to Cadence. There are some differences, but I’m not going to go into them now, but they’re very similar. Cadence has about 700,000 active users, and I think Specter has about 400,000 active users. They both provide free and paid. I would look at the paid version. I personally think Cadence is a little bit better than Specter, but there are people that would say Specter is better than Cadence. They’re both quality companies. I think probably Specter, especially Ashtra, do have a few more themes, starter themes that are aimed at real estate agents. On to the next one, Generate Blocks. I know the developer, it’s a privately-owned company, smaller than the first two, but he’s been in the WordPress space and running this company for a number of years. It really appeals to the more professional web designer because they don’t provide a lot of starter themes, but the code it produces and the speed it produces, the basic way you build or edit a website is going to be similar to Cadence and Spectra, but they don’t offer a lot of starter themes.

[00:20:47.320] – Jonathan DenwoodBut if you look at the code, it’s super quality and it’s super quick. And he’s adding, I think it’s just come out. He’s come out with a more class. This is web development talk, a class-based system that makes it more appealing to the professional developer and makes it even more quick and powerful. And the last one is max blocks. These people were big in the divi world and still are, and it’s one of the solutions that’s non-Gutenberg that we’re going to talk about. And they’ve produced and they’ve put a ton of work. And it’s the total opposite of Generate Blocks because they got, even with the free products, and the paid product is very reasonably priced. They offer… They’ve got about 300, 400 template starter themes in their library. I don’t know if any of them are specifically designed for real estate, but they’ve got an enormous library and they’re gaining market share. They’re nothing like Spectra or Cadence, but they are because they’re offering so much for free and even in the pro version, even a lot more. Like I say, they’ve got hundreds and hundreds of well-designed starter themes. That offer quality, that’s quite amazing.

[00:22:22.100] – Jonathan DenwoodBecause of their background in divvy in all those years, even though they’re a small team, I don’t think you’re going on much of a gamble. They’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money to get where they’re going. They’re the Gutenberg solutions that I would recommend. Shall we go on to… You got a comment before we go on to the non-Gutenberg page builders?

[00:22:50.850] – Robert NewmanNo, I mean, I could make some, but no, we got a lot more to cover, a little amount of time. Let’s get into it.

[00:22:57.280] – Jonathan DenwoodSo the non-Gutenberg, these are plugins that you installed that are not based on this Gutenberg core WordPress technology. And the big daddy, the big guerrilla is Alimator. Alimator really Elemator. Elemator, yeah. Elemator. They really dominate. They were one of the first that really got into the page, the non-code, drag and drop page builder. The one before them that had a large market share and still has is Divi. But Elemator really took off because It was the first in the market. Now, until recently, the problem with Alimentor was that the code quality wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t fantastic. It produced a lot of additional code to produce this drag and drop environment, which they were one of the first to develop. You overcome it, but you can overcome it by just provide them really good hosting, like WP engine or my other business, we provide hosting that WP tonic. We instill support Elementor, and we offer it. But we’ve got more Gutenberg. And also recently, they changed their core technology to something called flex box. And they’ve done this to reduce the amount of code necessary to produce a certain page or website layout, and that offers the prospect of it being quicker.

[00:24:54.800] – Jonathan DenwoodBut I think they’re running almost, I think it’s 10 to 14 million websites that are active users of the product. There’s quite a few millions upon millions of people utilizing it. I think as long as you got good quality hosting, that’s probably going to cost you between $20 to $40 a month. You’re going to get around some of the performance problems that Elementor can produce. Got any response to that?

[00:25:35.290] – Robert NewmanWe use Elementor on our installs. We swear by it. It’s a fantastic tool. There’s a thousand things you can do with it if you have the agency model. The saving of a lot of design elements inside Elementor, so it’s all drag and drop, allows us to create a specific experience for our customers that relates to real estate, different search bars, different design elements, which we actually do leverage all the time. It allows us to do a fairly advanced semi-custom site in incredibly reasonable amount of time, lowering the cost and lowering the cost of acquisition for a fairly customized website with an actual set of designers and marketing people behind it. A drag and in this whole world that we’re living in right now, John, it eliminates the perceived value of UX and UI specialists. What I like about Elementor is it can take a UI guy like myself. I don’t have a lot of technical skill sets as they would normally be related, but I am creative and I’m very good at user interface. Obviously, that’s an SEO skill set, which most people don’t understand. It’s not so much like it’s something pretty It’s ease of use.

[00:27:01.850] – Robert NewmanIs it natural? Does it navigate well? Do you want to click on it? Things like that. That’s all user interface. And so Elementor gives me so many options for user interface. I can go through my palette of 10 design options for a homepage, like 10 search boxes as an example. But if I don’t want to use the 10, we can always have the designer design another one and put it in Elementor, or a client can point out an element that they like on somebody else’s site. We can decide whether or not we want to keep it as a permanent addition to our design tool kit inside Elementor. Theoretically, our clients can use the same design kit at any time, basically allowing us to be a a version of a square for our own clients, but yet at the same time be a bespoke agency. I love Elementor. That’s the bottom line. Let’s go on to the next one. Number 6, Divi.

[00:27:56.320] – Jonathan DenwoodDivi was on the market before Elementor. Still extremely popular. The owner and the team behind Divi are some of the best marketers that I know in the WordPress space. Their SEO, their ability, their content they produce, the video they produce, they really know. These are online marketing animals, as I’m concerned. The owner really knows his target audience. A lot of DIY people still love Divi, and there’s a lot of graphic designers that still love Divi. The basic technology does not produce fantastic code. You need quality hosting if you’re going to run a Divi website, in my opinion, but it’s got a fanatical law following, and it’s got a lot of themes that it provides. There’s a lot of third-party themes. They are attempting to move to Gutenberg technology. They have been saying that they’re going to be doing this for almost three years. They have got it in beta, but they haven’t managed to release it to the public. Yet. People are wondering if they ever are going to be able to, but we have to see. The next one is Bricks. Bricks has become the darling of the website freelancer WordPress agency who doesn’t like Animator.

[00:29:59.140] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s I wouldn’t recommend it for a DIY individual unless they want… It’s a real hobby being mucking around with websites, but it’s enormously powerful. It has a drag and drop. It gives you total control. The code it produces is some of the best that I’ve ever seen produced by a page builder. When I became a web developer, you had to hand code things, and the standard of code it produces is very similar to somebody. If you looked at the code of somebody that had built a website that knew what they were doing. Very clean code, It’s a powerful builder. Like I say, for the freelancer, for the web agency who don’t like Alimator, but there’s loads of agencies like Rob, the one that Robert owns, and there’s loads of agencies that just love Alimator, and I’m agnostic about it because I think they all have their strengths and weaknesses. And lastly, we’re going to talk, and maybe next week we’ll delve in this a bit more detail, is there’s a whole world that’s controlled by this company called Theme Forest. Now, Theme Forest is just a website, a marketplace, where third-party theme developers offer themes, plugins, all sorts.

[00:31:44.200] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s based in Australia. It’s one of the most popular and profitable WordPress properties. I think it’s a publicly limited It’s a company in Australia, I think. And there’s thousands upon thousands of themes and plugins, and there’s a lot of work, a lot of themes, aimed at the real estate agent who wants to get something up themselves, or a WordPress freelancer, or a lower-level agency at a lower price, tend to utilize these themes. Now, there’s strengths and weaknesses. Next week, I’ll be going through maybe half a dozen of the most popular Theme Forest themes. But you got to be aware what you’re getting into because there are some amazing quality solutions on Theme Forest, but there’s also a lot of trash on Theme Forest. And you could make a real big mistake by choosing the wrong solution on Theme Forest. But a lot of people in the WordPress professional area, really rubbish Theme Forest. I think I’m more realistic about it. I think it has its place. I personally wouldn’t go there, but I understand why a lot of people that on a small budget and they just want… The other thing is a lot of these bigger theme, these starter themes on Theme Forest, they have IDX integration.

[00:33:43.510] – Jonathan DenwoodIt will work with a specific IDX plugin. You just got to know what you’re getting involved in, really. What do you reckon, Rob?

[00:33:58.060] – Robert NewmanWell, I agree with all that. I actually I have more input about Themeforce than I do most of the subjects that you’ve covered. Don’t know most of these companies. I actually just sent brick builders over to the lead developer on my team so that he can comment on it. I like Powerful. I like the way it’s laid out. I can also tell you in the 10 seconds that I was on the site that it cannot possibly be your most adoptable DIY because there’s language on here that I struggle with, and I know what I’m talking about.

[00:34:30.510] – Jonathan DenwoodYou’re talking about bricks, are you?

[00:34:31.580] – Robert NewmanYes.

[00:34:32.670] – Jonathan DenwoodOh, yeah, bricks. It’s aimed at the freelancer.

[00:34:38.280] – Robert NewmanOkay, so it’s not really a DIY.

[00:34:41.800] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, there are some DIY-ers that It’s aimed at the very knowledgeable…

[00:34:51.140] – Robert NewmanI would say that this is aimed at the small business owner with the technical background. Diy, to me, in this case, would be somebody somebody who’s already a proficient digital entrepreneur and is looking for a better than average tool that they can use and is not scared of a technical product. Then maybe Bricks would be the one you look at because I haven’t heard of it.

[00:35:14.780] – Jonathan DenwoodThey’ve been very aggressive on AppSumma. Appsumma is an online discounter, folks, and a lot of freelancers and web agencies spend They’re the king of the lifetime deal, AppSumma, and bricks to get traction have been very aggressive with their lifetime deals, Robert. They increased it. I bought it because it was such an attractive price, and I know the developer team behind it, Thomas. It’s based in Germany, and they’ve got a lot of experience in the WordPress space. I know he’s invested half a million dollars in de-verbing this, so they’re serious. They’ve been very aggressive with their lifetime deals, and that’s why it’s Freelancers and smaller web agencies love their lifetime deals, Robert. That’s how they’ve really got traction because they’ve been offering these lifetime deals.

[00:36:29.300] – Robert NewmanIt’s It’s got a lot of very relevant people giving testimonials on it, which I look at every single time I check somebody new out. And Bricks has the right pedigree in terms of who’s saying what about it, including John, by the way, first person, right pedigree. Then there would be other people with right pedigree. You do your own research. John and I are like, I don’t know about John, but I’m going to give the disclaimer. It’s like investment. Listen, we are talking about these people. We’re not really giving you advice. Make the decision that is Well, we are giving you some advice. We’re giving you input. Make your own decisions. These are all big decisions. Who you build your website on, it could be a many years relationship with this company. Theme Forest is something that I use for a while. And honestly, John, while I had to use it because I was getting started from me in a garage and one personal assistant, and that was it, it caused me a lot of problems using Theme Forest.

[00:37:25.320] – Jonathan DenwoodYou got to know what you’re getting involved with. So if you’re up for it, maybe we look at some of the most popular real estate themes in the Theme Forest because I think-But I think-Yeah, go on. Hold on.

[00:37:41.860] – Robert NewmanFrom Theme Forest, I went to Agent Evolution, the company IDX broker bought, the theme builder. I went to Agent Evolution, which is a particular theme builder. That caused me a lot of problems. You know why it kept causing me problems, everybody? Everything that John is saying that I know is almost incomprehensible to all of you; how a website is built is based very heavily on the code and how it’s built. Some load, oftentimes, things that look fine to you are not built in a way that the search engine is like or that they digest quickly or take a while. John’s referencing it in terms of web code load. But theme builders put many extraneous things in there because they’re trying to build a one-size-fits-all tool. That’s the way my developer explained it to me. I’m not professing to know this. I’m telling everybody I spend a lot of money on my guy who then tells me, Well, Robert, what they did is they put in 50 different solutions into the code, but you only need one. There are things like that that you cannot see. Anyway, John, I appreciate you sharing your expertise with us on this subject.

[00:38:52.020] – Robert NewmanIt’s amazing. Thank you so much for taking your time and your energy. Thank you for putting the subject together because I don’t know we’ve ever done this in four years. I think you and I have been working together on this show. Incredible, incredible. I learned a lot, and I’m still learning a lot. I’ve got everybody pulled up. I’m going to look at them when we get there.

[00:39:09.620] – Jonathan DenwoodTo finish off, I think if you’re going to go down this route, I would look at the first two or an LMA tour. I would either look at the LMA tour or look at the first two, Gutenberg, Cadence, or Spectra. But I think you should stand a chance and get something up.

[00:39:37.490] – Robert NewmanI’m going to sign off. If anybody would like to reach out and get more of my thoughts, I don’t have a lot of DIY thoughts on my website. I don’t talk about it much. This is a new subject. I’m going to say this. It probably sounds like I’m pooh-poohing it. I’m not. I’m not. John was 100% correct. If you’re a beginning agent and you are just getting up… I don’t know that I agree that WordPress is as easy as Square or Wix, but there’s a much deeper… John, you get to say your bit when I’m done because I know you may disagree, and that’s fine. But listen, I will say this. There is long-term thinking that goes with WordPress, which is way better than any other platform. You can build websites you own on WordPress. You can find guys like me and John who’ve done a lot with the tool and customized it. We’re probably going to give you, some of us, John and I both, are going to provide you with a lifetime license to the thing, which means you get to use it, vanadium, and you can control it way more than you can’t square Wix.

[00:40:48.160] – Robert NewmanThere is way more value in that if you’re interested in independence and ownership. There is way more value than that if you’re interested in SEO. All those long-term ideas work best with WordPress. That means that learning WordPress, which is a content management system at the heart of it, is the way to go with a long-term independent thinker. This means that if you wanted a baby step, let’s say you’re listening to the show and can’t afford me, you can’t even afford John, and that’s a perfectly reasonable situation. Well, then, what could you do that would still advance your career and maybe make your long-term thinking have some merit? This is it. This is a significant first step, in my opinion. That’s how I’m going to sign off. Do you want to get into it? Let’s look at a do-it-yourself builder for a couple hundred dollars a year and a minimal hosting fee. You’ll learn a lot in the process. Maybe you’ll succeed, perhaps you won’t, but the knowledge can’t be taken away from you. And you can leverage that many, many times in your real estate career, many times.

[00:41:54.550] – Robert NewmanRobert@inboundrem. Com, if you’d like to reach me, John, I will turn it over to you, let you sign off, and tell people how to contact you.

[00:42:02.850] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, sure. I agree with everything you just said. So the best way to get it is to go to the mail-right. You can book a chat with me on the Com website. It’s right in the top navigation. We can have a quick chat and see and maybe have the opportunity to show you what Mailright does. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:42:23.270] – Robert NewmanOkay. So guys, listen, thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you go to John doesn’t know this, but I’ve been getting more feedback that people have been finding me on. I’ve gotten two leads in the last 30 days from people who actually saw me on the MailRight YouTube channel and then looked me up. Sometimes happening there, John. I don’t know what it is. I haven’t checked it out myself in a while, but I will say that for those of you looking at this particular show, reach out to John. If you’re a DIY or have questions, you’re trying to establish a relationship with somebody who’s in the real I’m the SEO guy. Not that John doesn’t have his skills, but this is my breath for 16 years. John has been in the DIY space, the WordPress space, for a long time, and is acknowledged by many people who know what they’re talking about as a thought leader in this category. So, reach out to him and ask your questions 100 %. I can’t say it enough. That’s what I got.

[00:43:26.700] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, we’ll go now, folks. We’ll see you next week.

[00:43:31.880] – Robert NewmanAll right, we’ll say no, sorry.

[00:43:34.010] – Jonathan DenwoodBye. Bye.

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BoomTown vs CINC: An Honest Review For 20242024 comparison: BoomTown vs CINC Pro – Unbiased review helps you choose the best real estate software.

Get ready for an in-depth comparison between two real estate software giants: BoomTown and CINC. In this honest review for 2024, we dissect both platforms’ features, pricing, and user experience to help you make an informed decision. You can take advantage of this comprehensive analysis that will help you choose the right tool for your real estate business.

1 – Who is BoomTown vs CINC best aim At?

2 – What are the key differences between these two CRM platforms?

3 – What are these two platforms’ key strengths and weaknesses?

4 – Regarding the functionality price matrix, which offers the best value?

5 – What are the particular peculiarities of each platform?

6 – Generally, what agents or brokers would get the best value from either platform?

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:22.820] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen. John and I are excited to introduce you to episode 427 of the Mail-Right Show. Today, if you are a real estate system fan, we will be talking about sync in Boomtown. These systems aren’t going to be wildly searched right now because we’re in the middle of one of the most significant upheavals the real estate industry has ever seen. However, that will soon pass, and everybody will be coming back and circling back around for the newest, latest information on these systems. That’s what we intend to give you today: the information you will need to make a great decision about your next real estate system. We’re going to look at sync and boom town before we do. I would love it, John, if you could go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience.

[00:01:13.050] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of mail-right. com. We’re CRM, a lead-generative platform. We also provide fantastic-looking websites through WordPress. I’m back over to you, Robert.

[00:01:28.760] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. All right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we will get into sync in Boomtown. Before we do that, I want to let everybody know that while there are a lot of reviews, and we’re going to do a verbal overview today, we’re not going to look at the system; I do have two reviews up in which I got user licenses for each of these systems. I get a lot of questions, Sean, about the age of these reviews because I only update them sometimes. The reason is simple. These companies need to update their platform in meaningful ways for years and years at a time. My updates and reviews regarding what the system looks like are still 95% accurate, maybe even 97 or 98%. Can you hear it? John and I will download an informational download with our thoughts and opinions about how these systems are positioned today. John has gone ahead as he always does, done an incredible job, prepared a deep list, and The first question, which I think is brilliant, is, who is Boomtown versus sync best named at? I’m going to let you open up with your thoughts about that.

[00:02:37.990] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, personally, watching your reviews, I have actually not with Boomtown, but we actually had a couple of people helping us use sync. I have yet to get first-hand knowledge of Boomtown, only my research. I do have first-hand knowledge of sync, which is a really powerful system, ridiculously complicated. You needed a load of training—one of the persons we were working with kept complaining about the bits we supplied. I thought, You must be kidding. You have to spend almost 30 hours training with this bloody sink, and they also charge for it. I think I’m correct. They charge for the training. To utilize their enormously complicated system. And I believe Boomtown isn’t too far behind. So I think it’s really power users’ industry individual agents with a reasonably large power team or a brokerage. I really can’t; apart from those two examples, I can’t really see why somebody would use either to be quite truthful. But in those two examples I’ve given, I think their other problem, and I’ll be interested in your thoughts, is KVCORE, because the one that spent an enormous amount of money on trains with SINC.

[00:04:17.820] – Jonathan DenwoodAbout six months later, he went to KVCORE and moved there. I think KVCORE can run similar numbers as these. I don’t think it’s as good as either of these, but you might have a totally different opinion, so I’ll be interested in that. I go over to you, Robert.

[00:04:39.450] – Robert NewmanAs the years have passed, SINC has been less about a real estate lead generation system and more about a total back-end automation system. Currently, they’ve got banking integrations that are unique to them. They’ve got property management integrations. They’ve got mortgage integrations and HOA integrations, which are basically CRMs for each of those individual services. They’re far less about being a real estate lead generation system. They’re also far less about being a real estate lead generation system as it relates to everybody else, like everybody else in the industry. And they’ve got a different profile that they use for this called Sync Systems, which is connected to their real estate products. So they started with real estate products, developed all these tools in the back end to service real estate, and then spun it off into another website and another set of services. They are focusing all of their development and innovation time on integrations that don’t relate directly to the average real estate agent or even the average real estate agent. They’re going to be global. If I could best put it, they had the same idea Ben Kinney did with Place, except for their years ahead in making the nuts and bolts.

[00:06:14.380] – Robert NewmanNow, Ben Kinney has all the excitement, John, and he’s raised a billion dollars for the place. But Sync has the actual tools. I only realized how much or how deep they had gone into this once I did some research for the show and realized that they’ve been doing sideways development for a while. We all know Syncpro as their lead generation system. That’s what you and I are talking about right now, synchro. Syncpro is different from some of the other stuff they’ve been doing. Syncpro has yet to update at all, like in the last few years. Syncpro is a minimal version of these tools that connects to an elementary real estate website, and it doesn’t necessarily… I’m looking through it here for updates. Here’s what I do, ladies and gentlemen, and I’ve said this, and I’ve done this, and John, I’ve done this in countless reviews. I go to the website and see what they’ve been discussing. Are they updating their customers? Are they updating their internal or external customers at all? I look for updates because if you were updating your system as you do with Mailright and had a big audience already, a big group, everything, wouldn’t you take the time to tell everybody how awesome you were doing if you were updating?

[00:07:46.200] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, their main problem, if you’re talking about sync, is their website offerings because they’re painful, as I’m concerned, even compared to KV. ‘ I think KVCore has done more than what they’ve done. That’s saying something. I’m a bit sassy today. I’ve done another podcast, and I was a bit sassy on that, so I feel pumped up. I’ve had too much coffee, Rob. It could be evil, my comments so that I might get some emails instead of Rob. So there we go. But I need help seeing, apart from the website, what much more they can do. But what they’re doing is what you laid out. They’re doing more on the integration if you’re the most prominent broker and you wanted a Swiss army knife for your back-end stuff. That’s what they’re concentrating on, aren’t they?

[00:08:58.730] – Robert NewmanYeah, definitely. And you know what? As with most of my competitors, let me say, everybody, for the sake of this article, I went in and started to read the sync blog, and they’ve definitely increased their presence there. Since they actively advertise against me at InboundREM, I feel like they’re paying attention to what I’m saying. They’re doing many things where they’re doing real estate lead value index, and that’s basically where they indicate, Hey, a dollar spent in leads is supposed to be 13% commission. I am curious to know if that metric is theirs or if they’re pulling average lead value, but I can tell you it’s a lot of spreadsheets and a lot of percentages, and I do not know a single agent making any of these numbers. I need to find out what they’re talking about. I don’t have anybody that’s pulling in a 13 to 1 ROI on PPC right now. I need to find out where they’re getting their data from. But if any of you are listening to this show, just as a quick aside, and you are getting better than 13 to 1 off a PPC budget using any lead system whatsoever, let us know.

[00:10:10.400] – Robert NewmanDrop us a comment because I’d love to be proven wrong. I would love to be wrong.

[00:10:14.720] – Jonathan DenwoodSo let’s go on to the next one then because we’re almost nine minutes in. So what’s the difference between the two? What’s any really fundamental differences between the two CRMs, Rob?

[00:10:26.350] – Robert NewmanOh, tons. Sync is an all-in-one, and it’s super complex. If you have got super complicated back-end payment structures that connect into your front-end sales process, so essentially very large teams with very complex financial arrangements, like many, many affiliate partners, mortgage brokers that partner with you, many people that write loans for you, many people that refer business to you. Sync is one of the hands down. If you can comb through it and create a CTO-type expert and get all the training, and You are right, they oftentimes charge for their trainings. If you can do all of that, then sync is a hands-down choice. Now, Boomtown is a simplified lead generation platform built for teams of salespeople that are small to medium size that are hunters. Everybody can see my reviews, including you, John, where I really drill deep down into that and lay a foundation for why I say that, those two things. Why is it that I feel that those two systems are built that way and who they’re built for. What do you think, though? You’ve watched my reviews, and you’ve done so probably more recently than I dropped them than I have. So what do you think these two key differences are?

[00:11:40.860] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, number one, Boomtown is built on WordPress, but multi-site. I think that is still the case. Better-looking website than sync, but that’s not saying too much, is it? I think if you’re an individual agent, a reasonably large team underneath you or a broker, and you’re on the mentality to look at all the data and look at where all the leads are coming from and spend their hours and then actually have Excel or a database, and you’re keeping track, and you’re keeping track and you’re keeping track of all hours, blah, blah, blah. It’s probably worth it. If you’re in the hunter mode and you’re up for it, but I think there’s only a small… It’s sizable because still a sizable niche. But I think you got to have the mindset and the knowledge and the resources to make either. But if you’re in the lead generative mindset, you’re going to go with Boomtown, aren’t you?

[00:13:02.250] – Robert NewmanYeah. And speaking of Boomtown versus sync, it’s small, medium teams versus large teams with complex back-end scenarios. That’s sync. Ease of use is what I’d say the difference between Boomtown and sync is. If I had to put it down to one sentence for number two, ease of use. Boomtown is easier by far. Actually, everybody’s easier than sync.

[00:13:23.910] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah. So let’s go to number three before we go for our break. What are the two platforms as key strengths and weaknesses, Rob? One or two before we go for a break.

[00:13:34.330] – Robert NewmanSure. I mean, if I was looking for a sophisticated back-end system that was already developed, there’s no doubt in my mind that I would be taking a strong look at sync, comparing the hundred or so features that has in the back end of the platform and seeing if they met my needs. That’s a strength. The weakness is doing that comparison, doing a dive into sync, it’s going to be expensive and time consuming. That’s the weakness for them. Boomtown is easier to use by far, way overpriced for what you’re getting. I don’t know if that’s a weakness, but they have been so out Outvalued inside the CRM world. I’ve got no words for it. They used to be bleeding edge. For a long time, they were bleeding edge, John. Then they become like they have a slightly better-looking website. They’ve got a little bit more thought and passion put into their products. No doubt about it. They’ve got a better-looking IDX, which they built. There are a lot of strengths with it that they’ve got, but they haven’t really changed all that much in over eight years, and it shows. That’s what I got.

[00:14:45.680] – Jonathan DenwoodI think with Zinc, I’m not sure. I think they might got bought out by these people, but- Fidelity National Mortgage, yeah, they did. No, I was talking about Boston Logic. I think they’re trying to I think they’re trying to build a competitor to Boston Logic. Boston Logic built custom solutions for large brokerages. That was their bag. But I think Boston Logic either bought somebody. Did they bought Boomtown? I think they might have bought Boomtown. I’m not sure. I’m getting confused, Robert, but it happens often, doesn’t it, Robert?

[00:15:25.710] – Robert NewmanProperty-based and Boston Logic partnered up to build website/real-estate lead gen system. That was in 2018 that they made that announcement. I still haven’t actually seen the final product. I don’t know. I have no idea if they did that. I know they announced it. I don’t think that BostonLogic got bought by anybody because they were raising money six, seven years ago for all private equity money. Now, whether or not that’s remained the same, who knows? I don’t know. I do not know.

[00:15:59.150] – Jonathan DenwoodI just felt they were going… Because I knew, before we go for a break, I knew the owner’s son of Dickinson’s, which is, I think, the largest independent brokerage in Northern Nevada, and they were looking for a solution. I was having a chat with him, and they went with Boston Logic. But they had 500, 600 agents. So he was looking for a whole Swiss army. That’s why I I think I’ll be totally wrong. Shall we go for a break, Rob?

[00:16:35.040] – Robert NewmanLet’s do it. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we’re doing a deep dive today. So if there’s any place that you find this, share it with your other real estate friends, share it in your real estate groups, and that would be the way you’d thank me and John, and leaving us comments. We’ll be right back. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 427 of The Mailright Show. Today, we’re talking about Boomtown versus sync. We’re doing an honest review for 2024 because John and I are notorious for being dishonest. All right. Number four, regarding the functionality price matrix? Which is the best value? Now, do you want to take a stab at this? Or do you want me to just like, You know I’ve got a lot to say on all of this stuff.

[00:17:23.930] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I suppose I think I shouldn’t do this because trying to work out what’s going on in Rob’s mind is not really possible, really. But I presume if you’re looking for… If you’re that size of brokerages, and you’re really looking for a real back-end. And I find it… I know this is a bit of a sweeping statement, really, but I offer a certain type of medium regional brokerage. They have somebody who’s their marketing guru, their analytical guru, and they tend to go with Google paid average, and they track everything They got somebody on board. They’re also looking for a Swiss army knife for all the backends. I think they probably look at sync. But I think if you’re a smaller team and you’re still using They tend not to go, which is the wrong attitude, because they should combine it with content, what you specialize in. But I just find that it’s a mindset. They should combine both, but they tend to go with the paid thing. But if they’re more hunter, as you say, they’re probably going to go… They’ll be better off with Boomtown, aren’t they?

[00:18:56.950] – Robert NewmanYeah, in terms of price matrix, ladies and gentlemen, when Boomtown was doing some exciting collaborations with Craigslist, and they had some innovative advertising strategies that connected directly into the back of the platform. And now they’ve lost most of the races. Chime is just as easy to use from a platform perspective. They’re not nearly as valuable from the website perspective. But since Boomtown made the decision a long time ago to go with multi-sites, there’s actually not… While the actual site performs better for Boomtown than it does for a company like Chime, you don’t end up seeing the value out of building on WordPress because you don’t own it. You don’t have control of it, you don’t own it. And Boomtown will take your iteration of that website and do something else with it when you leave, maybe repurpose it, which is great for them and horrible for you, the end user, who spent all the money building up the domain authority and value, because that’s what you’re doing when you advertise to a URL consistently. In terms of the best value for your money right now in 2024, I absolutely would probably say sync, because the complicated, really specific things the sync system can do.

[00:20:20.890] – Robert NewmanI don’t know that… I mean, Boomtown has never been very friendly on the integration side, and that is more and more what the modern millennium is becoming about, and Boomtown is terrible. All of that sync is better, and they’ve got a lot of custom development. I just think that for them… But they’re both wildly overpriced, just for the record. That’s what I have to say.

[00:20:45.300] – Jonathan DenwoodLet’s go on to number five, because you know these… You’ve done an enormous deep dive. Are there any particular peculiarities that apply to individual or each platform that you think people should know I think that back in the days in which…

[00:21:03.910] – Robert NewmanI think it was Alan was in charge of Boomtown. There was a vast difference between sync and Boomtown. They both have incredibly strong management companies. There’s a dual CEO thing going on over at SINC, or there was when I last researched it. And Greer Allen, who is one of the more charismatic, personable, really dedicated CEOs, was the founder and owner of Boomtown. Alan Greer went out, the only money he ever raised was to buy a big building in the middle of the city that they’re in and bring all of his team members together to create a better working atmosphere. That dedication, the fact that they focused on high touch, Boomtown was very It’s very ahead of its time in certain regards, and still is. You still get a high touch onboarding process with a dedicated team. I honestly think that the strength of each of these teams would be in the people, not the platform. The platform technology on both sides is antiquated at this point. You can sit here and go, we would need to do a show on each one of these things. I would need to deep dive it for you and explain what What does all those systems do better for each one of these performance metrics, why AI is changing the game, what you could expect, where you should go.

[00:22:42.660] – Robert NewmanIf for no other reason than keeping this simple, Chime offers many of Boomtown’s same functionality for half the price. By the way, I’m not recommending Chime.

[00:22:54.610] – Jonathan DenwoodI think one thing I think you’ve touched on in your videos, and I we’ve touched upon it, is I don’t know what… I think it applies to sync as well. But Boomtown, if you want to take your data out and put it in another platform, they won’t make it easy, or basically, they’ll say no. Am I right about that statement? And I think it’s something 100%.

[00:23:25.590] – Robert NewmanIt’s terrible. It’s terrible. The customer service policies at Boomtown are 10 years old, and they could have been better to start with, and they’re awful in today’s marketplace. Terrible. Sync is better, but they still need some friendly customer service policies on the front end. Both of these companies have pivoted to the current revolution that’s happening, which is like influencer style marketing, where, honestly, most people who are their customers are looking for answers online. They’re finding them from third parties because boom, down, and Sync have yet to bother to build a robust content library about using their platform. They’re both locked in the dark ages. Let’s keep all the details of our systems private where anybody can find them. Whereas, of course, they can see it. They have to search harder, and then it won’t be you. It’s not going to be inside your control. It is crazy to me how neither one of these companies has embraced video to the level that they should from an informational standpoint. You want your users who are coming to you in your channel to figure out all the answers.

[00:24:34.320] – Robert NewmanThey both have channels. They’re just not what they should be, in my opinion. That ease of use, that knowledge that you and I talk about incessantly is my touchstone for everybody, which is pretty simple. Do you have the ability to make your products and services understandable and usable by other people? What are you doing if the answer is no or not very quickly?

[00:25:06.440] – Jonathan DenwoodBut I’ll say that the only thing that comes to mind is that it’s not a criticism: In the middle to higher-level power team or brokerage, you got Chime, you got Sync, you got Boomtown. Are any of these higher-level systems reasonably easy to use anyway? I don’t think there is, is there?

[00:25:32.040] – Robert NewmanBy the way, kvCore is the system that has become the easiest to use and has the most of this available from its user base.

[00:25:43.270] – Jonathan DenwoodAll right, yeah. You’re right about that. I see where you’re coming from.

[00:25:48.940] – Robert NewmanThat’s what I’m talking about. If I want to know how to use kvCore, that’s why kvCore is dominating the landscape, my friend. In my opinion, they’ve got so many user-based videos, so many incredible videos from so many different real estate, practicing real estate agents that say, This is the way I’m using the system and making money at it. So there’s a guy on SE Team Leader, there’s one video nine months ago on sync that’s talking about sync is starting to slowly but surely build some video library. They’ve got some videos coming out. Only a few. Five days ago, sync University, real estate training, sync shorts, who knows? Sink CEO on NAR settlement. Somebody said something from Sync on the NAR settlement 30 days ago. I’m going to have to watch it. Like, wow, somebody got online and said something. That’s pretty impressive. I mean, never mind. Considering how big of a company they are, my audience is almost as big as NAR. I mean, and good God, I think they got bought for what, $125 million? I don’t know what the number is, but it was ridiculous. I know that.

[00:26:58.290] – Robert NewmanIt is like a crazy big company with very little focus on its users in terms of how people try to get and use information online. Boomtown is guilty of the same.

[00:27:15.780] – Jonathan DenwoodSo, just to finish off, can you give one persona for each product? To finish off the podcast, Rob, give an ideal persona of who would get the best from each platform.

[00:27:33.480] – Robert NewmanSure. Multifocused real estate teams with complicated back-end systems. Real estate companies that focus on property management, sales, lease, rehab, and construction. The sink is a hands-down winner for you. Hands-down. They’re who you should look at. I could only recommend this. You’re doing a multifaceted real estate business of intermittent size, or you own a very large one. There’s a great example. For those people who are listening to the show right now, go out and look at Tarvin Realtors in New Jersey. It’s a multi-focused, multi-generational real estate company, and each kid in the company has taken on a new real estate vertical, so they do everything in their part of New Jersey. I mean, everything. They do buying, selling, rehabbing, or at least they did when I last looked. And they do commercial, they do property management, they do everything. That would be who might look at sync. That’s the target customer profile for which this would still be a hands-down winner. Boomtown. The persona or Boomtown is still a leader in the small to mid-size team space. And for the customer’s persona, this is a little bit more complicated to explain, but I think that small to mid-size real estate brokerages without a competent CMO or CTO on staff, which is most of the teams out there.

[00:29:03.410] – Robert NewmanThey need a tech person. They don’t have anybody that’s doing that for them. So when that is all the case, that’s when the customer service and the help, the outreach, the management that Boomtown does on the client-facing side, that’s when that money becomes justifiable. That’s when I am wrong about justifying the cost of the system. When you want to leverage that in-person training, you get assigned an account rep, or at least you did. Then, all the reports I got from Boomtown clients said that those training and one-to-one interactions were always precious. So, almost a universal five-star rating, which is why I say that’s where probably Boomtown shines. But who needs that specifically, John? That’s a little harder to answer.

[00:29:51.440] – Jonathan DenwoodYou’re going to sit down again.

[00:29:54.810] – Robert NewmanOh, sure. Sorry. I’m so sorry. I started pacing.

[00:29:57.360] – Jonathan DenwoodYou did? He was getting excited there; no, I’m so sorry.

[00:30:00.660] – Robert NewmanI forgot that you were doing the screen thing. I’m so sorry.

[00:30:04.440] – Jonathan DenwoodI think I was getting where he was getting fed up looking at my phone.

[00:30:08.320] – Robert NewmanI was pacing. I forgot we were doing that.

[00:30:11.070] – Jonathan DenwoodHe was pacing. I think it’s been an excellent show. We’re not gone too over. And I think we… So, to finish off, well, I think your answer number six is a good finishing point. So, back over to you, Rob. I think we will finish it.

[00:30:25.640] – Robert NewmanOkay, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for doing our updated review on these systems. If anybody wants to update my knowledge, I am always up for that. You can reach out to me at robert@inboundrem. Com. You can also go to my website, inboundrem. com Use any of my contact forms and say that you’d like to update my knowledge about sync or Boomtown. If you’re using these systems, if you’ve used them recently, or disagree with anything I said, I am always open to having another conversation about the platform. Over to you, John.

[00:30:55.500] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, and if you’re looking to have a nice-looking website on WordPress, we’re using Gutenberg, and we have a lovely platform for lead generation as part of our lovely WordPress website. So if that’s interesting, go over to Mail-Right. com and book a chat with me or Adam. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:31:17.060] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. Well, that’s it, ladies and gentlemen. The show is wrapped up. John and I are so grateful for your ears, eyes, and everything in between. Have a great day.

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Sierra Interactive A Pros & Cons Review For 2024Get the Inside Scoop on Sierra Interactive 2024 – Pros & Cons Revealed

Discover the comprehensive breakdown of Sierra Interactive in 2024 with our Pros & Cons Review video. Dive deep into the platform’s latest features, strengths, and potential drawbacks to help you make an informed decision for your real estate business. Don’t miss out on this valuable insight – click the link below to watch the full video now.

1 – Quick Introduction of What Sierra Interactive is And Does

Sierra Interactive sets itself apart by excelling in SEO lead generation, a service not commonly offered by others, in addition to providing PPC and social lead generation. Furthermore, they offer retargeting and remarking through Facebook and Google PPC to ensure no leads are overlooked.

With a rich array of features, Sierra Interactive promises a comprehensive experience that we will explore further to assess its reputation. We will also identify the ideal audience for their services, so stick around for more insights.

2 – Sierra Interactive Main Features

-a- SEO

Although a website may initially seem unremarkable, it is important to note that it is optimized for SEO, providing valuable leads at no cost. This optimization allows you to rank for your desired keywords effectively. Additionally, the websites are designed to be fully responsive and load quickly on all devices such as tablets and laptops. The fast loading speed also contributes to enhancing SEO performance.

-b – Marketing Automation System

When implemented effectively, marketing automation is a crucial aspect for any company as it significantly reduces time consumption. Sierra Interactive’s automation process involves selecting desired triggers (such as updated lead status), providing supplementary information, assigning tasks to leads, and allowing them to manage the rest.

-c- Combined Ad Campaigns

Sierra Interactives excels in PPC management services through their impactful Google and Facebook advertisements. They take charge of crafting your Google Ads, while giving you the power to decide on visitor registration. What stood out to me was the provision of daily performance reports after 4-6 weeks of campaign launch, allowing you to assess the effectiveness of this strategy.

3 – Sierra Interactive Pricing

Core Package

Essential Bundle: Priced at $499.95 per month, this package includes access for 5 users and 1 MLS IDX Connection. It offers 1,500 SMS texts and 100 MMS texts, along with 1500 dialer minutes, 250 ringless voicemails, 10k minutes of recorded storage, as well as standard onboarding and support services.

Growth Package

Expansion Bundle: Priced from $699.95 per month, catering to a team of 5 users with 1 MLS IDX Connection included. This package comprises 15,000 SMS texts, 5,000 MMS texts, 500 ringless voicemails, 35k minutes of recorded storage, personalized onboarding assistance, premium support services, quarterly consultations with a dedicated customer success manager, and privileged access to their specialized assets.

12-month agreement
No setup fees
Any additional users are sold in blocks of 5 users at $100 a month for both core and growth packages
For over 45 users you can get custom pricing
Each additional MLS IDX Connection is $25 extra per month for both packages

In comparison to some competitors they are on the pricey side, but not the most expensive option, so it’s something to take into consideration.

4 – Sierra Interactive Alternatives?

Real Geeks

Chime

Elope

Mail-Right

5

Major Pros?

Major Cons?

6 – Final Thoughts

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:09.620] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail-Right Show. Today’s episode is number 426, and we are going to update our review. John and I share interactive. We’re going to do a pros and cons for 2024 and hopefully give everybody who listens and watches our show a little bit of new or updated information on what is arguably one of the top providers of real estate websites and CRMs. But before we dive into this very meaty topic, John, I would love it if you would do me a favor and introduce yourself.

[00:00:51.180] – Jonathan DenwoodOh, thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mail Right.com. We’re a CRM lead generation platform built on WordPress, and we provide some great websites as well. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:01:08.210] – Robert NewmanCool. And I am the founder of Inbound REM, which anybody watching the show can see on my hat in the background. We are an inbound marketing company that focuses on real estate. We do things like real estate website development, SEO consulting, consulting, and providing services directly to real estate agents and brokers. All right, here we go. So we’re going to talk about Sierra Interactive, which is a choice that John made. And I’m kind of curious. John, we haven’t talked about these guys in a while. You haven’t taught. We haven’t mentioned them. There was no rumbling. Why did you choose them? What was the inspiration?

[00:01:48.910] – Jonathan DenwoodInspiration? Um, I think I’m just doing a review of the competition. Um, and I think we have spoken about them before, but it was quite a while ago, so I just thought it might be a good topic, a good time to have another chat about it.

[00:02:08.740] – Robert NewmanUm, fair enough. All right, so without any further ado, what we’ve got up first here, why don’t you go ahead and do the introduction about what Sara Interactive is and what it does?

[00:02:21.950] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah. You know, it’s a competitor to Mail-Right, but there are different flavors to these systems and they’re aimed at different buckets of users. And Rob did a detailed review of this about three years ago. It’s amazing where the time goes, isn’t it, Rob? And he did a bit of a deep dive. I’ve done a smaller review and I think that was, might be two years ago. So I think it’s got some strengths and it’s an experienced team behind it. The guy that set it up, lives about 3 hours away from where I live. He lives in Mammoth Lakes which is about a three-and-a-half-hour drive where I live. I think one of the, and I think you pointed it out in your review, I think if you’re really into, if you’ve got a team above five, a power team, 510 20 people, and you want something that’s customized and you want to know where all the leads are coming from, and you want to spend all that time because you got, I think you said in your review you’ve got a budget of 200 or 300,000.

[00:03:57.420] – Jonathan DenwoodYou do need to know where the leads are coming from. And I think that’s all great stuff, Rob, but I think the problem with wherein this is only my perspective, my view is one of the problems with Siri interactive is the competition. The competition is Follow Up Boss. And if you’re in that team space where you have an advertising budget of 200 to 300,000, in my opinion, you’d be better off going with Follow-Up-Boss. But the only problem with that is it doesn’t provide the website. And secondly, recently they got bought up by Zillow. And I wouldn’t want to share my data, which is my opinion, again, I wouldn’t want to share my data with Zillow. But obviously, Follow Up Boss would push back and say that they’ve made it clear that the data isn’t been shared with the owner of the company. Um, but me personally, I’ve got to be very careful how I word this, don’t I, Rob? But in my opinion, my opinion, I wouldn’t be very happy with that. But that’s my opinion, Robert.

[00:05:22.920] – Robert NewmanSure. So my opinion.

[00:05:26.660] – Jonathan DenwoodYes, it’s got to be your opinion, Rob.

[00:05:29.270] – Robert NewmanYeah. My opinion is that that, um, interactive for a very long time. So the guy that founded it, a guy by the name of Ben, was a very seasoned developer who was already doing work for real estate agents independently. And he ran across the same problem that I did with inbound REM. When you’re out there trying to do this work for agents who are almost exclusively asking you the same questions, we want to be able to get leads. We want to have a CRM, we want it all connected to our website, and the list goes on and on. But the questions have been the same for guys like him and guys like me for, like, almost 2030 years. Like, it’s crazy how consistent it’s been. Just give us one tool that connects to everything. And Ben was already building those kinds of tools as a consultant, and he had the idea of creating a, like, a server-based, fast real estate website that he could sell en masse using templates but his whole, like, a long time ago, John, and it’s all down now, so everybody just has to take me at my word.

[00:06:37.540] – Robert NewmanA long time ago, Ben used to blog, used to have a couple of thoughts that he published publicly. He’s just kind of said, hey, I’m just going where the wind is taking me, and building a solution to the questions that I keep getting asked. And then of course he did it. And real estate webmasters, which at the time were dominant in the industry, weren’t treating their customers very well. And BIM created a competitive product that eventually started to outshine real estate webmasters. This created a very big following that left real estate webmasters to migrate over to Sierra Interactive over about a five or ten-year period. And Sierra Interactive became one of the top real estate website builders that had a CRM connected to it. They still have the incredible acknowledgment that the number r1 estate website, by traffic, by exposure, by everything, is built on a Sierra interactive platform. That is Ruby Home, which was built on that platform by one of the very few experienced content marketers who got, who decided, that Sierra Interactive was going to be the website he built on. And then he even went so far as to blog about it.

[00:07:55.790] – Robert NewmanSo when, when you Google Sierra Interactive, the review from Tony, who owns rubyahome.com, is still there. It’s like number three in the results when you google Sierra Interactive. All that being said, Sierra Interactive has started to see a lot of bleeds. Ben has now sold the company. Nobody knows who he sold it to.

[00:08:17.790] – Jonathan DenwoodOh, I didn’t know that.

[00:08:19.530] – Robert NewmanYeah, there’s no announcement. He just sold it, was gone. Who knows? Who knows what’s happening with it, John? And if I’m just going to save everybody the time and the energy, I’m going to say right now, right here in this format, the biggest con that I have about Sierra Interactive right now is nobody knows who bloody owns the company and nobody knows what their plans are for it. I only know that I, and I think I said this to you once, maybe a long time ago, like, it kind of felt like Ben was getting exhausted running this company from start to, like, he withdrew out of the public light, stopped logging, stopped talking about everything, stopped. I couldn’t find anything on him. Seemed to not want his name out there, like associated with Sierra Interactive, which is bizarre considering the fact that it’s one of the top real estate marketing companies around. So just. Real interesting guy. So that’s that. I mean, that’s the ten foot high what they do, ostensibly, is provide a CRM and they build a real estate website and they provide leads and they do and can do that very well.

[00:09:34.730] – Robert NewmanWhat needs to happen, though, and I just want to say this before we get into the overall here interactive thing, I think that Ben sold the company because he knows that the whole platform needs to be rebuilt because they have not kept up with the mobile revolution. They’re falling behind in any numbers of areas that it relates to technology. And while they still build a solid feature and they’re still acknowledged as one of the leaders, somebody’s got to come in with a lot of new enthusiasm and keep this platform. Like, you can’t do multimedia content on their, on the content management system that he built was interactive. That used to not be a big problem. Tony has still built a leading website on it. But you basically have to be a genius content creator in order to get the kind of results that Tony has gotten. Like, just, that’s just the truth, because you can’t do video. You can’t. You can do a limited number of images. The CMS show and the leads that you get from this kind of website are diminishing in quality and have been diminishing quality for a long, long time.

[00:10:39.980] – Robert NewmanSo it is. The future is here. And Sierra Interactive, as it stands, is not as prepared as you would have thought a company with this kind of pedigree would be. So let’s jump into this, though. What are they doing? Well, let’s talk about number two on your list, because they are definitely a leader in this category and I want to talk about it. Sierra Interactive main features. The very first thing that you list on here, John, is SEO. So why don’t you talk about that for a second and answer the question, why did you list this first and all the features?

[00:11:21.690] – Jonathan DenwoodI just looked at all the other blog content and I drawed up a list following what other people were saying about it. Basically, when it comes to the SEO, I think, as you said in your own review, it’s in the detail, isn’t it? I think compared to some other platforms, it is very good. And I think in the hands, the website example that you utilized in your intro, the person that that was working with Siri Interactive was a very experienced inbound marketer. And that website, yes, it’s built on Sara Interactive, but it’s been enormously customized. So it is. And it isn’t. And what I mean by that, yes, it’s using Sierra interactive technology, the backbone. Is it what you normally get? No, it isn’t. And it’s the same with the SEO because there’s, there’s the technical setting up of a website and that will get you so far depending on who you are up against, but it won’t generate traffic. And without traffic you can’t convert. And the only thing that will get traffic is if Google thinks the content on that website gives more information, is more useful to its target audience than the competitors that you’re up against.

[00:13:15.510] – Jonathan DenwoodAnd that that’s a much more sophisticated. And then a checklist of it does meta tags. You can put it has this feature, it’s that feature. It’s all good stuff, but, and it has its place. But without hiring somebody like you or educating yourself and prepared to put the effort in, it really doesn’t, in my opinion, again, it doesn’t really mean much.

[00:13:48.700] – Robert NewmanRobert, I don’t disagree with any single point. I think that I would say that I’ve got a few, a few additions to add I want the audience to understand before I jump into my editions because it’s definitely going to be a longer than a minute and we would normally go to break in a minute. But instead what I’m going to do is I’m going to push the break to right now. And then when you come back from break, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going dive into my thoughts about Sara interactive as an SEO platform. We’ll be right back. Stay tuned. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 426. I think it is. John didn’t. Okay, we’re talking about an updated review for Sierra Interactive. The last time I updated him three years ago.

[00:14:39.730] – Jonathan DenwoodYou tell me off, Robert, I’ll be the naughty boy audience. He’s turning me off.

[00:14:47.770] – Robert NewmanJust being honest. John, stop, okay. I can’t. He can’t stop giggling. So the updated SEO review would be this in terms of, so there are two types of SEO that you can do inside, like real estate, you can do search mechanisms. That is what Sierra interactive focuses on. They do a lot of search filters, neighborhoods, city names, things like that. And then they provide a very fast, very good, very responsive way to propel properties into those search results. And it is still a solid way to rank in the search engines if you do ancillary SEO work such as domain authority, building content writing like blogging off the site, things like that, all of which Tony has done in proliferation. The guy that owns Ruby home. If I had to try to put a number to it, I think that Tony has provided himself with about half a million dollars worth of SEO work on his site. Okay, just so everybody understands what John was saying, because it’s very true. What, what Tony has done is he’s taken a very rudimentary backbone along with an incredibly detailed skillset and done something with it. And some of what Sierra interactive does do plays well into what Tony has done.

[00:16:18.800] – Robert NewmanAdding searches into his blog, interlinking on the site, which works very fast and very well. These are all SEO strategies and Tony has leveraged them to the hilt. The platform is being used about as good as you’re ever going to see it anywhere on Tony’s site. Would the average person have any of these skill sets? Heck no. Would even some of the people that you’re consulting with be able to leverage the platform in the way that Tony has leveraged it? No. Even though theoretically they understand what they’re supposed to do? No, they wouldn’t. Would anybody have the level of creativity and insight that Tony took in order to build a site? No. I’ve taken some ideas from him. His research was so good and he was so intuitive about how people would respond to the individual pages. In other words, looking at his site is like watching the babe swing a bat. Like you don’t understand what you’re looking at or Michael Jordan take a jump shot. But it’s one in a million. It’s one in a million is what you’re looking at. And so could anybody do what they’ve done? Would they even want to try?

[00:17:30.510] – Robert NewmanI don’t know about that anymore. Unless Sierra interactive makes some big changes. Like if they updated their platform and allowed for multimedia. Allowed for some. Because a lot of SEO these days, John is interaction with the site. Tony’s so good at creating content that he inspires his users to use the site despite itself. You want interactive content and infographics and accordion menus and many other things in addition to clickable search features. You need to give people options. You need to give people video. You need to give people many different options. While some of that might be possible with Sierra Interactive, it’s not intuitive and it’s not easy. And I’m not even sure that all, like, I’m not sure what the process is to include video, but I don’t see a lot of it on any site, which makes me think that it’s probably not easy. But I don’t know that for sure. Now, I’m going to jump into number two here and I’m going to take the lead on this one just because I’m in a flow marketing automation system now. Marketing automation, which is, could be a lot of different things. But Sierra Interactive still does shine in certain categories.

[00:18:45.760] – Robert NewmanMarketing automation in general, as it compares to like Ylopo or somebody like that, they’re behind the eight ball. But in comparison to every other provider that’s out there, Sierra Interactive still is ahead of the field in terms of automation.

[00:19:00.400] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, apart from mailrite, because I think the mail right system is better than this.

[00:19:06.250] – Robert NewmanYou can, you can elaborate, you know the mailrite system better than I do, so I’ll let you elaborate on that during your portion of marketing automation. I am unfamiliar, so I will, I can only speak to what I know for sure. What I know for sure is that in terms of automation, things like where CR Interactive has shown, and I still think that they probably shine a lot, is they have an intuitive system for adding agents to your CRM and then getting those agents to hunt inside the platform. Like look at users that have looked at 500 properties, for instance on the platform and then call or text them in an automated way, all from the actual inside the guts of the system. I have never with my system, anybody system that I know of even using follow up boss. If you have this very rarefied salesforce as part of your team, Sara Interactive still stands alone in terms of how intuitive is for a sales hunter to leverage that system. Now if you are like most agents or teams and you don’t have hunters peeling through the traffic of the site or you haven’t given them access, or I can go on and on, this doesn’t matter what I’m saying.

[00:20:31.710] – Robert NewmanAnd then automation, such as automated text messages, things like that, they actually are not ahead of the curve. They’re a little bit behind the curve in terms of what you could find. Like they’re about equivalent to real geeks. Like you’re probably going to point out you might be ahead of them in terms of that specific type of automation there.

[00:20:52.200] – Jonathan DenwoodNo, I say, I take back what I said because I see where you’re coming from now. And I, I took it as optimization, the actual interface ux design about how somebody who isn’t as experienced as yourself, they could set up the campaigns. And we did spend a fair bit of time and it’s a pretty robust and reasonably easy. It does need us to show a person a couple of times, but if they’ve got any ability at all, they should be able to do it. But I know, in all fairness, I think you did point this out in your video, the hunter bit, but I forgot that bit. So I see exactly where you’re coming.

[00:21:38.170] – Robert NewmanFrom and it’s a rare salesperson type. But the handful of guys that I know or have spoken to some of them many years ago, like there’s a young team that I’ve, I’ve heard rumors of but I haven’t talked to them directly, but I’ve, I know people who’ve worked with them. The keen brothers, who is one of the top sarah interactive sites. And apparently these brothers are hunters. All three of them. There’s three brothers. And apparently they leverage this system to like a massively successful high degree. Nothing I could sell them is ever going to work better than what they’re already doing. If they’re already used to going through their appealing through traffic, they’ve already know what good traffic looks like. Who is most likely.

[00:22:20.490] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah. The mail rights system is not aimed for those type of people. If you want that we help you integrate it with follow up boss.

[00:22:29.850] – Robert NewmanThere you go. So that’s, and in terms of automation as it’s being understood by the market, AI, truly true automation, things like that is here interactive anywhere even remotely in that category. No, they’re not.

[00:22:48.620] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, the mail. Right. System is. But I actually, I actually think, and this is my honest opinion, Rob, that, and I’m a big user of AI actually. I can see it if you’ve got an enormous amount of volume. But I also, and this is just my opinion, Rob, I think other players are over emphasizing the effective effectiveness of elite drip campaign using AI to some extent. But that’s just my opinion. I’m not saying it. I might be wrong.

[00:23:22.140] – Robert NewmanSo I think, I think, John, we need to do a few shows in AI this year. I do, because I agree with you. I think the AI for the most part, the tools I’ve tested seems to be a race to the bottom. I’ve not yet found anything highly customized or, and even what people call AI like y Lopo is, is very extensive exhaustive behavioral tuning as I understand it.

[00:23:46.610] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah. And I think you, I think you, you really rate the owners and one particular owner, you really rate them as a marketer, SEO expert. So they probably do provide a lot of value there. But I just also think, but I’ve got to be very careful because they can get very upset very quickly. I just think in my, mostly over.

[00:24:09.190] – Robert NewmanWhat I say, John, not you.

[00:24:12.150] – Jonathan DenwoodI don’t want any, I don’t want any aggro in my opinion. It’s overplayed a bit in my opinion. I think that’s, I think we’re going to rename the show in my opinion.

[00:24:26.440] – Robert NewmanYes. So anyway, let’s hand it over to you and let you have your full response about marketing automation system and how you really view SiErra interactive and maybe how you view share interactive versus mailrite.

[00:24:43.120] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I didn’t know where you’re going to take it, but I think the point you made was, on reflection totally correct. But I, because I’m just looking at in a different way because you also mentioned this, because I did look at your video a couple of times and I really went through the whole hour that you spent. And to give you honest feedback, I think because I am guilty of it, you really went all over the place. But it’s totally understandable because you were dealing with a really big review and you, when you spend an hour plus you are gonna go all over the place, right? So that’s not been disparaging, I’ve just been honest with you. But, and you did point out in your video you got the hunter bit. And like the Melwright system isn’t aimed at those hunter types. It’s a combination of bold leads with real geeks. That’s where I’ve kind of positioned mailwright. One interesting question is, in your own mind, because you’ve got a lot of experience in this area, you’re probably one of the most experienced individuals the industry. How do you, how do you compare it to real geeks?

[00:26:14.520] – Jonathan DenwoodWhat are the strengths? Because we say we’ve got enough of 510 minutes and you probably want to clear off, then I think this would be useful to our listeners. If you don’t think it is, we can just go on. But how do you compare it? Because I think a lot of the people that are listening to this, that might be on the market, they’re going to be looking at either male, right, Sierra Interactive and real geeks, aren’t they? So where do you position seeriact if we were real geeks?

[00:26:46.080] – Robert NewmanWell, Sierra Interactive is an interesting, is an interesting position still to this very day, inside the real estate industry as a CRM, I found it to be better by far than, let’s say a KVcore. Okay. I found it to be more robust with more options built in, more intuitive integrations for additional outside tools. I always use happy grasshopper as one because it’s an unusual marketing service that only integrates into two common platforms, that is follow up boss and Sierra Interactive. And there’s others too. There’s calling systems that they integrate very naturally into. If you’re doing high volume calling now, what that means to those lay people that are listening to this review is that teams are inordinately especially large teams don’t have a ton of great choices. No offense to anybody. I am not a great choice because I leverage follow up boss. Can follow up boss, take extraordinarily big teams and do well with them? Yes, it can. It just requires a big onboarding process. Sara interactive would require the same thing. It’s complicated. That’s why it took an hour for me to do the review. Real geeks took me about 25 minutes, if I remember correctly.

[00:28:05.170] – Robert NewmanIt’s a much simpler platform. Small teams and agents would gravitate towards mail, right? Or real geeks or something like that because it’s easier to onboard. And I’m going to say the same thing about mail, right. That I’ve said about myself. I’ve always felt, John, that real estate agents or business owners in general fall into kind of a couple different camps. Some people always want to kind of do a McDonald’s or Taco Bell experience with their marketing. They want to know a lot of other people are going there. They’re going to get a reasonably priced meal at a reasonable level of quality, and they’re happy with that. And they’re happy with the fact that they know that a lot of other people are using the system with some kind of track record. Right. And then you have another kind of person that is going to be like, well, I really want to go to a restaurant that where I’m going to walk through the door and the owner is still going to be there and, or at least they’re going to be in the business at some point during that day. And I know that they’re still individually making sure that the meals are served are of high quality and that the people are having a good dining experience.

[00:29:12.340] – Robert NewmanAnd you’re probably going to get all of that for the same or less in terms of price as you would at these days, like a taco Bell or something like that. And that’s how I kind of compare inbound Rem and mailrite. You want to still know that the company that you’re dealing with is in the hands of the person that founded it, that you’re going to have an experience that is going to be directly impacted by the person who founded the company. You’re probably going to want to call a John or me, depending on what you’re looking for, as opposed to one of these other companies. If you call real geeks, the owner, the founder is long gone. Who knows who you’re going to get? Hopefully a very good, qualified, experienced salesperson. But are you going to get somebody with a particular level of insight or involvement? No, I virtually guarantee it. I built too many of these sales teams to think otherwise. So would you get a personal experience with mailrite? Absolutely. You’d be able to talk to John directly or, or his partner, but one way or the other, somebody who has direct controlling interest in the company.

[00:30:13.160] – Robert NewmanAnd while that doesn’t impact the actual thing the systems do, I think that it’s really a massive factor when it comes to who do you want to use? Because do you want to use somebody that. All right, let’s just say that John doesn’t have as robust of a system right now as real geeks because he hasn’t spent $10 million building it and he doesn’t have 10,000 clients. But let’s say there’s a challenge for you. The client, like something specific to your business, the area you work in, you call real geeks. You’re going to be lucky for your request, even gets a support ticket. Whereas if you call John, you’re going to get a very direct response. I’m not saying that John is going to step into every single thing that anybody ever brings him, but you’re going to get a response from the owner and it’s possible that a solution will be presented to you. It’s possible that for your specific little teeny tiny business, with your little. Forgive me for saying this, but you’re probably little in comparison to many other people, small marketing budget, you might get a response from the owner or manager of the business.

[00:31:21.640] – Robert NewmanIt just depends for everybody listening to the show about, you know better than John and I ever will how you’re wired to receive service.

[00:31:32.460] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, thank you for those kind words, but which one? If you’re looking at realist, exclude me, all right. Because obviously you’re the joint presenter of this podcast.

[00:31:43.180] – Robert NewmanSure.

[00:31:44.190] – Jonathan DenwoodSo it’s a difficult situation to some extent, but let’s have a look at real. So who do you think real geeks is best for and who do you think Sarah Interactive is best for?

[00:31:58.160] – Robert NewmanReal Geeks is best for like an agent on a budget. Like an agent on a budget. Probably just getting used to using a real estate website as a tool. They’re hardcore setup time dealing with a number of different vendors. They’re pretty difficult to work with in terms of overall setup, but they’re also very inexpensive in comparison to almost everybody else. And you get a lot for the money that you spend. So I would say to an agent who has some digital marketing chops and the ability to read technical manuals and work well with them real geeks is the solution. Chime, which is next on your list, is exactly the opposite. It is a beautiful dashboard, easy to use, overpriced for what they do. They don’t actually do anything new or anything unusual. They’ve got a number of bleeding edge things that they talk about. But the agents I’ve spoken to so far have said that those things don’t implement well into their overall kit. So I would say that chime is good for small teams or people that are tired of Kvcore but have already used a mass adoption platform. I would say that chime is something to look at.

[00:33:09.610] – Robert NewmanI hesitate. They make a good looking website that functions fairly well and I like them for that. So much of it is automated that you’re not going to get very good SEO results. You’re up against a lot of other people using chime. So very soon your neighbor, your uncle, the guy down the street, they’re all going to have chime sites. So you have to be very cautious, in my opinion, if you adopt into chime. I don’t know. A lope can’t respond to that platform and I haven’t become the expert that I should have from mailrite. But I will say this, I would say that mail, right, is a better solution than real geeks for sure, especially if you’re looking for a personal touch.

[00:33:52.260] – Jonathan DenwoodAnd can I ask one question? Do you know what’s happened to bold leads?

[00:33:57.240] – Robert NewmanYeah, they got absorbed by a company that basically mothballed them. They got absorbed by a CRM. I remember that. Not brevity. I got somebody bought them and absorbed them into the platform and they just basically nobody ever talks about them anymore.

[00:34:20.060] – Jonathan DenwoodSo that’s what Melroy is. It’s, it’s, it’s kind of aimed at real geeks and Sierra interactive, probably more real geeks with a, with a strong flavor, bold leads added because I.

[00:34:34.380] – Robert NewmanProperty base.

[00:34:35.380] – Jonathan DenwoodProperty base model and we use Facebook. You know, I had to back off. I was thinking, oh, well, because what happened to Facebook with Apple? But they’ve used AI and they’ve roared back. So it has a high emphasis with a bit of Google local thrown in if you want it. But Facebook, has good landing pages, good drip, good email, decent CRM, and good integration with IDX broker. That’s what we offer. And in the next three to four months we’re going to integrate it a lot with Gutenberg and offer some great website solutions. But I’ll be talking about that in the coming months when we get around to it.

[00:35:29.360] – Robert NewmanSo just a quick aside for everybody, property base was originally. Well, property bases have been buying up, partnering with a lot of other ancillary technology companies, and then absorbing them into what was originally a CRM, that’s what property base is. And what my understanding, John, without any kind of deep knowledge, so please nobody, if somebody’s going to email, it’s your opinion. If somebody is going to email, John, just like inflame him for something I said, which has happened I think once or twice now you just understand. I don’t know for sure, but here’s what I’ve observed and, what you need.

[00:36:09.560] – Jonathan DenwoodTo say it’s your opinion.

[00:36:11.360] – Robert NewmanMy opinion is that the property base absorbed the technology for bold leads, built the same functionality into their CRM and that’s it. They are now just basically a CRM that has lead generation capabilities, that uses the framework that bold leads built. That’s what it was. And whether or not they kept how much of it they kept, one or the other of us would have to do a demo and look at what they’ve got to even begin to answer that. And so, yeah, I don’t know. Anyway, and then they did the same thing with Lone Wolf, which was an IDX provider. So now they’ve got IDX solutions on their websites, but that was being powered by Lone Wolf. So they absorbed an IDX provider and they absorbed like a lead generation provider and built them as spokes on a wheel into a CRM.

[00:37:05.290] – Jonathan DenwoodThey sound like the bog for the enterprise, don’t they?

[00:37:09.230] – Robert NewmanYeah, I mean, they find a technology company that seems to be ancillary, like compatible with theirs and then they buy them. Huzzah. Right. So anyway, ladies and gentlemen, this has been a very deep dive. We’ve gone 37 minutes into this. Sierra Interactive is not an easy solution to talk about because it is so robust, and has 50 integrations on the backend. Some of the bigger teams in the US use them there. Some many, many, many websites still get very strong SEO results based on the way that their search filters work. Many teams have massive budgets that are built on Sierra Interactive. And so when you’re looking at a Sierra interactive site, you have to keep in mind that some of the people who spend the most money in the digital space still use these websites. There almost is no comparison. They’re more comparable. Sierra Interactive is actually on the backend, more comparable to a sync and boomtown. Maybe, maybe. But really the two people that have built robust CRMs that do things like connect into mortgage brokers and try to manage little elements of the transaction process, connect into dot loop and the list goes on and on.

[00:38:31.100] – Robert NewmanThat’s C interactive.

[00:38:32.580] – Jonathan DenwoodAnd see where I would just to finish off because we’re going to end this. Because if you’re looking, and this is my opinion, my opinion folks if you’re looking at KV core or Sara interactive, I would go with Sara interactive every day. But the thing is, a lot of people get KVcore. In my opinion, the reason why they use it is they get it from their broker and they get it at a very high discount. So then they think, but in my opinion, if you shouldn’t use a system because you’re getting it from a broker at a very high discount, you should use a system that’s the best fit for you at that moment. And a lot of people use KV ore and they would disagree with me. They say we’re getting fantastic results. I think I, if I was that type of individual, I would use Sierra Interactive.

[00:39:38.460] – Robert NewmanI don’t disagree with anything you said. There’s one thing that’s hard to argue with because I’ve had this conversation with some of the biggest brokers in the country. KVcore, when you start talking about thousands of agents, gives a much better per-seat price than Sierra Interactive ever will. Additionally, at the highest level, when you’re dealing with a salesforce of five or 10,000 or more, you’re thinking to yourself, how do I train five or 10,000 people to use a CRM? And the answer is you probably don’t. Full stop. You try, but your salespeople won’t show up, they won’t absorb. You’re dealing with a very difficult audience to get adoption done. And when in considering all those factors, KV core becomes the de facto solution at $25 ahead for huge brokers.

[00:40:32.520] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I think that was very insightful. Thanks for that.

[00:40:36.610] – Robert NewmanYeah, so, and, but having said that, I agree with everything you said. Small medium-sized teams, people with more control, great teachers, smaller, more enclosed environments, or incredibly strong digital teachers, all would be better served probably using Sierra interactive as their tool. But, and this is the last little thing to everybody listening to the show, John and I said this ad nauseam, CRMs are only as good as your ability to use them. And still the easiest adoption CRM that’s still on the marketplace is follow-up boss. So if you’re just looking for a tool that people can or will learn and it’s inherent inside the platform, in other words, you don’t need to be a digital trainer, you don’t need to have a coo. You don’t have to need to have a CTO or CMO teaching your people how to use it. It can just be learned by the person. It is still follow-up, boss. That’s it in my opinion.

[00:41:40.760] – Jonathan DenwoodThis is my opinion show, folks.

[00:41:43.420] – Robert NewmanRight? We’re going to rename it, it’s going to be the, in our opinion, real estate show. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, thank you so much for listening to the Mail-Right show. God, we appreciate you tuning into us today. Can’t even begin to tell you how excited we are to hear, to have your earballs. Listen to us, John. If you wanted people to reach out to you, how would you have them do that?

[00:42:07.000] – Jonathan DenwoodTo get my opinions, all you have to do is go to the bell hyphen, write.com, and you can book a demo with me or Adam and we walk through the system. You have any questions, anything, we’re there to help you out. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:42:25.860] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. All right, ladies and gentlemen, if you’d like to reach me directly. Robert@InboundREM is a way to email me, if you would like to just learn a lot more about us before you message anybody or get a whole bunch of knowledge, including, by the way, what you should be doing with all this nar stuff, go to inboundrem.com, comma, look at my service page, about page. Check out my YouTube channel. I’ve been far more active this year than in any year in recent memory because this is a very pivotal time for real estate. So I’ll talk to everybody soon, or see you soon, or you’ll hear me soon. Thank you for tuning into the show today. We appreciate it.

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The post #426- Mail-Right Show: Sierra Interactive A Pros & Cons Review For 2024 first appeared on Websites and Real Estate CRM Software | Mail-Right.

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ReaJ vs Exp Reality: Are You Looking To Move Brokerages in 2024?In the current real estate industry, two major online-based brokerages, eXp Realty and REAL Broker, stand out. Although they offer comparable platforms and revenue-sharing programs, these companies have distinct differences. Let’s explore the disparities between eXp Realty and REAL Brokerage to help you determine which one best suits your needs.

1 – Commission Cap

*eXp Realty

Both brokerages save a lot of money compared to franchise-based organizations because they are cloud-based. Because of this, they can reduce the commission caps and pass the savings on to their agents. eXp Realty

Commission Cap: The annual commission cap at eXp Realty is $16,000.

REAL Broker.

Real Estate Brokers: A maximum commission of $12,000.

This round’s victor is apparent. You can save $4,000 annually by using REAL Broker since they have the lowest commission cap! However, does that still indicate that working for Real Broker is more economical? Do you think we should discover?
The commission splits between REAL Broker and eXp Realty are.

2 – Commission Splits

eXp Realty

Commission Split: eXp Realty offers an 80/20 split.

REAL Broker

Commission Split: REAL Broker provides a 15/85 split.

In this round, REAL Broker again wins, giving its agents a better-split ratio than eXp Realty and most other brokerages. This means more money in your pocket!

3 – Fee’s

Fees are another way brokerages generate revenue from their agents, so knowing all the fees a brokerage charges its real estate agents is crucial.
eXp Realty

eXp Realty charges:

$149 Start-Up Fee
$85 Monthly Cloud Brokerage Fee
$25 Transaction Review Fee
$40 Risk Management Fee per transaction (caps at $500)
$250 Transaction Fee after you cap

Real Broker, In addition to its annual cap, REAL Broker charges:

$249 Sign-Up Fee
$750 Annual Fee
$285 Transaction Fee after you cap
$30 BEOP fee for each transaction

The Real Broker doesn’t charge a monthly fee; you only pay the annual fee after closing your first three deals of the year. If you don’t sell any homes, you don’t pay any fees, period.

When comparing fees, consider the overall impact on your business and which structure best suits your needs. Remember to factor in these fees when deciding between eXp Realty and REAL Broker.

4 – Stock Bonuses

eXp Realty offers its agents 5 ways to earn free stock within the company:

Earn shares on your first transaction of each year
Earn shares when you cap
Earn shares when an agent you sponsor completes their first transaction
Earn $16,000 worth of shares by hitting their Icon Agent Award
Agent Equity Program allows you to purchase shares out of your commission at a 10% discount

REAL Broker offers its agents 4 paths to earning free stock in the company:

Earn stock by capping each year (the amount varies based on stock price & number of agents in brokerage)
Earn stock by attracting new agents to the company
Earn $24,000 worth of stock by hitting their Elite Agent Award
Purchase stock out of your commission & receive up to 35% free additional shares with a max of $8,000 free stock a year

5 – Revenue Share

eXp offers its agents up to $2,800 a year for bringing in a new agent to the company out of that new agent’s $16,000 a-year cap. Any agent you directly bring in will be in your tier 1. So if the agent you bring on then brings on another agent, that second agent will be in your tier 2. Their revenue share program can go up to 7 tiers with various compensation for each tier. To unlock the rewards for all 7 tiers, you must bring on 40+ qualifying agents in your tier 1. Qualifying agents means they need to be producing agents who are closing transactions.

REAL Broker offers a similar revenue share program, except they give you $4,000 for every capping agent on your tier 1 you attract to the company. You can receive an annual revenue share for up to five tiers deep, and you must recruit at least 25 qualified agents to unlock all five tiers.

6 – Software Included

Both companies utilize Workplace. This platform, created by Facebook, is like a series of Facebook groups JUST for business use without all the distractions of personal content and ads. You can mastermind with other agents, search for an agent, and directly message them. Both eXp and REAL also have additional training resources within the workplace.

eXp uses Skyslope for transaction management, while REAL Broker has built its proprietary transaction software, reZEN, which is very user-friendly and easy to use.

eXp Realty uses Inside Real Estate and KV Core for its agents’ CRM and websites, while REAL Broker offers its clients Chime for their CRM and Website needs. Although both services provide similar tools, Chime has a significant edge over KV Core.

Many eXp agents have found that Chime offers superior features and functionality compared to KV Core. As a result, some eXp agents choose to purchase Chime at an additional cost of over $500 a month, even though KV Core is already included in their package. In contrast, REAL Broker agents can access Chime for just $40 a month, making it a much more affordable and attractive option for them.

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:15.490] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the MailRight podcast. Today is episode number 425. John and I have been doing this 400… Well, I joined the show at episode number 138.

[00:00:30.110] – Jonathan DenwoodYou’re a newbie, Robert. You’re a newbie. I’m a newbie.

[00:00:33.350] – Robert NewmanWe’re closing in on my 300-show anniversary, which I feel pretty proud about. We’re going to talk In the last couple of podcasts, we’ve been mentioning a lot-I’m sorry, listeners, you’re going to have to watch the video.

[00:00:54.870] – Jonathan DenwoodHe’s got one of his cats flicking its tail right in front of Rob. What are you doing to those cats, Rob?

[00:01:01.460] – Robert NewmanWell, he was howling outside the door, which means that he was going to be part of the podcast one way or the other. At least right now, you’re not hearing him. So anyway- We’re pet friendly on this podcast. Exactly. We highly… Never mind. I’m not going to get into it. But he’s a rescue, so if anybody wants to rescue animals on their side, thing interests, I highly- Funny enough, Rob, I feel I can rescue every day. All right, so we’re going to try to stay focused, which is difficult for John and me. If you’re a long-time listener, you already know that. We will discuss the differences between real and eXp and share our thoughts about these two brokerages because they’re both at the forefront of a digital revolution. They’re part of many changes that are hitting the real estate industry. And if you want to, for those of you who are crypto people and DeFi people, which are probably not a huge part of our audience, but this for this particular show, I’m going to say that the decentralization is hitting the entire real estate industry and decentralization from brand and things connected to main brokers.

[00:02:13.050] – Robert NewmanThis isn’t going to be relevant to all of you, but some of you have already been seeing it. Major metro markets are the most deeply impacted. California, the Pacific Northwest, New York, and places like this, we’re really seeing a big change happening in the way that real estate agents train themselves, the way that they pay their community, commissions, what they consider good compensation packages to be. At the tip of the spear, there are two brokerages that are really at the forefront of this conversation, in my opinion. I don’t know if you agree or not, but it would be real and eXp. So before we dive into this, what I think is going to be a really meaty and really exciting subject for us to talk about, and we’re going to try to tie it into how that might impact your marketing as well. But before we get into any of that, John, number one, do you agree that these are the two companies at the forefront? And while you’re giving your thought on that, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself?

[00:03:08.550] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, before I start, Rob, I’m so impressed that you’ve managed to do this intro because if you’re watching this, listeners and viewers, his cat is swigging his tail right in front of Robert’s face consistently. And he just… Rob does the intro like nothing’s happening. I’ve got to say, Rob, I’m very impressed. But to be true for Rob, I wasn’t up with real. So I’m really in your hands with this episode because it balances itself. In some of the episodes, Robert isn’t the expert, but I’ll be interested in hearing your views on this particular one. And I’m also the founder, the joint founder of Mel-right. Com. We are a CRM, a lead generative platform for real estate agents. It’s really incredible what we offer. We also offer a library of great WordPress real estate website themes from which you can choose one, and you can then utilize the power of Facebook to get some leads. Back over to you, Robert.

[00:04:24.530] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. Okay. Well, my name is Robert I’m David Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound RMS, one of the only inbound real estate marketing companies that exist. We focus on content and SEO-driven results. We focus on a long-term view instead of a short-term one with your marketing. We focus on you owning your marketing mechanisms because I’m a big believer in taking control of everything related to your marketing. Actually, though, we don’t talk about it a lot. As far as I can tell, so does John. Today, we will talk about one of the more exciting developments in the real estate industry. John, in general, I’ve said to many people, and you and I have talked offline about how we often feel the real estate industry is 10, 15 years behind other industries, especially as it relates to agents changing the way they do marketing and things like that. But do you still agree with that? Is that still something that you buy into?

[00:05:32.220] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I think it does. It’s so fragmented, isn’t it, as an industry? The past five years have been a learning exercise because I’ve got deep roots in WordPress and web design, but it’s been a learning curve for me, and I didn’t realize how fragmented the industry was and that there are different silos of people isn’t it, and groups in it.

[00:05:59.910] – Robert NewmanThere’s a lot of different silos. And there’s a very small silo, about 13% of the industry that has been gravitating, has been keeping up a little bit more with the digital revolution. And what do I mean by that? So John and I talk a lot about video and agents that are generating commissions and traffic off video and how they’re leveraging video inside hyper-local strategies, and they’re doing all sorts of… But you know what? That’s not the typical agent. It’s a very small part of the industry when you look at the industry as a whole. What is still dominant in terms of marketing? It’s the old school Book of business, word of mouth. I’ve got a network that I built up over 20 years, and I mail those people and send those people little gifts, magnets, and things like that. That’s still almost 100% the standard way to do it. Now you have people doing Twitter, and you have people doing Instagram, and you have People leveraging messaging. They’re communicating directly to their audience, similar to how Elon Musk does with Twitter, communicates directly to you, the consumer, and for better or for worse, that’s how he manages a good percentage of his business.

[00:07:17.830] – Robert NewmanPublic perception has led to a lot of financing, a lot of stock increases, and all sorts of things. Well, that change has been rare in the real estate industry. I bet most of you listening to the show couldn’t name more than one or two agents that you hear that seem to have a natural voice about how technology is impacting real estate transactions, and then they’re trying to go directly to the consumer and explain these differences. Well, real and eXp are the brokerages where that small handful of agents are gravitating, that 10 to 13%. They’re gravitating to digital-first real estate marketing platforms, like real estate agent platforms. These platforms are applying a multi-level marketing compensation package to agents because they don’t have a brick-and-mortar network of offices, which, right off the top, eliminates 30 to 50% of the cost of running a brokerage. If you’re virtual, you’re going to save, or at least I would make the assumption that you would save a lot of money in rigid and fixed costs. Do you agree with that, John? Do you think that that’s an apt assessment?

[00:08:30.300] – Jonathan DenwoodIt is. To be honest with the audience, I have a slight problem, especially with eXp, because I need to learn more about how Rill operates. But I have a problem with eXp, and it might not be totally fair, but it comes from my background because, obviously, folks, I’m English, and in the early ’80s, multilevel marketing operations in the UK were totally illegal, and you can go to prison. It’s not only a civil illegality but a criminal offense in the UK to run a multi-level marketing business. And you can go to prison by running one. And there are people that have gone to jail for running one. So because I’m from that background, folks, it’s very difficult for me to get my head around that in the US, it’s still legal and it’s still quite totally… When it comes to the law, to run a multi-level marketing operation. And eXp, in my opinion, has elements of it. It denies that its core business philosophy and structure are based on MLM principles, but it’s certainly got a very strong taste, in my opinion. And because of my background, I have problems with that.

[00:10:25.090] – Jonathan DenwoodI think many of our listeners and viewers don’t have a problem with. But I just wanted to explain to you, Robert, why my reaction might seem a bit strange to you. That’s why I’ve just said what I’ve said.

[00:10:45.130] – Robert NewmanSo in the second part of the show, with John’s permission, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to use an incredibly deep article that I found on nextgenagents. Com. I couldn’t do a comparison better. There’s no point in me writing an article or creating an article because they did the best job that you’re going to see somebody do online. So I’m not going to recreate it on my platforms. But John and I can provide insight and commentary to the details of this. And of course, two of our guests, previous guests on the show, are the real spokesmen, which I found fascinating. Matthew Lawson, who you might remember as the guy that founded the YouTube Real Estate Mastermind channel, which is huge at this point. He’s a real guy, and he’s been on our show before, John, and he’s on the NextGen Agents article. He’s featured. He’s becoming a heck of a spokesman for real, it appears. At least that’s what it appears like to me. Before we dive into the nitty-gritty in the latter half of the show, I want to position this in a John, your comments reflect. It’s eerie because you just made this comment without, I don’t think…

[00:12:07.130] – Robert NewmanI didn’t link John, the next Gen article. I actually just looked it up. But I will say this, his comments are eerily reflective in the next Gen article because what eXp has created was a really aggressive growth model, but they were a little lackadaisical on the way that they created the rules for recruiting agents. And there are complaints circling the industry about schemes, basically somewhat not cool, somewhat fictitious schemes that agents have created to put… What they’ve done is they’ve created downlines of eXp agents, but some people have put those agents under their own name and basically offered training. So some of the commission that we should go to that agent are now going to the upline. And it’s a huge scandal, but there’s nothing illegal about it. You signed an agreement with both entities. But what’s happening is that some eXp agents are doing a lot of recruiting, and they’re not necessarily doing it ethically. That’s basically what it all comes down to. And it is because of the multi-level marketing. Somebody has created a compensation system and a structure where you as an agent, if you’re a good trainer, a real estate trainer like me or John, let’s just say that we wanted to train salespeople on the digital marketing side, but we didn’t want to be real estate agents.

[00:13:36.880] – Robert NewmanBoth eXp and real allow us to do that and receive commissions for doing it. And the way that you’re getting commissions is you’re receiving a very small piece of the earned commissions of the agents that you recruit and train. And so it is a new model where that appeals, mostly in my experience, to guys like Matthew. He’s a It’s a perfect case study where he was already… A broker isn’t going to provide Matthew a lot of value. Number one, he’s doing all his own lead gen. He relies on company branding or brokerage branding at not at all. When people come to do business with him, they’re already sold on Matthew Lawson. They actually don’t care where he works. They don’t care whether it’s Keller Williams or whether it’s Sotheby’s Luxury. They just don’t care. That I mean, and I’m pretty sure that we could probably go back in our show notes, John, and look at that episode. And I’m sure he said something to that effect, that when he gets calls, they’re sold on Matthew. They don’t really… They’re not paid too much attention.

[00:14:44.610] – Jonathan DenwoodI just quickly, before we go for our… Got about three or four minutes before our half break, is that the concept of a digital brokerage and the bit that is separate to the MLM element of it, I’m fine with it. I’m fine with it, them distributing shares because especially eXp, they are a publicly quoted company. I have no problem with that. The problem was, the problem, because of my background, is I have a I have a real problem with the MLM element of it, or the taste of it. I really have a problem with it, and it’s because where I come from, Robert, because I just consider it And it’s not the case here in America, but I consider it, because of my background, to be iffy, to say the least. I really don’t want to get involved with it.

[00:15:59.920] – Robert NewmanWhich makes sense. I have gotten involved with MLM stuff as a professional sales guy and a professional sales trainer and a professional sales leader. I’ve been approached hundreds of times. I’ve actually been approached three or four different times for eXp by various clients and people that know me and know my reputation in the industry. They all want me to get involved with eXp, and so far I’ve declined. The reasons for that is simple. It is It’s a very complicated thing to build a downline in an MLM. You can do it if you are somebody like me who’s already a CEO and already built companies, and you understand every single element of building a company, you provide a lot of value in your mentorship, and then in which case I would say my continued percentage from all my downline is worth it. There are people out there that provide a huge amount of value to less experienced people, and you pay them for them training. You just constantly pay them for training. But a lot of MLM people are professional signers. They just sign you up and they let everybody else always provide all the value if they provide any value at all.

[00:17:09.220] – Robert NewmanAnd they basically hire in masses, kick them in the asses, and hope that something sticks. In other words, somebody else provides the value. What they did is sign you up for the opportunity. And that’s where it gets really shaky, especially since multi-level marketing is somewhat of a pyramid, which is why it’s illegal in Europe. It doesn’t matter how you slice the pie, somebody, the handful of people at top are always at top. That’s it. We’re going to put a pin in this, and we’re going to go to break. And when we come back, John, are you okay with me sharing the screen?

[00:17:44.160] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah. Okay.

[00:17:46.010] – Robert NewmanWhen we come back, I’m going to use a presentation feature, and we’re going to dive into the incredible differences between real. Then in the bonus section of the show, I’m going to actually share my thoughts because I I asked for this show to be done, and I have some thoughts about why Reel is just right now on fire, and it’s taking a lot of the top agents They’re growing exponentially, and I think I know why, or at least I have an understanding of why they look more interesting to me than eXp. Without any further ado, we’re going to go to break. Stay tuned, and we’ve got some exciting stuff for you. All right, let me edit this out. I’m going to go to share the screen. Here’s our client. Can you see Matthew’s beautiful face right here with my mouse? Okay. We’re going to start here. Okay, we’re just going to… And then I’m just going to… I’m going to read, and then you and I will offer our thoughts. But honestly, it’s just some small differences. The big huge difference is down here in the conversation. This is the massive difference, which I didn’t even know, but we’re just going to talk about it real quick.

[00:19:25.720] – Robert NewmanOkay, you can read it. Licensee acknowledges and verifies that the referral agent has not promised, enticed, or provided contract with anything of value, including but not limited to lead generation platforms, CRM, coaching trips, rebates or currency in return for naming referral agent. In other words, you cannot… They fixed this massive hole in the exp agreement. Okay?

[00:19:49.370] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah.

[00:19:50.360] – Robert NewmanAll right. And then everything else we can read together, I think. Okay? All right. So here we go. Are you ready? Yeah. All right. 3, 2, 1. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. It’s episode number 425. For those of you who are able, we’ve moved over to doing a screen share. We’re once again looking at an article on next-gen exigence. Com. What we’re doing is we’re examining an article that they wrote, Taking a look at the Differences between Real versus eXp. For those of you who are willing to do a deeper dive, you should probably go read this article yourself. John and I are not making any assertions, even if we express opinions, that you should make any decisions as it relates to your real estate brokerage. We are not trying to provide professional advice that says that you should or should not leave a brokerage. What we’re trying to do is offer our opinion, take it or leave it, about these kinds of offers in general and the specifics of real versus eXp. To be fair, I have put John in this position, so he has not, and I did not send him this article in advance, so we’re going to both be doing this in real-time together.

[00:21:14.870] – Robert NewmanJohn, for the first time, and I’ve just started reading it, I didn’t know what the differences were. I had a very high level view of a lot of people that I respect in the industry, bailing from eXp and heading over to real. I asked the question, why? There’s so many of them. I’d say 50% of the top influencers I know are transferring. I just wanted to know why. And so this show was our answer to that question. Okay? So what we’re looking What I’ve got on the screen right now is a commissioning caps, eXp versus real. Exp charges a startup fee. They have a $149 startup fee, $85 cloud brokerage fee, $25 transaction review fee, $40 risk management fee, and $250 transaction fee after you cap. Exp also charges $149, $500 fee, and $225. In other words, for those of you who are listening to the show, there are some small differences in fees and charges, but to me, they look not that big. All right? Exp, John, I’m seeing here that eXp offers $16,000 worth of shares by hitting their agent award. Their agent equity program allows you to purchase shares out of your commission at a 10% discount.

[00:22:52.370] – Robert NewmanNow, there is a big difference here. Reel offers a lot more paths into getting stock, purchase stock out of commission and earn up to 50% fee and additional shares with a max of $8,000. Now, I want to be honest with everybody, you included, John. I own shares of both eXp and real, so everybody knows. So again, this is not investment advice. But I noticed something that is fascinating. Have you ever looked at either one of these stocks? Did you ever track it down? Is this Is there an area of interest for you, like personal interest for you at all? Do you invest in any of the companies you talk about?

[00:23:36.360] – Jonathan DenwoodNo, not really, because of what I stated in the first half of the show, Rob.

[00:23:41.290] – Robert NewmanOkay. All right. Well, I do. Here’s something that is fascinating. Real has a significantly better profit versus loss statement. They’ve got a significantly higher ability to earn revenue via stock. Their cap is much higher. 24 versus 16 is a 30 to 40% difference. Purchase stock out of commission and earn 50% additional shares with a max of 8,000 bonus stock per year. They’re getting very aggressive with agents that are willing to reinvest some of their own income into stock. Their stock, which is selling at $3 a share right now, and they’ve got this incredible P versus E, like a price versus earnings. There’s much more appealing from that end of it. Basically, according to what their share price is, they’re wildly undervalued. So if, John, I think that if you’re an investment-minded agent, this might look appealing to you? What do you think?

[00:24:50.730] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, funny enough, you bring this up. I was listening to Rob Rowland, and Rob Rowland was the joint founder of an email marketing platform called Drip, and he sold it, sold the business, and it was highly successful. And he runs a podcast called Startups For The Rest Of Us. And I was listening to his week. I listened to it weekly. And he was talking… And it’s related to what you’ve just outlined. He’s related to a concept and a founder of a company called Bold. And Bold was in email marketing and something else. And the employees could buy shares in Bold at a discount, a very high discount. The CEO of BOLD really went on a Twitter storm and online marketing and attacking… Oh, that’s why… It was a competitor to Stripe, online payments. The founder went on a bit of a Twitter storm and an online PR campaign there about how bad Stripe was and how great Bold was, and you should buy shares, and definitely all the staff should buy shares, and they did. They all palled in buying these discounts.

[00:26:24.620] – Robert NewmanSure.

[00:26:25.680] – Jonathan DenwoodIt all went pair-shaped, and what they didn’t realize, at the The CEO, at the time, he was encouraging all his staff to poll in and buy all this share. He was selling, and the company went bust. He walked away still a very rich man. I want to make clear to everybody there’s nothing illegal that was done. But it led a very bad taste in a lot a lot of people’s mouths, and a lot of the staff really got taken to the cleaners. So as you said all this to me, it’s really strange because I listened to Rob’s podcast on Monday, and as soon as you started saying this, that’s what came into my mind, Robert.

[00:27:22.230] – Robert NewmanWhich is fair. And I just want to be, once again, very clear with everybody, this is an investment advice, and I don’t own very many shares of either one of these companies, eXp or real. I just own enough to have them in my stock tracker so that I am paying attention to their stock price. I personally, it doesn’t matter whether it’s this company or another company, one thing that I do know is that decentralized real estate is definitely the wave of the future. Is it really in a multi-level marketing brokerage scheme? I don’t know. That’s a fast way to build a sales team, that’s for sure. Whether or not it’s the permanent method or model. I mean, one might as well say, John, that a digital education company that was really good at figuring out how to educate people about something could step into the real estate business and train the 50 to, well, the 25% of the industry, which is about 250,000 agents, how to sell real estate at a professional level, market themselves at a professional level, and then take a percentage of all their business moving forward forever because they train them.

[00:28:31.240] – Robert NewmanThat effectively is what these systems and companies are doing. There’s real value in that, I would propose. Whoever’s training the agents, there’s nothing wrong with creating an informational brand that says that if you do a good enough job and teach somebody a career, why shouldn’t you profit? But here’s the problem, and I’ve got it on the screen. There is something that eXp has drawn a lot of fire about, and it plays into John’s It’s the first statement, which he made without even knowing that this existed, because he is right. There are problems in the multi-level marketing model. It is not accidental that the UK has made this illegal, 100% illegal. That is licensee acknowledges… Here’s the big difference. It’s the major difference between real and eXp, and it plays into what are going to be my closing comments. Licensee acknowledges and verifies that the referral agent has not promised enticed or provided contractor with anything of value, including but not limited to lead generation platform CRM, coaching tips, rebates or currency in exchange for naming referral agent. That is a challenge that is happening with eXp. There are a lot of people out there that have got really aggressive with recruiting people into their downline, and they’ve gotten a little shady about how they do that so that they can collect compensation and stock incentives for recruiting It is a loophole that reel his field.

[00:30:03.280] – Robert NewmanThat reason, because while we are talking about the nuts and bolts in finances, I got to tell everybody, including John, the Reasons that people are listing leaving eXp and heading over to Riyal are not based on the compensation. It is a bonus, is what I’m hearing. It is a bonus about It’s just a bonus. It’s a bonus. Why is that? What is the deciding factor? Well, John, I cruised over to real and started to check out their website and I found something that was deeply fascinating to me. The CEO and many of the leaders of the company have done the in-depth mission statement videos, really in-depth reasons for why they established Real, what the mission of Real is, who they’re trying to serve, why they’re trying to serve them that way, what specifically are they aiming to accomplish with Real. It was such an incredibly comprehensive, passionate deep dive, especially by, I think it was the COO of the company. I’ve never seen anything like it. Not from Glenn, the CEO of eXp. You see ra-ras from him, but you don’t see this thoughtful, in-depth explanation. If you headed over to Real right now, trying to learn something about them, you’re going to be able to do the same thing I did, which is you’re going to see some of the officers, the people that run the company, and you’re going to get this incredibly personal conversation about what real is about.

[00:31:54.300] – Robert NewmanIt’s long form, it’s not short form. You have to invest a little bit of your time. But if you wanted to, if you wanted to invest that time, here you’ve got real leaders of the company sharing a lot of thoughts about the company in a very detailed and personal way. I was just staggered because it was so insightful. They really seem to have an understanding of what agents are caring about right now. They seem to really have a desire to serve those agents, help the agents that need help, reward the agents that are learning, teaching, training, growing, and pay attention to the quality of the experience that all real agents are having. That was a part of their absolutely stated mission statement, which is absolutely something that I’m noticing that as eXp grew, I don’t feel like they’re doing. They’re not focused on the mentorship experience that theoretically a multi-level marketing type company could Excel at, theoretically. You were precognizant about this. Now that you’ve seen that it was literally one of the main issues that was called out by Reel, and it’s also called out on this website, and it’s also like, what are your closing thoughts on this?

[00:33:24.600] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, it’s difficult, isn’t it, Rob? But hopefully you can see why I I needed to explain that I’m English and what the situation in the UK is, because I feel my stance won’t make much sense to you or the audience, really. And there’s parts of For me, it’s these eXp and real that I like. I think a digital agents brokerage for the right type of agents is very attractive and very beneficial. I think the commission The commission cap, the commission splits, the emphasis on digital technology, they’re all attractive. The bit that I can’t deal with is all the bit that a lot of people also find even more attractive than the things I’ve list, which is the multi-marketing side of it, which I cannot accept because of my background It just diminishes the whole concept to me. And I don’t think it has… You don’t have the same response to it. And I’m not And I’m not attacking you because it’s cultural, Robert.

[00:34:51.960] – Robert NewmanSo here’s my closing thoughts. Whether real or eXp are the answer for real estate, here’s what I believe with all my heart. The whole world, a good percentage of all marketing and sales is now happening in what one could refer to as the Influencer or information age revolution. So it is coming down to individuals that provide a lot of value to you. And if that individual has provided a lot of value to you, you are more inclined to do business with them. Or if you perceive that they, like the Kardashian’s is an easy target for me because they’ve made billions off influencer marketing, billions with a B. And they’ve sold video games, they’ve sold perfume, they’ve sold clothing, they’ve sold makeup. The list of things that they’ve gotten into successfully and made massive amounts of money on, basically on the idea of their own personal reputation is staggering. But to be fair, the Kardashian have been incredibly bleeding edge about how they leverage their influence. They’ve got a TV show, and from the TV show, they literally have turned their own reputation into billions of dollars. On a much smaller level, when it comes to real estate, there are a very small handful of agents and people like me and John that provide a tremendous amount of value to the average real estate agent.

[00:36:23.750] – Robert NewmanWhy? Because we will teach you something that is not being taught by your broker. Or if it is being taught by your broker, they’re teaching you things that are 10 years old. Because most brokerages, almost all of them, including Keller Williams, including most of them, don’t understand digital. They’re still promoting platforms and solutions that worked 10 years ago. And many of these platforms or solutions are second or third best options for you as agents to generate leads. And a lot of people, even Tom Ferry, when you walk into this seminar, they’re still I’m not going to be talking to you about mailers and bus benches and digital displays. I’m not saying they don’t also talk to you about websites and things like that, but we’re in a digital first era. It’s not digital second, digital third, digital fourth. I get tired of people saying, do I need a website? It’s like, okay, I get tired of people asking me, do you need a Google profile or a Zillow profile? Or it’s like, it doesn’t matter if you do business for Zillow, you need a profile. Because it’s the biggest, it’s like the Google of real estate.

[00:37:40.840] – Robert NewmanSo saying, Do I need a Zillow? It’s like, Well, yeah. Do I like that? The answer? No, I hate it. I hate telling agents that. I despise saying that to people, John. But do you need it? Yes, you need it. I’m sorry. That’s where the… Wherever the traffic is online, you need to be there, too. If you don’t want to pay them extra money, don’t. I hate that. Don’t pay Zillow extra money, but they let you build a profile for free. Should you not only have it, but maybe even have some reviews there? Because you can put reviews on a Zillow profile, whether or not you use the platform. Should you have some reviews on your Zillow platform? Profile? Yes, you should. Why? Because there’s massive amounts of people on the platform, and you’re back into some business, most likely. It’s frustrating to me that people haven’t realized, and the The only companies that are out there that are serving the digital-first agent, of which I’ve already said is less than 10% of the industry, maybe 10-13% maximum, is eXp and real. Because they are taking the idea of whoever trains you and teaches you on how to do business today in this market, we’re going to compensate you.

[00:38:52.630] – Robert NewmanWhy should a brokerage that is not… I mean, again, this is just my opinion, but wherever you’re hanging your license, if they’re taking a percentage of your revenue, shouldn’t they be providing value in equal amounts to whatever you’re paying or greater? Because to me, if I was an agent, that’s what I’d be looking at. If they’re not training me or they’re not providing me something new, they’re not giving me a mentor, they’re not giving me leads, they’re just taking a percentage of my commission, the answer is, but why? If I have to go out and learn all that on my own without any help from my broker whatsoever, and what John, it seems like you got something you want to add.

[00:39:32.080] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I think just to finish, I think everything you’ve just outlined, I can agree. I think it’s a balance. And I think when the MLM element becomes the overriding reason why somebody is involved with these digital brokerages and things like eXp. If that is the overriding aspect, project that interests them and makes them a influencer or a driver, whatever term you want to use, then I think I personally have a problem with it. I think if it’s only a small small part, and the other things that you’ve outlined are the main reasons why they like the platform, my concern isn’t so high. Is that making any sense, Robert?

[00:40:30.130] – Robert NewmanIt is. But John is right. We’ve covered as much as we can in a single show. There’s a lot more to be said about this in general. For me, if you’d like to tune in to what I have to say about these things, you can find some of those thoughts on inboundrm. Com. You can also find them on, I think my YouTube handle is YouTube/inboundrmvanis. You can just go to YouTube and put in InboundReum, and you’ll see all my videos. It’s easy to find me. John, if people wanted to find you, How would you like them to do that?

[00:41:02.460] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, go to mel-right. Com. You can book a chat with me. I can show you the platform. We’re building out some new functionality at the end of this month, at the end of April, actually, a library of great WordPress Gutenberg real estate themes, which you can choose a particular theme for your website that we provide as part of the Melright package. And it’s going to be super quick and super easy to edit, and you’re going to love them. So that’s coming out the end of probably April. And when it does, I’ll be talking a little bit more about it. Back over to you, Robert.

[00:41:47.730] – Robert NewmanSo, ladies and gentlemen, any market is always tough as a real estate marketer. But for those who are listening to this show, even though… I am not always firmly in the camp of endorsing somebody because I feel a social obligation. It has sometimes, at times, been a point of contention between John and me. But I will say this: right now, if I were you, if I was an agent, and things were belt-tightening, I think that conversation with John has additional appeal. His platform is inexpensive compared to most other platforms. I’m not trying to put myself in your pocketbook. I don’t know money. However, in terms of the competitive landscape, John’s solution is priced attractively. And then you have the fact that it’s built on WordPress, the fact… You do own it, don’t you?

[00:42:38.860] – Jonathan DenwoodOh, yeah. We’re building it on a framework called Gutenberg and a framework called Cadence WP. And I’ve built out a similar platform on my other business. And we’re building out half a dozen super fast-quality, attractive themes. At the present moment, we’ve only got one. It’s similar to Real Geeks, but we’re going to provide a library of websites, and we’ll give you some white glove training, and you’ll be able to customize it yourself, or you can hire us at different levels to customize it. But if you ever decide that you want to leave Mail-right, we will migrate the website to wherever else you want it hosted. So you do own it, Robert.

[00:43:25.590] – Robert NewmanPerfect. So that’s a big deal. Anyone who’s followed me for a long period of time, including John, will know that I’m just on fire about having control of your marketing, including the ability to have a lifetime license where you can do what John just said. You can move the website to one place or another, which means you can fire John, which, by the way, you can fire me.

[00:43:48.250] – Jonathan DenwoodSo it’s the same. Why would anybody want to fire you, Robert?

[00:43:52.790] – Robert NewmanAnd then you get to keep your… Thank you, John. You get to keep your stuff, which is essential if you decide to do work, customize, or learn to use the platform. Having ownership and control means that once you learn the skillset if you do learn the skillset, it is a durable skillset that’s likely to last and be an investment that is long-term in your real estate career. So this is an excellent time to talk to somebody like John. If I were in the position of many agents looking at all these changes and I got a lot of concern about my future budget, I’d probably be calling guys like John and looking deep into Weed Solutions. Now, for those tiny handful of you who are veteran agents, have… I’ve got a NAR. I made some comments on the NAR settlement. It’s in the process of going viral on my YouTube channel. I got like 500 views in under 48 hours. That comment is basically for those small handful of you that are veteran agents, this is the time to shine. Maybe some of you might want to reach out to me because this is the time to make moves and get your digital solutions for how you’re going to handle the buyer-side agreement and get out in front of everybody.

[00:45:04.190] – Robert NewmanBecause those of you who’ve done this for 20 years know you’re not going anywhere. You’re going to Excel in the long term because many people will surrender their licenses. That means that there’s going to be less competition for all of you. That’s the day. Anyway, thanks for tuning in, everybody. John, thank you for humoring me. I appreciate it. I hope everybody got value out of the show. John, I hope you are out of the show. I understand everybody is listening, and I appreciate John giving me a little bit of leniency on this one.

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NAR Lawsuit Settlement And How it’s Going To Affect All Real Estate AgentsAre you curious how the NAR lawsuit settlement will influence your role as a real estate agent? Our comprehensive podcast discusses all aspects of this game-changing development and its implications for professionals like you. Arm yourself with knowledge, stay informed, and be prepared for what’s to come in real estate.

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:06.350] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen. It’s episode number 424. And John just gasped in incredibleness when I just said this will be one of the most important shows that we do this year. And I don’t know that he agreed. But today’s show is going to be about the NARS settlement and specifically how you can insulate your business and giving you some ideas early on to protect yourself from some of the changes that won’t be coming until July or August of this year at the very earliest, but they are coming. Before we dive into the meat and potatoes of this, because we’re just going to rip on it, we’re going to go back and forth. I’m going to give my thoughts. John is going to give his thoughts. We’re going to talk about one of his favorite in the entire world as one of the leaders in having a voice on this, the CEO of Redfin, who I’ve seen four different times and four different media channels so far talking about this exact subject. Before we get into this, my English pugilistic friend, why don’t you go and introduce yourself to the audience?

[00:01:20.660] – Jonathan DenwoodI don’t know what that word means.

[00:01:23.130] – Robert NewmanThat’s in not your days as a boxer.

[00:01:26.050] – Jonathan DenwoodAll right. Thank you so much, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mel-right. Com. We’re a marketing platform, CRM, landing page, email and text messaging drip campaigns, and a couple of other things in one great affordable package. Back over to you, Robert.

[00:01:49.370] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. My name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of InboundREM, the 16-year veteran of the real estate industry, a real estate consultant, a real estate SEO expert, a founder of a couple of tech companies, but the one that I get on this show and talk about is Inbound Real Estate Marketing, otherwise known as InboundREM. Com. Go ahead and check us out. We have lots of great information. If you like this show, you’ll be able to get a little bit of education for free by me on all sorts of great subjects. All right. Without any further ado, let’s dive right into it. Over the span of the weekend, it was announced that NAR, after 10 years of had basically settled a lawsuit with the federal government that says effectively, finally, that consumers will be able to actually negotiate their commissions with both the buyer’s agent and the seller’s agent. That’s effectively what the lawsuit said. It’s not going to affect whether or not a buyer’s agent and seller’s agent get commission. That’s not what’s at stake. What’s at stake is that for the very first time ever, a buyer’s agent will have to negotiate their commission rate with their buyer as opposed to having that commission come out of the seller site, which is automatic and connected into the MLSs, which was what the lawsuit was all about.

[00:03:18.760] – Robert NewmanBefore I dive into it, because I asked John to interrupt our normal content flow so that we can discuss this in as real time as possible. This is the very next show that John and I did together after the lawsuit settlement was announced over the span of the weekend. So, John, what are you… And of course, John graciously agreed. And then redid, tossed out the old show. Well, it didn’t toss it out, but saved the old show and then jumped into this one. But you’re looking incredulous. So let’s start off with something that surprises me. You do not think that this is going to be one of the important conversations we have all year? Let’s start there.

[00:04:04.140] – Jonathan DenwoodI wouldn’t quite say that. No, I think it’s an important subject. How it pans out, I think anybody… I suppose because I’ve been living in America for almost 18 years now, it’s gone so quick, Rob. It’s unbelievable. And in the UK, seller’s agents are slightly under 2 %. The industry is still quite healthy in the UK. It’s a nightmare-ish system. What the UK system doesn’t do is the legal side, the contract, and you have to hire a lawyer to do that. And that is extremely expensive. So you combine the 2% on average in the UK with the legal fees. And the nightmarish, you don’t actually know if you bought a property until the morning of the transfer of the contract. Anything could happen at the last minute and does. It’s a nightmarish system, which has been very difficult to change because lawyers, it’s one of the main financial profit centers for the legal profession in the UK. And so most of the politicians are ex-lawyers. So it’s been totally impossible to change it. So I did some basic math. So let’s say the three %, being a buyer’s agent is a painful experience anyway. So there’s a lot of cost in showing people around and being there 24/7 for them and showing loads of properties.

[00:06:16.770] – Jonathan DenwoodHow that’s going to be paid for is up for debate. When it comes to the sellers, so let’s say a seller agent, they get three %. If they sell one house per month, and if you’re in your third year, you should be doing more than one house per month, in my opinion. If you’re looking at your first two years and you can get up to more than one house per month, I think that’s a great position to aim for. But let’s say you’re doing one house per week, per month, the average mean price in the US, the average price And obviously this varies enormously by city, region, area, is 400,000. 3% of 400,000 is around 12,000. That’s 180,000 gross per year, roughly. Expenses, take that out. Marketing expenses, having a VA, having somebody help you. Let’s say if you’re doing 180, your net might be 100,000, 110, 120,000. I think what it will affect, in my opinion, is the part-time. There’s 1 million licensed real estate agents in the US. That is unsustainable. That cannot keep-One million, two million, sir. I I heard 1 million, but I take you if it’s 2 million, it’s bonkers, right?

[00:08:08.360] – Jonathan DenwoodAt 1 million, it’s bonkers, in my opinion. This situation has benefited the National franchise brokerages and also the associations. Basically, there they are. There’s a lot of agents out there that are selling three, four houses a year. They have no money to invest. They have no money to really build a real business. They totally rely on the brokerages, and the brokerages like it because they’re highly profitable, those transactions. I don’t think somebody that’s not selling one house per month can be an effective professional and really understanding the market and really represent their clients in a semi-professional way. Can you see where I’m going from? Where I’m going at is from-I can.

[00:09:09.210] – Robert NewmanSo in 2024, the US had 1,554,064 604 realtors. That was members of NAR. Okay, there’s a 2 million licensed real estate agents, so a total of 400,000 realtors aren’t even members of NAR. The number that you probably heard was 1 million realtors were going to be members of NAR. The numbers that I’m hearing thrown around is that this lawsuit will probably shake out and have about 25% to 50% of the people that have licenses surrender their licenses, which is why it’s such a big subject and why it is a subject of the show. For a very long time, people like me and other people in the industry, and I say this with the greatest amount of respect, it is fairly easy to get a real estate license, which means that a lot of people have gotten real estate licenses, gotten into the industry with a very low experiential background, not only for real estate, but oftentimes people that have no background in business or anything else at all, full stop, get licenses, people who’ve been raising kids and things like this. That’s fine. But considering the fact I think that this is one of the largest transactions, one of the most important decisions that the people that are making it will ever make in their entire lifetime.

[00:10:37.110] – Robert NewmanMy opinion has always been the bar should be higher to get into the profession, to stay in the profession. The idea that you can come into this with no experience and do a transaction with your family because they love you, who knows what that could end up meaning, an interest rate that’s too high on a loan, contract details. There’s so many different things, inspections that may not be caught or done the right way, somebody buying a property that ends up not being healthy for them, somebody buys a property that puts them into bankruptcy. All of these things have happened and can happen and might happen again. Meaning that amateurs or people, well, maybe amateurs is not the right word, but people with low experience thresholds, this is at a minimum, I would think, because John and I have talked about this before, I’ve said, John, I think we may have said this off camera, and John may or may not have agreed with me, I don’t remember anymore, but I did say, I think the apprentice model would work well in real estate. Basically, you have to be an assistant to somebody that knows what they’re doing for 3-5 years before you can then go out and do transactions yourself.

[00:11:50.450] – Robert NewmanIn the hyper luxury markets, strangely enough, it still works that way. Oftentimes, very successful agents with big business backgrounds get into premium marketplaces like Beverly Hills, and they basically mentor under somebody that already has a very big name for themselves in the luxury market, and they do so for years before they finally either have a book of business or enough referrals or whatever the case is to compete for a single transaction, a single property in Beverly Hills, probably has 5 or 10 qualified choices at a minimum that you could use to sell or buy that property. The commission that we’re talking about, even at 2% to 3%, it’s huge. The latter half of the show, John, I’m going to spend explaining how you can protect your business. For the next three to four minutes, though, what I’m going to explain is how did we get here, in my opinion. Well, I looked up some statistics. This is the first show of the year and maybe the only show of the year where I walked in probably more prepared than John. One of the things that I researched was because I’ve been getting a lot of numbers that said over and over again, Things have changed for people buying homes.

[00:13:10.840] – Robert NewmanThere’s been a lot of pressure on the housing industry because effectively, things have changed a lot. Now, I’m going to show you what things have changed. A report that Zillow did said that the average American household needs to make $106,000. This is average across all 52 states. Needs to make 106,536 dollars a year to comfortably afford the typically priced US home, which, by the way, that is not us here in California, folks. They produced a list. If I wanted to buy a home in Los Angeles, California, the range that I would have to have from my household is $157,000 to $300,000. That’s a staggering number. San Diego is slightly behind us, and San Francisco and San Jose is more like $2,75,000 to $500,000. That’s to buy a home, any home. That’s a tough, tough, tough ask. This is why not only is there pressure right now happening inside the real estate industry, and NAR surrendered this suit after 10 years. Why? Because most people can’t even afford a home. If there’s any hope, psychological or otherwise, to lower the price of homeownership, that is where the entire country needs to line up and be. Nar knows that.

[00:14:40.680] – Robert NewmanThey know that we’re looking at a winter. They pushed it as far as they could possibly push it. But when most people, and I mean most people, John, can’t afford a home in any state, anywhere, that is very bad for the housing market, including the people that already own the homes. Yes, it’s great to be sitting on top of a cash pile. According to most of the things I’ve read, home prices have increased by over 50 to 60% in the last four years. That’s great if you’re sitting on a home that you’ve owned for that long. But imagine you’re like, I’m not buying that home. I can’t afford it, and I make a very good living, at least I think I do. But according to being able to buy a home, I actually don’t, which is crazy to me because I make more than almost anybody that I know. When you start looking Looking at that and going, I can’t buy a home, it’s like, holy cow, do you have to be a millionaire just to even consider buying a home right now in Los Angeles? The answer is almost yes. That’s the framework that is going to create a lot of changes in the real estate industry.

[00:15:50.560] – Robert NewmanWe’re just starting to see the first ones roll out. We’re starting to see a whole bunch of, this is the lawsuit settlement now, negotiate. Nara is I’m trying to pitch this as the 6 or 7% that you can negotiate on is going to make a difference in the home price. Truthfully, it’s probably only going to make a 1% difference.

[00:16:09.220] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s going to make no difference because none of the sellers, if they can pocket 12,000 on the average purchase prices. The mean average, which is 400,000, which is bonkers, absolutely bonkers. The sellers, they’re just going to pocket it unless there’s For some reason why they can’t. Where I don’t have our friend at Redfin, the man with the smile, as I call him, he’s always very cheerful, isn’t he? But he’s sold, like you pointed out last time we brought him up, he consistently sells the shares in his own company, is how it’s going to affect buyer, buyer’s agents, because How the model is going to work out. Because as you know, most more established agents, either they have juniors that represent buyers, or they just don’t want to do it because it’s the only type of work when you’re trying to get yourself established because it’s such a painful experience and such a time killer showing around possible buyers. And And it’s very stressful. But if you’re trying to establish yourself, you have to do it. Who’s going to pay? Is it going to be paid hourly? Is it, are they going to be a fixed package?

[00:17:49.300] – Jonathan DenwoodI’ll show you five hours. I don’t know how that’s going to work out. That’s the bit that I don’t think anybody knows, because You can say Australia, Canada, UK, but as I pointed out with the UK, it’s a very different setup. Here you’ve got title companies, the agent with the brokerage does the contract. That’s totally different to the UK. My understanding is the Australian and Canadian is very different as well. I don’t know on the buyer, that buyer’s agent is going to want to be compensated in some way. How that works out, I don’t know, really. Have you got any thoughts?

[00:18:46.490] – Robert NewmanYou need to go for a break. A lot of them, but we’re going to come to the break and I’m going to share those thoughts. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to be right back wherever you found us. We’re so glad that you’re with us today. Thank you so much. I hope you’re having a fantastic day. John and I are both We’re so grateful for the ears and the time that you give us. We’ll be right back. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the MailRight podcast. Today, we’re talking about the NAR settlement. Now, we just spent the set up and shared our individual opinions about what happened with Nara in the first part of the show. If you didn’t already catch it, go back and do a quick listen. But this part of the show, we’re now going to… John just ended the show by saying, Hey, what are you going to do about that? I have a lot of ideas about… It has always frustrated me that commissions were set for real estate agents because it became a matter of morality and ethics about whether or not you offered a bigger service package than somebody else.

[00:19:44.740] – Robert NewmanAnd in the luxury space, in certain real estate spaces, every single time you start talking about something that’s commoditized, search or other things, like cell phones is what I used to sell that was super commoditized and long distance plans, which is super commoditized. And you know what? Always, I had to differentiate myself with the personal service package. Always. It’s a mystery to me that it just goes to say that a lot of real estate agents haven’t necessarily been a multi-focused salesperson over the span of their career, because if you had been, you’d know that no matter what, you’re going to have to to come up with a service package in order to get your clients to not only pay you what you’d like to be paid, but also create resilience within your business. Now, here’s some of my ideas for creating a service plan that will, in turn, allow you to negotiate the highest or best buyer’s commission, which is what all of you are going to have to do. You’re going to have an agreement, you’re going to have your customer sign it, it’s not coming out of the seller’s package. Just a few ideas that I’ve had is that I’ve always found it to be ridiculous that on a commission-only basis, a buyer of a home can call you up and say, I would like you to take me out to see homes.

[00:21:11.070] – Robert NewmanNever made much sense to me, not in the digital age. Why? Because inventory is mostly online. Just do a Zoom call, look at some pictures together, and hash things out. Start focusing on making sure as part of the qualification process that it all happens over Zoom. What I would do personally, John, is if I was a realtor, and number one, John and I have said this forever, it does not make sense. It’s never made sense unless you’re dealing with a referral or a family member, and they say, I’m just going to give you the deal, and now you’re… Let’s say you live in Santa Monica here in LA, but they want a home in the valley, so you sell them a home in the valley. In terms of your marketing, though, that’s a referral. Your actual marketing needs to focus you as a specialist in a certain area. Always has been that way, always will be that way, and very few people even listen to that. Because for some reason, all real estate agents think it’s better to be a wandering generality instead of a meaningful specific, and I will never, ever understand that. You want to know your inventory really well.

[00:22:20.150] – Robert NewmanWhat do I mean by that? Right now, there’s like 157 listings in Vanuys. I’d set aside a month, and I’d go out, and probably once a month, every month, I’d pick my top 20 or 30 homes, and I’d walk out there with a camera, have an assistant do the same, and I’d film it because I’m a licensed drillter. I can get into the home anytime I want. As a buyer’s agent, you can see the home on the days that the seller has the home open to be seen, and you can walk through the camera and film it and do whatever you want. I then would keep those video repositories, and I would offer them up as things that my clients and I can look at via Zoom, so I’m not driving all over the place. Now, John, if I wanted to do full commission and I wanted to offer a series of services to somebody, one of the services I’d offer is, Listen, if you want that old-school experience, John, you want to ride around in a car with me and look at things, no problem. But I have a I can ask for that in my agreement.

[00:23:17.790] – Robert NewmanThat is basically a full-service writer that says, Listen, I don’t know how long that’s going to take. You don’t know how long that’s going to take. At a minimum, John, you now need to commit to me that you’re going to give me my full possible commission, 3%, and I will drive everywhere with you. Now, there is this thought that a lot of people are going to race to the bottom with price. Some people have already been racing to the bottom with price, such as Redfin, which is one of the least successful brokerages that’s out there.

[00:23:48.390] – Jonathan DenwoodYou’ve so clearly pointed out, but the only thing I would point out to your model, I totally agree with you, but the thing is the buyer’s agent is probably going to require that you pay a certain amount up front because you might get somebody to sign a contract, but you know and I know a contract is fine. But if you’re going to enforce it, you’re going to have to sue that person. That person is going to have money to be worthwhile suing, unless there’s some indemnity, some insurance, but that’s going to be so expensive. So you are going to ask a sizable deposit, depending on what package the client chooses, you’re going to ask for a sizable 50 % or whatever deposit or the full amount up front, aren’t you?

[00:24:44.790] – Robert NewmanThat would be another way to go. It’s all going to depend on your local marketplace, ladies and gentlemen. You’re going to have to see what other people are offering and decide whether or not you’re in the commodity business or you’re in the specialized service business. By the way, for everybody listening to the show, I’ve got no opinions. I’ve always been a specialized person. I’ve always been a person that aims at the higher part of my tiers and my service packages. I naturally gravitate in the way of overdelivering and underselling. Because I do, it makes sense for me to get compensated for that natural character personality trait of mine. Everybody’s different. Sometimes you don’t feel like you’ve got it, sometimes you just don’t want to. There’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you’re going to be a broker who’s going to be dealing with homes that are very commoditized, subdivisions that are all the same, blah, blah, blah. It’s going to be very hard for you to separate our sales package. You’re going to have to compete on price. There’s a thousand different reasons. If you end up having to compete on price, if it’s all about price, then absolutely at that point, you have to start relying on other things that John and I have said.

[00:25:53.110] – Robert NewmanFine, it’s all about price. You can move the conversation, though, to not only about price, but quality of service, which is what Redfin tries to do. They try to do that. They just don’t do it very well, in my opinion. You want to move the conversation to your Google business profile and the place that it has your reviews and start to make sure that you have lots and lots of five-star reviews there. Because if price is going to be the same between you and somebody else, and there’s no way to get around that conversation, then the quality of your service… Because if I’m… John, if you’re dealing… And the only thing that you get suck at, total suckage, is that if John and I both have 500 five-star reviews and we’re completely equal across the board, and then probably what it comes down to is, do they like you? Would you agree, John?

[00:26:43.450] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, it’s a mixture, isn’t it? I personally would never hire a family member or a friend to represent me in a property transaction, because if you ever lent any money to a relative or a friend, we think, I’ve been lucky. Some friends have lent me some money and I’ve always paid it and I’ve been lucky. But there’s been one or two occasions where a relative hasn’t paid me back and never will, and you just let it go. But really, it’s not a great idea. I think you want competence and you want somebody… It’s a bit like hiring a lawyer or any professional. You got to get You got to have a good feeling about the person, but it’s a professional relationship, isn’t it? They’re not your friends. But on the other hand, you don’t want them to be a shyester, do you? You just want them to do their job and be professional about it, don’t you?

[00:27:49.440] – Robert NewmanYou absolutely do. And so, ladies and gentlemen, this idea of… I don’t disagree with John, but I do think that there’s a lot of conversations that need to happen about around where you are. Here in the United States, we have one or two states where the average home price is still very low. They’re not very common anymore. There, I do know a single state which still sells houses for about 150,000. Single state out of 52. Their idea there might be that price is more commoditized. People won’t be taking the time and the energy that John is suggesting. I mean, somebody making $30,000 a year can definitely still afford that home. So somebody working at Walmart, that’s still a great job that’s going to pay all the bills and get them a home and allow them homeownership and the same opportunities that everybody else wants. In California, you basically got to be an entrepreneur in tech or have a pedigree profession like doctor, dentist, lawyer, that thing.

[00:28:45.810] – Jonathan DenwoodI have no idea what’s going to happen to California. Who is buying these? I can only presume it’s the investor class or foreign individuals. I have no idea how it’s managed to keep on going.

[00:29:06.870] – Robert NewmanYeah, all of that is true. But being the sixth largest economy in the world and having too many people Okay. I’ve had too many people in the world. There’s too many people. It’s the sixth largest economy, and we have too many people population-wise. So we We have 14 million people in Los Angeles, and I don’t know how many homes we have, but let’s just call it 500,000. So way more people, too few homes, still people that are making reasonably good income that can afford them. Crazy, but true. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re getting close to the part where we wrap this show up, and I’m hoping to start a dialog here. If you’ve got, John, and you know what? Actually, this is a great way to wrap this show up. I want to start a dialog around this. I would like to have some follow-up shows, but part of that’s going to be, can we get some participation from our audience? I’m going to ask the audience a few questions here. Do you have any ideas of your own about how you’re going to protect your buyer side commission? For those of you who are buyer’s agents, which actually is about 80% of the licensed realtors.

[00:30:18.780] – Robert NewmanSo some of you listening to this show should do a substantial piece of your business on the buyer side. Come July, this part of your business is going to change. What are your plans to protect your business? If we like the ideas enough, John and I will invite you on to the show, which will help you promote your business and help you promote your website. If you have a single idea that we like, but maybe others that we don’t, we will still mention you by name. I think you’re… Are you comfortable with me saying that we will do that, John? Yeah, we will mention you by name on the show and give you credit for the ideas that you have and say it to our entire audience, which might be 3,000 to 10,000 people, other real estate agents, which, by the way, are great sources of referral business from out of state. John, if somebody wanted to email you and contribute to you directly, some ideas or ask you some questions about the MailRight platform. How are they getting to touch with you?

[00:31:19.890] – Jonathan DenwoodYou can just email me at Jonathan, J-O-N-A-T-H-A-N@mail, M-A-I-L-Right, R-I-G-H-R. Com. Robert. Com. Just email me or you can go to the MailRight website. There’s a contact us form or you can book a quick chat with me. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:31:42.370] – Robert NewmanLadies and gentlemen, if for some reason you’d like to message me directly, I will take this subject personally and deal with it. I oftentimes don’t anymore. I’ve gotten very fortunate in the company it’s growing to the size that I don’t have to do a lot of the… What do you always call it? You have a word for it that I’m forgetting right now. Not the grunt work. You use another word. The donkey work. The donkey.

[00:32:04.780] – Jonathan DenwoodI think that’s what you say. I’m a donkey. You can just read me, Kerr.

[00:32:12.100] – Robert NewmanNo, that’s what… Listen, John, you say that. I don’t say that. You say that. All right.

[00:32:17.020] – Jonathan DenwoodI know my place.

[00:32:18.340] – Robert NewmanI’m a donkey. Robert@inboundrem..com. That’s I-N-B-O-U-N-D-R-E-M. Robert@. Com. All right, ladies and gentlemen, John’s laughing at me. Please take us offline. You can laugh at me more in private.

[00:32:37.130] – Jonathan DenwoodYes. E-oh, e-oh, my beloved listeners. Bye.

[00:32:41.330] – Robert NewmanBye.

————————————–

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood

Real Estate CRM and IDX websites. Identify lead behavior and automate follow-up and ad management tools.

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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2024 Real Estate Agent Success: Proven Strategies for Thriving in the MarketThe ever-evolving real estate landscape in 2024 holds tremendous opportunities for agents seeking a successful career. From leveraging the power of digital marketing and social media to connecting with potential clients and mastering the art of lead generation, agents can explore numerous avenues to stay ahead in this competitive industry. Additionally, effectively utilizing online resources and platforms, such as Zillow and the National Association of Realtors (NAR), can help agents strengthen their brand and forge lasting relationships with homebuyers and sellers.

Table of Contents

Toggle* 2024 Real Estate Agent Success: Proven Strategies for Thriving in the Market + - Key Takeaways + Weekly Time Blocking For Digital Lead Generation + Weekly or Monthly Quality Newsletter - Property Pick of the Week - General Local Property News of The Week - Local Services and Business Reviews + Producing Social Media Videos - YouTube - Facebook - Instagram + Practice Objection Sells Scripts Weekly + You Need To Have Your Website + Frequently Asked Questions - Q: What are some effective marketing strategies for real estate agents in a challenging market? - Q: How can I generate real estate leads in 2024? - Q: What steps should I take to start a successful real estate business? - Q: How can new realtors establish themselves and build their client base? - Q: What tips help real estate agents succeed in a competitive market? - Q: How important is brand recognition for real estate agents? - Q: How do solo agents best market their real estate services? + Final Thoughts A well-rounded marketing plan is essential for new real estate agents looking to make a mark in the industry. From creating impactful business cards and email campaigns to hosting open houses and virtual tours, developing a solid marketing strategy can help agents build their network and reach their target audience. Moreover, continually adapting to market trends and keeping track of local real estate developments can empower agents with valuable insights that will set them apart from the competition.

Focusing on building a recognizable personal brand and consistently fostering relationships with clients past and present, real estate professionals can unlock the doors to a sustainable and rewarding career in this dynamic industry. Agents can stay ahead of the curve by adopting innovative marketing strategies and utilizing digital platforms to ensure success in the crowded real estate market.

Key Takeaways* A strong marketing plan can help real estate agents stand out and reach their desired audience in a competitive market. * Leveraging digital resources like websites and social media can enhance an agent’s brand and connect them with potential clients. * Staying knowledgeable and adaptive to market trends and local developments can empower agents with valuable insights, leading to long-term success.

Weekly Time Blocking For Digital Lead GenerationIn the competitive world of real estate, agents need to utilize digital marketing effectively. Weekly time blocking helps agents manage their time more efficiently, ensuring success in generating quality leads. This section will discuss how weekly time blocking can benefit real estate agents’ digital lead generation efforts.

Develop a Regular Schedule: Consistency is essential when generating digital leads. Agents create a predictable routine by blocking specific times throughout each week for digital lead generation activities. This habit lets them focus on digital marketing strategies and ensure consistent leads.

Create a To-Do List: Planning is crucial to effectively using time. Before every week starts, agents should compile a list of digital marketing tasks they aim to tackle, such as updating website listings, writing blog posts, or engaging on social media platforms. This list will serve as a guide for what needs to be done during each time block.

Set Specific Goals and Deadlines: Setting goals and deadlines for digital marketing tasks is essential to maintain momentum and stay organized. Goals can include the number of leads generated, website visits, or social media engagements. Clear, achievable deadlines motivate agents to complete tasks during their allocated time blocks.

Prioritize Important Tasks: Not all digital marketing tasks are created equal. Agents should prioritize functions that yield the best results for generating leads. For example, focusing on email campaigns to past clients or updating popular property listings on real estate websites can be more effective than tweaking website aesthetics.

Monitor Progress: It’s crucial to track the effectiveness of digital marketing efforts and make adjustments as needed. Agents should frequently review their progress toward the goals set for each task. Tracking results will also help determine if any adjustments to time blocks or marketing strategies are necessary.

By incorporating weekly time blocking for digital lead generation activities, real estate agents can increase productivity, remain organized, and generate more leads. Agents should prioritize tasks, set goals, and monitor progress to ensure they efficiently use their time to build a successful real estate business.

Weekly or Monthly Quality NewsletterA quality newsletter showcases valuable information related to the real estate industry and becomes a helpful resource for clients and potential clients. It encourages subscribers to engage with a real estate agent, leading to significant business growth. This newsletter will include three subsections: Property Pick of the Week, General Local Property News of The Week, and Local Services and Business Reviews.

Property Pick of the WeekOur Property Pick of the Week showcases an exceptional property available for sale or rent. This featured property highlights unique aspects such as a desirable location, striking architecture, or exclusive amenities. The newsletter will provide a brief overview, stunning photos, and essential details, including:

• Address: The property’s address
• Price: The asking price or rental rate
• Square footage: The total living area size
• Bedrooms: The number of bedrooms
• Bathrooms: The number of bathrooms
• Amenities: Special features or on-site facilities

This section aims to pique readers’ interest and prompt them to learn more about the property or contact the agent for a viewing.

General Local Property News of The WeekThis subsection covers relevant real estate news, trends, and recent events in the local market. Stay up to date with information such as:

1. Recent sales and notable transactions
2. New construction projects and developments
3. Market analysis and forecasts
4. Regulatory changes affecting real estate transactions

By giving readers an informed perspective on the local market, they will better understand the current property landscape and feel confident in making knowledgeable decisions.

Local Services and Business ReviewsThe final section focuses on reviews and recommendations for essential services and businesses in the local area. Recommendations may include:

• Home inspectors, appraisers, and other professionals involved in real estate transactions
• Moving and storage companies
• Interior designers, landscapers, and other home improvement specialists
• Trusted local lenders or mortgage brokers
• Neighborhood businesses such as grocery stores, cafés, and restaurants

By offering insight into trusted local firms and services, real estate agents create a valuable resource for their clients, building trust and strong relationships.

Producing Social Media VideosEngaging social media videos has become a crucial marketing strategy in the competitive real estate industry. This section will delve into the most popular platforms: YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. Each platform offers unique opportunities for real estate agents to showcase their listings, provide market insights, and build a solid online presence.

YouTubeYouTube is an excellent platform for real estate agents to create more in-depth video content. Agents can create and upload property walkthroughs, neighborhood tours, or informative videos with market updates. To make a lasting impact, consider using the following tips:

• Create engaging thumbnails to pique the viewer’s interest
• Optimize titles, descriptions, and tags for SEO
• Collaborate with other agents or local businesses for cross-promotion
• Be consistent in video uploads to retain viewer interest

FacebookFacebook allows for video sharing and offers Facebook Live, enabling real estate professionals to create real-time, interactive content. Here are some ideas for Facebook videos:

• Host regular Q&A sessions on the local market or real estate tips
• Go live during open houses, giving virtual tours for those who cannot attend
• Share short, informative clips on various fundamental estate-related topics

To make the most out of Facebook video content, consider these tactics:

• Use bold titles and captions for better visibility
• Create playlists for easier accessibility to different video categories
• Engage with viewers through comments and messages

InstagramAs a visually-driven platform, Instagram is perfect for showcasing high-quality images and short video clips. Instagram Stories and IGTV are two features that can benefit real estate agents. Keep these tips in mind:

• Use the Instagram Stories feature to share behind-the-scenes moments and daily updates
• IGTV allows for longer-form content, making it ideal for market insights or property highlights
• Leverage Instagram’s post analytics to track engagement and refine your content strategy

By utilizing these different social media platforms, real estate agents can effectively market themselves, reach their target audience, and stay ahead in a constantly evolving industry.

Practice Objection Sells Scripts WeeklyIn the competitive real estate industry, agents who continually practice their objection sell scripts become more successful in securing listings and closing deals. Practicing these scripts weekly allows agents to gain confidence, sound knowledgeable, and overcome any challenges or objections clients may raise while buying or selling.

1. Observe and learn: Agents should study successful real estate professionals and adapt their techniques for effectively addressing objections. They should also utilize resources such as online tutorials, books, and training sessions provided by the National Association of Realtors (NAR).
2. Practice role-playing: Partner with a fellow agent or a friend to role-play client-agent scenarios, focusing on understanding the client’s needs and concerns. This will help agents structure clear, informative, and appropriate responses to each objection.
3. Please keep it conversational: When you practice scripts, you should maintain a natural tone without robotic memorization. This will allow clients to feel more at ease when discussing their concerns.
4. Create a script cheat sheet: Compile a list of common objections and their respective solutions to keep at hand. This will be a quick reference guide when practicing scripts or facing real situations.
5. Continuous improvement: Agents should evaluate their performance regularly and adjust their scripts to ensure optimal efficiency and a clear understanding of their clients’ needs.

Through this weekly practice, real estate agents will develop the skills to anticipate potential objections, effectively address concerns, and confidently close deals with their clients. This approach will ultimately set agents apart in the ever-changing real estate market.

You Need To Have Your WebsiteHaving a professional, informative, and up-to-date website is crucial for success in real estate. The industry’s shift towards more digital-focused marketing strategies has made it essential for real estate agents to invest in their online presence. Here are some key points to consider when creating and maintaining your website.

First, having a unique domain name representing your brand and conveying your services can help establish trust with potential clients. Choosing a domain name that is easy to remember and appropriately represents your real estate business is essential.

Once the domain name is in place, you can create a user-friendly interface. The website should be easy to navigate and provide a pleasant experience for visitors. Could you include concise, informative content highlighting your industry expertise? Please update your listings with the latest property information, photos, and virtual tours to keep users engaged and show your dedication to providing the best service.

Please consider implementing a blog section to share valuable insights and news about the local real estate market. This can help position you as a go-to expert and demonstrate your industry knowledge. Integrating testimonials from past clients can also enhance your credibility and build trust among potential clients.

Remember to optimize your website for mobile devices, as many home buyers use their smartphones to search for properties. Also, optimize the website for search engines (SEO) to ensure maximum visibility and attract more organic traffic.

To summarize, a successful real estate agent’s website should:

• Have a unique domain name
• Be user-friendly and mobile-responsive
• Showcase updated listings with photos and virtual tours
• Include informative content and a blog section
• Display testimonials and relevant credentials
• Be search engine optimized

Investing time and effort into your website can set you apart in a competitive industry and help you build a sustainable career in real estate.

Frequently Asked QuestionsQ: What are some effective marketing strategies for real estate agents in a challenging market?A: In a complex real estate market, agents must focus on building their brand, using email marketing campaigns, cold calling, and social media to reach potential clients.

Q: How can I generate real estate leads in 2024?A: Generating real estate leads in 2024 requires a combination of traditional methods, such as hosting open houses and networking events, and modern strategies, like posting on social media, optimizing your website for search engines, and engaging in targeted email campaigns.

Q: What steps should I take to start a successful real estate business?A: To start a successful real estate business, you need to develop a comprehensive marketing plan, identify your target market, build personal connections with potential clients, and continuously educate yourself on the best marketing strategies.

Q: How can new realtors establish themselves and build their client base?A: New realtors can establish themselves by providing exceptional customer service, leveraging their networks, seeking referrals from family and friends, and consistently delivering value to clients in real estate transactions.

Q: What tips help real estate agents succeed in a competitive market?A: To succeed in a competitive real estate market, agents should focus on building relationships with clients, staying informed about market trends, differentiating themselves from the competition, and continuously improving their marketing strategies.

Q: How important is brand recognition for real estate agents?A: Brand recognition is essential for real estate agents looking to stand out in a crowded market. By developing a strong personal brand and consistently delivering quality service, agents can establish themselves as trusted professionals in the industry.

Q: How do solo agents best market their real estate services?A: Solo agents can market their services effectively by utilizing social media platforms, creating targeted email campaigns, optimizing their website for search engines, and offering unique value propositions to attract potential clients.

Final ThoughtsThe real estate industry in 2024 is more competitive than ever. To become a successful real estate agent, one must employ various strategies, from traditional business cards and referrals to modern digital marketing and social media practices.

• Developing a solid marketing plan is essential for any aspiring real estate professional. It should include online and offline efforts, such as email marketing, cold calling, and nurturing personal connections.
• Building a personal brand is crucial for establishing credibility in the market. Leveraging social media, engaging with potential clients, and maintaining relationships with past clients can significantly elevate a real estate agent’s profile.
• Utilizing technology to the fullest is also fundamental in today’s market. Real estate websites like Zillow and the National Association of Realtors can provide invaluable market analysis data, assist in lead generation, and help agents connect with buyers and sellers.
• Local market knowledge and expertise in a particular niche, such as luxury or commercial real estate, can help agents set themselves apart. Agents should also maintain a strong relationship with clients and constantly seek ways to generate new leads, such as hosting open houses and establishing referral networks.

It is worth mentioning that becoming a successful real estate agent demands dedication, effort, and resilience. Building a real estate business requires perseverance, learning from successes and failures, and consistently adapting to ever-evolving market trends and technologies. By implementing these strategies and practices, agents can maximize their chances of success in this challenging yet rewarding career.

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What Are The Best Google Ad Strategies For Real Estate Agents in 2023Ready to take your real estate business to new heights with Google Ads? Our latest podcast/video outlines the top strategies for success in 2023. Discover how to create compelling ad copy that converts leads into clients, leverage AI-powered tools for efficient campaign management, and stay ahead of industry trends. Don’t let your competitors surpass you – watch this video now and revolutionize your advertising game!

With Special Guest Jarod Spiewak of Cometfuel

Jarod Spiewak is an international speaker and founder helping service and SaaS businesses scale by turning Clicks To CashTM.

At just 14 years old, Jarod took his first steps in the business world, earning money needed to attend college. After graduating, Jarod spent a year working in corporate America and two with a digital marketing agency before launching the first iteration of Comet Fuel at age 20.

Annoyed by traditional agencies promising the moon but only delivering stardust, Jarod saw a clear need for a digital agency that provided transparency and a results-oriented approach. For that reason, Comet Fuel offers every client a 200% money-back guarantee – how’s that for results-oriented?

Comet Fuel has helped their clients turn $40M+ in revenue into $250M+, so things are going alright.

When he’s not busy making his clients wildly successful, Jarod can be found cooking, watching too much YouTube (allegedly), and working on creative efforts that will never see the light of day.

Episode Full Transcript[00:00:10.800] – Robert NewmanBack, ladies and gentlemen, to The Mail-Right Show. This is episode number 398. And we are extremely excited to have Jared, and I’m going to say this the way it seems like it’s spelled phonetically,” Spiewak” Is that correct?

[00:00:27.930] – Jarod SpiewakYeah, that’s correct.

[00:00:29.430] – Robert NewmanOkay, Jarod Spiewak is our guest on the show today. Jared is a rock star of paid advertising. He’s got a number of different websites and a LinkedIn profile, all of which will get dropped during the show. And we’re extremely excited to have this guest. John, in his typical splendiferous fashion, has found us yet another paid advertising guy who really, really looks like he knows his stuff. So we’re going to be talking about what would you do as a real estate agent or broker in 2023 if you were going to use paid advertising? Jared’s going to help us out with that subject. But before I go any further, Jared, why don’t you give your own intro to the audience along with any details about yourself that you think would be relevant?

[00:01:17.250] – Jarod SpiewakYeah, of course. First off, thanks for having me, of course. My name is Jared Spuak. I’m the founder and lead strategist at Common Fuel. We help service-based and SaaS companies grow to $5-10 million a year without all the typical agency BS. I’m hoping to really leverage the experience that we have in real estate to hopefully bring some value to you guys’ audience. The first and only corporate job I ever had was residential real estate marketing. That transitioned into a law firm marketing role in which we also worked with real estate lawyers. Once I started my own agency, we’ve worked with real estate agents, investors, mortgage lenders and brokers, insurance, ISAs, SaaS companies, so on and so forth. I’m also a real estate investor myself. So like I said, I’m hoping to use some of that knowledge to bring some value to you guys.

[00:02:04.210] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. Well, this is going to be super, super, super exciting. But before we go any further, we cannot forget my co-host of many hundreds of shows at this point, but I know him. But I know him, but you don’t necessarily know him, the people that listen to the show. John, why don’t you go ahead and introduce anybody that may not know who you are?

[00:02:27.420] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks for that, Rob. I’m the joint founder of melhyfordright. Com. We build great WordPress websites. Also, we’ve got a great platform with CRM and the lead generating side of the business. Basically, we compete with Real Geaks and Sarah, Interactive. If that’s interesting, go over and book a demo with me and then chat. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:02:57.570] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. I’m going to help John out here. He’s also a multiple times tech founder. He is the founder of three different podcasts. His list of accreditations, rolls heavy. He has got one of the largest shows that’s out there about WordPress. I can go on and on. John has a lot of accolades to be sung in his praise. I am a real estate SEO guy that probably is the most experienced real estate online marketing consultant that’s currently working in the United States. I also have my own tech company, Inbound, rem. Plus, I sit on a couple of boards for a couple of prop tech companies at this point. Mostly as my role as a guy that really understands real estate SEO. Without any further ado, let’s talk about the other side of Google, which is not the organic side. Organic versus paid is one you figure out how to get placed by Google without necessarily paying them directly. Of course, if you hire me, you do end up paying, but it’s not a direct payment for placement. Whereas what Jared does is he’s going to get you found by paying to have your ads placed in various places.

[00:04:13.290] – Robert NewmanWhat do you think a couple of key things are that agents and brokers need to understand about using Google ads maybe for the first time, maybe just in general?

[00:04:25.000] – Jarod SpiewakYeah. One of the biggest things that I recommend, especially if you’re on the smaller side, is take a DIY approach. I’m a really big proponent of DIY. The reason being is when you hire somebody, whether it’s a freelancer, an agency, someone in-house, you use a referral from your broker, what have you, it’s really hard for you to tell they’re doing a good job if you have nothing to compare it to. The amount of times that I’ve talked to people that have hired someone to run their ads and then they did it themselves and they got better results is staggering. That’s how we got into it. I founded an SEO company. Our clients wanted us to do ads. I said, No, we’re not ad people. They said, Pretty please, we don’t like who’s running our ads right now. I said, sure, we’ll give it a shot. Watched one YouTube video and started improving their ads better than these agencies that they started hiring, and it was really, really shocking. I recommend people simply go to YouTube, type in How to run ads, try it yourself, understand the basics, see what you can do, and then compare what you’re able to do yourself before you’re hiring someone else to do it for you.

[00:05:38.130] – Robert NewmanOkay, I couldn’t possibly disagree with that. I love that. I’m desperately fighting back the desire to ask you questions about your SEO company, but that’s not what this show is about. I will get schooled if I tangent off too hard by John. Just on the DIY approach, when you log in to Google, and for those listening, you may or may not know, but Google has gotten pretty good, in my opinion, about making proactive recommendations just for anybody that opens up an account. You go into an account and says, Hey, you can improve these five or six things or whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. How do you feel about… How good of a job do you feel that Google does if all you did, all you did was follow along with and recommendations that they’re making at AdWords?

[00:06:32.500] – Jarod SpiewakSure. I think if you go online and you google a Google AdWords and see how people discuss what the recommendations the automatic recommendations, the recommendations that people from Google, contractors of Google, send you, out look not so good. Now, that being said, not everything that they send your way isn’t bad, but everything has to be taken with consideration. I wouldn’t just say apply all, hope for the best, because that’s really what you’re doing. Some of those recommendations will be pay us more money. You’ll get dinged on your recommendation score if they say, Hey, you should actually be paying us another $50 per day. If you say, No, your recommendation score doesn’t really change anything, has a lower percentage. They might say, Hey, remove these keywords. I’ve seen recommendations for a real estate lawyer, for example, where the term real estate lawyer was removed from the account because that’s what the recommendation said. So there are definitely good recommendations in there. There are sometimes settings that you accidentally said that you didn’t mean to that it’ll catch and it’ll remind you. But I would never just let it do whatever it wants. I would always look at the recommendations and say, if it’s a good recommendation, yeah, go ahead and apply it.

[00:07:46.380] – Jarod SpiewakBut if it’s not, it’s not always going to be a good recommendation. It’s not always going to be a good recommendation for you in your scenario. Just put a little bit of consideration before you just hit apply all.

[00:07:57.310] – Robert NewmanRight. For those of you that may not be aware, and I feel like some people are, Jared, and some people aren’t, but I’m going to say this. Oftentimes, you’re real estate marketers in general, SEO guys, paid advertising guys. It’s like buying insurance. You may or may not know, let’s say, 80 % of the subject. But what Jared just described is like a knowledge-heavy response where you got to look at what they recommend and know enough to understand if the recommendation doesn’t actually make sense for you. I have blindly followed along with a lot of different things, not understanding what the difference was because I didn’t have the knowledge, expertise. In the absence of knowing the answer for sure, I personally, who consider myself to be a fairly clever guy, would opt to follow the recommendation because I just didn’t know if I should or shouldn’t, which is a great example of maybe why such an obvious keyword was taken off of a client’s account because maybe in the absence of knowing for sure, somebody said, Well, maybe Google knows what they’re talking about. Maybe there’s a good reason for me to take real estate lawyer or whatever it was off the account.

[00:09:13.580] – Robert NewmanAnd this right here is why probably Jared, Jonathan, and I all have a living or business. It’s because at some point when you’re spending enough and the decisions cost you enough, it is better to have insurance. Though in Jared’s example, I’m definitely going to say if you’re at the place where you’re just starting your first-year agent, there’s no way in the world I think you should be hiring a guy like me or a guy like Jared or a guy like Jonathan unless you already have previous entrepreneurship experience and you already know what you’re doing, in which case, by all means. What are some of the fundamental mistakes you see?

[00:09:55.520] – Jonathan DenwoodCan I ask that question, actually? Get me. Yeah. Go. Yeah. What are some of the fundamental mistakes, one or two, that you regularly see your clients making when they’re in the DIY or clients come to you, Gerard? I’d imagine there’s a pattern that you observe. What is one or two that you see?

[00:10:19.490] – Jarod SpiewakWhen I get on the call with somebody who is already running ads, I ask the same two questions. I say, How much did you spend last month? And everybody can answer that. They look at their account, they go, 2,500, three grand, whatever that number is. Then I say, How much revenue did that generate? All of a sudden, that question becomes a lot harder to answer because you’re notmost people aren’t tracking the entire sales cycle through their ads. What happens is you might have one month, you get 10 inquiries, and you can look at your overall revenue and go, Hey, that was pretty good. Another month you have 10 inquiries and no new revenue came in. It’s like, hey, what happened here? What we found is that it’s very easy and possible to have one keyword, one ad group, one campaign that may have driven 20 different inquiries, form fills, phone calls, what have you. But maybe that only drove two or three real opportunities for you. Whereas another one may have driven only eight inquiries, but five opportunities. But if you’re only tracking the inquiries, you’re going to spend a lot more money on the former and a lot less money on the latter, yet the latter was a lot more profitable.

[00:11:30.150] – Jarod SpiewakWhat I always tell everyone, and one of the things that we try and really help people understand, is closing that gap between somebody filling out a form, someone actually being qualified to be worth your time to interface with, and then do they actually turn into a customer for you? Because if not, it’s just a waste of money. Really focusing on optimizing that full sales cycle and not just people taking that first step and reaching out, because not everybody who reaches out is going to be a good fit for you. That’s the number one mistake. I’ve been in about 1,000 ad accounts, less than 1% have this set up. The next big issue I tend to find is not having a real sense of who your customers are, which might sound silly, but what’s your goal? Make money. Great. Let’s start selling ice cream. Let’s do this. Anything can make money, but are you trying to go after residential, commercial, high-end residential, low-end residential? Are you trying to sell apartments, condos? Are you trying to sell to first-time homeowners? Are you trying to sell to investors? Depending on who your customer is, is going to completely change how you try to talk to that person.

[00:12:40.620] – Jarod SpiewakIf you’re trying to attract first-time homeowners and your copy, your website, your landing page is very vague on information about you, very vague about the buying process, I, as a first-time home buyer, am not going to feel confident to reach out because I don’t know if you’re a good fit. There are 9,000 other real estate agents around me who are all trying to bid for my business. Really honing in on who exactly are you trying to attract so that when they click on your ad, they can very quickly identify, is this somebody that I want to have a conversation with or not? Is this somebody who knows the area that I’m trying to buy, who knows the type of property that I’m trying to buy at the price range that I’m trying to buy it? Because if I’m trying to buy residential, if I’m trying to buy $125,000 apartment, I don’t want to work with someone who specializes in selling $800,000 single-family homes. They might not know as well as they could the buying process compared to someone who is more specialized in that area or who does more work in that area.

[00:13:37.350] – Jonathan DenwoodThat’s fantastic, Jared. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:13:40.720] – Robert NewmanThat was a really good point. Well, John, you had to throw a question in here that dealt with AI, didn’t you? How do you see AI affecting Google adverts, if at all, over the next 18 months?

[00:13:59.700] – Jarod SpiewakI think that there’s a couple of things that it can do, and it’s already doing. First is how do we define AI? If we’re saying AI/machine learning, whatever you want to call it, it’s been within Google Ads for years and years and years, way before ChatGPT became as popular as it is today. Google has been involving AI and machine learning in a lot more aspects of ads with performance max campaigns, with dynamic search ads with… Nowadays, when you create a text ad, Google will even suggest ad copy by crawling a landing page. It’s not really using AI, but you can call it AI if you want—and the effect of this is on one hand, it’s making it a lot easier to get up and going. You don’t have to know as much about ad copy if Google is able to just find your website and suggest you add copy, that may or may not work. But it’s also a bit dangerous if you overly rely on it and you think, Oh, this automated system that may not know my goals, may not know my business, may not know much of anything. I’m just going to click on all the things that it’s suggesting and hoping for the best.

[00:15:02.120] – Jarod SpiewakKind of like that first question, going back to the recommendations, maybe they’re good, maybe they’re not. It’s something that we always have to take with a grain of salt. I think on the other side, depends on what AI. If you’re running display or video ads, you might be using some AI that’s producing video or images for you. Right now, that’s a bit of a copyright issue where most people aren’t going to be putting ads on that. There’s a lot of lawsuits happening right now. Even Chatgpt right now, there’s a lawsuit. But I think if they lose that suit, they’re going to have to basically start over. Their entire database is going to have to be deleted because of copyright claims. Text, we have to worry less about. In and of itself, I think it’s great. I think you can use it, but I think you still have to apply knowledge and experience to it. You can’t just say, Oh, because this AI is suggesting content for me and ad copy for me, that it’s inherently good. But it’s a really good starting place to go, Yeah, that’s a good idea. Now let me expand upon this idea with something that’s a little bit more specific to my particular needs.

[00:16:03.940] – Robert NewmanI’m going to say, John, I know that you slipped this in here, but I’m going to take this time to say something that I’ve mostly been saying inside my closed Facebook group. Ai, which Jared, in my opinion, nailed it, there is no such thing as AI. The technology, in general, is mislabeled. Autonomous intelligence is not here yet. Behavioral learning is here and has been here. He called it Machine Learning, which is also another great name for it. But what it can do is it can learn from what already exists. It can go out there and say, We’ve seen 10,000 real estate ads and we can take bits and pieces of those ads and piece them together and perhaps maybe create something unique for you. That’s a big maybe. There is only a limited number of fields. I think Jared will know this better than I, but I think it’s like 159 characters or something for at least the standard text ads. I might maybe get any number wrong, Jared, but it is a limited number. I know that for sure. And so whatever that number is, you only have so many variations to those words, maybe millions or billions, but at that point, you’re only doing a very small change over each time that you accept an ad that is being generated to you by behavioral marketing.

[00:17:24.750] – Robert NewmanAnd I personally think that while I don’t disagree with the idea of maybe using it to give you some ideas, I do think that if you start to use it in its current phase, number one, you could run into some problems, which Jared is pointing out with copyright and things like that. Not so likely in the text ad space, but definitely in the image and video space.

[00:17:48.710] – Jonathan DenwoodBut.

[00:17:51.180] – Robert NewmanAnother thing that you might run into is becoming dependent upon a tool that is untested, something that I’ve seen countless times inside technology. Ai is definitely the wave of the future. As is behavioral marketing, machine learning, it’s actually been around for a long time and it’s only going to get better as time goes on. But to say, should you use it now? And what should you use it for are important questions that should be considered heavily before doing it, in my opinion. John?

[00:18:21.570] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I think it’s time for us to go for a break, Rob.

[00:18:24.400] – Robert NewmanOh, okay. I thought you wanted to say something other than that. All right, we’re going to be right back, ladies and gentlemen. When we come back, we’re going to talk about scaling.

[00:18:33.950] – Jonathan DenwoodHow can I do that? You’ve said.

[00:18:36.030] – Robert NewmanSo much, Rob. Oh, my God. All right, we’re going to talk about scaling and we’re going to talk about some of Jared’s rock star heroes. We’re also going to talk about a couple of other cool questions that we’ve come up with to ask our guest, Jared, and we’ll be delivering all of that when we come back. Stay tuned. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail right.

[00:19:06.810] – Jarod SpiewakIt is a powerful but.

[00:19:07.880] – Robert NewmanEasy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no-question-asked 30-day money-back guarantee. So don’t delay. Get started today. Go to mail-right. Com. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen to episode number 300 and 98. We’re here with Jared Spiwak, who is a founder of his own ad company, cometful. Com. You can also look up Jared on LinkedIn. Com. Forge slash in Jared Spewax, S-P-I-E-W-A-K. If you’re interested in finding out more about our guests, he has an incredibly impressive track record. And what’s more? He has done something that most of us wish we had done, where he just bailed on the corporate world and decided to create his own company. Among many other things about the company, one of the things that caught my attention is he offers a 200 % money-back guarantee, which basically means he will pay you if you don’t get the results, whatever they are, the deliverables that he discussed. So very impressive mindset on the way that service is provided. So having said all that, actually, you know what, John?

[00:20:29.630] – Robert NewmanWhy don’t you go ahead and do number four.

[00:20:31.140] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, sure. How do you scale Google Ads? The testing the walkers to really depending on your budget, really making a big difference into the six, seven figures to the top line. Can you give a broad description of maybe how you help a client from beginning to get into that massive end result?

[00:21:02.950] – Jarod SpiewakYeah, of course. For a little bit of context, the smallest campaigns that we’ve worked on have been as small as someone spending $500 a month on ads. The largest that we’ve worked on is someone spending over $700,000 a month on ads. There’s a big difference in someone who’s spending that little to someone who’s spending that much. But the one consistent thing is from looking and working with companies who are spending larger amounts on ads, even if they started off with really, really small budgets, is the ability for ads to be measurable. The better that you can measure performance, as I talked about earlier, the easier and faster it is to scale. If all you know is what’s driving leads, but what’s not driving sales, what’s not driving qualified leads, it’s really hard to be confident when to spend more money on what to spend more money on. But if you know you’ve spent a thousand dollars on X and it’s produced $4,000 in profit for you, you can test the waters and go, Okay, well, what happens if we spent $2,000 on that instead? Maybe it doesn’t go all the way up to $8,000, but maybe you get seven and a half grand, maybe you get six grand.

[00:22:15.150] – Jarod SpiewakMaybe that’s still a good enough ratio for a return for you to then go, Okay, well, what happens if we go up to 3,500? What happens if we go up to five grand? That’s really the process, which is if I can look at what I’m doing right now and know that it’s working, let me just start to incrementally what I’m spending per day. Eventually, you’re going to get to a point where your results start to dip down below your profitability requirements, or you start to run out of, you’ve reached all the people that you can reach. In those instances, you might need to change up your targeting. You might need to expand your keywords, your audience. You might need to try free marketing if you have and trying to display ads. If you’ve reached out, you maximize what you can do on search. It’s just a matter of really going, Okay, great, I spent X, I made Y. Am I happy with the ratio between the two? If so, let’s increase the input. Let’s see how that increases the output. If I’m not happy with that output, then let’s take a step back and go, is that because we ran out of ways to get more input?

[00:23:13.810] – Jarod SpiewakOr do we need to go back and say, how can we increase the output? That could be anything from improving the conversion rate of your ads, lowering the cost per click. It can even be on your sales front. The profitability of your ad campaign goes way beyond just your clicks and your leads. But how long does it take you to get in touch with the lead? Once somebody becomes a lead, how often do you follow up with that person? Can you create a new system or process where if you get 100 inquiries instead of 10 of them turning into some viable relationship for you, can you get that to 15, 20? If so, you just doubled the profitability roughly of what you were doing, and that might allow you to increase your input all of a sudden way more. Just mapping out every step of the sales cycle from start to finish, mapping out what was the input, was the output? Do I need, am I happy with the output? Let’s try more input. If I’m not happy with the output, let’s drill down on each step of that funnel and figure out what the path of least resistance is, optimize that so that I get an output that I’m happy with, and then go back.

[00:24:14.900] – Jarod SpiewakMore input. Let’s measure the output again.

[00:24:17.600] – Jonathan DenwoodThat’s fantastic. Over to you, Rob.

[00:24:21.050] – Robert NewmanI’m going to say as a closer. Jared, over the years, I’m publicly acknowledged in so many goddamn places talking about organic marketing and SEO and getting traffic back to your site, firing your marketing company, continuing to see returns, talking about return on investment in comparison to paid advertising. The following statement may surprise a lot of people listening to the show, which is I do think that there’s a space and a time if you have a dedicated partner and you’re talking about this honing down of a pipeline where you keep looking for efficiencies. The best partner in the entire real estate industry currently is Wailopo, who’s doing something like this because it has G. J. Fung. And if you haven’t checked him out, Jared, I strongly recommend that you do. He is one of the very few people inside the entire real estate space that actually truly, truly deeply knows his stuff. And the reason I say all this is because if you don’t have that really deep time and energy to go through and/or you have a partner who’s really doing what Jared described, and scaling up and tracking profitability and looking at return on investment and finding out which segment of your lead generation is actually generating you a return, then this may be difficult.

[00:25:44.660] – Robert NewmanBut if you did have that, then there is one thing that paid advertising delivers, in my opinion, that almost no other type of marketing does and not organic marketing, which is the ability to scale and scale fast. Which, unless I missed my guess and we’ll ask you this question later, it might be one of the reasons why you turn from an SEO company into a paid marketing company. But having said that, let’s go on to number five, which I’m going to take this one and, John, you’re going to take number six. Does that sound right? Okay. What have been some of the biggest influences? Or it’s funny, I mentioned, let’s talk about who some of your influencers are. Do you have any? Do you have any online mentors, digital people that you follow? Maybe they don’t know you follow them? Is there somebody that you really pay attention to in order to guide decisions? Or maybe do you just like to follow them because you think they say interesting things?

[00:26:41.280] – Jarod SpiewakYeah. There’s a couple of places that I like to go to. One in general is YouTube. I’m someone who grew up on YouTube. As a kid, it was watching funny, stupid videos on there. As I got older, I couldn’t afford to buy all these $5,000 courses all the time. Anytime I got stuck on something, I would go to YouTube. I’m not that great at reading. I struggle to really pay attention and just sit down and read a book. But I can go on to YouTube and I can watch a 20-minute video to exit and go, Oh, I didn’t know how to do that thing before. Here’s someone walking me through every problem that I’ve ever found in my life pretty much. That’s great and for free. Youtube ad nauseam is great. For specific people, a name that’s getting more and more popular nowadays, which is he’s done a really excellent job in his own personal branding, is a guy named Alex Hermozi. He’s become very, very large recently. He just released his second book, $100 Million Leads. His first book, $100 Million Offers. The offer that we have right now, the 200% money-back guarantee, is one that his book helped me basically form, and our lead gen massively took off after that.

[00:27:54.500] – Jarod SpiewakHe’s someone that I really like the way that he explains the concepts that he has. I think there’s no real BS in there, at least from my perspective. I think it’s very digestible content, easy to consume. He’s someone that I’m quite a big fan of in the not online space, so you can find him online. Michael Mikeovitz, I brought you the last name, he wrote a book called Profit First. That’s a really great book on cash flow management that also helped us as we were scaling up. He also has other great books like The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur and The pumpkin plan is also a really great book of his.

[00:28:34.290] – Jonathan DenwoodI love the titles.

[00:28:39.970] – Jonathan DenwoodI think it’s full marks for that. Sorry about that. I just had to say that, Gerald. Let’s go. Obviously, I am not a native Nevada. I come from England.

[00:28:52.570] – Robert NewmanYou don’t say.

[00:28:54.290] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, you don’t say. As a child, I was a great watcher of Doctor Who and The TARDIS, hopefully. If you had your own time machine and you could go back to the beginning of your agency in this journey, Gerhard, is there one thing that you wish you could tell yourself at the beginning of the journey that you know now?

[00:29:17.760] – Jarod SpiewakSomething I talk about all the time with others when I’m at events is don’t compare your business to other people’s businesses. It’s really hard to do. The reason being is, when I started getting involved in my own communities, the people in the industry, and going to events, conferences, what have you, I would have conversations with people and I would go, Wow, you’re growing so much faster than I am. You have so much more revenue than I have. Your team is so much bigger. I would start to look at, what are these guys doing that I’m not? How can I copy or emulate what they’re doing? Because that must be what they’re doing that I’m not must be the secret to success. Fast forward five years, no shame to them, but a lot of those guys are out of business. A lot of those guys no longer exist. Really, what I’ve done over the past two years as I’ve been a lot less involved in these groups, socials, I mean, COVID obviously had a pretty big impact on that. But as I just focused on just bettering myself, if you will, and not really looking at what other people are doing or how they’re growing their business, mine has actually grown much faster and easier.

[00:30:26.730] – Jarod SpiewakI’ve also had a lot less stress as I haven’t really been concerned with, Oh, no, we’re not doing this other thing that this guy who just doubled the growth of his company in eight months did, maybe we should do that. But we didn’t do that. Then two years later, that guy went out of business. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s just that what’s good for them might not be good for me. I’m happy for whatever they’re doing with their business, but I’m not going to change anything in mind just because I see someone else growing better, faster, whatever, from my perception right now because who knows how that will affect them in two, three, five years from now.

[00:31:01.130] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks for that, Jared. That was a fantastic insight, actually. Thanks for sharing that. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:31:08.340] – Robert NewmanLadies and gentlemen, we’re down to what would technically be the end of the show. Jared, we’re also through the questions that we set up. If you’re willing, I’d love to just have a riff for maybe 5, 10 more minutes. Are you down for that?

[00:31:27.020] – Jarod SpiewakYeah, I have time. I’d love it.

[00:31:29.020] – Robert NewmanOkay, so I’m just curious and I am going to go way off script here, but you are… I don’t know how old you are, but you look young. You look very young and you’re sitting.

[00:31:42.740] – Jonathan DenwoodHere- He’s actually older than me, Rob.

[00:31:45.880] – Robert NewmanThere isn’t anybody alive older than you, so that’s not possible, John.

[00:31:49.970] – Jonathan DenwoodI feel that way sometimes actually.

[00:31:55.740] – Robert NewmanI’m somewhat curious, what drives your… I wish that I got myself together. I’ve had seven businesses, but I really struggled when I was your age to keep the focus on a business. I am ADHD from here until the next century, and so I could never really dial my focus in to stay connected to a single thing that I was doing. I’m curious if you have mechanisms for doing that yourself.

[00:32:24.810] – Jarod SpiewakNot really. I also have ADHD, so it’s something that I struggle with a lot. I really struggled. I can’t really read. If you see the bookcase right there, those are all the books I haven’t read. The ones right here are all the ones I have read. I really struggle to do that. I’ll spend a weekend. I’ll have an idea and I’ll be like, Oh, that’s a cool idea for a business. Let me work on this. I have time. Then Monday comes on like, I don’t have time to work on this. Sometimes it’s just through attrition. I just haven’t simply given up. I’ve pivoted a couple of times as I found a greater opportunity for growth, but I guess I’ve never been smart enough to quit.

[00:33:08.920] – Robert NewmanWell, it sounds like you’re lucky in that. Now I’m going to ask you a traditional entrepreneurial question. As you, through perseverance, stupidity, luck, or maybe drive and talent, I don’t know. But as you get more successful, I’ve noticed that more and more people ask you questions, which personally frustrate me because I’ve been doing the same thing for 15 years. But the numbers grow as time goes on, the recognition grows, but what I’ve been doing actually doesn’t change. I do the same thing. There’s just more people out there recognizing what I do is what I found. When it comes to you, what’s been one of your greatest setbacks and how did you address it?

[00:33:57.230] – Jarod SpiewakThat’s a good question. I think honestly, one of the greatest side effects was what I mentioned there at the end was going to events, talking with people, hearing what they were doing, and then making sometimes radical shifts in how we were doing things just because. At the same time, nowadays we have slowly building out. We have tons of business intelligence dashboard, tracking tons of different metrics on our own business performance. I would do things like, Oh, wow! I really like how they present their proposals. I’m going to do something similar. But I was never really measuring what impact that had. I just assumed they have a much larger, more successful business, so I’m just going to copy them. Then I was literally at an event last week. I’m not going to say any names, of course, but someone who I quite look up to, I believe that they were doing really well on a company that they were working on. They were talking about how well they were doing on the company that they were working on. I thought that I was like, Wow, I wish I came up with that approach like, Maybe I should find a way to take what we’re doing, find a way to incorporate that because that’s really cool.

[00:35:08.390] – Jarod SpiewakIt seems to be working so well for them. I was talking to someone that was just talking to this person and they’re like, Yeah, that didn’t work for them at all. They had all this marketing material that said it was working so well, but they actually just shifted their business entirely because that crashed and burned. But yet on their website, talks about, Oh, you shifted to this and money goes up. Then behind closed doors, it’s, Yep, that’s not working. The biggest pitfalls I ever really made was caring too much about what other people are doing and just assuming that everyone is going to be honest with you and say what they claim is working really well for them is actually working really well.

[00:35:40.510] – Jonathan DenwoodI totally agree because 2-3 people that have become friends of mine, like Rob Rowling, the founder of Drip, he does the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast. He’s got a track record, he’s done it. He’s done itHe’s built up a multi-million dollar business and sold it. And like Jason Coman, the founder of WP Engine, he’s a personal friend of mine. He’s just got a track record of building business and selling them. They’ve done it and they’re very public and sharing. But you do get a lot of people that do say they’ve done this, done that, done the other, and when you really look at it, they haven’t really done much have they, Gerald?

[00:36:32.750] – Jarod SpiewakYeah, sometimes a lot less than you think they have.

[00:36:36.580] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, exactly.

[00:36:38.220] – Robert NewmanI’m glad that we’re talking to you on the website paid advertising side and that you’re bringing this story up. One of the reasons that I started in Boundary, which actually started as a blog, not as this fully fleshed-out business idea, but I had already been in the industry for nine years and I’d noticed that what most marketing companies said that they delivered or said the result of this delivery would be was completely false. I knew it because I had talked to hundreds of thousands of agents direct one-to-one and had the input straight from them that whatever that they bought or that was told to them was absolutely inaccurate. And sometimes so wildly so that you might as well have lied about it, like a completely fictitious service or result where very few people, if any, were getting what was advertised. And that knowledge drove me to start reviewing real estate marketing companies because so often what I see published doesn’t actually have… It’s not possible that the measurable result is what they’re saying. It’s just not possible, except for maybe- Can.

[00:37:50.750] – Jonathan DenwoodI say something about that, Rob? Sure. I don’t know if Gerald agrees with this. I think we touched upon this next week. I’m sure there’s been some active misleading, but also I think there’s a lot of confusion between what is classified as a referral to what is a digital lead and the measurement and process that you discussed in the main part of the podcast, Gerhard. There’s a lot of people in the real estate that think a digital lead and they compare it to a personal recommendation, somebody in the communities recommended them to somebody else. I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding there, Rob.

[00:38:40.960] – Robert NewmanI think I’m going to write this down and do a YouTube video on this. Now that you say it, lead, designation.

[00:38:50.890] – Jonathan DenwoodWhat do you reckon about that, Rob, Gerard? Do you think that is part of the problem? They compare one lead generative process with another. They don’t understand they’re dealing with a totally different beast in some ways. Does that make sense to you, Gerard?

[00:39:09.510] – Jarod SpiewakYeah. Every lead source is different and lead attribution is very difficult. The more marketing channels you have, the more difficult it is to attribute leads and to understand why people came for you, where they’re coming from. When it comes to referrals, for example, something that we just worked out with a client of ours is we were running an ad campaign and they were like, Wow, this has actually generated a ton of sales for us. But then they looked down, they were like, Actually, we can attribute quite a few of these sales to referrals that we got from other people being like, Oh, Google this keyword and this company will show up and I recommend you click on that company. They clicked on our ad. The attribution got attributed to ads. But then we just worked directly to go, Okay, great, we actually turned off that campaign when even though we were driving a ton of sales, all the sales ended up being people that were already looking for you, already looking for referrals. We cut that off and moved that budget elsewhere. Understanding, if you’re generating a small number of leads, it is nice to be a little bit extra critical of them.

[00:40:18.790] – Jarod SpiewakIf you’re generating tens of thousands of leads, it’s hard to look by each line item and go, Okay, where did this come from exactly? I haven’t talked to this person before. That game is a numbers game. But I know if if you’re working with a small data set, it’s like, okay, Bob came to me through a Facebook ad, but I met Bob four weeks ago. Maybe that ad didn’t really count as a lead. Ithink that’s okay and I think that’s okay, and I think that’s a great conversation to have. Sometimes that’s a little bit disappointing on our end when we think we’re doing a lot better than we actually were and someone comes to us, Actually, this wasn’t as good as you thought. Lead attribution, I think it’s important to look at. I think it’s important to know where leads are coming from. If you can, I think it’s important to understand that a lead could be tagged from SEO, it could be tagged from Google ads, it could be tagged from Facebook ads. Some of that was branded. Some of those people already knew you exist, and it’s going to be the SEO, the advertiser, the social media marketer.

[00:41:14.980] – Jarod SpiewakEverybody wants to attribute to the efforts that they’ve done, their own marketing, that may not be completely true. But at the same time, not everyone’s going to be explicitly trying to lie to you about that either.

[00:41:27.710] – Robert NewmanMy experience, and I think this is probably a good place to wind down, but my experience has been that with the ever-increasing importance of considering omnichannel approaches, it’s really hard to say, even with SEO, which is obviously what I do, I would love to be able to say that that lead quality has been rising and rising and rising. But that would only be true if you took into account all of the media that supports lead generation in the first place, personal one-to-one videos online, social proofs, so on and so forth. The strategies have so changed that when I drive paid traffic into pages that we’ve already done a lot of work on that has all this stuff present, all of a sudden paid traffic gets a much bigger and better bang for the buck. So saying, Oh, is SEO inherently better from a lead quality perspective? I don’t know that I agree with that anymore. It really just depends on the support of the marketing efforts where you drive that traffic to. And then that creates the relevance of your spend and things like that. There’s a smaller and smaller distinction between where the lead was initiated.

[00:42:41.500] – Robert NewmanWas it search marketing? Was it organic marketing? Was it email marketing? Was it whatever else it might have been direct mail, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, that’s been my experience. I’m not declaring it to be universal. I’m just saying this is what I’ve noticed. Guys, we have done this for 42 minutes. Jared, you’ve been an amazing guest. I’m going to preempt John and cross my fingers and hope that maybe at some point in the future you’d be willing to come on the show and be a guest again. I personally have enjoyed you a lot. I’ve really appreciated your insights. You’re honest and your honesty. If somebody wanted to reach out to you and find out more about you, how would you like them to go about doing that?

[00:43:25.250] – Jarod SpiewakFirst of all, thanks so much for having me. Would love to come back. If you want to know more about our company, you can go to cometfuel. Com. If you want to know more about me, you can just search for Jared Spiegel on YouTube. I’m also elementary to reach. I’m happy to answer anybody’s casual questions through email. Just jared@cometfuel. Com. Would love to know if you have any questions, I can help you solve.

[00:43:46.710] – Robert NewmanAwesome. John, if you would like somebody to reach out to you, how would you like them to go about doing that?

[00:43:51.200] – Jonathan DenwoodI’ll just go to the mail-right. Com website, look at what we’ve got to offer, and maybe book a chat with me or add my co-founder. Back over to you, Robert.

[00:44:02.800] – Robert NewmanIf you’d like to know any more about me or what I do or have done over the years, you can go to inboundrem. Com. You will find a massive resource on organic marketing, social marketing, humor, and movies, all related to real estate. We’ve been spending years building up this site. At this point, I solidly say it’s one of the best real estate marketing sites that exists in the country. So you can go and check it out. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Jared, for being the guest on the show. Thank you, John, for, as always, doing all the work that supports the show. I really appreciate it personally, and I know the audience does as well.

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

————————————–

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The post #398 – Mail-Right Show: The Best Google Ad Strategies For Real Estate Agents in 2023 first appeared on Websites and Real Estate CRM Software | Mail-Right.

The post #398 – Mail-Right Show: The Best Google Ad Strategies For Real Estate Agents in 2023 appeared first on Websites and Real Estate CRM Software | Mail-Right.

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Top 6 Reasons Why Real Estate Agents Fail With Facebook Ads In 2023Attention all real estate agents! If you’re wondering why your Facebook ads aren’t generating results in 2023, this video has all the answers you need. Explore crucial reasons behind failed campaigns, including improper audience segmentation and ineffective messaging techniques commonly used by agents today. Learn from industry experts who share practical tips for successfully turning around your advertising efforts on Facebook – don’t miss out! Click play now for invaluable insights into achieving greatness with Facebook ads!

1 – Choosing the right objective – (in the end, you boost the post). Also, the main difference is leads and traffic.

2 – You end your campaigns much too soon, and you have much too small a budget

3 – You need to use your warm and semi-warm lists on FaceBook

4 – Choosing not to click the check box connected to being in a particular category

5 – Agents are not using video in their adverts (video is king)

6 – No consistent digital follow through

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:10.440] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode 397 of The Mail-Right Show. Today, we’re going to talk about why. Why? Why? Why do real estate agents fail with Facebook ads in 2023?

[00:00:24.450] – Jonathan DenwoodI just don’t know.

[00:00:26.320] – Robert NewmanAnd we’re going to give you six of our top reasons. And when I say we, I actually mean John. Debbie, here we go. We’re going to get into it. But before we do, there must be a small handful of you that have been handed the show from your friends, your other real estate professionals that you don’t know and you don’t know who we are. John, who are you?

[00:00:49.740] – Jonathan DenwoodOh, God, who am I? I’ve been asking that question for 57 years. I’m the joint founder of Mail-right.com. We’re a great platform. We compete with Reel Geets and Ciarra Interactive. We provide a beautiful WordPress website with a lead generation platform and a CRM, all combined at a reasonable price. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:01:18.820] – Robert NewmanMy name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of my own real estate marketing company called Inbound Real Estate Marketing. The company is one of the very few that does both Inbound and SEO philosophies. We have a lot of different services. I’ve talked about Google and SEO for real estate agents for over 15 years. So if you want to know anything about me, just go to inboundreem.

[00:01:42.700] – Jonathan DenwoodCom. I’ve just got one more thing.

[00:01:46.800] – Robert NewmanOh, you’re telling me. Come on, that’s not.

[00:01:50.960] – Jonathan DenwoodEven funny. He’s been dealing with many clients lately, listeners and viewers that got one.

[00:01:57.700] – Robert NewmanMore thing. Yeah, exactly.

[00:02:00.400] – Jonathan DenwoodExactly. I’ve got one more theme.

[00:02:04.300] – Robert NewmanOkay. All right, for the handful of you who were watching YouTube, this was for John.

[00:02:08.400] – Jonathan DenwoodThat’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about it.

[00:02:15.570] – Robert NewmanThere you go. Here we go. Here’s the list. I’m going to give everybody the list upfront, but then John is going to dig through it one by one. I’m going to add some comments here and there, but honestly, most of this is really going to be John. One, choose the right objective. Two, end your campaigns much too soon. Three, list management. Four, not having people optimize their call to action correctly. Number five, using video, number six, consistent digital throwback policies. These are the topics we’re going to dig into each one of them. John is going to lead this one because when it comes to Facebook advertising, there’s no doubt that John is focused more on his time, energy, and business. He has a partner that’s extremely experienced in.

[00:02:58.680] – Jonathan DenwoodThis segment. I do not worry, Rob. I do not run Facebook campaigns. My partner, Adam Brown, runs and he’s got over 10 years experience with his own agency and he runs the campaigns. I know enough to fuck up your campaign. Adam knows enough to actually get some results.

[00:03:23.510] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. Without any further ado, choosing the right objective, why don’t we jump into number one and you share your thoughts on that, John?

[00:03:29.850] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, it’s choosing the right objectives. One of the pleasures, and it’s similar to Google if you’re doing paid advertising on Google, is it’s not the most friendly interface if you’re using your Facebook ad manager, which if you’re going to do paid campaigns, you need to set that up. There are loads of tutorials on YouTube. It’s not terrible. There are some steps that you should go through to protect yourself because Facebook, they’ve done it to me, they’ve done it to clients. If you’ve done any Facebook advertising for any consistent time, it’s very likely your account will be suspended and there are occasions where your account can be… You are blocked forever, so you need to set up another account and you need to know how to set up your Google ad manager in a way that will cover your backside because it will happen. It’s happened to me.

[00:04:40.740] – Robert NewmanYou’re talking about Google or Facebook?

[00:04:42.360] – Jonathan DenwoodFacebook. Sorry, Facebook. You go into the ad manager and it gives you a list of objectives. They mean nothing. You’re going to have to Google them to find out what the hell they mean, because it’s not in English. Well, it is in English, but it’s in techno talk. Teno talk. Babble, thank you so much. And the two that you really, depending on what market you’re in, you should be either looking at leads or traffic. Now, leads are the best, but it depends on what area you’re competing in, beloved listeners. If you’re in Denver or you’re in San Francisco or you’re in any major metropolitan area, probably the cost of running a campaign on a lead objective is going to be pretty pricey. The prices have gone up. They went down when Facebook was having a bit of argy-bargy. That’s a bit of English land for a bit of trouble with Apple iOS 14. Also, Facebook internally imploded during COVID. They’re trying to actually get hold of any response from them was practically impossible. The prices went down a bit. They’ve gone back up because they’ve recovered a bit from the crisis around IOS 14. It’s never been easy to get hold of somebody in Facebook.

[00:06:38.920] – Jonathan DenwoodBut during COVID, it became impossible. It is possible to get hold of somebody. But the leads have become very, very expensive, if that’s your objective. Now, traffic, as it say, will get you traffic, it won’t be as focused. I’m trying to word this in a coherent way, which is difficult for me, isn’t it, Rob? Traffic is a more broad term about the people they’re going to be sending to your landing page or to your website, but it will be cheaper. The budget that you will require to actually get a result will be less. The last thing in this, because of this, this sounds a bit of a setup, and if you’re doing it yourself, it will be, but it’s totally possible for you to do it, is you’re going to be tempted to say, Sody, I’m just going to boost a post. I’m going to write something and there’s a big button to boost it and I’m going to click it. You can do that, in my opinion, you’re totally wasting your money. It’s been that for a long time. I think it will be shown, especially on your page, to a larger audience, but to think you actually get any real leads from that is probably you’re deluding yourself a little bit.

[00:08:18.360] – Jonathan DenwoodOther people would argue against me about that. It’s a gray area. That is the broad outline. I could go a bit deeper. I’m not going to because I do not want to bore you, Rob, and I don’t want us to lose most of the audience that’s still listening to me jabbat. So back over to you, Rob.

[00:08:43.380] – Robert NewmanAll right, so I don’t have much to say about audiences. I have worked in Facebook, but there is like… I have people that I follow. It’s not like I don’t know nothing about Facebook. I know way more than the average.

[00:08:56.260] – Jonathan DenwoodThere are many, many things that you know, Rob.

[00:08:59.440] – Robert NewmanBut I would say that in terms of choosing the right objective, I haven’t gone in and set a campaign up in a long enough period of time that I don’t really feel like I can contribute all that much. We’re going to go on to number two. You end your campaigns much too soon and you have too small of a budget. Talk to me about how long do you keep the campaign running and what budget do you think you’re recommending? Because that’s the question that everybody who’s listening to this show is really going to want to know.

[00:09:24.160] – Jonathan DenwoodI want to point out, folks, it really is dependent on what area you’re competing in. If you’re in a semi-rural, if you’re in a city of less of around a quarter of a million to half a million, but that will depend on how hot your particular real estate market is. If you’re talking about a city of half a million in Southern California, it’s going to be a very different market than if you’re in the Midwest. It’s all swings and roundabouts. If you’re in the major metropolitan area, it’s a different cup of tea. But in general, the budget required has gone up. It’s gone up for the past 2-3 years. That’s why the idea that you can get any results for $5, $10 a day is popular. Depending on the market, it’s a bit delusionary. Most people, it will take at least a week for Facebook to look at your campaign, make a judgment call about the quality of the campaign, the graphic, the video that you should be using. They will make some judgment call about the landing page you’re taking people to, various parameters about. Then like I say, take at least a week for them to make a judgment and send traffic to that advert.

[00:11:02.670] – Jonathan DenwoodEach advert has a natural lifespan. They don’t last forever. It’s finding that sweet spot where you’re giving Facebook enough time to make a judgment call, but you’re not leaving it too long because the advert will exhaust itself naturally. But most people, when it comes to budget, like I say, I think now between $300 and $500 for advert campaign per month is a good starting point. Then try and see if you’re getting results and then if you can put anything between five and a thousand in afterwards as you’re getting some results, is probably a realistic place. The idea that you can just put 100 in, I think you could get some results with 250 a month. I think you can start off with that still, depending on the area. If you’re in a real big metropolitan area, that won’t work at all. But in a lot of areas, it’s still a good starting point. But the budget has definitely gone up, Rob.

[00:12:19.120] – Robert NewmanOkay, well, that’s good to know. I think I learned something there, so thanks for sharing that, John. I appreciate it. Number three, now this I do actually know a lot about. I have this one segment that I can probably contribute to. Before we move on, I just want to tell the audience, listen, John is giving you the insider local knowledge that I don’t have because I’m not working with Facebook. We’re talking about Google or AdWords, all those things, SEO. I know a lot about those, the local search market. All those things I have lots of data on. But the Facebook, how long to run a campaign, I have stuff I could regurgitate from other marketing experts that I follow. Honestly, I think the market has changed so much in the last six months alone that all of my information is outdated. I just want to qualify that. Number three, you need to use your warm or semi-warm list on Facebook. Can you explain what you mean by that?

[00:13:16.220] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, because costs have gone up on Facebook. I think costs have gone up on Google. We’ve hit this video, we hit this numbers of times, haven’t we, Rob? Retargeting. What I mean is, if you’ve got a list of emails and names and you can import them into your Facebook advert account and you can retarget to that list and the cost is going to be considerably lower, especially in the competitive urban areas, the metropolitan areas you’re going to see. Not only do they retarget to those, they retarget to people that are similar to the list that you import. If your list that you’ve built up is geo-focused, and over the last few years, because of government intervention and other factors, your ability to geo-target, utilizing Facebook, has diminished greatly. But if your list that you’re importing is geo-focused, they will take that list and they will retarget to similar people. Like I said, and we’re going to repeat myself, if that list is heavily geo-focused, the people that they target to some extent are going to be geo-focused. Is that making sense, Rob?

[00:14:53.890] – Robert NewmanYes. I want to.

[00:14:55.640] – Jonathan DenwoodAdd- You’re a hesitant. I can sense a feeling of hesitance there, Rob.

[00:15:01.780] – Robert NewmanYes, but I want to add some stuff. I’m not saying, by the way, guys, there isn’t this endless series of… There’s one of the few things that I really, really, really, really, really love Facebook for still today. After all the changes, the lawsuits that they lost, the fact that I’m not really terribly fond of their upper leadership.

[00:15:27.960] – Jonathan DenwoodI can’t stand them. I think they’re awful.

[00:15:32.400] – Robert NewmanBut having said all that, there are some things that Facebook has done incredibly well that as marketers, we would be fools to not involve ourselves with. One of those things definitely revolves around the idea of doing what is called remarketing and retargeting using a Facebook pixel on a website or some other service. What that means is that once you direct somebody someplace, the advertisement that you do follows them around onto Facebook and Instagram. Now, regardless of what people say about Facebook, I’m on it for an hour to a day every day. Most people I know are in the same boat. That makes it a very, very, very popular website. The thing about having your name out in front of your audience at all times, it’s like having a billboard, except this billboard will be in a place that’s actually relevant. It doesn’t matter whether somebody’s driving the freeway or not, you’re going to be in front of your audience. So when it comes to having a list, maintaining a list, honestly, that effort that what you do with the 10,000 leads that you’ve never done anything with, it’s an incredibly important conversation. It’s not just about email.

[00:16:53.600] – Robert NewmanIt’s about can you get up in front of these people quietly and silently and put an ad in front of them that cost you almost nothing. Display advertising on these services is very inexpensive. Even click-through advertising. You’re not going to be spending as much as you probably think you’re going to be spending because not a lot of people are going to click. But that doesn’t matter so much because a lot of people already know you. So they have your contact information, they have your phone number. They may not click on your ad, but when they think real estate, you come top of mind, which is the whole point of advertising. I love Facebook for that one advertising. If you want an omnichannel approach, you need to involve Facebook and Instagram and maybe even Threads soon enough. Who knows? Okay, so that’s probably the only input I’m going to give this entire segment, if I’m honest about it. Let’s dig into… Actually, let’s go to break real quick. Ladies and gentlemen, John and I have been doing this a long time. We’re closing in on 200 solid episodes together that we’ve done the show. So for half the life of Mel Wright, I’ve been his partner.

[00:18:12.070] – Robert NewmanAnd we’ve moved into partners. I was basically a guest host for a long time. Then we moved into partnering on the show and we’ve really evolved. But if you’ve evolved with this and I know there are those of you that are out there, we keep asking for input. Email John, I’ll make this easy. You’ll actually know what? My email address is easier, but I’ll give you both. Email John at Jonathan.

[00:18:34.160] – Jonathan DenwoodI can send it to you, Rob. I’m fine with that.

[00:18:37.390] – Robert NewmanOkay, so it’s email Robert at Inbound RE:IM with feedback about the show specifically. Ideas for subjects, we’ll take them. Something you’d like to see? More guests of a certain type? Please let me know, and we’ll try to make it happen for you. We do the show for you guys as long as it relates to real estate and marketing in some way or or another. Those are the two qualifiers. Other than that, give us the idea. And with that, we’re going to be right back. We’re coming up with another three amazing reasons why real estate agents fail with Facebook ads in 2023. Stay tuned. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail right. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no-question-asked 30-day money-back guarantee. So don’t delay. Get started today. Go to mail-right. Com. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. It’s still The Mail Right Show, and it’s still me and John, and we’re still talking about Facebook ads and why agents fail with them.

[00:19:51.770] – Robert NewmanWe are on to number reason number four. If you missed the first three reasons, please check out the first 20 minutes of the show. It’s really great stuff. John is killing it today. Number four, choosing not to click the chat box connected to being in the particular category. Now, I personally think that’s a mouthful. Maybe it should just be how you work your call to action.

[00:20:10.400] – Jonathan DenwoodYou would believe that I come from the land of Shakespeare, would you?

[00:20:15.530] – Robert NewmanNo. I’m thrown. Anyway, why don’t you walk us through?

[00:20:22.200] – Jonathan DenwoodI just wanted to say one thing linked to the last point before we went for our break. It comes from a real great book, but still relevant, even I think the book was published 15 years ago, and that is The Millionaire, real estate agent by Gary Keller. It’s still the Bible, as far as I’m concerned, if you’re into getting digital leads. The language and some of the concepts are a bit dated now, but it’s still relevant. He hammers away that the money is in the database. The money is in the database. He and that’s what it still is in some ways, and we hammer, I’m sure Rob will agree, the money is in the database if you’re into digital marketing. The last point where we were talking about retargeting, being able to upload a list with the pixels still works, but obviously they had problems with iOS 14, with what Apple were about. But if you’ve got your email list and you upload it, it will retarget to similar people and the people… If you’ve marked it to those people and you’ve farmed their email list, you’re going to get a much lower rate. That’s what Gary, and let’s face it, Gary, to say he’s been successful would be the understatement of the century.

[00:21:50.440] – Jonathan DenwoodListen to somebody. You don’t have to listen to me or Rob, listen to somebody who’s an extremely effective, wealthy person. What would you say about that, Rob?

[00:22:02.480] – Robert NewmanYou already know that I have physical mentors throughout my career and I have mentors that I’ve chosen that have done a good enough job in writing books or producing content or digital content or both that I definitely have mentors that have never met me. Like Neil Patel is a mentor of mine, and he is the main one. But there’s another guy by the name of Adam White that’s helped my business probably more than any other SEO expert except for Neil. And those two guys are my mentors. So what you’re talking about is a mentor who is doing something that you are doing and do you… Of course, but that mentor can’t see specifically what you’re doing, which is why a lot of people get discouraged with the idea of a main mentor. But you know what? Any business requires experimentation. Your model is going to require experimentation. I’m going to give everybody the piece of advice I give a lot of my consultation clients. Pick a couple of territories. I would pick Van Nys and Rosita from my two territories if I was selling real estate. Get the email address and this may take some time for you to build up the budget to do this.

[00:23:07.240] – Robert NewmanYou bite it off in pieces. I’m slowly acquiring the name of every realtor in the US. It’s part of my marketing strategy. What do I do with it? I email them high-value content and I don’t ask them to buy anything. That’s what I do with it. You have to figure out all of you out there. I spend many, many thousands of dollars on producing my content every month. It’s something high value. It’s not AI, it’s not any of that. You have to get the names and numbers to all the people that are in your farm, just like always, like forever in the real estate business, you have a choice. You can knock on their door or you can digitally advertise to them, and you can send them mail, and you can have somebody else knock on their door. To be honest with you, I would do a blended media strategy and try a little bit of all those things and see which one worked for me. That’s what I would do. But that doesn’t change the fact that database is first, that you should focus onwhen you say database, just say, This is my farm.

[00:24:03.340] – Robert NewmanI own it. Nobody’s ever going to do a better job at serving it than me. Then you go out and acquire everybody’s information, then you just do something that knocks their bloody socks off in terms of, I’m going to give you this thing for free. I’m going to give you this information for free. You could start calling each one of those people or sending them an email, but instead of getting all weird and saying, I really want to talk to you. I just want to introduce myself in real. Those are all say no propositions. A say yes to that proposition is I’ve done an appraisal on your home digitally, and I’m dropping it to you by email. I spent 10 minutes on this, and I’m telling you what everybody else has sold their homes for locally, just so you know, just in case you decide to sell your home in the next 3-5 years, that would be highly valuable. That’s going to get you an email-open, establish a relationship. If you slowly did that with every single person in your market that you could get an email address to, I guarantee you, literally guarantee to you, you would own that market.

[00:25:02.270] – Robert NewmanFull stop. It would be yours. It would be your market.

[00:25:05.880] – Jonathan DenwoodGreat advice there. Now get back, choosing the click. It was part of the regulations that came in. There was concern about how minorities were being excluded and some of it was overplayed, some of it was based on fact. There’s a tick box. If you’re a certain industry, I can’t remember the list, unfortunately, but one of them is real estate. If you’re placed in average, you’re supposed to click a tick box that you’re one of these special industries and there’s restrictions on the advert and its scope. A lot of agents choose not to click the tick box. I understand why. They will find out and your account will get either suspended or you’ll lose your account. It’s not if, it’s only when. I would suggest that you don’t do that. What do you reckon, Rob? You’re silent.

[00:26:23.830] – Robert NewmanI agree.

[00:26:24.980] – Jonathan DenwoodRight.

[00:26:25.570] – Robert NewmanThere we go. Number five, agents are not… You are not using video in their adverts. Video is king. Explain that one.

[00:26:35.620] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, video, I’ve got the name. The people that you, having liked some of your comments, but you, Amaya, as marketers in the real estate industry, I’ve got their name though, they have been using a lot of video adverts. If you want to reduce the cost and have more people click your advert and for it to reach more of its attended audience at a lower cost, utilize video, just as simple as that. You’re going to get three times the amount of clicks than image with text. Text is still important, but you’re just going to get a lot more response. Also look at Instagram, other Facebook meta properties, but you’re just going to get a much better result and achieve a cost, basically. What do you reckon, Rob?

[00:27:45.590] – Robert NewmanSo video is without question, like Krista Mayshore, who is probably the number one coach or consultant who uses video funnels on Facebook, she still leverages Facebook. She’s still coaching on it and she’s still killing it. I mean, video content in general, you should be sick of hearing everybody say it. I just got off two consultation calls today, John, where I had yet another two real estate clients saying, Oh, people have been telling us to do that forever. I’m like, Well, how much content have you produced? One guy did have 10 or so videos, but over five years, and the other guy hadn’t done any. Stop letting people tell you that you should do video.

[00:28:26.510] – Jonathan DenwoodDo you know how many videos I’ve got on my WP tonic? Youtube channel?

[00:28:31.580] – Robert NewmanNo idea.

[00:28:32.650] – Jonathan DenwoodOne thousand. Do you know how many videos I’ve got on the Mailright website and channel?

[00:28:37.760] – Robert NewmanNo idea.

[00:28:38.530] – Jonathan DenwoodFour hundred. It’s been one of the major, past six months I’ve been spending a lot more attention on the Mailright YouTube channel with Adam’s help. But on the WP tonic, it’s been a slow grind, but I’ve used it as a key part of my strategy with WP Tonic and it’s paid dividends. I think if you’re going to go down the Facebook advert route and you’re really serious about it, you really got to do it with video. We got different options at mill-right. We don’t have to utilize you. It would be better if we can. But you’ve got to be realistic here, but there’s techniques and there’s services that enable you to produce video that’s still reasonably engaging. That will get results without you having to be in the video. But you should be looking at that because it will make an enormous difference to the effectiveness of your campaigns.

[00:29:54.830] – Robert NewmanTrue facts. Video technology for AI is moving in a good direction where the way I suggest to… Listen, I have always said and will continue to say that what the skill is that people need to be focusing on is becoming great storytellers and understanding what their audience wants to hear. For real estate agents, I’m simplifying this for you. It’s lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle. Lifestyle. Lifestyle. Lifestyle. Property, prices, and things like that, market reports are important, but they should be a small part of your content marketing effort, including on Facebook. Great, great, great real estate agents tie in their marketing with lifestyle elements. Great restaurants, great stadiums, distance from thing X, commute to city Y. And those are things you’re going to mention in your video that are detail-oriented, spoken from the perspective of a local. I can go on and on: schools, baseball teams, Little League, dog parks, whatever your interest is.

[00:30:49.920] – Jonathan DenwoodI’m sorry to interrupt. You must love on your… You do a lot more consultations than me. Rob’s been in the industry a lot longer than I have, but you must love people saying to me, Well, what am I going to talk about? It’s time for us bloody stuff to talk about.

[00:31:07.780] – Robert NewmanIsn’t it? I’ve trained myself to hear the question a different way, and here’s the question that I hear. When somebody says, What should I talk about? What they’re really saying is, How would I say something that people are searching for? That’s what they really are saying. And the answer to that question is shocking. I’ll give you a thing that shocks me to this very day. Five hundred people a month search for dog-friendly restaurants in Cabo San Lucas. That’s a real number. On that specific search. You don’t know until you research it, you don’t know what people are actually searching for online, and the answer might actually freaking floor you in terms of what people search for, like people who are moving to Texas, off-time search for tax rate and gun law. And you’d be like, What? The major searches. Major. So if either one of those two things is a sub-interest of yours, if you’re a card-carrying member of the NRA and you happen to live in Houston, talk about it. You will be surprised how many people will tune into that, especially since I guarantee you that many realtors are going to be scared to talk about something like gun rights because Texas is getting more liberal.

[00:32:28.240] – Robert NewmanI understand. But you know what? If you plant your flag in a field that you firmly believe in that nobody else is talking about, I promise you you’re going to get a lot of attention, and eventually that’ll lead to calls. And if you’re half a salesperson, eventually that will lead to deals. All right, so we’ve covered video. We’re down to the last one. We are into overtime here. No consistent digital follow-through. This is our bonus topic. Let’s talk about follow-through, John.

[00:32:58.220] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, they don’t know. That’s why they cut their budgets, why they give up on it. That’s why they say they get on the forum and say Facebook advertising is a load of shit, blah, blah, blah, because they probably get their leads through personal recommendation. You can’t beat personal recommendation. But if you want to expand, accelerate your business or your new to area, that will take a long time. Or if you want to expand your business, you’re going to have to look at digital marketing in 2003. The thing is, as you so well know, Rob, it’s a much lower quality. What is a lead? That one word can cause so much misinformation, so much frustration. Because if you’re trying to compare a face-to-face recommendation compared to a Facebook lead, and even that has a different quality to a Google search. A Google search has a higher quality than a Facebook lead, depending on the advert, to some extent, in my opinion. But it’s not going to compare, like I say, so you’re going to get a lot of lower quality type leads, digital leads. Well, if you have no system or follow-through, like Real Geek, Sary, Interactive, or MailRite, where it sends them follow-through email, text messaging, blah, blah, blah, and then you put them on a quality email newsletter where you spend actual energy and money.

[00:35:08.010] – Jonathan DenwoodYou’re sending them something of value and then you do the things that you suggested where you send them something individual. Because these people are at different timelines of the buying cycle. They might be three months, six months, nine months, 18 months out. You’ve got to keep in contact with them. But if you don’t understand that and you’re comparing it to face-to-face leads, as I call it, you’re going to get pissed off and frustrated pretty rapidly. I think it causes so much agro in the industry in general because people just don’t understand the fundamentals, do they?

[00:35:53.100] – Robert NewmanNo. There is a lot of movement, consistent digital follow-through. Now, this is a category I pooh-pooh on AI a lot, but there are more and more tools out there that like Pipeline ROI and many, many others where they’re figuring out very clever ways to add AI into a fairly seamless follow-up process. I don’t know why everybody’s so… There are a lot of things that you can replace a $5 an hour VA with, but I still see there being a lot more efficiencies inside the human processes. But let’s just say that you’re a starting agent and have no money, no budget at all. I think you could do some really cool things with AI. One of those things that I think you could do is manage your response 100% through AI tools, and you probably don’t need to spend years becoming an expert. You can probably spend a couple of months figuring out chat prompts, getting your email set up, creating some web hooks, figuring out what all that is, and then you have an automated response system going out to every person that you contact, whoever that is. Now, I want to be clear with everybody because the idea of automating things or the idea of programic response is not new inside marketing.

[00:37:16.880] – Robert NewmanIt has been a dream for marketers forever. It used to just be that somebody would sell you their scripts. When I was a new salesperson, they would sell you a book or their magical door knocking script where you knocked on the door and you gave script and it was the magic script and if you stuck with it or it was the magic script and the magic 12 rebuttals. And over the years, it’s always been something. The magic technique, the magic this, the magic that. Now it’s moved into we’re just going to do it for you. We’re just going to do everything for you. I can even produce a talking head just like you, Robert, that can look at your 159 videos and create an automation that connects to ChatGPT and then talks about online marketing for you. Great. I don’t want a robot doing my business. And I really that what drives most of my brand is actually the personal touches that I’ve applied to it. It’s 90 % of why people call me. I have had three appointments today. They all called to talk to me specifically. They all wanted to hear what I had to say on a subject.

[00:38:23.570] – Robert NewmanThey didn’t want to hear what AI had to say. They wanted to hear what I had to say. I really feel like follow-up is, yes, if you’re desperate, sure, put in some automated digital response tools. It should make the response dialed in, like John is saying. And it is better than nothing and you will get deals from it. Don’t misunderstand me, but you should figure out a way to involve yourself in.

[00:38:44.910] – Jonathan DenwoodThe process. I totally actually agree with you that we’re not… What I’m saying is what the problem is, if you don’t… Because of the volume and lower core… That is not the right term to use, Jonathan. Lower quality, I was going to say. It’s not lower quality, they’re just different. They’re at a different stage of purchase. I prefer that use of language. They are at different… They are further out the sales process than a personal recommendation normally. Normally, a specific type of Google search will be at a different stage of the sales journey. Facebook, not always, but normally is at a further stage of purchase, depending on the quality effort and the thought behind it. You’ve got to be aware of that. Because of that fact, you need to be able… You’re going to get a lot of leads, but they’re going to be at different stages of the sales process, so you need an initial response to them. Because if you’re getting hundreds or 50, 60, 70, and you’re also dealing with your normal workload, you will not be able to consistently touch those people at the first initial stage. That’s why you need a platform.

[00:40:12.420] – Jonathan DenwoodBut where I do agree with Rob is then the purpose of that initial is to engage in conversation and then send them things of value after initial period where you’re sending text or automated email sequence. Then they should go on a list where you’re sending them quality content until if they either respond or they unsubscribe. But then you need to be able to actually know how long they’ve been on the list. Are they still receiving your quality content? Then you should ring them up if you have their phone number and engage in a personal conversation. It’s not a one-on-other. It’s the real successful agents are the ones that know how to mix technology with the personal touch. That’s what I would say about that.

[00:41:08.920] – Robert NewmanI got you. I’m going to agree with John, and we’re going to wrap the show up as I agree with John. Here’s what I’m going to tell you.

[00:41:15.710] – Jonathan DenwoodAll of you. Can I recall that, Rob?

[00:41:17.790] – Robert NewmanWhat?

[00:41:18.390] – Jonathan DenwoodCan I recall that? I’m going to record that. I’m going to cut that video and keep it.

[00:41:22.590] – Robert NewmanIt for- All right. Here’s what I’m going to close with. You guys will hear it here first. Ai is revolutionary. It’s going to do many amazing things for us. I am not disagreeing with the broad enthusiasm for AI. I am disagreeing with a lot of the immediate applications as it relates to real estate. And I am going to say that part of what you need to remember, all of you, is that already right now, without AI, personal one-to-one communication is becoming much rarer. Not text message, voice, or video. It’s becoming a bigger and bigger deal. Guess what? Ai is only going to increase that. You really want to set yourself apart in the market. It’s funny because some of you that have been applying old-school tactics where you actually call people and you talk to them or you knock on a door, you’re going to discover that these sales strategies that have long been ineffective are going to come back into their own because it’s becoming so rare that anybody wants to engage one-to-one anymore. Ai is just increasing that problem, not decreasing it. You heard it here first on The MailRight Show. That’s a prediction of mine for the future.

[00:42:40.330] – Robert NewmanJohn, in minute 42:20 on episode number 387, I made that prediction. You remember that. Ladies and gentlemen, we really love the fact that you’ve tuned in for us. We wish that we could give all of you a big hug. This is our big virtual hug today. So for those of you that have stayed tuned for the YouTube version, thank you for watching. We really appreciate it. John, how would you like people to reach out to you should they be inclined?

[00:43:11.400] – Jonathan DenwoodI’ll just go to the mel-right. Com website. Have a look at what we got to offer, give us some feedback, and if you think it could help you, book a demo and book a chat with me or Adam, and we’d love to show you how Melwright might be able to help you. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:43:28.170] – Robert NewmanInbound, Arie-M has had its first viral campaign of 2023. It has been about Google My Business. It’s a huge topic. We’ve got calls flowing out of our calendar like I cannot believe. We introduced a new service that focuses only on hyperlocal, not on all the elements of SEO that we focus on. Honestly, the response has been astronomical. So for those of you listening to the show, if you’d like to call or email me, you can either call or email Robert@inboundrim.com, or you can email my assistant, Aubrey@inboundrim. Com. Thanks for tuning in. We really appreciate it. We’ll see you on the next show.

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Real Estate Agents Supercharge Your Email Marketing & Lead Generation in 2023Are you a real estate agent looking to supercharge your email marketing and lead generation in 2023? Then this podcast/video is for you! Learn how to use modern strategies like automated follow-ups, personalized content, and segmented lists to increase your email open rates.

Discover the most effective ways of targeting potential buyers with an online presence so that they can find you easily. Discover why focusing on customer relationships is key to success in today’s digital world.

1 – Don’t use your normal email address/domain

2 – Subject lines

3 – Email warm-up tools

4 – Positioning your brand and nurturing relationships (having a real niche will make your email marketing more effective)

5 – Increasing sales and conversions. (divide your emails into lists)

6 – Email scraping tools combined with paid social media retargeting campaigns

Show Recourses linksWarmup Inbox – https://www.warmupinbox.com/

MailShake – https://mailshake.com/

Lemwarm – https://www.lemwarm.com/

Alex Berman – https://alexberman.gumroad.com/

LeadPost – https://leadpost.com/

GetEmail – https://getemail.io/

This Week Show’s Transcript [00:00:11.770] – Jonathan DenwoodWelcome back, folks, to the Mail Right, show. This week we will discuss everything around email marketing, lead generation, and everything you need to know to make your email campaigns and getting prospects and leads more effectively. I’ve got myself and my great co-host with me, Robert Newman, and we will do a deep dive into this subject. I’m sure you’re going to find it really interesting. So, Robert, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and new viewers?

[00:00:48.750] – Robert NewmanI’d love to. So I’m the founder of Inbound Ram, Inc., Which is just an abbreviation for inbound Real Estate Marketing. We build websites and do real estate SEO campaigns.

[00:01:05.510] – Jonathan DenwoodThank you, Robert. I’m the founder of Mailwright.com, and we build great WordPress websites and provide a great CRM-based solution that gets you leads a great competitor to real geeks and similar system platforms. So, Robert, I thought we’d talk about email marketing in 2023. It’s still recognized as one of the most effective ways of marketing yourself, generally and in real estate as well. But I know. No. Well, SEO? There are a lot of general fallacies and misinformation about digital marketing in the real estate industry. But one of the areas that cause a lot of confusion is email marketing and how to do it effectively. First of all, would you agree with that broad sub-notches of what I’ve said?

[00:02:14.570] – Robert NewmanYeah, I absolutely do. I think email has been a strong way to market for almost 20 or 30 years. What is a steady, consistent, go-to fallback email as the world gets more cluttered in terms of all the marketing options, AI and video, and all this different stuff? Is it we’ve mentioned it in the last number of shows, and it’s great that we’re dedicating an entire episode to it.

[00:02:48.550] – Jonathan DenwoodThe number one I’ve got is a shortlist here. I think the number one you got to be aware of is that, obviously, Google, through Gmail, dominates this area. You don’t want your email to end up in the promotional folder because when’s the last time, folks, that you checked? Are you aware that your Gmail or your Google Workspace has a promotional folder where emails that are marked as marketing and promotional can end up? It’s not quite like your junk folder, but it’s a similar graveyard where your email will never be read. So the main thing is there’s no point in sending out email campaigns if they really end up in people’s junk mail or promotional folder. Would you agree with that, Robert?

[00:03:59.710] – Robert NewmanNot entirely, but I feel what you’re saying. I do check my promotional folder, especially the ones that come from an individual. I don’t usually click them out of promotional into my standard email inbox unless it’s like a really exceptional circumstance. But for people that I have made an impression on me, that I follow, I have moved quite a few of Brian Dean, Neil Patel, Ricky Carruth, and a handful of other people out of my promotional folder into my standard inbox. So I pay attention to what’s going there and I occasionally move stuff around. But if something gets buried in a large sequence of emails and I haven’t opened up my email in a bit, I would agree with you then, which does happen a lot. I’d say 80% of the time that’s likely that could happen.

[00:04:48.990] – Jonathan DenwoodSo let’s start off with number one on my list. Don’t use your normal email address and domain for sending out bulk email campaigns. And the way I kind of work this out in my own mind, Robert, is there’s one to one email where you’re sending a one to one message to individual. There’s what I call micro email campaigns, and I’m utilizing language that I made up, but what I mean by that is not one to one, but we’re not sending out to a large list, we’re sending out to what I call a micro list, which could be anything between 200 and maybe 500 email. And then there’s bulk mass email marketing, that can be anything over 500, and that might be thousands. And what you don’t want to do is to get your main domain, like mine is Jonathan@mailwright.com. I don’t want to get that email address and that domain blacklisted if I can avoid it, because I need that to be really clean and be able to send email to people and have a reasonable confidence that it’s going to end up in their inbox. So what do you reckon about, first of all, the three ways that I’ve subdivided email marketing one to one micro list mass, and what I’ve said about not utilizing your domain to send out hundreds of email on your normal domain.

[00:06:47.570] – Robert NewmanWell, I send out about half a million on my normal domain over the span of about a quarter to a list. And it has occasionally impacted me in the way where if Robert inbound RM is what I’m using as that email, so it’s on my prime domain under my own name. And occasionally I’ve noticed that my email goes into people’s promotional folders if they’re not expecting my email. So I agree with what you just said, saying that if you do this X can happen. I can absolutely attest to the fact that it does indeed happen that way. I don’t know whether it’s positive or negative that when I’m sending out a warm email that somebody click like, and I tell them, check your promotional folder, and then they move it over to their inbox. But I do know that that happens quite a bit, and I don’t have an overwhelmingly large case of people telling me that it hits their promotional folder. So perhaps it’s just maybe the first time I send it to an email address or something. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

[00:07:54.060] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I think it really depends where you got the email from and if you got double option on your list, people have opted in. And I think what I said is people buying lists or doing cold email, your kind of email hygiene habits, because you have been a marketer for a very long time and you know what you’re doing, the risk of you getting your main domain blacklisted on a blacklist where you’re treated as a spammer are greatly reduced because you know what you’re doing well.

[00:08:41.720] – Robert NewmanYeah, which is the following for those listening to this show, here’s what my rule is with everybody, my clients, myself, everybody that’s listening. I don’t send out low value emails. Everything that I send out is connected to either a high value blog post with an extremely small intro and I don’t sell anything via email. I am always very conscious of the fact that it could for some people be a cold door knock and nobody likes a cold door knock where they’re just getting sold something. So instead, what I always attempt to do for myself and my clients is be helpful. And it, generally speaking, works. I have not been blacklisted in the way that John’s talking about, none of my clients been blacklisted in the way that you’re talking about. So generally speaking. But there’s a differentiation between that and saying I got a million names of people that I think might be interested in my stuff and I want to send an email to everybody at that point. A lot of the advice that you’re giving is excellent advice and I’d say go to a bulk email provider and send out those emails because a lot of times you send out a million emails, you get the 200,000 people or more likely the 17 to 20,000 people that are truly interested in what you have to say.

[00:09:53.790] – Robert NewmanYou get rid of the other 990,000, whatever the number is, and you have a good list.

[00:10:01.410] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, and Roberts really put it really very clearly. That’s what I was talking about. If you’re going to buy a large niche which probably only might affect a very small element of the listeners of this podcast that are on brokerage level a large city, a region if you’re individual agent, what we’re going to discuss is probably the one one and especially the micro email when you’re sending out to smaller list size. But you got to be aware if you’re buying a larger list and your email your best not to send it from your normal domain because you don’t want that to have any problems with it. The other thing is if you’re utilizing your Gmail, you shouldn’t utilize your Gmail to send micro and definitely it’s the wrong service, they won’t allow you. But there is a gray area where you can send so many email per day. I personally wouldn’t utilize your Gmail, I would just keep your normal email and your Gmail for that kind of one to one communication, really, but that’s my stance on it. Number two, the elephant that will mark up your email as being spam and junkie is utilizing certain words in your subject lines, emails.

[00:11:54.630] – Jonathan DenwoodThe services know what normal phrasing that spammers utilize in their email, and if there’s certain patterns of wording in your subject line, that will flag it up and probably get it in the junk folder and not in the inbox of your targets. What’s your thoughts about that? Robert um.

[00:12:30.750] – Robert NewmanI’m gonna leave that one alone.

[00:12:32.680] – Jonathan DenwoodOh, yeah. Now another one is email warm up tools. And what do I mean by this? Let’s say you’ve got a Pacific campaign. You’re running through Google or Facebook, and it’s going to a Pacific landing page. And it’s for a Pacific area. It’s targeted at a Pacific Niche market or Pacific Geo area. And they come into the landing page and it might be a new property that’s up for sale. And to get more information, they got to give you their name and email. Or it could be some other lead magnet that you are giving away to get this information from the prospect. That might depending on how much you put in the budget, that is probably what I would probably call a micro or lead to a micro email campaign. So you got this list and you want to market to those people, so I wouldn’t utilize them. You need to warm up that list. And there are certain services like Milkshake warm up inbox. And what they do is they set up a network of Gmail campaigns and they break up if you import a list into it, let’s say 250 to 500 email, and then they will send out the email, but Google won’t know that you’re utilizing it will be treated like a one to one email.

[00:14:44.170] – Jonathan DenwoodAnd they give you analytics as well. But it’s pretty guaranteed that those email will go to people’s inboxes, and you can utilize that. So it’s a micro focus email campaign aimed at a niche which should result from your campaign to get people to a specific landing page. And you do this to make sure that it does go into people’s inboxes your outreach after they’re given their details to get whatever lead magnet or information that you’re offering. Does that make sense?

[00:15:28.240] – Robert NewmanRobert yeah, but I’d like to put my own spin on this anyway, so it’s been a long time since I’ve heard of Warm Up Inbox stuff, and I think the reason that it’s been so long since it’s come up is that Warm Up Inbox stuff like, I’m on Warm Up Inbox. For those listening to the show, none of you are there, but you should go there if you’re considering this. Essentially warm up. Inbox is talking about its case studies. Its case studies are both examples of very large companies sending out millions of emails cold to very large lists and how warming up the inbox on a select set of the list such as 20,000 emails, increases the chances of opening those emails in a dramatic way. My emails, without using this tool get a 17% open rate and less than a 1% spam rate. To give you an example, on one of the case studies, the spam rate was as high as 65%. Why am I pointing all this out? If most of you real estate agents are not engaged in mass email campaigns to cold or semi warm lists, you probably don’t have to worry about this.

[00:16:39.950] – Robert NewmanVery few real estate agents that I know are involved in massive email marketing campaigns to relatively cold lists. Most real estate agents, at a minimum are sending out emails to a list where at some point, somewhere, somebody signed up for something. Every once in a while you get a real estate agent that is getting extremely aggressive, targeting a neighborhood or an audience, buying the list cold and then sending out emails to them. That’s pretty rare in my experience. And if those in that very rare circumstance, you’re one of those people listening to the show right now, by all means go check out warm up inbox it’s probably worth it before you send out your first campaign.

[00:17:25.150] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I agree with you there. I’m just really kind of putting in options to people from experts that I listen to. One of the main experts that I listen to about cold email and utilizing it as a marketing tool, he’s a man called Alex Berman. I’ve read his book and followed his YouTube channel for years and he’s a pretty hardcore cold email seen as one of the leading cold email experts. And he talks about email warm up tools. But I do see where you’re coming from because the people, they’ve opted in to receive email when they hit the landing page. But on the other hand, if you send in out your email and you just don’t seem to be getting a lot of seems very low, the results you’re getting, it might pay off to look at one of these Walmart tools just to double check, because you get analytics as well that show you but you got to have the time. They’re not enormously expensive. You can pay for one of these tools month to month and it might make a difference. I’m just putting the option out there.

[00:18:54.490] – Robert NewmanNo, I agree 100% and I think I might have to give a listen to this resource. He is mentioning things that I haven’t thought of in a while, but deliverability. Like the second that you start saying, oh, I’ve got over 100,000 people that I’m trying to do deliverability to all of these tools because they’re very cheap in comparison to the idea that you’re going to have 10% extra open rate on 100,000 emails and you really want your emails opened because now you’re talking about 10,000 names. You’ve already spent all that money getting the names or acquiring them, whatever it is. And then these guys want to charge you somewhere between $30 and $150 a month. Pay it. Hands down. You pay it if you think you can get the result, but keep on my man. The original cold email king, Alex Berman is on his list, ladies and gentlemen. So he has included Alex Berman, which I think is very cool of you.

[00:19:50.590] – Jonathan DenwoodAll right, we’re going to go for our break, folks. We’ll be back in a few moments doing a big dive on email marketing. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:20:01.710] – Speaker 3Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mailwright. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay. Get started today. Go to mailwright.com.

[00:20:26.650] – Jonathan DenwoodWe’re coming back, folks, doing a bit of a dive in email marketing. It’s still one of the most effective ways to outreach when people land on the landing page or to do a search on your website. You’re utilizing Robert services, expert services around SEO, or you’re utilizing paid campaigns. You want to get them on a mailing list and then keep that relationship going.

[00:20:59.730] – Robert NewmanWell, since he’s already introduced himself slightly, Jed, this is our live podcast. Why don’t you go ahead and say hi, since you just bumped into the back of it. Sorry, guys. All right, have a good buddy.

[00:21:13.250] – Jonathan DenwoodSee you later.

[00:21:17.190] – Robert NewmanThis is the challenge of me operating my first office. I’ve never had to deal with these particular challenges where I had my staff in the actual well, previously.

[00:21:30.740] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s been your cats, isn’t it?

[00:21:32.400] – Robert NewmanRight, it’s been my cats. They’ve jumped in the podcast a couple times.

[00:21:36.250] – Jonathan DenwoodAnyway, you’re non inferior friends. Yeah. There we go, on to number four, positioning your brand, nurturing relationships. The way I see this, Robert, it’s really linked to our previous podcast where we’re saying, trying to market, when you’re getting going, getting started, you just got to take whatever leads, whatever people that are selling a home, a property, you just got to take what comes your way. But as you grow in experience a bit, the quicker you find a niche and market to it, the better. And I think you totally agree with this as well, the better its fins are going to be for you. That niche can be a certain age group, a certain type of home, a certain geo farming. There’s numerous different types of niches. But the quicker that you find your niche. And that will then help with your email marketing, because the more you can provide value, which you mentioned in the first half of the show, the more that you can offer value in your email, your newsletter, your outreach. It’s going to be easier to offer value if you have identified that niche. What do you think of that, Robert?

[00:23:14.510] – Robert NewmanI agree. I agree with that.

[00:23:19.890] – Jonathan DenwoodRight, well, we’re running a little short.

[00:23:23.330] – Robert NewmanOn time, but I can certainly jump in and expand. We’re both niche marketers. We’re talking to a niche. We’re trying to speak to the real estate industry as a whole. So when it’s like a niche for real estate, it’s going to be speaking to people in the neighborhoods or targeted five step marketing plan. My favorite leveraging of cold email right now would be in conjunction with like a multi touch marketing plan like Brian Tracy used to talk about, which is where, for those of you who may not be familiar, it’s where you take 3000 homes in a targeted area. You try to get name, email address, physical address, try to figure out all the names of everybody that lives in every home, and then you drop them a postcard and a magnet, and then you send them an email if you’ve got their email address. And then you may even have somebody go ahead and flyer their home. So physically drop something on the door. And then after you’ve done three or four touches, you place a call. You have somebody place a call to all these people, and you try to provide something of value inside that call and schedule a campaign.

[00:24:36.210] – Robert NewmanIn other words, through five targeted touches, you basically adopt an entire area and make it your own through extremely focused targeting. Which email would be one, then that would be a niche, in my opinion.

[00:24:50.270] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, that’s great. Onto number five, divide your emails into lists.

[00:24:56.530] – Robert NewmanI told you, you wanted me to skip the question. Go ahead.

[00:25:04.690] – Jonathan DenwoodHe’s giving me a bit of our time on this particular podcast. He was nice to be last week. You never know what you’re going to get with Robert. Increase sales conversion. Obviously a dubbit to PV up. Increase sales of conversions, basically. You can overdo this, but I think, like what we discussed during the show, I think you have your kind of bigger list where you send them your news monthly newsletter. You have your micro campaigns, which are linked to landing pages, and then you have your one to ones, which you could utilize a tool like Bomb Bomb, which I think we’ve had a couple of discussions about. Bomb Bomb is they’re really effective in when you might have a smaller list, but you’re utilizing you’re just sending off one or two bomb Bomb videos per day. So that’s real kind of custom email marketing. Then you have the micro list, as I call it, marketing. And then everybody goes if they show no interest, they go into a nurturing newsletter where they get a high value newsletter per month. What do you reckon about that? That’s how I kind of rationalize it.

[00:26:47.110] – Robert NewmanWell, I’m going to tackle this as I oftentimes do, backwards, forwards, on number five. The way that you’ve got it is increasing sales and conversions. Divide your emails into lists. And so instead of doing exactly a response to your handoff, I’m going to say the following dividing emails into lists is something that we do do at Inbound REM, and we have a way of doing it, which I think is valuable to mention and didn’t make it up onto your list, which is this we multivariate test a lot. Ever since I handed my email over to the head of my brand and marketing campaign team, he multivariate tests every single email drop that we do and he’s slowly dividing our list into segments. A couple of those segments are high interactivity people who open up everything that we send and then he’s starting to divide into segments where some people open up some emails based on a certain topic that we talk about, such as lead generation versus website reviews and things of that nature. So taking these, I know everybody, this is my team, there’s many people here with me today, so you’re getting to meet all of them.

[00:27:58.810] – Robert NewmanSo dividing those listen to specific segments over time, I can’t really say for sure John, that it’s going to be hugely valuable, but I definitely think that there is value in targeting your list. Like people who are interested in for real estate agents, it’s going to be people who are interested in lifestyle updates or market reports versus property information. There’s all sorts of things you can talk about as a real estate agent and I think it would be really helpful to multivariate your test your list, find out who’s interested in what, and then segment your list out so that you can start to send emails to people on subjects that they’re very interested in.

[00:28:39.770] – Jonathan DenwoodRight, thanks for that. Rob onto the last one because I think you utilize this yourself. Email scraping tools combined with paid social media retargeting campaigns. One of these tools is a tool get email basically anybody that lands on your website. It won’t provide the data for everybody, but somebody lands on you, it can identify the IP address of the person and a lot of times it can identify few magic who that person is. And so a high degree of people that visit your website can be identified even if they don’t sign in to a lead magnet of some kind. And then you can put them on a list or you can upload that list into social media and by putting a little bit of money, you can retarget them through social media, through your posts and get yourself in front of that audience again through retargeting. What do you reckon about this one?

[00:29:58.750] – Robert NewmanWell, this one you’re right. This is probably the cornerstone of one of Inbound RM’s own marketing campaigns. Scraping email addresses off our real estate, our website, our blog, which we attract in through organic traffic. There’s no doubt that the 11,592 people as of yesterday that we’ve scraped are some of our most engaged email respondents. We also acquired about 40 or 50,000 names, numbers, cold, and we’ve also gotten about another 19,000 names through our social media channels. So, in other words, they subscribe to us on Pinterest. We’ve looked up their information, we’ve acquired it and downloaded it. Believe it or not, the scraper information is absolutely, without question, the highest engagement way of us acquiring email names and them being responsive, which is crazy because we have old contacts that I uploaded. And believe it or not, these scraped email addresses are just as good as my actual Rolodex that I uploaded into these email campaigns. So people I’ve physically spoken to respond about the same as these people that got scraped off our website, which I find you could have blown me over with that information. Jonathan. So I love these strategies. I love social media retargeting combined with email scraping, because now somebody visits your website and they end up finding they’re getting emails from you, that they’re seeing you on social media.

[00:31:29.770] – Robert NewmanI feel like if you were doing an omnichannel approach with that kind of lead, that there’s a very good chance that you could convert a medium person into a warm person through sheer persistence.

[00:31:40.990] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, it could work. So, to finish off with you, have you chosen to email them directly then with a newsletter or some other content, you’ve decided not to retarget them? Or have you also combined that with a bit of social media retargeting?

[00:32:01.570] – Robert NewmanI tested retargeting, and at the time that I tested it, I don’t have the capacity to take more leads than I get organically. That’s my problem. That’s why I’m in the Philippines right now training a sales team. Jonathan, is that I literally ran out of the ability I can’t take more calls, can’t do more clients, can’t take more calls. So I had to get more salespeople before I can worry about any of this. But I’ll tell you what, when I did test the retargeting campaigns, they were splendidly effective, almost too much so. We got 5000 visits to the website in almost no time flat and did not spend that much money for that kind of traffic or interactions. So it was brilliant. And it was so brilliant, I turned it off almost immediately.

[00:32:48.150] – Jonathan DenwoodSo just to finish off, I got the impression, I think you really like the last point. I think .5, you’re okay. I think the second half of the show, I think the first half of the show and I got most of this information from reading Alex book, and also some of it I’ve done myself. I think when it came to using up warm up tools and the subject lines and the first half of the show, I got the impression that you felt for our particular audience that a lot of the things that Alex and other experts doesn’t really directly apply to our specific target audience. Really? Would I be fair about that?

[00:33:35.280] – Robert NewmanYeah, I agree with that. Subject lines is one of those universal email strategies. Subject lines are definitely something you can play with. John, I’m just going to be straight with you. I have personally gotten very tired of kitschy grabby kind of email lines. And so instead, with me, it’s just like, does something look authentic from a person that I know to be what I call an authentic marketer, where I feel like they’re going to make some effort to provide something of value to me. And it won’t be a tricky subject line that will get me to click on the email anymore. It’s usually just very direct and very plain, like, this is what’s in the email. Because I’ve done the clickbait thing too many times and wasted too much of my time. I don’t respond to it anymore. I presume that other people are the same way. So subject lines for me are just pretty plain, like, this would be more effective with your email. That’s how I’d send out the email. It’s not all that clever, and it’s not all that Ben’s playing subject Lines, I don’t know that we’ve seen a massive difference in open rates based on clever subject lines, but I’ll have to check with them.

[00:34:41.850] – Robert NewmanSo I’m a little on the fence. And the rest of what you said is absolutely true. It didn’t necessarily apply to our audience.

[00:34:48.410] – Jonathan DenwoodNo, you’ve made a good point there because Alex, I do listen to Alex, but he is a real hardcore marketer to his core. He really is a bit of an animal. And what you’ve just said is very relevant because I had mixed feelings about it myself. But he is seen, built up a tremendous YouTube channel, has been pretty successful in his own marketing agency, and has a track record, but he pushes it really far out. He’s really hardcore. And I agree with you that I have similar feelings, but it’s been a great discussion because it hopefully puts some faults in your mind about email marketing and puts some ideas into your mind. So Robert, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what your team is up to?

[00:35:57.570] – Robert NewmanFor everybody that’s listening to the show, I would love it if you go to Inboundrem.com and look under the About or Services pages to get a little synopsis of what we do here. That would be great. How about you, John? How would you like people to look you up?

[00:36:12.920] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, go to Mailhyphenwright.com, and look at what we have to offer. We’ve got a great platform, great value, and also get the freedom of WordPress. It’s a real lead-generated platform, text, email, and some other call functionality. And we love to have a. Chat with you. We’ll be back next week, either doing an interview or talking about another digital marketing strategy that will help you get the kind of results that you’re hoping for yourself and your family. We’ll see you soon, folks.

[00:36:50.620] – Robert NewmanBye bye.

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The post #385 – Mail-Right Show: Real Estate Agents Supercharge Your Email Marketing & Lead Generation in 2023 appeared first on Websites and Real Estate CRM Software | Mail-Right.

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Agents Get More Listings By Using The Ones You Already HaveReal estate agents are always looking for new listings. After all, the more properties they have to sell, the more money they can make. However, many agents overlook a valuable resource they already have – their current listings. Using the ones they already have allows agents to get more listings and grow their business.

One of the most effective ways to get more listings is to leverage the ones you already have. By staying in touch with current clients and using their listings as a way to market yourself, you can attract new clients and grow your business. This approach is particularly effective because it allows you to tap into the power of word-of-mouth marketing, which is one of the most effective forms of marketing available.

You can use your current listings in many ways to get more. For example, you can send out newsletters or emails to your current clients, letting them know about new available properties. You can also use social media to promote your listings and attract new clients. By using these and other strategies, you can leverage the power of your current listings to grow your business and attract new clients.

Instagram ReelsReal estate agents can use Instagram Reels to create engaging, short-form videos that showcase their listings and services. One feature of Instagram Reels that can help agents create unique and eye-catching content is Hyperlapse.

Hyperlapse is a time-lapse video technique that uses high-speed photography to create a video that appears to be in fast motion. With Hyperlapse, agents can create videos that showcase their properties uniquely and dynamically.

To create a Hyperlapse Instagram Reel, agents can follow these steps:

• Decide what they want to shoot before they get started.
• Open the Instagram app and access the Instagram Stories camera.
• Once the Stories camera is open, they’ll see the “Reels” option near the bottom of the screen, below the record button, and next to “Story.”
• Choose the speed: they can speed up their video up to 12x.
• Use Hyperlapse to stabilize the video automatically, making for a less shaky shot.

Agents can use Hyperlapse Instagram Reels in various ways to showcase their listings and services. For example, they can use Hyper lapse to create a fast-paced tour of a property, highlighting its best features quickly. They can also use Hyperlapse to showcase their services, such as a fast-motion video of themselves staging a property or meeting with clients.

Overall, Hyperlapse Instagram Reels can be a powerful tool for real estate agents looking to create engaging and dynamic content that showcases their listings and services. By using this feature, agents can create unique and eye-catching videos that stand out on social media and help them attract more clients.

Facebook Market and CraigslistReal estate agents seeking more listings can use Facebook Market and Craigslist to promote their current listings. Facebook Market is a free tool that allows agents to create listings for their properties and share them with their followers. It is an excellent platform for promoting properties to a local audience, and agents can use it to reach potential buyers who may not be actively searching for a new home.

Craigslist is another free platform that agents can use to promote their listings. It is one of the most visited websites in the world and is an excellent place to advertise properties for sale or rent. Agents can post their listings on Craigslist and share the link on their social media profiles to increase exposure.

When creating a listing on Facebook Market or Craigslist, it is essential to include high-quality photos and detailed property descriptions. Agents should also include information about the neighborhood, such as nearby schools, parks, and shopping centers. This information can help potential buyers better understand what it would be like to live in the area.

Agents can also advertise open houses and other events using these platforms. They can create Facebook events and share them with their followers to generate interest. They can also post about upcoming open houses on Craigslist to attract potential buyers.

In conclusion, Facebook Market and Craigslist are two powerful tools that real estate agents can use to promote their listings and generate more leads. Agents can increase exposure and attract potential buyers by creating detailed listings and sharing them on social media.

YouTube CommercialsReal estate agents can use YouTube commercials to reach a wider audience and attract more listings. YouTube commercials are essentially advertisements that play before, during, or after a selected video on YouTube. There are different ad subtypes available, including stoppable commercials and non-skippable commercials.

Skippable commercials allow viewers to skip the ad after five seconds. This format utilizes a cost-per-view (CPV) bid strategy, so the advertiser only pays when a viewer watches 30 seconds of the video or the full duration if it is shorter than 30 seconds. On the other hand, non-skippable commercials force viewers to watch the entire ad before the video they want to watch plays.

Real estate agents must carefully target their audience to create a successful YouTube commercial. They should research their market and create a commercial that speaks directly to their potential clients. For example, if an agent specializes in luxury properties, they should create a commercial that showcases the luxury lifestyle their clients can expect when working with them.

Real estate agents can also use YouTube commercials to promote market updates or other relevant information that can help attract more listings. By providing valuable information to potential clients, agents can establish themselves as experts in their field and build trust with their audience.

In summary, YouTube commercials can be an effective way for real estate agents to attract more listings. By targeting their audience carefully and providing valuable information, agents can establish themselves as experts in their field and attract more clients.

TikTok AdsReal estate agents can use TikTok Ads to promote their listings to a wider audience. TikTok Ads is a paid advertising platform that allows businesses to create ads and target specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. Here are some benefits of using Tiktok Ads for real estate agents:

• Increased visibility: TikTok Ads can help real estate agents reach a larger audience and increase the visibility of their listings. By targeting specific demographics and interests, agents can ensure that their ads are seen by people who are more likely to be interested in buying or selling a home.
• Cost-effective: TikTok Ads can be a cost-effective advertising option for real estate agents. The platform allows agents to set their own budget and only pay for the clicks or impressions their ads receive. This means that agents can control their advertising costs and ensure they get the most bang for their buck.
• Engaging content: Tiktok is a highly visual platform encouraging users to create engaging and entertaining content. Real estate agents can use this to their advantage by creating visually appealing ads that showcase their listings in an interesting and unique way.
• Easy to use: TikTok Ads is a user-friendly platform that makes it easy for real estate agents to create and manage their ads. The platform provides a variety of ad formats and targeting options, making it easy for agents to create ads that are tailored to their specific needs.

Overall, Tiktok Ads can be a valuable tool for real estate agents looking to increase the visibility of their listings and reach a wider audience. By creating engaging and visually appealing ads, agents can showcase their listings uniquely and interestingly and attract more potential buyers and sellers.

Geotagged Landing PageOne effective way for real estate agents to get more listings is by using geotagged landing pages. A geotagged landing page is a web page that is optimized for a specific location. It is designed to attract potential clients who are searching for properties in that area.

Geotagged landing pages can be used in various ways. For example, an agent can create a specific neighborhood or community landing page. This page can include information about the area, such as local schools, parks, and amenities. It can also feature listings that are currently available in that area.

Another way to use geotagged landing pages is by targeting specific keywords. For example, an agent can create a landing page that is optimized for the phrase “homes for sale in [city name].” This page can include information about the city, as well as listings that are available in that area.

One advantage of geotagged landing pages is that they can help agents to establish themselves as local experts. They can build trust and credibility with potential clients by providing valuable information about the area. This can lead to more listings and more sales.

Also, geotagged landing pages can help agents target specific audiences. For example, an agent can create a landing page that is optimized for first-time homebuyers. This page can include information about the home-buying process, as well as listings that are suitable for first-time buyers.

Overall, geotagged landing pages are a powerful tool for real estate agents who want to get more listings. By creating optimized pages for specific locations and audiences, agents can attract more potential clients and establish themselves as local experts.

How to Rank Above Everyone on GoogleReal estate agents must rank high on Google to get more listings. The higher the ranking, the more likely potential clients will find them. Here are a few tips to help real estate agents rank above everyone on Google:

1. Optimize Google My Business ProfileGoogle My Business is a free tool that helps businesses manage their online presence across Google, including search and maps. Real estate agents can optimize their Google My Business profile by:

2. Claiming and verifying their business listing

3. Adding accurate and complete information about their business, including their address, phone number, website, and hours of operation
4. Uploading high-quality photos of their business and properties
5. Encouraging clients to leave reviews

Real estate agents can increase their visibility in local search results by optimizing their Google My Business profile and improving their chances of ranking higher on Google.

1. Create High-Quality ContentCreating high-quality content is key to ranking higher on Google. Real estate agents can create content that is relevant and useful to their target audience, such as:

2. Blog posts about local real estate market trends

3. Videos showcasing properties and neighborhoods
4. Infographics about the home buying and selling process

By creating high-quality content, real estate agents can establish themselves as experts in their field and attract more website traffic.

1. Build Quality BacklinksBacklinks are links from other websites to a real estate agent’s website. The more high-quality backlinks a website has, the more likely it is to rank higher on Google. Real estate agents can build quality backlinks by:

2. Guest posting on relevant industry blogs

3. Participating in local business directories
4. Partnering with other businesses in the community
5. Creating shareable content that other websites will want to link to

By building quality backlinks, real estate agents can improve their website’s domain authority and increase their chances of ranking higher on Google.

Real estate agents can rank above everyone on Google by optimizing their Google My Business profile, creating high-quality content, and building quality backlinks. By following these tips, real estate agents can increase their visibility online and attract more potential clients to their businesses.

Add a Pros and Cons TableOne way to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of using your current listings to get more listings is to create a pros and cons table. Here are some potential pros and cons to consider:

| Pros | Cons | | --- | --- | | You already have a relationship with the homeowner | The homeowner may not be interested in selling | | You have access to the property and can easily show it to potential buyers | You may need to invest time and money to prepare the property for sale | | You can use the current listing as a marketing tool to attract new clients | You may need to negotiate your commission with the homeowner | | You can leverage your knowledge of the property to provide potential buyers with valuable information | You may face competition from other agents who are also interested in listing the property | | You can potentially earn a double commission if you represent both the buyer and the seller | You may need to balance the interests of the buyer and the seller |

Of course, these are just a few examples of potential pros and cons. The benefits and drawbacks of using your current listings to get more will depend on various factors, including your relationship with the homeowner, the condition of the property, and the level of competition in your local real estate market.

If you decide to pursue this strategy, it’s important to approach the homeowner with a clear and compelling pitch. Be prepared to explain why you believe listing their property will benefit them and you. Additionally, be sure to communicate your commission structure clearly and transparently to avoid any misunderstandings or conflicts down the line.

Ultimately, using your current listings to get more listings can be a powerful way to grow your real estate business. You can attract new clients and earn more commissions over time by leveraging your existing relationships and local market knowledge. However, it’s important to carefully weigh the potential benefits and drawbacks before deciding whether this strategy is right for you.

Top TakeawaysReal estate agents looking to get more listings can benefit from using the ones they already have. Here are some top takeaways to consider:

• Stay in touch with past clients. Maintaining relationships with past clients, even after completing a transaction is important. Keep in touch with them through regular follow-ups, newsletters, and holiday cards. This will help keep you in mind when they or someone they know is ready to buy or sell a property.
• Leverage your network. Your network can be a powerful tool for generating new listings. Reach out to friends, family, and colleagues to let them know that you’re looking for new business. Consider offering referral incentives, such as a discount on commission or a gift card.
• Use social media to your advantage. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram can be great tools for reaching potential clients. Share your listings on your social media profiles and consider running targeted ads to reach a wider audience.
• Partner with other professionals. Partnering with other professionals in related industries, such as mortgage brokers or home stagers, can help you generate new business. These professionals may be able to refer clients to you or collaborate with you on marketing efforts.
• Attend networking events. Attending networking events can help you expand your professional network and generate new business. Look for events in your local area and consider joining industry associations to connect with other real estate professionals.

By following these top takeaways, real estate agents can increase their chances of getting more listings and growing their real estate business.

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The post 4 Ways to Get More Real Estate Listings with Your Listings appeared first on Websites and Real Estate CRM Software | Mail-Right.

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Effective Real Estate Digital Lead Nurturing Strategies That Work in 2023Are you a real estate professional looking to stay ahead of the competition?

Learn how to effectively nurture and capture leads in 2023 with digital strategies that really work. This podcast episode covers everything from setting up an automated response system, leveraging email campaigns, and optimizing websites for lead generation.

You’ll learn tactics that will help you generate more leads and increase your bottom line. Get ready to take your business to the next level – watch this video now and unlock the secrets of effective real estate digital lead nurturing!

1 – Planed Digital Content (you need a real plan of action) Omnipresence Marketing

Are you that agent that everybody sees online everywhere connected to the agent’s local marketing?

2 – Social Media With Paid Nurturing (you need to support your social media outreach with money)

3 – Email – weekly or Monthly with real-value content

4 – Google Displayed Adverts ( they’re very cheap compared to over forms of online adverts )

5 – Monthly Webinars

Top Real Estate Branding Ideas and Examples For Agents

————————————–

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

Episode Full Transcript [00:00:00.000] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail Right Show. Today, we will talk about effective real estate digital lead nurturing strategies that will work in 2023. That’s a hell of a mouthful that we came up with. But here’s what you can also know about the show. We’ve done this 384 times. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, the show number for tonight is 384. That’s just absolutely confounding.

[00:00:42.140] – Jonathan DenwoodBonkers.

[00:00:43.270] – Robert NewmanIt’s bonkers. It’s absolutely bonkers. And I’ve been doing this for about 160 of those times with John. So that’s bonkers to me, too, for that matter.

[00:00:56.430] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s amazing that you could put up with the 480 out the sides, really, right?

[00:01:02.130] – Robert NewmanOr vice versa. It’s amazing both ways.

[00:01:06.130] – Jonathan DenwoodYou’re more rational than me.

[00:01:10.130] – Robert NewmanI won’t argue with that. But I’m going to say this; it’s been a true delight, pleasure, and honor to do all these.

[00:01:19.240] – Jonathan DenwoodSometimes you wanted to kill me, really, didn’t you?

[00:01:23.280] – Robert NewmanWell, any good relationships like that. If you’re not making the other person want to pull their hair out, you’re not really doing it right.

[00:01:29.460] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, you got some hair to pull out.

[00:01:31.360] – Robert NewmanI haven’t. Right. So you’re automatically ahead of me. I can’t do the same thing because you have nothing to pull out.

[00:01:38.650] – Jonathan DenwoodI’ve got a little bit left. It’s getting a little bit thin now, but.

[00:01:41.440] – Robert NewmanStill got some left. Make up your mind. First you say you’ve got no hair, then you say you’ve got a little bit left.

[00:01:46.960] – Jonathan DenwoodI haven’t got as much as you have, so there we go.

[00:01:51.580] – Robert NewmanAll right. So before we jump into the show, ladies and gentlemen, John and I always do these shows the same way. We sit here and talk about ways to get a hold of us, and so on and so forth. So I’m going to… Every once in a while, I like to mix it up. So I’m going to mix it up this show. John is an incredible WordPress guy. He’s got another podcast, WP-Tonic, that is a leader in the field. It was one of the reasons that when I did my research initially that I decided that I wanted to partner with John on the podcast in the first place is that he obviously knew how to build up a successful audience. To dig into a topic, draw people in, and keep them there. If you haven’t already seen that other show, go to it. If you want to reach out to John, you can do so on his website, mail hyphen right, and he will give you a website or an email address if he wants. But here’s the thing. John’s making a WordPress website. He’s making CRM. He has lots of experience building these tools.

[00:02:50.090] – Robert NewmanHe’s done a good job of it. He competes with services like Reelgeeks and other companies. He’s got a slightly more competitive price point and a much more competitive mindset because he’s still building his service. So if you’re looking for something like that, how would you like people to get in touch with you and have that discussion, Jon?

[00:03:10.170] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks for the intro. Really, that was fabulous. Well, just go to Mel hyphen Wright. Com and book a demo with me or Adam, my co founder. And we’d love to help you out or have a chat, give you some advice. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:03:26.700] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. And for those of you who don’t know or do know who I am, you can learn a hell of a lot more about me at Inbound R AM. Com. I’m a real estate SEO guy, an inbound marketer, a storyteller, and I believe strongly in the power of drawing people into you as opposed to pushing them in a particular place. And I talk a lot about that on my website. Give out tons. Actually, I give out a million dollars worth of free information on my site. No joke. So go check it out. Now, without any further ado, we are going to talk about real estate digital lead nurturing strategies that we think are going to work in 2023. N umber one on the list is planned digital content. I think I know what the heart of this was. I think I understood what you were trying to say when you put the subject down as part of this topic. But I’d love to hear exactly what you meant. What do you mean when you say planned digital content?

[00:04:33.010] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, it’s linked to the concept that we’ve discussed omnipresence marketing. That’s a mouthful, isn’t it, Rob? It’s been everywhere in your local market online, in person, and also online. When people… The buyer’s journey is returning to a more normal span timeline. Most of the leads you generate digitally aren’t going to become a commission cheque straight away because that time span, a lot of the people that are going to be approaching you are not at the present moment looking to buy, but in the next 6 to 12 months they’re going to be. So it’s important that you keep yourself in front of them. So when it and you prove that you’re the knowledge expert, that you’re not a commodity, that you actually have something to bring to the table. And that’s why what you offer, Robert, in your team is about helping agents prove that they got something to bring to the table. But you’ve got to keep yourself in front of that audience. And that’s why you need a plan of action. So you are omnipresence online is there. You’re in front of that audience. So when they are ready to hire a real estate professional, you’re that person.

[00:06:15.420] – Robert NewmanDon’t disagree. The way that I read this planned digital content, so I’m going to take this in a slightly different direction. And this is just a matter of interpretation. It’s not what John meant. He just told us what he meant. But the way that I read it was a digital content plan, a strategy that you map out in advance. That’s how I read the subject. So the thought that I had walking into our podcast was I haven’t followed up entirely on the show that we did a couple of times ago, but John came up with a really incredible list of tools, some of which were tools to basically chop up and edit existing video content that you have and then redistribute it. So when you say planned digital content, I was thinking, It’d be really cool to do 10, maybe big pieces of media, 10 videos, that thing. But then if you could use some of those cool little tools and hacks and chop them up, you’d really then have a plan of distributing all that micro sized bite sized content in many different ways in many different places, social channels, just like you said, and drawing them back into maybe the long form piece of content.

[00:07:29.960] – Robert NewmanBecause what I’ve noticed, because I do long form, I do long form on my blog, I do long form for my clients, there’s no doubt that traffic is dropping the long form. Most of you would probably be surprised that a guy that does this for a living is going to tell you, Hey, interest and traffic drops to this. The thing about long form is that it doesn’t stop being effective. They have 10 people come and three read the whole damn thing. The three people end up being pretty sold on you and your expertise. It’s not about the high volume of numbers. It’s about getting a small handful of highly qualified people from beginning to end to an interest piece, something where you educate them on, let’s say, how to do a very specific thing. Maybe only 10 people want to know how to do that thing. Here’s the thing. All those little bite sized pieces of content that you planned, there are 10 lines in the water to draw people into that long form that are creative back in ways like Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest. You can get those little 30 second segments of a video that connects into a long form piece of content, you put them out there and have 10 different ways, 10 different little avenues to get somebody into a deeper dive.

[00:08:45.520] – Robert NewmanAnd that’s what I was thinking of when you said planned digital content. So it’s obviously not necessarily what you meant, but it plays.

[00:08:54.060] – Jonathan DenwoodVery well. No, actually, the two are combined because I totally agree with what you’ve just outlined, but I wanted to give, in my own thinking, why you want to do what you have so well outlined. And that’s the omnipresence because you got to plan it and re utilize the content you’ve produced, but you got to be consistent as well.

[00:09:28.110] – Robert NewmanBut all this whole entire subject leads us really nicely into number two on the list, which is social media with paid nurturing. And John in particular, he’s put you need to support your social media outreach with money. So once again, I’m just going to say, hey, why don’t you kick us off and explain what you were thinking when you put this on the list?

[00:09:46.450] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, apart from Twitter, but also Twitter has just done some changes that directly support what I’m just about to say. In most social media places, platforms do your native reach. If you put a post or a bit of content on Instagram, Facebook, there’s a number of platforms. Every year, the organic reach of that content is being throttled down and is linked to point one, you need omnipresence. Well, you might put organically on these social platforms as much content as you like, but every month, every six months, every year, they are frottening down how many people see that content. So you’re going to have to put a little bit of money down and also use retargeting, uploading a list of names and emails and then retargeting those people. Friending somebody that just shown some interest on your website or some content is a bit creepy, but retargeting works if you can put that in a list and then retarget your social media. But you’re going to have to put some money in, not enormous amount, but you got to put some bit of money. So all this effort that you’re putting in to your plan of action to get omnipresent marketing actually works, Robert.

[00:11:35.560] – Robert NewmanI don’t disagree. So I’ve talked about this before, maybe not on this podcast, but the best marketing, hands down, everybody hear me, is let’s just say that you acquire… I was talking to somebody recently, John, who is going to target a luxury neighborhood that has 3,000 homes. Older neighborhood, been there for a while, average home price, 1 to 10 million. But all the stops are coming out. There’s no limit on budget, no limit on what they can do. But they only are interested in those 3,000 homeowners, nobody else, don’t care about anybody else. So what are they going to do? Well, first, they’re going to do what we always talk about, blog posts, content, do YouTube videos, be useful, all that. But then they’re going to take it a step further. They’ve already acquired the 3,000 email addresses and all the information from those homeowners, which with very good information providers, you can get most of that information. Most of it is publicly available. So skip tracers have really great ways of getting information from anybody anywhere. If you’ve ever given your information to anybody publicly, you probably have had your name sold. It doesn’t matter how wealthy you are, what you’ve got going on, that’s probably true.

[00:12:54.820] – Robert NewmanSo all 3,000 of these names and numbers email addresses are going to get uploaded into every social media platform, Instagram, Facebook. And then he’s going to do retargeting and remarketing with pixels. And so the ads follow these people around along with mailers, along with YouTube videos, the blog content. So basically, there are going to be five or 10 different ways that these people are going to be advertised to. And a small handful of those people are going to probably see the email, see the mailer, go online, see the ad, and subconsciously, whether they realize it or not, the only real estate agent names that if they don’t really have one in place that they’re going to remember is going to be this guy, this team. It’s brilliant. It’s an omnistrategy, just like you’re talking about. It’s using every marketing method that there is really traditional digital. And hey, you could even back all that up by getting the phone numbers to all 3,000 homes and do an introduction campaign on top of everything else, a gift basket along with a phone call. If the money is big enough at the other end of this, it makes sense to do all that.

[00:14:06.650] – Robert NewmanMakes sense to just completely dominate and take over market 100 % and then just reap the rewards over the five or 10 year period. When you say social media with paid nurturing, you don’t have to go that deep, everybody, but you could do a YouTube video with paid advertising. Brett Wallace just did a little experiment with this and spent $150 and got 2,000 views to a video. Didn’t really get any calls, but he’s got a heck of a lot of views for 150 bucks.

[00:14:39.700] – Jonathan DenwoodI’m not talking about a huge budget here. I’m talking about $100 to $200 a month. If you’re going to put the time… The other factor, which a lot of agents don’t understand, is the amount of volume of social media that you’re going to have to churn out to actually move the needle. It’s a lot more. That’s where having a scheduler, having a platform, having a plan, and then being proactive around commenting about more time related local subjects and combining it, but you’re going to have to knock out a lot more than you think.

[00:15:33.150] – Robert NewmanAgreed. So next on our list is email. I’m in the Philippines and I’m recruiting a sales team, which is like making me relearn and request a lot of the basic sales principles that I talk about on the phone. One of the people that I follow, one of the influencers, said something interesting to me, not to me directly, just like in the span of teaching a course that I paid for, just emphasized again, 20, 30 years, ever since the advent of email, in their opinion, the most valuable thing that you can have is still an email address. And I don’t disagree with that. I think long, long term, over a five or 10 year timeline, email is still one of the most consistent, reliable forms of marketing they can do, which is why I’m happy to see that it’s number three on your list. Email, real weekly or monthly value content. So why don’t you explain what you mean by that?

[00:16:33.660] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I totally agree with what you say, but it’s also the most abused bit of marketing in the real estate industry. I mean, it is really a totally abused child of marketing. I don’t send weekly or monthly newsletter with mail write, but my other business I do. And I personally write it. I write it every week. I have a list of news topics, and then I write personally about a specific topic. And I’ve been doing that for about seven years. It’s a 1,000 person list. I do cleanse it every year, and it goes up a bit, and then I cleanse it, goes down. So it stays around 1,000. So it’s not large. But they’ve been receiving my email for almost seven, eight years now. And I know that some of my biggest clients, some of my most profitable gigs have come from that list, Robert. One of my biggest clients that spent a lot of money with me came from their outreach. But when it comes to the real estate industry, it is so abused d. You need to provide some value and you need to spend time on it, or you need to pay Robert and his team to do something like that for you.

[00:18:18.100] – Jonathan DenwoodBut it needs to be done in the right way and you need to provide consistent value. And if you do that, it will pay off.

[00:18:29.210] – Robert NewmanAgain, don’t disagree at all. Well, actually, I’m going to say this to everybody. When it comes to my clients, I’ve got my service built in tiers, John. The first tier is, let’s just build them a website, get them organic traffic, get them in front of YouTube, maybe get them ranking hyper locally, essentially get them some placement visibility on Google, right? Anywhere, any channel that makes sense. But then the second step, once there is visibility, is to install some more of the modern AI tools that are actually available that most people don’t know about, which are you can buy and install tools that will scrape traffic information and grab email addresses to people that have actually visited your website. It’s one of my favorite hacks in the world of marketing is that there are these tools that exist and you can probably collect 30 or 40 % of the traffic’s information that comes to your website and then send out emails to it. And then if you want, create further marketing redundancies because once you have the email information, you’re seeing who’s opening your emails. There’s nothing to say that you can’t create a list out of that, upload it to the social media channels that you like, and create retargeting campaigns around strictly people who’ve already engaged with your email.

[00:19:51.530] – Robert NewmanAnd so now you’ve got a truly impactful multi string advertising campaign, which, by the way, we’re going to do here at Inbound rem as soon as we actually need more clients, which we don’t. I’m in the Philippines training additional salespeople so I can do some of these things because I don’t need to right now. But for our clients, it’s a really great tool conceptually, and it’s very low cost. When you have these targeted, highly focused people that you’ve somehow pulled down and then you’re sending emails and they’re opening those emails, getting an ad in front of them and keeping it there is really not that expensive. So really effective, really inexpensive, and starts with email. Email is an important part of that. So love to see that. All right.

[00:20:44.440] – Jonathan DenwoodShall we go for a break?

[00:20:48.340] – Robert NewmanYeah, let’s do it. Sorry about that, everybody. So ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, John is going to say, Let’s do a break. I oftentimes forget, but we’re going to check out wherever you’ve seen us, wherever you found us, please do us a favor. Give us a thumbs up. Share any thoughts that you have about the show with us. Hit my contact form at inbound rm. Com. Hit his@mail hyphen write. Com, and we’ll be happy to have a conversation with you about the show. We’ll be right back.

[00:21:15.840] – Speaker 3Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need Mail. R ight. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight. Com.

[00:21:40.000] – Robert NewmanWelcome back to episode number 384. We are talking about effective real estate digital lead nurturing strategies that are going to work in 2023. We just covered number 3 on the list, which was email, weekly or monthly value content. Number 4 on the list is Google display adverts. They’re very cheap compared to many other forms of online adverts. Why don’t you explain… Yeah, take us away, Jon.

[00:22:12.450] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, it’s one of the more foldable. It’s conversion is lower than word targeting advertising on Google. I’m not going to lie, it is no shape or form as effective in lead generation. But combining it with the other things that we’ve discussed, it should be looked at, especially in a local market like your example of those 3,000 households that you’re working with a Pacific agent on, it linked to the concept of omnipresence. It’s very effective and it’s very affordable. But I think it combined with some of the other things that we said, it’s something that’s forgotten. But if it is combined with some of the other things that we’ve talked about, it’s very affordable and it can work. But just doing it on its own, I would say it probably isn’t. But I’d be interested in your thoughts, Robert.

[00:23:34.080] – Robert NewmanI’ve used Google advertising and adverts many times in many different ways, and I’ve always felt like in a specific circumstance, ads work really well. There’s never going to be a time that Google ads or adverts, whether it’s display advertising or text advertising, it couldn’t be effective. Ecommerce, real estate. I like the idea for advertising and real estate for something unusual. I dislike the idea of advertising and real estate, direct advertising, like search marketing advertising when you’re saying, I’m just going to say I’m up against everybody else that’s targeting the keyword homes for sale in Orlando, Florida as an example. I just don’t like it. So much competition, the bidding is really aggressive, the value of the traffic is diminished because you’ve got four or five other people that they can easily check out in the same keyword grouping. Now change that over to hit to to steal a little bit from John’s list here and instead say looking to learn about relocating to Orlando, I’m doing a free webinar on relocating from Canada to Florida on such and such a date and using that as a display advertising right up against the same keyword. So you’re advertising the same keyword, but your ad is incredibly different.

[00:24:53.040] – Robert NewmanAnd so now you send people to a page, you have them sign up for a free webinar, and now you get in front of the traffic that’s actually interested in learning something. If that’s what we’re using these advertisements for, I love it. Bout it all day long. And it’s much better than organic marketing because organic marketing is too slow to pivot to that strategy.

[00:25:16.080] – Jonathan DenwoodI totally agree, but I didn’t mean that actually. But you’ve put a new face there and I totally agree with what you just said. But I was linking it more about pointing the agent’s face in the in front of the target audience. You’re remarketing to them on social media and it’s just reinforcing. It’s just putting yourself in front again at a very affordable price at that target audience. But everything you’ve just said, though, I also totally agree with. It’s another way that you can utilize these display adverts.

[00:25:57.560] – Robert NewmanTrue fact. And last but not least, you got local search services, search packs, which Google separated out into its own category of advertising. So it’s actually completely separate from the entire eco sphere of other advertising products and services that they have. And it’s still a year into it being launched, it’s still the best deal available to a real estate agent in terms of price and acquisition price. You’re not going to get more than one or two deals a year because of how oversaturated it is. But seeing as how you only pay when somebody clicks on your ad or calls you, you can’t compare. Zillow doesn’t compare. Nothing compares. Every realtor in the country that has a license should be there because you get one deal a year, you’ll pay $150 acquisition price at most for that deal, and there’s no deal like that inside real estate advertising.

[00:26:55.780] – Jonathan DenwoodI don’t think still a lot of agents know about that or it’s traction. Do you think because it is Google and they’ve just been slowly rolling it out, why do you think the fact is why that hasn’t become more popular? Is it really just what you said? You get one or two deals, but it’s not enough to really move the needle a lot.

[00:27:19.000] – Robert NewmanI think it’s the complicated sign up process, really. It’s not easy. It’s not a given. You can’t just do it. Like I am saying, a license, but you have to hold the license. They check the license. It’s complicated. It’s complicated to sign up for. And then at the end of the day, somebody’s looking at how complicated it is to sign up and understanding that they’re spending all that complicated time for a method of advertising they have to pay for. I questioned it when I put my first client in. I’m like, This is a lot of hurdles to jump through so that I can pay you money. You have to be Google to pull something like this off.

[00:27:56.810] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, that was my own fault as well because we did some videos on it and I do believe in it. But it does seem a bit painful. It’s very typical of Google, isn’t it?

[00:28:10.270] – Robert NewmanVery. So last but not least on the list, and I preempted the subject, but it’s monthly webinars. I know so many people that still use this to such incredibly powerful effect. So, Jon, why don’t you share what you were thinking when you put it on the list?

[00:28:30.290] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I’d like to expand it because I think it’s the concept that we’ve pushed over the past year and a half of becoming the digital Mayor of your local market. I link it to doing a podcast where you interview movers and shakers in your local community, and then doing a monthly webinar about market conditions, proving that you’re the expert, that’s why I do the podcast. That’s why we do this podcast and why I do my other podcast, which is up. I did it this morning and we’re up to 760 shows. I’ve been doing it for eight years, Robert. God, for eight years, Robert. But the reason why I keep doing it, Robert, is I can’t directly. I do know that it has led to other people in the WordPress space sending clientele to me. For me, it’s social proof that I’m serious in the word of spray. There’s enormous amount of benefits, and that’s why I’ve continued. And I enjoy doing this podcast with you is that I think it proves that we’re legit, not so much you, because you’ve got a much longer track record. But I have been doing this podcast now for almost four years, Robert, so I think I’m reasonably serious about male riot in the business, really.

[00:30:07.180] – Jonathan DenwoodBut it proves that you’re doing the webinar. I would link it to podcasting as well. But the thing is, it’s all right suggesting all this. It’s just the time factor, isn’t it, Robert? It’s really difficult for real estate agents because it’s famine or it’s either you’re inundated or it’s famine. It’s very hard to get consistency. But if you do block up, you just need to block a bit of space to maybe do a weekly podcast and then do a monthly webinar about the subject. Block the space off unless it’s a crucial deal. Keep it blocked. And I think you’ll get benefits. What do you reckon, Robert?

[00:30:58.590] – Robert NewmanI think it’s a skill just like any other. I love the webinar format because it truly is a teacher’s format. T hat is really my whole jam with the web is that I think it’s a great space for us to educate, tell stories, compel through knowledge, compel through experience. That’s the direction I think marketing is going is gone. I love any tool that does that. Webinars are incredibly powerful. They’re like the old infomercials where you found yourself, if you’re older like me, I’m 52, I’m not going to call John out, but he probably knows what I’m talking about. But there used to be infomercials and we.

[00:31:41.620] – Jonathan DenwoodUsed to sell… I wish I was 52.

[00:31:44.540] – Robert NewmanWe used to sell… In Girls Gone Wild, we used to spend $7 million in infomercials per month. So we’re doing all this advertising. And we sold tens of thousands of DVDs. And it was really a compelling story that you were telling now. That was a really skill, not the proudest moment of my entire career. I didn’t really believe in that product. But I will say this, the storytelling format worked wonders. When you told a story and you drew people into it, you’d be amazed at how compelling that was and how many people stayed through to the end. A 30 minute commercial, really. And then they stayed through to the end and bought something from you. It’s all about how you do it, how you educate. So I love webinars. Same thing as an infomercial, really.

[00:32:34.990] – Jonathan DenwoodI think linking it, promote it through your podcast, promote it through your email list. It’s also something you can promote through social media. You can link the subject to somebody that’s really further on the sales journey. It can really generate a really a group of people that might be further on that journey and really get some really strong leads. So it’s definitely worth it. It’s just planning it out and being consistent. It takes… It’s not easy for Rob. You’ve hardly missed a session with podcast. I’ve hardly missed one. We’re very dedicated, aren’t we? A lot of people, they just don’t want… Like Einstein said, the sign of madness is you keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. But on the other hand, you’ve got to be committed and you’ve got to turn up. It’s a combination of the both, isn’t it? I feel. Yeah, I.

[00:33:54.300] – Robert NewmanFeel the same way. And I think that just depending on the webinar, the podcast, whatever it is that you’re talking about, if you take the time to understand your audience and how they’re responding, it’s going to position you very well. I’ve had the same experience, John, as I haven’t. I’ve probably acquired a couple of customers directly from the podcast, but what I have really acquired that is invaluable is a slightly more authoritative bent to my voice, the chance to have conversations with countless people that I really wanted to have countless those conversations with. And by the credit of having spoken to those people, when I mentioned that I have had conversations, it adds a lot of authority in even my sales presentations. It adds authority to my opinion about those competitors. It adds authority to it’s so So I wouldn’t say podcast directly has been responsible, but when I look at the ancillary benefits, there are many, many, many, and that’s why I continue to show up and do a million. I know we.

[00:34:55.890] – Jonathan DenwoodNeed to end it because it’s late at night for you. I just want to quickly say this. It just occurred to me when you were saying that, Robert. Agents, do you just want to be seen as a redfin? I’m not having a go. I’m not being disparaging. Do you want to be seen as a redfin agent? Or do you want to be seen as a real knowledge professional that really brings value to the table? You’ve got two choice. Either you’re going to be turned into total commodity, a redfin agent, or are you going to be seen as somebody that brings real knowledge, real value for the table? And I think you’ve got the next.

[00:35:38.490] – Robert NewmanFew years.

[00:35:39.040] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, exactly the latter. I want to.

[00:35:42.980] – Robert NewmanBe considered a real source of knowledge, help, and inspiration for agents, both new and old alike, like experienced agents and newer agents.

[00:35:54.870] – Jonathan DenwoodBut as an agent, you’re going to be totally commoditized. You’re just going to be that red thing, or you’re going to be somebody that actually brings value to your local market. And you’ve just got to display that. And the beautiful thing about displaying it, doing a webinar, doing the things we said, is that you can utilize that to market yourself effectively.

[00:36:20.800] – Robert NewmanTrue. Very, very true. Well, you called it correct. We will wrap the show up because it’s not so important that it’s early in the morning. It’s important that I have one more call to do, and I’ve got a team of people here in the Philippines now, so I don’t have the flexibility I often have with my schedule. But I’m going to say all of that and I’m going to say, John, how would you like people to… John and I always toss out their website addresses when we age the show. Sometimes it just feels like I’ve heard it a hundred times, probably because I’ve heard it 160 times. I don’t know. I did this the last time for you. Pick a method, not your website. Another way that somebody could find you. Do you have a Facebook page? Do you have an Instagram account? Yeah, join me.

[00:37:14.180] – Jonathan DenwoodIf you follow me on LinkedIn, Jonathan Denwood. I post a lot of stuff on LinkedIn. I love the platform. So if you want to follow me and see what I’m up to in my other podcast, I’m really dedicated to Word of Prayer Press. My degree was in computer programming; my Master’s was in UX design. I’m not an active developer, but I have over 15 years of experience in WordPress. But if you’re interested, follow me on LinkedIn. What about you, Robert? I’m going to.

[00:37:52.020] – Robert NewmanDo an unusual one, too. We will say today we’re going to do Instagram because I’m posting content to it for the first time. So it’s Instagram forward slash inbound rem. I post more business lifestyle stuff. I’m posting pictures of me and my team because I’m here in the Philippines, and taking shots with me. They call me Sir Robert and they all want to take pictures.

[00:38:19.470] – Jonathan DenwoodWith me. Sorry to laugh. I’m sorry to laugh, Robert. What do you think they call me, Robert? Don’t try. We want to keep the show clean.

[00:38:32.010] – Robert NewmanI don’t know.

[00:38:33.360] – Jonathan DenwoodI’ve.

[00:38:36.010] – Robert NewmanI got some interesting pictures of these young Filipino people and me, and I’m uploading them to Instagram. So go there. If you want to see what I’ve been up to, go to Instagram. That’s the platform I’ve been on.

[00:38:46.660] – Jonathan DenwoodThat’s what I will call you from now on, so Robert.

[00:38:52.340] – Robert NewmanJust great. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll catch you the next time. Thank you so much for tuning in. John and I really appreciate it. Stick around and we’ll hear you next show where you’ll hear us.

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kvCORE Pros and Cons General Review For 2023: Kunversion CRM Insights for Real Estate AgentsAgents are continuously looking for effective and user-friendly solutions to help them run their companies in the constantly changing world of real estate technology. The comprehensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform kvCORE (formerly known as Kunversion), which is designed especially for real estate agents, is one such platform that has grown in popularity in recent years. It’s crucial to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of this platform as 2023 draws closer so that agents can decide for themselves if it’s the best fit for them.

By providing various tools for agents to use, kvCORE seeks to streamline the duties involved with customer acquisition, communication, and nurturing. These features, which are all intended to assist agents in efficiently showcasing their listings and maintaining organization, include adaptable IDX websites, lead generation tools, contact management, and automated marketing campaigns. While many agents may find these features of kvCORE appealing, it’s also important to consider any potential drawbacks.

The cost and intricacy of the platform may be difficult for some real estate professionals. Additionally, users’ ability to adjust to kvCORE may be hampered by the learning curve and certain customization restrictions. It’s critical to think about how these kvCORE advantages and disadvantages can affect an agent’s performance personally and the expansion of their firm as they continue to weigh their CRM options for 2023.

Overview of KvCOREKvCORE is a thorough real estate platform created to aid real estate experts in streamlining their job procedures. From lead generation to task management to customer relationship management, it provides a wide range of tools and features that are designed to assist agents in their everyday work.

KunversionA crucial part of the KvCORE platform, Kunversion focuses primarily on lead generation and conversion. It provides a number of features to assist agents in obtaining, developing, and converting leads, including:

• Websites that display properties and collect leads through an IDX system are user-friendly.
• Landing sites, and lead capture forms are examples of lead generation technologies.
• Automated email marketing: Lead nurturing with drip campaigns and customizable emails.
• Website, landing page, and campaign performance analysis based on traffic.

Property AgentsKvCORE was created primarily to meet the requirements of real estate agents and teams. It provides features like the following that can help agents increase their productivity and efficiency:

• Automated alerts for new listings and price changes are provided for properties.
• Mobile app: Agents can manage their leads, assignments, and appointments.
• Tools for team cooperation include options for task assignment,.
• Customizable websites: Enabling agents to highlight their distinctive offerings.

CRMA robust CRM is part of the KvCORE platform, which unifies all client data and communications. Principal CRM attributes are:

• Contact management: Group and categorize contacts using personalized tags and notes.
• Tracking communications: Record all conversations to ensure none are missed.
• To stay on top of daily obligations, create tasks, assign them to others, and establish deadlines.
• Integrations: For smooth communication and scheduling, sync with popular email services.

The platform’s key features that serve real estate agents and teams are summarized in this KvCORE review. By providing lead-generating tools, a CRM tailored to the real estate industry, and useful integrations, KvCORE hopes to simplify the daily tasks of real estate professionals by 2023.

Benefits of KvcoreLead Management and GenerationKvcore provides real estate agents a complete lead generation and management system. It facilitates successful lead management for agents by automating the process of gathering new leads and offer:

• A thorough dashboard for managing leads from many sources
• Tools for automatic lead capture
• Adaptable lead assignment guidelines
• A lead nurturing strategy that uses text and email marketing

Marketing ElementsTo assist real estate brokers in promoting their offerings and services, Kvcore offers marketing solutions like:

• Listing pages that can be customized and have comprehensive property details
• Easy sharing of listings and information via social media Automated email and SMS campaigns
• Alerts about new listings and suggestions for prospective buyers

Website PersonalizationKvcore’s capacity to provide agents with a personalized, attractive website is one of its advantages. Some of its attributes are:

• A website builder that is simple to use and has configurable templates
• Searching for listings using IDX integration
• Adaptive design for desktop and mobile devices
• Choices for a custom domain and branding

Task Management and AutomationEvery day, real estate agents must handle various tasks. Kvcore’s automation and task-management tools include the following:

• Automated programs for lead nurturing
• Notifications of tasks and assignments
• Workflows that can be customized for team cooperation
• Keeping track of team members’ performance

Options for IntegrationAgents can use their chosen tools more easily within the platform thanks to Kvcore’s integrations with numerous products and services. These integrations include, among others:

• Unauthorized CRMs
• Google Analytics for monitoring website performance
• Integration using Zapier to connect to extra services
• Tools for popular email marketing

Cons of KvcoreKvcore Pricing and PlansAlthough kvCORE provides real estate agents with various features and capabilities, the price may be a considerable deterrent for some compared to RealGeeks or Sierra Interactive and other CRMs on the market, the pricing structure is very high, which may be prohibitive for agents on a tight budget.

• Initial plans cost $399 per month.
• For special pricing, teams and larger agencies must contact kvCORE.

Slope of LearningFor some people, especially inexperienced real estate brokers or people with limited technological knowledge, the abundance of tools and capabilities offered by kvCORE might be intimidating.

• takes time and effort to become comfortable with the platform
• Those looking for a simpler, more uncomplicated CRM solution could find it unsuitable.

Customer support is insufficient.Although kvCORE does provide customer service, not all users may be able to benefit from their existing capabilities. With so many options, agents may require more assistance than what is offered.

• Only available via email and chat; no phone assistance is offered
• Agents could experience longer wait times and slower response times.

Mobile App RestrictionAlthough kvCORE provides a mobile app for access on the move, it has some restrictions compared to the web platform.

• On the mobile app, some functionalities are inaccessible or have constrained functionality.
• Smaller screen sizes might not offer the greatest user experience.

Updates & Improvements for 2023For real estate agents and their CRM requirements, kvCORE had a number of changes and improvements in 2023. The improvements concentrated on making the experience more user-friendly and adding more features to aid agents in running their businesses more effectively.

The updated user interface is among the noticeable upgrades. The new layout makes navigating and organizing content easier, giving agents access to key features faster. The platform also now provides editable dashboards, enabling agents to personalize their workspace to suit their needs and tastes.

Adding the kvCORE’s marketing toolkit is another noteworthy improvement. New characteristics include:

• Email templates that have been updated with better design choices.
• New tools for publishing and monitoring social media.
• Integration with well-known third-party apps improves automation and user efficiency.

KvCORE provided advanced contact management tools to enhance the CRM capabilities further. Now, agents can:

• Use personalized tags and filters to better separate contacts.
• Create contact interaction triggers for automatic follow-up tasks.
• Bulk actions can be performed on groups of contacts to simplify database management.

Aspects of kvCORE’s lead generation have also been improved, including:

• Integration with well-known real estate listing websites enables easy lead syncing.
• Enhanced IDX website capabilities, enabling better user experience and SEO.
• Improved lead routing options ensure that leads are matched with the right agents.

In conclusion, kvCORE’s 2023 upgrades and enhancements show how the platform is still evolving, focusing on user-friendliness, cutting-edge CRM functionality, and effective lead-generating and management solutions for real estate agents.

substitutes for Kvcore

There are a few Kvcore alternatives for real estate CRM solutions that real estate agents may consider. These choices provide comparable attributes and advantages catered specifically to the requirements of real estate experts.

Alternatives to KvcoreCINCA wide range of functions, including lead generation, lead management, and marketing automation for agents and teams, are available on the comprehensive real estate platform CINC. Key elements consist of:

• Generating and nurturing leads
• Custom IDX websites Automation of marketing
• Agents’ mobile application
• Tools for CRM and reporting

CINC gives agents the tools they need to cultivate leads and create enduring bonds with their customers.

ContactuallyWith the help of the CRM platform Contactually, real estate agents may more easily maintain and expand their networks. Contactually has a number of benefits, such as:

• CRM that is relationship-focused
• Individualized aftercare coaching
• Email campaigns and templates
• Adaptable pipelines
• Adaptation to current tools

Agents can utilize Contactually to create individualized connections with their clients and keep them at the forefront of their minds.

RealtyJugglerFor real estate agents and teams searching for a straightforward solution, RealtyJuggler provides a user-friendly, straightforward CRM. RealtyJuggler’s salient attributes include:

• Lead management and tracking
• Easy-to-use interface for navigation
• Activity schedules that can be modified and drip campaigns
• Management of tasks and appointments
• Email marketing connection with MailChimp

For agents who require critical CRM functionality without the complexity of some other solutions, RealtyJuggler is an affordable option.

ChimeA comprehensive real estate platform called Chime offers capabilities for marketing automation, extensive CRM features, and more. Some of its benefits include:

• Customizable IDX landing pages and websites
• creation of leads using AI
• Automation of tasks and reminders
• Analytics and Reporting
• A mobile application providing easy access

Chime offers a complete solution to assist agents in streamlining their operations and expanding their businesses with a strong feature set.

Finally, it’s critical for real estate agents to investigate and carefully weigh the features and advantages of each CRM platform before deciding which one best meets their requirements. CINC, Contactually, RealtyJuggler, and Chime are all viable options for Kvcore substitutes.

ConclusionkvCORE is still a helpful resource in 2023 for real estate agents and teams looking for a strong and effective CRM platform. Its strong points are its user-friendly UI, automated marketing features, and effective lead-generation skills. With the help of these capabilities, real estate professionals may streamline their processes and concentrate on developing long-lasting customer connections.

But kvCORE has certain disadvantages as well. The platform may be expensive for smaller teams or individual agents, and some users may find the first learning curve to be high. Additionally, some users could find it difficult to use the platform’s limited customer care services.

It’s critical to consider the particular requirements of each real estate agent or team while weighing the benefits and drawbacks of kvCORE. When investing in kvCORE, brokers and agents should research the platform’s characteristics to see if the advantages exceed the disadvantages. Real estate agents may make sure they’re making an informed decision and choosing a CRM platform that aligns with their business objectives by doing this.

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Is The Death of Traditional Real Estate Branding Here?Are you a real estate professional wondering if traditional branding is still relevant? This show will help explain the shift in real estate marketing and explore how digital tools reshape the industry. Learn how to stay ahead of the competition and build a successful business by understanding what consumers want from their real estate agents. Discover why traditional methods may no longer be enough to succeed in today’s market and see which strategies are proving most effective.

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:10.880] – Jonathan DenwoodBack, folks, to the Mail-Right Show. This is Episode 383. It’s me, Jonathan Denwood, and my co-host, Robert Newman. I’m doing the lead this week. We will discuss a great subject that Robert did a great video on, the death of traditional real estate branding. It’s a great subject. It was a great video. It’s going to be a great discussion. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of it, let me introduce my great co-host, Robert. Robert, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?

[00:00:46.640] – Robert NewmanI’d love to. My name is Robert Newman. I founded Inbound Real Estate Marketing, better known as InboundREM. I talk about real estate marketing, SEO, inbound marketing, and real estate lead generation, and have a company that builds done-for-you marketing campaigns in those categories. Over to you, Jon.

[00:01:11.000] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mail Hyphen. You get the power of real geeks with the flexibility and branding power of WordPress with Mail Write. So go over there, look at what we have to offer, and book a demo. I’m sure you’re going to be blown away. So Robert, the death of traditional real estate branding. You could give us a quick synopsis of this video that you did recently and some of your key thoughts on the subject.

[00:01:49.900] – Robert NewmanYeah. I added this excitement, the really like, silly title to it because a day doesn’t go by, and you know this, Jon, where a realtor doesn’t call in and talk about branding. And then, when they start talking about branding, they talk about a traditional brand identity package. For those of you listening to the show that may not know what that is, that’s the letterhead, business cards, maybe throwing a sign on your car license plate, basically things that barely even move the needle in the digital age, things that are almost practically irrelevant and were almost entirely irrelevant during the pandemic. Because who is out there handing out business cards? Who is out there handing out letterhead? Who is out there doing any of that? So it got me to think that real estate branding has changed and hasn’t changed a little bit. It has changed 100 degrees. What people believe branding to be and what it actually is are two different things in my opinion. Now, you already know you’ve read the cliff notes, so I will ask you a loaded question here, John. Do you agree?

[00:03:13.940] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I totally understand where you’re coming from. I think I do. There might be a slight disagreement on the fringes, but the fundamental to noxious, which you’re trying to outline, is. But it is tricky because some traditional marketing methodologies still really work very effectively in real estate, whereas others… Business cards, I still have some, and I still hand them out at local events. It’s more habit than anything. Many young entrepreneurs and business owners don’t have them at all. So it’s a tricky strange era that we’re in, isn’t it, really, in some ways?

[00:04:03.010] – Robert NewmanVery much so. And so to go to your point about business cards, the only people that I’ve met or talked to recently are doing digital business cards, this metal card that you slap up against your phone and automatically downloads your information into somebody’s contact list. That’s what I’ve seen. I haven’t even seen traditional business cards. I have like 250 that I printed out when I started inbound rem, of which I’ve got about 50 left. And honest God, I think I’ve mostly lost the remaining 200. I think I may have handed out 25 business cards in seven years. But that’s not necessarily true of a salesperson selling real estate. But before we dive into that, I will give everybody the bullet points because I did this on a board where everybody could see it. I want to do the same thing in our podcast. So for those of you listening, here are the five points that comprise branding.

[00:05:08.800] – Jonathan DenwoodIn.

[00:05:09.390] – Robert NewmanToday’s age is in the 2020s of the modern real estate marketing era. Social proof is more important than visually based branding elements. Social proof reviews, what people say about you, what past clients say, and sold homes. Knowledge is more important than glad-handing or charisma. Proof is more important than Well, proof is just more important than word of mouth or buzz these days. That used to be the way it used to work. But I’m going to get into that a little bit. Personal brand, personal brand. This is one of the huge ones I’ve watched in real estate. Specifically, big brands have lost almost all of their cash. There are a few exceptions in specific markets, but most of the time, big brands have almost no authority anymore, and they don’t move the needle in how people choose their vendors. And this is one of my favorites because nobody ever knows what I’m talking about. A mission is more important than a mandate. Now, to go back to the beginning, John, social proof. When I talk to people about how they’re making decisions, and I talk to them, I am still making two or three sales calls a day with actual real estate agents, and I’ve been doing that for 14 years.

[00:06:53.430] – Robert NewmanAnd one of the things that really seems to have changed is that my dad, everybody I know who’s buying a home, everybody who’s buying anything, they seem to check out reviews. So my first question, before I even ask you what you think, when you go out and make a decision about, let’s just say you’re going to spend more than $100, maybe more than 200 on something, and you’re looking at a local service provider, whether that be a mechanic or a restaurant, you’re going to go eat out, you’re going to take somebody out on date, whatever it is. Jim, you’re going to sign up for do you read reviews?

[00:07:27.350] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I do. It’s a it depends on the amount of money, obviously. The more the ticket price of the purchase, probably the more research I do on that front, basically.

[00:07:47.520] – Robert NewmanOkay. So you look at social proof. When you read reviews, does it make a difference to your end decision?

[00:07:59.760] – Jonathan DenwoodThat’s easily, well, obviously, if there’s a lot of bad reviews and they seem to be reasonably sane people. Being that both of us are service providers in the business to business sector. I’m not being flippant here. There are a minority of people that are unpleasable. Whatever you do, they will find some fault in it. And there’s a very small minority that I even question their sanity. So we’ve all been there. But if the reviews or the bad reviews are there’s a consistent pattern and they seem reasonable people, yes, it would influence me. Okay.

[00:09:01.800] – Robert NewmanYou’re not alone. When I talk to people buying and selling real estate, when I talk to realtors buying and selling real estate, when I’ve designed my marketing campaigns, the clothes that I have, John, is mostly on the About page where we install Social Proof. These days, when we talk to a realtor who’s doing a lot of business out of a specific neighborhood or building, we make sure to get that sold home data on the web page to show, to start to demonstrate their expertise. And we find that it makes a very big difference in the performance of the page and registrations on the page and things of that nature. So I believe that social proof is more important than what we used to acknowledge as branding. The proof is in the pudding. And I believe, personally, and I feel like I have a lot of data to point in the direction. Now, what do you think, though? Because I feel like you’re saying, I agree, but with qualifiers.

[00:10:10.770] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, it’s just there are a lot of reviews aren’t really legitimate, are they? Depending on different platforms, utilize technology to stop orchestrated reviews. In some ways, Yelp’s policies are quite annoying when it comes to your ability to leave a review. But in some ways, you understand why their platform has got some loops that you got to jump through. So do Google, to some extent, a lot of these platforms because a lot of these reviews are semi orchestrated, aren’t they?

[00:11:01.660] – Robert NewmanVery much so. Now, 20 years ago, for those of you who are listening to the show who’ve been around that long, Century 21 was a dominant player because they had all these people in gold jackets that were on TV and all those…

[00:11:17.720] – Jonathan DenwoodDo you think I should get a gold jacket, Robert?

[00:11:20.720] – Robert NewmanI definitely think you should not, Jon. I do not think that either you or I are fitted out for the old style of branding. Do you remember back in the day, IBM had uniforms? Nobody remembers this anymore, but they did. Ibm had uniforms, Century 21 had uniforms. The big way to establish brand was to get all your people like soldiers running around in similar clothing and selling your service. And you did national advertising campaigns on radio and TV and newspapers. And that was the way that people used to do branding. That’s what a lot of Realtors still think that branding is. And I’m saying branding doesn’t work that way anymore. These days that branding is much more about informational intelligence. In other words, how can we prove that you, John, are an expert in your category of business that you say you’re good at? Let’s just say that you do do a TV ad. It’s no longer enough that you have an ad. You will not get conversions off that ad. You will get traffic back to a destination. That’s what you’ll get. You will not get your phone ringing. And I’ve done a lot of TV advertising when I was I used to work for Girls Gone Wild.

[00:12:31.410] – Robert NewmanWe did about $7 million a month, and that made our phones ring off the hook. It was other things, though, that actually got people to sign up for continuity programs. So I speak from a relative level of experience in this category. Knowledge is the new branding. That’s what this whole video is about. It’s basically how do you prove that you know what you’re talking about? Social proof is certainly one way. Video is another way, which you and I seem to talk about almost every show at this point.

[00:13:09.930] – Jonathan DenwoodIt does, doesn’t it?

[00:13:11.580] – Robert NewmanYeah, that’s another way. Demonstrating through video that you know what you’re talking about. And you know how you do that. You just put a video on a web page and start talking about what you’re good at doing. That will come across as more authoritative than a newspaper article that somebody else has written about you. Now, that is a huge, massive change. I’m not saying that a newspaper article that somebody has written about you is a bad way to advertise yourself at all. It’s a good way to advertise yourself, but it isn’t necessarily going to get you the same amount of calls that it used to. It’s not enough to get somebody to pick up the phone. What I’m suggesting here, John, is that what it would be enough to do is send somebody to a website or Google My Business page or Zillow profile and open up somebody’s mind to the idea that they’re going to research you. And they might read your bio and they might look at your reviews, and then they might also look at your past sales. And if all those things were online, they would then call you. What do you think about that?

[00:14:26.500] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I think you’re spot on. It’s the buyer’s journey. People pre qualify themselves to a much higher extent they used to. I wouldn’t say it’s totally, but depending on the price point, they do do a lot more pre research and pre qualify the vendor that they’re going to approach than they used to. And that process has only got more and more evident. And I think COVID even increased that, didn’t it? Because people just couldn’t went out there. They were at home and they were looking online, weren’t they?

[00:15:14.770] – Robert NewmanYes, definitely. Now, everything that I’ve said to you, if all of you followed our shows, so far, I haven’t said anything new. We’ve said this a few different times. Now, the last thing, the closer to this subject, it’s something that a long ass time ago, like two years ago, a couple of other branding gurus came on the show and they surprised me. I think, John, that I voted for them to be one of my top 10 shows when you and I were doing top 10 podcast. It was like this man and woman who were not husband and wife, but they were really witty and sharp and they were branding experts. T hey’re the only other people that’s ever mentioned this last line item in connection to brand. The mission is more critical than mandate. This is your extra credit. This is what everybody should be tuning into the show for. This is the gem in the content that we’re providing the thing that will really move the needle that not that many people have talked to you about. And that is, okay, so, John, let’s pretend that you have 100 great reviews online about you.

[00:16:27.140] – Robert NewmanLet’s pretend that you’ve got a pipeline of way to drive people into those reviews. People are looking at them, so on and so forth. You’ve got somehow the reading them. You’re ranking organically. You’re driving them into paid advertising. Word of mouth, one way or the other, they’re arriving there. So all of that’s in place. But the person doing the reading has a friend, a brother, an aunt, an uncle, a sister who is in the same business as the one that they’re reviewing. They’re just trying to be polite and do their due diligence. They’re saying to themselves, Well, I’m about ready to spend $10,000 or $12,000. I should probably look around and make sure I’m finding somebody good. And they look and they go, Okay, this is great reviews. The pricing is a little high, but about in line with what my cousins is. Now, in that circumstance between those two people, I would submit that most likely the cousin is still going to get the business. But there is a way for you to tip the tip, the scales in your favor, and that is the following. It is something that Gary Vee and Chuck talks about a lot and does incredibly well.

[00:17:44.680] – Robert NewmanYour personal mission, who you are as a human being and what you believe in. If you’re thinking that this is the only thing that’s going to really move the needle or sell you 100 homes, I would be the first to say no, probably not. But if you are in a very competitive market with a lot of other people doing a lot of what you’re doing and a lot of other really qualified professionals coming up against you, which happens a lot in the luxury space and to some degree in the upper middle class space as well, then what sets you each? What makes everybody different? Well, at that point, it comes down to do you have a mission or something relatable to these people? That’s what really can create a difference, such as… Christophe Chew’s mission is he sleeps on the streets with homeless people once a year, every year. He does a huge drive about it. Post the content all over his sites. He has his dogs. He has his favorite luxury causes that he supports, and he’s extremely vocal about all of them. Joyce Ray has her set also. So does Jade Mills. She supports the arts.

[00:19:01.440] – Robert NewmanChristoff does the homeless thing. And guess what? I know from talking to all three of these people, or actually not Joyce Ray, I have not heard directly, that they end up doing business with people that also support the arts, that also believe that there’s a homeless crisis in LA. It’s not coincidental, John. I think that all things being equal when you measure two incredibly competent professionals who both have great reviews and you’re looking for something that may be the deciding factor, I think its mission is going to be more important. The mission more important, critical than mandate is what is the corporate mandate? The corporate mandate from Coldwell Banker is their tag line and things like that. And to be honest, I think that most people that are in the real estate business laugh at that shit. I think the prospects laugh at it. I think the people shopping for the homes. I just did this huge… What do you think, Jon? Do you think I’m out to lunch full of bologna, don’t know what I’m talking about?

[00:20:05.500] – Jonathan DenwoodNo, not at all, Robert. But before we go for our break, I just want to comment about, which is true, a lot of people, I suppose it depends on where the market is at the moment. A lot of people, they do give themselves their home to either a relative or to a friend. And I would be totally the opposite, because employing a relative to sell your home initially might seem a good idea if it all pans out. But if it doesn’t, you’re in a really tricky situation. And it’s the same if you employed a reasonably close friend, it’s great. You want to be supportive, you want to that person, you want to be generous. But if it doesn’t pan out very well, you’re going to lose a friend. And business partnerships are totally different. I think a good business partnership can be very beneficial, but it could also be a nightmare. But it’s a totally different thing than employing a relative or a friend, because I think I would be reluctant to do it actually based on experience. I’d be happier just choosing somebody that I think is effective, that knows what they were doing, because if it doesn’t pan out, I’m going to have to get somebody else.

[00:21:45.840] – Jonathan DenwoodAnd that’s tricky if it’s a relative or friend.

[00:21:49.620] – Robert NewmanI don’t disagree with any of that you’re saying. But, John, why don’t you take us to break and we’ll be back. But I do have to tell you and everybody else listening to the show tonight that I only have the 30 minutes allotted for the show. So that’s probably 10 more minutes after we come back from break.

[00:22:03.630] – Jonathan DenwoodRight, that’s great. We’re going for a break, folks. We’ll be back in a few moments.

[00:22:08.430] – Robert NewmanDo you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need MailW rite. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight. Com. We’re coming.

[00:22:34.210] – Jonathan DenwoodBack, folks. We’ve had a big dive about this traditional real estate marketing dine or is dead. Robert said some great thoughts. We’re going to go back into it. So Robert, on we go. So what’s your next thought about this fantastic subject?

[00:22:53.640] – Robert NewmanWell, so I do want to clarify, since we have a little bit of extra time and like my original video that I did on this, John, was 23 minutes and 21 seconds. And so we’re already 20 minutes into this one. And I really said what I wanted to say about the distinction between the two. But having said that, I do want to embellish so that people can get a full scope of what traditional real estate marketing used to look like. Bus b inches, geographic farming. There’s little elements here and there of traditional real estate marketing, traditional real estate branding that still work. Geographic farming, as far as I know, has worked about the same five years ago, 10 years ago. And what that looks like, so that everybody knows, you got to spend five or six years building up a reputation with the audience that you’re sending these postcards to. There’s no trackability, nothing like digital. You don’t know if you’re getting a visit or somebody’s looked at your card a hundred times or throwing away a hundred times. You don’t know until the phone call comes in. And so geographic farming is marketing in the dark is what I like to call it.

[00:24:00.760] – Robert NewmanAnd so you don’t know for sure if you’re establishing your brand or not, which is probably why it’s one of the least popular types of marketing that there is. But it also seems to be pretty consistent from what I can gather from the people that I’ve talked to about it. So there’s that. There’s radio, which still is a thing that I’ve heard agents do. J ade Mills still advertises in the back of the opera digest. Places that she feels that really high net worth individuals spend their time, she still advertises directly and in print and does full page. The advertisements I’ve seen from her are full bios of her accomplishments as a real estate agent, along with a phone number to say, Would you like to have a consultation? That’s it. Full on, This is who I am, and she sponsors a lot of different stuff, a lot of the arts. S he is a very prolific human. If you’re enjoying the stage or a theater or opera, that’s where I’ve seen Joyce or Jade a lot. Those are traditional forms of marketing. I feel like what that does for you is it gets somebody to pick up their phone when they’re reading the magazine and Google you.

[00:25:30.550] – Robert NewmanThat’s because that’s what I did. I watched a couple of other people do the same thing. So likely, Jade Mills is in conjunction with this advertising, is getting a lot of direct traffic back to her website. That’s how it’s going to be identified. And now people are really starting to say, Let’s do the deep dive. Do I think anybody’s calling her off the back of those opera magazines? No, I really don’t. Do you have an opinion about that, John?

[00:25:58.100] – Jonathan DenwoodI’m not thinking. I’m doing it’s a branding exercise. And like all branding exercises, it’s hard to measure.

[00:26:07.440] – Robert NewmanFair enough. And my supposition here, one of the suppositions I’m going to make is, ladies and gentlemen, given the trend, all the branding that we used to do back in the day was branding in the dark. We didn’t know how many people watched our television. We were told by the Nielsen people, you’re going to be in 7 million households. Did we ever know for sure? No, we really didn’t. What I love about digital, and the reason I am a digital and the reason I am a digital market, it’s all trackable. If I spend $1,000 online, I get to see at least, did those people go anywhere? Did I get an impression? I may not get calls, but at least I know it happened. Do you understand what I’m saying? So one of the reasons I think that real estate marketing is legitimately slowly dying is as a newer generation takes up the mantle, they’re realizing some of these elements that I’m talking to you about, John. They’re realizing that marketing in the dark is a little harder to quantify your dollars spent. You just don’t know if they’re working for you or not. That’s the same problem that a lot of people have had.

[00:27:12.910] – Robert NewmanSo when you start being faced with two different types of marketing, one that has a big buzz like digital, plus it’s trackable like digital, I feel like traditional is becoming a smaller and smaller bucket, and it’s going to continue to be that way until it becomes 100 % niche. What do you think?

[00:27:32.880] – Jonathan DenwoodI totally agree with you. I just think it’s a really fascinating industry because all the data that seems, some level legitimate, is the appalling inability of most agents to keep in contact with their customer base to regularly continue any relationship. I can’t remember off my head what the figure is that most people selling the house don’t utilize the same age. And obviously, that’s down to between five and seven years before somebody buys or sells their house again. But the total lack of follow through and keeping any relationship going, which is easy to say, harder to do, but some attempt. And also a lot of people, and this can be down to totally unrealistic expectations, but it does also see that a lot of people’s actual experience of their real estate professional, a lot of them don’t have a great experience, basically. So I think there’s some fundamental problems. But if you can develop the skills, the service skills, and the internal processes, it’s going to reap rewards around having those reviews, having that relationship and reputation that I think you’ve expressed so well in the first half and in the second half, Robert.

[00:29:42.130] – Robert NewmanWell, I think we’re in a court. So for those of you listening to the show, listen, we could just keep going on and on and on about traditional branding. So here’s what my overall 10,000 foot view, probably not going to change. Traditional branding used to be enough to get you a call on a deal. It really did. See your picture on the Coke can or bus bench enough times, somebody might call you and be ready to do a deal. I really think that 98 % of the business that’s out there has gone away from that. What you should expect is that they’re going to go to someplace else and research you. Maybe they Google your name, maybe they go to a website. So the close for me, if anybody was going to say, Well, Robert, how would you do traditional branding? I’d say I’d send them someplace digital. Zillow Profile at worst, my own website at best, and probably very specifically, my About page or our landing page designed to tell a story and try to make a connection the very minute they visited that space. That’s what I would do. And then once that was established, I’d send them someplace else in the site, or then I would go for my call to action, such as, are you ready to have a consultation or carry on the discussion?

[00:31:06.390] – Robert NewmanGo down to the bottom of the website, use my calendar link. That’s how I would do it.

[00:31:13.660] – Jonathan DenwoodI think there’s just a misconception. I think obviously you’re in the content area of providing great educational content that you, with your clients and your team, you produce really quality content for their websites and attract people to the website through organic search. The thing with duck mail, we focus on paid Facebook, Google, on WordPress with our CRM and our email and text trips campaigns. But what a lot of people, I feel, don’t understand is that even if you’re utilizing paid advertising to drive traffic to that website, if they’re really serious, they’re going to look over that website. They’re going to have a good look over the website that they’ve been driven to by paid advertising. And you got to have all the things. You got to have reviews, you got to have video, you got to have a message that resonates with the audience. I think just driving them to the landing page, you’re going to, yes, get them, hopefully get their email or their phone number and you’d be able to make a call. But I think you also need some content, some branding, and some materials on your website, even if you’re mostly using paid traffic.

[00:33:03.410] – Jonathan DenwoodI think the most effective is a hybrid. But for various reasons, a lot of agents can’t. But that’s my big picture of the situation in a way. Hopefully, I’m not waffling, Robert.

[00:33:23.950] – Robert NewmanWell said as usual, a little bit. But we both waffled. So people have made it this far into the show, they know that. John, I must go. So why don’t you sign up?

[00:33:35.660] – Jonathan DenwoodYes, I’ll wrap it up.

[00:33:37.120] – Robert NewmanSign up. Yeah, sure.

[00:33:39.870] – Jonathan DenwoodRobert, what’s the best way for people to find out more about your thoughts and your insights, Robert? So if.

[00:33:47.180] – Robert NewmanAnybody is interested in learning more about me or the company that I founded, go to inboundrem. Com. Just inboundrem. Com, look at the services page or the About page. Either way, you’ll learn a lot about me and what we do.

[00:34:01.110] – Jonathan DenwoodThat’s great. And if you want to learn more about MelWright and how we give you the power of real geeks, but the branding ability and ownership that you can only get from WordPress, go over to Mel hyphenWright. Com. We’ll be back next week with a great either guest interview or another great topic. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.

[00:34:23.190] – Robert NewmanBye.

————————————–

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

————————————–

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How to Make & Edit Real Estate Videos Easily & Faster For 2023Are you a real estate agent looking to create videos faster and smarter in 2023? Look no further! In this podcast, we review the best services and apps that will help you make and edit stunning real estate videos that will capture the attention of potential buyers.

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VEED.IO is easy-to-use and allows its users to edit videos with ease. At the same time, we’ve heard all praises about their customer service. Its simple and easy UI is one of the plus points that has been helping them gain traction and position the platform as one of the leading video applications in the market.

Record: Live stream and screen record.

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Prices start from Starter $18 per month to $100

3 – Promo – https://promo.com/

Promo allows you to customize its pre-made templates – that you can use to create powerful real estate videos. All you need to do is choose videos and photos from your gallery, edit text, add a logo, resize, and you’re done.

Online Video Maker

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Video to GIF Maker

Photos to Video Maker

And more!

Prices start from $29 per month to $199 for these yearly plans, but you get 50% off the month-to-month plans,

4 – BIGVU – https://bigvu.tv/

From writing down and practicing your script to recording and editing video to rolling it out on your chosen platform, you won’t need any other video application.

Teleprompter

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Style Video

Composer

Trimmer

Share on Social Media – in one click.

Replace Green Screen

Video Landing Page

Prices start from $18 per month to $299

5 – iMovie Mac Only – https://www.apple.com/imovie/

Price – Free

6 – Adobe Premiere Rush – https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere-rush.html

Adobe Premiere Rush is a mobile and desktop video editing app that shows creativity like a pro. This amazing video editing tool allows users to shoot, create, and edit excellent and attractive videos on mobile and desktop.

Price: $9.99/month

7 – RunwayML – https://runwayml.com

Runway ML is a game-changer in the world of online video editing, leveraging the power of machine learning to revolutionize the editing experience. With its entirely online platform, Runway ML offers users the convenience of accessing the program without downloading or storing it, freeing up valuable device space. Moreover, its cloud rendering capabilities enable users to easily edit and export videos in 4K and work with files in PNG, ProRes, and other formats.

Price: $12.99 to $28 per month

8 – Vidyo.ai – https://vidyo.ai/

Make short videos from long ones instantly.

Prices start from $29.99 per month to $49.99

9 – Gling – https://www.gling.ai/

Your virtual AI video editor for Mac and Windows

Our AI will cut silences and bad takes for you so you can focus on your YouTube videos.

Price $5 per video export

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The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

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Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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 038: Good Quality Photography With Special Guest Greg McDaniels        We discuss with our special guest Greg McDaniels the importance of quality photography connected to being a successful real estate  Read more

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The post #381 – Mail-Right Show: How to Make Real Estate Videos Faster & Easier in 2023 appeared first on All-in-One Real Estate Sales & Lead Generation Solution.

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Advanced Google Business Profile Optimizations Tips For 2023Are you a real estate agent looking to optimize your Google Business Profile for 2023? This video is perfect for you! In it, we’ll show you advanced tips and tricks to ensure your profile stands out. From optimizing images and descriptions to creating attractive offers, get all the information and insights you need in this comprehensive guide. Don’t miss out – watch now to take your business profile optimization game up a notch before the new year!

1 – Nouns, verbs, modifiers

The words you use on your website are really important here.

2 – Local justifications

Reviews are king when it comes to Google and justifications.

3 – Choosing a category

You Google local business page; you can add your own services/categories.

4 – Community pages

You really need to beef up your community and services pages on your website.

5 – Geotag images

Geo Tags on your images

Geolmgr – https://www.geoimgr.com/

6 – tools you can’t ignore

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The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

WEBSITE DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT FOR REAL ESTATE AGENTS

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

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Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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 038: Good Quality Photography With Special Guest Greg McDaniels        We discuss with our special guest Greg McDaniels the importance of quality photography connected to being a successful real estate  Read more

039: Why Agents Need To Blog Regularly        Agents need to do more than blogging to get results in 2016. We discuss this during this show with our two  Read more

040: We Have Special Guest Greg McDaniels        Greg McDaniel literally began his career at his father’s knee. It would not be an exaggeration to say he has  Read more

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The post #381 – Mail-Right Show: Advanced Google Business Profile Optimizations Tips For 2023 appeared first on All-in-One Real Estate Sales & Lead Generation Solution.

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The Best Real Estate CRM for 2023: Reviews & PricingAs the real estate industry continues to evolve, it becomes increasingly important for professionals in this field to have a reliable and efficient system to help them manage their clients and transactions. This is where CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software comes into play. Having the right CRM tool in place can make all the difference between smooth operations and chaos within a real estate agency or brokerage.

But with so many options available on the market today, finding the best real estate CRM for your specific needs can be overwhelming. To ease your search, we present to you our Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Best Real Estate CRM for 2023: Expert Reviews and Pricing Analysis, an informative resource designed to guide you through everything you need to know when selecting your ideal solution from leading providers worldwide based on expert reviews and thorough pricing analysis.

When looking for a real estate CRM, it’s important to consider key features that can enhance your workflow and productivity. One such feature is lead management, which allows you to capture and track leads from various sources without missing any opportunities. Another important aspect is contact management, which facilitates easy communication with clients through emails, phone calls, or messaging platforms.

Another critical feature to look out for when selecting a CRM is integration with other tools and applications like calendars, social media platforms, or marketing software. This enables you to manage all aspects of your work within one system while reducing resource expenses on disconnected systems that don’t communicate well together.

Customization options are also essential as they enable unique functionalities specific to the agency’s needs, thereby increasing efficiency in task performance.

In conclusion, choosing the best real estate CRM requires careful consideration of targeted services being offered by information technology firms in this arena. It’s imperative always to balance pricing models against features required and budget constraints so that selection criteria align optimally with business goals for growth while minimizing the disruption caused by redundant activities already carried out independently outside its purview, otherwise leading towards redundancy affecting profitability negatively over time if not addressed quickly enough.

Real Estate CRM Comparison: Which One Offers the Best Value for Money?This article compares real estate CRM software comprehensively to help industry professionals make informed purchasing decisions. The review focuses on essential features such as lead management, marketing automation, and customer interaction tracking. The pricing analysis seeks to show which CRMs offer the best value for money based on their capabilities. Some of the top contenders include Zoho CRM, HubSpot CRM, Pipedrive, and Salesforce.

While these tools have similar functionalities at first glance, specialized aspects like integrations with MLSs or automatic data gathering may set them apart from one another.

Therefore it is important not just to weigh price tags when selecting a real estate CRM but also the trade-off between additional cost-efficient functions that will save time in the long run against limited options that work well for immediate tasks only. By reading this article’s detailed comparisons and concise verdicts after thorough reviews conducted by experts in various pertinent fields, including IT consultancy-backed research results on user satisfaction levels, etc., readers can gain insight into which option aligns best with their needs and budget.

Pricing Analysis of Popular Real Estate CRMs: Hidden CostsWhen it comes to choosing a real estate CRM, pricing analysis is an important aspect to consider. While most companies offer affordable packages with basic features, checking for hidden costs that can add up, in the long run, is critical. For instance, some platforms may charge extra fees for additional users or access to premium features such as advanced reporting or automation tools.

Another hidden cost often overlooked is training and support. Some CRMs require extensive onboarding that can take weeks or even months before you’re fully equipped with the software for daily use. This means investing additional resources into staff training and education, significantly adding to the time and money spent.

Ultimately, when doing a pricing analysis of popular real estate CRMs, it’s essential to compare upfront costs and consider any potential post-sale charges or unanticipated expenses that could arise down the road. By doing so, you’ll be able to make an informed decision based on your budget and specific needs without encountering surprises later on.

Bold LeadsNot only does BoldLeads furnish both the buyer and seller leads, it also lets you choose whether to market your product or service to consumers who will be either buying or selling. Some reviews note that the buyer leads are more successful than the seller leads, but it also holds true with most leads.

Prices start at Lite $269 | Professional $399 | Advance $649

https://boldleads.com

Real GeeksLike some of the other top real estate client relationship management systems, Real Geeks offers a full mobile-to-closing ecosystem, including a website and lead-gen tools designed to make lead capture more effective for a single real estate agent’s website. We find that Real Geeks beats out the competition as a comprehensive one-stop solution for real estate agents.

Prices are $299 monthly for one or two users, plus $25 per month for each additional user and a one-time $250 startup fee.

https://www.realgeeks.com/

KV CorekvCORE is a powerful all-in-one cloud-based customer service management platform from Inside Real Estate, an independent tech company specializing in innovative tech solutions for the real estate market. The Inside Real Estate company has 170 workers and is among the fastest-growing tech firms in the industry.

1- 2 users start at $499 per month with a 12-month commitment and an initial set-up cost of $999

https://kvcore.com/

Sierra InteractiveTo keep your business growing as you scale, you’ll want a CRM system with an integrated real estate website builder that generates leads, automatically populates them within your system, and sends you high-end lead conversion opportunities. Sierra Interactive is that unicorn, all-in-one sales ecosystem. It works as a truly robust CRM generator with first-class lead generation capabilities and ad management options.

$250 per month plus a set-up fee of $399 per month

https://www.sierrainteractive.com

ConclusionChoosing the best real estate CRM for 2023 can be tricky due to the many options available. However, Real Geeks, Bold Leads, and KV Core are three popular options. All offer powerful features with a wide range of plans and pricing points to suit any budget.

We get asked this question a lot through our podcast and YouTube video we make for the industry, and we totally understand why so many agents ask this question; all top real estates trainers like Tom Ferry or Jimmy Burgess say that if you went to be successful in the industry, you need to use CRM and we agree with this statement because when you look at the data one of the most significant facts that you see is how poor most agents are connected to following through consistently with possible new leads and also keeping in contact with their existing database, if they have a database, of past clients and people they talked to and had some relationship with see being a real estate agent is a people business.

One of the main problems connected to recommending the best CRM for a single agent or a small team is the term has, over the years, become slightly “devalued” What do you mean by this statement? Well, there are all types of CRM, from ones that include a website and are more focused on lead generation to others that learn more about client relationship management. Then you have what I call the Swiss army knife solutions that try and do everything in one package but, unfortunately, in my experience, end up doing nothing that exceptionally well.

Then you have some semi-popular real estate agent CRM platforms that were initially aimed at the more broker-level kind of set-ups that had an in-house full-time digital marketing manager but are now being sold to single agents or small teams; an example of this is KV-Core which is my humble option isn’t an excellent choice for the single or small team office.

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The post The Best Real Estate CRM for 2023: Reviews & Pricing appeared first on All-in-One Real Estate Sales & Lead Generation Solution.

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Building Relationships With Your Dream Customers Online In 2023With Special Guest Kurt Uhlir, Chief Marketing Officer Showcase IDX

Even as marketing technology advances to make following up easier, many companies of all sizes find it harder to consistently follow up with clients and prospects in a meaningful way. Why is that?
What is the difference between authority and influence? How should a company bring their customers into establishing either?

Kurt Uhlirhttps://showcaseidx.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurtuhlir/

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The Hosts of The Mail-Right ShowJonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

https://inboundrem.com

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Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:07.040] – Robert NewmanWelcome Back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail-Right podcast. We are beyond excited to have the chief marketing officer from Showcase IDX with us today. I can’t tell you how grateful we are that you made the time to visit our little corner of the internet today. So, Jon, I’m going to skip you and me for the moment because Kurt’s definitely the rock star for this particular show. So, Kurt, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to anybody who may not know who you are, who showcase IDX is, whatever.

[00:00:41.570] – Kurt UhlirYeah. Well, thanks for having me. Always blessed to be to join anybody’s tribe and get that little bit of trust you all give by letting me come on. So I work with showcase IDX. Com. So Showcase IDX. Com. For those that aren’t full in real estate, I know that’s where you all very much lay into and help with is we’re that home search. So by far, the dominant home search for individual agents. They help thousands of agents across 100-plus brokers as a team. It’s the only home search that consumers consistently choose Zillow, which is saying something. So there’s a huge benefit from the organic side, but people like to use it, which is a good thing. Myself though, I helped create three of the marketing channels that we all use today. And so when I got… I wasn’t looking to come into real estate. And so I had a fraternity brother reach out to me for some personal advice. And a couple of days later, I ended up actually joining the Showcase. And so it’s been a wild ride out of the last five years.

[00:01:39.230] – Robert NewmanOkay. Well, you can’t drop that intro and not have me ask, what are the three channels that you helped create? Because I didn’t have the time, obviously, to do the deep enough dive to figure that out. So now I’m just super curious.

[00:01:55.370] – Kurt UhlirInitially, it’s a location based marketing, location based targeting. So I was at a company called Navtech, became here technologies. And so any targeting of ads based on where the individuals are… Actually, I created some of the initial patents that Google and Apple and others and Amazon have licensed to do that targeting. And so as marketers, we all do that today and say, Hey, I just want to show these ads to people, real estate agents in the state of Georgia. So we helped. We built the data for that and all the core technology that was licensed for that initially and is now used globally. And then social media management. So I was one of the two companies that really was the enterprise plays for, we helped Facebook start their APIs for all the pages and social media management. Hootsuite would have been what each of us would have used individually with clients and things. But we were at a company called Vitor that Oracle ended up buying. And then I started one of the first influencer marketing platforms. So I mean, influencer marketing has been around for thousands of years in one form or another. But the true platforms that people go out to use, I helped start one of those.

[00:02:59.590] – Robert NewmanWell, I’m sure that you looked at that billionaire that just bought the hundred million dollar home here in LA, who is the king of influencer marketing. And you probably said, I wonder if I missed the boat slightly.

[00:03:14.610] – Kurt UhlirBut we made a lot of other people get money. So that location company is like… Some of us did okay, but investors did a lot better. But at the end of the day, it takes individuals to make technology work. So I tend to be the operations person and the person with a high end technology background. But it takes people like you all that actually use those tools because most agents, most individual businesses, either they’re not capable of it or they have other things in their business to do. It’s one thing to do the technology, it’s another thing to make something magic out of it like you all do.

[00:03:51.380] – Robert NewmanGot you. All right, well, that hell of an intro. Super excited to get into it. I don’t know what we’re getting into, but we’re going to get into it. John, why don’t you… For those of you who don’t know who John is, he is my fearless co host. He is a technologist himself. He is a long time entrepreneur. He started many different businesses, one of which happens to be in the real estate space, helping realtors out with websites and things of that nature. But for those people that may not know who you are, John, why don’t you go ahead and give your own elevator pitch real quick?

[00:04:28.260] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. It’s my birthday today, Rob.

[00:04:31.160] – Robert NewmanHappy birthday. You never tell me that. So congratulations on making it another year.

[00:04:36.250] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, it’s good. It’s true. I feel very blessed to make another year. Actually, just to correct you, actually, Rob, I’ve only run three businesses in my whole… Well, four businesses in my whole life.

[00:04:50.000] – Robert NewmanUsing the benchmark of zero, I still feel comfortable with my accreditation of the many.

[00:04:56.390] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah.

[00:04:57.110] – Robert NewmanYou would say. Most people have started zero businesses. Zero. Started four. That is still many in my book.

[00:05:04.480] – Jonathan DenwoodBut you hear these people, they’ve had loads of businesses, haven’t they? You hear some of these online. But yeah, I’ll tell you that. I’m the joint founder of Mel Wright. We build great WordPress websites, semi or full custom for real estate agents. Plus we’ve got a CRM, we do text, email marketing all on our own platform. And it’s all at a great price. And we link that with Facebook and Google paid advertising. Back over to you, Robert.

[00:05:39.440] – Robert NewmanCool. And today I’m your voice host. My name is Robert Newman. I’m a 14 year veteran of the real estate marketing industry. I’ve started a couple of tech companies of my own. Inbound rem is the only inbound marketing company that focuses on real estate in the US. And if you’re interested, you could go to inbound rm. Com and learn plenty more about me and what that company does. All right, with no further ado, we’re going to jump into it today and we’re going to talk about a component of real estate that I feel is talked about ad nauseam. But we here on this show, Kurt, haven’t had a conversation about IDX in maybe a year. So you stand alone in terms of our recent podcast episodes. I think the last time that we talked about IDX is when we had the previous CEO of IDX broker on the show, Chad, and I’m going to blank on his last name, but we had Chad on the show probably a little over a year ago, and that was our last conversation about IDX. So let’s jump into this. What would you say makes showcase IDX different from other IDX tools that are out on the market?

[00:06:47.990] – Robert NewmanLet’s start there.

[00:06:50.610] – Kurt UhlirThe main competitors, and so I separated two, is that an all in one. So part of the whole website that’s built in or an all in one like an inside real estate, or is it a standalone IDX like showcase IDX broker, iH ome F inder? And so for us, we’re the only one that’s actually part of your own website. All of the competitors, while they may have little widgets that will embed into your sites, the main search either takes place on a subdomain search. Kurt Euler. Com, or they’re going to take place in iframes. And no matter what anybody tells you, when you go look on the technical side, Google is smart enough to tell that when a subdomain or an iframe that it’s not on the same server as the rest of your site, so it treats it very different. Not that you can’t get organic traffic, but good luck ranking for most of the buying keywords with any of the competitors there because Google doesn’t give that credit to Kurt euler. Com. They’re going to give it to whoever’s hosting that subdomain website or the iframe, which is really all the competitors tend to run on.

[00:07:51.530] – Kurt UhlirThat’s different than when the all the one solution that are out there as well. We have clients like I give you the example. I think every agent could be Patrick Higgins. Patrick Higgins is a Compass agent in Nashville, Tennessee. He has Nashville Home. Guru. I didn’t even know there was a. Guru until he became a client. You go look up in Ahrefs, you go look in Sem Rush, you’ll see the numbers that he gave in the testimonial. He gets 50,000 organic visitors or more on a monthly basis from Google. And it’s not just because he dropped $100 plug in in there, but it’s what his team does with that technology. And you’re just not going to find those success stories with competitors. So that’s where I think a lot of people come. But people stay because, or a lot of agencies bring is because there’s that retention. There’s this huge drop off third party report saying… So not me, not my mom saying that we’ve got the best home search. But you look at the competitors and people go, yeah, you may get the lead, but there’s an 85 or 90 % chance that the buyer will still go to Zillow to do the home search.

[00:08:53.340] – Kurt UhlirSo you know a competitive agent is going to call your client and showcase IDX is on the opposite end of that spectrum. People actually tend to use it and come back to your site.

[00:09:03.530] – Robert NewmanCopy you. So I actually, John, give me one last second. I should have opened with this question and.

[00:09:11.710] – Jonathan DenwoodIt.

[00:09:12.740] – Robert NewmanEscaped me. So I’m going to do a follow up. And then, John, you booked this guest, so I know you reached out and did all the things. So I suspect strongly that you have your own list of things that you really are dying to ask. But one more question for me. I’m curious to know, I looked up your resume and it reads like any really strong tech digital resume would, which you don’t see inside the real estate space. Not really. There’s only a handful of people that really have a deep and solid tech background. Even when you look at the founders for real estate marketing companies, you find a couple of developers here and there like Ben, who did Sierra Interactive. You find a couple of SEO guys like me and Morgan. You find a couple of, but there are not that many true technologists here and there. You find the guys over at Plaster who were experienced technology startup guys, but they had no experience inside real estate. So you’re an experienced tech guy. What in the world got you to say yes to an IDX plug in company?

[00:10:25.190] – Kurt UhlirAnd a small IDX company as well. So I had taken 18 months off on a sabbatical after exiting an influencer marketing company and had been doing consulting for about another 18 months. And literally was now a friend and co worker, Alan Finstein, who started showcase IDX back in 2003. But it also started another real estate company called technology company called Tour Bus, which he had sold. And he reached out to me and we didn’t know each other, just fraternity brothers from different schools. And he’s like, Hey, you talked her. The intro was like, You talked your wife and letting you take a while off. That seems like a hard conversation. Can we grab coffee? I’d like to know how that conversation even gets started. He told me about showcase IDX, and he wasn’t bragging. But as I asked questions, it was clear the technology was light and day versus anything else that’s out there. I asked them, Hey, would you want me to talk to them? Because market adoption was their issue. And he introduced me to Scott Lockheart a couple of days later. And I mean, Scott Lockheart is a salt of earth, wonderful person, decades of time in real estate.

[00:11:36.630] – Kurt UhlirSo he’s got that background in real estate, as does Allen that you mentioned. And I was like, Wait a second, you already have the technology and selling it and getting people to use it as a problem, I can help with that. And so I think it was five days from conversation with Allen to me and Scott finding terms that I agreed to and joined.

[00:11:55.930] – Robert NewmanSo.

[00:11:56.670] – Kurt UhlirThat’s how I came in. Not at all looking for it whatsoever. I mean, there are some deep technology people, but it’s not who the average agent will get. I f you go talk to the gentleman who’s founded and runs Tribus, deep technology, way more technologist than I am. But he builds things for big brokerages. And it’s like that’s the average agent doesn’t just spin up and go, Hey, I want to go pick up Tribus.

[00:12:22.560] – Robert NewmanRight. Okay, interesting. Jon?

[00:12:26.320] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, it’s great. So you mentioned about this age and it’s getting nothing. You use a figure of 15,000 hits on his website. A lot more.

[00:12:35.810] – Robert Newman50.

[00:12:36.920] – Kurt UhlirIs the number. 50.

[00:12:39.330] – Jonathan DenwoodThank you. What do you think are some of the things… Because I try and put myself into the shoes of our listeners and viewers. So I try and ask questions that they’re probably wanting us to ask. So what are some of the things you think this agent is doing, utilizing showcase IDX the right way? How they’re utilizing that technology? Give a couple of examples, could you, that you feel they’re using it that gets them that type of success?

[00:13:10.980] – Kurt UhlirYeah, fundamentally he’s building community pages. You can see it if you go looking at your reports. I see Ross or anything about the pages. He builds these local community pages. So he’s in Nashville, but you can go look. I lived in Nashville for a number of years. And so there’s a suburb of Brentwood, Tennessee. He’d have a page for Brentwood, condos in Brentwood, townhomes in Brentwood, open houses in Brentwood. And he has a process that they just build those out over time. I think too many agents, they think about their website as I build it, then I’m done. Patrick didn’t take that approach. He built it, knew that people don’t generally search for addresses. They search for subdivisions, community property types and areas. He just started building those community pages that uses showcase IDX technology, but then he puts his own unique words on there. First of all, he has the page. Just having that standard operating procedure and says, Hey, look, I’m going to build two of these or five of these every week is what most agents won’t do. They either want to write a small check or a big check and be done with it as opposed to start it up and just start building these over time.

[00:14:22.240] – Kurt UhlirBecause anything in marketing, as we all know, whether it’s inbound, drip campaigns, pay per click, SEO, it takes consistency. And so refining things. And frankly, Patrick wasn’t scared. He got started. Did he do the first pages perfectly? No. Just like none of us did our first podcast perfectly. This version is probably way better than the first five that you did. And so he just keeps doing those time and time again. And there’s lots of examples of customers like that. Red Wagon team. Red Wagon team.

[00:14:53.940] – Jonathan DenwoodCom is another one, J Volanto. He now at this point, probably has thousands of those community pages, but he started by just building a couple. It’s great. Just observation. I don’t know if you agree. I think also a lot of people, they get a bit daunted by the whole concept because they’re busy with other things. So you see a lot. So these community pages, these guide pages, a lot of them are very cookie cutter and they don’t have a lot of value because they… So what are, of the successful community pages you observed, what are some of the key things that you think people really love with a good quality community page? I think for me, there’s.

[00:15:38.050] – Kurt UhlirAlways those two audiences that agencies need to be aware of. There’s the consumer, the buyer and seller, and there’s Google. The consumer is only ever going to see your page if you send it out to them unless you can make Google happy. And Google wants something different. If you did, we’ll stay with the Brentwood, Tennessee example. If I did condos in Brentwood, Tennessee, if I don’t put something unique on the page, there could be 100 agents using showcase IDX in Brentwood, and they’re all going to be the same basic list things that are available for condos there unless you do something different. And so the difference is, what would you say if I was an agent or if you were an agent and I called you and said, Why should I buy a condo or not buy a condo in Brentwood, Tennessee? Agents tend to get locked if you ask them to write that down. Go write me 300 words or 800 words about why somebody should buy a condo in Brentwood, Tennessee. They’ll freak out and they’ll find every reason for the next three months to not write something that if I just called them on the phone and said, Hey, I’ve got $300,000.

[00:16:41.390] – Kurt UhlirI want to buy a condo, they could all talk for three minutes on that. And so the successful agents, they find some way to get unstuck. In some cases, it’s writing it. I literally find that the agents that really get unlocked is they’ll leave themselves voice message and then send it to their virtual assistant, or they’ll do a voice note and then they’ll just send it to Rev. Com to transcribe it for them because every agent in an area could talk enough to get any of the content we would want to see as a marketer like we all are on those community pages. But if it doesn’t get out of the agent’s head onto the page, Google is not going to see it. But when Google sees it, they’ll rank it because that’s not something that Zillow can do. Zillow may have more listings and coverage for your area, but Zillow can’t write unique content about moving into that property type in your area or that neighborhood, and you as an agent can. And when people do that with the right technology, Google pays attention.

[00:17:40.350] – Jonathan DenwoodHi, it’s Rob.

[00:17:43.000] – Robert NewmanSo there are a lot of innovative things that K site IDX has done, things that they stand alone in interactivity with the audience, viewing properties together as a group. These are innovations that showcase IDX has put into the marketplace, have comments on a property, stuff like that. They created properties and then they made a little widget that says you can add a comment as if it was a blog post. But I think that the comment then gets sent to the person who owns the site. So instead for the website user, it’s a tricky way to increase engagement on your website using your property search tool as an engagement reducer. It is.

[00:18:31.010] – Kurt UhlirIt’s also that way of, look, no matter what site you’re on, whether Zillow or not, nobody searches for a home alone. I mean, if you’re married or you’re in a relationship, you’re searching with your partner. So you’re texting or emailing them links from Zillow or other places. If you’re single, you’re still texting your friends, Hey, I saw this place, or you’re asking your mom or your ex or something, Hey, what do you think about this place? And so that same widget allows you to invite people just into that private search on the site and choose whether or not you can actually, as a home buyer, not let the agent see that. You can turn that off in your settings. And at which point is like, No, then that’s just a private conversation between me and my wife. Or I can uncheck things and say, Hey, I want the agent who owns the site to offer feedback on this.

[00:19:17.870] – Robert NewmanOkay, we’re going to go to break, but when we come back, I’m going to see if you have… So I already personally between me and John, I was already familiar with Red Wagon team and Nashville guru. They have, one, come up in my consultations with people as websites to chase. And two, they have come up for me as an entrepreneur because we have been using IDX broker for a long time. Do you know you to some visual customizing things that I happen to really love about IDX Broker. However, I have probably looked more at showcase IDX than most of the people that you will speak to that isn’t actually a client using the tool. And I have some questions that I personally would.

[00:20:09.460] – Kurt UhlirLove to know. Awesome. I would love the feedback too. There’s things I do like about IDX brokers. If I was running an agency, there are reasons I might use them as well, too.

[00:20:17.130] – Robert NewmanSo with no further ado, we’re going to come back and do an even deeper, deeper dive than we’ve been doing. Ladies and gentlemen, stay tuned, stay buckled in. We’ll be back in a number of seconds.

[00:20:28.290] – Kurt UhlirDo you want to build quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need Mail. R ight. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight. Com.

[00:20:53.700] – Robert NewmanWelcome back to the Mail. R ight podcast, ladies and gentlemen. We are in a conversation with Kurt.

[00:20:59.730] – Robert NewmanKurt, am I saying it right when I say euler?

[00:21:02.680] – Kurt UhlirYeah, euler. You have to say it closer to the way the Czech pronunciation is, but my family says euler here.

[00:21:09.560] – Robert NewmanUler. Okay. All right, Kurt Uler. To be fair, I travel a lot, so I would normally go towards the natural language pronunciation of the word. So Kurt Uler. We’re here with Kurt Uler, who’s the chief marketing officer for showcase IDX. And I’m here with my co host as well, Jonathan, the founder of MailR ight. And of course, I’m Robert Newman, the founder of Inbound R AM. Welcome back to the show. We are here talking about showcase IDX. Now I’m about ready to ask some questions that may make most of you have their eyes glaze over, but there might be a handful of you brokers listening to the show that are curious about some of these same things. So one of the things that I’ve noticed, and it’s not your fault, I got to say this before the audience, Kurt, this isn’t a showcase IDX issue. This is a person using the website issue, which is not showcase IDX. Showcase has done a great job of providing a tool that helps realtors get traffic back to the site. Got to just massive, full disclaimer right up front. But I’ve discovered that with the kinds of pages that some of these guys are writing, that while they do occasionally elicit response, oftentimes the response is extremely low quality, false leads, things of that nature.

[00:22:34.580] – Robert NewmanI am curious to know that as the chief marketing officer, have you spoken to these customers and have you ever asked the question about ROI on these sites? I don’t doubt that there’s massive lead generation. I’m saying specifically, do these leads convert to sales?

[00:22:53.140] – Kurt UhlirI’ve asked that question. Different sites do get hit with sometimes waves of spam that come up at times. In some cases, that also just happens as you start to rank much more, you’re going to get more lower quality leads. And so some degree, if you have a site that doesn’t rank, you’re not getting very many leads. And so in my experience, pay per click leads tend to be pretty good for getting responses. They’re not always the best from converting to closed transactions, which is also the ROI that I really like to ask. And so for me, I end up looking at and asking questions about what happens to your closed transactions with using showcase IDX, whether organic or pay per click compared to others as well. And so those tend to be very good. I do say, I don’t care what you’re using, whether in your real estate or not, you need to be able to vet and pull out clients and choose the who not to work with, especially as your business starts to grow. Sure.

[00:23:48.610] – Robert NewmanSo the answer is, the case studies that you’ve talked to, they are taking some of the leads that they get, no matter how… And we’re attributing them to the website and showcase in particular particular because if most search tools, that is the primary lead driver for most agents. Not as an inbound marketing company, by the way, we get a lot of phone calls off phone numbers. But I also, since we’re using IDX broker, we get leads through IDX broker. They tend to be lower quality than the actual calls that we get. That’s why I’m asking you the question is I’m just curious to know if you’ve ever dived into that with a client. I have.

[00:24:27.900] – Kurt UhlirIt does also depend on where that traffic comes from on the page. And so those that are getting their traffic and leads from those community pages, especially where they’ve written the unique content, the quality of those leads are heckable is what I hear. The issue is sometimes, I mean, this is using technology for good and bad, you can also use the technology to also drive a ton of traffic to your home page, which is going to be generally a lower quality lead, no matter what industry you’re in. But if I go, if we stay with that Brentwood, Tennessee page, if somebody has searched for Brentwood, Tennessee or Brentwood Condos and your website shows up and I choose to click on that, there’s such a high one that’s a very buyer related keyword. But also then the trust that comes with you as that local agent over a big national brand tends to be much higher. If on the other hand, I end up getting driven to your homepage, it’s brand versus brand at that point, at least in my experience. I’ve heard a little bit of that too, but the leads on those individual community pages are quite high from a conversion perspective.

[00:25:35.430] – Kurt UhlirNow with that, I also personally, what I like and experience, I love the organic side of it where I see things then have a 10 X increase for agents is when they built the community pages with the content and they bring it in to their inbound either on the pay per click side or just their content marketing. So what happens when I meet somebody that’s out in the real world or somebody my team does, and you say you’re looking in Brentwood, we’ll stay with that example, and my follow up to you is a community page with 500 words of unique content on Brentwood, Tennessee. Now, I’ve just passed the vetting test with you that Zillow is not going to have. Most agents are not going to have because they may have a community page, but they’re not going to have anything that details those two. But it also gave the agent something to follow up with. I just say from the inbound, that’s when I see things really start to change is when the agents take the inbound upon their actual relationships. I had another agent in Florida. How many people buy vacation condos? After he started building community pages, him and his son run a site together.

[00:26:41.370] – Kurt UhlirWhen he met somebody, instead of just giving them his business card and hoping they’d follow up, he’d be like, Oh, you’re around this weekend? Hey, Robert, there’s some open houses here. So he’d bring up his site because he knew it. And he’d be like, If you just send this email to yourself, just give me your email, it’ll send you to a page where all the open houses are for condos at the beach that you like this weekend. Well, that was the first part of his process. It changed his interaction because it became… It’s a sales thing when I give you my card or I ask for your info. When instead I have that open houses that are available this weekend, you and your wife can go look at, I just gave you something then. So he was like, people almost 100 % would take his phone and enter their email address to forward the page themselves. The game changer after that was when his inbound marketer said, Did all those people sign up? And he was like, Well, not all of them. And they went, Could you just go through your sent emails on Sunday and send me the people that you met that didn’t sign up?

[00:27:43.030] – Kurt UhlirI’ll follow up with them. Those two things, it’s the content in the inbound side that changes your interaction. So you’re not a salesperson at that time. You truly are a service person at that time.

[00:27:57.030] – Robert NewmanThat is a fascinating case study. John, please remember to send me this show. I’m going to have to go back and review that. That sounds deeply fascinating to me. I might even follow up with you, Kurt. It’s been a while since somebody has made me sit here and think, if I want to change the consultations that I give, the strategies that I apply to my business. Usually, I’m a little bit out in front of the pack because doing information marketing and trying to inspire response is very different than doing push marketing or trying to send somebody into a landing page and then grab their email address, usually through hiding something or telling them that they have to register, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, fascinating. Jon?

[00:28:46.560] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, thanks. So both me and Rob utilize WordPress, and I’ve been involved in the WordPress community for 15 years, and I run one of the biggest podcasts in WordPress development community on the internet. So me and Rob, we’re quite passionate about utilizing WordPress ownership, all the benefits of customisation. But what do you say to people? Why should they look at a WordPress website, utilize and showcase IDX, rather than it’s a real geek? So a number of total SaaS based enclosed platforms.

[00:29:37.320] – Kurt UhlirYeah, that’s a great question. There are other platforms. I do all very much know Wix and Squarespace. And God, if I hear Webflow, no, never use Webflow. I understand why the creative designers that want to move stuff by a pixel care about it, but don’t use Webflow people. WordPress is just so far advanced. Wix and them may come along with it, and I hope that they do because they have an ecosystem similar to WordPress. It’s just most of us that build the technology, we can’t integrate with those the way that we can with WordPress. And so the ability for our technology to integrate with WordPress and in a proprietary way make our content that those homeless things appear native to Google is something I just can’t do on other platforms right now. So always choose WordPress. But there’s nothing wrong with doing a Reel Geeks or a KV Core or a sync or something like that. But I think the agents need to think about it in terms of do they want an all in one or a tech stack of best of breed? And so we almost all have that multi tool that has wires and you open up and it’s got a knife and it’s got a phillips head screwdriver and a bottle opener.

[00:30:49.670] – Kurt UhlirThat’s useful. It’s nice. Kv Core and sync and real geeks are nice because they’re just all together. And so if you don’t have somebody like one of you to one of your companies to help put together the full stack, they’re just going to work out of the box. But are they the best? Well, no, but they serve a good purpose. And that connectivity is wonderful for a lot of agents. But it’s like if any of the three of us were going to… I tell people, hey, even though that’s a good tool, that multi tool or Swiss Army knife, if you had a million dollars to build a house and 20 people showed up as contractors, would you give them all that multi tool suppliers, or would you give somebody a saw and somebody a hammer and somebody a screwdriver? No, you’re going to use specialized tools and you’re going to use what’s best for each one of those pieces. And that’s what WordPress was showcased in choosing the right CRM, the right marketing agency to do things on top of it. That’s what you get when you either do it yourself or you have somebody else assemble the best of the breed searches.

[00:31:52.530] – Kurt UhlirI’ve been to websites that use Reelgeeks or Synk or KV Core. I’m not going to use those to do my home search, but I will use that with a showcase IDX. Are they the best CRMs? I actually personally prefer Follow Boss. Follow Boss is my favorite pure real estate CRM. Now there’s others that are okay, but does KV Core get by with it? Yeah, it’s really good. You just have to know how to use it. So that’s how I choose to explain to people is, do you want that set ofliers that folds out to get a knife and a screwdriver? Or do you want a stack of the best tools and somebody that will help put that together for you?

[00:32:31.860] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks for that. Over to you, Robb.

[00:32:34.720] – Robert NewmanI’m just laughing.

[00:32:36.320] – Kurt UhlirKurt, if.

[00:32:37.980] – Robert NewmanYou watched my KV Core review or my Follow Up Boss review, you were more succinct about it, but you discover that I said almost word for word, identically what you just said. Certainly the spirit of the videos is the same. It just made me laugh. That’s why you’re.

[00:33:00.160] – Kurt UhlirIn the business that you’re in.

[00:33:02.330] – Robert NewmanIt’s.

[00:33:03.040] – Jonathan DenwoodA bit like mail rights CRM. It’s pretty okay. The CRM that you use is the one that really works. But I say to people, if you really into really utilizing a CRM to the top level, you should look at Follow Up Boss. It’s the leader. But you should use one anyway to get started because so many people do have it, but they don’t use it. Sorry, Rob.

[00:33:35.000] – Robert NewmanNo, that’s the key.

[00:33:39.160] – Kurt UhlirTo me. And using it and using it with other parts of marketing you should be doing. You should be doing drip campaigns. You should be sending out things. I love following boss, but I know people who have… I’ve told them that they should leave Follow boss because they’re not using it, whether it’s them or the tools or the combination. It’s not intuitive to those individuals, so they should find something that works well for them. I’d like.

[00:34:06.480] – Robert NewmanTo do if you’re okay with it, Kurt and John, both of you, I would love to do five extra minutes of the show for bonus content. If you’re down, the five extra minutes would be asking you, Kurt, what your favorite integrations are that work in or around showcase IDX. We started on the subject already with some of the conversations that we’ve had, so we’re just going to continue on in this vein. But I’m asking you if there’s anything you haven’t already said that you may want to say on the subject, and then that’ll be that. Are you down? Five more?

[00:34:38.330] – Kurt UhlirI’m good with that. Okay.

[00:34:40.350] – Robert NewmanAll right. John, are you down? Yeah, sure.

[00:34:43.170] – Jonathan DenwoodOkay.

[00:34:44.350] – Robert NewmanLovely. So, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to be right back. And then, you can find the bonus content on the YouTube channel, and we hope that you tune in. It will be about Kurt’s favorite integrations that work in or around showcase IDX.

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Is the Real Estate Lead Generation Industry CollapsingGrowing a successful real estate business means creatively and strategically generating leads. In addition to referrals, many real estate professionals turn to “online leads” to generate more business. In this episode of the Mail-Right show we look at some problems this particular model might be facing in 2023

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:00.000] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 378 of the MailWright podcast. John gets the prize. He’s done this 378 times. I’ve done it about 250 times. But nonetheless, that means that John has done a hell of a lot more than I have. We’re super excited to be here today. We’re going to talk about one of my favorite subjects and something that John has also talked about quite a few times, which is, is the real estate lead generation industry collapsing? It’s a very clickbaity subject line. I apologize; it’s not John’s fault. I actually created it on my channel. But you know what? It’s a really good question. So before we get into answering that question, let’s make sure that you know who your magnificent hosts for the podcast actually are. John, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to our new audience members?

[00:01:06.360] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Robert. I am the joint founder of mail hyphen write. Com. We build beautiful websites on WordPress, Semi or full custom. Plus, we have a great CRM lead generation platform with some great digital products and services. And I’d love you to come and sign up for it. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:01:30.750] – Robert NewmanCopy you. My name is Robert Newman. I’m also the founder of a real estate marketing company by the name of Inbound rem. Quite a few of you probably already know who I am. And if, for some reason, you do not, go to my website stat immediately if you want to learn anything about how marketing is changing, how marketing is going digital, personal messaging, personal branding, and SEO, which is what I was historically known for. But these days, with all the automation and AI user behavior, how people use the web is becoming synonymous with how people find you. I talk about that a lot. Today, we’re going to talk about it even more. I can’t wait to get into this. So we’re just going to jump right into it. It is the real estate lead generation industry collapsing. John, I want to do a mathematical equation for you, which we’ve talked about in different ways. So let’s say that in 2022, we had 3 million people doing an average of 30 searches per person for real estate. That would be 90 searches. Would you agree that it doesn’t matter somewhere in that search process, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, it doesn’t really matter?

[00:02:43.650] – Robert NewmanBut when somebody is searching, regardless of where they’re searching, most marketers are trying to capture them somewhere in that process. Would you agree with that?

[00:02:52.390] – Jonathan DenwoodI would.

[00:02:53.480] – Robert NewmanOkay. So you have 90 million searches happening in 2022. In 2023, the year that we’re now between interest rates and between a lowered inventory in most marketplaces, you have watched the overall interest in real estate drop. Nobody’s published the number yet. Nobody knows exactly what that number is. But looking at Google Insights and a number of other tools that I follow, the number is 30 % fewer people are doing searches this year than last. Let’s use that math. So if 90 million searches were happening this year and 60 million searches are happening in 2023, that would mean that you have 30 million fewer times to try to capture somebody to turn them into a lead if you’re doing some marketing, right?

[00:03:45.000] – Jonathan DenwoodYes.

[00:03:45.870] – Robert NewmanAll right. So then let’s add in the additional information that… How do you think most Realtors, like the average Realtor, not somebody with a $10,000 budget per month, let’s just say you’re a little Realtor and Podunk nowhere, and you’ve got a budget of $100 per month to market yourself, how do you think people are doing that, Jon?

[00:04:07.250] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I think they’ve got to utilize, if that’s their budget, they’ve got to utilize very guerrilla marketing and sweat equity. If they’re going to move the needle or to buy most of it they’re going to have to do themselves. And it certainly won’t be through paid promotion. So it would be posting on social media themselves. Video, we’ve been hammering away for the past two years about video, haven’t we? Something which you can do, which you got a fantastic bit of technology in front of you. And you got Instagram, TikTok, you got Facebook, you can put that video on. So that’s what you’re going to be looking to do, aren’t you? But most won’t be doing anything.

[00:05:05.750] – Robert NewmanI agree with everything you said with one small adjustment. So one of my clients, and a shout out to him because he’s an avid listener to the show, that’s Brett Wallace. Brett, thanks for listening to the show. We appreciate you tuning in all the time. And we’re going to say this, Brett gave me this information. I’m just regurgitating it. So thank you for sharing with me, Brett. Brett ran an experiment. You know that we do SEO, so we mostly do organic traffic. We don’t do a lot of paid? He and I. But he was curious to know what would happen if he put $10 a day and he just did a video on a specific area is what he did it on. And then $10 a day got him close to 1,000 views. It was surprisingly effective. He got well under a dollar of view to the video. So with $100, you could theoretically generate a good amount of traffic. But here’s the key to this marketing, John, is most Realtors are leveraging listings and most Realtors are not educated enough to understand that they could do the same thing using other people’s listings and act the buyer’s agent.

[00:06:08.750] – Robert NewmanSo they’re mostly waiting to lay themselves out of listings. So when I say the following to everybody listening to the show, understand what I’m saying. I think that paid advertising usage from the real estate industry has dropped by almost 50 % between 2022 and 2023. And why am I saying that? Well, there’s far less listings for people to advertise. They understand how paid is working far less. The numbers seem to indicate that that’s where people are at. So already in this early part of the conversation, John, you and I have talked about two different things, and we have certainly in a very educated way said, Well, we’re probably looking at somewhere between a 30 and 40 % decline in the amount of advertising that’s happening. So is the real estate lead generation industry collapsing? Well, that’s shrinkage for sure. But here’s the subjects that we’ve talked about in other shows that are also problematic for the average real estate agent. So what has happened in 2021 and ’22 in the busiest real estate markets ever in history? What do you think happened, John? And I mean, that’s a very broad question, so let me be more specific.

[00:07:18.330] – Robert NewmanWhat do you think happened with people using paid advertising services, real estate marketing companies like Mike mine, like yours? They’re spending whatever, a few thousand dollars a month, like Sink, like KV Core, like real estate webmasters spending $3,000 a month. They’re spending $7,000 a month on Zillow, 2021 and 2022. And now here we are in 2023. What do you think is happening with those people spending $3,000 to $7,000 a month on those services I just mentioned?

[00:07:45.730] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, they’re getting less results. A actual client actually buys a property and they get a commission cheque. Right.

[00:07:55.760] – Robert NewmanHere’s the thing. Less searchers mean less response for those of you doing paid advertising. That’s it. That’s a fact. If all of the people listening to the show recognize that they had a 30 to 50 % reduction or more, for me personally, if I was your CMO, your chief marketing officer, that’s what I would be, or your chief operating officer, that’s what I would be telling you to expect. You should be expecting a 30 to 50 % decline in your results at minimum in 2023. So for some of you who are listening to the show, you take 30 % to 50 % less results, plus a 3,000 to 7,000 dollar budget. Now you have to ask yourself the following question, because this is leading up to the subject of this podcast is the real estate lead generation industry collapsing? And I think it would be better to say is the real estate lead generation industry collapsing for you, for the person listening? So you take that money, John. And if you had a client, let’s say you’re doing $10,000 a month in advertising, you’re making $40,000 a month commission, it’s easy to figure out you’re doing a 4 to 1 return.

[00:09:09.070] – Robert NewmanBut if everything we just said happened, you are now spending the same amount of money, but instead of making 40, you’re making 20 and you’re spending 7 or 10, that’s a much narrower margin for you to be… Would you agree? You’re like, ou’re working on a much smaller margin for error and that $7,000 that you’re spending seems like a lot more money to you, even though it hasn’t changed. Do you understand what I’m proposing?

[00:09:43.880] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I’ll.

[00:09:44.380] – Robert NewmanTell you. What I’m proposing?

[00:09:46.360] – Jonathan DenwoodYes.

[00:09:48.830] – Robert NewmanOkay. So now, finally, I get to the point. I have been getting the reason that we talk about this ad nauseam. The reason I created a video about it is that I get this question all the time, almost every day, John, I’m getting clients asking me, Is the real estate lead generation collapsing? I’m literally getting that question. I’m getting it all the time, which is why I decided to do a video on it. And the answer is it seems like the sky is falling to about 80 % of the real estate agents that I talk to because the real estate marketing industry has changed so fast in the last 6 to 12 months that it’s like night and day if you’re spending money on paid advertising. Because number one, you are no longer easily pulling down a three or four to one return no matter what advertising. Many people that I’ve spoken to who are using Zillow are telling me that they’re losing money. I’m using very generous math in all of my examples because my clients are calling me and saying, I’m spending $7,000 a month and I’m not even making three or four.

[00:10:58.520] – Robert NewmanAnd now they’re canceling their real estate marketing. Many agents are canceling real estate marketing contracts. Zillow and other people that I know inside real estate marketing companies, and I won’t mention them by name and I won’t mention the companies out of respect for the people who are calling me, but they are freaked out. I have many people that I’ve worked with over the years because everybody knows that I’ve consulted with big marketing, other marketing companies, luxury presence, agent image, and that’s just the start of the list. There’s many more smaller ones that you’ve never heard of, smaller shops here in LA. And I still am in touch with many of these people. And these guys are calling me going, What’s going on over there? Because we are dying.

[00:11:42.780] – Jonathan DenwoodCan I interrupt a little bit? Sure. Why the bloody hell is this a surprise to people? I’m not trying to be funny here, but the past two years before, let’s say, six months ago, because of COVID, because of shortness of supply, you cannot have a market that increased house prices, increased over inflated price before COVID, a market that was, in my opinion, overpriced. With COVID, it went on steroids and you saw a 40 % increase on that of the average house. What the bloody hell do you think is going to happen?

[00:12:36.440] – Robert NewmanI understand where you’re coming from. And you and I have talked to you about this before, but it was funny when in 2007, there were a lot of smart agents out there who understood that the mortgage industry was overheated. It was so overheated, John. You’re so overheated. A lot of real estate agents were selling mortgages on the side. It was just overheated. It was so easy to get these mortgages, and you made such a good commission on it. It almost didn’t make sense not to sell both services. There wasn’t all the paperwork.

[00:13:15.270] – Jonathan DenwoodI’m not having a go at anybody, really. It’s a commission based. I’m not having a go. What I’m saying is why are they so surprised?

[00:13:28.260] – Robert NewmanBecause when you’re in the midst of it, I think that it surprises people the way that it actually ends up rolling out. I don’t think anybody’s surprised that the real estate market is changing. What is surprising people is the sales numbers on 2023 and 2022, we’re not collapsing the way that everybody thought we were. But inventory is still fairly rare. Home prices are still shooting up in busy marketplaces. But what has changed for all of everybody listening to the podcast is that you don’t have 20 or 30 properties anymore. When you get a single property, your job… I just talked to a consulting client, and I’m not going to name her by name either, but I will say she’s literally the top agent in the areas that she serves. Number one, no competition. And it’s in the East Coast, New Jersey. She got a million dollars listing. Her job, John, became fielding and sorting through the 20 offers in 48 hours that they got on over a million dollars property, which is an expensive property for the area that she’s in. 20 offers in 48 hours. That just takes you time to sort through all the offers so that you can ask the proper consultant to your client and say, We have 20 offers.

[00:14:46.850] – Robert NewmanThese are contingencies, cash, exceptions. Do you see what I’m saying? You have to know what all those offers are so that you can then turn around and consult with your client. She’s got two days of work to properly read through all of the offers that she got to turn around and then say to the client, Good news is we have 20 offers. The bad news is here’s what I feel are the top five and we have to choose. Do you see what I’m saying? Unless there’s just somebody that came in, no contingencies, no anything, million to $200,000 above asking all cash. And then obviously in that circumstance, you’ve got one offer that takes the cake and you just run with that. And then every other than 19 other people that bid on that property are done. They don’t get it. They don’t get the property. It’s a weird market that we’re in, Jon.

[00:15:39.320] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s a fair because obviously you’ve got somebody that’s in the field just told you something. The only way I can rational is that, and it’s not based on data, it’s based on my gut feeling, so it might be totally incorrect, is you have the top echelons, somebody that can look at a million dollar house, they’re in the top 5 %. But you could say that almost every house in Southern California is around that. So you’ve got to quantify this. But that’s around if they can borrow. But if they can afford a million dollar house, they’re in the top 10 %. Only 10 % of the population are more than 100,000 a year. Only 10 % of American working population and more than 100,000.

[00:16:43.290] – Jonathan DenwoodSo the fact, 60 % of the population haven’t got $400 in savings.

[00:16:50.440] – Robert NewmanBut.

[00:16:52.550] – Jonathan DenwoodThey’re top echelon, they’ve done very well in the stock increases. They’ve done very well over the past three years in property. They’ve done very well in stimulus checks to businesses. I know quite a few people that have quite a pool of capital. They’re not doing much with it. You cannot put UB very ill advised to put that capital in commercial property. That would be, in my opinion, until the market calmed down a suicidal. And we have got inflation between 6 and 10 %. So just keeping it in the bank for years, most people of that type of capital are putting it into short term treasuries because they’re getting 5 %. So there is a lot of money out there. But on the other hand, I think you are correct. You’re dealing with a very fragmented, confusing market because there’s a lot of people that got property. They’re looking at what somebody got six months ago, eight months ago. They’re unwilling to move on the price. And you got a load of buyers with interest rates just going up. They’re just saying, Well, we’re not buying until you lower the price. Correct. So everybody’s looking, most markets, everybody’s looking at everybody else.

[00:18:32.660] – Robert NewmanHere’s what we’re going to do. When we come back, we’re going to go to break. And when we do, John, I’m going to make some predictions. Now, I just want to say to you and to the audience at large, I got very lucky. I made some predictions in November of 2022. I recorded them to my YouTube channel and uploaded them. Okay, so they’re there. They’re there for prosperity. I feel like one of my main predictions has played out exactly like I said it would. I said that we would do… Everybody was predicting that real estate would collapse in 2023. And I said that I felt like the hot wind from the hot market, regardless of interest rates, regardless of everything, was going to carry us through 2023. And it was somewhere around 2024 that we had to probably look for a true adjustment inside the real estate space. So far, that prediction has been 100 % true with some major things happening in the market that are staggering in implications. So I’m going to make some additional predictions with your help. I’m going to ask you your predictions, and we’re going to measure predictions. We’re going to use this show as a benchmark for anybody who’s interested to find out what’s happening with a note towards the lead generation industry.

[00:19:41.200] – Robert NewmanThis is going to be a lead generation specific message because that’s what the title of the podcast is and that’s our industry, John and I’s, and I want to speak to that directly. So stay tuned. Wherever you watch this, do us a favor, give it a thumbs up if you’d like, if you think we’ve done a good job, tell us we suck if you think we suck, and we’ll catch you when we come back from break. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail right. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight. Com. Welcome back to the Mail. R ight podcast. It’s episode number 378. The subject of this podcast is the real estate lead generation industry collapsing. I, during the first with John’s help, we illustrated how we both thought, or I illustrated… Here was my point.

[00:20:48.640] – Robert NewmanMy point was more like, John’s point seems to be why is anybody even surprised? Why are we even talking about this? Why are we even having the conversation? My point was, I think that I’m getting a lot of calls and a lot of messages, including, by the way, guys just like me who are in the industry, and they’re scared to death that it is collapsing. And John’s point seemed to be, well, why are they even…

[00:21:10.660] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, no, I just want to clarify. I think it is very important that you really look at your marketing budget and really listen to someone because I think investing in video, investing in SEO, investing in content on your website, reducing the budget on paid for lead, basically reduce your Zillow, reduce your Google, reduce your Facebook paid advert. Now, reinvest in your website, the actual content on the website, video, other forms of marketing. I think just relooking at your marketing strategy in the next six months is really important. So I’m saying no. But what I am saying is I am surprised that people are surprised at the way the market is going.

[00:22:15.080] – Robert NewmanSure. Well, ladies and gentlemen, in November of 2022, I made some predictions, which we cover before break. And I’m going to make a few more. And, Jon, you can either poke holes in my predictions, just agree with them, say that I’m just fucking out of my mind. Excuse me. Or you can agree, or you can say you can do whatever.

[00:22:40.230] – Jonathan DenwoodThere’s only one of us that is bonkers in this podcast and it’s not you.

[00:22:48.160] – Robert NewmanSo you can disagree or agree or whatever it’s going to be. But I’m going to say this. I actually have some small adjustments to my original predictions. My larger prediction is 100 % correct. But boy, oh, boy, did I not see the rapid and almost global collapse of regional banks everywhere? I did not see that coming again in 2023. And as a matter of fact, I may have specifically said something, and I think a lot of other podcasters like us have said, oh, we’re not due for another bank collapse like we were in 2007. And boy, should we have shut our mouths. Wow. Did we get that one wrong?

[00:23:35.040] – Jonathan DenwoodI got to say something. You got to quantify this. Listen to some views. Don’t get the wrong impression. I’m very scathing on my criticism of the banking industry in general, not in the US and in Britain. But we got to quantify this. When it comes to Silicon Valley Bank, there are some specifics around the type of clientele that were banking with them, and also the risk management, the CEO, the chief financial officer. There are a number of things going on in that particular bank. The other two banks, they were heavily into cryptocurrency and they were heavily criticized. There’s a couple of very well short sellers who positioned themselves and went online and their predictions of these two particular banks have come true. These two banks, I can’t say what I really want it because I just don’t want to get into it, but they were, let’s put it this way, they were involved in cryptocurrency up to their eyeballs, and seemingly by reports, they were extremely badly managed. When it comes to the Swiss Bank, that bank has been in trouble for over 10 years. It is a basket case. It has been mismanaged for over a decade plus.

[00:25:10.330] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s been on life support. It had to go to the Saudi’s and they invested billions and got 10 % equity in that particular bank. So yeah, the banking industry has some problems. Is the whole thing ready to collapse? Who knows? Because these particular banks were in a lot… They were particularly ropey banks. I don’t know what you think about that, Robert.

[00:25:42.410] – Robert NewmanSo I want to talk about that a second, okay? Because I do agree with you. What we are watching happen for those listening to the podcast is a combination of, in my opinion, of three things. Now, I do not know these things. Number one, I subscribe to a blog that I absolutely love called Puck, and I spend a few hundred dollars a year. And if anybody’s listening to this show, I’m not an affiliate. It’s basically the best of the best writers who’ve gotten together and started their own thing. And they’re all really experienced industry people, and you can buy their content. And it’s been an amazing source of information for me. And I’m regurgitating some stuff I heard there. I’m regurgitating some stuff that I heard from Motley Fool, which I also… I pay about $1,000 a year, John, in paid subscriptions to financial bloggers. Not because I’m that big of a finance guy, but because I’m fascinated and it’s worth the investment for me. So I will say this, we were due for an adjustment that happened with crypto. We’re still watching crypto shock waves. The failure of one of the big crypto platforms is rolling out and it’s hitting everybody.

[00:27:06.860] – Robert NewmanIt’s hitting nine other companies which are all slowly failing around it. It’s also starting to roll out into the traditional banking industry, which indeed had started to get into crypto and their balance sheets weren’t solid enough to take losses. Though my understanding of the Silicon Valley Bank is that it had a lot more to do with bonds than anything else as to the real reason that it failed. And they made some very bad decisions in investing in bonds that were too long term, and they couldn’t get their money out without literally losing billions of dollars if they tried to execute those bonds early. So they took long term investments on loaned money from their clients deposits. And just like William Cohen, who’s one of the writers for Puck, I’m going to say the following, banking is a confidence game. It’s literally a confidence scam that we’ve all gotten into. The confidence is this, at any given time, if a bank has $92 billion in assets, something like 60 billion of that is invested, and 30 billion sits in seeming deposits in their accounts. But it’s not. It’s our money and they’re going out and gambling with it.

[00:28:14.350] – Robert NewmanTheoretically, banks are supposed to be gambling at very large terms. They’re supposed to be doing safe investments, John. That’s what they’re supposed to be doing. And they’re supposed to be getting a slightly higher percentage return on 90 billion. And when a bank is run well, like with JP Morgan, Chase, they’re going to make something like two trillion dollars in profit. They’re going to make a bucketload of money. But because of some laws that Trump created that took away some of the safety, some of the rules as it related to banking, in order to do what he thought was streamlining the banking process, just like Clinton did back in the 80s with Glass Steele, he removed some safeguards thinking that free markets are going to regulate themselves. And part of the free market is that when you give people the right, they’re going to gamble. And small and regional banks are more at risk when they gamble. Just like Silicon Valley, they gambled that nobody would do a run on the bank, and they gambled wrong. Forty two billion in deposits were pulled out in less than 24 hours due to the incredibly insular nature of their depositor base.

[00:29:27.820] – Robert NewmanAnd so that created a run on the bank that then made them execute these long term loans, take an immediate multibillion dollars loss. Everybody started to freak out because their bank and all this is transparent. So they started to casually ask around about getting capital. They’re very smart clientele who are much more financially savvy than most other depositors are as a whole and who all talk to each other as well, sat here and said, Oh, my God. These guys are looking for terrible rate money. They must be in trouble. And the remaining of their depository base almost immediately pulled back their deposits.

[00:30:10.510] – Jonathan DenwoodI think you made a key point. This is a witch’s brew of many reasons why that particular bank. But when the CEO asked for it, we need to raise two billion. Don’t worry, your money is safe, but we need to raise two billion. What the hell do you think is going to happen?

[00:30:33.640] – Robert NewmanRight. And so when I make predictions, ladies and gentlemen, here’s some of those predictions. I do think we’re going to see some more regional banks fail. I don’t think that we’re going to see that impact the real estate business. So even though John and I have been talking about some really scary stuff, and I know that a lot of you are having PTSD from 2007, I know that I got scared. I’m not thinking that there’s a problem. But when I started to see over and over again, because there’s been a few not as big as Signature or Credit Suisse or Silicon Valley, there’s other banks that have failed. It’s like a list of seven or eight, but some of them just are not big enough to make national news. They’re smaller, more regional things. And so I’m going to say that I started to go, Holy shit, are we looking at yet? Because the problem in 2007 and 2008 weren’t that people didn’t want to buy homes. I don’t know if all of you realize that. I was working in the industry when that happened. It wasn’t that people didn’t want to buy homes. It was that they couldn’t get them financed.

[00:31:35.720] – Robert NewmanYou couldn’t find a note. There was nobody willing to sign off on a note, even with triple A credit. All of a sudden, great credit really clients could not get a note for their home. And how many people run around with cash to buy whatever they’re going to buy? John, whatever you’re looking to buy next year in Reno, do you have the half a million in cash? Would you even spend it if you had it? I’m not trying to put you on blast, but even if you had the half million dollars, would you sit here and go, I want to put that cash up front into a property and then roll the… That’s a different thing. Normally, you got to have millions of dollars in that cash up front is not a big significant part of your personal wealth to make that decision. That’s a big decision for most people. So the market dried up entirely because you couldn’t get a note, you couldn’t get financing. That’s what happened in 2007. And it didn’t really come back for those listening to the show. It stayed gone all the way through the end of 2009. Financing was incredibly difficult.

[00:32:40.870] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I was going to say, I don’t think the market really started until the end of 2012, into middle 2013. But other people would argue with me. But yeah, it was a 4 to 6 hard year period. Right. We’re not entering that again. That’s one of my predictions, John. We’re not.

[00:33:00.510] – Robert NewmanEntering that again. The big boys are still going to be there. We’re really not going to see that much impact on how people loan money. The impact is going to come from these interest rates, which they’re going to raise one more time, if they raise it at all. I’ve heard a lot of debate about this, and it doesn’t really matter for those of you who are in real estate. I’ve already started to see in many, many markets with many customers talking to me that people are back in the market trying to buy property at the current interest rates. There was sticker shock and everybody was waiting to see if interest rates were going down. It is incredibly obvious to everybody that interest rates are not going down. That’s not happening. So everybody’s gotten off the sidelines and are buying homes at the 8 or 9 %, whatever the interest rate that John, I honestly don’t know. But they’re all out there buying homes at that price now. They’re buying with that money. And while it’s just going to surprise a lot of lot of people. I think that while this is slowing the market and may impact the market with a decline in 2024, if the Fed holds to its guns and everybody sticks with it while we may see recession, I am pretty sure that these were all the right decisions for the market.

[00:34:28.280] – Robert NewmanI’m extremely excited about them. And I think that in 2025 or 2026, after a short recession, we’re going to watch business finally go back to normal. And by normal, I mean probably interest rates somewhere between the 5 and 7 % rate range, which has been our historic average in the US. I’m not declaring a miracle here. I’m saying that interest rates will go back to average of what they’ve been for decades. And then we’re going to see, finally, real estate agents probably hit another 10 year cycle where things will finally be more… There will be less variants, less of the ups and downs, less of the hills and valleys that we’ve been dealing with over the last number of years, assuming there’s.

[00:35:15.000] – Jonathan DenwoodNot a national pandemic and assuming half the world doesn’t catch on fire, we’re going to see a more normal market. Those are my predictions, Sean. What do you have? I’ve got very mixed feelings in some ways. I think it’s going to be a sizable correction. I do think the prices have to readjust. I do think if you want to sell a property, you’re going to have to be more realistic about the sales price. But on the other hand, I think if you’re realistic about the sales price and I think you can sell it. I think you really need the advice of an experienced real estate professional. And you do not, in these circumstances, want a property that’s on the market for month after month after month. You’d be best to listen to somebody, a real estate professional that got experience and price it slightly below present market value, and I think you can sell it. I personally think there is going to be a correction. For some reason, I agree with you. I don’t think it’s going to be as bad as 207.

[00:36:23.900] – Robert NewmanI think it does really depend on the unemployment situation. Here’s a couple of facts as evidenced from the this is coming in from Redfin. So ladies and gentlemen, according to Redfin, in February of 2023, over the same period last year, home prices are down in California by 6.5 %. I recently read a national report that said home prices were down by 3 % nationally. And in California, we need a huge reduction. So on average, the number of homes that were sold is down 33.4 % year over year. And there were 16,000 homes sold in February, down from 25,000 homes sold in February of last year. Now, here’s what I think is going to happen, because I’ve talked to mortgage officers and real estate agents, and here’s what everybody seems to be noting. I think that I predicted the same thing that you did. I thought we were in for a very dramatic drop, and I predicted that in 2022. I thought prices were inflated by over about 20 % nationally, and I suggested that we would see a 20 % decline. We’ve seen a 6.5 % decline, and I think that we’re going to see a much more gradual slide than I originally predicted.

[00:37:40.240] – Robert NewmanI think that we’re going to see home prices slowly drop market to market, which is the best thing that could possibly happen for people selling homes, for the industry, for real estate lead generation people like me and like you. The best thing for all of us is that these prices go down slowly, that nobody gets put under water fast, that if you see these prices sliding and you took on a questionable note, that you have the chance to get out from under it. I think that these things are all going to happen. And because it’s gradual, we probably have a chance to avoid a dramatic market shift.

[00:38:21.370] – Jonathan DenwoodThat’s my opinion. My position is slightly more pessimistic. I think there is going to be a sell in 2023 through 23 into ’24, there is going to be a dependent on the market. It is a regional market with variation. But in the most hottest markets over the last two to three years, I think there’s going to be a sizable correction. But I don’t think the outcome… I do agree with you, though, that the outcome won’t be as bad as the 2007 to 2012 outcome. I think there’s a lot of people that got really fantastic remortgage there. I’ve got a couple of friends that re mortgaged. They will never in their lifetime see deals that they got. I got one friend that got an interest rate re mortgaging that was just unbelievable. He’s got a steady job. He could always lose it, but he works for the state of Nevada. He’s a senior manager. It’s very unlikely that he’s going to lose his job. There’s lots of people that have that. There’s other people that don’t run their own business like you and me. I just feel it really is. But you can never discount a black Swan event.

[00:39:35.550] – Jonathan DenwoodAnd it’s t also is really determined by the unemployment. But the reason why I think you… I’m a little bit more pessimistic than you, but I do also agree with your general attitude. The other thing that’s discount is there’s a load of people I know. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. I’m not too bad, but I know a lot of friends that are sitting on a quarter of a million, half a million, million plus in cash. They’ve got that type of assets. They’ve got it in treasures. They’ve got it in other short term notes. But I know a few people, I know lots, lots, lots more people that couldn’t get $400. That is the contradiction of what we are facing at the present moment. I agree. And that 40 % of people, ladies and gentlemen, are going to continue to drive the market. We’re going to continue to see new home buyers down. They’re down to 25 % from 35 %. We’re going to continue to see that rate stay low. And I think we’re going to see the market adjust over the next 3 to 4 years until the new buyers with limited resources and great financing deals can get back.

[00:40:51.200] – Robert NewmanInto the market.

[00:40:52.210] – Jonathan DenwoodThat, unfortunately, is not ahead of us right now, in my opinion. We are not looking at that.

[00:40:58.910] – Robert NewmanWe are looking at a market where people who are sitting on capital looking for good investments, trying to hedge inflation. Real estate is a great place to go. So I don’t predict that real estate is going to be dead or dying. I do think that the types of buyers that we see and who’s making moves inside it, it’s going to change. I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs that I know, John, here in California buying two, three properties, Airbnb them out. They’ve already got equity somewhere else. They leveraged that to buy more properties. The interest rate doesn’t scare them at all because they’re using the property as a business. And so they get to write it off, they get to finance whoever if they get lucky and there’s a high rate of tenancy, and the desire for travel was still very high because of the pandemic. People are pivoting. As with every other economy and every other thing, what always surprises me about California and other places in general is the resiliency of the population, how entrepreneurial they’ll get, how determined they’ll get. And that’s proven to be true in this market as well. My heart goes out to those people who were waiting on the sidelines hoping to buy a home for the first time, though, because I do not think that that is any easier or that it’s a great time in general to do that.

[00:42:27.760] – Robert NewmanCould I be wrong? Of course it could. Over the span of 20 years, it’s always a good idea to buy a house as a primary residence. Over the span of 20 years, it doesn’t matter what you buy out or what the interest rate is. I’m just a little bit more pessimistic because when you got people saying, What’s the event? I don’t think there needs to be event. When you have a.

[00:42:55.090] – Jonathan DenwoodMarket over a two year period that goes up by 40 % and you dump 2.2 trillion dollars into a company and don’t figure that you might trigger off a hyperinflation event, I think you’re deluded. And I also think the idea that something can go up by over 20 % for more than two years in classical economics 101, I’m no expert, but whatever I’ve read, any market that goes up more than two years for 20 % will collapse on its own. Yeah, probably true. Well, ladies and gentlemen, when we started the show, John asked me, Did I want to talk about this? And I told him, and I may have even said it on the air, I don’t know. I don’t remember anymore.

[00:43:41.500] – Robert NewmanBut I’m going to say, I could talk about this every day for the next 52 weeks, literally. If we just did a podcast talking about the state of the real estate industry. It’s only the second time in my 14 year career where I’ve watched the times become as interesting as what we’re living through. I really don’t know what the specific small blocks are going to be that impact the business tomorrow, but here’s what I know. From years worth of reading, from my own personal experience, it is a scary time when everybody’s scared and shelters for those people that have an above average amount of determination. This is the time to make your moves. Warren Buffett says it, everybody says it. Anybody that you listen to, when everybody is running for shelter, you look for opportunity. Now, there’s a very small handful of you out there that are listening to this show, and I don’t know what that opportunity is specifically. Maybe you do invest in properties. Maybe you find people that are underwater because of these rising interest rates. Maybe there are. But as this thing moves in a side direction, for some of you who are listening to this show, there’s going to be huge opportunity.

[00:44:59.440] – Robert NewmanThere’s opportunity to reexamine the way that you’re doing your marketing to get real estate leads. There’s an opportunity to reexamine your real estate business as a whole. What brokerage do you work with? How do you operate as a business model? These times that we live through are going to go to the ones who win the efficiency and marketing games. That is my other prediction. So if you’re not examining your own personal efficiency and your own personal marketing right now and how you’re spending your dollars and how efficient is your business acquiring business and names and then marketing to them, I think you’re making a major mistake. Those of you listening to the show who do do that are going to find that you’re probably light years ahead of your competition. This is going to be the time in the real estate lead generation industry where we start to watch those 20 and 30 year vets who’ve never done anything other than do some of those people are going to go out of business. They just are because they didn’t really market very efficiently to their client base, and they’re going to discover that the client base that they count on for repeat business is not there.

[00:46:13.340] – Jonathan DenwoodI totally agree with you there. 100 %. So shall we wrap it up now?

[00:46:21.720] – Robert NewmanYeah, let’s do it. How would you like people to reach… Sorry, Jon, I warned you I would love to talk about this. How would you like people to reach out and get in touch with you?

[00:46:30.610] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, go to the mail hyphen write website, and have a look at what we got to offer. We really build some nice websites on WordPress that you own. Book a demo, and have a chat with me. I’m looking for some really great champion real estate professionals that can champion mail, especially if you’re looking to move to a digital brokerage situation. We can do some really great special deals for those types of individuals because I’m really looking for those types of people. Back over to you, Robert. All right.

[00:47:05.360] – Robert NewmanLadies and gentlemen, I will say the same thing I said at the show’s start. Do you want to learn more about me? If you want to find a company that does inbound marketing and content-based marketing with a website you own, you can go to inboundrem. Com. If, for some reason, some of you want to ask me personal questions, you can do so at robert@inboundrem. Com. Footnote for you, Jon, a footnote for everybody listening to this show. 2023 is 100 % my last year on the phone. I’m undoubtedly headed to the Philippines to open a sales office. I’ve said this in past years, but I’m doing it this year. My ticket spot, I’m on the plane; I will work there for the rest of the year. This is it. For those of you listening to this show, if you still want to talk to me directly to talk to me about the website or SEO services, you got it. You have a seven-month timeline. That’s it. And then I’m going to be a CEO and a proper founder. So thank you for giving me the platform, John. I don’t usually self-promote very much on here.

[00:48:04.960] – Robert NewmanSo this is just an exception to show. And I appreciate everybody that’s listening. John, if you want, give us some feedback. Email me at robert@inboundrem. Com. Email John. Talk to us. Let us know how you think we’re doing. All right? I would appreciate it. I know John would. We’ll catch you the next time if you tune in.

The Hosts of The Mail-Right ShowJonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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Best On-Page Real Estate SEO Strategies For 2023The basics of real estate SEO fall in line with general on-page SEO techniques. Sure, elements like slugs and image alt-tags are essential, but you probably already have a basic familiarity with them.

This article will dive deep into these essential strategies and provide you with a highly detailed and hyper-current understanding of how to best leverage them

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:06.940] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail-Right podcast. It’s episode 376. And as usual, my amazing, amazing, amazing podcast partner has had to be patient for approximately 25 minutes as I completely lost track of time. So here we are. I’m present. Who’s the hero of this particular podcast? My partner, Jonathan, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience, man?

[00:00:33.700] – Jonathan DenwoodIt was okay. I was captured with my email. Endless list of emails, isn’t it? Thanks for that, Rob. I’m the co-founder of Mail-Right.com. We build beautiful websites on WordPress semi or full custom. Plus, we got a suite of marketing tools that get you some fantastic leads and keep you in front of your web-based customers. Over to you, Robert. All right.

[00:01:01.180] – Robert NewmanMy name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound rem. Com and a 14-year veteran in general of the real estate marketing industry. I specialize in attraction marketing and SEO. Without any further ado, we’re going to get into my home sweet home territory today. We are going to talk about real estate SEO on page trips, tips, strategies, and hacks that are still effective, if not really effective in 2023 because Google has definitely been changing some of the things that they are measuring and or the weight of some of those things, and some things are getting continued to gain traction. So without any further ado, let’s get into… This is going to make some people’s eyes glaze over. So, John, I’m going to stay away from the highly technical speak and stick to stuff that people can understand simply. So here’s one of the biggest hacks in the entire world, everybody, on the page. Here’s something that Google did five years ago. They went to a natural language recognition system, otherwise known as semantic keyword recognition. But they have to make everything as complicated as possible for you to understand. Everything. So they didn’t say, we’re better at recognizing what you’re trying to say, nor did they tell you how they’re doing it.

[00:02:37.510] – Robert NewmanSo guys, guess what? They’re doing 80 % of their semantic or of their natural language recognition of the title of the post, the title of the page. And what else do they look at? The subtitles in Google speak, because they got to be dumb this way. It’s H2s, H3s, and H4s for the handful of you that are highly technical. They take those signposts inside any piece of content that they’re reading. And what they do is they then take the keyword density and they recognize all the relatable keywords to the signpost that you put up. Otherwise known as semantic keyword recognition. But what does this mean in the absolute most basic layman’s terms? It means that actually, 80 % of your content recognition comes off the title of the page. If you spent two hours thinking of the title and researching it and 20 minutes writing a thousand words, I’d probably tell you, well done. Well done. That’s the way to do it. Titles and headers are everything in SEO right now. Everything. They also pick up something called semantic keyword depth comes from how many headers do you have in your content. So in other words, how many H2s, H3s, and H4s?

[00:04:20.040] – Robert NewmanHow many signposts that you have with content under them that Google can mix up the keyword density and understand? Did you actually produce something relevant for that signpost? Because if the answer is yes, if they look at the keyword density and discover that the right number of words are being used, they will go, Oh, well, then you might be a valuable resource for this thing, this other thing. So this is in on… Do you have any… Jon, any questions, any comments?

[00:04:50.520] – Jonathan DenwoodNo, but I think you’re making it pretty clear because I think Google, haven’t they got the most PhD people of any company in the world. And like you say, they seem incapable of writing literally anything in reasonably easy language, don’t they? They just don’t seem up to it, do they? It’s like a glorified university department, the whole company, isn’t it?

[00:05:23.530] – Robert NewmanYes, it is. And that’s basically what Google is. It’s a data science factory, and they do a very good job of employing a lot of data scientists and rocket scientists and professors and really high level intelligence that basically tries to sort. They are sorting through the whole world’s set of information. It’s one of the most complicated jobs that’s ever existed. It’s taking the entire world’s worth of information and categorizing it and organizing it for all of us. That’s what Google does. So so that’s a step number one. And it’s got to be one of the biggest. Now, here’s another way, though. If you were looking for a creative way to send other little signposts, you might ask yourself the question, Well, are there any other ways that Google picks up these signposts off the page, Robert? Because we see content with all this different stuff in it, like images and videos and blah, blah, blah, blah. And the answer is yes. More and more often right now, John, on page signals include multi media. So graphs, charts, images, though images have been overused. And most people don’t know how to put a creative image inside their blog post.

[00:06:42.420] – Robert NewmanSo they’re for the most part a waste of time and space. Infographics are still big, still productive. So all those things, multi media elements are huge on page SEO factors. Another multi media element, which is oftentimes spreadsheets, clickable elements on a page are all multi media factors that improve the signals that you send. But a real strong signal is a somewhat creative or self took image that is properly tagged, that is still an incredibly powerful signpost inside of content. All of our best training content on my site, John, forever has been all the stuff that I image tagged that was real estate quotes and real estate memes. I’ve ranked for those posts for five, six years now straight, like without break. Anything with lots of images, with lots of sign posts that make it clear about what’s on the page Google tends to love. But it’s a lot of work tagging all those images and doing that stuff. So saying that you’re going to do 50 images like I did for those two posts. Now, if somebody had said, oh, Robert, you’re going to rank for five years off that work, I would say, okay, it’s worth it because it was worth it.

[00:08:04.270] – Robert NewmanSo it’s a give or take. So real estate SEO strategies, like the image optimization is another big hack. Image compression, which is on my… I have a blog post about this. You can see what we say about that specifically. One of the things that I’ve noticed that is really taking off that is an interesting on page trend is actually how to titles. Kyle handy, who some of you listening to this show will know, he gets 80,000 visits to his site per month off how to videos, how to blog posts. He has got far more traffic than I do. And I think it’s because he makes his posts simple. He speaks directly to real estate agents, and it’s all how twos. Have you ever looked up Kyle? Yeah. He came on the show with us at some point, didn’t he?

[00:09:01.140] – Jonathan DenwoodYes. I have to try and have him back.

[00:09:04.420] – Robert NewmanYou should, man. He’s a big deal now. B y traffic and audience size, he’s a huge deal. You should get him back.

[00:09:14.420] – Jonathan DenwoodOn if you can. He came on the show. That’s what helped him.

[00:09:17.550] – Robert NewmanRight. We launched his career, man. Kyle Handy is 100 % due to us. No, I’m just kidding. That was a very big joke.

[00:09:27.090] – Jonathan DenwoodDon’t get upset. Don’t write.

[00:09:30.210] – Robert NewmanTo me. Don’t call me. All right.

[00:09:39.070] – Jonathan DenwoodBut get to it. I think the images is really important to the alter tag, the description. And I think what you’re saying is linked to the first point in having the titles, spending time on the titles, spending time on the subtitles, tagging the images and also putting some video on the page. That’s a lot of work. Writing something, researching the title, the sub headers, having some decent images, using Canva. Canva tip. If you want to get some good images, Canva is a great resource. And then getting some video. But we’ve been hammering on about video for about two years now, haven’t we? I think the audience probably is getting a bit tired of us talking about video, but it’s really related to this. If you want a really great page that Google is going to love, get all these factors and plus some video. Would you agree, Robert?

[00:10:50.680] – Robert NewmanYeah. On page signals, ladies and gentlemen, are definitely all important, but we’re trying to appeal to what I believe, and this is not necessarily supported by documentation, but I believe that Google has been leveraging AI more and more and more inside their search ranking. And I think without proof, I think without proof, I think that the way the AI is working is user behavior based. What could an AI track that would be user based that Google has data access to? How long does somebody stay on the page? How do they interact with the page? How do they interact with the page? Do they keep coming back to the page over and over again? These user interaction signals, which used to be less than 3 % of the algorithm. Now, the last time that I saw a lot of other SEOs document it, they had raised up to 8 % of the algorithm. Most other SEOs agreed that was about 4 or 5 years ago. My guess is that user behavior signals are now 20 to 30 %. And I think that by the time everything is said and done, there can probably be upwards of 50 %.

[00:12:03.280] – Robert NewmanSo when you’re creating something on the page, if you want to know what I think the biggest hack is, how do we make something that’s going to make somebody stay there a second longer? And that plays directly into your video comment, John. Somebody will definitely stay on the site longer if they watch your video. Maybe as long as 30 seconds to two minutes, depending on how good of a job you’ve done. So video is very important because 30 seconds to two minutes is forever in the world the internet. Really great real estate sites rarely have hang times from users for longer than one minute to one minute and six seconds. And that’s above average. Average is 30 seconds for a real estate website. Oh, my God.

[00:12:46.870] – Robert NewmanSo you should start tracking your own analytics, John, and seeing how your sites do in comparison to those numbers I just gave you. Without any content from a client, our sites average between one minute and 30 seconds, so three times better than the norm, all the way up to two minutes and 20 seconds, which is really high on the normal scale. And clients who are installing content, oh, my God, they can be upwards of three to five minutes. I have clients with the average hang times on their websites for five minutes, and those clients are doing extraordinarily well because remember, that’s averaged out over the many thousands of people that come to the site. So if you’re saying five minutes, that means that the average engaged user is on there for 15 to 20 minutes, and the person who accidentally ended up there and like, o opsie, and left immediately in one second, that averages those two people out or three people. All right. Let’s get the time. We’re a few seconds away. You know what, John, I’m going to make a judgment call. We’re going to go to a break a minute earlier. We might cut this show two minutes short because I’m on a very tight timeline today.

[00:14:00.860] – Robert NewmanSo, ladies and gentlemen, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, please stop, take a moment and do me and John a favor and leave us a thumbs up, whatever. Give us a chance to get your feedback. More and more often, John, I’m hearing people reference the show. I used to say to you that I never heard of anybody referencing the show when they called into me. I got to tell you, I’d say for this year, the numbers between five and 10 % of my inquiries mentioned the show. So it’s happening. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. We will be right back. Stay tuned. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need MailW rite. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight. Com. Welcome back to the Mail. R ight podcast. Today is episode number 376. We’re deep in my field of expertise, which is why John is a little quieter than usual.

[00:15:13.230] – Robert NewmanWe’re talking about SEO hacks that can go onto your page. So if you want to get some bonus example, title tags, things like that. Title tags are great titles to blog posts. That’s what we’re talking about. It’s blog posts. So let’s say you’re doing a blog post and you’re in need of a good title, you can always hit the Inbound rem website and get some ideas that we had for free. Same thing goes for headings, which is the H2s and the H3s that I mentioned, which is just the little sub sections of a blog post. And then we’re going to start talking about things that don’t make sense, metadata. Skip that for the time being. But one thing that we did that was really cool, I thought, John, you have to let me know what you thought, we did include something that I had never seen on any other blog post about SEO strategies, which was user interaction strategies for real estate SEO. And then we included a list of things you can add to a page that gets people to interact with the page. Did you read the post? Did you see that bit?

[00:16:39.930] – Robert NewmanAnd if you did, what did you think of that? And if you didn’t, what do you think of that anyway?

[00:16:44.630] – Jonathan DenwoodI didn’t read it that specific bit, but it was linked to a question I was going to ask you anyway. Because what’s your view of mini surveys and mini quizzes, asking free question set up? People seem to like it. And have you utilized that on a regular basis with your clients doing mini quizzes, surveys?

[00:17:15.470] – Robert NewmanNo, I’ve never used it, but that’s more a lack of bandwidth to apply it inside our ecosystem. So would I use it? Yeah, potentially, maybe I would absolutely use it. There’s no I think it could be a good strategy. Here’s how I would use it. If the desire was sincere to serve the audience, but you needed to do some research before you could potentially help people, that’s what the survey was about. I would do one of those within no seconds flat. If it was a sales survey that was meant to set somebody up for a sales call, I’d be a little bit more reluctant. I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I’m not saying it can’t work, John. But I really am not like, as time is going on, I’m becoming less and less a fan of push strategies inside the world that we live in right now. They’re just not very popular. And they’re getting a lot of resistance from the audience at large. What’s resistance? Dropping out of the forum and never looking at another email that you ever sent again, unsubscribing from your email marketing list. The list goes on. Those are all signs that you have missed the mark with your marketing.

[00:18:31.940] – Robert NewmanYou have strong open rates inside emails and things like that. Those are all great ways to decide whether or not your marketing is hitting its intended target. How do your response rates, are they above normal? Do you know what normal is? Now, guys, here’s some example for some user interaction features. Toggle drop down boxes, video, which we already said, social media share. There’s lots of tools that you can plug into most WordPress sites that allow you to have social media iconography right on the page. Most of our competitors don’t do that. John and I’s like, you can’t get that versatility on the page. Comments and responses, once again, not all that common with our competitors. Calculators, newsletter signups, contact forms, drop down FAQs, IDX and interactive maps, internal links, external links. Download like infographics or ebooks, which we do use, John. I’m pretty proud of that fact. Quizzes and surveys, which you already asked me about. Image or client review carousels.

[00:19:47.140] – Jonathan DenwoodWe.

[00:19:47.320] – Robert NewmanDo use those as well. Work extremely well. Podcasts, we do not use those, but we’re doing a podcast so you and I both inherently understand the value. And chat boxes. These are all things that you can do to enhance the value of your website to the world at large. I know people that have incredibly small amounts of traffic, like 100 people per month as an example, John. So they’re not doing that great at attracting people to their podcast, to their profiles. But believe it or not, that very small stream of traffic oftentimes generates some business, like some business. Like enough, one or two clients per year for having 100 people per month listen to you, saying that you’re going to get a few clients off that is pretty incredible. Digital marketing works usually by the tens of thousands. You’re measuring the success of videos by thousands of views. Do really heavy informational content. And I’ve noticed that your views drop, but your response rate goes way up and the quality of your leads is very high. My close ratio, most of my clients close, it’s like 50 %. It’s ridiculous. Honestly, it’s ridiculous. It’s an incredibly large number.

[00:21:04.410] – Robert NewmanSo you’re not spending your time qualifying or quantifying leads. You’re spending your time talking to people who are already qualified to some degree or another, probably a very high degree. John, that’s been the tips. There is another pro tip that the head of my branding content team, his name is Ben, everybody. Some of this stuff, Ben comes up with himself. I no longer come up with everything. I do 80 % of it. I do a video, John, and then Ben creates a blog post out of it. He does this world class job. If you’ve read my blog, you’ve seen his work. He’s absolutely insane in terms of the level of quality of his work. Best I’ve ever seen. But one of those things he does is every now and again, he finds something. He usually adds his own little piece to the blog post. And he did so on this post. And I thought it was very clever, and I’m going to repeat it, but I can’t take credit for it. He took that idea that interactivity was really important to Google, and he said, You should be asking for input from your clients. Ask them on the blog to communicate to you.

[00:22:35.790] – Robert NewmanAsk questions of your audience inside your content. Now, our content is really deep and I don’t know if it’s working correctly for us or not, but I will say this, we’ve started to get a lot more interactivity off the blog, off the website. I do like it. Whether or not it’s really impacting us well for SEO, that remains to be seen. Whether or not it’s increasing lead count, without question, it’s improving both lead quantity and quality. So does it impact us well? Yes, it does. Does it have the desired effect of improving our SEO? Not sure about that. But for those of you listening, making sure that you’re trying to engage your audience, John just gave a great example. Put a button on there that says, Take a quiz, help me out, let me do some market research. Would you be willing to do me a favor? I’m trying to do some market research. Anything that engages your audience is probably going to be number one, maybe a high quality sign for SEO, probably would be my guess. But for sure, creating interaction between you and your audience is one step closer to creating a customer relationship.

[00:23:50.700] – Robert NewmanWould you agree with that, Jon?

[00:23:52.580] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah. And I was thinking of some fun quizzes. I f you did a bit of evergreen content about a certain area in the city or region that you’re covering, and you say, you could have three questions. What are the main things? Do you love the parks, the mountains? Why did you move to Rio? Did you move for the skiing, for the biking, or for the gambling? It’s just some fun questions and getting some into reaction on your post. I’ve seen a few people do. I haven’t done it on my own properties. It’s something maybe I should look at because I think it just gets them engaged a bit.

[00:24:44.980] – Robert NewmanI agree with you. And honestly, that everything you’re saying is right on the spot on. I especially love asking clients on real estate or geo specific blogs, some of the stuff that John mentions, verged on genius. Why are you thinking of moving here? But here’s one thing I would say. It is far more likely you’re going to get response if you try to figure out what the broad categories are and make it as fast as just clicking in a button. Don’t make anybody type. Just put in radio buttons where you can just click a button, put that in. You want it to be done in five or 10 seconds. There’s no way you’re going to get anybody to hang on to your blog longer than that. So super fast. But like John said, really specific to both the area and the blog. I think that’s brilliant. I think that would work very well.

[00:25:41.040] – Jonathan DenwoodI think it was going to happen in the next couple of years, Rob, with AI, is when they choose a particular of those three examples I gave you and they clicked it, the content will change on the page.

[00:25:56.770] – Robert NewmanYeah, you know what? You’re probably right. That would be if they haven’t done that, they would be doing that. And since we’re going to spend… So, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to cut off the show today at about 27 minutes because John and I have three minutes of something I need to talk to you about real quick. And then I got to go. But the bonus content today is just going to be talking about some future hacks. I’ve been talking about this one a lot. I’m going to contribute mine. You just gave me a great one. I think you’re right. I think AI or some chat GPT background thing is going to switch up the content based on your answer. I think you’re 100 % correct on that. Here’s what I think, though. I think that chat GPT is also going to change. We’re going to see a little bit more traffic go back to Bing. We’re going to see people in the Google Ecosphere using chat GPT or GPT tools a lot. And here’s what I want you all to hear. You heard it here first. We’re going to watch people translate that into ads, a lot more audio ads.

[00:26:58.620] – Robert NewmanIt’s going to be audio ads. You’re going to speak a thing into your phone. The AI is going to recognize what you mean or think that it knows what you mean, and it’s going to translate your search better. It’s going to have a better intuition about your search than Google does, which means that for a little while chat, GPT is going to start taking over voice search a little bit more, in my opinion, which is going to lead us to more audio ads. So that’s my prediction.

[00:27:31.100] – Jonathan DenwoodThe future. I’ve got mixed feelings. Well, not mixed feelings. I just think how it’s being presented at the present moment is understandable but a little bit shallow because what I think is going to happen is, I think it’s going to affect the middle, but I think there’s going to be a certain degree of searches that AI or chat is going to answer. But people do want to learn. If they’re serious, they do deeper searches. It’s more research. You’ve got a whole group of searches, which is a quick answer. They’re just looking for a quick answer. And then you got a whole smaller, but they’re further along the purchase journey where they’re doing comparative searches and they actually want to go to sites that show some leadership, some knowledge on the subject and give them information. They’re doing a deeper dive. What do you think of that? Is that making?

[00:28:38.670] – Robert NewmanSince Rob? Yeah. No, I do. I think it does make sense. I don’t disagree. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Jonathan and we are out of time for today’s show, so we’re going to wrap it up. Jon, if somebody would like to reach out to you, how would they do that?

[00:28:52.550] – Jonathan DenwoodI’ll go to the mail hyphen write. Com website and book a demo with me and Adam, and we can show you our great platform. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:29:03.090] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. And if you’d like to learn a little bit more about me, go to inboundrem. com. Click the About or Services pages, and either one has a long video either about me or the company. Either way, you should be able to learn all that you need to know. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for tuning in. We really appreciate it. We’ll see you here next week and we’ll be talking. We’ll dig into something exciting for real.

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The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

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Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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Tips & Advice on Producing Great Real Estate Focus Video In 2023With Special Guest Devon Higgins of Photoup

Devon owns a real estate marketing business and is also a Realtor himself. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has been in the real estate space for over 10 years. His main business involves working with real estate marketing professionals (specifically photographers) and empowering them to provide more value to their agent clients through photo editing, property websites, virtual tours, and virtual assistants. Outside of work, you can find Devon spending time with his wife and 2 daughters, enjoying the outdoors, and socializing with friends & colleagues.

Episode Full Interview Notes[00:00:11.020] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Episode Number 376. Host, We’re super excited to have Devin Higgins today with us. He is the CMO for FOTO Up. I’m also with my amazing co Jonathan, and I’m going to give both of these superlative humans a chance to introduce themselves. So we’re going to start with our guest today, Devin. For those that don’t know you, why don’t you introduce yourself to the Mail-Right audience? Yeah.

[00:00:38.640] – Devon HigginsHey, everyone. My name is Devon Higgins. As Robert said, I am the CMO over here at Photoup. I am also a realtor based out of the Grand Rapids, Michigan area. But Photoup, my main business, deals with real estate marketing and digital marketing for both real estate agents and media professionals who are in the real estate industry. So we’ve been around since 2012 and excited to talk to you guys today. Beautiful.

[00:01:11.690] – Robert NewmanAnd for those who don’t know, the British accent coming to you through the airwaves, and I’m using very old language here because it’s probably through fiber these days, but I’m going to say airwaves anyway, and say that that gentleman is the founder of the show, founder of his own company, and my co-host on the show, his name is Jonathan. But, Jon, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself?

[00:01:37.490] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mail-Right.com. We build beautiful websites and WordPress for real estate agents, semi-custom, and full-custom. Plus, we got a host of digital products and services that help you get yourself noticed online and get some quality leads. Back over to you, Robert.

[00:01:59.340] – Robert NewmanMy name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound rem. We’re an inbound marketing and SEO company that focuses on real estate. All right, so here we go. Today, because we’re talking to arguably a photograph expert, we’re going to talk a little bit about that, as all of you who are listening to the show can probably guess. But before we get into it, Devin, did I understand correctly by reading your bio and talking to you pre-show that you also maintain a real estate license as well as being a tech founder? Is that correct?

[00:02:30.520] – Devon HigginsYeah, that is correct. My journey into the real estate industry started back in 2014. I joined up with a couple of guys that were starting a social enterprise real estate photography business. I did not know much about either at the time but knew that I liked the guys and liked the mission of the company and I was curious about a social enterprise. So joined them at that point, at that point in time, we had a very small number of clients being real estate photographers sprinkled all throughout the US and only about five editors over in the Philippines, which is where our operations headquarters were located. So I came on at about early stages of the company, again, pretty small, and helped them with their sales and marketing of growing the team of editors along with our client base, where we now today still do photo editing. It’s still our bread and butter of the business. But we now have over 200 editors and thousands of clients all over the US and the world. We’ve grown as well from not just doing photo editing, but also doing things like video editing and virtual staging. We also have property websites and a virtual tour product and are trying to really be the end-to-end solution for the real estate media professional or real estate agent.

[00:04:04.340] – Devon HigginsAnd then along that line as well, about two years ago now, we had just been in the industry for so long. I had known so much about the media aspect but just didn’t really know enough about the agent side of things, so got my own license here in Grand Rapids. So I started trying to understand that as well. And from there, we’re now trying to create our own separate brand that’s not specifically for media professionals like photographers, but actually going directly to agents themselves to help them get some of their media up to par. So yeah, that’s short and skinny for me.

[00:04:41.980] – Robert NewmanAwesome. Well, that’s very impressive. 200 photo editors is… That is a lot of people to be running… Never mind. The company I founded, it does the same thing. We’re only 20 people, but it is already a lot of work scaling those people in that other place to do the job. So I’m just thinking, okay, what if I was 10 times bigger? I’m like, that would be a lot.

[00:05:12.600] – Devon HigginsIt’s not an easy task, but it’s a fulfilling one. Again, the social enterprise piece that I mentioned earlier is really we’re there to help folks over in the Philippines stay within their country, provide better opportunities for them to provide for their families, not have to go into foreign overseas worker programs. And there just aren’t a lot of young creative jobs in some of these developing markets. So by us being able to provide that, it’s a win win. Low cost, high quality editing service for our clients and high paying, great jobs for young creative individuals over in the Philippines. So yeah, excited about what we’re doing and we’re always trying to continue growing just like everybody else.

[00:05:56.940] – Robert NewmanI love that. And I like the way that you’re thinking about working with the Philippines. As a call center services guy, I’ve been working in the Philippines for decades. So never really thought of it like that. But then again, looking back on it, I’m realizing that the proliferation of US businesses and how we’re is changing the culture and in some ways for the better. I’m extremely ecstatic to hear somebody give me a couple of social enterprise lines that I have never heard before. John, you sound like you look like you’ve got a question.

[00:06:34.700] – Jonathan DenwoodNo, I didn’t. You don’t mind me asking me intrigued, where did the idea of utilizing resources in the Philippines come from? You said you got involved, was it the original founders? Did they have ties to the Philippines or was it evolution? Was it like a lot of things, it was initially a, I wouldn’t say, mistake, but something happened. And then you built on building resources in the Philippines. I just wondered what led to that.

[00:07:14.620] – Devon HigginsNow it’s a great question. It actually was a trifecta of serendipity, I would call it. The two founders, actually, three founders that initially started it, one of them was a real estate photographer up in Anchorage, Alaska. The other was a realtor up in Anchorage, Alaska. And the third was a guy down in Colorado getting his MBA in social enterprise, the real estate photographer and real estate agent up in Alaska. The agent had run a small website building company and had a connection to a guy over in the Philippines. And the photographer said, Hey, do you think you could connect me with anybody over there that might be able to do this stuff for me? And they said, Yeah, let’s work together. Let’s see if we can build you a small team of editors because he knew that there were highly talented people over there for relatively minimal cost. And then the guy down in Colorado was starting up a social enterprise doing wedding editing. But a similar type of deal and also over in the Philippines working with scholarship students. So those guys all somehow had a mutual friend that was the connection point that connected them all together, said, You guys should talk.

[00:08:27.810] – Devon HigginsAnd photo up was born, bringing the business side of real estate and photo editing from Alaska over to the social enterprise side in the Philippines connection with scholarship students from the original founder who was down in Colorado. And the rest is history. I came on shortly after they had all met and got the juices flowing and they needed sales and marketing help. And I was the guy to be able to help them take everything to the next level.

[00:08:58.100] – Jonathan DenwoodI have it to you, Rob.

[00:09:02.240] – Robert NewmanSo do you have sales and marketing? Great. My stream yard tends to slow down on me for reasons that I haven’t quite figured out. So hold on a second here. Let me… No one is. Oh, well, listen, can everybody still hear me? Yes. Okay. All right. Well, at least we got that going for us. All right. So let’s move on a little bit. I’m curious and I’m going to throw your curve ball, something I didn’t cover in the pre show notes because I’m an SEO guy. I love talking to clients about leveraging photos to actually get traffic back to their website, which is not common inside the industry I work in, the real estate marketing industry. It’s not a lot of people saying that. But I’m curious, when you talk to people about use cases for better photography or edited photography, what are some of the top things that you mention to them in that conversation?

[00:10:02.400] – Devon HigginsYeah. Photography in general is the launching point or sometimes the landing point for real estate marketing. There’s so many different tools out there for real estate marketing now, some of which I mentioned, video, virtual tours, virtual staging, all this stuff. But still, the photos are the key point of getting anybody interested in a listing. There are obviously many ways to take photos. You could take photos from your iPhone. You could take them on a point and shoot camera. You could hire a professional to shoot with their DSLR at a certain level. You can also hire more of an architectural photographer to come in and set up a bunch of different lighting techniques and spend a day or two at a property or space shooting very high end, beautiful photos. There’s a varying level and degree in terms of the quality that you might be looking for based on any space that you’re trying to shoot. I would say the typical client that we work with is a real estate photographer who’s doing this day in and day out and trying to shoot anywhere from two to maybe 10 homes a day, depending on the market that they’re in.

[00:11:16.520] – Devon HigginsWe then again work with very high end photographers who maybe only shoot one or two jobs a week and really spend multiple days out there prepping the site, getting lighting correct, waiting till the perfect moment to get that most beautiful shot. We then work with a lot of folks who are just jumping into the industry, who are starting out going off on their own and trying to create their own business as a real estate photographer and don’t know much about it at all. So we vary the gamut in terms of levels of photographer and folks that we work with. But at the end of the day, the photography itself is going to be the gateway into any real estate listing that a realtor might have.

[00:11:59.940] – Robert NewmanAnd for those photo ignorance out there, which oddly, I am one of them, I’m curious to know, can you give me a couple of very easy low hanging fruit… So somebody sends you a photo to edit. I have been always the one to take a photo on my phone and just post it, submit it, do whatever, never edit it, never look at it twice. Can you give me a couple of common things that people would want edited out of… When you say editing, what are you actually talking about? Because I legitimately don’t know.

[00:12:36.580] – Devon HigginsStandard editing that we do are things like white balance, correcting the verticals in a room. We also do things for free in any of our images, things like adding a TV image to a blank TV screen that might be in a room. We also remove any cords, messy cords that might be ight be under a desk or around an entertainment center. We remove those. We also do things like adding a fire into a fireplace that’s in a room. If the fire wasn’t on to begin with, we have editors that can throw a nice looking fire into that, whether it’s a fireplace inside the house or a fire pit outside. Then we do things exterior side by doing things like greening the grass. If it is shot the beginning of spring, the grass is mushy or mucky and brown, we make it look nice and bright and green. We also do things like sky replacements. So if the home was shot on a day where it was overcast or you maybe even had some rain outside, we can take that gray sky and put a nice bright blue one in with nice puffy white clouds for you.

[00:13:46.300] – Devon HigginsSo all that stuff comes included in the standard editing that we do at photo up. And then you get into the premiere photo editing, too. You can do things like converting a daytime shot into a dusk or a twilight shot that looks really nice and looks like it was taken at that twilight hour. We do things like doing object removals. You wouldn’t believe it. Maybe you would. But a lot of the times we have to remove cars from driveways because the homeowner just decided to leave their car parked in the driveway and the home looks a little bit nicer when it’s photographed if that big truck is not planted right in the middle of the driveway. So removing realtor signs is another big one that we remove. Removing just garbage cans even from the sides of homes. So we do a lot of removals on that side. And then like I said, too, we also do things. If a home was shot and the home is empty, we do things like adding virtual staging. So virtually placing furniture into a room to make it look as if it was staged physically, but have it just all be done digitally, which is going to save you time and money in the long run.

[00:14:56.340] – Robert NewmanWell, that was a very long list of things that I hadn’t thought about and a couple that I didn’t realize were possible. So I’m actually really glad I asked the question.

[00:15:10.140] – Devon HigginsI’m glad you did, too.

[00:15:12.310] – Robert NewmanWe’re going to go to break here, ladies and gentlemen. And in Murphy’s Law, for anybody that watches the YouTube channel, I was thinking, Oh, I’m going to fix my camera during the break. And no sooner than the break mark popped up, then my camera just automatically fixed itself. Anyway, technology. All right. So, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to be right back. Wherever you are, wherever you’re watching the show, do us a favor, like it, share it with those photographer friends that you have, and let everybody know that John and I are incredible humans. No, I’m just kidding. Anyway, we’ll see you in a second.

[00:15:54.180] – Devon HigginsDo.

[00:15:54.400] – Robert NewmanYou want quality.

[00:15:55.120] – Devon HigginsLeads from.

[00:15:56.040] – Robert NewmanHomeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you.

[00:15:58.610] – Devon HigginsNeed mail right. It is a powerful but easy to use.

[00:16:01.920] – Robert NewmanOnline marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads.

[00:16:05.640] – Devon HigginsAt a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question.

[00:16:10.480] – Robert NewmanAsked.

[00:16:11.070] – Devon Higgins30 day.

[00:16:11.860] – Robert NewmanMoney back guarantee.

[00:16:13.400] – Devon HigginsSo don’t delay, get started today.

[00:16:15.500] – Robert NewmanGo to mail. R ight. Com. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail Right Show. I honestly have already forgotten what episode it is, maybe 379. We’re here with Devin Higgins, who is a social enterprise entrepreneur, a real estate agent, and many, many, many things, also incredibly knowledgeable about the editing of photographs among probably, I’m sure, a whole quadre of services that his company offers. However, the service that we were talking about for the first part of the show was definitely photos and photo editing, which is more along the lines of my curiosity about what you would pictures how you would edit them because I was legitimately confused and I was given a very long list for so that was very cool. Before we go any further, though, I do want to add something in because I’m going to throw a little bit of a footnote in from my expertise. When you’re on a website and you’re using photos, you can use photos to tell stories. Now, most of the time, my stories, Devon, are informational. What I have my clients go out and do is take pictures of stuff that go well beyond the house because you can see so many pictures of so many houses because that’s what everybody has been putting up digitally for the last decade or so.

[00:17:41.620] – Devon HigginsSo.

[00:17:43.090] – Robert NewmanOftentimes, there’s little things you can take pictures of and sort them through, let’s say, a photo carousel on a website. That would be local amenities or if you’re working in communities, which is really easy, pictures of the gate, pictures of the code box, things that people don’t think of that effect the living or the lifestyle elements of the area that you’re specifically talking about. Taking pictures tells a story. I’m a big storyteller, and my belief in inbound marketing is that it’s best done when you’re being very informative and relatively interesting. And you can do that with videos. You can do that with pictures. You can do that with a written word. It’s all possible. I think that with what Darren just shared with us, telling a story might be changing whether the picture was taken during the day or the night. If you feel like the home is going to have a better story told at a particular day, an example that would be a home with a magnificent view. You obviously want to take those photos and display them during the day. Tell the story about the home, about the lifestyle connected to the home.

[00:18:56.330] – Robert NewmanCertain other types of lighting, though, might… Let’s say it has cabanas or chairs. And I know you’re not going to get that a lot in Michigan, but we would get that here in California. So let’s just say part of the lifestyle is actually like a sunset life. In California, yes, you sometimes hang out at the pool during the day, but by the time all that’s done, your margarita is out and the barbecue is going, that’s a sunset activity. So you take the photo at sunset, and you can use these photo editing services, apparently, to change the time of day that these pictures appear to have been taken at. So what I heard when you told me the list of services for photo editing is I heard a whole list of ways that people could tell a better story with a picture. That’s what I heard. Absolutely. So those of you listening to the show, this might be an interesting way for you to change the way that you’re thinking about your pictures. I’m always a believer that you want to tell the best story possible, whether it’s an individual listing, what you’re doing on a website.

[00:19:57.060] – Robert NewmanYou also want to be informative and useful. And for that, you’re going to have to do a little bit of research, listen to John and I, stay tuned into the show because you need ideas to keep that what is informative. Everybody thinks real estate is a very one trick pony, and I’m here to tell you it’s not. John, I’ll be out here.

[00:20:17.460] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, sure. All right, sure. So, Debra, you’re dealing with a lot of professional photographers and people taking video. Are there any trends that you have noticed in the past 18 months around how photography is being utilized or video? Because I’m sure in the industry photographers are looking at other photographers, and I would presume that there’s like in web design, there’s certain trends that develop. And I would imagine in video, that’s the same. So A, am I correct? And B, if that is, what are some of the trends that you have noticed in your team?

[00:21:02.840] – Devon HigginsYeah, totally. Great question. I think even probably the biggest change that we’ve seen, and it’s not even in real estate, it’s just globally, was before 18 months and it was COVID. It upended everybody’s lives and changed the way that marketing, specifically in real estate, was done. Our primary service was and still is for the most part real estate photo editing. But we saw a huge push into video, into virtual tours, into virtual staging because people just weren’t physically able to go into homes during those COVID times. So what we’ve seen after that and getting through COVID and now as we’re all getting back to normal is starting to see those trends still continue. People actually really enjoy going and looking at a listing from the comfort of their own home and computer or phone and getting a lot more information other than just pictures. But you can get a lot more information through a video, through a virtual tour by seeing a couple of different rooms that are virtually staged with different types of furniture. So you can really get a feel for whether or not you want to spend the time and effort to go walk through a home instead of then probably what you were doing before COVID was going through, if you were a buyer, going through 5, 10, 15, 20 different homes until you made that final decision to put in an offer.

[00:22:33.300] – Devon HigginsAnd obviously, going through COVID now, you’re probably putting in multiple offers on listings. But just saving your time and effort of physically going through a space by getting more digital content that gives you a much better understanding of what the home looks like and feels like. So the digital media, I think, was the biggest change that we’ve seen in the past, really, two to three years that is a continuing trend even today.

[00:23:00.980] – Jonathan DenwoodI totally can see that. And that’s why you’re going to try and provide more services directly to real estate agents, and also your professional photography clientele as well. I totally understand that. Are you also looking to provide any services? And I don’t know, you might have decided not to. Are you going to provide any services around editing, around agents, YouTube, or TikTok, or Instagram video needs, or have you looked at that, or have you got any plans in that area?

[00:23:42.600] – Devon HigginsWe definitely have looked into it. The problem is it can be very hit or miss, and it’s not as broad as maybe things like video editing, photo editing, some of these bigger services that are more well known. What we have done, though, is we’ve created a virtual assistant program where you can literally hire a member of our video editing or photo editing teams and have them work for you as essentially a full time employee. So have them edit your photos, have them edit your videos, have them do things like social media marketing, have them help you with your TikTok videos and edits. Have them do even things like lead generation, email marketing. So really trying to become the back end support for either an agent or a media professional to help them run their business by having the cost savings and availability of somebody who speaks great English and has a great skill set over in the Philippines.

[00:24:42.000] – Jonathan DenwoodSo do you spend a lot of time on training? Because I would imagine this is crucial, finding the right people, but also turning people that have potential into a real way player for your company.

[00:25:00.090] – Devon HigginsAbsolutely. When we started out, man, we were looking for anybody and everybody with photo editing experience and trying to get the people with experience in the door. We need experience. What we found out over the years is it’s much better if you have a great personality fit with at least photo up than what we do. If you’re eager to learn, if you’re excited to do something creative and you want to learn additional skills, you’re going to be a great asset to photo up and to another company down the road. If we can teach you, which we obviously can, the photo editing, the video editing skills, and we give you the training materials to learn some of these other skill sets that are valuable for a real estate agent or a photographer, we basically give you a launchpad to become a back end service professional, media assistant, virtual assistant, whatever you want to call it, for some of these other people who are looking to hire somebody to add to their team.

[00:25:56.720] – Jonathan DenwoodThat’s great. Over to.

[00:26:00.070] – Robert NewmanYou, Rob. We’re going to switch over here a little bit because we’ve been talking about photos. That’s your primary business. We deeply appreciate all the information that you’ve given us. It’s been a great ride so far. A lot of things that you’ve talked about that are actually making me take a beat and think about not only as a guest on the show but also as an entrepreneur because I also work out of the Philippines. I have 13 employees there. So you’ve given me a lot to scratch my chin about and think on. But having said that, the thing that John and I are hammering away at because video has been is the future of real estate marketing. It just is. We can talk about photos and they are an incredibly viable medium. But I look at website analytics all day long. And if you look at what drives traffic, what drives engagement on a website, not like a listing site, like a listing service, but a website, it’s almost always video when you can find it. Eighty % of the media that was consumed last year was video on sites that have video, especially ones that are doing full walkthroughs from an age.

[00:27:18.840] – Robert NewmanAnd oftentimes you have hundreds of thousands of views and maybe 20 or 30 views on each individual picture. Video is just a more kinesthetic way to transfer information. And as people get used to it, they’re really starting to favor the medium. So having said all that, I’d love to hear your thoughts on where do you agree with that in general? Do you think that video is as big of a deal as I just suggested it was? Has that not been your experience? And if it has been your experience, how are you going to… What little ways are you dipping your toes into the video pool?

[00:27:59.530] – Devon HigginsYeah. So you talk earlier, Rob, about telling a story, right? And there’s only so much story you can tell from even just photos and video is that next level of storytelling, right? Can I get a feel for how the house flows? Can I see myself sitting on that couch? Can I watch the water running out of the faucet? Can I see the fire going? There’s just a lot more story that can be told via video, and we’re seeing that as well. I have some stats that I brought with me here. Seventy % of homeowners now say that they’re more likely to list with an agent that does video for their listing, right? Four hundred and three % more inquiries are driven from listings with videos that’s coming directly from NAR. So these trends are not going away. They’re increasing. I think from an agent perspective, video can be daunting. It feels like a very big task. Oh, my gosh, how do I get into video? How much am I going to spend? How hard is it? And this is where the clientele that we work with right now can help you out. They’re photographers, they’re the professionals, they know how to do it.

[00:29:11.500] – Devon HigginsBut if you are trying to keep it under a budget, you have a ton of power with that thing in your pocket that you carry with you all day, every day. And we’re able to utilize a lot of the video that you can shoot right from your iPhone or Android, sending that content over to our team of video editors and putting it together in a nice-looking walkthrough. I mean, really just taking a room step by step, trying to keep that camera as stable as possible if you don’t have, let’s say, a tripod or a Gimbal or a stabilizer, which are all great tools to have, but you can get a lot of value out of literally just walking through your home with the phone that you have in your pocket and then getting that video edited by a professional team. That’s where I’d say I want to encourage Realtors to be able to go out there and empower them to be some of the media professionals, but also work with the professionals as well. There are a lot of folks out there, professional photographers who are great, who are going to be able to provide you with a high-quality level of service.

[00:30:18.160] – Devon HigginsBut then I know that every listing doesn’t demand that. If you’re in Michigan like me here, a $200,000 listing might not require all the bells and whistles. In California, you guys are probably saying the half-a-million-dollar listing doesn’t require all the bells and whistles. It’s just a different level. So I think being able to, though, provide good quality marketing for your clients, that’s what you need to do for every listing, regardless of the price point. Be able to provide an extra level of media that is going to catch people’s attention and get people to come and walk through that house.

[00:30:54.300] – Robert NewmanCopy that. I love everything you said there. Remind me, I’m going to put something in the chat here. I have a non on-air question for you. So you agree with what we said about video? And so, John, we’re easing up into bonus time right now. So do you want to break the segment up or do you just want to…

[00:31:28.900] – Jonathan DenwoodI think we might just keep on going.

[00:31:31.660] – Robert NewmanGot you. And we’re going to spend the last few minutes, for those of you who are watching and listening, I’m going to spend the last few minutes diving a little bit deeper into the video. So I would imagine because you just indicated so that photo up is moving in the direction of also staffing up on the video editing side. Was that a correct assumption based on something I heard you say?

[00:31:52.130] – Devon HigginsAbsolutely. Yeah, we’re seeing an increase in that. So we are adding video editors left and right now to help keep up with demand.

[00:31:59.890] – Robert NewmanI got you. So you’re starting to see the same window of opportunity for your own particular business as you did all that time ago with the photos or you and your team, the other founders, everybody collectively saw that opportunity. And now you’re seeing it again today in the video space. Is that what I’m hearing you say?

[00:32:22.960] – Devon HigginsYeah, 100 %.

[00:32:26.080] – Robert NewmanOkay. And if you’re going to give me the same rundown that you did before because I am actually moving into thinking about doing video editing for some of my higher end customers. And I’m curious to know what would be some common video editing questions questions, comment, what do you do with video editing? Because once again, I don’t know the answer to this.

[00:32:50.360] – Devon HigginsRight. How we look at video editing is threefold. We have a standard video edit that is very I mean, clean. Has a nice title of the address, the amenities in the home, nice clean cuts, start to finish, has an intro and an outro of a realtor logo. Pretty standard. We then have a premiere or premium video edit that is going to do things like motion graphics, really engaging the viewer to draw them into the listing, having a lot smoother and nicer transitions, have better range of music in the background, having maybe a realtor give an intro and an outro of the property, physically being on camera, talking about the listing. Then we have that third tier where if you really want to get into video editing at that next level and you’re doing a ton of video. You’re wanting to do not only video for every listing, but you’re wanting to do an agent video, a brokerage video, videos of all the other things and services that you as an agent provide. We have the ability to hire a video editing virtual assistant that works for you full time, can do all sorts of other video editing for you that you might want above and beyond just your average listing.

[00:34:09.100] – Devon HigginsSo those are the three different levels, at least, that we have and we see right now.

[00:34:13.400] – Robert NewmanSo if you’re going to hire somebody, literally take advantage of one of these virtual assistant roles, can you give me a range of what that would cost?

[00:34:20.860] – Devon HigginsYeah. So how we set everything up is on a monthly fee, and our monthly fees range anywhere from $1,295 to 1695. And that’s going to depend on the contract term. So how long do you want to work with that person and their skill set? What skills do they have? Are they just doing photo editing? Are they doing video editing, photo editing, or virtual staging? Or are they doing more VA administrative tasks for you? Social media marketing, lead generation, email marketing, that thing. So that’s the range that we have and we’ve seen a lot of adoption in that space.

[00:35:00.720] – Robert NewmanGot you. I would think so. That’s a very reasonable cost.

[00:35:05.680] – Jonathan DenwoodIf you.

[00:35:07.220] – Robert NewmanKnow the.

[00:35:09.260] – Jonathan DenwoodCost, the early cost of a good video editor.

[00:35:14.700] – Devon HigginsIn terms of just quickly, in terms of an hourly rate, and these people, they’d be working for you eight hours a day, five days a week, you’re looking at roughly anywhere from $7 to maybe $10 an hour. Very tough to find somebody that does quality work over here, for better or worse, at those rates.

[00:35:40.420] – Robert NewmanMy mind is going, but not in the way it should be. It’s going in an entrepreneurial way because that raises some other questions. But go ahead, guys.

[00:35:50.700] – Jonathan DenwoodKeep going. Yeah, sure. Because I think your service is fabulous, actually, because I think you’re filling a vacuum because I think what I observed, and I’d be interested to see if you agree and also Rob agrees, there seem to be two points, but nothing in the middle. And what I mean by that, there was the age and that he utilized his phone. He does a quick walkthrough. He puts the phone in front of him. He talks into the phone. And then you had this high-quality drone luxury property, full production videos. But it didn’t seem a lot in the middle because of cost, the inability, because the agent would probably want to do that themselves. But then I know the amount of time editing takes in audio or in the video. And the amount, if you’re a busy agent, the last thing you’re going to want to do is edit videos. And that’s why I think it’s a major reason why that middle area is… And to hire somebody domestically that knows what they’re doing. You’re looking at 30, 40, 50, up to 100 plus dollars an hour. And for a lot of agents, depending on the type of property they’re promoting, it just isn’t viable, is it?

[00:37:15.960] – Devon HigginsTotally. And I think you bring up a great point, Jonathan. Really, what it comes down to is opportunity cost. Where is my time best spent? Is it editing photos? Is it editing videos? Is it taking all of these photos and videos, or is it hiring and working with somebody who is a professional in that space? Whether it is the photographer themselves or whether it is a VA or whether it’s partnering with a team that can take all that stuff off of your plate. I think my goal and our goal as a company is to be able to provide professional-level marketing on every listing. When I started back in 2014, I think the stat was around 15 % to 20 % of all listings in the US were shot with professional real estate photos and professional marketing. That rate has now increased. We’re up to maybe 40 %, sometimes 50 or higher in certain areas. But across the board, that average is about every other home that is shopped professionally or marketed professionally with a professional editing or professional marketing service. If we can continue to raise that water level and reduce the barrier to get really high-quality marketing, I think that’s our goal as an industry in general.

[00:38:32.800] – Devon HigginsIf we can provide a higher level of value to our clients, that they’re saying, Wow, they really pulled out all the stops for me in my listing instead of just, Oh, I saw him walk in with his iPhone and then immediately throw those photos up on the listing, that is going to dictate a different level of service than the guy who brings out the professional media crew. But again, coming back to the fact that that thing in your hand, the device in your pocket is so powerful now that you can do almost anything in terms of marketing and in terms of media from your phone. And that’s only going to continue to increase as we move along here.

[00:39:11.260] – Robert NewmanAgreed. Well, guys, we’ve done a good show. We’re ending. We’re closing on the last minute or so. So I want to use this last minute once again, directing people to whatever your pet interests are, where you want them to go, and where you think you can be useful. Devin, why don’t you go ahead? If somebody wanted to reach out to you if somebody wanted to learn more about some particular part of your company that you’re focused on yourself right now, where would that be?

[00:39:36.510] – Devon HigginsYeah. So to find me, you can go to photo up. Photoup or. Com. It’ll both get you to the same spot. And then check out our website. We have a lot of information on there in terms of our services. We have a lot of great blogs with a lot of the content that I talked about today. We also have a little chat feature that you can ask for me personally, if you’d like to, or talk to one of our supporter sales team members. We have a phone line that goes directly to our sales staff, including myself. So if you want to give us a call, feel free. We also give anybody who signs up for an account 10 credits to be able to use any of our services. We’re currently, right now, running a special little promotion that any agent that signs up for an account will get one free, virtually staged image, too. So if you’re interested in any of that stuff and you’re thinking you want to give it a try, come on over, sign up for an account, give it a go and let me know what you think.

[00:40:34.220] – Robert NewmanCool. Jon?

[00:40:36.420] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, sure. I just want to point out to the listeners and viewers that we’re looking for some local evangelist real estate professionals to join the Mel Wright family. Basically, get your website hosted and also custom designed the homepage, and the About Us page. And all we ask is that you utilize the service and you then promote it in your local area and become a joint partner with Mel Wright. If that’s interesting, go over to Mail-Right and book a demo. It’d be me or my co-founder, Adam, and we’ll show you and we’ll see if we have a good fit. Back over to you, Robert.

[00:41:17.240] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. My name is Robert Newman. I am the founder of Inbound R AM. You can just go to Inbound RAM. You can look in the… For those of you who are doing the video, you can just look over there. Just go to InboundREM, and you’ll learn all sorts of stuff about real estate marketing, inbound marketing, and about me if you really want to. I will say this, John’s beta offer is rare in the world of technology. If you are looking to get in on the ground floor someplace, this would be a great time. And I think that no matter what our audience has done, Devon, you probably want yourself a customer in the form of me. So when we get off the show, the airwaves here, I just want to ask you to stay on for just one more second. All right, everybody, thank you for joining us today at the MailWright Show. We have loved talking to you. I’ve been having consistent technology issues for which I am sorry. But we’ll catch you the next time and we appreciate you guys.

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4 Real Estate Blogging Ideas To Dominate Your MarketGenerally speaking, it’s smart to take a two-pronged approach to your blog content strategy. The very best real estate blog ideas focus either on lead generation or broad engagement.

1. Neighborhood Guides

There was a time when simple neighborhood pages generated leads. Now the game has changed. Neighborhood guides need to include lots of helpful content.

2. Local Real Estate Niches Articles

So far we’ve covered neighborhood guides. Another excellent blog topic is anything related to your real estate niche. Take this article on Victorian homes from Ruby Home. It generates 2500 monthly visitors. It ranks #1 for the keyword “Victorian homes in Los Angeles”, for which 50 people search every month.

3. Financial and Tax Information

You may be surprised to hear that many potential clients do not have access to this information, especially in a highly-readable format. People get frustrated because they can’t get a straight answer from anybody, and that’s a huge opportunity for you.

4. Living In” and “Moving To” Blog Posts

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:11.320] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, everybody, to the Mail. Right Show. It’s episode number 375. Wow. John and I are going to talk to.

[00:00:21.730] – Jonathan DenwoodYou about it. You poor man. You’ve had to pull up with me for, I think, 175 episodes plus, probably.

[00:00:31.500] – Robert NewmanBefore we get into this, everybody, we’re sitting here before the show and John, we’re talking about how our weeks have been. And he looks at me and he goes, and I’m coming to him, Oh, my God, you’re so busy because I’ve seen all these calls in his calendar, and he comments to me, Well, how do I say this, Robert? When you’re so focused, I don’t know what the hell he was trying to say, but I honestly think that everybody is what he was trying to say is that usually I am a bike bike. Half way being an asshole.

[00:01:07.560] – Jonathan DenwoodYou’re just very focused, more focused than me in some way. I’m a bit of a dark, closer F my way, don’t I? But I can waffle a bit, can’t I?

[00:01:23.660] – Robert NewmanYou can at that. But hey, everybody, we’re here 375 times. And no matter what John and I say, we’ve done this 200 times together, maybe more. Maybe I think it’s actually about 220 times because I’m pretty sure I joined on Episode 155 or 154.

[00:01:41.060] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, right on that.

[00:01:41.620] – Robert NewmanSo we’ve done this 250 whatever times, but you haven’t done it with us and you may not know who we are. So as per my usual, I would love for my co host, the lovely British gentleman that you can hear on your headset or on your speaker to introduce himself.

[00:02:02.020] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. I’m Jonathan Dingwood. I’m the joint founder of Mel Highford Wright. We build beautiful custom, semi custom, real estate websites on WordPress. Plus we offer a load of digital services and products to get you more leads. And the beauty of WordPress is you own your website, you’re not renting it off somebody. That’s a great idea, isn’t it? Back over to you, Rob.

[00:02:31.760] – Robert NewmanIt is indeed. And hey, everybody, my name is Robert Newman. I’m a real estate online marketing consultant. I’ve specialized in real estate SEO. I’ve been doing it for 14 years. I have had a very lucky impressive career with the number of people that I’ve worked with. In California, I would say I’ve worked with 50 % of the top 2 %, mostly on building websites and doing SEO. So John and I got together.

[00:03:02.120] – Jonathan DenwoodAnd you’ve kicked your sanity.

[00:03:04.780] – Robert NewmanWell, maybe, maybe, John. Maybe. So John and I got together a while ago when he had me on his guest podcaster. And we’ve been doing this ever since for years now, just talking about real estate online marketing. And today, what we’re going to talk to you about, everybody who’s listening, is we’re going to talk to you about four blogging ideas for real estate lead generation. So I want to be clear with everybody who’s listening to the show. You can write a lot of blog posts, and 95 % of them will not generate you any business ever, even if you had 100,000 people come to the website. There are certain things that you can talk about that either set you up for conversion or take you over the plate in terms of getting a conversion, getting somebody to call you, things like that. They’re oftentimes not what you think because the sexy articles are the ones that you can draw 100,000 people with. And the ones in my experience that produce calls are the ones we are getting one or 200 people to the site. But they’re really specific articles aimed at really specific people. And once the article is read, you’ve made your impression and you get the phone call.

[00:04:29.150] – Robert NewmanDo you have John’s nodding? But I want to hear your thoughts on that, John.

[00:04:33.100] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I think that’s spot on, really. I call them vanity metrics, the vanity how many social media posts consumed, how many visitors you get to a website, which is important. If you don’t get any visitors, you can’t convert them. But on the other hand, I’ve seen loads of websites with loads of traffic, but it’s the wrong type of traffic which had very little interest or very little intention of buying the product or service that the website is supposed to be promoting?

[00:05:18.890] – Robert NewmanI agree. So here’s what we’re going to do, everybody. John was kind enough to select an article from June 21, 2022, which is for real estate blogging ideas to dominate markets on inbound rem. It says it’s under real estate blogging ideas. And this is the post that we decided to reverse engineer for the sake of this show. One of those first subjects that we talk about that’s in terms of a blog post is neighborhood guides. But there was a time, and I had a lot to do with this article when it was written, Jon, I actually wrote an original article that this one is based off of. And a lot of the stuff that I left there is still here. So there was a time when you could write a decent little neighborhood page and get leads. And maybe in some places, in some markets, that’s still true. For the most part, however, you’re not getting a lot of leads that register with your site, no matter how good your neighborhood information is. Or at least most realtors don’t have the will to make a neighborhood information good enough. There are still a couple of Realtors out there who are mostly content background people, and they’ve set the entire industry on its ear because when they write a neighborhood guide, it’s like 3,000, 4,000 words.

[00:06:44.440] – Robert NewmanIt’s a deep guide, has pictures. And both of these agents have been consistently generating leads for years. As a matter of fact, they’re two of the highest GCI, highest producing agents I’ve ever seen or heard of. I wrote a book on them.

[00:07:00.360] – Jonathan DenwoodCan I ask you why you think this is? Because if you’re a newbie agent, let’s say in your second, third year, this is something that you could do yourself. I would suggest you really need to have a WordPress website because if you’re renting it off your broker or one of these platforms where if you totally stop paying, you lose the website. But it’s something that if you spend a bit of time and produce a really nice bit of what we call, and I think you call it as well, evergreen content, you can just update it once a year and it just keep paying for itself year in, year out, won’t it?

[00:07:46.720] – Robert NewmanIt does, especially if you write the right pieces.

[00:07:49.710] – Jonathan DenwoodBut why do so little of them do it?

[00:07:54.510] – Robert NewmanWell, I think that a lot of realtors don’t understand what an information, like a good informational piece of content looks like. And the ones that do generally speak, think to themselves that they understand how much time it takes. Because if somebody was to say it would take me 20 to 40 hours to write a page, on our blog post, we use this example called Tanglewood. And we link to the page that we’re using as an example because not even we as a professional marketing company have done the job that they’ve done at Houston properties because they are off the hook with how deep their content is. And so somebody who knows how to write would look at this and go, Oh, my God. Somebody spent 40 or 50 hours writing the original version a week. And they would be correct. Houston properties has made the realtor Paige Martin millions of dollars. That is not an over exaggeration. The number is in the million. She feeds a team of 30 salespeople off this website. But they have been working at and writing great content for a while. Why do I think that realtors don’t do it?

[00:09:06.090] – Robert NewmanI think the initial investment of time and energy is too high. It’s too intimidating. And that’s assuming that you know what you’re doing, John. I think that some real estate agents, especially some listening to the show, because you all are amazing, because I think that some of them are going to go, Well, I could probably see making an investment. And when you start talking about investment for high end SEO, when you’re talking like $5,000, $6,000 a month, I just ran across Tim Stout. You remember Tim Stout, our previous guest? He went with an SEO company called Andor SEO. I want to say they’re doing nothing even close to what we’re looking at. I’d say they’re doing one fifth of what a page on Houston properties is. And Tim’s paying $5,000 a month for that.

[00:09:55.020] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah. Before we go on to the next one, do you think Because we don’t want to discourage people because I think there’s still some great opportunities here because so few other agents are prepared to put any effort into this. So I know a couple of agents in Northern Nevada who understood a bit about websites and educated themselves. And there’s a couple of names in my mind that I’ve done quite well. But can you give some tips, some ips, insights about what you think should be in a good neighborhood guide that maybe could give a quick outline? So we’re giving some advice to our listeners.

[00:10:43.160] – Robert NewmanAbsolutely. If it’s going to be a good neighborhood guy, you’re going to have all the points of lifestyle interest associated with that neighborhood. I mean, the stores may be ranked by usefulness, usability, such as I have a Costco right down the street. That’s one of the first things I tell every single person about living in Van Nes is I can walk to my Costco. It’s enormously important thing for me. I actually do walk to it occasionally. Number two, schools. Number three, if you’re older or talking to somebody older, some note, notation as to not only the hospitals, but how friendly and easy to use are they? Another thing that is oftentimes commonly asked of realtors that you could throw into a neighborhood guide is information about that. Some people are so intent on their animals that they are, Is there a good vet in the area? And then last but not least, if you’re dealing with a younger audience, you might even go so far as to make notation of are there marijuana dispensaries in the neighborhood or around the neighborhood? Things of this nature.

[00:11:50.820] – Jonathan DenwoodThat’s very California, isn’t it?

[00:11:54.540] – Robert NewmanYeah. But you’re right, John, because I have a friend that’s buying a nine million dollars studio city home. And one of his main questions was, How far is this house to the closest dispensary? You never can tell in California. With money, with things.

[00:12:10.760] – Jonathan DenwoodI think the Vets would be more my cup of tea. You got to look after your Prairie friends, haven’t you?

[00:12:19.560] – Robert NewmanSure. And I agree with that. It’s just what you have to look out for in a neighborhood guide is if you’re listening to this show, the thing that blows my mind is I do write some great content. What I’ve had the experience doing, John, is reading other content that other people have written for years. And I have a pretty good understanding of what some of the more creative things are that people have ever thought of ever inside the real estate business. And one of the things that I can tell you is that really somebody is going to think of something that everybody is interested in for the first time. They’re going to get it on a neighborhood guide, and that’s going to drive them a whole bunch of leads. Whether it’s not just restaurants, but reviews to restaurants, your personal reviews to restaurants. I think that the next step in neighborhood guides is connecting a neighborhood guide to your local service profile and starting to put down your own personal reviews as part of that neighborhood page. I think that’s the direction that we’re going for a strong content page. But now, let me tell you something else, John.

[00:13:24.200] – Robert NewmanIf you do those things, take all that time. There is no doubt for those of you listening to the show the numbers are incontrovertible. Go to my website and figure out how I am a science guy, I’m a marketing guy, I’m a numbers guy. I make all my decisions based on the math that I’m able to get my hands on. And this guide that you’re talking about, these content pages, they generate more leads over time than any other method that you can try. They stay relevant, just like John said. Just like what happens to… Okay, Robert, you have to update it. Sure. But once the big thing is written, you go through, you spend 30 minutes every year. And if you have hundreds of these pages, that is a long time. However, like Paige and I’m forgetting his name right now because I’m tired. But the other guy that do Ruby at home, between the two of them, they’ve sold a billion dollars in real estate. That is with a B people, not an M. And they’ve done it all using content marketing and very little paid advertising. So when you’re wondering to yourself, what’s possible?

[00:14:30.440] – Robert NewmanThe answer is you can create generational wealth by doing this well. That’s what the answer is.

[00:14:36.860] – Jonathan DenwoodSo should we go on to number two then? Sorry. Yes. Local real estate niche articles. So give us an outline of what that is, Rob?

[00:14:49.280] – Robert NewmanSo talking about Tim, Tim had Lake Homes on his website and was targeting very deeply homes that were on lakes. And I think he’s probably making his money, if he’s making any at all, off that specific search. So niche real estate is niche neighborhoods, niche home types, niche people. We’ve got probate people here in California. That’s niche. You’ve got other things as well. It’s t doesn’t… There’s a hundred different ways. I’m probably going to go back and talk about niches again because when you’re talking about niches, I wrote an article that had 150 different niches in it. And funnily enough, John, I can only remember like five or six. But I remember when I researched and wrote the article, I’m like, Holy shit, there’s a lot of different ways that you can make money because anything can be a niche for you. It doesn’t have to be a home type. It doesn’t have to be a neighborhood. It could be a Gotham properties here in LA who I used to consult with. Their niche was training their salespeople to be actual expert real estate transaction consultants. And they were brilliant at it. They had a deep level of knowledge about what you could do with a piece of property, how you could financially maneuver it, 10 31s, living trusts.

[00:16:19.250] – Robert NewmanThese were all things that they talked to their clients about. They basically raised the bar of technical education very high and actually created this mystique around the salespeople that they were actually educated like a doctor or lawyer would be. When you went to them, you were getting advice from an investment person, from a real estate officer, all of it. And it was pretty incredible. It was so incredible. The guy who founded it got bought out almost instantaneously. He created a huge curriculum, John, and then he got bought out within six months. It was pretty crazy.

[00:16:58.070] – Jonathan DenwoodI think we’ve spoken in other episodes about if you’re starting out, it’s totally understandable. But as soon as you get any traction and understand what are the type of customers, properties, locations that you like dealing with, the more that you can focus on a niche as a real estate agent professional, the better you’re going to do in this industry. That trying to market to everybody seems to be the right idea, but it isn’t. It is. It’s not a good idea.

[00:17:46.100] – Robert NewmanAt all. There’s a list of names of people that focus on niches. So it’s Jeffrey Hyland before he passed, Maurice O’Mansky, Josh Flagg, my client, Jacqueline Thompson. Every single name I just mentioned to you is probably top 50 in California, top 50 producer in California. There’s a few people, really old school people such as Joyce Ray and a few others that don’t seem to appear, don’t focus on niches, but they’ve been around for so long. You would never be able to replicate your success if you tried to do it exactly the same way in the exact same cities. You’d have to wait as she has had to wait for 30 or 40 years before you started to see your business grow the way that hers is. Everybody else, even here in LA, even in Hollywood, they’re focused on niches and surprising niches at that. They’re not the niches that everybody thinks. Like Jeffrey and Mauricio, while they would do the listing and take the listing, I think they focused their actual energy on luxury condominium high rises, like their actual marketing energy, their shaking hands and going places and meeting people. All of that was more focused around buildings that had units that they could sell from between two and 25 million.

[00:19:10.880] – Robert NewmanAnd so that’s a niche. And everybody who makes a ton of money is doing it. Some people like Christoff, too, have targeted… He is focused on Beverly Hills for almost the entirety of his career. Just Beverly Hills. Now he has many other places.

[00:19:29.380] – Jonathan DenwoodDo you think, obviously, there’s a lot of other factors, intelligence, hard work, commitment, blah, blah, blah. But do you think this is one of the key factors? Because you know and I know that only about 20 % of individuals in the real estate industry make a really good living from it. Do you think identifying a niche is one of the key factors that will determine if you’re going to become one of those 20 %?

[00:19:59.860] – Robert NewmanIt certainly does. But I’d say mindset and self education of the others. Yes, understanding that you have a niche, but understanding and being disciplined and diligent about targeting that niche, talking to that niche, showing up for that niche. Jacqueline focuses on a single neighborhood, Shady Canyon. It’s where 80 % of her business comes from. It’s only 300 homes. And she’s one of the top producing agents in the country. The same thing goes for other people. But just because the market is small does not mean that there isn’t a very, very large degree of work that that agent has put into building up the untouchable reputation that, like, Jacqueline has put up because she’s doing it. She’s marketing to these people. She’s mailing, she’s knocking on their door, she’s walking the street, she’s putting her signs up. She’s doing probably… Brian Tracy used to have this old sales methodology that he used to train on called the five touch mechanisms, and he pulled it from other sales trainers. But the psychology of a sales process, Jon, is that somebody has to be introduced to you five times before they’re ready to buy. And things have not really changed in the digital age.

[00:21:09.400] – Robert NewmanWe’ve just transferred those touches online. So when you’re working a neighborhood or a niche, or anything, you target the hell out of your audience and just try to keep introducing yourself to them so every single person in your niche knows who you are. That’s really the only objective. It’s the only objective I have with them about who I am. Not trying to sell everybody a website. I just want them to know who I am. That’s what I think. And when it comes to blogging, because we’re talking about blogging, guys, when you have a niche, it gets very hard for me to talk to you about what that niche is going to be or what you should be blogging about within that niche. Paul Kaplan is one of my favorite people to talk about. He sells modern homes here in California. He does it specifically out in Palm Springs and Palm Desert. That’s his niche. And he talks about modern homes on his blog all day long, 24 7. That’s all he does, is talk about modern homes out in that part of the country. But sometimes he talks about them in other parts of the country, too.

[00:22:13.930] – Robert NewmanHe talks about the history and where you find these homes and why he likes them so much and what’s unique about them. And I can go on and on and on and on. And so that’s what you talk about when you have a blog. And he gets a massive amount of word of mouth. He sells a ridiculous percentage of the modern homes that are for sale in Palm Springs and Palm Desert because he committed to a niche. He loves the niche, which is interesting. He actually just likes it. Give him a chance to sell just a regular old house or modern home. And I haven’t confirmed this, but I think that he’s going to go, Oh, yeah, give me the modern home. If his schedule is full and he has no ability to service and he has a modern home over here and a non modern home over here, he’s going to go sell the modern home. I’m pretty sure.

[00:23:00.720] – Jonathan DenwoodThat’s great. Shall we go for a break, Rob?

[00:23:03.340] – Robert NewmanYeah, let’s please do it. So everybody, thank you so much for humoring me. And John, last night was one of my deep, deep, deep, deep insomia nights. I only got a few hours of sleep, so I may be a little lost in the sauce. It happened every so often. So thank you for bearing with me. John, thank you for bearing with me. Wherever you guys are at, where you’re watching the show, listening the show, do us a favor and give us a comment. All right? We’d really appreciate it. We’ll be right back. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need Mail write. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight. Com. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail Right Show. We are on episode number 375. And as usual, John and I are all over the place talking about so many things, but we’re talking, trying to talk about really good blog ideas for real estate lead generation.

[00:24:10.140] – Robert NewmanThat’s what we’re trying to talk about.

[00:24:13.140] – Jonathan DenwoodI think we’ve been successful so far.

[00:24:16.400] – Robert NewmanOkay, I’m going to take your word for it. We talked about neighborhood guides, and the second thing that we talked about was blogging about a very specific niche inside the real estate space. So now let’s talk about financial and tax information. Okay, now niches and speaking deeply inside your niche. So everybody needs to hear me on this. All these ideas work, all of them. But if you want to say, Robert, what’s the most effective strategy, short term, long term, all term? It’s absolutely the one we just covered. It is picking a niche, discussing it, really getting into what people care about inside that niche. And everybody hear me. What do you think, John, if you had to guess, if I was to say, here’s an idea for how to write for a niche, but this is the number one thing you should do. What would you think you would need to do to write about a niche? What do you think one of the things is that you could do to find some interesting ideas to write an article when you’re talking about a very niche market?

[00:25:23.020] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, you caught me out here. Nothing occurs, part of having a passion for it, which you touched in the first half. Yeah, you caught me out there, to be honest, Robb.

[00:25:37.040] – Robert NewmanNothing beats talking to people that actually live, work, and exist inside that niche. Nothing beats it. Nothing beats it then thinking that you have an idea for a blog post and calling a business owner that may be in an area that you service or calling a past person that you did a transaction with. All of you, every single person, you included, Jon, we are content machines when you train your mind for the discipline of remembering the questions.

[00:26:06.720] – Jonathan DenwoodThat people have. I think that’s a great insight there, Rob, because it fits in because doing a podcast, doing videos about the niche, just building a whole… Getting those five touch points, which you outlined before we went for our break, it all links in, doesn’t it?

[00:26:30.340] – Robert NewmanYes. But the number one thing I do, I do research, I do keyword research, which is part of it. And you can do keyword research, but I teach my clients. Keyword research is secondary because you’re going to tie a subject into a type of title that people are searching for, and then you’re going to match the content to the title. But what you really should be doing is you should be out there talking to people, remembering the questions that they ask you. And for those of you listening to this show, anybody that’s a professional salesperson, John, me, anybody that promotes a business, you get sick of answering some of the same questions because it’s an absolute fact that if you’re selling something, eventually you’re going to have the five or six questions that everybody asks you and you just get a little bit tired of answering them. Those five or six things are your number one blogging subjects because at a minimum, you can send somebody to a digital place to answer those questions. At a maximum, you’re now driving in a lot of curiosity, curious people who appreciate you answering those questions. So much so, the expertise that you have is so well established in their mind that they pick up the phone and they call you.

[00:27:46.360] – Robert NewmanSo going the route of highly specific information, especially if it’s based on questions that people who work want to buy homes in that niche, want to sell homes in that niche, want to look in that niche. Million dollar homes are great for one thing. They get lots of lookaloos. You could build on a massive list by trying to sell a single five or 10 million dollar home or one that’s in the top two % of your market, and the smart realtor would create a mailing list around it, have conversations with everybody, understanding they probably weren’t going to sell that home, but they would create a large amount of dialog and then come to market with a couple of smaller homes in the same area, like the same niche. You take the top of market and then you collect all the information from all the people who just want to look, want to gawk, who want to dream, and then you let them dream. And then you say, by the way, now that we’re done dreaming, I’ve got this really cool thing over here.

[00:28:49.940] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, the other thing is, before we go on to the financial taxes, the other thing occurred to me, as you were saying that, Rob, is that this is so fantastic because it’s self fulfilling. What I mean by that is that the more you talk about the niche and all the things you’ve outlined, the more these people consume it that you’re targeting it. They’re pre qualified in themselves, aren’t they? The more they consume it before they approach you.

[00:29:20.760] – Robert NewmanCorrect. Financial and tax information, closing cost, property taxes, 10 31 exchange information for specific areas. A lot of financial and tax information will surprise everybody listening to the show. Some of it doesn’t change state to state globally. Some of it’s federal, some of it doesn’t change. Unfortunately, though, a lot of it does. And your consumer, whether you know that or not and you should as a professional real estate agent, but your consumer will know that, especially they bought or sold a home before. And the financial and tax information is something you get burned by once. And then generally speaking, people are willing to do a much deeper dive than you’d ever think looking at things like closing costs and property tax and really understanding what they are, what can possibly input the sale. And why is that? We all get handed a big stack of paperwork, but as one of the line items, eventually we’re going to have our closing fees and things like that as part of that. And we’re going to see things like 1 % on for something, which is going to be here in California, it’s going to be $10,000 that we just took from you, Mr.

[00:30:24.610] – Robert NewmanNewman. Thank you for the 10 grand. You’re like, what? It’s not small. The numbers are never small in these things. A quarter of a % adds up. 1 % really adds up. More than 1 % I would recommend that everybody’s paying attention to it because this is a 20 to 25 year transaction for most people. And in California, it exceeds a million dollars almost every single time. So it is simply not small. And you should be paying attention to where your 10 and your 30 and your 40,000s are going.

[00:30:57.220] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I think I’m not. Well, yeah, I think you’re spot on because I think, like you say, a lot of housing in Southern California, a million dollars. The property tax, a lot of people are in for shock, aren’t they, in the next few years, aren’t they?

[00:31:21.740] – Robert NewmanYeah, they.

[00:31:23.220] – Jonathan DenwoodSure are. Not a pleasant shock.

[00:31:28.000] – Robert NewmanAnother financial tax information is things like probate. And I can go on and on. There are lots of different things to do around financial information. In my article, we listed an example of an article that we wrote three, four, five years ago. I don’t even know it’s still on the first page and we never updated it. It’s basically property taxes in Atlanta. And we still somehow remain on the first page for this article for years and years and years talking about property tax. And we don’t really get that much competition. The people that want to competition with us are like nerd wallet and property base. They’re not actually direct competitors of ours, and they’re not direct competitors to the client, so it doesn’t really matter to them. They’re not competing for your real estate prospects’ attention. They’re competing for some other reason. They want to sell back services or something.

[00:32:19.360] – Jonathan DenwoodI’ll tell you another good subject, but I just want to see if you think it’s a good one for agent to write about is HOA fees, about how are they how can you tell if your HOA is just ripping you off? How do you judge you’ve been charged for it? Because they seem to be all over the place, don’t they?

[00:32:44.540] – Robert NewmanThey’re all over the place. And the second that somebody comes up with a comprehensive national website that covers that, that is a social media platform that covers all these HOA dialog that has proper… I’ve seen one or two of these, by the way, John, but nobody really has the experience growing a digital brand. They don’t understand how expensive and how time consuming it’s going to be. But the minute that somebody does, that’s a $10 million idea right there because everybody should be having a conversation with everybody else that’s ever managed, used, but dealt with this HOA so that you know in detail what to expect. You shouldn’t have to attend some meeting in the basement or the rec area of your own building and do it at eight o’clock on a Tuesday ight, all so that you can just basically learn what your fellow homeowners are going to try to force you to do on a piece of property that you’ve already bought. It’s ridiculous. It’s a ridiculous system. And so, yes, everybody’s dealt with those HOAs where there’s just random.

[00:33:47.520] – Jonathan DenwoodI don’t see on any of the Northern Nevada agent websites any outline of what is the price? Are there any guidelines these HO should follow? Blah, blah, blah. Because when you look at different properties, it can vary from $180 to $600 a month.

[00:34:16.700] – Robert NewmanThat’s just tip of the iceberg in California dollars. There are places here whose HOA fees move you a very long way into what your mortgage payment is. I’ve seen them be as much as half the mortgage payment. Or more. Some HOAs in some communities here cost equal amounts because they’re providing security, they’re providing many other things that go along with the fees. And along with that, you come with all the crazy California laws where you have to insure everybody and make sure everybody’s making over $15 an hour and blah, blah, blah. So it adds up. So for those of you listening to the show, number three is that tax information. Go to my blog post if you’d like to see more. Now, number four is engagement blog posts. And this is our bonus content because really, we’re out of time. This is the end of the show. John’s going to separate it. We’re going to have a little piece of a bonus content. Move on to either the mail hyphen, right blog channel or move on to just Google YouTube inbound rem. Either way, though, you’re going to find an article. Now, the last way to make a lot of money using content for real estate lead generation ideas that involve blogging.

[00:35:34.320] – Robert NewmanAnd this is very low hanging fruit, everybody. Relocating to, moving to, or living in. I just gave you the three top titles. Those are keyword titles with the digital landscape shifting the entire country and its population. Those three keywords are massively used, plus retiring in. So it’s moving to, living in, retiring to, and moving to, right? Relocating to. That’s what’s happening right now. All the fan companies letting all those people go. Everything that you’ve heard about or read about in the news is propelling a large movement in our population, maybe as much as 3 % to 4 % of the population is on the move right now. And that means that these guides get a tremendous… They’re both sexy, they get traffic, and they get you leads. It makes them a trifecta in terms of writing about. Like, anybody that has a website or a YouTube channel or a Instagram channel, it’s not trying to explain to your audience the pros and cons of moving into a neighborhood, relocating to a neighborhood, you’re really missing out on a big revenue stream possibility. I wouldn’t even understand that as a real estate agent. Van Isis is a really blue collar city.

[00:36:45.860] – Robert NewmanAnd I don’t think that very many people, except ones who are struggling with home price, move here. It’s one of the only places.

[00:36:54.920] – Jonathan DenwoodI’ll give you an example. I like to ski, Rob. And I normally ski at Hefner in late time. Every time I go skiing and I’m on a ski lift. I start chatting to the person next to me. We’ve moved to Northern Nevada. We’ve moved four months ago, a year ago, three years ago. We moved from the Bay Area. We’ve moved to Northern Nevada because we like the area. I must hear that f there isn’t… When I go skiing, I must hear it three times during the day. I’ve moved to Northern Nevada from the Bay Area.

[00:37:41.260] – Robert NewmanAnd that would be what John just said was an opportunity for content piece because now if I’m the realtor and I’m sitting here on a ski lift and that’s the reality, I get to do this. I get to say the surprising reality of skiing in Reino for those who’ve just relocated. I’d have to rejigger the title, but I have a blog post based on what you just said. I do. And the blog post would be, what does it cost? Where do you go? And how do you get into skiing? And I’d aim it specifically. I’d mention the amount of times I’ve had people from the Bay up here talking to me. So I figured I’d just make it a little easier for everybody else. And now I’ve got an article that’s targeted at people moving from the Bay, headed into Reino, doing something that they love skiing.

[00:38:31.090] – Jonathan DenwoodI’m not normally a better man, and I might be wrong. If we did a search to find a really good article, what you’ve just outlined on any Northern Nevada website, Lake Tahoe based or the Reino area, I bet we won’t find one. Probably not.

[00:38:52.120] – Robert NewmanIs my guess. I don’t think that we would find one. I don’t think that we would. So, ladies and gentlemen, that’s it. We’re done with this subject. But let me just summarize this and close this out by saying, if you don’t understand that we are living in the information age and that providing the best information is actually a marketing strategy, please do yourself a favor. Sign up for some beginner digital marketing courses, some beginner courses in SEO. We are deep in the weeds in the information age. John and I are just talking about little signs of that. People consume more information on video. Hey, you know what? Chatgbt may change that and say that Microsoft stuff starts to propel audio ads inside their search results and that they take a much larger percentage of the search market than they used to have. But guess what? It doesn’t actually change what John and I would really be talking about. Not really. It just changes where it’s happening. That’s it. That’s the destination. You’ve got to say to yourself, where do you stand on being a personal information provider? And for those of you who are still in that, I just want to pay somebody and get my leads.

[00:40:12.200] – Robert NewmanAnd if I’m going to share any of my expertise, it’s going to be inside a single conversation with a person that I’m talking to already. Guys, that is a dying and dead strategy. You are living in the past. I hate to break it to you, but that’s the truth. John, how would you like people to get in touch with you have a strong client.

[00:40:33.000] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks for that, Rob. I just want to point out, if you’re looking for a good platform for your website, plus a CRM, Mel, right, we’re a third cheaper than real geek bold leads, most of the other CRM website systems that you’re looking at, at least a third cheaper. So if you’re looking and I’ve been at it for about five years now. So if you’re looking for a really good platform that you own, plus it’s great value, go over to Mel hyphen Wright. Com and have a look at what we got to offer. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:41:14.220] – Robert NewmanLadies and gentlemen, listen, thank you so much for sharing your time with John and I. We appreciate it. We’re both a little crazy, trust be told. But I think that most people are in their own different ways. We’re just our own brand of crazy. And we really appreciate your patronage. The numbers, as far as I’ve always heard, keep growing. I occasionally do promote the show. I occasionally don’t promote the show. When I do promote the show, my numbers, my side of it, they go way up. That just means that I know a lot of people are listening. And I occasionally get that feedback too, John. And I just want to say, everybody, we know your time is valuable. We know how hard the job is that you’ve chosen for yourself. We really appreciate you giving us to listen. And if we can ever be of more service to you, just drop, please either email me at Robert@inboundrem or Jonathan@mail hyphen write. Com. Either way, you’ll get a response. You’ll discover that we’re what we sound like, just two guys doing our best to one, build businesses, no doubt about it, but also number two, provide good advice and help while we do it.

[00:42:22.240] – Robert NewmanWould you agree, Jon?

[00:42:23.780] – Jonathan DenwoodOh, yeah, especially from you. You’re the one that’s got the 15 years experience. But I think the main thing is, yeah, I think there’s great opportunities still out there if you’re a committed real estate agent professional. I think it’s still possible to build a really great business and use your website and your online marketing to really get that success for you. I honestly do believe that. And the great thing, if they listen to quite a few of our episodes, I think we give a great outline of the things they’ve got to know, not only through our discussions, but through our guests. I think we’re given a lot of value, Rob.

[00:43:07.720] – Robert NewmanMe too. And I certainly hope that we have. But if anybody disagrees, you can always talk to us. I don’t know what our response will be, but we’ll listen. All right, everybody, thank you so much for tuning in. Jon, take on. If you’d like to find out more about me, I am a shameless plugger in a different way than Jon is. I’m visual. You can see it on my shirt. You can see it on my background. Just go to foundrem. Com, see, John. I went back with new branded logos so that I don’t have to incessantly do this. This is who we are.

[00:43:40.770] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s very impressive, Robb. We’ll see people next week.

[00:43:44.840] – Robert NewmanBye. Bye.

————————————–

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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The post #375 – Mail-Right Show: 4 Real Estate Blogging Ideas To Dominate Your Market appeared first on All-in-One Real Estate Sales & Lead Generation Solution.

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KvCore New Features 2022/2023If you want to learn more about the new KvCore features, you need to watch this video! InboundREM has released a comprehensive review of the new features, and it’s worth your time to read it. By the time you finish watching this video, you’ll have a much better understanding of the new features and how they will impact your business.

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:00.200] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Episode 374 of the MailR ight podcast with a recent purchase by Inside Real Estate of Boomtown. We are going to spend a little bit more time and energy talking about KV Core than we usually do. Specifically for this podcast episode, we are going to talk about the updates they announced at the end of 2022 in November, and we’re going to dive into those and dissect them. Before we jump into what is a very specific and very meaty topic, I’d love to introduce… My name is Robert, by the way, and I’m the founder of Inbound rem, but I’d love to introduce my co host, whose name is Jonathan, for anybody who may not know him, and let him tell you a little bit about who he is and why you should listen to him. Go ahead, Jon.

[00:01:03.780] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of mail hyphen write. Com. We build beautiful websites on WordPress. Plus, we offer a CRM and a suite of other digital marketing tools to convert possible leads into actual customers. Back over to you, Robert.

[00:01:23.360] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. All right. I’m the founder of a company that does everything exactly opposite in the way that all these companies that we always talk about this. I’m a content provider, a storyteller, and I have an expertise in SEO, search engine optimization. So we produce great content. We help get it found. So here’s… Oh, wait. I’m putting it on my screen like you all can see my screen. So here we’re going to jump right into it. But before we do, John, I want to make sure that everybody understands the way that these big real estate prop tech companies release their updates. First and foremost, the vast majority of these systems haven’t updated themselves in any significant way in at least five to seven years. In KV Core’s case, the last major batch of actual updates that changed the core functionality of their CRM took place in 2016. They’ve had five or six years of what are called hot fixes, and they’re releasing them as product news on their website. But were they product updates? Not really. They were more like people fine tuning the system that they’re already in, big customers, big teams coming in and saying, we want this one little thing added to this very specific piece of functionality.

[00:02:47.340] – Robert NewmanKb Core going, okay, developing it into the platform and then launching it to everybody who probably isn’t even going to use it and calling it a product update. Was it really a product update? No, it wasn’t. I mean, yes, in the most technical way, yes, it was, but it wasn’t meant for everybody. It wasn’t meant for the average user. It was meant for somebody specifically.

[00:03:13.090] – Jonathan DenwoodI think what you’re saying is it wasn’t a real improvement to core functionality.

[00:03:18.960] – Robert NewmanCorrect. So let’s just dive into this. So, ladies and gentlemen, you can’t see it. It’s off screen. I’m going to put it on my screen so it appears if I’m looking at you in the camera. But the update announcement came in November 9, 2022. And then I did some YouTube videos, and now we’re doing a podcast. So first of all, one of my main beefs with KV Core has been that they have not done any design updates since they launched the product. Not really. And this still remains true. We’re not going to talk about design updates unless you’re talking about listing design. Certain pages have been enhanced in terms of user experience, but their websites have not been redesigned. Everybody listening to this show really needs to understand that. What they’ve done, the first set of enhancements, and almost all of the enhancements, are going to be around the property display features of the site. One of the things that they did is they allowed sold listing carousels to be leveraged on the homepage. Normally, such a small enhancement would not cause me to say, Hey, John, can we do a podcast on this? But I think that KV Core got this one right For a very long time, social proof has been the way that you generate yourself more results.

[00:04:51.400] – Robert NewmanKv Core, one of my main… You can’t customize their systems. Not really, not very much. They’re one of the least customizable solutions on the marketplace. So you might wonder why they’re so popular. It’s because they manage to do cheap and efficient very well. And so the cheap and efficient part is something that real estate agents love more than enough to give up customization, uniqueness, things like that. So one of those updates is you can now, on the homepage, add listings with a sold banner on them once they’ve been sold. I do not know if you can do it throughout the site. It would appear based on the notes on their own blog.

[00:05:35.250] – Robert NewmanThe answer to that is no, you can only do it on the homepage. Still a feature that I really love that connects into social proof. So, Jon, what do you think about that feature?

[00:05:48.320] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s okay. It’s about okay, isn’t it? I think one of the main things is it’s an enterprise level product. Which was at the same price as some of its broker level competitors. And then they decided to do some deals with some large brokerages. And they did some very large package deals with agencies, brokerages that had tens of thousands of agents, regional brokerage, and they discount it heavily. And it’s offered to a lot of agents as part of their monthly digital package, which they have to pay for as part of their breakage charge. And they get their half to pay for it anyway, or it’s highly advised. It’s either they’re forced to buy it or it’s highly advised and they buy it because the normal price is quite expensive, but they get it at a tremendous discount, or they think they’re getting it at a tremendous discount.

[00:07:13.450] – Robert NewmanAgreed. Okay. So that’s another thing, guys, that I’m just going to add on to John’s. One thing that everybody needs to understand about KV Core, and I’m going to read it to you right now, our featured area is effectively to showcase your local expertise while capitalizing on how consumers search today with automated community centric highlights. The trick here, guys, is automated. So if you are on a team of 50 and you have a KV Core site that your broker is giving you and all other 50 people are located in your area, you must understand that the automated data that is being presented on your website will be presented on every KV Core website, and thus it’s repetitive. It will never rank for SEO. My supposition to anybody listening to the show is that it devalues your information or brand. We live in the information age, and I still just I will never understand as long as John and I do this show, why people don’t understand that that being information and informational and unique is a brand. It’s an enormous brand for real estate agents. It’s a huge brand. So why would you just pile on to people that are literally telling you, We’re going to do the same thing for everybody.

[00:08:33.130] – Robert NewmanIt’s going to be automatic, but it’s cheap. Well, yeah. I mean, if you want to drive an Edsel, drive an Edsel. Sorry, hugely weird reference there.

[00:08:43.000] – Jonathan DenwoodI think one of the main concerns with this, and I wanted to see if they’ve updated this through your own recent research, one of your main criticisms of it was the performance of the platform. You said it was so bad that you just couldn’t price. When you were even last time, you did an extensive testing of the system, you just couldn’t stand it because the performance… I think one of your strongest statements, you said you just found which is slow. So what do you think? Do you think they’ve improved that at all?

[00:09:24.610] – Robert NewmanI haven’t looked at it. I haven’t logged into a cloud version of their CRM since I did that review, which was probably a year or two ago. So the original review still stands. It’s still a cloud based system. They’ve added a lot more people onto it. It’s possible that they’ve deeply expanded their server base so that each individual user can have a faster, more seamless cloud use case out of it. I do not know. Kv Core is oftentimes given to agents like… I just took on a new client today, John, that had 22 agents, and they’ve handed KV Core to their client and can’t tell me if anybody’s ever logged in. It’s one of those things that you provide as a broker, sometimes at $35 a seat, where 90 % of the people that you’re getting it for don’t use it. And even if they pay for it themselves at $35 a month, they don’t use it. And the ones that are using it, which is probably well over 110, the number that I saw published a few years ago by KV Core was 110,000 daily users. So that’s slowing the system down. Now, let’s just say they become far more popular and they have 300,000 daily users.

[00:10:31.530] – Robert NewmanThat means that their server capabilities must be way more than what they were previous. Have they kept up with that? I have no idea. I don’t know at this answer.

[00:10:43.320] – Jonathan DenwoodYou need some cloud resources if you’re running that amount of people into app. And it’s quite intensive. The other factor is it’s all embracing, it is powerful, but it was aimed at a broker level or some in a brokerage that was a digital manager, in my opinion. It’s the same level as Boontown, which they have pulled out recently. They’re merging, aren’t they? Or Zink, I always pronounce it C IA. Zink? Zink. I always struggle, thank you. Zink, which is another, what I see as a brokerage, one of 100, 200, 500 level product, which is what Boone Town was a Broke Ridge that had 100, 200, 500 agents. And KV Core was not quite there, but similar. But then through a lot of discounting, eXp, they did a deal with eXp and their main agents to promote it on YouTube. It’s been sold as a single agent type tool or small power team. Those origins are not really for that type of scenario in my mind. What do you feel? What I’ve just said?

[00:12:21.100] – Robert NewmanI would agree. Sorry, I was trying to think, I was going to go deep in the weeds, but I’m just going to say, I know I agree with you.

[00:12:26.900] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s just my interpretation. They just nd I think if you’re going to look, if you’re a single or a married couple or small boutique power team or experience broker with four or five junior agents, I think you’d probably be better off looking at something else, basically. But that’s just my opinion. I think bold leads, real geeks, something like Mel R ight, or something like that. I’m not sure that, but it is enormously popular, isn’t it?

[00:13:14.940] – Robert NewmanWell, by far and away, the biggest system with their purchase of Boometown, they are now, besides Placester, they might have the largest install base. And I’ve heard rumors that Placester sold off a big percentage of its customer base to Brand Co. So I don’t know that to be true. I don’t know what the arrangements are. I don’t know what the contract is. I just want everything to be clear. It’s just something I heard that is unverified as of now. But if that’s the case, then Placester actually tried to take care of the problem that you and I pointed out. Remember, hundreds of thousands of agents calling in for customer service? They sent that customer service contract to Brandco and tried to offload it from them entirely. That’s what I heard. So whether or not that makes Inside Real Estate the largest user base by far. probably inside real estate, hundreds of thousands of agents, I would guess, making it nobody even comes close to touching them. Having said all that, it’s also, of all the big systems, least customizable. If I was going to list it, pros and cons or give it an overall score, it would come in one of the lowest.

[00:14:23.940] – Robert NewmanI might even place CHIME above KV Core, but it is easy. There’s so much content produced about it. Now, John, this is something I’ve talked to a lot about. I’ve oftentimes said it’s not so much the system itself, it’s people’s ability to use it. Now, what KV Core has that nobody else has, as all the high level entrepreneurial minded content producers that sat here and are producing teams all over the US for eXp, and they’re under a multi level marketing system, which means that that attraction of agents and is amazing major part of the revenue model, if not the biggest part of the revenue model. So they sit here and do content explaining how to use these eXp sponsored tools ad nauseam. So now KV Core, even though it’s one of the worst sites, it is actually one of the easiest to learn how to use at the highest level because so many great people have done so much great content surrounding it. So now I always have to rejigger my reviews when it comes to KV Core because it’s more usable than the other systems, even though it’s got all these features because so many people have done tutorials on how they’re producing deals using those individual features.

[00:15:38.980] – Robert NewmanThat makes it more adaptable and profitable than other systems. But it’s not as feature heavy or as fast or as friendly in many ways. So we’re going to come back from our break in a second. We’re going to go to break, I suppose I should say first, and then we’re going to get into a little bit deeper into this. And one of the things that we’re going to cover when we come back is an incredibly powerful subject that is going to be… We’re a few months off. In 2023, it’s going to be something that’s in every single Realtor’s inbox, if it’s not already. And you all need to be aware of it. It involves texting. Kv Core finally got out in the head of everybody else. I’m really impressed the fact that they’re one of the first big people to address this problem. So without any further ado, we’re going to go to break. John, if somebody would like to look you up, how would you like them to do that? Actually, not you specifically. Let’s just say that somebody wanted to compare Mele R ight against KV Core. Where would you recommend they go to do that?

[00:16:41.450] – Jonathan DenwoodLet’s go to male hyphen right. Com. All right, perfect.

[00:16:45.460] – Robert NewmanAnd ladies and gentlemen, inbound RMM is not really comparable. We’re a different thing. We’re looking for high end, elite users that want to set themselves free from systems. So different type of client. But if you’d like to research me and understand what we do, just go to inbound rMM.

[00:17:03.720] – Jonathan DenwoodThat was one of his clients.

[00:17:07.380] – Robert NewmanYeah. And we’ll take care of it. All right, we’ll be right back. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need MailW rite. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight. Com. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 374 of the Mail Write Show. We’re so grateful that you’re here. John and me are reviewing… We’re having a dialog about KV Core, and we’re having a dialog about its updates, which is the first in many, many years. One of the first things that they are leading the pack in, is they are the first to insist on compliant text messaging options inside their platform. No longer can you send out an unlimited, unsupervised stream of text from KV Core. Their language that they use to what is scaling down a feature, not scaling it up, but scaling it down, is a master class in marketing because it says we are helping to ensure you are compliant in your marketing efforts through new opt in language at various customer touch points.

[00:18:38.610] – Robert NewmanThe new worry free texting enables you to take advantage of KV Core’s direct messaging capabilities, worry free exclamation point. So what is that telling you? John, these guys have understood that their clients are abusing text message marketing. It’s one of my biggest frustrations in today, 2023, the leading edge concerns, drop my historical stuff. I get calls and text messages all day long. It’s illegal. Anybody not hear me? It’s illegal. You should not be texting anybody on the text message marketing system. You must have them opt in the same way that you have to do it with telemarketing. You have to opt in.

[00:19:28.640] – Jonathan DenwoodI’ve paid people. I’ve never done business. I must have about 10 text messages a day, sometimes a lot more, from companies, business loans, health insurance, blah, blah, blah. I’m pretty sure I never signed up for a lead magnet for most of these people. They’ve just brought in a list and they text me.

[00:19:54.350] – Robert NewmanWhich is illegal. And eventually there was a guy out there by the name of Zin marketers. Eventually, he’ll nd what he did is he took all these companies to small claims. He used to do it for tele marketers, John, and he made hundreds of thousands of dollars every year because he won every single case. It is illegal. The fact that we as a consumer do not operate, act on it is just an anomaly. Here’s what you guys as real estate agents and every single person who leaves the show who’s done real estate for longer than a year is going to nod their head to this. You have a concern that very few other professionals have. Your competing realtors are not your friends. Sorry, I’m trying to change this inside the real estate industry. But realtors are competitive and oftentimes they’re snotty. So they will literally, if you break a rule that they themselves are following and you just don’t happen to know that you’re breaking the rule, they’ll turn you in. You’ve got probably five or six of your competitors on any email or marketing list. I know I do. I have every single competitor of mine the CEOs and CMOs.

[00:21:02.100] – Robert NewmanThey’re all on my marketing list. I know that. I don’t know if they’re looking for me to stumble and fail, but with real estate agents, there’s definitely something going on there that says that your own competition is going to turn you in. Google ad words budgets are constantly hacked and inflated by agents. I know because I run paid accounts and I see how Google is catching the fraud because it’s fraud. If this same person whose competitor clicks on your ad 15 times, that’s a form of fraud. They’re just trying to make you pay 30 or 40 or 50 bucks or whatever it is, and they have no intention of doing anything with you. And they think, hah, spend the $50, you bastard. Sorry. So, like, John is barely keeping it together. So this, from a compliance standpoint, this is great. From a marketing standpoint, they just took something away from you and sugarcoated it, like big time. It was the Wild West.

[00:22:11.130] – Jonathan DenwoodI got a buy, they weren’t. They must have had a few minutes to get that worded like that. I have been touched.

[00:22:18.650] – Robert NewmanRight. I told you a master class in marketing. I mean, that’s the sweetest way anybody’s ever said, hey, we used to let you do whatever you want. Now you can’t. But that’s what that says. And yet they were like, well, anyway.

[00:22:33.800] – Jonathan DenwoodOn to another feature, which I think you highlighted in your excellent video. Rob’s got excellent video on the Inbound YouTube channel on his late you set up date review, go and watch it, folks. But I think I watched it a couple of times. And I think one of the things she talked about was their map widget, which they’ve updated. Do you want to quickly give a description of that improvement or added feature?

[00:23:03.500] – Robert NewmanSo the map widget, which I’m looking at on the screen, it is pretty freaking cool, man. They’ve gone ahead and updated into Polygon searches, which is where you can draw a map. Here’s what I like. The user experience, the UX, and unfortunately, John, if I said specifics and you watch my video more recently, please catch me at the end of this. But I’m going to say this, one of the things I really enjoyed, just in general, was the experience on the old map system on KV Core was standard. It was like with all the money they have, you could never understand why they just weren’t doing a better job. This new map experience, I felt, was very slick looking. I just felt that way, and I’ve never felt that way about anything with KV Core. Those of you that have followed me who’ve watched my reviews know I’m very even handed. It’s very rare I say this many non complimentary things about a provider. I think they got the math function right. I think it’s very cool and very nice and I really enjoyed it. Now, what did you think, Jon?

[00:24:11.090] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I thought I want to say it’s a major improvement, but for what it does in UX design and usability, it’s a nice feature. Is it groundbreaking? No, but as an additional feature, my only concern about this is that there are they’re taking over Boone Town, they’re marketing hard, they’ve got this deal with eXp. There’s a lot of info on YouTube about it. They’re pushing it hard. My concern is performance because, like I say, it struck me because you are when you’re talking about these on your YouTube channel or in this podcast, you choose your words more carefully than me. Most times I’m a bit wilder, but you had quite strong wording when you were talking about utilizing their system. You said it was awful. It was really rough experience, and that was down to the performance.

[00:25:23.240] – Robert NewmanIt was to the performance. There’s nothing unique about it. Even in their update that they are releasing to all of their customers, which I wish everybody could read. I think that one of my Southern relatives, which I haven’t talked to in a long time, but they’re saying they’re painting a dirty pig old. It’s an old Southern saying. I’m just going to jump into that. Some of the things that they announced that we’re not going to really cover in depth here is the listing machine and design center. What they allowed you to do is slightly better brand your listings on their service. That’s it. A couple of updates that they literally are making it sound like this major upgrade, beautiful feature. And maybe it is for KV Core. They haven’t even caught up to what standard inside the feature. So yes, it’s an upgrade for them. I agree. Is it an upgrade in general across all of the KV Core people, like, No, not doing anything interesting here, not doing anything unique. Go ahead. John really wants to say something.

[00:26:38.700] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, you’re going to have to tell me if I’m being fair here because I am a competitor in some ways. I’m a top of the tiny independent. I think if you’ve been made to pay for it, if you’re in your first year and you’re part of the XP or you’re part of a brokerage, and part of the monthly digital fee that your brokerage is charging you, or you’re being highly encouraged to use it because it integrates with the brokerage, blah, blah, blah. Try and use it. The problem is I know they’ve got the improvements, more customisation by look, but it looks old fashioned. It’s not going to really brand you. But if you can’t afford anything else and you’ve been made to semi pay for it, you might as well set it up and use it. I don’t think it’s not going to unless they got your email address, it’s not going to show up high with Google because of the factors that you will know about because that’s your expertise, content marketing, SEO. It’s not that KV call is inherently bad in its structure. You might probably know a bit more about that than me. It’s just that, like all these platforms that you don’t own, you would be bonkers to spend a lot of money putting content on it.

[00:28:19.910] – Jonathan DenwoodThe only way that, apart from knowing the address, the only way you’re going to get traffic is to pay traffic through Facebook or Google. My problem with that is, which has improved the map you’re pointing out, a little bit more customisation through the templates offered, is my main problem until they brought the these updates is, yeah, you drove traffic to it. I think because of its look and that, the performance concerns, I think to convert those into email, into something you could remark, it’s going to be lower than other platforms. Is this making sense?

[00:29:08.240] – Robert NewmanYeah. And I agree. And that’s some of the other things that KV Core has announced as far as updates. This idea that they will provide templated in mass updates. Another thing that they did was they basically created a print system where you can digitally print your listing pages out of a printer at your local location and then take those printed flyers to listings and then hand those out. It’s not unique, but it’s cool. I like it. The all new Core Social is just KV Core finally acknowledging that social media is a strategy that should be paid attention to. But what they did is they took a library of content that they themselves produced, give you free access to it, and all the agents get to come share it. They effectively are trying to lock their user base into something that most brands, people like me influencers, we are trying to produce really incredible content so that you will share it. Kv Core is telling you, Oh, to use our system right, share our content everywhere.

[00:30:20.280] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, Bill Wright has that functionality, but the way we’re mittled. I totally agree with what you say, but when it comes Facebook page, because of what Facebook has done, it just will not generate. But you’ve still got to have a reasonably active Facebook page because you’re going to have possible client to check you over. And if you’ve got a Facebook page, which they will expect, and it’s not being updated, it’s not going to look well. Our system will also push so much content to Instagram. We suggest that you mix it with individual content. The reason why we still push and it’s still part of our system is a lot of agents don’t understand about the volume required. So most think producing one or two pieces a week. We provide a mixture of semi content a week. We cannot offer individual programs, which costs a lot more. So we offer different options. I see where KV Core are going from, but you are correct as well. It’s filler to some extent, but it can be useful. But you are right. You got to mix it with individual content where either they’re hire experts like you have on your team or they hire on the low end male right, at least they’re doing something, can’t they?

[00:31:55.960] – Robert NewmanYeah, and I agree with that. At least they’re doing something. And by the way, John did say something magical in one of his earlier statements. I’m going to point out the magical thing he said. I think the KV Core is a great place for agents who are working for other big teams, who are new to real estate. Man, don’t try to become an expert social media person, extra digital marketer in your first year. Not unless you have a background in it, a love for it, a passion for it, for something that’s really driving you. Other than that, learn the real estate business and let, yeah, use your KV Core account, press the auto post button. Use all the tools the providers give you to try to make the job easy so that you can develop your own opinions about posting content, see how your friends or family or audience responds to it. I have no doubt that if you were to contact KV Core or MailR ight or any other company that does social media suggested content, that they probably have given it to their clients, their clients have used it, and in some cases gotten response and made money.

[00:32:54.600] – Robert NewmanNo doubt, zero doubt, none. It’s just when it comes to your you’re trying to establish your own footprint, really lock in your audience, my opinion is always the same thing. It has to be your own authentic voice in most of your messaging. Even if you were to use, like John said, even if you’re going to use templated content, alter it, adapt it, put your voice into it, whatever. Make sure that people understand that you have something to say about it. Like, if you’re doing a meme, nothing wrong with posting somebody else’s meme, but at least take the time to post a sentence or two about it so that with a hashtag or two.

[00:33:31.940] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s just the volume. When they hire you, they’re hiring your experience and your team’s experience. You interview, you learn about the agency, the brokerage or the individual broker agent. They specialize, you customize the social media to the individual requirements of each customer. It’s a bespoke service you’re offering. Mail rights are much lower. We can offer a bit of that, but we do not We’re aimed at a different type of clientele in the real estate industry.

[00:34:05.820] – Robert NewmanSo there is one thing that they have done that I don’t have much experience with. Here is one place that KV Core decided to go in a different direction than every single other provider out there. I admire them for doing something different, John, regardless of how it treats and functions. They announced something called Amp Stats. Amp Stats plays into KV Core’s mass popularity and the fact that so many eXp brokers are using them. If I had to tell you, I think that 30,000 of their customers are probably eXp agents. That makes them the eXp preferred broker, which makes their they build functionality to do recruiting straight into the platform. I don’t know. What they’re doing is they’re allowing you to vet candidates faster, check their past production as part of the platform, do net income comparisons. You can check their income, which is going to tell you if they’ve been doing splits, not just the number of transactions they did, but how good they are doing double sides, things like that. All of that allows you to make the choice as a broker about whether or not you’re going to select this candidate, assuming it works correctly and that it does what it’s supposed to do.

[00:35:28.420] – Robert NewmanI don’t know the answer to any of those. What I will say is that to the best of my knowledge, they’re the first platform to introduce something like this. I love the try. I love the swing. I love the…

[00:35:41.480] – Jonathan DenwoodI don’t know. Maybe you know. Does eXp, is it set up with their preferred list of digital vendors? Or is it exclusive deal that KV Core is done with eXp?

[00:35:58.360] – Robert NewmanI don’t think it’s exclusive. They do have a large set of people that they work with, Keller Williams, eXp, just to name a few. Basically all the big brokerages that still like hammer recruitment, usually KV Core is the place that they go. Keller Williams and eXp are definitely the top two. But between those top two, that’s 220,000 licensed realtors, which makes it 10 % of the real estate agents in the country. So it’s a pretty big swing, just saying eXp and Keller Williams.

[00:36:30.840] – Jonathan DenwoodThat.

[00:36:33.020] – Robert NewmanIs most of what they have here. There are some things that they said were upgraded functionality to the listing feature. I went through the set of listed things very carefully. What you could basically say is they changed a couple of small things, put some gold paint on the pig and called it a fresh piece of meat. It’s not true.

[00:36:53.010] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I think we got to do a shout out to the listeners now. If you’re utilizing their platform, please outreach to either myself through the Mel Wright YouTube channel or inbound marketing email me or message Robert and just tell us what your experiences have been lately with the performance because t’s the performance I think is one of the main concerns of Robert myself. Robert based on his testing experience, me about what some other people have said to me directly is that it’s not been a fantastic experience. But please share yours with us about how you found the platform because that’s one of our major concerns, isn’t it, Robert?

[00:37:37.160] – Robert NewmanIt is indeed. No doubt about it, John is correct. My email is Robert@inboundrem. Com. You can message me about your experience with KV Core. I’d love to hear it. If there’s anything that’s really unusual and we feature it, like, if you give me a piece of information that we decide that I decide is relevant enough to update my review with, we will credit you, which means that you’ll get a backlink, which is a big deal. All right. So thank you, everybody, for tuning in. John, we’re way past. We really got deep in the weeds with this. This is my jam, this stuff, getting deep in, trying to interpret it for all of you who listen to me, follow me, try to make sure that you understand what is exciting and what’s not. That’s it. That’s my hot take. John, if you wanted people to contact you to either ask a question about comparing your system to KV Core or just asking you some questions in general, how would you like me to go about doing that?

[00:38:32.550] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, go to the mail hyphen write. Com website. I just want to point out, folks, for the basic system for one agent, we are the third of the cost to real geeks to KV Core, unless you’re getting it highly subsidized. We are one of the most cost effective platforms out there.

[00:38:53.030] – Robert NewmanPlus.

[00:38:54.440] – Jonathan DenwoodYou have the insurance state. It’s a WordPress website. I have one of our template solutions, but we offer option for semi to full custom solutions. And we give you a cast iron guarantee that if you get fed up with us, we will migrate your WordPress website somewhere else. So you’re not locked in and you lose everything. We’re one of the few providers. Like I say, I think the functionality that we offer is equivalent to most of these platform. It beats out a third of the cost. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:39:25.440] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. And ladies and gentlemen, if you’re looking for some higher end customized solution, content base, setting yourself free from all platforms forever for the rest of your career, you can reach out to me at robert@inboundrem. Com, or you can simply go to inboundrem. Com and hit my About page or my Services page. Either way, you’ll find ways to contact me or my team and schedule a call. Everybody, listen, we so much appreciate you. We appreciate your patronage to our blog, to our blogs, respectively to the show, which is a collaborative effort between the two of us. Everywhere that you engage with us, John and I appreciate it. If there’s anything that we can do, anything at all to improve the information that we’re trying to provide for you, let one of us know. You’ll probably be surprised by how responsive we are. That’s it. John, anything else you want to add?

[00:40:19.870] – Jonathan DenwoodNo, I think we’ve offered some good information. We’ll see you next week.

[00:40:26.410] – Robert NewmanBye, everybody.

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

jonathan@mail-right.com

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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Real Estate Landing Pages That Really ConvertJust as real estate agents need to learn about each individual client to find ‘em the perfect property, real estate marketing requires offering up the right digital content to viable leads online.

Sure, that might sound like a tall order—especially when you don’t know exactly who is visiting your website or browsing your listings.

————————————–

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

jonathan@mail-right.com

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

————————————–

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:11.320] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail.-Right podcast, and video cast, wherever you’re looking at it, we are here for you. Me and my partner, John, are extremely excited to be having a discussion with you about landing pages. What are they and what ones work? We’re going to do what is an effective landing page, but I think that first, we have to explain what a landing page really is, and then we can move into what an effective one of those might be for real estate specifically. Having said all of that, it is my strength, my man, the man with the magic behind the production of the show is John, and he’s sitting here waiting desperately to introduce himself to all the new users and listeners for the show today. So, John, take it away, my brother.

[00:00:58.090] – Jonathan DenwoodOh, my God. He’s got caffeine. What are you swelling down? I don’t know. It must be pure caffeine, I reckon. Thanks, Rob. He’s shaking his head. It’s pixelated now, Rob. It’s pixelated. So I’m the joint founder of mail hyphen write. Com. We build beautiful websites on WordPress, semi or full custom that you own. You’re not leasing them. Plus, we got a suite of digital marketing tools that will help you collect and generate some quality leads. Back over to you, Robert.

[00:01:35.580] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. All right. So ladies and gentlemen, landing pages. What the hell is it? Google defines it as a page that somebody lands on on your site. It’s an entry page. It’s the first page that somebody sees. More increasingly, as the digital era stretches out to the horizon, landing pages used to be the landing page on most websites was the homepage of the website. That’s not true anymore. These days, on most of my sites, less than 21 % of people land on the homepage. They’re landing on internal pages on the site. That’s the first page. Again, a landing page is defined as the first page you see introducing you to a new offer or service that you have not yet been introduced to and you land on it. There are a lot of different types of landing pages because they are as robust as there are types of humans on the planet, literally. Probably there are that many on the internet. So when you land on something, John is chosen the subject to be an effective or results-driven landing page. So let’s define that. In real estate, results are usually defined as getting a lead. I personally don’t do that marketing, so I don’t have much to say about those landing pages.

[00:02:54.300] – Robert NewmanBut I’m going to participate in the question because I have 14, or 15 years of experience and I know what all my competitors are doing for the most part. By the way, my name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound rem and we are a real estate SEO and website development company. I personally have many year’s experiences doing it and hundreds, if not, thousands of projects that I’ve personally participated in, which is where my knowledge comes from. The landing pages. When we’re building a landing page for a lead generation effort, what you’re generally doing is you’re trying to make an exchange between the client and you. In other words, we’re going to give them something, usually access to listings is what’s historically relevant with real estate. But there are many other ways that you can go about it. Not using these systems and platforms that everybody loves to use, can’t do it there. But you can do what’s called a content magnet or content drop. I have one of those on my website where I’ve got a little line that says, Hey, here’s the top 50 memes. I give you 49 for free, but the 50th, you need to register with the site and see the meme and you register behind a blurred image.

[00:04:14.620] – Robert NewmanSay I gave you 49 for free. And if you want to see what the number one meme, real estate meme in the entire world is in 2023, you have to register with the site. That’s an example of a content magnet. You’re something that magnetizes people, attracts people, and then you have to give them your information in order to exchange. Unfortunately, and I’ve done this plenty, that doesn’t really create really great leads. But all of you listening to the show are really used to not really great leads, so I’m not a lot worried about it. You’re usually getting low intent, medium intent leads anyway. So this is going to generate a low to medium intent lead, and that’s exactly what you’re used to. I can go on a long time because there are a million different types of content pages that one can do. But I’m going to let John take it away and have a discussion about what he thinks are effective lead-generation pages. And then I’m going to share with all of you how I, as an inbound or information marketer, content marketer, how I use these pages, which is different because I’m not trying to close somebody on giving me their information on one of these pages they land on.

[00:05:27.570] – Robert NewmanI’ve got a different mission and I’m going to save it so that you all just stay tuned by your little phones waiting and waiting and waiting for that little piece of information. All right, Jon, take it away, sir.

[00:05:39.040] – Jonathan DenwoodI haven’t got your experience of a marketer. I’ve got a fair bit of experience as a WordPress developer and agency owner. What I found, and I fall into it, is that if you want effective landing pages, you got to understand what you’re getting into. I totally agree about the value of lead. A couple of shows ago, we talked about people’s misunderstanding of the word lead. I really think it’s at the crux of so much frustration and confusion in the real estate industry, what people classify as a lead. I classify as a digital website generation paid advertising lead. In no shape or form is it going to compare to a personal recommendation from a previous customer to somebody that they have a relationship with, recommending them to you. The real estate, it’s not in the same ballpoint. And if you think you’re going to get that from any digital marketing, you’re deluding yourself. And this is what is going to cause you a lot of frustration and a lot of disappointment. So they’re totally different beast. You’re going to get a higher volume if the digital marketing is working and you need automated processes to do the initial outreach because otherwise, you’re not going to be able to deal with the amount of low to medium quality leads that it’s going to generate anyway.

[00:07:36.270] – Jonathan DenwoodUnless you’ve got a personal assistant, unless you’ve got a team on board to deal with it, you’re going to have to utilize marketing optimization process to do that outreach after they get the lead magnet from the landing page, which you described. I think that was number one I wanted to point out, because I really do think even now, it’s this semi unrealistic expectation of what that word lead means when it comes to digital marketing that causes so much disappointment and frustration, Robert.

[00:08:19.210] – Robert NewmanWhat do you think.

[00:08:22.460] – Jonathan DenwoodI’m waffling?

[00:08:24.900] – Robert NewmanNo, actually, I think you’d waffle a lot, but not today. Just kidding. I’m just joking. Everybody that was. John opened up on that one. So I’m just going to say this. I actually think that one of your passions and one of my passions is we really need everybody, the people that you guys talk to on the phone, everybody. We need them to change their language. We need all of you to change your language. What is a lead? Well, you might as well call a lot of what you’re going to collect off these efforts. I wouldn’t even call them leads. It’s an information gathering process for potential prospects. That’s it. If you eliminate the I’m going to get a sale today or in 30 days from your mindset and change it to say, I’m going to get a large list of prospects that might be a viable transaction in the next year or two, number one, your expectations will be in line with reality, like what you’re likely to get, what all of you are going to get. Number two, you’ll be able to move your budget in line with what your expectations are. Because somebody says to you, Hey, you got to pay me all 12 months of whatever my rate is upfront, and somewhere towards the end of the agreement, we’ll get a deal.

[00:09:40.440] – Robert NewmanAnd that’s after you’ve chased a lot of leads. But the good news is that once the funnel starts, you might have quite a few. All of that’s true. If you’re doing a funnel correctly, if you’re working leads correctly, all of that’s true. But it’s also true that most likely you’re going to have to spend a long time holding on to these leads before you realize your profit. And once the profit starts, you have to keep consistently doing the system in order to keep that pipeline alive. You turn everything off and likely you have a year’s worth of pipeline left if you’re working it correctly because that’s how long this all takes. But you all, John, everybody is not being educated correctly. They’re not being told that this is what the expectation is. And the amount of brokers and agents that I have call me, it’s a staggering number that don’t know this fact that you’re sharing.

[00:10:32.630] – Jonathan DenwoodNo, it’s quite even.

[00:10:35.600] – Robert NewmanI would put it that high. Eight to nine of the 10 people I talked to would not know.

[00:10:41.350] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, because we’re pretty upfront. I think we’re pretty honest and pretty frank. And I think a lot of people in the digital marketing area, unfortunately, for understandable reasons, don’t feel they can be frank about it, can they?

[00:10:58.520] – Robert NewmanYeah, I agree.

[00:11:02.480] – Jonathan DenwoodBut get back to the landing page. The biggest mistake I’ve made is there’s a balance. It’s got to look reasonably okay, but you’ve got to have really concentrate on less is more when it comes to landing pages. And I’ve been the number one person that had to learn the hard way with this. I’ve always resisted and it’s time consuming. That’s one of the things that you should get from a platform is that their library of landing pages, they should have heatmapped them. A lot of them don’t, but that’s part of the deal. They should have tested them and had them heat mapped. What I mean by heat mapped, there’s technology you can put on the landing page to see where somebody is moving their mouse around, and that will indicate how their interest, the message on the landing page. And that’s one of the things, you can’t do this if you’re knocking up these landing pages yourself, because it just isn’t worth the time and energy on it. But what I found, where I’ve hired an agency that specialized in this area, is that I’ve underestimated how bare bones we should have these. One headline, one key message with a really great lead magnet, putting too much copy on.

[00:12:44.100] – Jonathan DenwoodIt takes knowledge to reduce the amount of copy, but still get over the message that you’re trying. That will induce them to give you some information to get the lead magnet. And that’s a bit of art form, really. And I’ve always tended to put too much copy on multiple calls for action. I’ve always gone down that route and I’ve always spit me on the ass, really, Rob.

[00:13:13.320] – Robert NewmanUnderstandable. So, ladies and gentlemen, and you too, what I want to do is I want to spend a second talking about a different type of landing page with a different purpose, different message. Because landing pages, when you intend for them to land on them, the landing page that has been made most popularized these days is ClickFunnels. I’m going to talk a little bit about that in a second. We’re going to go to our break, and when we come back, I’m going to mention what the difference in different types of landing pages that you may have heard of are and what makes them work exceptionally well. Stay tuned. We’ll be right back. Wherever you’re at, give us a thumbs up, give us a like, tell us we suck. Whatever it is that you’re feeling thinking, we would really appreciate to hear it. He’s pointing at me. You can’t see it. For those of you who are watching on video, you saw that. John pointed his finger at me. You can edit this out. He gets to edit this shit out. It’s not fair. All right, here we go. We’ll be right back. Thank you for tuning in.

[00:14:12.080] – Robert NewmanDo you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need MailR ight. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight. Com. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. This is episode number 273. John and I are talking about landing pages. It is just the exciting fireworks subject that you wanted to complete your day. Thank you so much for paying attention to us here on the R ight Show. I can.

[00:14:53.060] – Jonathan DenwoodTell you have full reviews. I did put the word in effective, did I?

[00:15:01.940] – Robert NewmanAll right. Well, effective requires that people understand what they are. And I would guess that the vast majority of our audience doesn’t. But here’s the other part of this. Effective. What are you trying to communicate with landing page? We’ve just discussed ad nauseam, trying to get a result. Now, the most popular website in the world, there’s two of them that have landing pages designed to get you a result. Sell a product, sell a service, right out of the gate, one page. That’s click channel s or Shopify. So both of these companies operate off a similar principle. You drive somebody into a single page and you can do all the things you need to do on what is basically a huge website in one page. And why does that work? The same way that Google just transferred all their search results into infinite scrolling. We have a natural predisposition to not want to turn the page, but we’ll scroll forever. We’ll scroll until we’re dead. We just won’t turn the page. Think about it. Think about it for everybody who’s listening to this show, think about your own. Do I want to go to the second page?

[00:16:08.440] – Robert NewmanNo, that’s so much work. Do I want to keep scrolling? Well, of course I want to keep scrolling. There’s more things to look at. I don’t know what psychology that is. I just know it.

[00:16:15.520] – Jonathan DenwoodTo be true. I think it’s also linked to the increase in usage of mobile devices, phones, and tablets, isn’t it? Could be.

[00:16:24.250] – Robert NewmanOne way.

[00:16:25.140] – Jonathan DenwoodOr.

[00:16:26.260] – Robert NewmanThe other, it’s reality, though. Infinite scrolling is what ClickFunnels works off of. To some degree, it’s what Shopify works off of. And it allows you to transfer all the same information that you have on a website, but you’re pulling it into a page. You’re doing really clever sales language. You’re usually adding your social proof to the same page. You’re trying to make sure that nobody leaves the page. You’re not doing a lot of external linking. And all of that is ClickFunnels. I buy that on those Shopify and ClickFunnels sites all the time off Facebook ads and things like that. I am what we would call a mooch. For the very small handful of things that I buy, I buy almost as soon as anybody puts them in front of my face. So here’s one of the weird things that I buy. I have bought almost all my competitors’ courses. I n almost everyone, they say, Oh, I’ve got a new course. It’s the best thing ever. We can generate 10,000 leads. Blah, blah, blah. I’m like, Okay, where’s the buy button? I want to see what you’re doing. I need to look at it and say, Are you doing something I have not.

[00:17:28.460] – Jonathan DenwoodFigured out? You just blew out the eardrums about this. Oh God, you’re definitely wrong.

[00:17:43.920] – Robert NewmanOkay, so how everybody else does it. How do I do it? When somebody lands on a page that we’ve built and designed in a perfect world, what they leave with is an incredibly… So a lot of my landing pages that are successful are either blogs, blog posts, or area pages. Now, on the blog posts, we don’t have the clients with the financial bandwidth to make the best use of a blog post. Because how would you do a great blog post? Well, you do it the same way that I do it on an inbound rem where I have a book that I wrote and I have content drops that we’ve spent. I spent $5,000 writing my book. I spent a ton of money on it. I’m redoing the cover art as we speak. And this is a free eBook. It’s not supposed to be overly sophisticated, but nonetheless, I spent a small fortune on it because I wanted it to be super valuable to the people that downloaded it. It is not something written in haste or that has not been read nine different times. And the idea behind the book is to educate people about how valuable inbound marketing can be, content marketing for realtors.

[00:18:58.740] – Robert NewmanI needed to express that idea in a way they get excited about. We don’t have the ability to write a book for our clients. We don’t have the ability for… And most of our clients can’t write a book for us so that we can do a content drop off the blogs, which would turn your email list into an incredibly high value tool, which is what mine is. My email list drives so much engagement.

[00:19:22.940] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s.

[00:19:23.690] – Robert NewmanDumb. I just get tens of thousands of people responding to my emails because I don’t sell anything on them. I just educate and try. I bend over backwards to try to provide some value. And now my team, now my brand and content team does that for me. So what is the landing pages that we do that are successful? And I love this about our sites, we get a lot of success off our area pages, which are where we focus on a county and then there are cities inside the county. And we’ve usually built custom maps onto that page. So somebody can interact with the maps, they can interact with the county. They get a lot of directional support about where they can go on the website, what they can find there. And really, it’s more an information site. It’s information on the neighborhoods. It’s not houses, it’s not houses, t’s not listings, we don’t do listing sales sites, we do informational sales sites. And that strategy has proven to be incredibly successful. We have an above average bounce rate off our landing pages, John, our directional landing pages, but they’re not meant to sell anything. I’m not trying to get a lead off that landing page.

[00:20:37.340] – Robert NewmanIf I was doing that, I would apply the same strategy that ClickFunnels does. An infinite scroll on my most popular pages that takes you all the way down and then tries to force you to register. But that goes against my marketing and sales philosophies. We want to nurture somebody through amazing content and let them reach out to our clients organically. Very unpopular concept.

[00:21:01.480] – Jonathan DenwoodI would say I don’t find that. I always think it’s a middle road. I think if you’re looking to get the last bit of juice out of the landing page, you follow click funnel. Don’t get me on Branson. He’s a really smart cat. I find some of his marketing… He’s hardcore marketing. He’s really hugely successful, wish him well. Guy knows what he’s doing. He goes a bridge too far for me. I find it too much in your face. But maybe that’s who am I? He’s a multi millionaire, but good luck to him. That’s what I say. But I think it’s the middle of the road. I think you’re utilizing your SEO with your clients. You’re utilizing non paid traffic. I think you could utilize Google and Facebook to take somebody to the landing page, but you’ve got to keep it simple. Having too much copy, one tag line, one quick, and you haven’t got a lot. I think the type of people that come into your client’s website is a little bit more sophisticated because it’s not paid traffic. Hopefully, the people that come into the website, they’re coming either you’ve come up in search and they’re on the hunt in a way, or they come to the website before.

[00:22:53.040] – Jonathan DenwoodSo maybe they’re a little bit warmer. I don’t know. I don’t know what you feel about what I’ve just said.

[00:22:59.900] – Robert NewmanWell, I opt for myself and for my clients both. I made the mistake through of my 14 year career in marketing here. I’ve chased the big numbers for 12 of those 14 years. And so I’ve made this mistake, and I’m sure countless people here that are listening to this show today who are fans have made the mistake too. But just because you get 10,000 visitors does not mean you get three times as many clients. I’ve learned that the hard way. And I apply the same knowledge to my own website. I just opened up my Google Analytics, we’ve had 2,800 users. At various times in my career here, I’ve had as many as 10 to 20,000 users hit the inbound rem site. I’m no longer really interested in that. I just want highly focused users. If you want to say put in the search, I want to compare all the top real estate lead generation systems. I very much want to come up for that search. And I think I do. But if you want to say say, what is real estate lead generation or real estate lead generation, the broad search, I would not mind coming up for it, but it’s not a priority.

[00:24:09.560] – Robert NewmanIt’s not something I’m focusing lots of time and money on because it’s pretty simple. If you want to make a comparison and you’re ready to spend an hour or two doing it, John, you know my work, you’ve seen it. It’s pretty good if that’s what you’re trying to do. But if you’re just looking for basic stuff, probably not going to be your cup of tea.

[00:24:39.520] – Jonathan DenwoodNo. So I think like what Rob said, when it comes to the landing pages, how do you fitting into the content that’s already on the website, I think people, regional guides, area guides are a good way. I think properties that you’ve just signed up for selling at the right price that are not being marketed yet and advertising them and taking them to a page. You’ve got to be really careful about the balance of the information that you offer on the page. It’s got to be enough to induce interest and get them to sign up. So you send them the full details. But on the other hand, it can’t be too much information because they’re not going to bother to give you the contact details, so you can send them the full details of the property. So you’ve got to keep that. It’s a goldilocks scenario. You’ve got to just give them the right amount. I think also, like what you said, your regional area PDFs that give more information. Education and then based are a great idea. A lot of people give Quazer automatic pricing reports. You give the detail your home, there’s services that would generate that.

[00:26:08.640] – Jonathan DenwoodI think you can offer, but it should be a custom report where you do it manually and you send it to them. Using something like Bombom to do a video and have the videos attached to the email with the report is a great idea to personalize it, to get that that, hopefully get that person to call you. I think that’s a great idea. I think some of these ideas, when it comes to landing pages, can be effective. What do you reckon, Rob?

[00:26:43.300] – Robert NewmanI think that I agree with you 100 %. I think that many of those things we’ve tried are trying. My overall commentary on landing pages and websites in general is, ladies and gentlemen, including you, on boys and girls, everybody listening to the show. Guys, we have spent a lot of our time and energy over the years creating low value real estate marketing systems all under the assumption that if we provide a very small little teeny tiny piece of functionality that will get somebody’s information and then we can market more aggressively to them, call them, text them. That’s what I mean by market more aggressively to them. I really believe, guys, that right in front of our eyes, we’re watching the world shift. I believe that very deeply. I do not think that people want to give out their information. I think that more and more they’re becoming unwilling to give out their information unless the value proposition is high enough. And so instead of just waiting until you’re bleeding money and bleeding everything related to your marketing, guys, I’m telling you now, try to provide something unique. Try to be useful. I say it into the book, until I’m blue in the face, find something on the page.

[00:28:01.160] – Robert NewmanDo you have contingencies? Do you have maps, amenity lists, stuff that you developed over the years, something you can develop? Do you work with HOAs and have a list of their fees? Create a PDF with this information on it and attach it to your page, make it downloadable, and watch your SEO sky, like, ranking skyrocket. Because it’s useful, user interaction will drive ranking and your clients will love you. It’s a triple win and it gives your customers something that they want. And they’re willing, again, if you give them something that’s high enough value, they will give you their information. And then once you have it, please, for the love of God, everybody, stop using automated texting. Stop doing low value systematic things. There’s no faster way to get to turn people off, in my opinion, than to send them low value marketing communication. I just don’t know about anybody else but John, but if I told you I get 30 or 40 call calls on my phone per day, I don’t think I’m actually over exaggerating. And I think that most real estate agents are the same way. So why they would contribute to text pollution is literally a mystery to me.

[00:29:25.460] – Robert NewmanWhy would you do that?

[00:29:28.640] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I think the only thing I wouldn’t say I disagree with you. I think it’s really in the detail because I think you’re totally correct. I think a lot of people are really, really abusing text messaging, and it’s going down the same path as email. But a lot of people were writing newsletters, emails out. They were saying, Oh, that’s dead. Just utilize social media. And they’ve learned the hard way that utilizing somebody else’s platform and relying totally on somebody else’s platform. We’re a great believer in video, but I wouldn’t utilize YouTube as the total mythology for generating digital leads because you could get kicked off any of these, and anything can happen to these platforms. But email, having an email list, it’s old school, but you own it, but you shouldn’t abuse it. You are right. But if somebody has come and they’re looking to find out about a specific property that you’ve just are starting to market. And I think you can text someone saying, I’ve just sent you a bomb bomb. I’ve sent you the details of the property. Do you want a tour of the property? Do you want to have a conversation with me?

[00:31:03.740] – Jonathan DenwoodAnd sending one or two texts is I think that’s fine. I think if you send them a regional guide that spent a lot of money, leave it a couple of days and they’re having a text message saying, Did you find the guide useful? Is there any more information you’re looking for? Offering service, offering extra value. But I do agree with you when it’s not around that and it’s just bombarding people. I’ll just send thousands out and we get one or two % because I don’t see that working. So hopefully I’m not waffled there.

[00:31:43.350] – Robert NewmanNo, I don’t see it working either, and I understand you’re qualifying so that everybody’s clear. I do believe in direct marketing. That is where advertising can work. But here’s how I usually leverage advertising. When me or my client or the combination of the two is produce something really cool, we usually drive a lot of people to that really cool thing. I also use a slightly gray hat tactic where we scrape email addresses off the volume of traffic coming to a site. When you have a high value content site where every page is designed with intent and provides value, people tend to remember who you are. So collecting their email address without necessarily getting it on a form is valuable. I’ve added 10,000 people to my own email marketing list, and we beat the industry open averages by about 300 %. So I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that the handful of clients that I’ve had, same thing is true. We send market updates and done by the client, and that’s all we’re sending. And by the way, if I was to leverage paid advertising, I would do retargeting and display advertising with Travis Tom, over at Y Lopo.

[00:33:00.000] – Robert NewmanPretty much all the savvy, bleeding edge marketers are also using retargeting and redirecting somebody’s eyeballs to something. My something would be, Hey, remember this amazing content over here? Remember the fact that I have an updated market report over here? That would be my content. Just keep driving people to your amazing content because when they hit the top of their decision making funnel, if you’ve been in front of them a lot and you provided a lot of value, probably about 60 % to 70 % get the call. I think the.

[00:33:31.920] – Jonathan DenwoodOther factor is a lot of people forget about this. I feel if you really follow this, folks, you won’t go far. Everything you send out or your website sends out, your emails you’re seeing that, just try and place yourself in your prospective client’s shoes. If you’re in their shoes, would you want to get it? Would you find it? Would it help you in your in the purchase of the largest purchase that you’re ever going to be engaged in for almost 80 to 90 % of the population, it’s the biggest financial purchase of their life, their home. Is anything you’re sending them, does it help them? Does it educate them? Does it help them? Does it make it easier to buy the right house? If it doesn’t, for God’s sake, don’t send it out.

[00:34:27.880] – Robert NewmanYeah. And here’s what we’re working on an inbound rem. I’m giving everybody a bleeding edge look, literally like you can almost still hear the ow as the knife cuts the skin. Everybody, listen up. It is what’s the list of resources you need to sell your home on average. And what I mean by that is who are all the people that you’re going to contact? And some of the things we’ve already come up with, such as tax resources, probate, 10 31 exchanges, some of these are common. Here’s what’s not common, ladies and gentlemen. It’s not common for somebody to give you a full and complete list all at once. That’s what’s uncommon. It’s not that the individual elements that I’m going to say should have rang any bells for anybody in particular. But what if I was to tell you that we’re going to do a 200 point list on every single thing you might possibly need to list your home, down to painters, landscapers, all the possibilities as a template so that you could pass that off to each and every single person listening in their home. Works anywhere in the country because it’s so complete.

[00:35:33.820] – Robert NewmanThat’s what I’m talking about. That’s value. My agents and people coming to my website will probably download that incessantly because it’s free and they can use it. But guess whose logo is on it? Guess who made it? Guess whose copyright is on it? Moah. All right. I think that we’ve used our time really well here today, Jon. I’ve enjoyed the conversation. Obviously, I’ve been on one It’s just I’ve got a weird super adrenaline filled life on the other side of this podcast, and it’s just been nonstop. I want to say thank you to all my clients that listen to this show. Inbound R AM has already had a couple of record, literally backbreaking months in the early parts of 2023. We’re barely able to keep up with it. So do us a favor, like the show, Jon, if people would like to reach you and talk to you or beta test with you or any of the amazing things that you offer, how would you like them to do that?

[00:36:37.120] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, we’re looking for some community to be a site agents that know if they get themselves prepared in the next year, that in 18 months, they’re going to be inundated with new clients. But you’ve got to do the work now. So we’re looking for some agents. We got a great offer. For the right agent, we will build and host a website. We will customize your homepage, your About Us page, host it for you, maintain it for a year for free. You’ve got to utilize our platform, give us feedback, love it, and tell other agents about it. That’s the deal. And it’s a great offer. If that sounds interesting to you, and it should, go over to Mel hyphen Wright. Com. You can sign up for a quick chat with me or Adam, and we’ll see you for a good fit. And hopefully, we’ll work with you and get some great results for you. Back over to you, Rob. For those of.

[00:37:38.920] – Robert NewmanYou that follow the show, you’ll know how rarely I mention inbound R AM on here. It’s actually pretty rare. I just say you can go to the site, look at it. So I’m going to make a rare announcement for inbound rem. We have actually had such a strong opening to the year that sooner than later, probably in the next couple of weeks, we’re going to close our calendar for new clients, potentially for two to three months. I f anybody’s listening to the show while we scale up and produce the clients that we already have in the queue, if anybody’s listening to the show and they think they want to get, they might want to explore our services, which are definitely on the mid to high end of the marketing market, please do me a favor, reach out via my About page, which you can find on the website. Sorry, Services page, which you can find on the website. Either send me a message directly or go to my calendar, which is on my About page and schedule an appointment with me directly. Anyway, thank you, everybody, for your support. John and I deeply appreciate it. John, thank you so much from me to you.

[00:38:36.820] – Robert NewmanI really appreciate you selecting the topic and as usual dealing with me and poking small fun as I very much deserve. All right. Thank you, everybody. We really appreciate it.

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The post #373 – Mail-Right Show: Building Real Estate Landing Pages That Really Convert appeared first on All-in-One Real Estate Sales & Lead Generation Solution.

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YouTube Strategies For Realtors in 2023Why is it so important for you to get more views on YouTube? Because YouTube is more of a search engine than a social media… That means that when someone searches for your type of content, they’re likely ready and willing to do business!

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:00.240] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail-Right podcast show. We’re on episode number 372. And today, John and I are going to talk about our favorite and oftentimes dialog about the topic, YouTube strategies. And without telling John, I’m going to focus at least a little bit of this conversation on what different types of videos on YouTube can actually accomplish for you because I have been discovering in my recent consultations that that’s widely misunderstood. But before we get into that, we’re going to make sure that all of you beautiful, amazing, glorious people who are tuning into us know who we are. So, Jon, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself?

[00:00:50.520] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of mail hyphen write. Com. We build beautiful semi-to-full custom websites on WordPress. Plus, we got a suite of fantastic digital tools which we can help you get some quality leads with. Back over to you, Rob.

[00:01:09.660] – Robert NewmanMy name is Robert Newman. For those of you that don’t know me, I’m the founder of Inbound rem. I am a long, long-time vet of the real estate marketing industry. I’ve been doing real estate marketing consultation and all sorts of things for 14 years. I’m super excited to get into today’s topic because I’ve been talking to Realtors about the video for probably 11 or 12 years now. When we first started talking about it, to give everybody a little bit of a history lesson, nobody thought that video on YouTube was going to move the needle for real estate. Nobody saw the potential to do any business. And it was through a few really enterprising clients like Christoff2 that they literally created the market for lead generation off YouTube. And it’s been a very long road. John and I have been talking about it for five or six years. And now in 2023, I really feel like we’re starting to watch the strategy become adopted. People are listening and people are doing YouTube videos, which raises the next question. All right, you’re out there, you’re doing video. What are these various videos supposed to do for you?

[00:02:18.730] – Robert NewmanWhat are lead-generation videos versus traffic-generation videos, and brand-building videos? Because there are three categories of videos that I usually talk to my clients about. And they’re different. They accomplish different things. So, John, you know that I can pontificate on this subject for hours and days, and I actually do spend hours talking about it every single day. So before we dive into that, was there something that you wanted to like? Did you want to dial me in and get me focused in a certain direction as we launch into the topic, or did you just want me to give my head and let me run with it?

[00:03:02.460] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, just give a quick outline and then you can comment on it. First of all, I think you need to select your niche. What I mean by that is, concentrate on one particular type of YouTube video and get. And as you do more and more of them, you should get better. You will get better. And then when you get to a certain your channel gets known, you can then slightly mix it up with some other type of YouTube format content. But I think initially you want to decide on what show YouTube content you’re going to focus on, rather than trying to do various types of content, if that makes sense, Rob? And secondly, I think the great news is that 95 % of your competition in your region, city, town, or wherever you are, aren’t doing video, will never do video. And if you don’t get into video in 2023, you’re really missing a golden opportunity.

[00:04:30.000] – Robert NewmanSo I would definitely agree with the concept of missing a golden opportunity. So for those of you who don’t know, 80 % of the content that everybody in the US consumed last year was video. Video is the place that we’re going. We’re going to TikTok and Instagram and Reels. And we’ve talked about all those little things individually ad nauseam. I focus my clients efforts on YouTube because with a little bit of extra work, it’s easier for us to get a video found. Video can keep getting found, keep drawing eyeballs in for years, which is not true of Instagram or these other channels. So I focus on long term value and building that up on YouTube. So first of all, in terms of where to post video, I tend to advise, start with YouTube. And then the next thing that I advise is, as John said, what niche do you want to go into? Well, really big luxury agents tend to focus and spend a lot of money on listing videos, and they’re always calling me and talking to me and saying, video doesn’t work. I don’t get any calls. Well, guess what? You’re not going to get any calls off listing videos.

[00:05:38.280] – Robert NewmanListing videos there to brand to your client, the person who listed with you, especially on the luxury side. They expect and you should do a very nice video for a property that is in the top two % of the area that you represent. You want to make sure that you’re letting them know that you’re going to get their video out on all the big video platforms so that people who are interested in looking at this beautiful home can. But don’t think you’re going to get any calls off it. They’re very rare. I’m not saying they never happen, but they are very rare. Traffic building videos. These are my favorite kinds of videos to talk about. I also belong to a place called the Real Estate YouTube Mastermind. I noticed that the number one conversation that happens in the 10,000 people in there that share ideas about real estate video and YouTube is they are talking oftentimes about why their videos are not generating calls. Yet they have, let’s call it 300,000 views on their channel. The reason for that is they’re doing top… When you go out and you are trying to research video, all of you listening to this podcast, most likely you’re seeing all these very popular channels, many subscribers.

[00:06:47.240] – Robert NewmanAnd what they’re doing is they’re doing the top 10 reasons people relocate to T uson. The 10 things I love to hate about T uson. You better know this before you move to City X. Is all that ringing true for you, John? You’ve seen lots of those videos? Yeah. He’s nodding, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll interpret John for everybody. Those videos, you will see them ad nauseam. T hey’re great interest attaching videos and they get that TikTok market, they get kids watching them, they get adults watching them because you might be able to cleverly string together a very well edited video that shows all the major highlights of an area. On a scale of 1 to 10, the likelihood that somebody is going to call you off one of these videos is about out of two. It’s a very low converting video and I’ll explain why. You’re not really necessarily on these videos. You’re engaging somebody, you’re proving that you’re an ambassador to the area. You might be giving them very good lifestyle information, and a lot of people are interested in that information. But you’re not necessarily looking for a house. You’re not necessarily ready to buy.

[00:08:00.060] – Robert NewmanYou’re not necessarily ready to list. The videos, and nobody has been more surprised by this, Jon, than me. But I’ve discovered that the videos that get some of the most calls of any video that we produced over 10 years of doing case studies with high end and low end agents alike, the videos that seem to get the most calls are neighborhood tour videos where you’re driving around a neighborhood and you’re talking about the inventory in that neighborhood, which number one, clearly identifies that you’re trying to sell that inventory or list that inventory. And number two, paints you as an expert in that person who might be watching that video’s exact area of interest. In other words, I live in Van Nes. If I’ve got video for Insino and Resida, that’s great. But am I going to get a ton of calls for Van Nes? No. And if somebody’s watching from Van Nes, who’s interested in Van Nes’ home and they see Insino and Resida, they’re not going to call me in Van Nes. Yet, if you produce a very specific video, you are branding yourself as a person that really knows the neighborhood. You’re showing somebody that you do business in that neighborhood.

[00:09:14.040] – Robert NewmanAnd number three, and here’s the most incredible part. You have a chance to really strut your stuff. Like, if you’ve done a lot of business, if you’ve sold a lot of homes in a particular area, you can talk about the history of selling homes in that area. You can say, I’ve done, over the years, I’ve done about 20 transactions in man eyes, and I’ve noticed that the price point has gone up by 10, 20 %, 30 percentile points, 40 percentile points. So if you bought a home in 19… I moved into my home somewhere 20 years ago and it was worth $3.85. It’s worth about $800,000 or 900,000 today. So I could give that progression to people watching the video in Van Nes specifically, which now paints you as an expert, lets people know that you’re in and doing business in Van Nes. These neighborhood tour videos, John, they don’t get nearly as many calls or views or anything. So actually, I don’t see a ton of them happening online. They’re not the common video, the place that real estate agents go to, they also require a little bit of extra effort. You got to get in your car, you got to put your set up your camera correctly, you got to make sure people can hear you, and then you got to drive around.

[00:10:24.400] – Robert NewmanThat is a little bit of extra effort to produce this particular video, and they don’t get as many views. So people who are unfamiliar with YouTube or video in general are going to go, Why would I produce that video? I’ve seen a few of those. They only have 80 views. And then I saw this guy do one on the city, like the city top 10 reasons to live in Atlanta. And that one had 10,000 views. So why in the world would I produce the one that has 80 views? It doesn’t make any sense when you’re looking at the analytics. But it makes sense when you understand that somebody can watch five or six interest pieces, but they’re going to call off the video, which is you driving around talking about the houses. You with me, Jon?

[00:11:03.820] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I think you’re making a really excellent point because I think you know and I know it’s linked to principles of SEO that there’s different content that appeals to people on a different stage of their purchasing journey. I think that’s the other factor. I think when it comes to the 10 things about Los Angeles or whatever city, you’re going to get people that might be visiting that town. But also those that are thinking of moving to city, they might be further out on their purchasing journey. Then another type of video, which you’ve just outlined, would appeal to somebody further along that journey, if that’s making sense, Robert.

[00:11:59.040] – Robert NewmanYep. The buyer journey, which I oftentimes refer to as intent to the people that are doing business with us, what the intent of the search is that drives somebody into a video in the first place is very important. Saying why live in city name is probably somebody who might be a year or two out and researching an area very casually to see if maybe it’s a place that they might want to move to. Whereas if a person who already has a neighborhood and they’re saying home in neighborhood name or neighborhood name Van Nes or Aliana, Texas, they’re moving deeper down the intent funnel. They now are not just researching a broader area such as Fort Bend, which is the entire county that Aliana is located in. As a matter of fact, Aliana, I think, is located in Richmond. So now you’re two levels down, two levels of research down. I already know I want to live in Richmond. It’s just a matter of which community inside Richmond I want to live in. Now I’m looking for specific information on a specific community. And I think the intent behind that search and that research is much deeper than the broader ones.

[00:13:03.870] – Robert NewmanYou might say there’s 10 times more likelihood that that person is close to or seriously considering buying a home in that area, which makes those 86 visitors probably more relevant to you than the 860 that you had on your broad area video. Now, I’m going to disagree with you slightly though, John, because when you’re creating a YouTube strategy and you say you want to get good at one thing, I don’t necessarily agree with that. If you’re going to make a decision to do video, you could say, I’m going to sit at my desk and do 20 of these and talk about every area. That’s a video type that’s sticking with the niche, and that’s what you and I are talking about. But if you wanted to get both traffic and calls to a new channel, it would make sense to do area interest videos broadly and then the specific videos. I know you said you want to work into that. And I do agree with that. Start someplace, any place. But I would also say the place to start would probably be broad with all the copyable content that’s everywhere, like that you could just see a million different examples on YouTube of the top 10 reasons to live in city name.

[00:14:18.620] – Robert NewmanDo you follow what I’m saying? Because there’s so many good examples. There’s not as many good examples of neighborhood videos of people driving around and keeping up a good informative stream of information going out for five minutes while they’re driving around. It always surprises me, John, how few agents are equipped to actually just talk straight for five minutes on a single area and know their information. How many homes have sold in this neighborhood in the last 5 to 10 years? What’s the price range? Are there any contingencies or special master plan community fees? The list goes on.

[00:14:59.460] – Jonathan DenwoodI think I’m influenced about this stuff. Before I chose this subject, I’ve done a bit of a dive about other people on YouTube discussing this topic that are seen as fault leaders in this topic. And one of the videos he was talking to a Canadian broker based in Calgary, who’s come on my radar before. And he does home tours, but they’re around the million. They’re custom builds from new builds from custom builders, and they’re around the million dollar, and they’re a certain style of video and that channel. And I will have in the show notes, folks, I will have a short list of different agents doing different styles of videos. That will give you some encouragement about the different types of videos. I know you’ve got some agent, I forgot the gentleman and brother and sister, one of your clients, he does videos in Austin, is it?

[00:16:25.710] – Robert NewmanYes, that would be Houston properties. h Houston Local Guide is what their video is called, their channel together. They have a dual channel together. And then they also have individual channels, each of them, where they go and they produce. They focus in different parts of Texas. And then they each do neighborhood videos and deeper dives. They’ve done very well with it. They’re very, very well with video. I think that the Brett’s sister in her very first year in real estate made like $200,000 or $300,000, mostly using lead generation on video to drive that result.

[00:17:09.480] – Jonathan DenwoodAnother type of video is linked to our concept that we’ve pushed together about becoming the digital Mayor of your city area town. And that’s about… There will be an example in the show notes, folks, of a rater that interviews local business s, and it’s not directly linked to real estate, but he builds goodwill. He gets referrals from these businesses because he’s actually helping this business by promoting them, by interviewing the owners of these businesses. And also these businesses promote his channel, so he gets more traffic to the YouTube channel. So that can be a beneficial way of approaching it. Agreed.

[00:18:04.380] – Robert NewmanSo we’re going to go to our break, ladies and gentlemen. When we come back, we’re going to start to riff a little bit. I’m going to assume that if you’ve done any research on video at all, some of this you’ve heard. But I’m going to drift a little bit deeper into ideas that you may not have heard about video. Video that does work, it works very well for lead generation. There’s a video that I promote consistently that maybe one person out of every 1,000 people doing real estate video is even doing. And they don’t realize how important it is or how much business it can generate them. So we’re going to talk about that when we come back from the break. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail right. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight.

[00:19:01.870] – Robert NewmanCom. Welcome back from the break, ladies and gentlemen. It’s episode number 372. You are listening to the Mail Right Real Estate Marketing podcast. Me and my co host, Jon, are talking about video, and we’re talking about real estate video and YouTube video specifically. Before the break, I mentioned that I was going to be discussing a video idea that very few people act on, but is a high, high profit driver. So, Jon, I’m going to use you as I oftentimes do as test case. And if I was going to say on my business, inbound rem, which you know that I’ve established 100 % through organic marketing methods. I’ve built it up entirely bootstrapping, no advertising budget, no paid advertising of any kind, even once. So if you had to guess what percentage of my clients had watched a 30 or 40 minute video, either on my company mission or on my about page, how many would you say would you guess?

[00:20:02.960] – Jonathan DenwoodI have no idea. Sorry, I honestly don’t.

[00:20:07.270] – Robert NewmanOkay, so the answer is 30 to 40 %. These are 40 minute long videos doing nothing but either talking about myself or what the purpose or mission of my company is. O ftentimes, the deciding factor of that person to call me is based alone on the about video or the bio video. The reason for that, ladies and gentlemen, is I’m a 35 year sales vet and I’ve studied every sales trainer that has written a book, almost like thousands of books, thousands of pieces of knowledge. All of that boiled down into one simple idea. We buy stuff from people that we like. If we get the bonus of having a good value and a mission that goes along with somebody that we like, it becomes an almost tidal wave of momentum for somebody to reach out and connect with you. T hey like your value proposition, they like who you are, and they like what you’re doing. But how do we communicate that to them? Most salespeople and real estate salespeople wait until they’re face to face to try to build that momentum up. They share their mission, their unique selling proposition, and everything else for when they are talking to their client.

[00:21:22.500] – Robert NewmanBut guess what? You’re missing the opportunity to create the momentum for them to reach out to you in the first place. So one of the most important kinds of video, one of the things that really separates my clients who do really incredibly well on video versus ones who don’t, is sharing an about video that really dives deep into who you are as a person, what your history is, and what your mission is with whatever your business is. I’ll give everybody an example. I’ll give you an example, John. One of the most common things that I hear from my clients, once they understand that I am a mission driven dude, is they oftentimes start talking about how upset they get about how poorly people operate inside the real estate business in the area that they work in. This really goes 10 times when you start talking about a market in LA. I’ve had hundreds of my hours consumed by luxury real estate agents telling me how poorly they feel like some of their upper end clients are served because they very well know that they’re about ready to make 60, 80, 100 % of hundred thousand dollars in a single transaction, yet they feel like their competitors are offering very little service in comparison to what they’re about ready to earn.

[00:22:37.860] – Robert NewmanYou with me so far? Yes, I tell you. So their selling proposition is literally, these are the 30 things that I do for my client. I am the one that ushers in the staging crew. I’m at their doorstep setting everything up. I personally watch, manage and monitor all the teams that come in to set these kinds of properties up. Even normal markets, I get out my drone and take aerial shots, take in person shots. I do three different additional types of content to make sure that we post these things in three different places as opposed to one. That is a unique selling proposition and something for you to talk about inside the video that you do. Every time you’ve added a single element of service to your personal sales process, that is something that you would be talking about inside your about video. Why you’re passionate about doing this, you can do what is called a reverse review where you’re basically talking about the things n general, don’t ever name anybody specific, but just in general, what your marketplace is lacking. Another thing that I find oftentimes, John, is newer agents trying to compete against these established agents who, quite frankly, it sounds to me like many of them get lazy.

[00:24:04.200] – Robert NewmanThey have a lock on the market. They’ve been doing it forever, 20 years, word of mouth referral. And so they take the listing, they put a sign out in the front yard, and they send out an email to their existing clients and call it a day. Whereas a newer agent might say, I’ll do all that, plus this, plus that, plus.

[00:24:22.880] – Jonathan DenwoodI’ll pick the phone. I think it’s a combination of that. And also I think it’s a combination of burnout. That could be it, that.

[00:24:31.680] – Robert NewmanCould be it, too. That could very well be it. And every single one of these things, ladies and gentlemen, is an opportunity for you to put inside a mission video what you see in terms of a challenge, what you’re doing in terms of addressing and fixing that challenge. If you can express that, figure out a way to articulate that clearly inside of a video, you’ll discover that your results on all the other videos that you produce will be miles ahead of anybody else. I have people call me up who have a million views on their channel, and my client, Brett, who has 60,000 views on his channel is absolutely making a ton more money than them, which is very frustrating for people who are calling me. Why have I spent all this time getting a million views, yet the case study you have on your website is more productive monetarily than my 1 million views? And the simple answer to that is most real estate agents don’t understand what videos they should be producing to get a lead. They don’t understand that there’s a difference, and they don’t understand the following, that along with all those videos, make sure that one of the main intro videos to your channel is explaining who you are, good, bad or indifferent.

[00:25:52.760] – Robert NewmanMake sure that you give people an opportunity to connect because that is the power of video. We buy stuff from people that we like. That was my point like 10 minutes ago, we buy stuff from people that we like. That’s it. Rush away 30 years of sales knowledge. Would you agree with that, Jon?

[00:26:08.830] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah. I think also the great benefit of video is you hear from a lot of people that the problem with a lot of digital lead generation is they always say, These leads, they’re not really leads. They’re low quality. I’m inundated with these internet leads, and they’re not real leads. And I do understand why they say that, but I think it’s also down to some degree a lack of education and knowing what they’re getting themselves involved in. But the beauty of video is that if somebody consumes a lot of your video content, they’re normally, and then they approach you, they’re normally a much higher quality digital lead.

[00:26:59.400] – Robert NewmanThat is definitely the case with our clients. V ideo is not the only strategy that we employ, but it is a strategy. It is what I like to call the close of the digital selling cycle. So you might have somebody read something, you might have somebody listen to something, you might have somebody appreciate some of your pictures. But the thing that’s going to give them the momentum to pick up the phone and call you or register with your site is going to be video that you’ve done, for sure. That’s 100 % the way that most of the internet is working. Kristen Maysure, every single big person that we’ve had on the show that’s breaking the averages in terms of results is using video. Even what companies like Wailo are trying to cycle video into their lead generation process. Travis Tom creates most of his revenue by doing videos that he drops on Facebook. The list of people goes on and on and on. But video is the way that we’re connecting. The close ratio for most of my clients is between 30 % to 50 %. So close ratio is where somebody calls you, and I know you know this, John, but then out of 10 people that call you, how many turn into clients?

[00:28:04.740] – Robert NewmanSo with most lead generation strategies online, that number could be one in 100 or one in 10 is usually incredibly good. Zillow is usually one in 10. So when I’m saying 30 to 50 %, I’m saying 3 to 5 out of 10 %. That’s insane.

[00:28:22.740] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, but especially if they’ve come from a more referral based lead generative system. They’re using what I call the Baffini, or they’re just using friends and family, or they’ve got a local personal referral network. And then they want to increase the business and they go into the digital, they think that a lot of these digital lead generative platforms or ways, that leads going to be like the quality of their personal referral. And this is why they get peeved because you’re dealing with a totally different beast. But I think when we’re talking about video, it’s a bridge between real personal referral and the quality digital lead that you get from other forms of digital marketing.

[00:29:28.300] – Robert NewmanI definitely agree with everything that you just said. Now, one of the thing about video, because we talked about a lot about video type, let’s just say that you nail this all down. Let’s just say you’re doing three or four different types of video and you’re along that process. There’s one remaining bit about video that I find to be one of the more exciting elements of it. I have most of my video that I’ve recorded on my computer program that I use called Screencast Domatic. I’ve lately started to go through my Screencast Domatic and upload some of my old videos to Instagram. I’ve now managed to acquire, so far, I think maybe 500 to 1,000 new views on old videos that I’ve done in many years past. The total requirement for me is to upload them, tag the video, put the tags on Instagram to get some attention from people, and that’s it. So for the first time in forever, my Instagram channel is growing again in terms of audience. I haven’t really done anything new. I have certainly not created any new content for it. I’ve only leveraged the video that already have. You can do the same thing on LinkedIn, P intrest.

[00:30:36.040] – Robert NewmanEverybody knows that video is where it’s at. So once you get used to putting everything up on YouTube, assuming that you kept the original video files, you actually have a tool that you can use to propel your business and keep your audiences engaged across every platform, Facebook, everywhere, just by repurposing those videos, which is an excellent task for virtual assistants and assistants if you have one. You just have them go through, give them access to your work computer. They go through it and they just upload those videos to wherever you want them uploaded to. And you just get a whole new series of views on something that you may have done quite a while ago. John’s looking, you’re Oh, okay, you’re listening. I thought I misinterpreted your look. Your raised eyebrow was not, I want to say something. It was you were listening to what I had to say.

[00:31:23.500] – Jonathan DenwoodI always tell you to look at it.

[00:31:29.100] – Robert NewmanAnd then one last thing. So I’m going to give everybody, I’m going to end the call or in the subject with one remaining tip. There is one broad video that I’ve been told over and over again that does generate leads. It is a broad video. It’s the only one that I’ve consistently heard. Market to market seems to generate leads for real estate agents. I don’t personally focus on this video, so I can’t say that definitively. I don’t tell my clients to focus on this video. But I’ve heard that relocating to videos are ones that actually get calls. That’s my hack, my tip as we close down the show, because for everybody listening, I have between 500 to 2,000 calls with real estate agents every single year. I’ve been doing that for 14 years. I am talking to somebody for two hours per call, usually one to two hours. So you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of case study research for me to be able to come on the show and then directly communicate to all of you, Hey, this is something that I think is working. Do you have anything that you want to add, Jon?

[00:32:39.530] – Jonathan DenwoodNo, I think we’ve given some good insight. I think the main thing is listen to this video, listen to some of our other videos, do a bit of dive, listen to some other channels. Like I say, I will have some links in the video notes and the show notes to accompany this podcast and the video version and do a bit of a dive. But do something. Can 2023 actually do some videos? Have a go at it.

[00:33:12.760] – Robert NewmanYeah, for sure. Listen, John and I have been saying since we started the show, two, three years ago, video is the place to be at. Every year we go, this is the year, this is the year. Same thing in 2023, this is the year. Couple more years, you’re going to probably miss the train in terms of it still being a bleeding edge tactic that you can still make a lot of money in in most markets because it’s not oversaturated. It’s getting that way. We’re starting to see so much movement in it, so many people making so much money at it. Eventually, all of you listening in whatever market you’re in, even places like Aspen, and Durango, and really lesser known marketplaces, you’re going to still hear about video. So do it. Do it now. That’s our advice in 2023. It’s also, by the way, a real good hedge against lead attrition, which we’ve talked about in other episodes too. So please go through our back catalog. John was the brilliant one who came up with the idea of understanding how lead attrition works, and we talk pretty extensively on that subject. So get involved in some of our old content and figure out what we’re talking about so that you can bulletproof your marketing strategies in 2023 against lead attrition.

[00:34:22.780] – Robert NewmanAll right, thank you for tuning in. John, how would you like people to reach out to you if they’re so inclined?

[00:34:28.860] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, thanks for that, Rob. We’d be doing, we’re looking for some evangelist agents, people that really want to get a result in 2023. And the deal is this, if you’re looking to get your own website, we will build you a nice semi custom solution, a custom homepage, and some of the key landing page. We will do that for free and we will host and support your website for one year for free. And what we want in return is that you utilize it. If you’re happy, you start talking about it and you start promoting it to your fellow agents. If that sounds interesting, go to the mail hyphen write. Com. Book a chat with me. He’s right on the top navigation and we can see if we’re a good fit and we’d love to have that discussion with you. Over to you, Robert.

[00:35:22.760] – Robert NewmanAll right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in. If you’d like to reach out or learn more about me, go to inboundrem. Com and click that About button or watch the video on the homepage. Either one will do the trick and let you know who I am because I follow my own advice. So proud of myself. All right, everybody, we really appreciate you tuning in. Check you out next time.

————————————–

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

jonathan@mail-right.com

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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The post #372 – Mail-Right Show: YouTube Strategies for REALTORS in 2023 appeared first on All-in-One Real Estate Sales & Lead Generation Solution.

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Instagram Reels Ideas for Real Estate AgentsHead Trainer + Co-Founder | Business Video School | We teach real estate agents how to use video in their businesses.

When it comes to real estate, Instagram is one of the best platforms to post photos and videos. It’s also a great way to show off your work, meet new clients, and create opportunities for yourself. In the past, we’ve shown you how to promote your Instagram real estate page with some Instagram marketing tips for real estate businesses.

Nick Niehaus

Head Trainer + Co-Founder | Business Video School | We teach real estate agents how to use video in their businesses.

https://www.bizvideoschool.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-niehaus/

Episode Full Show Notes[00:00:11.290] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail Right podcast. We’re incredibly thrilled, excited, and happy to have Nick Nyhouse, who has a long track record of being an entrepreneur and founder of a lot of things. Currently, he’s head trainer. Actually, Nick, let me do this. You have a pretty robust profile, so instead of me trying to introduce you and list off all of the things that you’ve done or that you’re known for, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience, anybody that might not know you.

[00:00:44.780] – Nick NiehausSure. Yeah. I’m Nick Niehaus I’ve been in the, I would say, marketing space basically since I was a freshman in college, so almost 15 or so years now. I can kind of figure out how old I am based on that if you want to, but my background, I’ve been self-employed pretty much the whole time. I invented a product called the Case. Cooley. Keeps a case of beer cold for 10 hours out of ice. That was a lot of fun. I did that for a few years, but my primary focus has been video. So really, for the past seven years or so, I’ve been making videos. Making videos, and other people teaching people how to make videos. So for about three years now, I’ve been running we started a company called Business Video School. Not on purpose, in alignment with when the pandemic started, but it kind of worked out that way. So we pretty much launched right as everything got shut down, which was kind of good timing because it’s an online school. People were able to dive in right from the start. And, yeah, I worked with a couple of thousand real estate agents over the past three years or so, teaching them how to use video, so all kinds of stuff.

[00:01:47.730] – Nick NiehausSo I’m always happy to talk about video, whatever vein or topic you want to go on there.

[00:01:53.270] – Robert NewmanOkay, cool. Well, I’ve got my pugnacious partner in crime for those that you don’t know him and you should. Boy, oh, boy, should you ever. John, just for the people that might not know you, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience?

[00:02:10.230] – Jonathan DenwoodThank you so much, Robert, for that introduction. I’m the joint found of Mail Right mailhytheonright.com. We build beautiful websites and WordPress. Plus we got a number of great marketing widget add-ons to help you get digital leads through your website, and it’s just a great product. Back. Over to you, Robert.

[00:02:32.470] – Robert NewmanAnd I’m Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound REM. I made my bones in the real estate marketing business by being known for real estate SEO. But I’ve expanded. I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve actually found a couple of businesses in this space. I sit on the board of advisors for a couple of digital back-ends, prop, tech, technology companies, and a whole bunch of stuff. Go, look at me@inboundrem.com and look at my about page. And you’ll get any story that you want from me. But today we’re going to talk to Nick, and I did the rare thing. Where do you want to hear a funny story, Nick?

[00:03:05.540] – Nick NiehausSure.

[00:03:06.250] – Robert NewmanOkay. There’s a reason this show was created and founded by Jonathan.

[00:03:11.600] – Nick NiehausIt’s his show. Really?

[00:03:12.430] – Robert NewmanWell, it’s our show now, but it was originally his show. It was his show 100%. And then we had this experience where he got on with a guest and he tried to pronounce their last name, and they just got really upset at him. And this is about a year and a half ago, and he’s just like, that’s it, Robert. You’re doing the hosting. And now I just massacred your last name. I’m so sorry. It’s nehouse. And I said, Nighhouse.

[00:03:44.630] – Nick NiehausI almost consider that an acceptable alternative for how often that’s what I hear. So it’s not a big deal at all. I need to start putting since it’s the word knee and the word house, which are both very obvious English words, I should just spell it that way, you know what I mean? That would make it a lot more straightforward, obviously.

[00:04:02.670] – Robert NewmanPerfect. Well, today, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to talk about a subject that’s really fun and it’s also really catching a lot of buzzwords lately, and that’s Reels. We’re going to talk specifically about Instagram Reels, but honestly, video content can really be repurposed for any place that hosts Reels, which is most services these days. Facebook does reels. Instagram does reels. A lot of people do Reels. YouTube does reels. Everybody’s getting into the short little clip business because everybody’s trying to compete against the phenomenon that is TikTok, and not very well, I might add. But be that as it may, Nick, while I would consider myself relatively adept at YouTube specifically, and I certainly am adept at the realm of storytelling, I am not adept at taking a long vision and turning it into a 32nd reel. So we’re going to lean on you pretty heavily, I feel like, in terms of this show, this particular subject. So if I want to do Reels for business and let’s say I’m a Real tour, would you immediately have any suggestions about how one might approach researching what kind of reel you want to do?

[00:05:17.270] – Nick NiehausYeah, that’s a great question. So when you’re first getting started with Reals, I guess the first thing I would suggest is it should not be the first place you start with video in general. So I think that this is an area that a lot of people get wrong, where they go straight to social media, they go straight to short form content. And I personally think that might be the hardest kind of video there is to make. I think people often look at, like, live video. It’s harder. And I’m like, well, you just go live and just talk whatever comes up off the cuff. That seems easier than trying to make, like you said, make that whole thing in a 20 seconds long, right? So I think you got to keep that in mind.

[00:05:55.230] – Robert NewmanRight?

[00:05:55.410] – Nick NiehausSo if you don’t have any experience with video at all, you might want to start somewhere else for a little while first. Get some reps in, get comfortable and that’s going to help you learn how to be concise. And I think that’s really the first thing you got to remember with Real, that’s one thing you got to have some experience. Number two then is who are you trying to attract? You got to know who the audience is and one of the things that’s different about short form content versus a lot of other kinds of content is, and this is how TikTok works, is that it’s not necessarily that people are following you, right? Most social media is about you’ve got followers, you’re making content for them. The short form stuff is more about you’re making content for the people that follow those topics. Right? So it’s kind of more akin to like a TV channel sort of attitude as opposed to active followers. So when it comes to the real, that’s where you start. So who are you trying to attract? What is it that they care about? So if it’s a Realtor, I’m going to focus on their community.

[00:06:54.450] – Nick NiehausCan I highlight things in town? Because that means I’m going to attract people who live in my area and as a real estate agent I need people who live in my area obviously. And then you can stop there if you want. You could just sort of make things about stuff that’s going on in town. I like to go a step further and ask how further can I narrow that audience? Are they young families? Are they people that care about sports? What do I know about my ideal customer? And try to come up with really I try to aim for three to five content pillars, three to five topics that you can come back to like clockwork. Right? So I’m talking about the same few things, not too many. In fact kind of less is better in most cases and then you got to just figure out what can you talk about in under 20 seconds? And obviously reels can be longer than that. But when you’re first getting started, anything you think is going to take 20 is probably going to take 40 or 50, you know. So you almost have to like aim for extremely short in order to get something that’s even reasonably short.

[00:07:53.180] – Nick NiehausRight? So I think starting out I would, I would really dial into that and I think that I know that’s not necessarily easy. So that’s why again, I don’t necessarily say start first with reals, I would start with other kinds of video so that the video skills are out of the way. You kind of feel comfortable making something and then you can be targeted to that audience. And I think that to me, if you do that part, the number of views, all that kind of stuff is less important because you’re sort of guaranteeing you’re talking to people who are going to be a good fit for your business. And then, hey, if I get 500 views on a Real that was well targeted, that’s 500 people that could potentially hire me. That’s what I’m really looking for. I don’t care about going viral at that point. Right. So, yeah, just a couple of thoughts on kind of where to get started. Does that make any sense? Hopefully?

[00:08:39.510] – Robert NewmanWell, certainly, but I want to let John has been masterminding these subjects lately, and I feel like he oftentimes has, like, a background action or thought in his head about how he wants these conversations to go. So, John, why don’t you jump in here on the Real conversation?

[00:08:59.250] – Jonathan DenwoodI’m sorry to blow that bubble. There’s very little that goes through my head, actually. Thank you for those kind words, Rob. I think when it comes to Instagram, Reals and how they’ve been trying to utilize Reals as a kind of competitor to TikTok has caused a bit of controversialism because a lot of people say, well, we come to Instagram and Reals doesn’t really fit in. I don’t know what your stance on that is. But secondly, through your course, you’ve trained a lot of real estate agents. Are there anybody that is in that’s come on your radar lately that you think have been utilized in these short it’s called short videos. I think that’s a better because they’re on YouTube, they’re on Instagram, they’re on TikTok. Are there any of your students or anybody that’s come on your radar that’s in your memory bank recently that you think has been doing a really good job about utilizing that short video? And maybe you could point out why you think they’re doing a good job.

[00:10:24.920] – Robert NewmanI love that question.

[00:10:26.470] – Nick NiehausYeah, there’s kind of two questions there. I’ll start with the first half and then come back to the examples. I think. First of all, yeah, I think one of the problems that Instagram and Meta, which owns Instagram, are having right now is well, and this is my opinion, but it’s basically that they sort of screwed up social media. Social media is supposed to be, you know, people in real life. You connect to them through these platforms, and then you can build and maintain that relationship sort of through this digital medium. And obviously the pandemic made it even easier just to immediately connect with somebody on social media. And maybe you never met them in person.

[00:11:07.820] – Robert NewmanRight.

[00:11:08.010] – Nick NiehausAnd then you can still build that whole relationship there. So traditionally, that’s how we see social media. Right. Well, these platforms, they just have messed with it so much. We’re going to click for a while. Facebook started pushing news, and they started pushing group posts. It was stuff that kind of came before TikTok even, that started to turn people off. I said, Well, I’m here to talk to my friends and family. Like, what is all this other junk? Well, that’s kind of the backstory to that. Then you have TikTok starts to emerge, and TikTok is we would call this more of like a content discovery platform. It’s not as much about the people you follow. It’s not as much about having that relationship. I mean, you still build the relationship, still very much a parasocial relationship, but it’s much more akin to, like, TV channels. It’s much more like YouTube, right? And you hear people talk about YouTube as a social media, and it never made sense to me because they’re literally called channels. It’s like television, right? I think that’s where Instagram really messed up. They just kind of kept copying because that’s what Meta knows how to do, is copy other companies, right?

[00:12:15.550] – Nick NiehausSo they said, oh, here’s TikTok, and we got to copy this. And that’s what everybody that’s what the backlash was ultimately kind of about, right? It’s this idea of, well, that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because I want to connect with specific people. I want to see the pictures from my friends lives. And instead, you’re showing me random videos from random creators that might be engaging, might be interesting, might be exciting, but they’re not what I asked for. You know what I mean? That was the problem. I think that’s why you see Instagram kind of circle back. They’re deemphasizing video. Right? Now they’re leaning more into photos again. But it’s not about video versus photo. It’s more about, I want to see the people I chose to follow. Right. And that’s worth understanding, right? Because that means that currently these strategies work very similarly because Instagram copied TikTok. So if you take a TikTok strategy and you apply it to Instagram, it still works pretty well. Right. But I think we’re going to start to see that change because I think Instagram is pivoting back in this direction of you’re going to see reels from the people you follow.

[00:13:22.400] – Nick NiehausAt least that’s what they’re kind of saying, right? That’s kind of where we’re at there, right. So that being said to sort of answer that second question of who’s doing well with this, what I’ve seen is that there are several examples of people who are kind of doing this stuff well. And what’s interesting about it is they’re just influencers. It’s not like we talk about real estate and then we have these individuals. For instance, like Zach Faust, zack spouse has 1.5 million TikTok followers. At this point. He’s a real estate agent, and he’s just basically he’s a super animated guy. So, like, when he talks and obviously leans into it, but it’s just engaging. Right. And then he emphasizes it, but he’ll do this thing where he’ll zoom in and out on his face as he’s telling a story. And a lot of his videos are like, he’s just sitting in a car yelling. Basically he’s just telling the story. He’s so impassioned. And I’m like, if most other people told the same story, I probably wouldn’t watch that video, right? Because sometimes they’re really good stories, sometimes they’re just sort of average. But it’s how he tells it, right?

[00:14:34.310] – Nick NiehausSo that would be kind of one example. And I think that’s what in terms of a strategy, you have to look for that’s. What you have to remember is that this at this point, if you want to go in this direction of these short form videos, it’s less about the relationship you already have. It’s less about just checking in with people who already know you, which is what you would do on Facebook or Instagram. And it does work. And the truth is I think that’s better for most agents. I don’t think most agents need to have a very large audience. They need a small audience, a few hundred people, maybe a couple of thousand in their town that want to have a relationship with them and they need to maintain those versus the short form stuff is amazing for going viral. That’s kind of what it’s built for. It’s built for this idea of like if you make something that’s just really engaging, that’s really funny, that just gets somebody glued. It’s why things like the number of times it gets replayed, that’s an important stat on these short form platforms. Because they want to see content that keeps people even re watching the same thing a couple of times.

[00:15:37.530] – Nick NiehausThat is what works there, right? For the agents that it’s a little bit of a catch 22 in some ways because I feel like if you go all in on that, you might end up with a million followers, but most of those followers are not going to be in your area, right. They’re not going to be people that can do business with you. And so you’ve also seen some of that where you’ve got certain individuals that are in cities that are just exciting places to be, right? Like if there’s certain agents who are in, for instance, Las Vegas and they have hundreds of thousands of followers because Las Vegas is just full of really cool, interesting stuff to look at, right? So they go make these little community highlight videos, but they’re talking about stuff that doesn’t exist in most cities, right, versus you go to somebody who’s based in like I live in St. Louis, Missouri, right? There are some exciting things to talk about here, but we don’t tend to have as many of those type of influencers in St. Louis, right? So you do have to kind of consider where you are and then sort of match what you do to that.

[00:16:35.550] – Nick NiehausIf you think about it that way, you can find a strategy that does cater to your area. And I would actually say for a lot of agents, I think having a couple of thousand followers but they’re all in my town is more useful than having several hundred thousand and most of them can never hire me, right? Because I might get a lot of engagement. But let’s say I put a video on, I get 200 comments on it. Now I got to go back through and look at all those and I don’t know how many of those people could actually hire me versus if I have a smaller audience that’s more targeted, I know they’re all worth talking to.

[00:17:06.220] – Jonathan DenwoodSo I think before we go back to Rob, what I think you’re trying to point out, and thank you. It’s been really insightful of what you’ve just outlined, but I think what you’re trying to say is some of these metrics when it comes to a real estate agent, could be a bit vanity metrics where the real business of really getting clients is a smaller but a more engaged audience.

[00:17:34.850] – Nick Niehaus100%. Yeah, I think we’ve always dealt with vanity metrics and social media but I think short form video has made that problem worse. Also like TikTok, for instance, a view which they actually call a play just means the video started moving at all. So on Facebook it’s 3 seconds. So if you get a view, you know that person spent at least 3 seconds with you. YouTube it’s 30 though, right? So if you can’t really compare those together and then you got short form like TikTok where it’s literally zero if it starts to show up at all accounts, I just really warn people about it’s. Great, you want to have lots of views, that’s all really exciting stuff but they don’t mean the same thing. I talk a lot about the idea of being active versus impactful. So is the thing you’re doing making you feel busy or is it actually accomplishing something for your business? And social media? And especially these video tools can be really impactful but they can also be a way to feel active. And I think a lot of times there’s so much psychological blockage when it comes to making video because they’re so nervous, they’re so uncomfortable with it, that you make one of these videos is 20 seconds long, you put it out and you get this huge sense of relief because you just did the video thing, right?

[00:18:54.270] – Nick NiehausAnd that’s certainly true and by all means the first couple of videos you make you’re going to go through that. But what are you getting from it, right? Are you tracking those results? Are you tracking? How many people are actually reaching out to you about real estate? Or are you getting conversations that lead to business conversations? Or are you just getting comments that make you feel good because you got ten comments on your video. And this is obviously stuff that has become kind of a personal pet peeve of mine because I see people talking about engagement rates and all that stuff all the time. So I get it. I mean, it’s hard not to think about, but it’s very important, especially when you’re talking about social media, that you’re measuring the right things.

[00:19:30.470] – Robert NewmanOkay, so, Nick, on that note, we’re going to take a break. We’re going to go to for our audience, it’s going to be a brief little break here. And for us, it’s going to be a few seconds, but when we come back, I’m going to share some thoughts about where I feel real are for real estate. John, I’m going to ask you to do the same, and then Nick can weigh in at the end. So without any further ado actually, you know what? Before we go to break, Nick, we’re going to do this twice. If somebody did want to reach out or do a little bit of research on you, I think that you’re savvy you’re talking about a lot of the same hot points that I talk about when it comes to video. So if somebody wanted to watch your videos and learn from you, where are they going to go?

[00:20:15.330] – Nick NiehausWell, the two best places to go would be our YouTube channel. That’s going to be for our business. So you just want to look for business video school. I put a lot of our even full 1 hour trainings on there for free. And then, honestly, it’s a little old school, but I still like connecting with people on Facebook. So if you just look me up on looking for Nick Nihaus on Facebook, it’s Nickniehaus. And obviously you’re looking for the one that the guy who works in business video school. So just make sure you find that there are a couple of nickname houses out there I’ve found without many. So that’s probably the best way to find me.

[00:20:48.980] – Robert NewmanCool. All right, so, ladies and gentlemen, stay tuned. We will be right back. John and I will be giving you our contact information at the end of this podcast session. If you have seen us on any platform at all, that allows for ratings, reviews, or comments and you’ve appreciated the show, which I’ve been getting more and more comments lately, John, that people have been I think three people have mentioned the podcast so far this month to me, which is crazy. So do us a favor. Leave us comments on those platforms. It helps us a lot. All right, thank you so much. We’ll be right back.

[00:21:23.050] – Nick NiehausDo you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail, right? It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay. Get started today. Go to mailwrite.com.

[00:21:47.810] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the podcast Mail Wright podcast. We are doing an interview with Nick Neehouse and we are talking about video. We’ve gone deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep down the rabbit hole for reels. And here is how I view reels. So I don’t do reels at all, ever. Okay? I experimented with reels when I first started my Instagram channel and I got thousands of views on them. And then because I was properly tagging and I’ve got about 3000 viewers and then I started getting leads. Everybody hold the phone, it sounds so exciting, right? But everybody was turning into a lead based on a 1 minute video. And that one minute’s worth of information was not nearly enough to take that person to the place I like them to be before they talk to me. It wasn’t even close to it. I was getting random questions like, do you own a marketing company? What kind of marketing do you do? I was like, well, here’s my website, go there. I don’t want to talk to any of you. So I stopped doing reels. I think though, that if I had an existing, strongly focused audience, I would do reels for them if I thought that there was a purpose.

[00:23:08.660] – Robert NewmanI’ve watched Tom Ferry do reels. I’ve watched a few other people that I follow do Reals. And if you’re doing a very quick little inspirational thing to a very select, targeted group of people and you’re intending it as a value add to an existing audience, I love reels for that purpose. Give me 1 minute of like, let’s go and I’m going to be like, awesome. As long as that’s the only purpose you’re not really trying to give. You’re just trying to say, hey, it’s another day. It can be harder, it can be great, and you just make it whichever way you want it to go. But something like that. Like I watched Tom Robbins reels, there’s a few people cyguru. I watch the reels because they’re little injections of a message I’m already familiar with. That’s my opinion on real. So if you’re a real estate person and you have a huge audience and you’ve worked really hard on it, maybe save yourself some content production time and just do a little quick reel to keep that audience engaged with your channel. Jonathan?

[00:24:08.840] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, thank you. I agree with you there. Robert, what’s coming to mind? And I wonder if Nick agrees. If you’ve got a Pacific property and you want to promote it quickly to get it out there, that’s one way. I think real, especially if you’ve built up this tight knit social media that you were talking before a break. Nick, where you’ve got like 1000, 2000 people on Instagram or Facebook following you. If you’re utilizing reels on Instagram or Facebook, this short form video about Pacific property, I could see it being quite useful. What do you think, Nick?

[00:24:51.630] – Nick NiehausYeah, I agree with that. Sometimes the stuff a lot. This is about testing and just seeing what people respond to it. Blows my mind sometimes, the kind of house walk through videos that will get 100,000 views on these short form platforms because it’s nothing special, right? Somebody just kind of walks in each room, sticks their phone camera in it, and they speed it up so it goes through in 30, 40 seconds. But that’s the kind of stuff that works really well, right? So, yes, I think the short videos highlighting properties, I think that you need to have more than that. You need to be doing other types of stuff, too. But yes, if you have an audience and you can put something in front of them like that, realtors have that kind of nice built in advantage that people are naturally curious about what the inside of other people’s houses look like. Right? So you just lean into that, give them what they want, and they’ll respond well to it. And I do think back to what Rob was saying. I love that understanding of these short form videos, which, the way I would kind of come back to comment on that, is just that idea of whatever your thought is, what is the short but entertaining version of it, right?

[00:25:55.590] – Nick NiehausBecause you’re right, you’re not going to teach much. You’re not going to provide a ton of value in 20 seconds. Right? So whatever that highlight is, that little sound bite that is out of context but is still interesting to hear, that is, I think, a great sort of way of explaining what makes a good short form video, for sure.

[00:26:15.830] – Robert NewmanAwesome. I’m going to move the target a little bit here, and I’m going to pull it back a bit and ask you some, like, higher level generalized questions. So John and I talk about video incessantly. We talk about it all the goddamn time. And finally, after I’ve been talking to Realtors about video for ten years, and for the first eight, I got ignored, no joke. Last couple of years, especially since the Pandemic hit, people have started to look at it with, like, a much higher degree of intent. And I have watched certain people come out of nowhere and make massive incomes from themselves, all using video as the primary strategy, the primary driver of said strategy. But with emerging adoption comes a need for more thought out strategies. The way that most of these people are making it in real estate. Nick, whether I don’t know if you’re familiar or not, but they’re doing like, top ten reasons to move to Dallas. Top ten reasons to live in Dallas. What I hate about Dallas, honestly, every single Realtor in the US is following the same template right now. They’re all making the same kind of content, whatever market they’re in.

[00:27:30.880] – Robert NewmanAll right? I do not advise my clients to do that. We do different content. But I’m curious, you’re a video expert. You understand that the challenges I’ve painted it. So what would you be telling you? Get a. Real estate person who’s called you? I’ve been doing video, it stopped working. It’s not working as well. Nine other people are doing the same videos in the same market. Nick. What do I do?

[00:28:01.450] – Nick NiehausWell, yeah, it’s a great question. I think that the reality is right now, if you were an early mover, you’re probably not going to lose your advantage maybe ever, right? So you don’t really get those kinds of calls because that person is already better at video, right? They’re a better performer, they’re more compelling on camera, they understand lighting and audio and they’re just making a better video that’s easier to watch, which so good for that person, right? So that’s why this is the issue. A lot of agents, they see that person, they go, oh, they’re making these top ten list videos, I’ll make the same thing. And then they don’t get the same results, right? They’re not as good on camera, they don’t have the experience, et cetera. So it’s all about niching down. I think that in my sense, anything you get more experienced with, there’s sort of this theory that the more of an expert you become as something, the simpler it becomes in your mind because all the steps sort of blend together into just a few steps. And with this video stuff and with social media, it’s kind of for me, started to feel that way, where it’s like it’s just marketing fundamentals, right?

[00:29:03.940] – Nick NiehausSo a lot of people, they skip the marketing fundamentals. They don’t think about those questions that you should ask before you start any marketing effort. And so one thing that’s always confused me about those kinds of approaches is it seems like all the realtors with these YouTube channels are marketing to people who are transplanting to their city. Because I’m not going to search for a video of like, what are the top ten things, what’s traffic like in the city I already live in? Like I already know what that’s like, right, or the reasons to move to my city. Like I’m here, I’m just moving from one house to another. So that to me, I think is the next stage we’re going to start to see is people thinking first, okay, I’m here, I’m in this area. What’s the group of people in this area that I want to do business with and they’re not going to search for that kind of stuff. I mean, YouTube is a search engine. TikTok is a search engine. In fact, people under the age of 25 search more on TikTok than they do on Google in some cases now.

[00:29:58.080] – Nick NiehausSo that’s what you want to start with, right? So it’s so narrow further down. You’ve probably seen this stuff, right? So I would get into like, who’s the customer, who’s the avatar? I mean, this is the work that people want to skip because they want to just ask what the tactic or strategy is and implement it. But if you do the work once, you tend to have an advantage for years to come. So who’s that person? If I’m going to make a video about something in my town, what are the parts of what’s going in my town that that person cares about? So it’s not about moving to St. Louis now. It’s about what do I do? What’s something coming up this weekend that young families would be interested in? If that’s my target audience, right? How do I talk about those topics over and over again? And you should start to see everybody sort of develop their own strategy. So YouTube, and I think TikTok as well, was built on sort of a television model. They call them channels on YouTube. Well, what differentiates different channels on TV, right? They tend to have kind of themes.

[00:30:55.900] – Nick NiehausYou got news channels, you got ones that will show a bunch of reality TV shows, ones that are all about nature, et cetera, with social media, where this isn’t social media. Now we’re talking about these sort of content discovery platforms. It’s even more niche. Right? So how can you get into those smaller niches that people are probably searching for? So if you combine understanding your ideal client with the kinds of search terms they look for, which is that’s just fundamental SEO stuff, that’s where you’re going to find the gold moving forward, I would think.

[00:31:25.370] – Robert NewmanAgreed. And I would approach it much the same way, and I will just add a little to denim. You covered all that territory so well for us, Nick. I oftentimes have to throw in a little thought at the end. I don’t with you. I will say this. You want to use tools. The two tools that I use. The three tools that I use. No, the four tools that I use. So here’s my tools. I use Neil Patel’s ubersuggest. I use a reps for YouTube searches, and I use vidIQ for only YouTube. I think that Jonathan uses YouTube, buddy. But either way, you can use something for keyword research on YouTube specifically. And if you got a larger budget and you happen to be or some of you who are listening are CMOS marketing guys, operations guys for real estate brokerages, get them to get you an arrest account is about $99 a month. But you can search all the platforms all at once for keyword research. Everybody. Amazon, everybody.

[00:32:23.470] – Jonathan DenwoodI think the other thing, Rob, is, Nick, last week we had an internal show. We were talking about Google Local Guides and becoming a contributor. I think video for your blog content, for your website, for your content that you’re providing for Google. Using video is a great way of showing Google you got a lot more value to your audience. And I think a lot of people would devalue, but I think people I just sensed it. I don’t know if you agree, Rob, that people are realizing having your own website and utilizing these platforms to drive people to your website is the best long term way to go. Rather than just utilizing these platforms as a way of generating metrics that to some extent a vanity metrics. What do you reckon, Rob?

[00:33:34.850] – Robert NewmanI think that most of real estate is vanity metrics, especially if we start to say, what are you looking at? What are you trying to do? That’s where my conversation happens much more frequently. A lot of people are trying YouTube, they’re trying video, and they’re getting it wrong. Like, bit deeply wrong. They’re doing commercials, or they’re trying to be too entertaining. It’s funny because some of the most successful agents I do like leads for actual leads. People calling them is still just a neighborhood where you get in a car, you drive through the neighborhood, and you do the who, what, when, where, why of that neighborhood where you just say, this is how many houses that were sold here last year? I’ve been selling houses here for ten years. A house like that used to go for 10,000. Now it goes for 50,000. I like the fact that there’s a Costco over here and a school over here. I’ve never been to the school, but I’ve heard that the kids that go there tend to be pretty happy and you’re just driving around. Believe it or not, that video still gets more leads than oftentimes.

[00:34:36.930] – Robert NewmanLike a video that has 50,000 views, it talks about the ten top reasons, like you might want to live in Dallas. That’s not very specific to call me for about a house that is really come to my channel, become a follower of me. I am, generally speaking, like a tourist guide. I don’t think you really want to do that. If you wanted to do, every once in a while, drop a video that you know you’re aiming at a big audience so that you can increase your total user base into a channel. Sure. But I would personally ground that channel foundationally with really valuable, specific, deeply knowledgeable real estate information. That’s how I would do it. That’s how I’ve seen my clients be successful. My guy Brett has 60,000 views and makes about half as much as another channel in the same area that has 1.6 million views. Okay, that’s crazy numbers. And he’s not doing all the false calls, all the false stars as everybody else, because his channel is very goddamn specific. And for those of you who are doing the podcast, nick is just sitting here nodding. So I think that I’m used to.

[00:35:42.220] – Nick NiehausBeing on video, so I just not. But, yeah, they’re hearing us. They can’t hear me nod.

[00:35:47.710] – Robert NewmanAll right, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve kind of come to the end of our time. We gave everybody some bonus content. Usually we asked Nick, but we’re actually well over the time that we normally schedule. So we accidentally had you deliver a little bit of bonus content for us. That last little segment that wasn’t based on Instagram is probably how we’re going to divide this up and say that it was bonus content. But this is one more chance for people who might want to know you follow, you get to understand what kind of value you add. Keep in mind, our audience is 100% realtors or real estate professionals. That’s all we target this show at. And I know from personal experience we get a lot of brokers and people like that who listen to the show. So how would you like those people to reach out to you if they were interested in researching it?

[00:36:35.070] – Nick NiehausYeah. So this time I’ll give you my website, bizvideoschool.com. So www.bizvideoschool.com, that you’re going to be able to get a hold of us. There contact info, lots of guides, free stuff you can download and then really again, it’s Facebook. I mean, I know that’s for how old I am, that’s not really popular on my friends aren’t on Facebook, but most of our customers are. So that’s where I tend to spend a lot of time. So you find me, Nick Niehaus, on Facebook. N-I-E-H-A-U-S. That is a great place to connect and I accept all my friend requests unless they are suspiciously weird. So as long as you don’t have a weird sound and account, I will accept your friend request and be happy to connect to the connect there.

[00:37:14.970] – Robert NewmanAwesome. So John, same question for you, but why don’t you tell people what you’ve got going on? I know that you’ve been looking for some beta testers. Why don’t you talk to us a little bit about that as we wrap up.

[00:37:28.770] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, we’re looking for mail. Right champions. If you become a male right champion, you’ll get a beautiful WordPress website free for one year and hosted and supported, and the only thing we ask you is that you utilize the platform and you have strong connections in your local community and your local real estate association and you become hopefully a real champion. If you’re not happy with us after the year, we will move your website somewhere else and you won’t lose it. It’s a great offer and we’ve had quite a bit of interest and we have a chat with me or Adam and we see if we are a good fit and then we get you on board. Back. Over to you, Robert. Beautiful.

[00:38:21.200] – Robert NewmanIf anybody would like to do some research for me, about me or at the company that I founded or anything else you want to start that inboundrem.com and either watch the video on the homepage or watch my about video. There’s two separate videos that will both do a deep dive into who I am, what the mission is, what the missions are that I have, and how you can engage either me or in one of my missions, if you so choose. So, having said that, everybody, ladies and gentlemen, Nick Jonathan. Listen I so very deeply appreciate that. Everybody that shares time with me has been a lot of fun. Nick, you’re deeply knowledgeable. If anybody is looking for some information on video and maybe some kind of coach or material, I’m going to give it my stamp of approval. Jonathan’s offer is amazing. For those of you who might be looking to make a change but don’t have a big budget, a beta test best offer is incredible. So take him up on it. Call him. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much, guys. Thank you so much. We’ll catch you the next time.

————————————–

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

jonathan@mail-right.com

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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Effectively Using Google Local Guides for Real Estate AgentsWhat are Google Local Guides? Well, anyone with or without a Google account can sign up, become a local guide, help visitors navigate your local neighborhood and experience well-hidden secrets that only a resident would know. But is there a hidden danger to businesses? This is a great opportunity for real estate agents to become what we call the “local digital mayor ” of your city, town, and region.

Episode’s Full Show Notes[00:00:11.290] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 370 of the Mailwrite podcast. John has given me an extra special surprise treat today, which hopefully you all will enjoy as well. Today we are going to talk about Google Local Guides and how you can work that into your real estate marketing strategy. It’s something we’ve never spoken of before. I’ve seen a couple of people selling courses on the subject at this point, and I was telling John I was actually part of the beta on this service. I go all the way back. I love the Local Guides feature, and I can easily extrapolate how I might see some value for you, the real estate agent. But before we dive deep, deep, deep down the Google rabbit hole today, john, for all those people that may not know who you are, will you do me a favor and introduce yourself to our audience?

[00:01:08.950] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mail Hyphen. Right. We build beautiful websites on WordPress, which you own, you don’t lease, and then we provide a suite of digital add-on services to get you more quality leads. Back. Over to you, Rob.

[00:01:28.100] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. So, for those of you who may not know, there is this cool little feature that you’ve got that everybody who’s got a Gmail account has that suggests that once you’ve hit a restaurant or you’ve gone out, like, if you’re using Google Maps to get places, google Maps will say, hey, do you want to review this place you just visited? And most people don’t even notice it or say no. But what should happen if you should say yes? Well, behind the scenes. John, do you remember when Google was doing something with a feature called Google Authors?

[00:02:09.350] – Jonathan DenwoodIt does trigger something in my memory banks, but my memory banks are getting a bit old, but it does. But like a lot of Google products and services, they come and go, do they not?

[00:02:23.700] – Robert NewmanThey do. But here’s a difference between this and every other service. So Google did something cool called Google local author profiles. And what that was is that they attached value to the content that you were producing under your name, using your Gmail and user behavior as metrics of how valuable the stuff was that you were posting. They mothballed it because it was connected strictly to Google Plus, which is a service they also mothballed a few years later. But guess what? Just because they mothballed it doesn’t mean that they actually got rid of it. Oftentimes with Google, it does mean that they’re really going to mothball, or they get rid of it like Google Plus is gone, never to come back. But the pieces of the functionality that they liked, they kept. And they told us at the time, we are not done with Google Author Profile. For the moment, we are stopping collecting signals, but we intend to reintegrate the feature in the future. That was it. Total announcement done? Well, they’re using Google Author in the background of their local services programming. What that means is that they’re paying attention to not only what you post, but what the quality of those posts is.

[00:03:42.970] – Robert NewmanAnd they’re starting to measure how much value that you’re providing to your local audience. And when you provide a relatively high amount of value, every single time that you drop a review as a local services guide on any profile anywhere in the Google Ecosphere, you come up number one inside the reviews. Meaning that it’s pretty easy, if you know what you’re doing, to get a few hundred thousand people to be introduced to you personally. It is through the local services guide feature. But not only that, check out this bomb diggity bomb piece of information. I strongly believe that Google is starting to once again collect data and understand who their valuable local service commentators are. And I would expect them to mix those signals into your Google My Business profile. I do not think they’ve done that yet, but I got three years out ahead of this because I looked at it and said, god, it would make a lot of sense if they went back to the Google Author profile on what their new Google Plus business service is, which is Google My Business. And God, if they follow, if they’re true to their history, they’re going to reactivate the stuff that they liked on Google Plus all here on Google My Business.

[00:05:03.630] – Robert NewmanAnd I think that’s exactly what they’re doing. John, you came up with this subject. I didn’t tee it up to you. You decided you wanted to talk about it. Tell the audience, if you would, how did this get on your radar?

[00:05:17.570] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I was looking at some videos on the subject, and it kind of linked into I think two of the biggest trends in 2022 were that we were trying to communicate with people as one video, utilizing a lot more video. I think we’ve hammered away at that, and I think the other thing that we kind of regularly hammered away at was you should become what we I think we jointly I don’t know which one of us came up with the term, but I think we both liked it. As a real estate agent, you should be trying to become the digital mayor of your town city area region. Right. The go-to person. Well, this seems very a gorilla marketing technique that won’t take up too much time. You can do it on your phone when you’re moving around, it gives you more exposure. And it’s linked into this concept of the digital mirror that we have talked about. And the final thing I’ve got a question. I don’t think they’re doing this entirely for what I’m going to ask you. I think at best, it’s only a small percentage because they have had to ongoing I don’t have to classify this.

[00:06:52.070] – Jonathan DenwoodI wouldn’t say problem but it’s flared up with Yelp. I think Yelp has either attempted to sue Google or they’ve had a rocky relationship, haven’t they? Yet? An ongoing one. And it does seem to me, and I don’t be interested to have your faults. It does seem Google this is a kind of attempt to encroach or whatever terminology that you want to use on what Yelp the same time.

[00:07:28.590] – Robert NewmanGet out of my head, dude. You literally like nobody’s going to believe this. So John’s talking about this. I did a video yesterday, and I swear John and I did not compare notes. And the title of my video is The Death of Yelp for Realtors. As a matter of fact, I’m finding this so astounding that you would just immediately leap over to the thing. You got to give me 1 second to just share my screen. I just want people to see that I’m really telling the absolute truth because I have the video up and I’m literally in the process of editing it. But look at the title. The Death of Yelp. For realtors. And I was commenting on this because and I’m going to stop presenting now for those of you who are going to catch our bonus notes, if you’re interested, we will post this to one or both of our websites in video form. But I will say this. I totally agree with that concept. Yelp should be pushing back a bit. But where Yelp is going to lose every single time, which is why I pointed it to in my video, is that ultimately they can sue Google as much as they want about positioning, about Google, competing with them.

[00:08:52.090] – Robert NewmanAnd Google is doing all those things, make no mistake. But the reason they’re doing them is because Yelp has done a terrible, terrible, terrible job at anything related to providing additional value with market dominance. They’ve mostly sold people ineffective marketing campaigns with ineffective information. And that’s what my video focuses on. Not so much like, yes, they’re not getting positioned inside the Google algorithm. Google is going to be able to prove to any court that cares to listen to them that they don’t make these choices, that it’s an algorithm. Is the algorithm in favor of Google Search? Sure. Why? Because Google is properly instructing their clients. Like, that’s us. That’s everybody that has a Google profile, they’re properly pointing us in the direction of creating something that’s useful for the end user. They’re saying, we need pictures. We need video, we need reviews. Here’s how you do all that. They gamified it. They added gamification to it so that it’s fun to do it. They’re offering all sorts of other incentives for us to do it. Positioning, views, marketing advantage. So has Yelp done any of that? None. So they’ve just been out competed. And if Yelp was a brand new company and Google was the big bad guy with a hammer and smacking him on the head, I would feel bad about them, but they’re not.

[00:10:19.480] – Robert NewmanYelp has had a commanding position for over like a decade now and a.

[00:10:24.980] – Jonathan DenwoodPretty crummy repetition as well with some of their business practices, haven’t they?

[00:10:33.450] – Robert NewmanSo whatever they get, I think that their business reputation has earned it. They didn’t stumble into this position. They’ve had dominance in the review space for many, many years. They have not leveraged that dominance very well. It is time for them to be gone, in my opinion. And I think that Google is doing the right thing by creating a better ecosystem for us to live in and play in that revolves around local services and reviews. I think I said something a little bit like fiery this time. I think it’s usually you.

[00:11:12.440] – Jonathan DenwoodIt was a bit big too. Part of my reading of this subject. They gamify it a little bit by giving you points. It’s not totally clear what the benefit? I think it’s up to 10,000 points and you get various benefits. The benefits aren’t particularly that clear to me, but I think it’s probably linked to your comment that your perception that they’re probably going to link this to your local business profile or something linked to that. I might be totally wrong here, I suppose, but you did say anybody that’s got a Google account can participate in this views about how affected the gamers and any insights about how they might link that at all to Google business profiles.

[00:12:24.270] – Robert NewmanSo they’ve already linked it to business profiles. I did say it, but I’ll say it again because I think it’s split by you. When you leave a review for a business and you are a local guide, your review comes up first. They have made it so that when you are operating in the local profile space, if you’re a local guide, if somebody has 500 reviews but none of them are ranked in the local guides category, you’ll never read all 500 reviews. You might read five or ten. Google is telling us this local guide has had 50,000 reviews, 50 likes. People trust them as a reviewer, and because they trust them as a reviewer, we have put their review of this service at the top of all 500 other reviews. In other words, you gain positioning based upon your repute of using local services. And the more videos and the more things that you do, leaving a review for a business is a very tricky way to get in front of that business is traffic. So if you leave a great review for, let’s say Disneyland, a place that gets 30, 40,000 visitors a day, whatever it is, half a million per month or whatever the number is, I don’t know, but whatever the real number is.

[00:13:41.640] – Robert NewmanBut imagine if you left a review for Disneyland and that review was happened to be the number one review for Disneyland. It’s theoretically possible that over the span of a year you get a million views on that review.

[00:13:52.280] – Jonathan DenwoodWow.

[00:13:52.840] – Robert NewmanSo if, let’s say you’re sitting here going part of your title of your local services profile is Robert Newman, online marketer extraordinaire. Right.

[00:14:04.400] – Jonathan DenwoodSupreme one.

[00:14:05.890] – Robert NewmanYeah. Guess what? You now have a little bit of an advertisement, plus you get what’s called the local services profile. So actually somebody can go review all your content. And here’s the tricky thing, ladies and gentlemen, this is what I love about this. You can leave a review for your own damn business and you can keep leaving reviews for your own damn business.

[00:14:27.500] – Jonathan DenwoodSo that I thought you couldn’t leave a review for your own business.

[00:14:34.630] – Robert NewmanMaybe I’m wrong. I thought you could. I did for mine long ago. But the rules may have changed, John.

[00:14:42.000] – Jonathan DenwoodWhen I do that with a very regular basis.

[00:14:46.570] – Robert NewmanWell, we have to go to our break. So we’re going to come back and we’re going to keep our amazing dialogue going about this. I’m super excited that John brought it up. It is definitely something that I think could be leveraged for huge traffic and huge gains. We’re going to talk more about that when we come back from break. If you are liking what you’re hearing, give John and I some encouragement. Email us. John, what’s a good email for you. It’s Jonathan@mailhyphenrite.com and I’m Robert at inboundrem at the word inboundrabbit. Edwardmichael.com, thank you so much. We’ll be right back.

[00:15:23.750] – Speaker 3Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail, right? It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today, go to mailwrite.com.

[00:15:48.510] – Robert NewmanThree, two, one. Welcome back to episode number 370. John and I were having this intense dialogue about local services. The new local services function, it’s not new, it’s years old, but google has been really pushing, as they have with everything with this local services. And John was in the middle of a comment when we went to break. So, John, why don’t you finish your thought?

[00:16:10.390] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I’ve got another question actually. I think you’re the SEO expert, but Robert totally knows this. But I’m just going to lay it out. There were some major differences between local SEO and regional and national. And one of the main differences when it came to local was there’s still some vested dominance about utilizing directories and what directories were trade lists. You had various directory websites that would list product services and there were online services that you could pay an annual fee. Moss SEO, and I think they still have it, was one of the better valued ones. And you filled in a form on the moss SEO website or through their interface and it would push to all these local directories. Do you think, and almost all SEO people that knew about SEO knew about this and blah, blah, blah. So do you think that Google is trying to build this up so it gets better quality signals about local businesses and services so it helps them with their search? Or am I totally off there because I don’t even know if they’re utilizing directory placement. Got you. Or they plan to utilize this to give them a better signal strength.

[00:17:57.790] – Robert NewmanThey still use citations? Yes. So they still use nap citations. These are all fancy names for exactly what you’re saying. Directories. Google has moved in the direction where they ignore all directories for the purposes of hyper local, except ones that are manually verified. That means there’s a real human being looking at your business submission, checking real quick to see if you’re an actual business. And most of the directories that do that are actually smaller directories. The only change in the big, weird thing that’s happened in the hyper local in terms of technical signals related to directories is that it used to be that the big directory, super pages, white pages, manta, those were great places to be. And there’s still good places to be for traditional SEO. As you said, regional, but not hyper local. Hyper local is all about those hyper local little directories that you know nothing about. Little mom and pop businesses that maintain like a list of businesses, but they manage the directory themselves. That’s more valuable in Google’s eyes these days because they know a human being looked at your submission, and when you verified it, that they’re assuming that that other human being said, oh, you’re a legitimate business in my area.

[00:19:06.780] – Robert NewmanWe’re going to add you to our directory.

[00:19:09.230] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I suppose what they’re doing with this has the same taste, really, doesn’t it?

[00:19:14.210] – Robert NewmanYeah, it does. And I think we’re going to continue to see one of the things that I cannot emphasize enough is that all of the resources that Google used to throw towards Google Plus, they didn’t just fire all those people. The most recent round of layoffs, if you look through the departments that Google is laying off, you’ll discover, as I did when I read the footnotes, they’re not laying off anybody in their Google Maps division. This division continues to be well funded, have lots of extremely veteran software engineers involved in it, and they continue to make innovation after innovation after innovation inside hyper local. They have correctly surmised that all the growth that they want in terms of how do you lock businesses into a search engine. They figured it out, these hyper local profiles, which, by the way, people would say that Google Plus was a mistake. Google plus wasn’t a mistake. It was a learning experience. They learned that nobody really wanted to use Google as a social media company in the traditional sense, but they also learned that people associated Google with their business, and they were more than willing to put a business profile up on Google Plus and then start posting content ad nauseam.

[00:20:34.370] – Robert NewmanSo Google said, we need to combine all that activity into our primary platform. And thus Google my business was born. Now they continue to invest millions, billions of dollars every year into hyper local. It is the place that the most innovation is happening, that the most recognition is coming from Google. They are starting to get socially involved. And if you doubt that, just go to YouTube and look up Guiding Stars 2022. They are honoring in a big way, all the people that contribute heavily to Google. And by the way, I have some of the same ranking that some of the people are that they are honoring, and they’re honoring them from all over the world. It is an incredible effort that they’re making not only to have us be contributing, but they’re trying to create a community, John, which they’re trying to do social a slightly different way. They’re trying to say, this is a community ambassador. That’s what they’re angling at. And guess what? If you’re a business owner, imagine how valuable it could be to you, John, to have a title like Realtors are the number one people that should be pursuing this, because what person is supposed to be representing a lifestyle more than a real estate agent?

[00:21:56.500] – Robert NewmanIt’s supposed to be real estate agents. So more than plumbers, more than roofers, more than landscape artists, more than every other professional, realtors are supposed to be lifestyle experts. So imagine you’re a Realtor, and you go on and you leave a review and it says, Ambassador.

[00:22:16.250] – Jonathan DenwoodI tell you, R1 estate. Unfortunately, I forgot his name. It’s our friend from Montana, the video guy that also had the massive Facebook group. I bet he’s onto this like fly on ice cream. I have to outreach and ask him to come back because I’m sure he’s on. But if you’re not doing this or looking at this, and hopefully we’re giving you some ideas in this podcast, I will make the link available where you can sign up to become an ambassador. But you would be really missing opportunity if you’re not listening to this podcast. And B, not to do this because it’s totally free and spending a little bit of time on it.

[00:23:07.680] – Robert NewmanCorrect. And I’m going to give you some tips. Let’s say those people are out there. You’ve already got the profile. Maybe you left one review for somebody ever. All right, so here are some tips. Google is once again pushing hard for you to do video inside your reviews. It’s possible, and they want it. They are starting to reward extra points, extra upload points, extra everything for video attached to your view. Use it. It’s a way for you to catch up to more established reviewers like me pretty quickly, because I never did video. As a matter of fact, I’m not even sure you could upload video when I started using the service. So it’s something that people who are just getting used to using it now are going to be more comfortable with than me. I always just take a couple of pictures. My superpower is writing long, detailed reviews, which is the next thing you should do. You should really do the who, what, why, when, where of the place that you’re at. Why are you there, when were you there? What did you eat, do experience while you were there? How did you hear about the place?

[00:24:09.380] – Robert NewmanTo start with, tell a compelling story in your review, because part of what Google is looking at is how many views do you get, how long do people stay on your review? And the better that those numbers are, there is some way that they are likely to recognize your profile. By the way, John, I wouldn’t be so sure that Google between your Google business profile and all the reviews you get there, I strongly believe that when somebody has verified who they are, like, I’m Robert Newman, I proved it to you. Google. I think that Google is going to head in the direction of making sure you’re a verified human, you’re a verified business owner. We know it’s you.

[00:24:51.470] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, it’s kind of linked to the average launch, which we not last week, but the week before, around artificial intelligence, because to counter it a bit, they’re going to place more well, this is only my interpretation. I’ll be interested to hear what you think about what I’m just going to say is that I feel they’re going to really emphasize people that can prove that it’s actually a human giving the writing the content, or they’re going to if you can prove it’s actual person, a real person, that Google is going to give it a lot more emphasis. What do you reckon?

[00:25:38.990] – Robert NewmanI reckon that they can already do that. I think it’s already done. They can verify the metadata. There’s timestamps, there’s location stamps, there’s device stamps, all off a cell phone. Since I use an Android device, it would just absolutely knock me on my ass if Google wasn’t 100% sure that when I was uploading the review that it was Robert Newman. Because I got to do a fingerprint to get into my device, and my device is a Google device. I think that’s how they’re going to win the device for long, long term. And keep in mind, Google is full of rocket scientists who do look at these problems from a very long term perception. When we win the business owners over, like in terms of this is now a marketing device, I can promote my business off it really efficiently and effectively, and I can do it for free. Then there’s an argument to be made about why you might migrate off an Apple device onto a Google.

[00:26:32.700] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I can see where you’re coming, but they have some slight problems with the justice partner right there. However, I’m sure that’s going to go down a bundle, isn’t it? That’s going to go even more what I mean, listen to some views, if you’re not aware, is that the Justice Department is just taking as just declared that with a number of state justice departments, they’re taking Google to court as a monopolistic entity that needs to be taught some manners, that they are gunning for Google. Am I basically correct about that, Robert?

[00:27:21.450] – Robert NewmanI haven’t kept up to date with that. There’s never a time that Google isn’t in court with a country, state, city or entity about some type of no, I’m not kidding, like monopolistic advice. And in many ways Google got a lock on certain pieces of search. And I think some of these lawsuits, in my own opinion, are warranted. But in some of these other ways that when people take Google to court, they lose because they don’t understand how Google works. And in certain things, like Google doesn’t yet have a monopoly on hyper local. They don’t okay, they are moving in.

[00:28:02.840] – Jonathan DenwoodThat direction and they’ve struggled with it, haven’t they? They’ve consistently changed things, put new heads in head of departments. I think Melissa was head of it before she became head of Yahoo and finished a career to some extent. But now this particular one is on a different level. I think everything you said is correct, Robert, but the Justice Department, it was published yesterday, and they really mean business. And their focus is on the paid advertising side of Google. And they’re saying that they’ve got a total strangle hold on paid advertising and they’re not happy with it in digital spaces.

[00:28:55.200] – Robert NewmanAnd that may very well be true. There’s also many things that since Google is reading the web, like they have stringleholds on analytics programs, browser programs, and they stay away from making those things too apparent because the way that Google works is they track most things through Chromium, which is our browser. 80% of the people in the world use Chromium, and when you count Opera and other systems, chromium operates in those browsers as well. So actually we’re probably talking like 92% of the world uses Chromium version browsers to the Web.

[00:29:31.750] – Jonathan DenwoodAnd I think I don’t know what you feel about this. I think this was linked to the actions of Apple around OS about blocking, which really has affected Facebook’s advertising model. But I also feel that this is also a tent to pay back Google because it’s rumored, and I think it’s true that Apple are going this year or actively going to publish their own advertising platform. And this is one of the reasons why they’ve increased the security on OS, because the data will only be available if you advertise on the Apple platform. I think that’s the overall plan. What do you think of what I’ve just said there?

[00:30:23.530] – Robert NewmanWell, I haven’t heard about Apple’s plans to get into the advertising ecosphere. It would be shocking to me if they didn’t eventually consider it. I know for sure that I’ve read enough and followed him and some other people to understand that Google or the Apple is starting to see a more sunsetting environment for the device business. Obviously, they’re the world’s leader in this, but there’s all sorts of things that go into that. There are supply chain issues, which is Tim Cook’s master skill is he’s a supply chain maestro. So he’s managed to keep on top of basically the same device pool, growing in user base and all this different stuff. But there’s only so much of certain types of things in this world, some of which devices use. In the meantime, they’ve jumped into making equipment, like making TVs, making laptops, and I think that they’re going to combine all that into a content based ecosphere. And I would be shocked if they didn’t get into the advertising side of it. Ultimately, I haven’t looked into it too much.

[00:31:37.500] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I think you’re totally right about that. I think on the device, the only thing that’s heavily rumored, to the extent that you can be pretty guaranteed that it’s true, is the glasses, the Apple glasses linked to either phone or watch. Apple Watch, which is virtual reality or augmented. Thank you for that. I always get the two terms intermingled. That seems to come this first half of this year. It’s strongly rumored, and I have no idea if that’s going to be a winner or not. I really can’t tell you. But I do agree with you. Apart from that it will be highly profitable, but it doesn’t seem to be any big extra revenue producer. That’s why they’re looking at the ad model, isn’t it?

[00:32:41.220] – Robert NewmanYes, but here’s, for all those people listening to the show, here’s my prediction. Listen, I really strongly believe that what John just mentioned, I think Apple is the best positioned company to make an augmented reality product happen. They have the brand recognition, they have enough people that would try it that maybe if Apple released something, it could get adoption. If it gets adoption and it’s good, that means it’s now going to become part of our common societal vernacular. Only Apple, of all the companies that we talk about, has the ability to just literally apply a sea change for everybody globally by doing something like that in the technology space. And I think that the time for augmented reality is here. I do not think that we’re here there for virtual reality. Maybe another five years. Yeah, I think augmented reality, yes. Today, give us something that works. I think that and and like I said, I think it’s Apple that’s going to do it. So my prediction is a couple of years from now, augmented reality and glasses as a device, if it’s like that’s their big move to something that could really, product wise, that can move, like really advance them, draw new people into.

[00:33:57.370] – Robert NewmanThe brand. Like if they make an augmented reality product that works, for the first time in my life, I might buy an Apple something or another. Never done it, never wanted to.

[00:34:08.350] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I’m a real apple. Well, I’m quite cynical about Apple, but I do buy a lot of their stuff, but I’m a total fan buy. I’m very careful because obviously you are being taken to the cleaners to some extent, so I’m very careful. But no, I totally agree with you. If anybody is going to be able to do this, in my opinion, must be Apple, because they’ve got this compared to Facebook, they have a lot of people that got computer power in their pocket through their iPhone or through their watch, which they can piggy bank on to the glass device. So that’s enormously beneficial for Apple attempting to build something. So I totally agree. Well, I think it’s time to wrap it up. I think we’ve given people a bit of insight and I make sure the link there’s some links in the show notes, folks, go over to the Mail Hyphen website. So what do you reckon, Rob?

[00:35:19.690] – Robert NewmanI reckon that I’ve enjoyed the show so much, I’d love it if you download the link and get it over to me. I don’t need you to do it every show, but this one I really want. I would like it. I’m going to publish this on my side, I think. John, get out of my head, man. I have been thinking about doing a video like this on my own channel, but you actually beat me to the punch, so I’m thrilled it’s such a good topic. It’s something that we’re probably going to talk about many additional times. You heard it here first. Great show. John, if somebody wanted to reach out to you and talk to you about a website, or just pick your brain about where you think the future of real estate marketing is going, how would they do that?

[00:36:01.060] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, thanks for that, but we got a great special offer which we’re going to be pursuing for most of this year. We are looking for city region Mail Right ambassadors, people that really want to move their real estate business on and that also are popular in their real estate community. And what do you get? You will get a beautiful Mail Right website which will be yours and we will help you semi customize it and we will host it free of charge for one year, plus maintain it for one year, free of charge. And that will give you a fantastic resource, get to know the product and hopefully you will become an embarrassed for us and talk about it. And if you’re not happy with it after a year, we will migrate it somewhere else for you so you won’t lose the website. So if that’s interesting, go over to the Mail Hyphen Rights.com website and book a demo discussion with either me and Adam and we’ll see if we are a good fit. Back. Over to you, Robert.

[00:37:13.110] – Robert NewmanAnd if anybody would like to learn more about me, about my vision for Inbound marketing, about how I believe that you should be representing yourself in the Information age, which is the age we’re in right now, and everything we’re talking about plays into it, then you should go to Inboundrem.com. Click the about button or the Services button. Those would be the first two places I would start. They learned the most about me about what we do as a company. We produce a lot of content for free and we also have a service line, but it’s mostly for veteran agents looking to get off the cycle of systems they don’t own.

[00:37:48.310] – Jonathan DenwoodRobert, I would say, is the leading expert in SEO when it comes to real estate. So if that’s your bag, go over and talk to Robert.

[00:37:58.770] – Robert NewmanThank you so much, John. I really appreciate it. Everybody else, good God, we appreciate you. It’s 2023. Can you believe that? We’re so excited. Everybody joins the show. Do us a favor, leave us comments on either one of our channels. Call John. Leave a comment.

[00:38:15.310] – Jonathan DenwoodI think we produce some of the most unique down to earth content in the real estate podcast area. I truly do believe that.

[00:38:24.420] – Robert NewmanI agree with you, too. And so I forgot to mention this, but I’ve had some incredible feedback. Finally, some people have listened to this and this thing that I’m doing right now, which is why I’m so enthusiastic about it. John, I’ve actually had a couple of people now call and thank us for the show that we’re doing. And it’s great. It’s great. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for tuning in.

————————————–

Mail-Right

Jonathan Denwood & Adam Brown

jonathan@mail-right.com

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

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InboundREM

Robert Newman

https://inboundrem.com

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369 – Mail-Right Show: The Best Virtual Staging Software & Tips (DIY & Pro)

The Best Virtual Staging Software & Tips (DIY & Pro)

If you haven’t shopped for virtual staging software lately, you might be in for a bit of a shock. Many apps that used to offer Realtors an easy-to-use DIY virtual staging platform now just sell done-for-you professional virtual staging—usually with a higher price tag. While that’s great for teams and brokerages with big budgets, many agents still want to get their hands dirty and DIY their virtual staging.

DIY virtual staging:

You take photos or videos and then use your phone or tablet to edit them yourself. You can drop in 3D furniture or use filters to remove items, boost color and contrast, or even change the time of day. DIY virtual staging puts the power in your hands to stage the properties, but it means you need to learn the software yourself.

Professional staging:

You take photos or videos and then upload them to the company’s platform. You tell them what you want to be done with it, and they return it to you, usually within 24 to 48 hours. The advantage of such a service is that you don’t have to do anything; just send it in and forget about it.

1 – Apply Design From $7 to $10 DIY Service Static Images and 3D 360 Tours

https://applydesign.io/

2 – Spotless Agency $79, $99 &199 per image options Static Images Only

https://www.spotlessagency.com/

3 – roOomy – $49 per image or virtual tours from $400 to $1,700 Static Images and 3D 360 Tours

https://rooomy.com/

4 – BoxBrownie – $32 Static Images and 3D 360 Tours

https://www.boxbrownie.com/

5 – Square Foot Productions – $29 Static Images Only

https://squarefootproductions.com/

6 – Hasten – (Call for Pricing) High-end service for the luxury properties Static Images and 3D 360 Tours

https://hasten.me/

7 – Cedar Architect Subscription-based service. For $59 a month DIY Static Images Only.

https://cedreo.com/

Full Show Notes [00:00:10.970] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen. Today we are doing episode number 369 of the Mail Right podcast. And today, we’re talking about virtual staging tools. I’m going to talk more about where these tools are positioned. And John, who’s had a chance to create list and research the list, is going to talk more, maybe about the specifics. Still, I’m going to try my best to add value to the conversation by explaining the few real-life situations where I know people are using these services and how they’re leveraging them and what I was overall thinking. So, John, without any further ado, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to people who may not know who you are and then take us away into this subject that you selected for the podcast today?

[00:01:02.790] -Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. I’m Jonathan Denwood. I’m the joint founder of Mailhyphenwright.com. We build beautiful semi or full-custom websites and WordPress for real estate agents. And we’ve also got a CRM and a plateau of digital marketing apps and tools to help you get more leads in 2023.

[00:01:26.300] – Robert NewmanBack.

[00:01:26.570] -Jonathan DenwoodOver to you, Rob.

[00:01:28.250] – Robert NewmanWell, no, we’re serving it up to you, so actually, never mind. You know what? I’ll tee it up for you. Number one on a list today is Spotless Agency. Now, here’s the description of Spotless agency. It’s a new virtual staging service where you can do one staged photo at $29. Okay? But what they’re doing is they’re basically doing virtual or AI design work, sending the photo back to you, and you’re taking a picture of a space, and then they’re going ahead and staging that photo for you. They’re Photoshopping it so it looks, however, like the design instructions that you might want them to do. So, John, now take it away.

[00:02:11.450] -Jonathan DenwoodYeah, sorry about that, Rob. Yeah, it seems like a pretty good service. It starts at 79. They’ve got a kind of token-based system. You buy tokens and one token for one static image. They only do static images, and depending on how quickly you want the image back, the more it will cost you. I think it will take about three to four days; it’s 79 per image, 2040. 8 hours, it’s 99. And if you want the next day, it’s 199. Seem pretty good. I think the elephant I like about the opportunity is there seem to be three levels of services that these providers provide. Basically, they are static images. Staging. In static images, you got the image it’s a bear room, and you want, as you know, to show bare rooms on your website or send them to a prospective buyer isn’t the greatest idea because it’s better to stage them. But to stage a room or property physically is expensive and time-consuming. Doing static images is much cheaper. And there are three levels. The static images, there are 3D images that are more realistic, but the person that’s viewing them has to have glasses and Goggles to view the 3D image. And then there are 360 Tours, which it’s like a virtual tour of a property; you need special camera technology to take the actual images.

[00:04:15.640] -Jonathan DenwoodBut I think now there are apps for your iPhone and your Android that can assist you in doing that. So I think that’s moved on to a certain level. But for those that make the 360 Tour offering, I think you have to get individual advice from them about which technology, what cameras, and what setups they require if they are going to process those virtual tools for you.

[00:04:46.170] – Robert NewmanSure. So when you start talking about high-volume providers for images or clever digital presentations on the site, my pros and cons remain almost the same. Generally speaking, doing virtual stage photos if you’re doing condos model homes, if there’s a certain design style or a standard that’s prevalent throughout a large volume or a large amount of the same spaces, I think that these kinds of services can be extremely useful in creating case studies for how many different ways the same shape space can look in the same building, which makes an investment like this a no brainer for creating a unique and special website experience. When you start talking about somebody that’s in the luxury space, like a very nice size home, anything middle to the upper end of the market, you’re never going to consider any of these services. They’re just not going to deliver the customized value that your clients are expecting. The designers on the other end of the spectrum are usually not going to deliver the kind of unique finishing touches that people on the middle to upper levels of luxury expect. Like, I’m looking at these designs, and they’re all good enough, I suppose, but nothing really eye-popping.

[00:06:18.240] – Robert NewmanEven though some of these designs seem to be presented in $5 million plus New York apartments, I don’t know anybody who will design their homes this way. So that’s what I’m talking about. Specifically, I’ve had opinions from Top Realtors that have kind of echoed what I’m saying to you. But if you’re in certain markets, these services can be neat, is how I’m going to go with it. There are people that will figure out how to leverage this. In the meantime, specialized customer requests. It is good that everybody on the show, John, knows that these services exist. If you’re listening to the show and didn’t know that you could do virtual staging photos, guess what? You can. And for some clients who may have a very extra high level of service requirements expected of you, this is a line item that you can put in your listing contract that’s going to really add sizzle to a listing contract presentation but be something that you rarely have to execute on. And so saying that you’re familiar with the entire 3D photo arena so that you can give somebody a whole bunch of designs, ideas, maybe sit them down with the design consultant.

[00:07:39.830] – Robert NewmanAnd right now, John, I’m speaking to literally 1% of our audience, but that 1% you know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re sitting in front of somebody, you’re talking to them about selling a $10 million unit, which means that your commission on it is going to be 300,000 plus dollars. They have $300,000 worth of like listing expectations of you. They’re going to tell you there’s no way in the world that you’re worth as much money unless you’re going to spend hard dollars to advertise our property. And at which point you can pull out little pieces of sizzle like this and say, we’re completely adept at talking to the right buyer about how they’re going to design, develop and appreciate this home. And in those very rare cases, that’s when services like this become actual, have value, list value. And then for those of you who are ultra luxury, as you also well know, this is the kind of thing that you assign to your personal assistant, your real estate assistant, your transaction coordinator. You don’t do this yourself. You go on your review spotless agency and you send them there because you listen to the podcast and you send your assistant there and they go do the research for you.

[00:08:52.890] – Robert NewmanAnd now you can add it on to your line item for your contract.

[00:08:56.580] -Jonathan DenwoodYeah, the only thing that was going through your mind and I just wanted to see what you thought about it because what it looks like, what the market is going to be like in 2023 and to some extent in 2024, I think there’s going to be more empty properties out there. And because of COVID and people to some extent they’re going back to the office or being made to go to back to the office, but I don’t think the market is ever going to go back to what it was precluded. I think the acceptance of people moving away from where they are based to another state and I think people’s acceptance to look at property before they get a short list of properties that they’re going to look at physically. I think the markets changed a bit and people viewing property and going further along the sales process online has moved on to some extent where these possible services have more relevance than maybe they did before pre covert. But I’m really interested in your view of what I’ve just outlined. I might totally off track there.

[00:10:24.100] – Robert NewmanI think that eventually everybody in real estate is going to be dealing with an almost completely digital toolkit, the same way every other industry has been changed. So yes, at a very high level and yes, I think this is part of the digital revolution. I think this is along a lot more people’s radars. Major metro market people like Houston, Dallas, California, most of Florida, most of any place where you’re driving 30 or 40 minutes to show home. Ladies and gentlemen, any tool that makes that unnecessary, such as the old idea of staging a home physically, everybody knows how much effort goes into that. You got to call the person, have a vendor on hand, get the homeowner to let you in the house. Do that staging. unstage it at some point. It’s a very extensive process, whereas these virtual tools allow you to stage and unstage a home in a matter of days with no coordination with the homeowner. So do I think that there’s a place for this? Oh, hell yeah. Just depends on where you are and what kind of business that you’re building for yourself. I strongly recommend that people be building a digital business, but I’ve been saying that forever.

[00:11:33.800] – Robert NewmanAnd only now after COVID, are people starting to listen. They’re seeing the days and the time in which all people want to essentially it’s going to be a ten step process, and the last step is going to be to walk through the home. You’re going to have schedule the person, come out to appraise the home. You’re going to walk the home, see the home, but everything else would have been done by that time. You’re not going to go back to the same home and show the same home 3456 separate times, which really happens, John. People like Realtors get forced to drive out to the same property many different times so that a buyer can keep walking that home over and over again. At a minimum, digital tools like this prevent you needing to do that. No longer does it like, hey, what happens if I put a couch in the corner there? Remember that one room? I don’t remember it. Can we go back in and get just like, let me look at that room or measure that room? No, here we’ll do it virtually.

[00:12:31.230] -Jonathan DenwoodYeah, obviously state in the office, but also if you’re in one of the coastal cities or areas that’s on the radar for international buyers, I would imagine these tools become much more relevant to you.

[00:12:53.110] – Robert NewmanYes, I do have clients that are already doing complete virtual. Okay. One of the things that’s made that popular second home market is a big market for doing completely virtual transactions. So they’re leading the way in these tools because people can’t travel as easily to a second home destination like Cabo San Lucas, Big Bear, Lake, Arrowhead, the list goes on. They want to do that. They’re going to do all of that or as much of that as possible virtually. So yeah, I think there’s a huge market for this, but let’s move on. Let’s go to the next one. The next one on the list is Hasten is what it’s called. It’s a 3D interior visualization tool. So talk to me about this a little bit, John.

[00:13:37.720] -Jonathan DenwoodWhich one was it?

[00:13:38.650] – Robert NewmanSorry, it sends you to Hasten.

[00:13:42.170] -Jonathan DenwoodYeah, Hasten. Well, the research I did, it looked like they were aiming for the higher market side of it, the luxury market. The reason why I say that is some of the reviews that I read, they all said that’s what they were pitching at the luxury side. And to get a price, you got to call them. So that always suggests that they’re going to be in the higher end. They do all 3D, all three main services, static image, three D, and three hundred and sixty tools for you. But you got to get a price by bringing them up.

[00:14:19.800] – Robert NewmanBasically cool guys, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, even though it’s run by some crazy freaking Swiss folk, three D and Matterport, which ultimately is CubiCasa and a number of other ancillary products, they still own the 3D space, ultimately. Do I think 3D can be useful? I just saw a $4 million property that was done in Venice, John, and I was looking at it legitimately. Like, I’m looking at it as the consumer because I was idly considering like a really high end work slash living space and splitting the space with somebody and like like upgrading my my work living game. Right. So I’m looking at it for reals, and I found that I was incredibly frustrated with the 3D walkthrough, which I think was a matter for a 3D walkthrough. I just wanted somebody to take the darn phone and just do a video walk through. It’s so frustrating for me. So I don’t think that I speak for everybody, by the way. I’m sure that I don’t. And I’m sure there’s process things that are problematic for real estate agents. Like maybe it’s easier to do these 3D things. I don’t know. But John, am I really all that impressed with this 3D?

[00:15:36.410] – Robert NewmanNo, I’m afraid of that. I’m not.

[00:15:39.470] -Jonathan DenwoodI think it maybe just utilizes a marking initial, have it on the website to get them to call, and then if they can’t come, they’re too far away. You would arrange to do a walk through with them, or you probably have to walk through already as part. Well, if it’s that type of property, you think you would do a video walk through, but if you’re technically not up to it, I think maybe getting one of these services or getting somebody to do it for you and then uploading it to one of these companies, it’s better than nothing, isn’t it? I think it varies.

[00:16:21.610] – Robert NewmanIt does vary. It’s better than nothing. I don’t disagree with those things. Everybody that’s listening to show you a gimbal and your cell phone ten times better in my opinion. Ten times better in terms of how you market it. Ten times better about where you post it. But if you’re really stuck virtual staging, 3D, virtual, it can be okay. I’m not a big fan. That’s just the truth, John. Sorry.

[00:16:52.550] -Jonathan DenwoodNo. Shall we go for a break?

[00:16:55.830] – Robert NewmanSure, let’s do that. So, ladies and gentlemen, my name has been Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound REM. You can find out lots of information about me on Inboundrem.com. We are pretty much the leader, maybe the only inbound marketing company out there doing real estate, SEO and stuff like that at a very high level. But I appreciate you turning into the show. So does John. If you could do us a favor, wherever you’ve seen us, heard us, leave us a comment, do us a thumbs up. It all matters. We do this show out of mostly goodwill. Little bit of like, hey, we’re really good at what we do. Pay attention to us. But a lot out of, how can we be of service to you? So thank you for tuning in. We’ll be right back.

[00:17:41.730] – Speaker 3Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail, right? It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked, 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay. Get started today. Go to mailwrite.com.

[00:18:06.570] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 368. Is it eight or nine, John?

[00:18:12.770] -Jonathan DenwoodIt’s 69. Three, six, nine. You’ve already got another thought yet before your sentence is finished, Robert?

[00:18:20.860] – Robert NewmanOkay, 369. It’s a really lucky number. Three, six and nine. So if you’re into numerology, today’s show is lucky. And we’re going to talk about we’ve been talking about virtual staging. We’re moving on to another company that John has selected for us called Square Foot Productions. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about this, John?

[00:18:39.990] -Jonathan DenwoodYes, good price, static image only. Don’t offer a DIY. Some of these companies, not many of them also offer a DIY app or service, but they don’t. But of those that you got to get them to do it, it’s not a bad price, but it’s only static images, and it’s $29 for image. I don’t know what the time, how much time they require, because I looked at the website and I couldn’t find it that particular. I’m sure it’s probably there, but the price seems pretty good.

[00:19:22.770] – Robert NewmanOkay, assuming that this so I have a surprise here, John. Assuming that they can do what they say that they do at a high level of quality, I’m a huge fan of Square Foot Productions, okay? The simple video editing of taking a cluttered room and uncluttering it without you having to clean it up from your client means that you can walk through your assistant can walk through a home, take all the same series of pictures inside your home selling process, hand it over to Square Foot Productions for visual editing. They will declutter, basically create a perfect environment so you don’t have to have the client professionally clean their house, professionally stage the house. They do aerial, spotlight, photos. They do all sorts of really cool things. Now, I want to emphasize that neither John nor I have actually used this company, picked it out of a hat. So the reviews are good. What we can see looks good. The service is what we’re talking about, the idea of the service. And we’re not promoting these guys. We don’t know them. We’re just saying that the service they provide, if it’s provided as advertised, it’s pretty damn cool for very reasonable price.

[00:20:39.530] – Robert NewmanLike turning a daytime to nighttime photo. Your photographer takes a kind of weird shot of it with a house that has a lot of shadows in it. These guys edit the shadows out and make a nice sunset photo for you. It’s really your house. They used your core image. It’s a beautiful service. Doesn’t break any copyright laws, just alters the edit existing thing. Makes the photos far more appealing. It’s such a low cost that it’s easy for most agents to work it into like a cost versus sales structure. I like it. That’s my overall input.

[00:21:13.510] -Jonathan DenwoodOkay. Box Brownie yeah, like what they got to offer. They do static images, three D, three hundred and sixty. They do the whole spectrum. And it starts at the static images at $32. The free D tours, I think that started at around $600, and depending on what kind of tour you got or need, it goes up from there. But they had some nice training tutorials on their YouTube channel. I did watch a couple of them and they seem to know the initial impression I got. They seem to know in the price for the static image isn’t outrageous.

[00:22:02.790] – Robert NewmanSo once again, this is just a clever photo editing like tool, things like that. And it can be cool. These guys that are doing a very specific thing where they’re essentially doing a very pricey thing for a reasonable cost. 360 renders are cool. Interior renders are cool. Exterior renders are kind of cool. The interior renders are going to be the thing that you really want to pay attention to. They can help move the needle. Do I really think that this is worth the $280 or $400 an image? Not usually, but then again, they’re very cleverly doing these renders for commercial spaces. Commercial spaces which commercial real estate, while John and I don’t talk about it very much, is definitely something where these services retain extra value because professional business people have higher degrees of expectation about how they can perceive a space can be altered. And you’re only signing a lease. Like oftentimes a building which is leasing a space might not have to lease it except once every ten years, which means that there’s a very high level of cost associated with it. But there’s also a high level of reward, which means that customizing the space using these virtual tools, in my opinion, for commercial at the prices that we’re talking about with Box Brownie makes a lot more sense than residential.

[00:23:35.510] – Robert NewmanYou’d have to have pretty gosh darn nice property that you’re representing to make it worth it. John.

[00:23:47.370] -Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I agree. On to the next one.

[00:23:51.390] – Robert NewmanRoomie.com. Hit me with it.

[00:23:53.710] -Jonathan DenwoodLove the name. $49 does the full spectrum static images. Three D, three sixty for the free. The virtual tours. It’s from 400 to 1700. Okay, so to give with Brownie, they only have a starter price, which is around 600. They start for 400, but they give you from 400 to 1700. Because I’m not a photographer expert, I can only give you my initial impression of the website, the verbiage, the offering. I just went with Box Brownie a bit little more. But you just got to do a dive, talk to them and find one of these players that has the Pacific offering at the Pacific price that’s attractive to you.

[00:24:55.790] – Robert NewmanTrue. So Rumi does a little bit of a better job in simplifying the idea than Box Brownie. But I agree with John. The actual demos on Box Brownie appear to be much more robust. Rumi seems to be focused on a more sparse presentation style on their website. That’s all that John and I at least that’s all I am basing my opinions on.

[00:25:23.500] -Jonathan DenwoodJust the sign.

[00:25:25.770] – Robert NewmanSo there’s some interesting visualizations with roomy that are a little bit more complete than the ones I saw with Box Brownie. Gives you an understanding of how these 3D room like visualization and staging products would really work. We had a friend of mine on a long time ago Robert, that does this kind of work. John this kind of 3D. So I believe in it as the future of the business, as I said then. But I do think that in terms of what power you served right now, currently, we’re served very well with video. There’s one feature that Rumi has that I am now going to retract, which is called a measurement feature, which allows you to measure between elements in a room, which you don’t even get to do when you’re physical, when we catch up with functionality like this. Ladies and gentlemen, when digital can do this, measure a space, give us inches and square feet, and then allow you to replace furniture inside this virtual space that you’re building. That’s the day that people are going to prefer to do digital walk throughs than personal walk throughs. And we’re approaching that day. John are we there yet with any of these tools that we’re looking at?

[00:26:41.230] – Robert NewmanNo. Are we getting there? Yes.

[00:26:43.940] -Jonathan DenwoodWe’ve sky in there and AI. We’re all going to be replaced. Robert.

[00:26:48.620] – Robert NewmanOh, God. John, stop. All right, we’re going to go on to the next one. Aptly design IO. I have enough of those kinds of AI conspiracy here inside my circle of friends. I don’t need you to start up on it.

[00:27:09.370] -Jonathan DenwoodWas it applied Design that we’re talking about?

[00:27:12.240] – Robert NewmanApply design?

[00:27:12.960] -Jonathan DenwoodYeah. Well, they’re one of the few that’s got a DIY product, and I watched some of their videos and I was quite impressed. It’s a token system. You buy a token one tokens for a static image. They provide all three services static free D 360. I don’t know if their DIY product can do all three or it’s just static images. I didn’t do a deep enough dive on that particular subject, but I did look at some of their own videos and other people’s review and the interface, the library of objects. It was quite impressive. If you’re just looking, there’s a real need. You’ve got a really nice property or a reasonable property, and it’s bare and you just want to do a couple of the rooms and you want to do it yourself or get your assistant to have a guy that’s it and not cost a lot of money. Have a look at what they’re offering. I was recently impressed. Robert?

[00:28:23.370] – Robert NewmanSounds good. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we are on to our last wait. That was our last well, I’ve got.

[00:28:30.850] -Jonathan DenwoodOne more that I added after I sent the list to you, and that’s a company called Cedar Architect. And they only do static images. They do have a DIY product, but the interesting thing is it’s a subscription model. It’s the only one. All the others, you pay by the image or whatever you want. This Cedar Architect, they do a subscription and it’s $59 a month. And I’ve got the impression you can do as many static images as you like.

[00:29:08.750] – Robert NewmanSeems more like a design CAD software, right?

[00:29:17.730] -Jonathan DenwoodWell, they seem to do the static images as well. Yeah.

[00:29:22.850] – Robert NewmanOkay.

[00:29:25.590] -Jonathan DenwoodI was just interested in the subscription model.

[00:29:28.790] – Robert NewmanI think this kind of software is going to be for people that have some type of preexisting design experience coming out of school, in which case this is going to be really exciting. If anything else, I’m on the site. It is overwhelmingly complex, so just keep that in mind, everybody. It’s very similar to it’s like an AutoCAD for those of you who are familiar with it. Okay. It’s chief architect interior design. Like, we’ve occasionally looked at coral, coral, kad, CAD. I’ve looked at some of these things as I’ve tried to design wireframes for websites. So 3D modeling on websites and basically wireframes is just as relevant as it is for normal blueprints. Like, it’s the same thing. People don’t understand how well, like, traditional design concepts play into web concepts. Really the same thing. So you use some of the same programs like you can theoretically, I’ve tried oftentimes. It doesn’t work. Usually you need people dumbing down the technology. Because I am not an architect. I didn’t go to school for years or spend any time using all the tools that architects use. Having said that, this is a very unique tool. I would agree with John’s assessment.

[00:30:50.260] – Robert NewmanIt’s unique in this space. And if some of you are looking for both a different payment model and a different level of tool, maybe one with a slightly higher end like conceptual application, I would agree with you.

[00:31:06.150] -Jonathan DenwoodGreat.

[00:31:09.030] – Robert NewmanWell, John, ladies and gentlemen, we are right there. At the time limit. And today I have a missing animal, unfortunately, in my house and I have to rejoin the search ASAP. I took all the time to make sure I was still present, but I’m like, I’ve been checking my phone, looking for messages. Got six people in the neighborhood right now, all looking around. Thank you so much for tuning in. I’m going to ask John in a second here how you may find him, if you’d like to. John is a wealth, a whole deep well of knowledge on various ideas about how to market your real estate business. Plus his agency builds really cool real estate websites that you can check out and should check out. So, John, without any further ado, how would people check you out if they indeed wanted to?

[00:31:55.740] -Jonathan DenwoodYeah, thanks for that, Rob. We’re looking for some regional and city champions, real estate agents that want to be a male right champion. And if that’s enough interest, what do you get? You’ll get your website for a year for free and all the digital tools for a year for free, and we host your website. And after a year, if you’re not happy with us, we will move your website to another hosting provider. But hopefully that gives you the confidence to try out the system and then become a Mail right champion in your area. If that sounds interesting, go over to the Mail Hyphen right website and book a chat with either me and Adam and we love you to consider being a male right champion.

[00:32:48.780] – Robert NewmanBack.

[00:32:49.110] -Jonathan DenwoodOver to you, Robert.

[00:32:50.690] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. That’s a hell of an offer. And if anybody wants to learn more about me, you can go to inboundrem.com and I would love to have conversations with people inbound marketing about SEO, things like that. And if you don’t know what those things are, just look up the acronyms and the acronyms interest you. I’m the only guy that does these things in the US at the level that I do them. So if you haven’t heard of them, I’m not surprised. Thank you so much for tuning into the show. I think that’s John appreciates this. I sure as hell know that I do. I appreciate every second, every minute that you guys spend with me and John. We do not take it for granted and we do hope that you’ll come back. Bye.

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Best Real Estate Lead Marketing Tools For 2023#1 – PostcardMania

https://www.postcardmania.com/

2 – Promo

https://promo.com/

A – produce marketing video advert quickly and painlessly

B – 3,000 Templates

C – $25 per month paid yearly 36 Premium Clips per year

3 – Canva

https://www.canva.com/

A – Great free account

B – thousands of great templates

C – Only $119 per year

4 – Jasper

https://www.jasper.ai/

A – Helps you produce great copy for your website, and Facebook adverts, plus a lot more

B- Easy-to-use interface

C – $40 per month

5 – Tailwind

https://www.tailwindapp.com/

A – posts automatically to Pinterest and Instagram accounts and Facebook page

B – Ghostwriter AI writing service

C – Starting at $12.99 per month, paid yearly

6 – SurferSEO

https://surferseo.com/

Price $49 per month

Episode Full Transcript[00:00:12.810] – Robert NewmanWelcome back to the mail. Right, Podcasts? Ladies and gentlemen, today’s episode is number 368. Woof. We’ve done a lot of these. John and I are going to talk to you today about we’re going to have a little bit of back and forth in this because John was saying best Real Estate lead Marketing Tools for 2023, and I didn’t really have a chance to get back to them and say maybe we should just say some unusual ideas for lead marketing tools for 2023 on the list. I’ve tried five of these six tools so I know how most of them operate, which is probably why I didn’t communicate back to you super fast. I was like, oh, I know all these tools except for one. So without any further ado, though, I think this is going to be a really fun podcast, especially if you like to hear me and John go back and forth about things. So let’s introduce John though for those of you that may not know him. And then, I’ll introduce myself. Go ahead.

[00:01:15.750] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. I’m the joint found of mail, right? We build beautiful websites on WordPress for real estate agents, and a host of marketing digital tools will be part of the package. It’s a great value package. Go over and have a look at it.

[00:01:31.730] – Robert NewmanBack.

[00:01:31.950] – Jonathan DenwoodOver to you, Rob.

[00:01:33.550] – Robert NewmanMy name is Robert Newman. I am essentially the only inbound marketer that focuses on real estate, which is a whole bunch of things all wrapped into one storytelling, SEO many, many different things. But you can go to my site inboundrem.com and learn everything that you need to know about all of those subjects. Without any further ado though, let’s go on to talk about the set of tools. Now I want to give a summary, so everybody knows what we’re going to be talking about. We’re going to be talking about Promo.com, canva.com, Jasper, AI, tailwind surfer, SEO; those are the list of tools that we have up to discuss today. They’re a good list of tools. Maybe postcard mania, or did I pull that from someplace else? Yeah, postcard one.

[00:02:19.470] – Jonathan DenwoodNumber one is postcard mania.

[00:02:22.030] – Robert NewmanOkay, so let’s start there, then. Without any further ado, why don’t you discuss with me why did you put postcard mania on this list, John?

[00:02:35.860] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I think a lot of people, if they had regularly listened to this podcast, would get the impression that we are all about digital marketing, and to some extent, that’s true. But I think both of us have made it really clear that we are not against more traditional forms of marketing. And when it comes to action postcodes and other printed outreach, I think it really can be part of your marketing quiver and can be really quite effective and cost-effective. And I think you have mentioned that some of your clients do utilize print media quite successfully. And this particular company they don’t totally specialize in real estate, but they have parts that do, and they can send out you can get postcards and other printed materials at very reasonable prices, and they have a very good reputation. What do you reckon, Robert?

[00:03:47.930] – Robert NewmanSo I reckon that postcard strategies can be and oftentimes are incredibly effective. I currently have in my list of clients for Inbound Ram, one of the people that has made the most waves of anybody that I’ve ever met using postcard marketing. And her strategy is to partner with local artists, get original pieces of artwork that focus on the communities that she services and then translate those onto a postcard and send it to her clients. Send it to people. Now, I don’t think she does handwritten notes because she farms the entirety of two full communities. It’s probably 25,000 cards if I had to guess. So I doubt she’s going to be doing 25,000 handwritten notes, but she may have a single note that gets printed on the back of these cards and perhaps she signs them because that is the kind of person that she is. Everything is about the personal, the thought out, the details matter a tremendous amount to her. So somewhere on the back of these cards there’s a little note that says and by the way, I hope you enjoy these beautiful pieces of art that local artists have produced. So the card actually promotes the artist more than it promotes herself.

[00:05:02.950] – Robert NewmanAnd when all of that is done, she mentions this was ultimately sent to you by Sharon Steele. So anybody is curious, you can just Google Sharon Steele and you’ll be able to see her strategy. She talks about it on our website a lot and it makes her a lot of money. 50% of her business probably comes from this postcard strategy that I’ve just described and she is one of those real estate agents that is in the enviable position of being in the top 2% of income earners inside the profession. So it is definitely in the right place, in the right hands. Postcards can be devastatingly effective.

[00:05:48.910] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I might be wrong here, but when I did my research on them, I think they do integrate with a certain number of CRMs. I’m not sure if any of them are the Pacific leaders in the real estate sector, line desk or follow up boss, but I think there’s some that they do. So definitely have a look at them. Shall we go on to the next one?

[00:06:16.950] – Robert NewmanWe should just give me 1 second here. I have written about this, but unfortunately I am not in the top ten or 20 results on the Google search results, which is pretty rare. But anyway, if you go to my site, I’ve done a full post with expanded thoughts on how I feel about postcards. So number two, Promo.com. The only video maker that you need join millions of business creating videos in minutes. The unlimited media from iSock and Getty Images. All right, so John, you you go first.

[00:06:52.520] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, well, we’ve been hammered for the past two years, and especially in 2022, we hammered away about video. You know, you got a powerful tool in your pocket, your iPhone or your Android phone. But making videos or getting over the hurdle is difficult. That’s why you should be doing it, because a lot of people won’t to make videos for Facebook, for social media, and having an editor. Promo provides it all. It provides a web based editor and app editor for your phone. It provides a library, extensive library of video templates with royalty free music video, videos in a library, and you cannot pre made ones. And it starts at $25 a month, paid yearly. You get so much of the library is what they call free videos, and then they have what they call premier clips at the starter plan, like I say, which is $25 a month. You get 36 of these premium clips, as they call them. I haven’t personally used it, but I gave the website a good look over and it looks a pretty cool service to get you going into producing more video. What do you reckon, Rob?

[00:08:34.230] – Robert NewmanWell, I think a toolkit like this, something that makes it video easier, is definitely something to look at. I get ad nauseam big websites that produce video trying to talk to me and do something called getting backlinks, like they want to post blogs. Video IO is one. There’s just so many there’s so many of them, and I’ve never really dived too deeply into any of them, including Promo.com. So, unfortunately, in this subject, while I can agree with John 100% that if this is a toolkit that is going to increase your ability to make an efficient video, then you should do that. My only additional piece of commentary is to take us back, because there is an easy way to get a feedback from people who are doing lots of video on their website. You can very much get into people get input from people who are actively doing what you’re doing on Facebook. It would be the Real Estate YouTube Mastermind, which are done by friends of the show. We’ve had both the founders of this group on the show in the past, Matthew, and I am not remembering as clearly his partner, but if you just simply look on Facebook, you go and you search the group real Estate YouTube Mastermind.

[00:10:03.480] – Robert NewmanThis is the place where I would go and drop a comment about, what does everybody think about Promo.com and see if anybody is using it and just basically get your own internal reviews from people who are real estate agents. And I think that that would be brilliant if you took the time and did that. Blissfully john, this is the only tool of the ones that you listed that I can honestly say I just don’t know that much about, but everything else I’ve used or used currently. So thankfully, I will be able to speak to them with a high degree more of expertise.

[00:10:40.010] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, you don’t have to buy the yearly, you just get the cheaper price. You can go month to month. I think the month to month is around 45, 55, so you can try it for a month. I think you can sign up for a free plan, which you can try out. You can’t export anything out of it, but you can sign up for a free account and play around with the back end. I think do that and then just pay them for a month and try it out. It’s not a ridiculous price and they look pretty feature rich. And they do have a library of templates designed for real estate. So I think anything that can get you making video and utilizing video in 2023 is worth a go at maybe, but I think what you’ve said is also fantastic. Onto the next one. Canva? Well, you can have a free account. The free account is useful on its own. It’s not crippled. It has a lot of value. The Free Account or Canberra. But to get the real power canva, you want the Premier, which is about for a personal account. It’s 119 a year, so it’s not ridiculous.

[00:12:04.590] – Jonathan DenwoodI know all these subscriptions do add up. If you’re producing images, producing flyers, it’s got a lot of value. I use Photoshop, but I also use Canva and I pay for the Premier for the 119 a year and I find it well worth the money. What do you reckon, Robert?

[00:12:38.370] – Robert NewmanSo me and the team here use Canva. We are building most of our infographics off Canva, so I can’t really say, as with most design type products, my eye for them is the ease of use, the price and the execution. But I’m coming at this from like an agency leader standpoint, not from an I’m using them personally standpoint. Here’s what I can tell everybody about the feedback that I get from my team. They say these guys are the hand down leader. There’s lots of templates that you can choose from. There’s almost every type of content that we want to produce. That’s a graphic that already has a template, so we can just go and remove or change elements. Since we’re in the real estate space, as everybody listening to the show, there isn’t actually a very high bar for custom graphics that you might put into a blog post, put into a flyer, put into something hard copy. The bar is very low, making canva for us in the real estate business an incredibly valuable tool. John just said the premium I don’t even know what the premium price is. If I’m paying $119 a year for canva, then it’s got to be one of the best values that we have for a production based tool.

[00:13:51.450] – Robert NewmanSo I think very highly of it, john and I think that everybody should, if anybody is interested in graphics, they should look at it. But it is one of those things where it doesn’t make any sense unless actually I’m probably using canvas for teams now that I look at the options. The idea here is that you’re producing graphics to go along with your business. And if you are, if anybody here is listening to the show, is spending a lot of money on custom graphics, this might be something to look at to cut your costs down and increase your productivity.

[00:14:28.070] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I think like I say, that they have a free version. The free version, they have a certain amount of their library which you can have access, they have a stock imaging, imaging, which so much of it’s available with a free plan. I think if you start using it, I think for anybody that can’t afford to hire a graphic designer to help them, I think it’s invaluable tool to keep all the time plates they provide. So it will help you produce flyers, graphics, thumbnails at a certain standard that won’t look amateurish. So I think it’s invaluable and it’s something if you’re not looking at, if you’re doing a lot of this work yourself, which a lot of real estate agents are, I think it’s invaluable. Shall we go for a break, Rock?

[00:15:29.410] – Robert NewmanSure. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, while John and I do promote our businesses on here, our first interest in the show is making sure that we’re giving you valuable information mostly on the subject of marketing for your real estate business. That’s it. We don’t know if we do a good job or a bad job. Our user count grows, our repeat listeners keeps growing. So we presume that we’re doing a great job, but the number one piece of feedback that we look for, that we hope for, that we wish for is something like comments or written form feedback. You can email me at robert inbound REM. But more probably a better bet would be to email Jonathan or John at mailrightmail. Is it malhefen right? Even on the email?

[00:16:10.090] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s Jonathan@mailhyphenright.com.

[00:16:14.070] – Robert NewmanOkay, Jonathan@malhefenwright.com. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for tuning in one way or the other. And we’re going to give you a small break and we’re going to be right back.

[00:16:23.610] – Speaker 3Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail. Right? It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today, go to mailwight.com.

[00:16:48.690] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen. It’s episode number 367, I think, 68 and we are doing a show on good real estate marketing tools for 2023. And the reason I keep hesitating is the next tool up on our list is Jasper AI. And this is literally the reason that I will not be using the words best real Estate lead marketing tools for 2023, which will give John a clue as to how I feel about Jasper AI. But before we jump into that, John, have you used Jasper AI?

[00:17:27.390] – Jonathan DenwoodI use alternatives. Jasper is one of the leading, obviously utilizing AI for copyrighting and that has become a very big topic. I’ve been using WordPress equivalent, which we offer on all our websites, which is Bertha that uses AI technology. OpenAI is the company that is the leader in providing the background technology that all these type of products like Jasper is built upon. And Jasper is one of the leading SaaS providers people, and I’m sure Rob is going to I’m guessing what Rob’s going to be saying, which is dangerous because I could never work out what Rob’s going to say. I don’t even attempt to work out how his mind is working. That’s a good one, Rob. You should green. It basically helps you write content and it can be abused, but a lot of people really suffer in getting going. It’s a bit like video. It’s a bit like promo that we discussed in the first half for the cost. I really see it as a tool to help you get more video. I see Jasper as a tool in helping you produce some content for your website and getting you over the hump. I see it’s an aid.

[00:19:31.330] – Jonathan DenwoodBut a lot of people I think there’s a balance here. I think it can be overplayed overstated what it can do, but I also think it’s useful. Over to you, Robert.

[00:19:46.250] – Robert NewmanOkay. AI is a hot topic. I follow like two people on Twitter and one of those two people who is Rand Fishkin, who many of you may not know, but Rand Fishkin is a pioneer, an incredible dude that had previously built one of the most relevant SEO companies that existed called Maas.com. And I just like the way that he approaches everything. He’s a very well researched guy. He always talks from a deeply, like, educated perspective. And his comments to AI were that he tweeted today. So interesting that John brought that to my attention. And I’m going to ask that you bear with me here. Just give me 1 second worth of patience.

[00:20:56.990] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I got no worry about that. You were patient with me last week because I was late. I had a flat tire. I was in a bit of a mess when I arrived late for the show.

[00:21:08.310] – Robert NewmanHere’s what Rand said, and it echoes what I feel. Here’s my favorite take so far on the Chat GPT and AI content. Hype train. I hate the hype around chat GPT Whenever the topic of AI writing tools comes up, I’ve noticed that the proponents of AI tend to group everything else into two camps haters and technology ludites, and fellow fans and avid users. I don’t fit into either group. I’ve been enthusiastically playing with every AI tool I can get my hands on. Jasper copy AI, chat, GPT, stable diffusion dollar e canvas, existing AI image generator. On the other hand, I don’t agree that these tools will change the world of professional work anywhere close to the scale that most coverage describes. I would love to take these tools on the repetitive marketing task I currently find mind bogglingly boring. But we aren’t there yet. I have used Jasper AI extensively. I was hoping that the tool would eliminate some of the guest blog posting responsibilities that we still handwrite. I have a team that writes over 300 guest blog posts each and every single month. I was really wanting and hoping that this tool would either take some of the weight off or all of the weight off that team.

[00:22:25.920] – Robert NewmanI have discovered that Jasper AI isn’t even remotely close to being there yet. It does not write anything that’s engaging on a human level. It does repeat itself, even though, theoretically, they say it’s not supposed to. It does. I’m telling you, not from the perspective of this is not an opinion. I use the tool on similar subjects in similar areas because that’s what we do. I wasn’t trying to trick the tool. I was trying to experiment with it for workflow, and it did not work. I cannot be more clear about that. Did not work. It regurgitated large segments of the same content, slightly different, but not enough, unfortunately, to make it past Google, which is what is just flabbergasting me, is that these tools are literally advertising, including Jasper AI. On its home page, on the scroll, it’s saying, use this tool to produce SEO content. Holy meatballs. Everybody that’s listening to the show, do not do that. You will get yourself penalized into the ground. Google has been very vocal on the subject of AI and using AI to produce content. And I’ll summarize it, don’t you dare do it, is what they say.

[00:23:49.370] – Robert NewmanThat is literally what they say. And if they catch you doing it, and they catch you doing it in Plentitude, you are just asking to have your website blacklisted. Because if AI could write all the content on the site, number one, that would defeat the purpose of what Google is supposed to be about. But here’s the most important thing. Google is filled with rocket scientists. They’re very smart people. We all wish that machines would produce content at a level that a smart human being could learn something from the machine. None of them are there yet, including Rank Bring. The AI that Google uses. They’re just not there yet. No machine learning has learned enough yet to educate us on a subject, which means that human writers and human content producers and human thinkers need to be behind something if you’re going to really try to provide valuable to a searcher. And guess what? Google’s core business is providing value to searchers which means that AI runs directly contrary to Google at this exact moment. Which means if you try to use it for SEO, you are guaranteeing it. So here’s the problem. You might get away with it for a little while because maybe you wrote a piece of content or two that nobody else had written yet.

[00:24:59.230] – Robert NewmanBut you really think that everybody in the real estate game is not going to get in there, or that they’re not I mean, there’s like 1.6 million pages on Van Ice. I live in a podunk town in the middle of, like it’s just not a very exciting place, and yet there’s 1,600,000 people have written about it. So what do you think is going to happen with your little towns and your little cities? It’s going to happen. And when it happens, the website that once ranked well is going to go get its ranking dropped into the ground, and you will not be able to figure out why that happened. I’ve seen this type of shit hit the marketplace in the past, john, I cannot emphasize enough how deeply I think you need to stay off this train. And I don’t even know that you’re ever going to be able to get on the train because Google currently and I see John’s frowning. But here’s the thing that most people say I’m frowning.

[00:25:52.110] – Jonathan DenwoodIt’s just dickens. Sorry, I interrupt.

[00:25:55.080] – Robert NewmanThat’s okay. I just think people don’t understand the way that Google is, like, reviewing even what are supposed to be standard content pages. Like, you’re going to catch a penalty. You get penalized if you use a big provider. Like, let’s just say somebody’s producing 10,000 websites like Agent Image, and they have the same buy sell page that they put buy, sell real estate. Sell real estate. And in the past, it was always very exciting for all of us to say that some of your website content was going to be written for you and then you didn’t have to worry about it. Guess what? Replicative duplicated pages even like that, even ones that are no followed, impact your SEO ranking. So there’s a way to get Google not to read those pages. There is no way to ignore the user behavior that comes off highly repetitive websites, which is very bad. Okay? If you produce a site that looks similar and acts similar as a competitor right down the street, and you’re thinking that you’re going to get great user behavior, which is in turn going to yield you good SEO rankings, I’m here to tell you you are wrong.

[00:26:56.020] – Robert NewmanYou are wrong, wrong, wrong. Go ahead and write your own pages. Even put down a sentence. Put down a link someplace else, but make it original. That’s what Google rewards in terms of rankings and anything else, you’re either taking a penalty or you’re hitting the neutral button, the neutral gear button on your site. Now, having said that, the place that I think the AI is kind of exciting, John. And that could find a use for everybody right now is some of the use cases on it I do agree with. So the use cases of writing emails I do not agree with. Writing sales copy. I do, however, agree with writing certain customer service copy, certain business mechanics copy, post process copy. But here’s the thing that everybody I think is forgetting. You do have to go and proof the copy. You have to read it because it’s not producing perfect copy. It doesn’t matter. I’ve never seen an AI, I’ve not personally tested an AI, John, that’s producing perfect copy. If you have, then you have got an experience. I have not, no, I think the.

[00:28:03.870] – Jonathan DenwoodMajority of what you said I would agree with. I just see it as a tool to some extent, but a limited tool. And I think if you see it and they’re promoting it like you say, but they’re bound to, aren’t they? Also, Google is going to have no love for this because Microsoft was one of the largest investors in OpenAI. They have invested about 50 million. Open AI is an open source, but it’s a nonprofit company and Microsoft has never liked open source or nonprofit companies. So I was a bit puzzled why they were one of the major investors. Because they came on my radar about a year ago. But then we found out the past couple of months, it’s become very obvious why Google Microsoft is because they’re planning to invest I think they publicly have state they’re going to invest a billion dollars into open AI.

[00:29:15.810] – Robert NewmanThey already have. I just watched the CEO talk about this the other day on a program in India and they’ve got an Azure backbone there. They’ve invested most of the designers, developers and engineers for the core programming came out of India. And this is Microsoft stab at probably defeating Google’s monopoly. They hope the AI gets good enough to be able to write content autonomously. This is a competition between two massively sized technology companies.

[00:29:50.810] – Jonathan DenwoodYes, fundamentally, I just see it’s overplay tool overhyped to some extent, but I do think it’s a legitimate tool. But you can get into some hot water if you don’t really know what you’re dealing with. So let’s go on to the next tool, which has as part of its sales pitch, AI writing tool element, that’s tailwind and tailwind. I want to point out that Mail Wright has a similar functionality than this. But basically it provides a library of content that you can set up in a calendar scheduler for Print, Pinterest and Instagram. And for Facebook, it has a library that’s specifically aimed at real estate agents. It’s also included what it calls a ghost writer, which seemingly works with Pinterest API and write some reasonable stuff for your images that you’re going to place on Instagram. And the price starts at 1299. I haven’t used it for what the price level if it helps you post more to these platforms, I think it might be worth a look at. I’m not indulcing it. I’m just saying, have a look at it. What do you reckon?

[00:31:37.150] – Robert NewmanSo Tailwind is I use it. I’ve used it for years. Do not use the AI feature so that everybody knows, we manually write our Pin descriptions. Okay? We manually write those Pin descriptions on the actual images because Pinterest will import the image into Pinterest, and then you will get the description that’s located inside the image into Pinterest, which is what makes, like, the way that we have done SEO optimization. We add a layer of value for the handful of people that actually post images off their site, because, honestly, the captions are already done for you. You just post the caption. It comes complete with the writing into wherever you’re sending it to, whether that’s Instagram or Pinterest. Pinterest has always been one of the most valuable SEO tools that we use. There is definitely a social component to the way that Google ranks sites. There’s a branding logarithm that Google uses to rank sites making anything that you consider related to Pinterest interesting. Instagram can’t be read by Google. So if you’re thinking about SEO, there’s no value on Instagram for that except for the transfer traffic from that platform to your platform. John, you’re off screen.

[00:32:53.240] – Jonathan DenwoodOh, sorry.

[00:32:56.550] – Robert NewmanSo I apologize for the interruption and for that. John. So, guys, I strongly think that Tailwind has value. It’s a cool tool. It automatically adds value. There’s other tools that are interesting in this space. I think that here’s a secret. I do use automated or behavioral marketing in certain elements of my marketing, which is how I know what does and does not work. Audience I test. It exhaustively trying to find the places that we can hack like Google or Social without breaking any big rules and still getting strong results for our clients. I’ve probably tested 50 or 100 tools so far. I will keep testing them, by the way. I’m not going to back away from testing them. I’ve only found one that I can use out of all that testing. I’m not going to name it. I worked way too hard to find it. But I’ll tell you what it does. It automatically posts to a number of social platforms simultaneously leaving comments on people’s profiles, liking and disliking stuff, and building audiences. I’ve used this tool to build my audience on Pinterest, which currently stands at 17,000, and I have done very little to do that.

[00:34:21.510] – Robert NewmanSo to say to everybody here that’s listening to the show that there’s not a place that there can’t be a place for tools like Tailwind and other tools that automate really arduous processes. Now, why do I have a tool that automates something? Well, I’m already creating unique graphics and design elements and unique content on my site. I spend a bucket ton of money doing it all. I want is to promote it in social places. That’s all I want to do is take actual, real, deeply valuable information that I have produced that is original, and I want to promote it on other platforms. That’s where you get complicated. It gets complicated. I found a tool that kind of does that. Okay. It does it well enough. So Tailwind does make that process easier for a single user trying to post stuff off a website. If you have a personal assistant, if you have a social media marketer in the Philippines, if you have anybody that’s helping you, then I think Tailwind is brilliant. If you don’t have anybody that’s helping you, I think it’s too manual. That’s my opinion.

[00:35:24.230] – Jonathan DenwoodYes. On to the last one. Server SEO. It’s a pacific SEO tool. It uses some of the elements of artificial intelligence. It starts at $49 a month. It’s a quasar professional level SEO tool. Robert is an expert on SEO. He might disagree with that statement.

[00:35:53.070] – Robert NewmanWe use it. John, I’ll cut you off the past. I currently use it, and I use it on every single article that we publish on inbound REM. But I have a very specific thing out of the toolkit that they’ve done very well for $50 a month that automates this one thing extremely efficiently. But I don’t use the rest of the toolkit.

[00:36:13.990] – Jonathan DenwoodI think I use one of its competitors.

[00:36:20.090] – Robert NewmanWhy wouldn’t you put the competitor down here?

[00:36:27.630] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I think somebody trying. I think it’s a good tool. I’m a cheap skate. I’m using something I got a better deal on as polish new design terms as it does the job. Maybe you can explain what surfer SEO does for the audience, Rob.

[00:37:00.300] – Robert NewmanWell, it does a lot of things, but what I use it for is the semantic keyword recognition component of it. So what we do is we feed a title of an article in there and we feed like a written article into it. And usually we’ve got about 1001, 500 words, 3000 words. When you are pretty convinced that you’re going to write a blog post that is going to rank in the search engines here’s, where most people, myself included, lose a lot of value on that article, your article can rank for either 100 keywords or 1000, depending upon the semantic value of the article. Now, semantic value is really mostly in the headers, the headers that you’re using inside your content. That’s mostly what Google is examining. And then they’re comparing it to the title and seeing how well those things add up. Now, what surfer SEO does in an instant is measure all of your subheaders, not the title of the article. There’s plenty of tools out there that do that for you. What’s a good title? Keyword research. There are not that many tools that do a really good job at looking at your subheaders and saying, oh, you should change this to this or that, and then.

[00:38:09.390] – Robert NewmanSo you go down the content and you change your headers up, and you sometimes can increase the reach of the same article. You’re not really rewriting the article. You’re just kind of changing around the headers and such. And you oftentimes double the reach, increase the reach by 10% surfer. SEO for that one task is pretty cool.

[00:38:33.730] – Jonathan DenwoodI use it because the articles rewritten takes a few months for Google to assess them, and then I use other tools to keep an eye on it. And then I use a similar tool to give me insight about how Google seen it, how I might be able to improve the article if it’s not ranking as well as I hoped. And I just use it as a method to help me improve existing articles, and I found it useful for that myself. And it has worked. But you got to know a bit about SEO, and you got to be motivated to consistently utilize it. Like all these I see, all the things that we’ve outlined, maybe even canva everything we’ve outlined, none of it’s ridiculously priced. And they’re just tools, basically. They and if you’re at a certain stage where you can’t afford to also have people helping you, that might help you improve your digital marketing as a real estate agent. That’s why I thought it was a reasonable list. What’s your thoughts, Robert?

[00:40:10.380] – Robert NewmanMy thoughts are you added a thing at the end, which I agree with, but I’m going to add just a contrary thought. So John has listed a whole series of tools that all pretty much fall under the sub, $100 a month. And if any of you are brand new agents with very limited budget, selling one or two homes per year, making $30,000 to $60,000, whatever the number is, this is a great list if you happen to be in $100,000 range anywhere in the US. I’m going to add one tool to this list that I feel dominates all the tools, and that is a virtual assistant that comes out of one of the countries where you can pay them a reasonable living for somewhere between three and $6 an hour, which is mostly parts of India, Pakistan, and Philippines. Now, Philippines is where I go. It’s where I suggest you go. But if you get stuck, you can look at these other countries as well. So a personal assistant can if you’ve created any processes around these tools, you can use a personal assistant for that. Actually, one last thing on the list. It’s not so much a tool.

[00:41:21.310] – Robert NewmanIt’s fiverr.com. Fiver.com, if any of you haven’t heard of this service. For between five and $20, you can get a lot of marketing tasks done for you for the amount of money that you spend, as long as you spend a little bit of time making sure that you’re shopping for a good vendor for the task. A lot of things done. Thumbnails on graphics. The same graphics that I spend my money on in canva. You can actually have somebody do them for you on fiverr, no problem. Like that’s one thing you can get done all day long, video is a little bit more expensive on fiverr, but you can get it done there. Content copywriting, you can get that done there. So basically every single thing that we’ve listed, you can get done, including sharing images on social media, it can all be done on fiverr. So it’s a one size fits all recommendation. These are the additional thoughts. But ultimately, when John is listing these tools and I’m looking at them, he is absolutely correct. Each one of these single tools does an important thing to install inside your marketing process. But the most important thing for all of you, everybody, including John, listening to the show is create a process that other people run and take yourself out of it.

[00:42:28.290] – Robert NewmanAnd then focus on improving the process so that it gets you more people to call, more people to do what you really do, which is sell real estate or keep in touch with people. But a process with fiverr as part of it, or a virtual assistant, even more important, even if that person was working for you one or two days a week at 8 hours a day, $24 a day, you could get them for $116, which is really not that much different than the rest of these services. Go ahead.

[00:42:59.370] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah. Or you can try it out and then get somebody to do it for you, either using the service or doing it themselves. There’s a host of ways to approach this. I think it’s time to wrap it up. Rob, what do you reckon?

[00:43:18.510] – Robert NewmanI reckon that you are correct, sir. So let’s do this thing the way that we always do, except I’m going to switch it up. My name has been Robert Newman. I am a real estate online marketing consultant. I’m an SEO guy. I’m an inbound marketer. I’ve been doing it for 14 years. I have founded a company called Inbound REM. We build websites, we do SEO campaigns. We’re really meant the service is designed for the veteran agent, the veteran broker who’s looking to own everything that they do, all the content, the website, all of it, and take themselves off systems. So if you want to learn more about that, go to inboundrem.com. John, how would people look you up?

[00:44:04.270] – Jonathan DenwoodJust go to the Mail hyphen right.com website. And if you want to book a chat with me or add them, you can book it on the website and we are always happy to have a quick discussion with you and see if we can help you.

[00:44:17.730] – Robert NewmanBack.

[00:44:18.050] – Jonathan DenwoodOver to you, Rob.

[00:44:19.310] – Robert NewmanAll right, brilliant. Listen, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. We’re excited to continue to serve up incredible content in 2023 and we hope that you’ll be along on the ride with us. All right. Have a great day. Bye, you.

————————————–

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

jonathan@mail-right.com

775-372-6322

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

————————————–

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The post #368 – Mail-Right Show: Best Real Estate Lead Marketing Tools For 2023 appeared first on All-in-One Real Estate Sales & Lead Generation Solution.

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Redefining Digital Lead Generation Goals in 2023Welcome back to episode number 367 of the Mail Right podcast. John and I are incredibly excited to be back on the show to talk to all of you. And we’re going to talk about something that John has brought up using different terminology in 2022. But the name of the show is redefining your Digital Lead Generation. Goals and Expectations for 2023. This is something that we’ve talked about in pieces, and I thought that it would be a really good idea to kick off the new year and start our own do the whole episode. Now, before we get into that, I would love it if all of the audience could be introduced to you, john, I would also love for you to explain to them why there’s a wptonic.com up in the upper right-hand side of the show.

————————————–

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

jonathan@mail-right.com

775-372-6322

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

————————————–

Episode Full Transcript[00:00:11.210] – Robert NewmanWelcome back to episode number 367 of the Mail Right podcast. John and I are incredibly excited to be back on the show to talk to all of you. And we’re going to talk about something that John has brought up using different terminology in 2022. But the name of the show is redefining your Digital Lead Generation. Goals and Expectations for 2023. This is something that we’ve talked about in pieces, and I thought that it would be a really good idea to kick off the new year and start our own do the whole episode. Now, before we get into that, I would love it if all of the audience could be introduced to you, john, I would also love for you to explain to them why there’s a wptonic.com up in the upper right-hand side of the show.

[00:01:14.040] – Jonathan DenwoodThat’s a very good question because you’re lucky that we’re here at Audience. I’ve had some car troubles, flat tire, so I’m 15 minutes late. And Roberts just got over Covert-19 The virus got him in the end. So that is why you got that. But I will remove it right now. And that’s it. I have the technology.

[00:01:52.550] – Robert NewmanJohn isn’t kidding, ladies and gentlemen, we made it here by the skin of our chinny chin chin. And I’m I am personally so happy not to be feeling terrible. Like, I am very excited. I’m basically just excited to be capable of speaking because I really got kicked in the proverbial, you know what, for this last round of COVID. So here we go. With no further ado, why are we talking about redefining digital lead generation goals in 2023? All right, so let’s get into the numbers so far. For 2022, we’ve watched the real estate market decreased by about 20%. Most realtors that I know are looking back at their income versus 2000 and 22,021, and 2022 and recognizing the fact that they’ve seen a decrease in many cases for the first time in years, this decrease is going to carry over into lead generation. The logic is there. Most people understand that. So you should be redefining your goals. But what most people don’t understand is what a normal lead generation market looks like. Even people that have been advertising for years don’t remember three years ago. Unless they’re really good at tracking their numbers, they don’t remember what they were getting three years ago.

[00:03:25.890] – Robert NewmanJohn, do you remember what you were what results you were getting from your marketing three years ago?

[00:03:30.850] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, kind of. Yeah. Not very. Looking back, it’s improved quite a lot. But I am not as religious about my tracking like you.

[00:03:47.210] – Robert NewmanWhich comes down to what we’re going to talk about, which is what should your goals be, what should your expectations be? What should they be of individual companies, depending upon their strategy? So I’m going to make a bold statement. I’m going to ask for John to follow up with it. Excuse me, everybody. And the bold statement is going to be this. If you are using a paid advertising service, that is, anybody that’s using paid advertising to drive people to a destination, okay? So anybody that’s advertising on Facebook on your behalf, anybody’s advertising on Google on your behalf and you’re sending them to a website, your expectation should be for lead count to drop by 30% to 50% in 2023. Right. Take it away, John, with your thoughts.

[00:04:42.650] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, yeah, I agree with that, basically.

[00:04:48.090] – Robert NewmanOkay, so number one, you have that expectation, lead count is going to drop. Okay, so we check that box. We’ve already said it in other shows. What’s going to make this show unique for you? Well, here’s something that hasn’t been talked about a lot that I’m going to talk about a little. I’m doing my deep dive analysis. So John, I haven’t had a chance to talk to you about this yet, but for the first time in many, many years, sometimes in some cases ten years, some of the real estate marketing companies out there that I have obsessively religiously told everybody they don’t really update much. There’s nothing new for me to report on my review from four years ago, so I’m not going to say anything new. They’re updating, all of them. Leading the pack is Walopo. Right behind Walopo, shockingly, is KV corps, who hasn’t updated a single thing since 2016. So now they’re, they’ve got a massive list of updates that are coming out on KV Core and there, there are other systems that are following in suit, but here’s what most of you don’t know. KV core wailopo sync boomtown. They are massively oversold.

[00:06:11.190] – Robert NewmanOkay? So even though I’m giving you all of these numbers right now, something that I don’t think occurs to the average agent to ask is, when you buy a service from any of these people, how many other people in this marketplace are you doing business with? It’s a reasonable question, because John, would you agree with me as a fellow real estate marketing professional, that the more people doing the exact same thing inside an enclosed demographic, let’s just say reno, okay? Would you not say that the more people doing the same thing lessens your personal chance? Like if you’re doing the same thing as ten other people, do, you not lessen your chance for success based on the fact there are ten other people doing the exact same thing as you?

[00:07:01.590] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, well, I think that would be logical, wouldn’t it? Obviously, I think the only parameters that might affect it slightly is if you’re in a very large urban area, like if you’re in the Bay Area or San Francisco or you’re in Dallas or Seattle that could have been the size of the market, the effect. But then it would just depend on I just instinctively would suggest that it’s slightly not. But any kind of average market, depending on how many they allow in per area, will have an effect yet here’s.

[00:07:50.560] – Robert NewmanWhat my boots on the ground information has been for a long time and I got tired of talking about it. Just listen. You just said something critical without realizing it, depending on how many customers they allow. Guess what, John? Would it surprise you if I told you that most real estate marketing companies do not actually cap the number of customers that they take in per area?

[00:08:22.370] – Jonathan DenwoodNot really. But I would have hoped that on the upper end of the price bracket, I think I would have expected it to be regulated by the sheer cost of the system. So the percentage of possible clients that would be interested in that particular platform would be self regulating. Is that making any sense?

[00:08:48.920] – Robert NewmanYeah. And sadly, I’m here to say that that is not correct. Now way back in the day, when Wailopo had founded Tiger Leads, tiger Leads was pretty good about selling X number of people into X number of zip codes. They actually had a fairly regulated way of managing the system. Now when they decided to use Facebook, which does not leverage zip codes, they lost that ability to manage clients based on zip codes. So they’re using some murky internal system, probably based on city name or neighborhood name, to try to put a number of people into a marketplace. I have had many calls, many, many calls where clients are like I’m tired of receiving, like sending out a text to a client and them telling me that I am the fourth real estate agent that has sent them exact same text. Because just like everybody else, while system, the system is the same no matter who’s using it. So if a person responded to an advertisement in one place, responded to another advertisement someplace else, they’re going to get the exact same message, the exact same. And they’re going to know for sure that whatever you’re doing, you’re using the same marketing as competitor B or C or whatever.

[00:10:14.390] – Robert NewmanWhich definitely does not make you look like unique little snowflake in the marketing world. So I’ve been hearing these reports, of course, from the reason I mentioned Wailpa is I’m surprised. I usually have a very high opinion of the team over there. And I am not saying that I still don’t have a high opinion of the team. I do actually. But I think that they missed a major thing because there’s no doubt, none whatsoever, that their system is oversold. And I could have guessed that because they’ve got 1114 thousand people as part of their success community. Now, if you or I or any other real estate marketing company had 14,000 active recurring clients, we would have to really have sorted those clients out correctly in order to not have oversold our territories. Same thing goes for Zillow and Trulia. These platform companies, they have oversold their territories. Generally speaking too, their solution is simple. The more people that we put into the system, the more. We scale back how much leads each individual agent gets and we keep increasing our profit margin. It’s nuts. We will just literally take the same market segment. We’re producing 100 leads inside it.

[00:11:32.510] – Robert NewmanYou’re paying us $800 for however long we’ve been giving you 50 leads. But guess what? Three other people signed up for also $800. So now we’re going to give you 25 leads, them 25 leads, the other guy, 25 leads. And that’s how we’re going to setture that problem, though you use different language surrounding it, but that’s ultimately what they do. And so whether or not your lead system has been oversold should impact your expectations. And I recommend that every actually, I’m going to get John’s buy in. I think that as I tighten my belt and I’m watching my dollars more closely, I think this is deserving of a phone call to my existing lead provider to ask them how many other people are targeting this exact same market. What do you think, John? Do you think that’s reasonable? Unreasonable? Do you think that’s something that you would take the time to do? Or you think I’m just being anal?

[00:12:40.130] – Jonathan DenwoodI’m sorry, I’m a bit silent, which is a bit tricky on a podcast. I really don’t know if you’re going to get anywhere. Basically, I suppose it really depends on your contract length with that particular provider, the size of the client you are with them. You got much larger customer base than me. We’ve only got a very small customer base, but I actually think my product is a lot more sorted out the last 18 months than any time I’ve been running mail. Right. So that’s a tricky one, because, like I said, it really depends. I know most for understandable reasons, most of them on year contract. I suppose it really depends. I think it’s probably worthwhile it just depends on how they value as a client, what kind of answer you’re going to get from that phone call.

[00:13:55.880] – Robert NewmanAnd I think that John is raising some good points. Let’s just say that you call your provider and they refuse to give you an answer, or they give you a vague answer or a workaround answer, but it’s not a specific answer. It’s not like we have four clients in the same area targeting the same thing. Let’s just say it’s a run around answer, I’ll get back to you. And they never do. That should show most of you where your level of priority is with your lead provider. And I would say that has to be in my opinion, that has to be an important conversation for all of you. We are no longer in a boom market. Now, I don’t think that we slowed down or I don’t think the market is crashing in the way that even I predicted that it might. So please don’t misread me, but I do think the market is slowing. The numbers say it’s slowing, it’s not. Robert newman saying it, though, there is a number out there. I think it’s 20 or 30%. The market is slow, maybe not for every single person listening to the show, but it has slowed.

[00:14:55.310] – Robert NewmanSo what does that mean that some of you should be doing? In order to do lead generation goals? You should be questioning your existing lead provider. Even if you have no intention of giving them up. Find out how important you are to them. You should be very important, I promise you. Companies like Yelpo Sync Boomtown. They’re Hemorrhaging clients. One thing that you might be able to do is you might be able to get increased priority with existing marketing spend by placing a call to your lead generation provider moving into a shaky market. How do you think about that piece of advice, John?

[00:15:34.010] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, it’s very linked to my previous answer, really. That conversation. Depending on the size of customer you are, you got every right to ask that. You got every right to have a conversation, a serious business conversation. How responsive that provider is going to be is really going to be really driven by how important they see your custom, aren’t they?

[00:16:02.240] – Speaker 3Yeah.

[00:16:02.870] – Robert NewmanAnd so we’re going to go to a break, ladies and gentlemen. And when we come back, we’re going to keep feeding you a couple of this is a mixed show. We’re going to give you some advice about what you should be doing. But all of this ultimately should be affecting the conversation of lead generation goals in 2023. Maybe one of the lead generation goals that you’re going to have is to change lead generation providers based upon the kind of prioritization that they’re giving you, which is reasonable considering the fact that no longer are you just a number. You have been for a long time. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a marketing budget in 2023 and you’re spending it, you’re no longer a number. Trust me. All right, we’ll be right back. Do us a favor. Wherever you’re hearing the show, if you’re watching the show, do us a favor. Give us a thumbs up. Give us a comment. Tell John that you love his haircut. Something, anything. All right, thank you. We’ll be right back.

[00:17:01.910] – Speaker 3Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail, right? It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay. Get started today. Go to mailwrite.com.

[00:17:26.510] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail Right podcast. We are talking about redefining your lead generation goals in 2023. So far in the show, John and I have been discussing lead providers in specific territories being oversold in two 1212-021-2022 idea of reexamining your relationship with your lead generation provider. In 2023. And we’re not saying to ditch them or get rid of them. We are saying call them up and get back in touch with them and start to re explore how important you are as a customer to them, is what I felt like we said. Would you agree?

[00:18:08.730] – Jonathan DenwoodYes, I think what you outlined is fair. I think a very small percentage of clients are going to do that. I think a lot of them, they’re not going to do anything or if their contract is getting close to ending or it’s month to month, which some of the companies it just really depends because some of the price points of some of the not KV core, but some of the other companies over there really aimed at a very successful individual, small team or brokerage level. And they’re going to be annual contracts. But I suppose maybe you’re on because I was thinking that a lot of people are just going to either cancel or not bother. But even if you got quite a bit on your contract, having that conversation really should be a leading primary if you’re going to renew that contract when it comes up.

[00:19:19.490] – Robert NewmanCorrect. And some rock solid advice as you’re discussing and renegotiating your contract. So guys, forever. I have been talking about on my personal website, on this podcast, how you are oftentimes entered into golden handcuffs with your real estate marketing company during boom markets, which we have been in for ten years. Getting your real estate marketing company to negotiate with you is going to be dependent solely on how much you’re spending with them. Most of the time, like 90% of the time. Guess what? As panic sets in at these real estate marketing companies, even for those of you who are not going to move providers, and you’re looking at your goals in 2023, one of the ways that you can increase lead generation effectiveness is by making sure that you’re getting the maximum value out of the money that you’re spending. How do you do that? Well, one of the things that bugs the hell out of me when it comes to some of these other providers like Boomtown Sync, they make it difficult to move your leads from one place to the next. Okay. If you’re going to renew your contract with them, a really sneaky way to make sure that you’re maintaining and increasing value out of your current lead generation provider is to get access to all your existing leads to say, all right, I’ll sign another agreement.

[00:20:36.660] – Robert NewmanI’ll extend the one I’ll continue on and not exercise an early exit out of this contract. But I want complete and total access to all the names and numbers I’ve generated in the form of a CSV spreadsheet, which is an Excel document for those of you who do not know, and we’re going to download all that information and take control of it. That’s a good way for you to get a lot of extra value out of your provider. Now, some of you already have access to your leads. Those who are using follow up boss, you do. Those who are using a lot of other systems. KV Core, I think, does allow leads to be uploaded and downloaded. It will. Boomtown is the worst and most egregious people that don’t allow access to your data sync, I’m not sure. It’s probably complicated because everything on sync is complicated. So I’m not 100% sure. But I can promise you it’s probably complicated because everything is complicated. Chime, I’m unsure about what the rules are in terms of uploading and downloading on Chime, and I am fairly certain that lion desk is incredibly easy and I could go on and on.

[00:21:46.290] – Robert NewmanSo really you’re probably talking about a couple of the really expensive platforms and you want to make sure that you’ve accessed your data. Now John, you said you had a whole copious amount of notes. Why don’t you hit me with some of those before I use up all of our time?

[00:22:00.490] – Jonathan DenwoodCopious because I was leaving it for you.

[00:22:07.130] – Robert NewmanI can keep going. No problem. Okay, so having said all that so let’s just say, ladies and gentlemen, that you’re looking at scaling back your goals or expectations by 30% to 50%. Now here’s the exercise. If you’re looking at your numbers and saying, I’m going to make 30% less GCI or 40% less GCI, and I’m spending X amount on lead generation, let’s call it $3,000 a month. So I’m spending $3,000 at $36,000 a year. I made $750,000 last year. I’m going to make 550 this year. You need to compare those two math, those things, and then you need to make sure that the margin between what you’re spending on leads and what you’re expecting to make makes sense. In many cases it might not. In some cases it might. There’s pros and cons to keeping your goals at the same place that they were in terms of your lead generation spend this year. Now, a pro is increased importance to your vendors. You can negotiate better contracts, better extras, better everything. If you take the time, as John said, I don’t believe most of you are going to take the time to reach out to your vendors, but that handful of you that do, you might have extra negotiating power if you should do that.

[00:23:31.760] – Robert NewmanOkay, number two, and he’s agreeing, he’s nodding, and he’s even said yes. I think he really thinks that that’s a thumbs up. Well, I’ll let him tell you.

[00:23:43.350] – Jonathan DenwoodI think it’s the way you do it. None. Is it business like and just business like? Basically. I think you got every right to ask those questions. I just feel a lot of the times I was going to say that you’re probably not going to get a lot of information back. I can’t really base that on any knowledge, really. So it’s not right for me to say that. Is it.

[00:24:18.290] – Robert NewmanOkay? Sure. I got no comment. You’ve got a valid opinion. So what’s the remaining bits here? So you look at the math, you go, Can I or can I afford? So you may need to adjust your spend down. But here is what most of you should know. I am honestly on my blog and everywhere else, in most cases, I’m advising that people re examine their math. Because if you are looking at your marketing spend and you understand that you’re looking at best at a two to one or three to one ROI, this is the time, ladies and gentlemen, that you focus on longer term strategies that have higher ROI. Because even in the long term world of inbound marketing, or information age marketing, as I’m starting to call it, even in that world where we’re sitting here going, oh, it’s going to be longer than direct, like paid advertising, it’s not right now. The timeline is roughly the same. So you’ve got roughly the same with one type of marketing giving you an incredibly deeper upside, like way deeper upside. Instead of two to one to three one, you could still be looking at 20 to 130 to one way.

[00:25:43.230] – Jonathan DenwoodWould you be interested in how Malwight dealt with this question? Sure, yeah. Because I believe in being totally honest with the audience, basically, it’s been up a five year journey plus. But I’d say really only in the past three years, three to four years, that I’ve been able to really work on the system, got it to a level that I was happy with. But the way we dealt with it, we had to make a decision, and we did this. We have a DIY product that has a library of landing pages and PDFs, and we have a weekly zoom where we advise anybody that joins the zoom. And we’re giving some insight and some group training about how to set up a Facebook marketing campaign, but it’s a DIY level. And then we up to all the prices to a much higher level on the campaigns that we will run for a client to a kind of bestoke level, which is on the mail. Right? And I still think it’s great value, but it’s a much higher price than something like Bold Leads. And that’s how then we can spend the time in producing individual campaigns that will get some results, which also normally includes a high level of video marketing on Facebook, but they’re at a much higher price level.

[00:27:41.060] – Jonathan DenwoodSo that’s how we dealt with some of the issues that you’ve outlined in this podcast.

[00:27:47.190] – Robert NewmanPerfect. And I agree with that. And for those of you who don’t know, because I didn’t know like six or seven months ago, I knew vaguely what that bespoke meant custom, but I have discovered that it came from the custom tailoring world is where that term came from and now is applied to the digital world. And it means custom, it means that somebody will design something to your specifications, essentially. So one way or the other, when we’re talking about lead generation goals in 2023, I think that one. This is a great time to start saying you’re willing to double down if you have the budget. This is a time for you to be looking at long term. Long term, in my opinion, is 100% in the information age arena. What is that? That is where you give detailed answers to questions that people can find on your website, on your Facebook page, on whatever platform that you’re going to use to disseminate information. In my opinion, obviously, and John’s probably as well, is that a website is the best possible central hub for all of that information. Now, we make these things, we’re in that business, so maybe you got to take what we say with a grain of salt.

[00:28:58.580] – Robert NewmanBut I have put all of my time, energy, and money into that category. But once that information is there, you have to get people there. Now, you can do that through organic marketing, otherwise known as SEO. You can do it through social marketing. You can do that by simply brute effort where you’re posting stuff all the time, but you’re probably paying somebody to post. So it’s still paid advertising to a degree, except if you own the content, if it’s your answers to questions that people are asking, nobody gets to take that away from you. Once you’ve produced it digitally, it’s yours. You’re protected by two or three different types of copyright laws. Take a picture. Same thing applies. You’ve got a digital copyright whether you know it or not, especially if you have a DMCA badge on your site. This is what I constantly refer to as taking charge of your marketing destiny. Stop relying upon others. When you own the content, you own the answers, you own the website, you own the result. And even if Google was to go out of business, you still retain all of the work that you’ve done in the past, very similar to people who created really deep sales manuals 20 years ago.

[00:30:16.610] – Robert NewmanGo ahead.

[00:30:17.490] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, can I ask a question? Because I’ve been dying to ask you, as you were saying this in the second half of this show, do you think it’s the right question to ask you? Because if I was looking at one of these higher platforms like Boomtown, if I was looking either to change ship or I was looking at that higher level of provider, I don’t know if they’re aware of this. I really would be looking at a custom WordPress website, follow up boss and hiring a team. If I was looking for paid advertisement over on Facebook, Google, I’d be looking to hire agency a team. If I couldn’t run it in house, I’ll be looking just a higher team to run and utilize something like Follow up boss with my own website solution. The reason why they look at something like one of these higher end solutions is it they just offer Swiss Army knife in one can in one place, and that’s the real attraction. That’s why they go there. But they don’t understand some of the drawbacks which you’ve outlined in this show.

[00:31:46.370] – Robert NewmanActually, usually it’s ease of use is the idea that they’re sold on. Almost always it’s ease of use. We have a mechanism. You use our mechanism. It’s a guided mechanism. You’ll get business that’s simple. But it isn’t. It isn’t that simple. There is actually no provider that does a very good job of selling somebody correctly when they walk through the door. And everybody learns that the hard way, which is why we have a podcast, why I have a business, likely why you have a business. They’re not knowledgeable enough on the sales side to educate people when they come through the door about how big of a gap there is between a tool like Boomtown and making a profit off it. You must have a disciplined salesforce using that tool correctly to get value out of $1,000 a month CRM, full stop. And you got to train everybody on it. Now, I will say this. Boomtown is easier to learn than KVCore and most other tools. But is Boomtown easier to learn than follow up boss? No. So guess what? You have a better option at one 10th the price. That’s where these big teams don’t know that they don’t know that.

[00:33:01.660] – Robert NewmanThey don’t know. And follow up boss is not in the business of marketing themselves that way. Their I market follow up boss better than follow up boss markets follow up boss. Follow up is just like, hey, we’re CRM. Come check us out. We do good for real estate, right? They don’t say no. We can effectively step up to the plate and be as just as good of a CRM as Boomtown. We can effectively step up to the plate and take your team of 50 and give them a dashboard to look at. And you can watch everybody placing calls out of follow up boss. Same thing as Boomtown. You don’t really get told that there’s nowhere that their marketing really clearly identifies that. Whereas with Boomtown, they clearly are in your face all the time saying, all the best and biggest teams use our system. It’s so easy. It’s so nice. Give us $1,500 a month just to start.

[00:33:56.090] – Jonathan DenwoodTo be honest, you probably got more experience of this, I don’t know recently, how difficult or how easy is the follow up API to integrate with a WordPress website? Then one more time, how easy is it to integrate follow up boss with a WordPress website?

[00:34:19.910] – Robert NewmanSuper simple. They give you like a pixel. The same way that Facebook does help if you have a team like to do it, because people get confused about inserting pixels and headers on websites. That’s just the way of it. That little. Piece might daunt like 50% of the people. So if you want to spend $100 and have somebody off fiber install the Pixel for you, do that. It’s still easier and still cheaper by far. I will say this, there are systems out there like Sync and KV Core. Here’s what KV Core has going for it. KV Core now has the largest open source digital library of training of any system I’ve ever seen. You can find so many different training videos on how to use KVCore. It raises my estimation of the platform. Not because the platform has changed or any of my technical reviews have changed, but because if you get enough help, you can be successful in even bad systems. If you just have somebody pointing out every pitfall and everything that they had to work around and giving you the solution and bite sized pieces, it becomes much easier. Like anybody could be successful no matter how complicated or difficult the system, because other people have gone out, tried, failed, learn from it, and then educated you without you going out, having to try and fail.

[00:35:46.810] – Robert NewmanAll you got to do is do the learning. That’s kind of true of any platform, really. Now, maybe some platforms have a higher learning curve than others, but KV Core has hundreds of videos that I’ve been able to identify, at least 20 or 30 of which are being done by qualified people using the platform, achieving success out of it. So they’re giving you tutorials. They’re giving you tutorials now Boomtown doesn’t have that. Follow Bus doesn’t have that. Sync doesn’t have that. KV Core stands alone because all the guys and gals from EXP who are making recruiting money are using KV Core because it’s an easy platform to install. Like they can give it to you for $25 a month. KV Core is going to continue to be their go to platform until somebody else creates just as good of a platform and allows you to add agents to it for an inexpensive amount of money. Sorry, I went off on one there, didn’t I? My bad. John.

[00:36:46.370] – Jonathan DenwoodNo, it’s just interesting because I truly mean this list of some views. If I was got to the stage where I had a reasonable budget, I would honestly look at WordPress, Fire up Boss and then just running the campaigns. There are some specialized agencies that will run the campaigns for you through Google or through Facebook that specialize in working with brokerages and power teams. There’s about three or four of them out there where you’re not being locked into a specific platform. I’m a bit puzzled, but I’m puzzled, but also I totally understand because it’s just a more it’s just the ease of use argument supposedly, isn’t it? Which you outlined, right?

[00:37:55.750] – Robert NewmanWhich is not a real argument. But that’s why I do the videos that I do. That’s why I do the education I do, is that people don’t realize that. So I’m slowly god, it takes a lot of time, John, but I’m slowly chipping away at that old block, letting people know you’ve been sold a bill of goods. My friends and the people making these platforms like Boomtown has been doing this for ten years. They know what they made. They made something way ahead of its time. Ten years ago, they’re way behind the times now, ten years later, they’ve updated. Almost not at all. They understand that their market momentum is what propels them.

[00:38:36.950] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, I think it just depends because, basically, we’ve done these reviews. I think what you would say about Boomtown is the actual website is the same template, it’s the same solution. They don’t really customize it very much. And then the back end, I think you’ve said, and I would agree, that it’s one of the easier ones to use. And the normal functionality, which is around texting, and sending out emails, so you can keep in contact with the list that’s inside it, gathering information. But the bit that’s extra that they can help you run in that is the actual campaigns, isn’t it? Having the CRM platform isn’t going to produce a client paying a commission check. It provides the organization. But the campaigns, if you’re going to go down the paid route, it’s a campaign that can provide the traffic, which then hopefully will be converted into the system and then converted into a commission check, isn’t it? I don’t really think a lot of people understand the different bits, do they?

[00:40:06.450] – Robert NewmanI would agree with that. But, ladies and gentlemen, we can deep dive into some of this on another episode. Just so that you know, the idea behind this was the market is changing. Your lead generation and marketing goals should definitely be looked at now, this year. Right now, as you listen to the podcast, I am unsure of that. There’s no doubt that you should re-examine it. I’m not telling you to take action. I’m not poopooing your existing marketing company. I am saying, dear God, everybody else is re-evaluating. You should be too. All right, thank you so much for tuning in for us. For those of you who made it for your first show ever, god, what a great show for you to fall on. Thank you. For those of you who are tried and trued and loyal listeners who tune into John and I, I know you guys are out there, you’re very quiet, but there are thousands upon thousands of you. So thank you so much. We really appreciate it. We’re excited about 2023. I’m speaking for John. John, if you do want anybody, if you’d like to close out the show in your own way, or if you’d like people to reach out to you, find you, whatever, how would they do that?

[00:41:13.210] – Jonathan DenwoodThe best way is just to go to the website mailhyfenwright.com, and you can book a chat with me or add them through the website we’d love to help you out. Back. Over to you, Rob.

[00:41:22.870] – Robert NewmanAnd I am the same answer, except that my website is the same thing as what’s behind me right here. It’s inboundrem.com. You can go to my about page and learn a little bit more about me. And if you’d like to inquire about some of our services, feel free to use the contact form. But I do recommend that you read all the content that we’ve produced or read my landing pages before you do so because we are not the company for everybody. We’re different. There’s only one of us. So be sure to read the stuff on my site before you book an appointment with me. All right. Having said all that, thank you so much. We’re going to go. Give us a thumbs up. Give us a like, tell us we suck, and we don’t care. Just communicate with us. We appreciate it. Have a good one. Bye, you.

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How to Close More Leads with Text MessagingReal estate agents, did you know that communication is evolving fast and over 89% of consumers want to 2-way message with your business? Now you can leverage a business text messaging app that combines SMS and multiple messaging services. You can even enable your existing business phone number to send and receive text messages.

Aaron Weiche (WHY-KEY) is the co-founder and CEO of Leadferno, a text messaging platform for businesses to close more leads faster. Aaron is an entrepreneur founding and led multiple software companies and digital marketing agencies over the past 20 years.
Prior to Leadferno he was CEO of GatherUp, growing it to serving over 25,000 businesses and appearing in the INC 5000. Aaron lead GatherUp to an acquisition in 2019. Aaron speaks internationally on digital marketing, customer experience, conversion, and messaging.

Episode Full Transcript[00:00:11.290] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail Right podcast. This is episode number 366. Three six six. Those are magical numbers, and I mean that literally. We are here today with Aaron Weiss, who is the CEO and co founder of of Lead Furno, which is not even the only thing that Aaron has done. It’s just the latest thing that Aaron has done. He has got an epic track record. We’re super excited to have him on the show. Aaron, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience?

[00:00:39.870] – Aaron WeicheYeah, thanks so much for having me. An easy way to describe it, I’m a lifelong digital marketing addict. Luckily, I found the industry as it was starting to mature in the mid to late 90s, started building websites, started building digital marketing agencies, building websites and search campaigns, and along came social and mobile and all of those kind of things. And then after 15 years in that, I got into the software business and ran a company called Gather Up, which focused on customer feedback and online reviews. Brought that company to a great place, and we were able to sell it and exit in 2019, just before that little pandemic thing. And that freed me up to the next thing I wanted to get in trouble with, and that was starting a tool focused on conversion and text messaging. And that leads us to today In Lead.

[00:01:37.010] – Robert NewmanAnd for anybody that might be tuning into the show, either a recurring visitor or somebody who’s brand new. John, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself?

[00:01:47.810] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah. Thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mail Right. We build beautiful websites on WordPress. Plus we offer a suite of marketing digital tools that gathers and gets you more leads.

[00:02:01.180] – Robert NewmanBack over to you, Rob, and your field of host here is Robert Newman. I am the founder of Inbound REM and arguably the most experienced real estate marketing SEO consultant that’s working in this space today. So without any further ado, let’s get into a conversation with Aaron. And so, first of all, I want to actually ask you a little bit about text messaging and real estate, because at the pre interview part, you acknowledge to me and John that your wife was a real estate agent of 15 years. So I’m not sure if she still is or was previously, but how do you think the text messaging is impacting real estate digital marketing?

[00:02:50.230] – Aaron WeicheYeah, so she retired a handful of years back. My schedule, four kids, everything else. And as you guys know, the schedule of a real estate agent, those things didn’t line up very well after a while. So to keep sanity, she sunset that after a very, very successful career. She kicked my butt in the earnings place for many years as an entrepreneur and was fabulous at it. And I always say I modeled myself an entrepreneur or real estate assistant. Right. If you’re married to an agent. I always call it my wife’s name is Marcy. I called it driving, Miss Marcy where I’m driving. She’s on her phone, talking emailing, sending stuff, jumping out, putting in yard signs, hanging sold signs, the whole gamut. You live and breathe that industry when it’s a part of the career of your partner in life. So, yeah, within that, one thing I can say is texting has been very early into the real estate field because realtors have been using that as their primary communication. Their best days are not behind a desk. They’re out on the move and talking with clients and getting things done and meeting with people and everything else.

[00:04:04.260] – Aaron WeicheAnd they made that traverse from a personal channel to a business channel extremely early. And consumers, I think, really wanted it too, because that real estate purchase is one of the biggest, most stressful purchases for most people in their life. So they want that communication, they want that personal relationship with their agent. And so they were very quick and fast to adopt that. The area where I see that it’s really kind of grown is how you can keep that connection going and the different things that can be done kind of prerelationship and even post relationship with texting. And that’s where I think things have really evolved. So as we’ll get into and probably talk about as we’re focused on conversion, we really see this. Like, what better than be able to ask a question over text, right, from a real estate website, right from a listing page, right from a digital piece of content that they have out there and be able to ask initial questions, something that might be really detailed, really quirky. You’re just trying to get a feel for how they communicate, if they’re the right fit for you with an agent and things like that.

[00:05:13.560] – Aaron WeicheThat’s definitely one area and then the other, just being a way to stay in touch with your customers down the road and find out how things are still going, when they ever might be in the market to make a move again. You probably have notes on maybe what their dream property might be. So when you come across a new listing or something new you want to do, you want a great way to reach back out and be like, hey, I have something I think you might want to see or know about. So those are really the two ways that I see it, pre process and post transaction, and process being a really great tool to land new customers and to keep repeat business coming your way.

[00:05:55.410] – Robert NewmanI’ve made a ton of notes, but before I dive into any of that John yeah, sure.

[00:06:03.880] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. Aaron, I don’t know if you agree what I’m just going to outline. I think there was a lot of interest, but also I think it was in some ways overplayed about when somebody goes on a website, they would be engaged in conversation messenger, facebook messenger, that you’d be able to almost automate the onboarding of new clients. And then it would be almost all kind of automated. And there seemed to be a kind of message that the agent would be almost excluded. The personal communication element, first of all, would you agree with that? And secondly, how do you see your particular product and service helping agent? But not if you agree what I’ve just outlined. How do you avoid some of the miscommunication?

[00:07:23.070] – Aaron WeicheYeah, there’s definitely some good points in there. I think one thing, right, any of us that are a business owner, we run a business like time is the commodity, right? So we’re always interested in tools that can bring efficiency or even things that can be doing the work for us, right? The magic elves making shoes for us at night, leads being landed and matured and brought to the table with knowing all the details and everything else behind it. But interestingly enough, when we flip over to the consumer side, as consumers, we actually want the opposite of that. We actually want a personal relationship, we want personal touch. So what we’ve looked to do is kind of blend that. So to one extent, right, we’ve had years now of the promises of what Chat bots can do and automated processes. Obviously we’ve had some new developments with Chat GPT and some of the other AI things coming out there that are definitely taking a step forward. But I’ve still yet to engage and I’ve engaged with many chats as a consumer and then also in just doing research, always looking at conversion elements and I’m still yet to have any type of a wild feeling, right?

[00:08:30.610] – Aaron WeicheA lot of them I think, are there to placate the user and hey, where can we send you? Where there’s already content on the site or how can we just gather information about you? It’s not actually maturing a relationship, it’s not building trust and it’s not creating a personal one to one connection, especially in an industry like real estate where that’s what you want to have. You want to have trust with your agent. You want to feel great about their skill set and what they’re able to do and how well they understand your needs. So I think from that standpoint, it’s a lot of like hollow promise and we see a lot of people making the move, they’ve tried it and they’re going away from it because they couldn’t manage it the right way. It was difficult and tricky and so when they look at a solution like ours that offers business text messaging, they already understand how to text because they do that in their personal life, right? It’s for most people the top app that they use on their phone. And now you give them some of that promise of efficiency and a better working process because you have an app that automatically does replies to new leads.

[00:09:29.150] – Aaron WeicheSo it’s not trying to have a conversation, it’s just saying, hey, thanks for contacting us. We’re currently with a customer and we’re going to text you back as soon as we’re free and we’re glad you’re here. Here’s a link to view some of our listings or if you’re looking to sell, here’s some information on some of the things that we do. And then that agent is able to pick up the conversation and personalize it and take it from there. You also can have saved message templates, so you already have questions, answers, links to things pre saved, so you can call those up in just a couple of taps. So instead of having to type out an email, point them in a direction, answer a question, ask a question. You already have that built out. Maybe you need to edit it just a little bit. But you already have hundreds of characters typed out and you can send it within a matter of 2 seconds instead of two minutes to type all of that out. So we’re really still focused. We want to make that human connection happen. We want to make it pleasurable for both sides, efficient for both sides, and make people feel like they’re really being taken care of in the personal channel that texting is, instead of a robot is trying to help me jump through these hoops and collect all my information as just a kind of a glorified lead form.

[00:10:36.600] – Aaron WeicheSo that’s how we see that a little bit different. Can those things change and will they possibly take more steps forward? Yes, but still, at the end of the day, and I’m sure every agent would agree, like, getting me in touch and giving me a line in that prospect is really going to be the best bet for me to show off my expertise, customize the experience for them and help them achieve the outcome that they’re looking for.

[00:11:00.610] – Jonathan DenwoodFrank Sarah, that’s a fantastic answer.

[00:11:06.210] – Robert NewmanSo your skill and experience as an entrepreneur is really showing in this call because when we first set this interview up, I thought you were just another sequential text messaging sender, which I got to be honest, I am not a fan of, nor am I a fan of what I’m seeing. It due to the prospects inside the real estate space and just for those people listening, because Aaron’s smiling and he’s laughing, but you may not like if you’re listening to the show, you can’t see that. But for everybody listening to the show, there’s plenty of people out there, like using Wailopo type services where you sign somebody up for something and then you basically get entered into a behavioral sequence of text messages that get sent to you. If you trigger the right responses from the system, you can actually get as many as 30 of these messages in as little as one to four weeks. To me personally, as a guy that lives and breathes off his cell phone. Anybody that’s going to send me 30 messages, including the DNC and everybody else, I hate them. I flat out hate them. There is no other way to describe my feelings on the subject other than hate because I have to respond to my phone.

[00:12:22.860] – Robert NewmanSome of these guys I don’t quite feel comfortable blocking, but at the same time, they send me so many messages, I’m like, what are you thinking? So that’s not what you’re describing here. And I’m curious to know you’re laughing and you’re smiling. So just briefly, what do you think about those services that are doing behavioral or mass testing as part of a sales process?

[00:12:50.310] – Aaron WeicheYeah, so this is like one of those areas where I definitely have a soapbox that I’ve stood on and continue to stand on with this. So, yeah, you’ve done a great job upon hitting that. So here’s the high level thing. I’ll frame this up again from both sides because number one, I just always believe in that software should be a win win for both the business and the customer, right. Not one sided because that’s ultimately not going to work. So when we look at it from the business side and this means no on a fence, but the simple phrase sums it up for me, a fool with a tool is still a fool. Right. And if you don’t have the right strategy and you’re not looking at this for the right way and the right reason, you’re going to do the wrong things with it. So businesses get a hold of, let’s just call it a text marketing or SMS marketing tool like this and they’re like, great, I can pound people with buy now, you need to work with me, do this, do that, everything else. And what they’re failing to realize is you have a connection to them by having their cell phone number.

[00:13:51.520] – Aaron WeicheThat is their most personal communication channel. And you’re willing to go through and burn that and get blocked because you have this automated series you want to put in front of them or you want to let them know about something. Right. Not in real estate, but in retail business. We see this with 10% off, 15% off, this sale, that sale, everything else. And so this could be a customer that if you nurtured them the right way and you had strategic one to one touch points and conversations you were smart about, could be an extremely valuable customer to you. But you’re going to trade that for burning them over being able to fire them off a bunch of messages and you convert 1% or 2% of that entire base that you’re sending out to. So that on the business side, I think is ridiculous. And then on the consumer side, all you’re doing is, if anything, you’re going to make them feel like, I felt good enough to give you my number and I thought I was going to get value out of this. And now you’ve completely sunk that value, right? You’ve made me feel like you’re only after sales.

[00:14:50.200] – Aaron WeicheYou’re only after to kind of hound me. It’s going too far now. And now I’m going to block you. So now even if you came to me with something great, the same, whatever else, I blocked your number because I was tired of receiving these and that was the easiest way for me to stop hearing about you. So I totally agree with you on these things. And businesses just have to be smart in treating their customers the same way they want to be treated as a consumer themselves. And if you follow that rule, you’ll likely avoid a lot of these pitfalls that are there. That being said, there are ways and the right ways to do some of these things with automation. But again, you really need to be smart about how the customer is going to receive it. And you need to think smart about not just getting that one sale you’re really after, but making this a lifetime customer, making this person a brand advocate that’s going to refer other people to me or write great online reviews for me. That’s your multi headed goal there, not to be able to fastly funnel them through a sales process and try to get them to buy now.

[00:15:50.350] – Robert NewmanSo when we come back, we’re going to go to our break. Aaron, that was incredible. So incredible. I have some things I’d like to say and I am going to get on the soapbox for a second.

[00:16:00.610] – Aaron WeicheWe’ll rant away.

[00:16:02.290] – Robert NewmanBefore I do, we’re going to go to our break. And when we come back, some of the reports that I am going to have is the idea of the centric idea for all real estate agents everywhere about how we need to start valuing our data differently. Okay. It’s so incredibly important that everybody do this. It’s actually in every service industry, not just real estate. But since John and I focus on real estate on this show, we’re just going to talk about real estate. But I cannot begin to explain to all never mind. I’m going to do it when we come back. All right. So without any further ado, we’re going to go to our break. We’re going to be back in what’s going to be about 2 seconds for you and we’re looking forward to it.

[00:16:51.170] – Speaker 3Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail, right? It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay. Get started today. Go to mail, right.com?

[00:17:16.170] – Robert NewmanWelcome back to the mail. Right, show. We’re at episode number 366. And for once, I don’t actually have to ask john, what the show number is, because those are magic numbers. Numbers divisible by three actually have placed in numerology. So this is going to be a lucky show for us and a lucky show for you, Aaron. I am convinced of it, John.

[00:17:37.250] – Jonathan DenwoodHe has to be very lucky for me to die. Is it?

[00:17:40.360] – Robert NewmanYou bunked your head before the show, which is true, everybody. And and now he’s got his little British cup in his hand. All right, so for those people, before we went to break, we were talking about aaron was kind enough to share his thoughts about sequential marketing, or text message marketing, and Mass, which is a marketing service that I strongly don’t advocate for. And here’s the reason why Aaron said it in his way. I would like to say it in my way, which is we are getting better and better. So for every guy out there like Aaron, there’s another guy out there that’s creating an app or a service or a piece of technology that’s screening your email, screening your phone screening. And when you get a message from somebody that you want to communicate to, text messaging is really great. And when you’re getting messages and lots of them on your phone, which you feel you’ve got to manage and nurture in a very concentrated way, there’s nothing that says irritating text messaging has become the new telemarketing, like where you’re getting these interruptive messages to you. I came from telemarketing. Aaron. I used to run some of the biggest call centers in the world.

[00:18:54.410] – Robert NewmanI have seen what happens to an industry when the industry ignores the consumer. We all think to ourselves, oh, I’ve got a million names, like, if you live in a big city and I can text all those people if I buy that data right? And 1% response rate is a lot of business, so let’s do that. What you don’t realize is that you are taking a very big audience, like 99% of them, and they’re becoming people that you can like, if you burn them enough, you’ll never get the chance to use that as a marketing tool again. They will simply block every message from anybody that they don’t know. And when that happens, the value, which is what I felt like you described, Aaron, and I do feel like you have a very incredibly valuable approach is going to be gone. We can’t use the tool responsibly if a whole bunch of other people have used it. So irresponsibly because, trust me, everybody, if you think that the federal government won’t eventually step in and start to create laws surrounding this, please do your homework and go back and look at what they’ve done with Telemarketing.

[00:20:07.560] – Robert NewmanBecause it’s illegal for me to call you. It’s illegal. I can get sued and fined by the FTC if I call you on a mobile phone. Just most people don’t know it. They just don’t realize that that’s the rule. And text messaging is still in that gray area. So as real estate agents, when you get your customers information, when you get somebody who registered maybe through a low value paid advertising strategy and they landed on a landing page, you force them to register for your site. For the love of God, treat that number responsibly. Do not enter them into a 30 text message cycle if you can avoid it, maybe ask a question or two respectfully and then don’t text them again if they so if they don’t indicate interest. John is dying to add something to this. Thank you for not jumping in and interrupting me. I appreciate it. John, give it to us. Give it to us.

[00:21:13.330] – Jonathan DenwoodI think it really links a signaling, isn’t it? I think what the key is, and I’d be interesting to see if you agree with this, if you put the right message in front of the right customer at the right time. That’s what really effective marketing is about, isn’t it? You know, I must receive hundreds of cold email, but on the other hand, there’s been a couple of subcontractors, that a couple of them still with me almost six, seven years. And the truth is, they contacted me through cold email, but they just done it. It was the right email at the right time, so it worked. And I think that’s what you and Robert just spewing out stuff and hoping it will stick isn’t probably going to work in 203, in the coming years, but sending the right message to the right person. So I suppose it’s really having a website or a system that provides enough signals so then you can send the right message out. Am I roughly on the right track there, Aaron?

[00:22:38.230] – Aaron WeicheYeah, absolutely. It’s why we’ve really focused on the qualities of using text as an inbound tool for the business, right? Not an outbound, not a blast, but how do we procure more one to one conversations? And it’s why we place these floating buttons that are always visible on the site, on the screen. It’s on your about pages, it’s on your listing pages. If you have an IDX solution and you’re able to configure these buttons to say, like, have a question, we’re just a text away and it maybe has your review rating on there, any other type of social proof. But the combination of the elements in our buttons are really to convert you, as we call it, from being a lurker on the website to being a lead. And so the main point of that is having that right message of we’re approachable and we offer multiple ways to contact us, because you can also connect our buttons into click the call or email us or fill out a request form. But we see by far and away people want to text. It’s the lowest barrier to entry to start asking small, specific questions that don’t get you anywhere more committed in the process until you’ve built your trust up high enough so that right message at the right time.

[00:23:49.450] – Aaron WeicheThe right message is showing you’re approachable, you’re trusted, you’re easy to work with, you have the channels that they want to communicate with you. And the right time is those buttons are always there on the screen, right? In building hundreds of websites over the years, I can’t believe how bad people mess up with just placing easy call to actions for the customer. There so many small business websites, the only call to action is just a contact link in their navigation. It’s such a waste of persuading or marketing to that customer to start a conversation with you. So, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And tying it in full circle to what we’re ranting about, instead of always looking at how do I do a one to many conversation that businesses think is so great and interested in how do I just crush up my one to ones? And how do I build that funnel right, so that I’m getting these one to one conversations? And as you guys hit upon, I’ve listened to some of your episodes, you were just talking about conversion and landing pages. Like you should be moving traffic from all these borrowed channels and all the other things out there into a property that you own right into your digital assets.

[00:24:54.900] – Aaron WeicheAnd then once you get them there, you need to have the right tools to convert them, right? Getting them there is half the battle and for a lot of people trying to double or triple or quadruple your web traffic is very expensive, takes time, there’s a lot that goes into that. And so you need to make sure you are milking every ounce out of that traffic. You are driving to your digital properties and being easy to talk to, being easy to work with and putting that front and center is exactly how you want to do that.

[00:25:21.350] – Robert NewmanFor the record, I agree with this. And I do think on my notes, I did put something down that I thought was kind of interesting, which is a text me now format, which I have actually not tried. Oddly, as a call to action on Inbound REM’s products. I’m you 20 years ago, I have a company, I do a few different things, but one of my inbound REM, the company that I am most well known for is that company still builds real estate website, still has these calls to action on it. I’ve noticed that what we are seeing a drift towards is people wanting to do more. Like let’s calendar a call. The same way that I schedule appointments with my prospects, like here’s calendar link, let’s do a call. People are actually more inclined to go through a longer process. I don’t have to email you, I’m going to schedule a call. But an interesting idea somewhere in the middle is text messaging. John and I have talked ad nauseam about chat bots. He’s for them. I’ve never had any good experience with him.

[00:26:26.970] – Jonathan DenwoodHe has well, most of my leads run two businesses, Aaron. And I was saying to Rob, while the business, almost 90% of the lead come through a chat, but I answer all of them if not one of my team is available. We make it clear that you’re not going to get a reply if you put a question in at 03:00, a.m. Pacific Standard Time, because there’s none of us around, so we make it clear. But when they do put a question in, they get a reply from me or another member of my team. It’s a person. In other words, it’s not a list of unsuitable questions that we’ve all been there, haven’t we? I was going to say my question. The other thing I’ve noticed, which is really important, is people are pre screening themselves before they even contacted you. They’re reading all the pages on the website, they’re reading the competitors websites. And I think they do that with real estate agents. They get some recommendations, they go to the website to find out about the agent, they pre identify the one that they’re going to do the initial outreach, and it’s up to that real estate agent to either get that first meeting or not.

[00:28:05.370] – Jonathan DenwoodAnd I don’t think there’s a lot of people in the industry that understand the clients are screening a lot more before they approach. What do you think about that, Aaron?

[00:28:17.310] – Aaron WeicheYeah, I mean, I’m of the opinion that you have to use every advantage you can, and content, I think, is one of the biggest weapons. I have been an inbound marketer my entire time. I’m building my second SaaS company without ever running a paid ad. I am not a paid acquisition guy. I am a write content, educate people, be there with answers and help build them up so that when they learn and they fully understand it, they’re going to go right to the person who helped them learn. Now, the real estate process is so important, and again, we’ve already talked about the trust with it that you absolutely need to be showing how you’re unique. What is it about your personal side, how well you know the area if you’re in a bigger city, how well you know specific neighborhoods and things like that. You need to find the unique content angles to really have yourself show up and be out there. Because, let’s face it, there’s enough tools out there where there can be thousands of real estate agent sites that all look the same. Some of them even use the same stock photography.

[00:29:20.110] – Aaron WeicheSo you need to personalize it and you need to show that for yourself. I’m also amazed. I was always thrown off and it wasn’t even as much when my wife got into it. But there are so many real estate sites that come up in searches ahead of that. Realtor is their own site. Right. And they haven’t completed the profiles on any of them. Those profiles aren’t linking to the site they currently own. They’re jumping domains every time they change a website provider. You just have this host of things where it’s like you need to be updating any possible inroad with the exact reflection of who you are and when they come to your site, not only should you have tools to understand what they do and everything else, but what’s your unique local knowledge? What do you bring to the relationship? Who are you as a person, family person, everything else that will make them identify with you? Right. It’s amazing to me. My wife was she was into triathlons. We had four kids, like all these things, right. And a customer would just say like, oh, when I read this about you, that’s what made me want to work with you.

[00:30:18.790] – Aaron WeicheI knew that you were the right person for me. So it’s not going to land you every lead, but you’re absolutely right. When we have so much content and so many things on demand, you have to put out what your unique advantage is and market that and allow them to take it in and make a decision.

[00:30:35.530] – Robert NewmanGreat. Sorry guys, I’m guessing you can hear me because I’m sorry, John’s, expression change. Okay. But my screen froze again. We would like to keep you on for an additional five, maybe ten minutes, but I have kind of a curveball question because you’re speaking my language. If John will allow me the I.

[00:30:57.440] – Aaron WeicheWould be go ahead.

[00:30:59.410] – Robert NewmanI would just like to ask you one broad question that isn’t specific to Lead Inferno, isn’t specific to me and isn’t specific to John. I am curious if we could use the bonus section to talk about what your vision for digital marketing in general is going to be for the next year or two as we enter into a changing economic environment. Would you mind kind of just free riffing and sharing your thoughts? Sure.

[00:31:27.840] – Aaron WeicheI don’t know where that stream of consciousness will go, but let’s put it together.

[00:31:32.210] – Robert NewmanOkay, hold on. So John, do we want to separate out the show and do yeah, the.

[00:31:37.090] – Jonathan DenwoodPodcast and we go on to buy this so I can watch on the YouTube channel.

[00:31:42.670] – Robert NewmanOkay, so for everybody listening to the show, we’re going to move the last ten minutes to the show. We’re going to get Aaron’s thoughts on this very broad topic and we’re going to put it on the mail hyphen, right? YouTube channel and maybe the inbound REM YouTube channel as well. So either one of those places you can check it out. In the meantime, Aaron, if you would like somebody to find you or your incredible company, how would you like them to do that?

[00:32:09.420] – Aaron WeicheYeah, head to Lead for no. Probably one of your best moves, as I hinted at, we write a ton, so click on our blog. There’s 50 plus articles. We’ve done surveys you can understand, data on how people view response times, where people are spending their time, why they like text messaging, all those kinds of things, getting to know our features. So that’s the best place. And still, currently, as of us recording this, I haven’t jumped the Elon ship. I’m very active on Twitter, so ask Aaron Wiki on Twitter. Happy to engage, respond to questions and everything else there. Beautiful.

[00:32:44.340] – Robert NewmanAll right, so, John, how would you like people to find you?

[00:32:47.500] – Jonathan DenwoodI’ll just go to the mail right? Website. You can book a chat with me or my co founder Adam, and we’ll be more than happy to try and help you out. Back over to you.

[00:32:58.250] – Robert NewmanRob and Inboundrem.com is my handle. Most of you already know that you can start on the about page or the Home page. Either way, you will find a very long video explaining who I am and what my position inside the real estate marketing space is. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. We deeply appreciate it. We hope that you’ll come back and give us another listen. We’ll catch you the next time.

————————————–

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

jonathan@mail-right.com

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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The post #366 Mail-Right Show: With Special Guest Aaron Weiche CEO & Cofounder of Leadferno appeared first on All-in-One Real Estate Sales & Lead Generation Solution.

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What Are The Leadership Skills Needed In a Difficult Market?Scott Agnew has dedicated his life to helping leaders discover their most significant potential inside themselves.

His passion is leveraging personal leadership dynamics to make a positive impact on the people around him.

The owner of multiple businesses, including several Keller Williams real estate market centers, Scott consistently ranks in the top 1⁄4 of 1% of profit share earners in Keller Williams Realty International.

Scott is a founding member of MAPS Coaching and was a key advisor in the deployment of the Recruit Select Training Learning Mastery into the KW system. And the author of Long-Term Leader: The Hidden Secrets of the Power of Soft Skills to Go From CEO To Successful Business Owner.

Full Interview Transcript[00:00:11.290] – Robert NewmanWelcome back to the mail. Right, Podcast? Ladies and gentlemen, today we’re extraordinarily excited. We have an incredible guest this afternoon, so I’m going just to read the title of this guest. It’s Scott Agnew, who is the CEO and operating partner at Keller Williams Realty, east Valley, Tempe, Arizona Park City, Utah, and KW, Utah region leadership and motivational training agent, business coaching, and life advancement. And the man has a list of achievements in a warm longer than my arm. So if you want to highlight any of those, Scott, feel free to do so. But that was my introduction, so why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience?

[00:00:51.070] – Scott AgnewWell, sure, I appreciate that, and I’m glad I’m able to talk with you guys a little bit about myself. I don’t talk about myself very often, so it’s kind of almost a little bit uncomfortable at times. But I’ll tell you what; I guess if you could summarize it, nobody, especially myself, would ever have believed I would accomplish what I’ve accomplished. But I owe it a lot. I owe so much of it to the amazing leadership that I’ve been able to learn from over the years with people like Gary Keller, of course, mo Anderson, a guy named Robert Kalinsky, bob Kalinsky, a good friend, David Osborne, Linda and Jim McKissick, Beverly Steiner. I mean, there’s just a long litany of people that have helped contribute to the overall success of this company, and I’m pretty honored to be part of it.

[00:01:45.490] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. And John, for anybody that might not already know who you are, would you introduce yourself to the audience?

[00:01:51.710] – Scott AgnewDan?

[00:01:52.060] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. I’m the co-founder of Mailhyphen Right. We build beautiful real estate websites on WordPress, and we have a suite of marketing tools that will help the agent get some great digital deeds back over to you, Rob.

[00:02:09.610] – Robert NewmanAnd honestly, I don’t usually actually introduce myself, but Scott, I don’t think you know who I am, so I will tell introduce myself to you as opposed to the audience. So I’m an SEO guy who’s been specializing in residential real estate for 14 years and as far as I know, I might very well be the most experienced real estate residential SEO consultant founder that exists. I have a marketing company that I founded called Inboundrem.com. You can see it right behind me. And I educate agents, lots of them, tons of them, but for free. I do inbound marketing style content where I give them the free digital tips and advice that they need to rank and Google my business, change their mindset as it relates to inbound marketing and real estate and a whole bevy of other things. So that’s who I am. Without any further ado, ladies and gentlemen, for the first part of the show, we are really excited to talk to Scott because Scott, after all these years in real estate, you decided, I’m guessing that you decided to put your knowledge down in book form. And you wrote a book called The Top Ten Mistakes That Prevent You From Being a Long Term Leader.

[00:03:21.710] – Robert NewmanBefore you tell us about the book itself, might you tell us why, after all these years, you decided to write? And especially a guy who just self identified, you don’t like to promote yourself or you don’t like talking about yourself, so why write a book?

[00:03:37.940] – Scott AgnewSure. Well, it was during the pandemic and I didn’t have anything else to do because I was grounded, I couldn’t travel. So just by virtue of having extra time on my hands, I joined a group of entrepreneurs. And I found one thing in common between all these amazing, successful, what I call fulfilled entrepreneurs in a network that I joined called Genius Network. And I saw so many human beings that were not thinking about their own profits or their own success or their own fulfillment, but rather they’re more focused on what they can do to help other people achieve what they’ve achieved and kind of what’s in it for them type of attitude. In fact, the founder of the network just wrote a book and I’m going to promote it because it’s an incredible book. It’s called? What’s in it for them? You’ve heard of the book called how to Win Friends and Influence People? Well, this book is about how to win the right friends and influence the right people. And based on some of what I’ve learned from the gentleman Joe Polish that wrote that book, I decided and I was inspired to write my own book.

[00:04:56.370] – Scott AgnewAnd the main theme around leadership, I wanted to take a much different approach. That approach was more about how to interact as a long term leader in the moment, rather than focusing on all the hard skills, the tools, the objectives, the plans and all those kinds of things. One of the things I have learned over the years, almost a plan almost never gets executed the way you write the plan. And so you’re always pivoting, you’re always making adjustments. You might even scrap a strategy and have to go back to your team and say, we’re not going to do that. And so long term leadership is about how you do that so that your team doesn’t put a noose around your neck or walk out the room. Right, right. Those are some key elements of being in the game for the long term.

[00:05:54.830] – Robert NewmanSo that leads me to another question, and then I’m going to hand one over to John. I’m curious. You are a man that appears to be, from everything I can see, at the high side of your career. So you are also talking about having joined a networking group while you’re at the top of that mountain and saying, I’m going to join a group of like minded individuals. How important has, like, mentorship been throughout the entirety of your you’ve now twice mentioned it in the first part and now here. So how important has mentorship been to you inside your career, would you say?

[00:06:36.910] – Scott AgnewIt’s been incredibly important. It’s probably been the main contributor to helping me keep my head on straight, stay focused, and more importantly, help me get in touch with the things that I really want and help me get in touch with the human being that I want to be. When I was my father passed away when I was eight years old. The book says I was ten, but the truth is, it’s eight, okay? And I grew up without somebody to kick me in the butt, somebody to hold me accountable, somebody to challenge me, somebody to, you know, what dads do? I didn’t really have that. But I had many figures in my life that filled that role for me and starting all the way back to Little League. And Mr. Frigy, who was my first coach, and then in high school after that, mr. Fulton, who was my basketball coach. And these gentlemen helped shape my work ethic and helped me understand what was, you know you know, there were times when I thought I was, you know, a four on a scale of one to ten, and they would say, no, Agnew, you’re an eight or a nine, you know?

[00:07:45.110] – Scott AgnewAnd they they helped me be more realistic about my, you know, what I was actually achieving, because I never really felt like I was good enough. That’s part of the reason I think people become entrepreneurs. They’ve got something inside them that they need to prove. And so mentorship has played a huge role in helping me get comfortable with who I am. It helped me write the book. I mean, that’s crazy, right? Writing a book on leadership? There’s been thousands of books written about leadership, and yet I wanted to write something that I thought was different about the how of leadership, not the what. And so the soft skills, I think, were incredibly important to me because I was taught by mentors. I was given a lot of mentorship. Dr. Jack Vandewowda helped me, and of course, one of the premier people that helped me was Gary Keller. He’s the guy that taught me how to not write scathing emails to people.

[00:08:48.250] – Robert NewmanHey, you need to teach John that. No, I’m just kidding. I’m just joking. I’m totally everybody, that was a total joke. All right, John, take it away, sir.

[00:08:58.900] – Jonathan DenwoodI’m so hurt, Robert. I really am so hurt. It’s been a rough year. You just finished it off so well.

[00:09:07.780] – Scott AgnewRob.

[00:09:08.680] – Jonathan DenwoodThere we go. Scott, from all the things that you probably cover in the book, what would be one that comes straight into your mind here and now that you would like somebody to learn from the book, read after reading it?

[00:09:25.890] – Scott AgnewYeah, well, I think the message of the book is very basic, it’s very simple, and that is, how do you increase your potency as a leader? And what I mean by potency is when you make a suggestion or when you give some guidance or when you offer some perspective. How do you get your people in a place where they’re anxious to hear what you have to say as a leader? I had a wonderful coach many years ago who taught me this, and it made sense to me. He said, in most accountability sessions or reviews or quarterly summaries, when you’re having those kinds of meetings with your team, and in my case, leadership team, because everybody that reports to me, they’re all leaders in their own right. He says he’s told me, he said 99% of the time, those meetings leave people feeling worse than when they came into the meeting. And it made sense to me because yes. And why did it feel worse? A lot of times you feel worse because you just feel like you’re not doing enough. And that’s when you go home and you start kicking the dog and your kids aren’t good enough and your wife isn’t supporting you enough, because you’ve just come out of this interaction that you feel like, gosh, there’s so much more that I can do.

[00:10:49.070] – Scott AgnewAnd what it does, it creates anxiety and it creates stress. And as a leader, it’s important not to have that kind of anxiety and not to have that stress. It’s certainly not to let that bleed into your interactions with your leaders because it flows downhill, right? Whatever you start, it will continue to pay itself forward. So it’s more about being inquisitive, and instead of being as a leader, being in a directive mode I’m going to use this word being a Requestive mode. One of the one of the superpowers of Gary Keller is all he does is ask great questions, and he’s there to learn. And as a leader, I’m there to learn. And what am I there to learn? I’m there to learn what my people are feeling, what their obstacles are, what their challenges are. And I’m also there to learn what their real victories are. What are they really proud of? They might be proud of something that isn’t part of my objective plan or their objective plan, but they’re proud of a win or they’re proud of how they move the ball forward. And it might seem small, but to them, it could be big enough to actually fulfill them and give them a motivation to really go out there and bust their tail at the end of the day because they realize that they’re cared for as human beings, not just for what they can accomplish.

[00:12:19.220] – Scott AgnewAnd I think in business today, especially today, you’ve got a scenario where the typical younger leader, if you will, they’re more wired around the emotional and psychological side of the business than they are around the competitive side of the business. And so competition versus collaboration is something I talk about in the book. It’s a very interesting topic to me.

[00:12:51.190] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, it’s a bit of a balance, isn’t it, depending on personality, style, isn’t it? Some people, especially on the sales side, they are really driven by the competitive element in office or a scenario where other types, they can sometimes be just as effective in sales, but they’ve got a very different style and they don’t particularly like that competitive side. Would you agree with that, or do you think I’m off track?

[00:13:23.920] – Scott AgnewYeah. I mean, when you look at the top productive agents in real estate, they’re task driven. We call them taskers. They do one thing, they accomplish one thing. They take about 1 second to enjoy their accomplishment and they’re ready to accomplish the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And they achieve at a very high level. They’re the they’re the type of folks that, you know, they’re in the top two 3% and they do, you know, 50% of the business. And that’s just the way it is. I mean, that’s the way it is in sport, professional athletics. Unfortunately, it’s probably not that way in politics. We can’t even find a one or 2% in politics these days. But if you really look at the difference in how they’re motivated, that level of agent is motivated by challenge. They want to be challenged. They want to be called out on their imperfections. They just have super high expectations for themselves. They have high expectations for others around them. And my book is ideal for this kind of achiever because the challenge that those top one, two and three percenters have is that while they make a tremendous amount of cash flow revenue, they tend to suffer quite a bit.

[00:14:50.820] – Scott AgnewAnd the suffering comes from having high turnover on their team. And so they’re constantly retraining. They’re rehiring and it feels to them, I think in many cases somewhat like a hamster wheel, right? The more they do, the more they’ve got to take care of everything. And they don’t have a sense of who they can bring into their business that could actually replace them so that they could still own a majority interest of the business and have a life. This is the kind of stuff I talk about in my book. Because anybody that has the will to build a big real estate business or any big business, the challenge they have is to be able to change their mindset and be able to enjoy it and be able to let other people have opportunities inside their business and then open the door for them to do it. And do it in a way where people trust each other and do it in a way where people get great results without a lot of friction or anxiety. Because after all, you can only go to so many restaurants. You can only buy so many pairs of shorts and have so many cars and so many homes and all that.

[00:16:05.410] – Scott AgnewWhat’s left after that? After that is you want to have a life and you want to have something that you can enjoy. Maybe you want to have a family and enjoy your family. So that’s why leadership is so important, because it gives you great leverage over your business.

[00:16:24.110] – Jonathan DenwoodThat’s fantastic.

[00:16:26.730] – Robert NewmanWell, ladies and gentlemen and Scott, we’re going to go for a break. When we come back, Scott, I’m going to give you an opportunity to talk about talking to the world at large. Our audience is 100% real estate professionals. So what would you want? The top three things that you’d want to point out to somebody about maybe the top three lesson deliverables you feel like your book might be able to help somebody with. Let’s call it that. What are the top three lessons that you might learn from your book? When we come back from break, I’m going to ask you to serve those up. And then if it’s okay with you, I’m going to ask some questions about Keller Williams.

[00:17:08.080] – Scott AgnewGreat.

[00:17:09.110] – Robert NewmanAll right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for staying tuned as always. Do us a favor, please, and give us a like wherever you’re watching this video, whether that be YouTube or your favorite podcasting service, we would really appreciate it. Leave us a comment. John and I always read them and always appreciate them. We will be right back.

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[00:17:52.150] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail Right podcast. John and I have done this well, not me, but we’ve done this 365 times in total, which is crazy. So it’s episode number 365. And today we’re here with Scott Agnew, who is many things. But what we’re talking about today in at least part is his book, the Top Ten Mistakes That Prevent You From Being a Long Term Leader. And then we’re going to spend a much smaller part of the podcast talking about what made him qualified to write the book in the first place, which is experiences at Keller Williams. So without any further ado, before we went to break, I said I asked the question of if you were talking to somebody who’s never read the book and maybe doesn’t even know who Scott Agnew is. What are the top three lesson type deliverables that you feel somebody might be able to pull from the book? Should they read it?

[00:18:41.430] – Scott AgnewWell, there’s really just one message, right? And yes, there are some lessons in there, but the one message is really communicate. Communicate with your people. Most people think they’re great communicators. However, when you talk to a lot of people and you ask them, hey, do you think your boss gets you? Do you think your boss understands you? Or do you think your mom and dad understand you if they’re a teenager, right? Or when you ask that question on the other side, most people don’t feel heard. They don’t feel appreciated. They don’t feel understood. And in fact, many really powerful relationships between colleagues and even between people that end up getting married, one of the common things that you will hear is, will they get me? They understand me. They know where I’m coming from before I even speak. They finish my sentences for me because they’re honestly listening. And so that’s the real message, is when your people have that, when you have that relationship with your people and they know that you get them, then the walls come down. And when the walls come down, then you start learning what you need to learn as a leader.

[00:19:58.760] – Scott AgnewYou learn what’s going on in the front lines. I can’t tell you how many meetings that he was in as a young professional where we would all get after the meeting, we’d go, God, they don’t know what they’re doing. Upper management doesn’t know what’s going on. Gosh, they’d have no idea what it’s like out there on the streets and blah, blah, blah. And that’s because the model for leadership then was the leader got up and had to be the smartest guy in the room and pontificate for an hour about what everybody needed to do, what their objectives ought to be, what their plans ought to be, and how they ought to execute. Well, that doesn’t work anymore. If you really want a team to be bought in, part of the execution, part of the plan has to be from them, and it has to be well thought through. And most of the time, you see leaders make decisions, and they don’t even think about the unintended consequences of their decisions. And I would say that’s probably one of my superpowers, is, look at all the different angles. Put yourself in the other guy’s shoes when you’re talking to him.

[00:21:09.770] – Scott AgnewWhat are their fears? What are their aspirations? As Jonathan say, what is their communication style? And put yourself in their shoes so that you can communicate on the same wavelength. And it’s like FM 101 versus FM 95. Get on the same frequency, and then your potency as a leader is so dramatically increased that it’s almost like you hit the beautiful notes instead of just singing loudly, if you will.

[00:21:41.810] – Robert NewmanOkay, that was beautiful. I have a follow up question, John, but before I do, do you have.

[00:21:48.930] – Jonathan DenwoodAnything that you no offer was a fantastic answer.

[00:21:53.300] – Robert NewmanHonestly, so do I. And the question that I have is, anytime somebody’s written a book and I’ve done the same, but I feel like there’s this long road that leads you up to a point where you feel like you have something to say that you’re going to put down in a book, right? It’s a long road. So I’m going to kind of try to touch a couple of what might be milestones upon that long road for you, which would be my questions would be, so you’re in charge of it or you’re a leader within this very large territory for Keller Williams. Do I understand that? Basically. So if you had to guess, how many people ostensibly are you responsible for leading or talking or coaching or whatever the right language is for that?

[00:22:48.630] – Scott AgnewSo that’s one of the mistakes leaders make, is they think they have to lead everybody, and really you don’t. What you’ve got to do is you’ve got to lead five to ten key people and then they lead everybody else. And so we have a saying, success through your best and brightest, right? Success through them. And those five to ten people might change over the years. You might have different people that come in and out of that. But that’s one of the things I’m very careful to do, and that is that I lead to what I call my span of influence, direct influence and direct potency. So I don’t try to lead everybody. I let my leaders there are people in Keller Williams in Utah that don’t know who I am. They might know my name, but they might not even associate with me at all. And that’s completely okay. My goal or my objective is not to know everybody and be the center of attention or be their hero. My goal is to make sure that I’m creating an environment where they can absolutely thrive. And if I get the right people in place and I give them the right support through direction, through effective questioning, through great consulting, through making sure they get the right training and have the right tools, if I support them, then I know they’ll go out and pay it forward into their environment.

[00:24:19.630] – Scott AgnewAnd so that’s how we’ve grown. We’re number one in Utah. We have number one market share, number one agent count, number one production level. And we are not a discount brokerage. We are a full service brokerage, which means that we are not the cheapest. That being said, I’m pretty proud of the fact that while we don’t go in cheaply, but we do go in with tremendous value, we kind of position ourselves in a way as the costco, if you will, brand name, great quality, but at a very competitive price. And so I’m pretty proud of that. When I started there, I took over a failing brokerage that had 21 agents. And today we have almost close to 1700 agents in Utah. And I didn’t do that by myself. I did that through getting in business with some amazing, incredible people. I could start naming names, but the problem is I’ll probably forget somebody. But they were incredible. Yeah, beautiful.

[00:25:29.850] – Robert NewmanI think that answers my question. And I appreciate it, but let me just make sure that I do understand how long ago was starting. You said the word start. So when I started, how long ago was that?

[00:25:45.820] – Scott AgnewWell, it was actually in 2001. That was when I first went up there. And I didn’t really get a strong foothold until about 2002. Took me about a year of interviewing different I went to different vendors and my question was, who do you know that’s quite influential in real estate? And what happened was I would get the same name over and over again from different places. And so then I made appointments with those people. And I remember the first meeting I had with one of my most successful legendary leaders in Utah of all time. Her name is Lee Stern. Anybody in real estate in Utah knows that name. And I was fortunate enough to have an appointment with her. And she sat down with me and she says, okay sonny, you got ten minutes. What do you got? And 3 hours later, right when our discussion finally ended, I made some promises and commitments to her. And I think if you would talk to her today, I think she would say that I lived up to every one of those promises and commitments, which was kind of tough at the time because at the time I promised being the entrepreneur that I am, right?

[00:27:09.120] – Scott AgnewI wasn’t even sure I could deliver on a couple of things that I promised. But I got in over my skis a little bit and I had to come up with some money and capital that I didn’t really have, all those kinds of things. I would just say that anything of great significance, the only way you’re going to accomplish it is if you find a way to get with and be part of other people’s vision too, and buy into what they want. And so often our visions are so aligned anyway, so it doesn’t have to come from the leader. I don’t have to be the smartest guy in the room, and I’m certainly not and I don’t want to be. I’d much rather be surrounded by people that are just excited and committed. Sometimes it’s for a cause. I mean, in Lee’s case, she was an absolute advocate for the welfare of her real estate agents. She thought of them as her family, like her kids almost. And she wanted to do everything she possibly could to set the stage for them to be successful and fulfilled. And that’s my kind of person. And not only did she have that rhetoric or that talk, but she had a track record to demonstrate that that’s what she actually could accomplish.

[00:28:27.800] – Scott AgnewAnd so to this day, I’m just so blessed that Lee and I were able to find each other and do what we did.

[00:28:38.230] – Robert NewmanHoly cow. That is the kind of gold that I look for when we do these podcasts and I deeply appreciate it. I’ve only got 14 years behind me in the industry, but I have had the chance to work with legendary names like Joyce Ray and people like that. And so you become part of the fabric, like the story of the industry that you’re within. Jeffrey Highland, who is unfortunately past people, you meet them, and I have always found that once you meet them, who they are is not ever who you thought they were going to be. Like, nobody ever prepared me for the fact that Jeffrey Highland was literally probably one of the smartest, most well educated building historians and architectural historians that to my knowledge, has ever worked in the real estate industry. I’ve never met anybody with the depth and breadth of knowledge that he had. So when you meet with him, you’re thinking, oh, I’m going to meet with this extraordinary sales guy, right? That’s what you’ve got in your head, the founder of Hilton and island. Then you meet this guy who’s just like a professor of this thing, and you’re like, holy cow.

[00:29:54.760] – Robert NewmanThat’s not what I was expecting. What you said about Lee Stern, I don’t know her, but I know her. But I know the repute, and I’ve never met her, never met her team. But I have heard through the grapevine, through Keller Williams. I’ve heard that name before. It doesn’t surprise me that she’d be like mama bear as it relates to her agents. Scott so John and I usually ask our guests if they I pushed off the questions I have about Keller Williams. He’s been providing so much great information. But I would love to do, if you’re willing. Ten minutes of a little bonus section and just I’m going to let John serve up the first question, which we talked about before the podcast, but I’d kind of like to key it up for the audience if you’re willing to give us the extra time to say we would like to ask your opinion about how Keller Williams is positioned, moving into the future, things like that. From more of a tech and marketing standpoint, which is what our show tends to be about. Is that okay with you?

[00:30:52.940] – Scott AgnewAbsolutely. Yeah. Wonderful.

[00:30:55.070] – Robert NewmanOkay. John, do you have anything? We’re going to go to the final break and move everybody over to the YouTube channel. Actually, you know what? Now I think about it. How would you like people to look you up? Like, if somebody wants to research you, want to research your book, Scott, how would you like them to do that?

[00:31:11.270] – Scott AgnewThe easiest way they can email me is Scott A@kw.com, and then I can get them a direct link to check out the book. Or if they don’t want to email me, they can just go on to Longterm Leader. Very easy to remember. So either way, Scott A@kw.com or longterm leader.

[00:31:31.140] – Jonathan DenwoodActually, I haven’t done this before, actually, but I think Scott is such a fascinating we just extend the podcast. Show Robert for another ten. We just extend it.

[00:31:43.630] – Robert NewmanOkay, so we won’t do these at the outro yet. Beautiful. Great. So, John, if you wouldn’t mind, if you remember the question that we talked about prior to the show, why don’t you serve it up? Because you are a little bit more graceful than I am, which literally is a rarity. Usually it’s opposite, but in this case, so everybody knows I kind of got shut down and John kind of got the green light, so.

[00:32:09.770] – Scott AgnewThat’S okay.

[00:32:16.730] – Jonathan DenwoodSo, Scott, what’s your fault? Were you surprised about what has happened to Zillow to Open Door and to some extent Redfin? They all to some extent, went into wholesaling. It seemed to be what they thought was going to be, especially with redfin going to be the future, that there was going to be a hybrid wholesaling landscape that was going to be the driver of their growth. Also Zillow obviously open door. That is their business model. But to all extent, to say that it hasn’t worked out, was you surprised or did you have a feeling that this was going to be the outcome when the market became more of more realistic? Put it that way. Shall I?

[00:33:22.670] – Scott AgnewWell, I’m not going to sit here and pretend like, oh, yeah, I knew that it was going to fail. But I will tell you, every year as we kept looking at analyze the financial, the financials of these companies, and they were losing millions of dollars. Gosh. Another one you didn’t mention is Compass. I mean, these guys have burned through $700 million. And basically the whole concept of trying to either displace or to go directly to the consumer without having a real estate agent involved is a very tenuous. I can see the aspiration because they see the dollars and the money. But as far as real estate itself, man, it’s an intimate business. When you buy and sell real estate, when you buy and sell property, when you invest, you want somebody you can call and talk to and you want to be able to trust that person. I mean, I don’t want to sound old school here because I totally believe that technology has its place. All of my clients look on Zillow for what their property is worth. Great, wonderful. I don’t have to send them the CMAs, and I don’t have to do all that stuff anymore.

[00:34:38.570] – Scott AgnewBut when it comes down to them wanting to buy or sell property, who do you think they call? They want to call somebody that knows what they’re talking about, that knows the pitfalls and the landmines and the unforeseen challenges and problems. And it’s a big decision whether you’re investing, whether you’re buying real estate for yourself, whether you’re in the commercial world. Everybody wants certainty. They want to know what landmines are around them that they either can avoid or walk away from. And that’s where professional real estate agents play such a vital role and all these companies that made the attempt to displace that, I think it was just a bad strategy overall, and it was certainly a case where it was profits over value in terms of the client experience. They poured tons of money into marketing where they had the we have a marketing company in Phoenix right now that’s taken the world by storm. They’re everywhere. And it turns out they have a 40% fallout rate in their transactions. They claim to have 11% of the market. They only have about four and a half percent because it’s all marketing. I had an agent the other day call me up and she goes, I’m going up against this big behemoth company.

[00:35:58.100] – Scott AgnewWhat should I do? And I said, we’ll just tell them you do the same thing they do. You just don’t misrepresent yourself about it. And they don’t. And she walked away with the listing and was happy and got it sold and did a great job for the client. And the bird still chirped and the air was still clean. Everything was fine. And that’s exactly what we’re faced with Wall Street. A lot of big bucks behind these companies. The amount of venture capital that’s been poured into these companies is mind boggling. It’s because they see the profitability, they see the numbers. But to access those numbers, we believe very strongly that the way to access that is through professional real estate agents who are fiduciary, who wake up every morning with their clients best interest at heart, who are there to serve as servant leaders, not as salespeople, who educate first and help their clients make great decisions. That’s what we believe. And I think that for the long haul, I think that strategy is probably going to prove to be pretty solid. I don’t see it any other way.

[00:37:10.250] – Robert NewmanCopy you well, a small adjustment, and I am only regurgitating stuff that I’ve read, but I think you were actually overly generous in the amount of money that you said that was lost. I believe the number with compass alone is actually in the billions. But I appreciate, as another leader who is oftentimes speaking on platforms, it’s always better and wiser to just say the least possible thing. You can’t get yourself in trouble usually, so I get it. But I will put myself out there, not you, and I will say, I think the number is much higher than the one that you gave. So having said that, I think the only John kind of skipped the question. But that’s okay. We’re going to leave it alone. If John didn’t want to do it, then I’m going to lean in on his wisdom and say, we’re not going to do it. But I do want to ask one other question, which is a burning one from me. I’m asking you one Robert Newman question. I’m curious to know how you feel. Keller Williams is positioned against more, and maybe this is a marketing thing, but more digitally focused real estate brokerages such as Realty One, EXP.

[00:38:17.390] – Robert NewmanThere has been a shift, a newer trend that is not compass, which is trying to do the same thing with a little bit better branding and a mobile app, in my opinion. So that’s what they were trying to do, right?

[00:38:28.210] – Scott AgnewYeah.

[00:38:28.840] – Robert NewmanYou do have a couple of companies with new ideas out there that are trying to do things in a somewhat different way. And some of those ways are almost entirely digital. Virtual offices, virtual, virtual everything. I’m curious to know how you feel if you can say no, if you’re willing to weigh in and kind of say, how do you think is Keller Williams is positioned against these other digital companies and why?

[00:38:59.600] – Scott AgnewYeah, sure. Well, things have a way of finding an equilibrium. EXP came out, and their big thing was there was two things. Number one is we have one statewide brokerage, which means if you have a team, you can have identical marketing throughout the state. You don’t have to have different signs, work out a different offices and all that kind of stuff. That was a point of friction that they removed for the agent, which for the top agents, the people building teams and those kind of things. And that was really a good move, and we kind of missed that one a little bit. We were hearing it, but we weren’t really listening. We were hearing it, but we weren’t listening. So that was one thing that they did really well. They also came out with an opposite position on physical space. Right. Their position was, we don’t need to have offices. We don’t need to have physical space. You can work out of a rented executive office or whatever you want to do. And that seemed kind of sexy and appealing in the beginning, but you know how I say things have a way of creating equilibrium and coming back together.

[00:40:15.910] – Scott AgnewI have a 20,000 square foot office building in East Valley. I have an 18,000 square foot office building in Park City, Utah, with three satellite offices up there, and we’re full. Agents like having an office space. They like being able to walk down the hall and ask another agent a question about a transaction or get some advice or pop into a training room or get on. Heck, if you just maybe you just want to have maybe at the end of the day, glass of wine with your fellow colleagues and you create a culture around agents being connected to each other. And that happens because it’s facilitated by somebody in that physical space who’s a leader, and that leader creates a tribe, and that tribe becomes strong. And that and and you have, you know, you have I have 60, 70, 80 agents in the same office. You think they’re a little smarter than every single agent out there thinking on their own, who are maybe they’re only texting back and forth. Or maybe the only time they get smart is when they’re in a Mastermind. What’s it like if you could basically have a mini Mastermind every day, right?

[00:41:36.020] – Scott AgnewBecause all you do is walk across the hall or meet somebody in your office, say, hey, let’s go to lunch. And I don’t think that’s the end all answer. I think you still have to have an amazing presence in the digital space, but it has to be physically enhanced. I believe that. I don’t believe it’s one or the other. I think it’s both. And you’ve seen Amazon. Apple isn’t virtual. Apple has stores. Amazon has stores. Now you’re going to see that trend, I think, go back to digital space with physical enhancement and that Keller Williams is positioned beautifully for that. We’ve got a technology platform called Command that had a little bit of a rocky start when it was launched, but we’ve been busting our tail for the last 18 months, and Gary Keller just flat came out and said, listen, we’re not even going to talk about Command until we’ve earned the right to. And he’s poured so many resources into this, and he has so many smart people working on it. We have two people, Matt Green and Chris Cox, who are just I mean, they have been dedicated to nothing but making Command completely stable, completely functional.

[00:42:53.680] – Scott AgnewAnd at the upper end, there’s a small portion of upper end limitation, but for 98% of our agents, command is a beautiful platform and it can do everything they needed to do. So we’re excited about our digital future, for sure.

[00:43:10.030] – Robert NewmanWell, I will say this I’m a transparent person, so transparency, I raised some doubts at the beginning of the show, which I’m not going to go into, but I will say that I raised some doubts and I wanted to also say, contrary to that, to you. And while we’re live, I do think that in terms of what I’ve seen, because I have seen command and what I’ve seen, and that’s what people follow me for. Scott, you don’t know me, but I do deep dives into everybody’s platform on my website, like, use the platform and show it KVCore, which you guys used to use before you got Command, and just boomtown and sync and install the big platform. So I go deep down, I haven’t been able to do that online yet with Command, but I have seen it. And so I will say that in terms of the tools that are being provided by an actual brokerage, it is somewhat out ahead of everything else that I’ve seen. I haven’t seen anything similar coming out of Compass or any of the other big name brokerages. Keller Williams, not to my surprise, is the only brokerage that I know of for certain has invested the kind of time and resources that you’re alluding to.

[00:44:24.230] – Scott AgnewWell, yeah, everybody else has thrown in the towel. They’ve all gone to contract technology. We’re the last one that has our own technology. I don’t say that every piece of technology is our own. I mean, what we’ve done, though, I think it was brilliant. And this was the pivot we made a couple of years ago with Command. Instead of trying to be the all inclusive, now we partner and we utilize all the best partnerships with companies like Sync and Boomtown, and now that’s integrated. And Command is like the central command center with all these companies that are very good in their niches. And we’re marrying those niches into the central hub of Command and then using the cloud and AI to help come out with better marketing strategies, better customer service follow up, better anticipation of what makes a house sell or how you can buy a house better. All these kinds of things are what the AI function of. Command is eventually going to give many really good insights to the agents. And with our consumer platform, the consumers are going to benefit from that also. And we’re not trying to be the only place you go, but we do want to be the place.

[00:45:51.160] – Scott AgnewIf you do go, you want to stay there. We provide this platform to our agents for a nominal fee every month, and it’s very powerful. So again think of costco. And not everybody wants to shop at Costco, right? I mean, that’s that’s not that’s they’re not the end all, be all, but I think you could say Costco is the number one distributor of blueberries and strawberries and bananas in the world, and that’s because they provide a great value, and there are many other things Costco is famous for. Gary Keller’s always had the strategy of bringing the most value he can at the lowest possible price that he can. But he won’t sacrifice value, he won’t sacrifice quality, but in many cases, he will sacrifice his own profit. If real estate agents out there knew Gary like I know Gary, I think, man, I think it’d be game over. He’s one of those guys like the guy you were talking about, who you met that was one of the wisest guys in the developing world. Yeah, that’s exactly my feeling around Gary I’ve ever met.

[00:47:18.430] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I’ve listened to his Red book three times, and I forgot when he published that. But I still feel it has a great deal of value and relevance, even in 2022.

[00:47:35.570] – Scott AgnewYeah. The strategies are the same. The tactics are different. You no longer pop a cassette tape in and listen to it. Right. The tactics are now different, but the strategies have not changed. It’s staying connected with your clients. It’s working. You haven’t met turning them into Mets, turning them into advocates. That is a strategy that will be forever and ever. And where Keller Williams is starting to shine now is, in a higher level way, is the execution of those things. Because it’s one thing to have the theory, the strategy, but it’s another thing to have the tools and the expertise and the intelligence to execute and the discipline to execute. We’ve got so many programs that we can just plug and play with our agents now. So they’ve been vetted. We know it works. We know they’re going to waste a bunch of money because there’s so many programs out there. We’d like to kind of be like the place you go where you know that everything on the shelf is really quality.

[00:48:48.730] – Robert NewmanWell, Scott, I got to say, I have had the incredibly good fortune of meeting a couple of people that are close to Gary, and you are similar in all of them to that. I’d follow you into battlemen and I’ve seen that drip down from Gary to his people. I’ve seen Gary speak. I’ve been to Keller Williams reunions. But you know those sticks, he’s got 10,000 people trying to come up and say hi to him. So I’ve never met the man. I’ve seen the man, I’ve seen him speak, I’ve listened to his stuff, I’ve watched him on video. Same thing as John, but I’ve never met him. I have met a couple of people like you who have been close to him and they all say the same thing. Every single person says the same thing, which is a one of a kind leader, a one of a kind thinker, and he values his people like almost nobody does inside the real estate space.

[00:49:45.370] – Scott AgnewYeah, I appreciate you saying that and I think podcasts or shows like yours that help get the word out are fantastic and I appreciate the opportunity to be part of it today. I enjoy you guys a lot and thanks for giving me such great questions and giving me a little bit of a platform to pontificate a little bit, but I hope it didn’t come across that way.

[00:50:09.480] – Jonathan DenwoodOh, no, not at all. Scott, you must come back. Hopefully you will come back in the new year because you’ve been a great guest. I’m sure Robert agrees.

[00:50:19.050] – Scott AgnewYeah, that would be nice.

[00:50:23.350] – Robert NewmanA lot of fun. John will tell you. Never mind. I do these things for these moments where somebody like, lights my fire and gets me really excited and you’ve done that. But let’s wrap the show up, gentlemen. So, John, if people would we skipped this part a little bit earlier. I’m going to circle back around to you, Scott. But John, if somebody would like to reach out to you or ask you any questions, ask you your feelings on this particular show, how would they do any of that?

[00:50:54.710] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, please leave us a review on iTunes or give us an email, Robert, or myself; it’s always great to hear from the listeners and viewers of this show. If there are any topics or anybody that you specifically want us to interview, suggest them. Both me and Robert would love that. And if you’re interested in Mail Wright and a chat with me or my co-founder Adam, go over to Mail Hyphen Wright, and you can book a demo or a chat with me, and we’ll be more than happy to help you.

[00:51:28.460] – Robert NewmanOver to you, Rob, actually, one more time, Scott, for how you’d like people to reach out to you should they want to converse with you about your book, maybe just about Keller Williams. I don’t know.

[00:51:39.710] – Scott AgnewSure, you can find me on LinkedIn, and you can find me on Facebook. You can find me in all those places. Just Scott Agnew realtor or Scott Agnew KW. Whatever. But if you want to email me directly, it’s Scotta@kw.com, and I check my email 15 times a day. So I’ll get back to you, I promise, and send you a link to the book, a direct link if you want to do it that way. I’m on Amazon. Long-term leader. Scott Agnew on Amazon. Or you can go on the long term. Leader. There are a lot of ways you can access the book. It’s a fantastic read. I would hope that there was a book I read many, many years ago that I just kind of keep beside my desk and refer to it, even though I think I’ve got it memorized. And it’s a book called The Four Agreements, and it’s a very simple read. But whenever I’m communicating or getting it, and whenever I’m in a leadership challenge or the heat of the moment, I think back to that book, and I think back to how it helps me stay in this cool spot, this okay place.

[00:52:49.480] – Scott AgnewBecause leaders have a lot of pressure on them. They get pent up, and they have financial issues; they have cash flow issues. They might make tons of money, but they might have cash flow issues, they might have people issues, they might have vendor issues, they might have technical issues. They get hit with all these things. It’s hard to stay happy and go lucky and easygoing when you’ve got all these things shooting at you all the time. But my book is a book that I think would help. I probably should not have called it Long Term Leader and called it how to Keep Your Head on Straight because that’s really what it is.

[00:53:29.890] – Robert NewmanAll right, if anybody would like to look me up, you can do so@inboundrem.com. My name is Robert Newman. If you’re wondering how a long-haired, hippie-looking dude manages to get into conversations with notable real estate types like Scott Agnew, you can find out all of that on inboundream.com. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. We deeply appreciate your listening and viewership, and we’ll see you on the next show.

https://www.longtermleader.com/free-gift

https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-agnew-1733a32/

https://www.kw.com/

————————————–

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman

jonathan@mail-right.com

775-372-6322

https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa

————————————–

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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Real Estate Landing Pages That Actually Convert!Wishing your website could do a better job capturing leads? The perfect real estate landing page captures short attention spans and takes advantage of that tiny window available to convert a visitor into a lead. But what kinds of page elements, content offerings, and designs encourage visitors to offer up their contact information?

Start the show with general discussion points connected to the global key things that make great landing pages.

1 – Home Valuation Landing Page

Home valuation landing pages give property owners an estimate of their home’s value for free. To be fair, a small cost is involved: Site visitors must share their contact information. These leads are especially valuable because now you know these site visitors are at least considering selling their homes.

2 – Property Search Landing Page

Prospective buyers use property search landing pages, help leads look for available properties, and set up custom alerts. What is the cost of accessing these tools? Contact inf

3 -.Coming Soon Landing Page

Coming soon landing pages are ideal for buyers, especially in a hot market. Buyers give you their contact information in exchange for early access to the photos, details, and pricing of a property about to hit the market.

4 – Community Guide Landing Page

Like this one by Luxury Presence, the community guide landing page is one of our favorites because it conveys your value proposition to your farming area.

5 – Exclusive Buyer or Seller Content Landing Page

Offering helpful guidance in exchange for contact information is a tried-and-true approach for a reason. Real estate transactions are complicated, which is why offering a resource that hits on consumers’ pain points is a great way to start a client relationship and highlight your value as a trusted adviser.

Episode Transcript[00:00:10.510] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We’re here with episode number 364, the Mail-Right Show. My gosh, we’ve done so many of these. John and I have done so many of these together. Today, we’re going to take you on a little journey and try to explain landing pages. Now, John has separated out the subject by landing page types. I would like to talk a little bit about the premise of a landing page because I feel like the language is way overused, and we’re not going to help that in this description. But before we get into any of that, I would love it, John, if you would do both me and everybody else the favor of introducing yourself and letting us know who you are before you explain landing pages.

[00:00:54.940] – Jonathan DenwoodThat’s great. Robin. Rob’s been very nice to me because I’ll be late for this episode of late, and I’m normally not late.

[00:01:05.590] – Robert NewmanNormally, you are.

[00:01:13.540] – Jonathan DenwoodThe co-founder. We build lovely-looking websites on WordPress for the real estate semi-luxury market, and we offer a suite of marketing tools that help you generate leads from your lovely-looking website. Over to you, Rob.

[00:01:33.410] – Robert NewmanSo, first of all, I’d like to talk about that language for landing pages. The simplest definition of a landing page is a page that people land on. That’s it. What’s confusing for everybody is the many messages that you can get to have somebody land on a specific page on your website. You can have an email landing page because you can direct people to it from an email campaign. You can get somebody to land on a page in all sorts of ways. Recently, landing pages have started to have additional language attached to them, such as squeeze pages, and click funnel pages, as different people put different branding associated with something that is effectively still a landing page. It’s just a landing page that people land on. John and I are going to confuse the topic more by explaining different types of landing pages to you, which is ideas of pages that people can land on your site. And John’s premise for the show, which I agree with 100%, runs right along with all of my premises about digital marketing. How do we get an ROI from a page that people land on or a landing page?

[00:02:44.760] – Robert NewmanAnd John’s going to take us away and really show his stuff because he did the research, and he did. And I have what I do as an agency, so I’m the founder of my own marketing agency, and we use landing pages extensively, but we use them directionally, not to get the conversion. We use landing pages to send people to other places on the website. So that’s how I’m using a landing page. I’m not using it the same way we’re about to talk about, and I’ll explain that a little somewhere along the way. But John, the first example.

[00:03:19.920] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I just want to quickly respond to what you just outlined, because I’m in total agreement, which normally is the case, not always, but I see this, Rob. It’s very similar to the language utilized around real estate CRMs, because it’s just a general term CRM. There’s marketing CRMs, there’s sales orientated CRMs, there’s lightweight CRMs, there’s heavy duty CRMs. It’s just a very general term. And the same with landing pages, squeeze pages. Landing pages, very generalistic term. A lot of people abuse. It a bit like CRMs. If you’re going to use the landing page as a kind of conversion tool, then that’s the classical term. The other way is the layout, the landing page. Classically doesn’t always apply. But classically the landing page, you don’t have your normal navigation in the head or the footer. You only have one call for action. You don’t have multiple. But you could apply that to, well, optimized normal pages that you don’t have two to three different messages on the page. So there’s a lot of overlap. So let’s start with number one valuation landing page. So you’re offering either a cane system or a better solution, a more customized home valuation.

[00:05:03.710] – Jonathan DenwoodThis, to me, is the real kind of classic landing squeeze page that’s utilized a lot in the industry. I’ve got such mixed feelings about it because people say they still get great results, but I feel it’s been slightly used and abused. What’s your feelings, Rob?

[00:05:26.740] – Robert NewmanSo, as usual, I’m going to give off I’m going to write a lot of some stuff here. Home evaluation pages, where you’re using an automated tool, they still work. That’s basically what you’re saying when people come to them. Do they still work to generate leads and give you ad names to your database? And the answer is yes. Do they work for high value, high intent leads? Not that I’m seeing like I’m not seeing it somebody selling the home in a few years that gets trapped into your form, that reluctantly takes a communication from you. Sure. But I am seeing people using a variation of this that I really love, which is probably because I follow so many inbound marketers and inbound marketers, everybody, they add a lot more value than your average marketer does to a page. And I’m watching more and more people brace videos, something that John and I have talked about for ages, but now it’s actually happening. We’re finally watching a full embrace of video happening. And part of that is that somebody is leaving a trail like, this is my home evaluation process. And step number one, if you’re interested in involving it, like, you outline seven steps, a little video, and then at the very end of that, they’re still the same form, and then you input your information.

[00:06:43.270] – Robert NewmanBut I am seeing a mix where home evaluation is part of a longer, deeper, targeted strategy, and I’m seeing a lot of value coming out of that longer, deeper, targeted strategy. John, that involves the home evaluation tool.

[00:06:59.550] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I see where you’re coming from. I can see how that could work if it’s presented in the right way. On to number two, property search landing pages. Well, I think it’s going to be linked to what you just said about home. I think it can still work, but you just got to be a bit more creative and offer a bit more value. What do you think?

[00:07:30.040] – Robert NewmanI’ve taken them off my websites entirely, that’s what I think. I don’t use them anymore. I don’t use them on home pages. I usually tell my clients to take them off. I’m not seeing them on a lot of high performing sites that I’m looking at that are starting to do really well. The day and age of property search sites, they’re diminishing. Like they’re not gone. But you probably need to have a site as good as a real estate webmasters here, attractive in that category. WordPress. If somebody said, I’m going to do a property search site on WordPress, I’m going to be okay. If you really want to, I’m just going to say I don’t believe in them. John. That’s the simplest way I can put it.

[00:08:14.610] – Jonathan DenwoodHow would you classify a search landing page first? How would you describe it to our audience?

[00:08:27.110] – Robert NewmanWell, the way that we do searches, we do guided search. We drive you into neighborhoods and show all the listings for those neighborhoods and you’re getting a guided search experience on site. So if you’re doing a guided search experience or neighborhood search, like you’re seeing property search, when you say property search landing page, that is to me a bar where you can search for property. I’ve taken those off my site entirely. They don’t exist. So if you’re going to ask, how are you leveraging? The answer is really, truly, I am not. I have a single search function on my site, which is an advanced search function where somebody can fill out an entire form and not a bar and do a search. Not that many of my sites have that even in the top 50 pages that’s visited. Like, it’s usually an almost inconsequential feature on the sites that we’re building. So how would I define it? I mean, I don’t know, just like I did search bar, but I wouldn’t use it. That’s just me. If you’re using WordPress, I wouldn’t use it. If you’re using something really cool like Share Interactive and you’ve got everything on the site boiled down to neighborhoods or buildings or you’ve done something really specific with the site so that somebody can get a very drilled down piece of information, it might be interesting to have a search bar connected to that experience in some way.

[00:09:48.190] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, I agree with you. On to the next one. Coming soon, landing pages. I’ve seen more Facebook advertising where people really dependent on the condition of the market. Last couple of years, just getting something to sell was the problem. You could put it up and you’d be in a date in a lot of areas. You would have multiple people queries in other areas. So it just depends on market conditions and other factors. What’s your thoughts about Coming Soon landing pages?

[00:10:33.700] – Robert NewmanWell, again, I’m really glad that you put this one on your list because I have a case study. One of my clients in Los Cabos has development with a Coming Soon page on it, and it’s a top performing page. It is also a top frustration for them because they have they are getting leads. They’re getting a list of name and they’re talking to they’re calling these people up. They’re legit. So you putting it on this list is a very I couldn’t agree with it more. There’s just some marketing positioning, things that I think everybody would need to realize if you are successful with this strategy, understand that a certain number of people might be very excited for whatever development or building or thing that you’ve decided to put up. If your page is performing well, that is going to be because there’s some excitement about the community or the building or whatever it is that you’ve posted on your site that says Coming Soon. Sign up now to make your reservations or to get updates or whatever, however you’re going to position yourself. So my clients have dealt with a deferred development on the shore of Los Cabos.

[00:11:44.320] – Robert NewmanIt’s going to be millions and millions of dollars. It’s a super exciting project, but of course, as with many luxury things, it’s getting pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. And every time there’s a pushback, they’re reaching out to the entirety of their development list and communicating with these people. Then they’re getting calls because the level of excitement is so high. So they have spent a tremendous amount of time without even having anything to sell. There’s no unit to walk through or sell or do anything with. But from a marketing perspective, though, it worked. So, like I said, it has a place on this list. Just understand that with what you said, John, some people are not prepared mentally or marketing wise, like with how well the strategy will work and where the market is at. Even my client, who’s two extremely skilled entrepreneurs, and they haven’t said it to me directly, but I hear it in their voice. They’re, like, a little frustrated with how much time and energy that they’ve been spending on a thing that they can’t.

[00:12:51.660] – Jonathan DenwoodEven yeah, it’s unfortunate. Understandable, but unfortunate because Kelly Williams and the Bread Book, you know, the money is in your database. How do you know you’re going to drop a certain percentage of a year out of your database? So you need to keep filling that database with new possible connections. And that’s what you’re doing in one way with what has been established with this landing page. So it does have value, even though you can understand the frustration. But in my experience, and I think you would agree that’s hard for a lot of people to understand that, isn’t it?

[00:13:34.910] – Robert NewmanIt is indeed. Wow. Do you mind if I introduce this next one?

[00:13:41.440] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, sure.

[00:13:43.760] – Robert NewmanSo the next page John interestingly, had found somewhere a Luxury Presence page. Then he said a community guide landing page like this one by Luxury Presence. A Community Guide Landing Page is one of our favorites because it conveys value proposition to your farming area. Everybody does this differently. And the reason I asked to read this one is I use these pages on my site. This would be the closest thing to that gateway page that I mentioned to you. It is a community page that covers in broad a larger swath of territory, separates it out by smaller categoric areas, and directs people to those smaller categoric areas while still being very informative. And I use custom maps, I use custom images. I go very deep into what could very easily be called a Community Guide Landing page. That’s why I asked to intro this one. Luxury presence does it, too. We each spend, actually, a fairly large amount of development time because the quality of this page might connect somebody a little bit deeper into the lifestyle premise that you’re selling if they’re not already familiar with the area that you’re communicating to them about.

[00:15:03.710] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, there’s a bit of just before we go for our break, Rob, there’s a bit of overlap with this being Evergreen page, isn’t it? And we’ve spoken about Evergreen pages as well, haven’t we? To my mind, there’s a little bit of overlap. Would you agree with that?

[00:15:20.400] – Robert NewmanI would. So we’re going to go over our break, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to take a couple of minutes here. Do us a favor. Wherever you see us, wherever you hear us, give us a like share. I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from people that I’ve been getting shared meetings and that some of this podcast has occasionally been getting shared in real estate sales meetings for all those people who are brokers and are looking for ways to educate your sales team. Do John and I a favor. Drop us a line and let us know what you want us to talk about. Message John and say that you would really love to see XYZ digital marketing subject on the show, because I think that I could speak for both of us that we would love to get some feedback and help you out, right?

[00:16:07.240] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, we might.

[00:16:08.490] – Robert NewmanOkay, so we’ll be right back. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in.

[00:16:13.540] – Speaker 3Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need mail, right? It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads and a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a noquestion asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay. Get started today. Go to mailwright.com.

[00:16:38.660] – Robert NewmanWelcome back, ladies and gentlemen. I am here with my amazing co host Jonathan Dinwood. We’re super excited to be here with you today. We are talking about landing pages, which is a misunderstood term and if I had to stick with what the traditional term of landing pages, I wouldn’t be very excited about talking about it. Fortunately, John was really lovely in the beginning of the call or the beginning of the podcast and said, please take some time, explain all the different things that can mean. And some of those meaning types I really gravitate into, one of them was community landing page. But we’re going to move on. That was what we covered right before the break. Coming back from the break, we’re going to talk about exclusive buyer, seller content landing pages. Why don’t you take us through the journey of what you meant by that, John?

[00:17:26.740] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, it’s kind of linked to the last topic before you went to break because in my mind there’s a lot of overlap between this particular section and evergreen pages. They overlap because you’re offering guidance, exchange, consumer pain points. So it’s kind of quasi evergreen blog kind of scenario set up. Would you agree with that.

[00:18:11.910] – Robert NewmanBlog set up?

[00:18:13.450] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, because in my mind, probably not right more the Evergreen, the blogging, it’s time related, isn’t it? So I probably push that bit too far. So it’s probably the Evergreen in it evergreen page maybe.

[00:18:32.180] – Robert NewmanSo, Evergreen is a page that you write out and that you don’t change or don’t change often for many of you listening to the show, because some of you are. And I know this because I’ve gotten a chance to talk to a few of you over the years, which has been great. And I know that some of you are already in your own ways dedicated content marketer. So let’s just say that you have a 20 point sellers plan that you’ve mapped out over a 20 year career. That’s probably an Evergreen page, which is what John is talking about. You have to take the time to transpose it digitally and maybe you use some cool graphics or some cool white spacing to make it really like digestible. But you should have your own seller and buyer’s road map that is custom to you, to your sales approach, to your team’s approach, to your approach. It’s an Evergreen page on your site, right John? Yes. So that’s what John was talking about. Exclusive buyer, seller content, landing page. That could also mean in my head, exclusive could mean that you have an exclusive offer that gets a little trickier, a little hairy, just depending upon what state you are in, what the law is as it relates to your MLS.

[00:19:48.310] – Robert NewmanBut some places, including, I think California, have a cooldown period when you take on a listing. We have X amount of time to get between taking the listing and then listing it with your contracted MLS system. Right. So you could theoretically send an email out to all of your customers and before the thing is even fully digested into the MLS, you could already have offers on the property. Technically speaking, I’ve seen that work that way many different times in many different states. That’s definitely an exclusive offer. Like, pay attention to me today we have this house. Yeah, it gets listed in the MLS in two days from now. You’ve got a 48 hours exclusive. Right?

[00:20:30.140] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, when you were saying that you got this scenario in a more normal market where you could say, well, we’ve had great success in a particular area, here are some examples and we’re offering this exclusive package to those in this area and you can also prove that you got some prior success, that type of scenario. Do you reckon about that?

[00:20:58.640] – Robert NewmanI think that’s true. So that’s our final thing on landing pages. And I want to throw John and everybody else a curveball on the show, if he’s up for it. I didn’t think of this in advance and I apologize, John. That’s why I didn’t write to you about it. It just came up super recently. And here’s the thing that I want to point out to everybody that’s going to sound like a sales pitch. It’s really not. So something that I’ve been noticing. The second that the interest rates stopped rising, my agency got really stupidly busy. All my competitors that are dealing with direct marketing are slowing down and laying off employees. Everybody’s in trouble. They over committed. They’re offering these massive deals and discounts, trying to get sign ups, trying to keep their workforce busy. And I’ll explain why I think that is to everybody on the show. And this impacts you too, John. So I think that the reason for all of this is that when the market slows and direct marketing stops working and many of the people that are calling me right now are people that have significant budgets in direct marketing efforts, those budgets are not working, or they’re not working in like they’re coming back with maybe an even money return.

[00:22:21.250] – Robert NewmanThey’re just not working. They’re barely working. And in many cases they’re not working and they are literally losing money. So instead of throwing that money away, they’re deciding, now is the time to take control of my marketing. I can’t spend it anywhere else anyway and get a result. I might as well turn around and go to owning a product, getting rid of that really expensive golden handcuff thing that I’ve had for so long. And I want to say that that logic is 100% accurate, whether you call a guy like John or a guy like me. Now is the time. For all of you listening to the show, now is the time. The slowing market, the toughness with direct marketing trying to figure out where to put your money, where to put your time. Now is definitely 100% the time that you should be making moves in your strategy. Like I said, it sounds like a sales pitch, but I firmly, strongly believe it. John is looking really confused. Like, he’s looking super confused.

[00:23:28.940] – Jonathan DenwoodNo, I think it’s very insightful. I think one thing you got to clarify, not for me, but for the Listers, what you mean by direct marketing, you’re talking about paid advertising.

[00:23:40.410] – Robert NewmanPaid advertising. You go direct to the source. Direct marketing is where you go direct to where the audience is or you paid. Yeah, you’re right. Another way to say is paid marketing, search marketing. If you want to get in front of directly get in front of somebody, you’re going to pay YouTube, Pay, Instagram, pay Google, pay somebody, right. You’re going to pay them. And I can put an advertising in front of you tomorrow that’s paid advertising, search advertising, direct marketing. Direct marketing can also be other things. So you’re right, not the best language. So I apologize. But the idea is this. We all want to say that if we spend $1,000, we get X amount of return. Now, even in a good marketplace, you spend $1,000 a month with, like a whileobo or somebody like that, and 90 to 90 days to six months is when you should expect a return. That is not happening right now. I’m hearing case studies that are like 13 months, 14 months. When you start saying you’re going to wait a year to see a return on a new direct marketing or sorry, a new page search initiative. Man, that’s actually probably longer than an inbound marketing campaign or something that John and I would tell you to do, like blogging or getting your own website.

[00:24:58.010] – Robert NewmanThat’s longer. You’re looking at a longer timeline right now and a significantly larger amount of money, and you won’t own it, which is the nutty bananas part of that whole conversation to me. Sure, spend $12,000, don’t get a deal for 13 months. And by the way, you don’t own Diddley Squad.

[00:25:19.860] – Jonathan DenwoodWe haven’t discussed it for a long while. It’s also linked to the dirty thing that was known that wasn’t really explained, and that lead inflation, I call it the platforms. There was scarce at the beginning, but there was because of lead inflation. The actual quality of the lead was getting more worse, wasn’t it? The digital lead, wasn’t it?

[00:25:47.460] – Robert NewmanCorrect. And now they’re just not happening. They’re still bad, but you’re not getting that many of them. So there is a whole different shift, John, like a massive shift, and everybody’s noticing it, which is why I’ve tagged it onto the show. The shift happens fast. It happens very fast. And the shift is happening lightning fast right now. And this was luck. I think my original prediction about the way the market was going to work, I think it’s just going to turn out that way. I think we’re going to see the rest of the heat escape really high sales prices through the first quarter and then the marriage go round ends. And for all those people who are writing the last of that marriage go round, not seeing that many leads, but still getting a couple really high price deals off your paid advertising campaigns, great. Expect that to dry up. If I was all of you, I would be at least considering a backup option and dividing my budget barest minimum. Have a backup. Like, okay, maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m wrong, and I would be love to be wrong for a lot of people.

[00:27:05.150] – Robert NewmanBut you know what? Divide your money up.

[00:27:08.230] – Jonathan DenwoodWell, if I had a decent budget, I would really look at improving the website. I’m bound to say that. But I’m saying it from a quasar truthful place because I do honestly believe that. But I would really look at video, really look at my investment in equipment, but also a consistent way of producing video for my social media platforms and for my YouTube. Just getting as much video out there and having a production plan and having some basic equipment in my organization, my boutique brokerage, my power team, but really having understanding about how many videos we’re going to produce every week, every month, and really having a go at it. What do you think about that?

[00:28:02.210] – Robert NewmanI couldn’t agree more. Like I said, there is truly a groundswell happening where realtors have come to the realization that marketing has changed. It’s finally happened. The only strongly performing section of marketing that I see is messages passed through Kinesthetic, learning things that’s all really fancy language for saying that people are embracing the idea that they want to see you before they call you. Video not just a picture of you, not just a resume. They would like to see what you have to say. They’re getting spoiled with it as it takes hold across throughout the market. In almost every market, somebody doing searches or somebody looking around does have the option of running across. Somebody using video as a tool to explain the neighborhood, to explain a lifestyle, to explain themselves. And if that person makes a connection with them, they’re getting the call, man. That’s it. Full stop. To get in the call. I get calls off my profile for real estate stuff. I’ve sent out two referrals this month alone. All right, because people like, oh, you seem like a cool guy. I can tell that you are a marketing company. I know you’re not a real estate agent, but you must know a few.

[00:29:13.000] – Robert NewmanSo let’s call you. I shit you not, John. I get them. I’m not a real estate agent. I clearly say it everywhere. But no, still get the call because they like me. And trust me, that’s the message for all of you who’s listening to the show. You’re going to have to embrace video if you want to really separate out, like, break the mold a bit.

[00:29:43.250] – Jonathan DenwoodAnd I think just to finish off, I’m not going to be blase about what next year is going to be like if you’re a real estate agent. But the good part of it is that I think the days of somebody thinking, oh, I can hire my uncle that just got his license six months ago, or Auntie Gerald, or this friend of a friend, and I don’t care, it’s just a friend, and they be able to sell it. I think when people have got a property and they’re looking to sell it, they’re going to do a bit more research and a little bit effort about who the agent is that’s going to represent them. Do you think I’m on the right role there a little bit, or am I deleting?

[00:30:34.040] – Robert NewmanI agree with there’s an element of what you say that I couldn’t agree with more. And I’ve used the analogy many times in a call, and my dad just proved this to be somebody in our family passed the property, went into probate. My dad had to sell it, and he ended up doing a shit ton of research on the person that he was hiring the family. He’s getting pressure from his brothers. Everybody’s pressuring them to sell the property fast because they just want the money and they want to do something with the money. My dad is like, that’s not going to stop me from calling referrals. Like, I’m talking he drilled deep down into it, John, and the reason that he drilled so deep into it is he’s like, hey, we’re going into a bad economy. I can tell that this is going to be difficult. So I want to find a Realtor that’s really going to fight for every last penny of value, and I’m going to do the extra work to find that person. And he read reviews, he fucking ran real estate licenses and then looked at what they said. I hadn’t even thought of that.

[00:31:37.670] – Jonathan DenwoodNo, I haven’t. I’m amazed at the moment. I just thought it was market conditions, really. Rob I’ve always been a little bit but statistically, it wasn’t only market conditions. I’ve always been a little bit surprised about this industry, that people aren’t a bit, but I think it’s going to change. I think that’s a good thing. But people need to be a little bit fussy about the agents that they hire.

[00:32:08.390] – Robert NewmanThey really do. And for those of you that did not live through 2007 to 2009, here’s a number for you that is a real number. The last time the market slowed, we had 2.2 million licensed agents. At the beginning, at the height of the real estate market, before the market slow stopped and things reversed, we got down to 1.4 million. Putting that into perspective for everybody that’s listening to the show, 50% of the people that were out there that had a real estate license surrendered. It. You are going to watch a lot of people get out of the real estate game. And for those of you who know that you’re committed and you’re going to stay in it, you have to ask yourself the question, how do you want to position the next leg of your career? Because there was 2007 to 2009 and then there was after that, and before that. You can ask anybody that’s been in the business, you made a mint, especially if you’re in mortgages. Before that, then you lost a lot and had to be committed to your career. And then slowly but surely, many people have been banking like a lot of money for a long time.

[00:33:18.860] – Robert NewmanAnd now that we’re going into a harder market with not such easy advertising directions for people, and the referrals have stopped coming in and every aunt, uncle, mother, sister stopped calling you for a piece of property. Yeah, some people are going to surrender and other people are going to figure out the ways to connect with people that they want to be connected with. And I deeply believe that whether it’s video on YouTube or video on Instagram or video is the way to go. Everybody should have videos on the website, on all those other channels.

[00:33:50.160] – Jonathan DenwoodAnd just to wrap it up, I know it’s self-serving, but honestly, honestly believe these folks. You really want to listen to the backlog of podcasts and videos that Rob’s got. You want to go to Rob’s website and have a deep dive, and you really want to listen to the 100-plus of podcasts because it’s just a fountain of knowledge from our guests, from you, about how to market yourself in this new coming-up period. I really believe that, Rob.

[00:34:32.240] – Robert NewmanThank you very much, John. That’s very nice. And by the way, everybody, if you’re starting your career and you’re scared to death by some of the things I just said, john is a good place to start having a conversation to get you on the track. I believe that there can be an evolution of owning your own websites. I am a done-for-you service that takes on a very small number of clients who are very well-established and are basically ready and willing to spend a reasonable amount of money to achieve success. And I do everything for them, almost everything. But you don’t start there. Full stop. You don’t start there. You start someplace else. And if you got used to WordPress and you got used to blogging and you took all the same advice that you’re hearing from me, but you took it from John, because he’ll say the same thing 80% to 90% of the time, you will have a huge platform of success to then to call a guy like me.

[00:35:28.390] – Jonathan DenwoodYes, I do honestly believe that. And that’s why I think we can still work together on this podcast because that’s how I see it totally as well, Rob, completely.

[00:35:41.260] – Robert NewmanAll right, well, listen, everybody, we’re going to wrap it up. We’re going to take us off. Aaron here in a second. Happy Thanksgiving. I hope everybody had a good day of things spent with family and friends, no matter where in the world you are. We appreciate you listening to the show. You can email me at Robert at inbound REM. And John, how would you like people to get in touch with you?

[00:35:59.450] – Jonathan DenwoodOh, just go to the Mailwrite.com website, and you can book a demo discussion with me or my partner, Adam. And one other thing, we have an amazing guest next week. I haven’t told Robert. I probably won’t let you’re going to be blown away, Rob. Well, you might not be, but I’ll be surprised if you’re not blown away. And it’s great I’ve had a chat with him; I’ll give you a hymn. And he seems to be he’s really interesting stuff to say, and he seems a great guy. And I think you and the audience are going to be blown away.

[00:36:42.010] – Robert NewmanCan’t wait. Can’t wait. Thanks for doing that, John. Alright, everybody, have a good one. John, take us offline. Bye.

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Geographic Farming & Digital Marketing Advice For Real Estate Agents in 2023Farming is the future! That is the mantra that Ryan Smith full-heartedly lives by. Ryan is on a mission to share his new project, “Launch Your Farm,” with the real estate world and to ignite the same excitement in other agents.

Ryan became passionate about geographic farming after relocating several times over his 14-year real estate career, forcing him to rebuild his business multiple times. Having tried almost every strategy in the book, he quickly realized that combining your strategies and tactics in a hyper-local fashion was the best way to build momentum and success in real estate. That was when he became a real farming fanatic.

After coaching, training, and interviewing some of the top agents across North America, Ryan realized his true passion was helping other agents reach their full potential by helping them develop systems and tools to build the best geographic farming foundations in their real estate businesses.

To learn more about geographic farming and how to grow your business, head over to www.LaunchYourFarm.com to access the show, marketing ideas, resources, and more.

Here’s A Full Transcript of The Interview[00:00:11.490] – Robert NewmanWelcome back to the Mail-Right podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, we are super excited. We know that you are tired of having heard John and just talk amongst ourselves for the last few times. Ryan Smith from Launcher Farm was gracious enough to join us today on the show. I don’t want to take you steal his thunder. Ryan, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience.

[00:00:32.320] – Ryan Smith Awesome. Thanks for having me here. I’m really excited to share my love of geographic farming with your audience. I know that from my own experience and the agents that I’ve trained that when they learn to implement geography in their business, they can really take the business next level. So I’ll kind of share a quick backstory of who I am and then why I’m here and then what I want to share with you. So I am a licensed agent myself. I’ve been in the business for about 15 years. My kind of not claim to fame, but is this geographic farming? But the reason I became successful at geographic farming was because I moved multiple times. So I started the business my very first time I got started, I moved three and a half hours away from where I lived. I knew nobody other than my aunts and uncles that lived in the area. I had no idea what I was doing and I kind of bumbled my way through the business. And then I moved again. After a couple of years, I met someone and I moved to be with her and I didn’t know anyone other than her.

[00:01:19.800] – Ryan Smith And I kind of refigured it out again. And then I kind of got some momentum going. Then I moved again and I started taking the things I’ve learned and I realized I had failed along the way. And then I took kind of what didn’t work. I started compiling what did work. And I’m someone who loves to learn and I learned and learned and learned and learned and I also learned through failure and I failed so many times and I started realizing that there were some patterns and things that were successful that other agents were doing that I wasn’t doing. And then I became really obsessed with geographic farming. So my third move, I basically started this farm with a business partner of mine and we kind of like say we crack the code on kind of what was working. I took all the failures left out of the business and took the kind of the best practices and really started focusing on becoming a hyperlocal expert and becoming that go to agent in the area. And really that launched my business even further. After a few years, I sold that off to my business partner and then I started doing more coaching and training and I was working as a productivity coach in the office.

[00:02:18.370] – Ryan Smith And I realized that I had a real passion for helping other agents grow and miss the mistakes or skip the mistakes that I was making. And I wanted to help agents kind of speed up the process and not have to go through all the money and the time and the headaches and the heartaches of failing on your own. And I wanted to share that with other agents. So I started doing this just before Cobid started. It was getting it started and Cobid hit, and it was actually kind of a blessing. This guys. And it really helped me really focus on what I’m doing. And so the last couple of years, I’ve been really helping agents grow their geographic farms and become more passionate about it. That’s a long window.

[00:02:54.040] – Robert NewmanThat’s a hell of a journey. Before I hand it over to John, let me make sure that I understand what you’re doing today, right now. Are you a coach, are you a writer, are you a blogger? Are you all of the above?

[00:03:07.720] – Ryan Smith A little bit of everything. So I mostly focus on education and training, so I’ve got some courses and programs. I also have a podcast as well. So I interview agents who are doing hyperlocal geographic farming in their business, and I’ve sharing their love and passion and strategies that work with other agents and helping bring that love of geographic farming to the world.

[00:03:28.570] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. All right, John, my man, my Englishman with the plan, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself for those people that are lucky enough to be joining us for the first time.

[00:03:41.940] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, you always make me laugh. Robert I’m the joint founder Mail-Right, we build beautiful WordPress websites that you own you won’t lease. If you’re looking to get into the luxury side of the market, we can build you a beautiful custom solution. And we have a suite of marketing tools that will help you get some quality digital leads. Back. Over to you, Robert.

[00:04:09.450] – Robert NewmanLadies and gentlemen, for those handful of you that may not know me already, I am probably the most experienced real estate online marketing consultant that currently works in the US. Doing it for 14 years. I founded a technology company that focuses on websites and SEO for real estate agents. And if you want to learn more about anything that I am doing after you watch this stellar job that I’m about ready to do on this podcast, feel free to go to inboundriem.com. All right, so without any further ado, I certainly have quite a few questions, but as per his usual, it is John who has done all the groundwork for the show. He is the one who communicated with you. You two coordinated with each other and came up with the guests. So John, usually he’s magnificent, usually has a series of prepared questions that you like. So before I get into my shit, John, is there something that you’d like to kick us off with?

[00:05:08.160] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah. Thanks for that, Rob. So, Ryan, I think a great place to start the conversation based on our off air chat. Is that your emphasis? And I think you totally agree with this in mixing what I’ve called the pathini mythology of building, like 300 people in your community that will refer clients to you and building a really local focus referral engine. But you also link that with advice and consultation about you should combine that with digital marketing. And I’ve noticed in almost five years of doing this podcast, which blows me away, is a lot of agents can do one or the other, but a lot of agents struggle doing both and doing both well. First of all, would you agree with that statement? And second, have you got one or two insights why you think that is?

[00:06:14.950] – Ryan Smith Yeah, I think it’s totally true. And I think, like you mentioned, that the buffini method, I love his stuff, but I find that a lot of people who have used something like the Buffini method, if you don’t have a database to work, you don’t have people to follow up with and build relationships with. And again, from my own experience moving and starting over in a place that I had knew nobody, that method wouldn’t work for me. So I had to start with online marketing to start to fill my funnel with leads. And what I’ve learned is that when you do that at a hyper local level and you get real focus with it, you become that community ambassador. It becomes even easier when you’re the specialist in the area. So that’s where I started combining my offline marketing and really doing taking that from adding the online marketing to the relationship side of things. And that’s where I talk about CPR is something I coin. It’s community positioning and relationships. And you have to start with a community first. You have to put them ahead of the transaction. You have to have that community that you’re going to serve.

[00:07:12.300] – Ryan Smith Then you learn to position yourself as an expert and an ambassador, and then you build relationships. And so many agents are focused on the transaction and not the actual relationship itself. And in my experience, the ultimate goal of real estate is really to build and strengthen relationships. The kind of byproduct of it is selling homes. But you need to learn to build relationships. Now, how do you fill that funnel? How do you build that pipeline? That’s where you can start getting into digital marketing strategies, online and offline marketing and different things like that. But you have to ultimately think relationship at the end, at the end of the goal. And that’s kind of where when you refocus that way, it becomes a lot easier to find opportunities to do marketing when you’re thinking about hyper local and then building that relationship long term.

[00:07:53.660] – Robert NewmanSo when you still had your license and you were responsible for building your business up again, can you give us a couple of examples of maybe the third move or the fourth move, what did you do? What was your specific hyper local strategy?

[00:08:16.920] – Ryan Smith Perfect. Yeah. So the thing that when we built that farm that first time, or the time where we kind of cracked it, was we did what we call the neighborhood a home prices report. And we did a monthly report. And what we did was we created a sales report each month. And what we did was we had a binder. I don’t have it here, but we got binders from the dollar store. And we had a binder and we had a hard copy. We had a little cover on the front. And we would go around and we’d ask people if they want to get a copy of the report. And we would send the report out each month. And then each month we would update it. So we’d print out actual hard copy of the sales. We’d have a newsletter and we’d have some information each month. And we had all hole punched and ready to go. So we would go out and we would doorknock it each month, and it would be only to the people that would put their hand up. And that’s where creating that. Our farm was about 3600 people, and then we ended up having about 450 people in our database in a report that we’re getting in, and we would drop it off each month.

[00:09:08.100] – Ryan Smith So we were getting face to face, we were creating conversations, we were building relationships, and then they were holding onto it and they were keeping that and keeping the value of that. And they would come back and we’d go to an appointment and they’d have it on the desk and they’d have it either with them. What it did was it created an educational piece. It created a marketing piece because we were promoting ourselves. We were partnering with local businesses, they were helping sponsor it, we were doing community events and we were putting that into our newsletter and things like that. So it was a way to stand out and create value that people wanted each month. And they actually were looking forward to it. And if we even missed a day or two, people were like, hey, we haven’t got a report. What’s going on? So it created something that people would want to get and get consistently. And I use example with books all the time. Is that a tangible hardcover? A hard copy thing is perceived, sorry, it has a higher perceived value than digital copy. I sell the time. I’ve downloaded all kinds of ebooks.

[00:10:03.750] – Ryan Smith They’re sitting in my download section. I have full intentions of reading them, and I just don’t have the same value. But when I have a book that I can actually pick up, I can read it on the train, in the bath, in bed, whatever. There’s a more perceived value. So what we did was we did online marketing. We would run some online ads to drive people to get the report, and then we would use that to then create more values as we went along. That was one thing we did. Another thing we did was we would borrow listings from other agents who were in the area. And so if another agent had a listing in their farm area that we’re focusing on, we would ask if we could borrow the listing, and we would try to promote their listing and try to get buyer leads from that. And that’s something I’ve really honed down and really mastered. And I got really good at classified ads and online ads like facebook marketplace. So what we would do is we would compound our efforts because now we’re doing marketing in the area, and now we’re getting these listings that we’re promoting in the area, and we are generating leads by promoting those listings.

[00:10:57.390] – Ryan Smith But then what happens is people in the community start to see these listings, even though they’re not our own listings, but they create this perception that we’re a lot more successful in the area. And then we started getting leads, and then we had buyers. And then we would go to a listing appointment, and we would say, hey, mrs. Seller, we’ve got 150 buyers in our database right now looking for homes in your area. So if you list with us, we bring a listing sheet with all the buyers that we had. And we created demand before we even had the listings. And we showed up at the appointment, and the listing of the clients were like, wow, this is amazing. No one’s ever showed up with this many leads in our specific area. So we catapulted that way. And I think one of the other big parts of the success that we did was we branded ourselves around the neighborhood rather than branding ourselves around ourselves. So our team at the time was the orchard real estate team, and the orchard was the area that we were focusing on, and we branded ourselves as the orchard real estate team.

[00:11:47.880] – Ryan Smith So right out of the gate, you could tell that we were specialists. This is what we do. This is the area we focus on. And we would show up to an appointment, and people would say, well, you guys are the expert, so you tell me what I should do. And the next appointment was, you’re the expert, so you tell me. And we created that perception of success. And now, mind you, I never even sold a home in that area before that. But once that started, then we leverage the success we had, and then it became even easier once we started getting even more listings. We then use more advertising and more marketing and create the kind of a self perpetuating machine.

[00:12:21.560] – Jonathan DenwoodGot you, john, I’m just blown away. I think you provided more insight and value in five minutes. Then we’ve been blessed with some fantastic guests, ryan, but sometimes it’s hard to really get to crux of value, but you’ve just done a fantastic job there. I don’t know where you want to take this, Robert.

[00:12:52.310] – Robert NewmanWell, I would say what John just very ablely did is he broke down. He got into some specifics and those specifics would have specifics. I mean, one of the things that jumped out at me is that you partnered with local businesses in order to get the original reports because let’s say you’re going to do a dollar as the cost, hard cost for every binder that you created, right?

[00:13:17.340] – Ryan Smith Yes.

[00:13:17.790] – Robert NewmanWell, I don’t know how many homes are in Orchard, but let’s just use in a neighborhood I am familiar with. Let’s just go with there’s a place called well, no Aviara. There’s an aviar in Richmond, Texas. It’s got about 575 homes. So just to completely blanket that one subdivision in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, it’s $575, not counting the time it takes to deliver or however you’re going to get it there. So I’m curious to know, how do you do partnership? Do you insert a leaf for the businesses, have a list of businesses at the front say, hey, this report is sponsored by these guys, and if so, what’s that pitch to those businesses? Is it like, hey, give me $200 and I’ll include your name at the front of my binder, but I’m going to hand these out one by one to everybody in this neighborhood. Like, how does that work?

[00:14:12.070] – Ryan Smith Start at the beginning. One of the things that we did was we didn’t send this to everyone. And that was part of the thing that we did. And this is where the mistake that a lot of agents make, I think, is they try to send valuable things to everyone. And this is where traditional farming was. You just send out a bunch of stuff to the same people over and over. We went out and we got people to put their hand up and ask for the report. So we went out and we doorknocked it and we cold called the area and said, we’re putting together report, would you like to get a copy? So the initial upfront cost was a lot of money. I fronted the money myself. It was thousands of dollars because it cost about $10 for the initial binder with their initial printing and everything after that. And that was about a dollar per month after that. So I paid out of my pocket for that initial upfront. Then once we had that, then we went to the businesses and said, listen, we’re sending this out to x amount of people in the area.

[00:14:55.120] – Ryan Smith We already had proof of concept, so we showed them, hey, we’re already sending this out to this many people that are getting in the area. So some of the things we did, we would have a sponsorship page in the back of the binder, and then we would start partnering with events as well. And then we would co brand stuff. So we did some offline marketing. We did some postcards. We would co-brand some stuff together. We did a lot of community events. And that was one of the ways that we co-worked together. And I think one of the things that agents need to consider is that there are other ways other than just cash that you can do to leverage and partner. So sometimes people may not have cash, or sometimes businesses may not have the cash up front, but you can do cross-promotion. And that’s one of the big things that I’m a big believer in, is that you can work together with local businesses and community groups and organizations to work together. So, for example, hold on, we’re going to pause there.

[00:15:42.870] – Robert NewmanSo we’re going to pause working with local businesses together. And then you’re going to continue. We’re going to come back for part two. But ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to go for our break. We will be right back.

[00:16:21.940] – Robert NewmanWelcome back to the mail. Right, Podcast? This episode is number 363. We were just talking about some specifics. Ryan was sharing with us a very specific case study about how he used a hyper-local strategy is what I would call it. He’s calling it geographic farming. Either way, it’s how do you get in front of a targeted market and get that market excited about being targeted. He’s talking about a lot of value, a binder he’s creating. He’s talking about how he was creating this partnership with local businesses. He was about ready to give us the specifics before I rudely interrupted him and told him he had to go to a break. So if you could take it where.

[00:16:57.600] – Jonathan DenwoodYou rob Robbie; they offered you, well.

[00:17:03.260] – Robert NewmanThree years and 300 some odd episodes or however many it’s been, it’s bound to happen at some point. So Ryan, go ahead, please pick up where you left off.

[00:17:13.750] – Ryan Smith Yeah, so perfect. I’m glad you asked that because as mentioned before, is that we created the value up front so that we could sell it to the businesses a lot easier. So we had to show that there were people interested in that. We already had an audience doing that. So one of the things like I said we did was we had a sponsorship page in the back. We also put an insert in there. We would do a blog or an article about them, so we’d feature them. And we had a newsletter that went out as well. And we would feature them in the newsletters. That was part of the things that they would help with. And then I said community events were a big part of what we were doing and we would co partner with some of these things. So one of the things we did was we partnered with a local bank, and the bank was fantastic at getting us support. We went into the bank and they got us a table. We got to set up and talk to people. We had our listings and stuff up in the bank. They had a wall full of real estate listings that we could put up.

[00:18:01.290] – Ryan Smith We got to do a presentation for the employees that were there. So we were explaining what we’re doing in the community. And one of our biggest I think my things I’m most proud of was we partnered with a local organization in the community. And they was a father and son team and they would build birdhouses out of recycled wood and then they would sell the bird houses and every dollar went to the hospital. So there was in Burlington and there was a big hospital being built or being built on to. And at the time, I think they had raised it was like four, $5,000 maybe. It was actually a bit more than that. But I just fell in love with what they were doing because it tied in so well with what we were doing, which is we’re in real estate. We sell houses and bird houses go well, it was an awesome thing. The kid was eight years old at the time, and him and his dad were doing this. So what I want to do is help promote them. So I started promoting them. I did an interview with them. I took some pictures of them.

[00:18:56.040] – Ryan Smith We put them on our social media. And then I got him to come into our office, and then he did a spiel at the office and a bunch of agents in our office bought a bunch of birdhouses. Think he sold like $1300 worth of birdhouses to our office. And then the bank that we partnered with, we got together and did a giant sale at the bank. So we partnered with the bank. We got the news was there. We had a bunch of outlets were there. There was some local politicians were there. We got some other businesses to sponsor this event. And I think there was almost $5,000 worth of sales that we had done for this organization. And for us, it was a win win for everybody because it got us publicity. We were on the front cover of our local newspaper, and I would say if I had to pay for that kind of coverage, it would cost me thousands of dollars for that front cover. So we got on the front cover of the paper, we got in all these news outlets and things like that. And it was a great partnership and it worked really well together.

[00:19:47.880] – Ryan Smith We then got involved with there was a local, like a Montessori school. It was a Waldorf school. It was kind of an alternative kids school. And we created a community event. And then again, we brought our business partners into that and did some sponsorship that way. So it was really just tying the people that were serving the community already together and bringing them together to help create more relationships and really expand and reach more people.

[00:20:11.810] – Robert NewmanGot you. Well, that sounds like a lot of work. I think my question would be, ultimately, work doesn’t matter because John and I both occasionally present ideas to clients that would ultimately be a lot of work. The idea behind it is, what is the potential ROI? So do you ever case study, like, when you finally do get a lead or somebody calling you out, do you have a close ratio for that lead? Do you have numbers that you could share with the audience about what that yielded you in terms of your total amount of business that you produced off this?

[00:20:50.660] – Ryan Smith So at that time, this is a few years ago, our total cost spent was about $11,000. And so we started farming in September. Our first listing came in in January, and from January for the next 15 months, we ended up doing 17 transactions over those 15 months. At the time, we made 235,000. I made money since then from spin off and other things, but it’s $235,000. So our return on investment was like 21 times return on investment plus our time, obviously, to do that. Our numbers were worked out to be about for every 40, plus about 40, give or take, people in our database, getting a report would turn into a transaction. So then for us, it was just, how do we get more people onto the report? How do we get more people in our database, and how do we build those better relationships? So it was easy to track. And then for us, I’m a numbers guy. I love to track things. I got spreadsheets for all kinds of stuff, and I was tracking how many people we needed to get, how many people could we get out of there and kind of extract.

[00:21:47.610] – Ryan Smith And then what happened was, once we started doing that, we then moved on to another area and then expanded into that. And then we started another kind of different plan around. But then at that time, I ended up selling part of the business off to my business partner. And then I’ve since moved on, and I can share from other agents who’ve used things that I’ve taught them. And coaching. I’ve had one gentleman that was one of my first coaching clients. He does multiple six figures from his farm in over three years. He did about 500,000 GCI doing the same thing with the report and the binder. And he didn’t do the community events. He didn’t do the other things we were doing. He was basically just getting out there and building relationships. So that came down to choosing the right farm area, the right price point, and the consistency with that was huge.

[00:22:30.880] – Robert NewmanSo I seem to hear a little bit of Canadian in your accent. Do you mind if I ask what part of North America you’re working in?

[00:22:40.240] – Ryan Smith I am in Canada, so I’m just outside Toronto, about an hour and a half outside of Toronto, depending on traffic.

[00:22:46.410] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. John, I’ve been hogging the mic, so to speak. So I’m sure you’ve been sitting on at least a single question, if not more. Why don’t you take it away?

[00:22:56.980] – Jonathan DenwoodThanks, Rob. So I think one of the themes that I love with what you’re saying, Ryan, is what me and Robert have been hammering away consistently is what we call becoming the unofficial digital mayor of your community. And it’s linked to another one of my phrases, that you can’t be a successful real estate agent in 2022 and being visible agent. Yeah, but I just got a quick question. You really laid out a really fantastic gorilla marketing plan. How do you link that with effective digital marketing?

[00:23:39.930] – Ryan Smith That’s a great question. And one of the things I would say when it comes down to if you’re going to if you’re trying to stay hyper local, is think like a local person and create your marketing around value that would add to that community. So one of the first things I would say is start with video is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing in today’s society. I think one of the best ways to do that and stand out and be different is to do community based video. Instead of just being all about me and all about real estate is, again, create content for the community that you’re serving. So one of the things I would start with, and one of the things I teach agents is to do local business interviews. So get out there and do some quick, easy videos that you can go out there and there’s so many businesses you can do that serve your area. They don’t have to be directly in your area. They may be a pool company, they may be on the other side of town, but as long as they serve the area that you’re working in, do an interview with them, it literally costs you nothing.

[00:24:30.360] – Ryan Smith You have a cell phone, you have Zoom, or you have some type of internet connection, you can do an interview. Then I would use that and leverage that to then build an audience. And the great thing with doing something like that is you can leverage that video in multiple ways. One, you obviously have content for your audience and that’s one of the biggest things. You want to create good quality content that they’re going to appreciate, but then it also gets you in front of that local businesses audience. As well. And I always say that when you interview someone else, you are going to get an audience built into that. And I use the term one to many marketing. When I get interviewed by someone, I’m way more likely to share that with my audience when I’m being interviewed. And it’s a lot easier for me to go out and tell everyone that I was interviewed on something, then share that I did a hey mom and dad, I ran a Facebook ad today. Like my friends and family don’t care that I created a Facebook ad. If I’m featured on something, I’m going to be more likely to share that and tell my friends and family because I feel good about it.

[00:25:26.020] – Ryan Smith And it makes me feel nice that someone featured it just like this interview. I’m going to share this once it goes out and I’ll let people know. So what happens is those local businesses are going to have that same effect. And when you interview them, they’re going to want to share it with their audience. And if they’re in business, they obviously have an audience. They’ve got clients that they’re probably going to share it with. So you can find businesses that are well connected in the community and do some interviews with them. Then you want to learn then to distribute that. And this is where I think that some of the work takes that you can do that is good, that doesn’t take a lot of work, is get involved in local Facebook groups. And that’s, again, one of the most underutilized mediums that people are not leveraging, especially at that hyperlocal level, is there’s so many different Facebook groups. And if there aren’t, start one. And the great thing with those local Facebook groups is it’s the people living in the area you’re serving, and then they’re focusing on hyperlocal content.

[00:26:16.170] – Ryan Smith They’re there because they’re part of that community. They want to know what’s going on. They’re hyper-aware of the local things that are happening in the news that is happening in literally street by street. So you can share that message and content with them, and then you can become that digital mayor by being that ambassador and really building relationships. And with Facebook groups, the amazing thing is you’re literally having conversations. And this is a big difference between Facebook pages a lot of people that they don’t know is that Facebook pages is more of like a push marketing. Facebook groups is literally conversations. It’s just like being at a party with someone. You’re able to jump into conversations. You can start conversations; you can connect with people, and build relationships that you would never ever have on traditional type marketing if you’re just sending out a bunch of postcards. So I would leverage the community groups because you’re able to connect with people completely differently. And it allows you to fly under the radar, build trust with people, and see that you’re a person who cares and bringing value to the community you serve.

[00:27:16.760] – Robert NewmanI love everything that you’re saying, Ryan. So I’ve noticed that you manage to get online with Tristan Amatta, which is awesome. So John and I always like to add a little something to our show that you may not have spun in another digital area. So I’m curious to know, is there a little tip or trick that you can’t recollect having shared recently with any other podcast or any other person that you’ve done an interview with that it could be very small, but something you can share with our audience here? Actually, you know, what are you going to be? We’re 27 minutes into the show. We ask for 30. Do you have an extra ten minutes that you can share with us so that John and I can do some bonus content?

[00:28:11.340] – Ryan Smith Yeah, absolutely.

[00:28:12.430] – Robert NewmanSo perfect. So why don’t you think about it? I don’t want to sucker punch you here on the show and see if you can think of something for us. And in the meantime, we’re going to spend another minute or two wrapping up the actual podcast part of the show, and then anybody that would like to stay with us, we’re going to do ten extra minutes, and we’re going to throw that ten extra minutes up on the mail right. YouTube channel for anybody that would be interested in going over there. So, Ryan, this is the part of the show where I ask you if there are people that would like to look you up, contact you, or try to research your lessons in any particular way. Where would you send them?

[00:28:53.110] – Ryan Smith The easiest place is launchyourfarm.com. That’s kind of my main hub. You can find my podcasts there. The courses, my blog, and my social media. If you’re just searching, you can search Launch, your Farm, and Google, and basically all the major platforms you’ll find me. That’s kind of the main place. You’ll see it when you get there. If you want to follow the podcast, you can click the podcast link, and all the links to the locations are there. Easy to find on social media as well. You can find me on with Ryan Smith. It’s a little harder than Ryan Smith because there are a million of us. So I would find you through the launch of Farm Channel, and you’ll be able to connect with me that way.

[00:29:26.730] – Robert NewmanBeautiful. And John, who’s been far less Ignatius and usual and much quieter. If somebody was going to want to leverage your incredible expertise in either WordPress or building a website or owning the website, any of those things that you mentioned at the beginning of the show, where would you like them to go?

[00:29:47.960] – Jonathan DenwoodYeah, go over to the Mail-Right. You can book a free discussion with either me or Adam, my partner, or work with us. We got over twelve to 15 years of building beautiful WordPress websites on your website. Don’t lease it, and let us build help. Be your partner in building your business. And I didn’t feel I needed to interrupt this. Interviews are very easy to ride about you, aren’t he, Robert?

[00:30:20.040] – Robert NewmanHe sure has. No doubt about it. All right, ladies and gentlemen, if you’d like to learn more about me, reach out to me, contact me, or talk to me. 2022 is probably your last year to do that. Maybe the first part of 2023. Then after that, I’m going to hang up the headset, so to speak, and let other people do that for my business. Inboundriem.com is the place that you go. That’s the word inboundrabitwardmichael.com. And without any further ado, for those of you who are left who are interested in the bonus content and Ryan’s, just for us, tip that I am trying to into giving us, you can find that on the YouTube channel. We’ll be right back.

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We Review The New Placester Solution is it Any Good?

Placester is a real estate website builder that promises a specialized, high-performing website that brokers, admins, and agents can create and manage without the help of a web developer. The need for this Placester Summary (Part 3 of the NEW Placester Review) discussed by the founder of InboundREM Robert Newman, is to explain the road bumps that the creative minds at Placester have encountered in the past, leading them to go back to the drawing board to re-invent the Placester website/marketing offer from the ground up.

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show Jonathan Denwood

jonathan@mail-right.com

775-372-6322

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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Introduction Google Local Services Ads is a specialized advertising program that allows real estate agents to reach potential buyers and renters in the area they want. It is an affordable way for small businesses to get their name out there, something that was not possible before Google gave customers this opportunity.

The platform allows real estate agents to create ads that target potential clients based on certain keywords, locations, the price range of the house or apartment listed, and even features like “pet-friendly” and “pools”. The size of the ad itself can be chosen as well as how often it is supposed to appear on Google searches. Real estate agents can also choose which device (desktop, laptop, etc.) they want their ad to appear on.

1 – Google Local Services Ads for Realtors – What Are They?

Google Local Services Ads (LSA) is an online advertising platform that Google has been offering to real estate agents for the past couple of years. This article will discuss what exactly LSA are, why they are so important for real estate agents, and why every agent should be using them in their business. This article will also discuss the importance of reputation management in real estate and how you can use LSA to help build your brand.

What Are Google Local Services Ads? Google Local Services Ads (LSA) are a way for Google to connect its AdWords users with businesses that offer services that are closely related to the keywords being searched for by consumers. This is an important distinction from other forms of online advertising because this platform targets businesses that have a direct impact on consumers’ lives, as opposed to something like banner ads or Facebook adverts which only target visitors based on their viewing habits or demographic information. As of right now, there are two types of LSA – “Placement Related” and “Shopping Related.” Placement-related ads show up when someone searches for a service category or location-specific terms such as a service provider name or company name.

Shopping-related ads show up when someone is searching for products or services that they would like to buy immediately, rather than services that they need at some point in the future. Why Is LSA Important? There are many reasons why LSA is important for real estate agents, but the key reason is that they allow you to reach out to potential clients while they are actively looking for a service that you can provide them with. This means that if you can rank well and stay on top of all the relevant keywords, then you will have a high probability of getting quality leads from your advertising campaign.

2 – Say Goodbye, Zillow; Hello Google Local Services Ads for Realtors

Getting Quality Leads Has Never Been Easier! When Google allowed real estate companies to advertise on Local Services in 2010 it was revolutionary because it allowed for agents to compete with larger online portals such as Zillow or Realtor.com where the user experience was lackluster at best and oftentimes misleading. Nowadays, large online portals still exist but there is no greater way for an agent to get their name out there than through paid search marketing campaigns using Google AdWords especially since local SEO has become so vital over the past few years (and will continue to be in the future).

3 – LSA Are High Quality And Offer High Conversion Rate Relative to Other Types of Advertising

How Can Real Estate Agents Use LSA? There are many ways that real estate companies can use LSA but there are two main ways I see them being used. The first way is for local SEO purposes and the second way is for lead generation purposes. Local SEO: If you want to rank well on your local SERP, then having a Google Places account is key because it allows you to show up on the map results when someone searches with their GPS-enabled phone or computer, this will be their first impression of you.

The only problem with Google Places is that the listings are often not as comprehensive as they should be and will often times even have incorrect information on them – this is where LSA comes in. Lead Generation: Even if someone is searching online for a service, they may not know who to call or what to do next. By using LSA (and some other PPC platforms/advertising) real estate agents can drive traffic directly to their site where they can offer a free quote or show clients how much it costs for them to work with them. If you want to learn more about Google Local Services Ads and how your agency can start utilizing this platform, then I highly recommend checking out our recent video, see below, on the subject, which can be viewed here.

4 – The Clear Benefits of Using LSA Compared to FaceBook Adverts

– LSA advertises your property to people who are currently searching for homes and are not necessarily in your area, whereas a Facebook advert can only be viewed by users who have actively searched for the content you have posted.

– The cost of an LSA advert is usually much lower than a Facebook advert because it does not require viewers to click through to another page before viewing your advertisement.

– Since the demographics on LSA are so specific, you will find that the audience matches exactly with your ideal customer – leading to better conversion rates.

5 – How to Prompt LSA Results?

We have been getting more and more questions about how to get yourself showing up in the Local Search Results if you are a real estate professional. The two most effective ways are having a system of getting great testimonials from your clients or people in your local area that have known you and have done business with you. The second best way is producing what we call quality and informative “Real Estate Agents Content: In an effort to provide useful information about local search engine optimization to real estate agents and other local business owners.

Conclusions We feel LSA offers some of the most exciting opportunities for an independent local real estate agent to be able to level up their digital presence so it can effectively match the big boys like Zillow and Red-Fin. However, you really need a holistic approach to your digital online marketing to get the most out of this exciting platform. We at Mail-Right are dedicated to helping agents get the most from the real opportunities that Google LSA offers. If you want to know more about how the Mail-Right system can help you all you have to do is book a free consultation and demo here.

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How a New Agent Used The Power of YouTube to Become a Top Local Producer

Amber’s Bio:

As a native Houstonian, I can’t say enough great things about this city and its surrounding areas. I’ve always had a passion for real estate but most importantly I love helping people. Whether you’re buying, selling or leasing, I am here to assist with every step of the process. I also have a knack for finding amazing deals on home furnishings and decor, so if you want to talk design, I’m all ears. Please don’t hesitate to reach out at any time! Can’t wait to chat. My number is 832-338-8503.

2021 RE/MAX Chairman’s Club Team Award

2021 RE/MAX Platinum Club Individual Award

2021 RE/MAX Top 500 (Texas)

2021 RE/MAX Fine Properties Top Producer for Small Teams Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4

https://www.har.com/ambermoore

Bret’s Bio:

Developing and maintaining relationships with my clients is the single most important attribute of my business. I work primarily by referral so that I can devote my time and energy to exceeding the expectations of my clients before, during, and after a transaction. If this is the type of relationship that you desire, please do not hesitate to call me at (832) 641-3727 and let me know how I may be of service to you. Best of luck in all your real estate endeavors!

2021 RE/MAX Chairman’s Club Team Award

2021 RE/MAX Platinum Club Individual Award

2021 RE/MAX Top 500 (Texas)

2021 RE/MAX Fine Properties Top Producer for Small Teams Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4

RE/MAX Hall of Fame

https://homesoffortbend.com/

Houston Local Guide:

https://www.youtube.com/c/HoustonLocalGuide

Fort Bend TX Real Estate:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBX88z2vN6d5mc0acSQfhXg

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show Jonathan Denwood

jonathan@mail-right.com

775-372-6322

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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Introduction Having a Google Business Profile (formerly called Google My Business) is one of the most important steps you can take as a real estate agent as it pertains to marketing your business and is the most important first step connected to getting ready to use the power of Google Local Service Adverts.

You want people to find your business when your target customers search for your services and products on a search engine like Google, don’t you? So if someone asks Google for “real estate offices near me,” or “real estate agents near me,” this is the local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that will show up.

We’ll go into more reasons why you need a Google Business Profile (GBP) below, but we wanted to start off by asking if you’ve ever Googled yourself? If you haven’t, take a minute right now and click here: Google myself, and then come back (also take this step if you haven’t Googled yourself in a while too). What populated in your search? Whatever is showing happens to also be the online marketing that Google is displaying about you. Now, let’s review why having a GBP is so crucial, as well as some of the basic, but important, intentional steps you can take to get more SEO out of it.

What is a Google Business Profile? This is an online listing for your business specifically on Google. Although there is a free version everyone should take advantage of, you should also consider utilizing the optional paid ads through Google that we’ll briefly go into later.

Why does a Google Business Profile matter? Google is the largest search engine in the world…need we say more? In addition, you want a GBP because you want to grow your business online, reach more people and get more leads…right? Another reason is that if, or when, people Google you (or your business), they’re more than likely going to see what you just saw when you searched for yourself. This might be a positive or negative experience depending, so you might as well control what is seen by what you develop with your GBP listing for your company.

What’s the cost? It doesn’t cost anything (except for some time and knowledge) to get it set up and to use their basic services. However, there are options within a GBP that do cost extra if you’d like to, but it’s not required.

How do you create a GMB listing? As we mentioned, you can create your own listing either by yourself, or you can have a company like Mail-Right set it up for you (it’s also included with all of our plans because we understand how powerful this is for you and your business). There are some nuances and details when setting up your listing that you’ll want to consider and take advantage of, so if you’re not familiar with the local SEO, utilizing keywords and what ranks best in your industry and area, you should probably have someone like us create it for you so you can maximize the results vs. hoping you set it up correctly. However, don’t be afraid to try to create it on your own too…it’s all about ROI (your return on investment) and your availability.

Step 1:

Go to: business.google.com (It’ll look similar to the illustration below.)

Step 2:

Navigate through each of the tabs on the left side and become familiar with them. You can also begin to add the necessary info in each tab where you’re able to. These are the tabs you’ll see: Home, Posts, Info, Insights, Reviews, Messages, Photos, Products, Services, Website, and Users. Take note:* The tabs that have an asterisk * next to the above means that you will be limited on what you can do in those tabs until your account is verified.

Step 3:

The Info tab is perhaps where you’ll spend most of your time should you tackle this project on your own.

Business Location: The first part in the Info tab is your business location. Depending on your local real estate regulations and guidelines, this will help you determine if you should use your home address or work address. (Please ask your brokerage for guidance on this matter.) If you choose to use your home address…do you really want the general public to know where you live, even if you work remotely at home?

It’s probably not the safest option either, and again, it may not be within your local guidelines, so it’s something to consider. If you work for a brokerage and don’t have your own office address, you can either add your brokerage address, or clear your address as we illustrated above, and move on to the next section which is your Service areas.

Can you have a Google business without an address? Google Business Location Requirements: Even when your business doesn’t want to display an address in the listing, Google requires a mailing address for the business. While in the Info tab, click the Address section, and in the window that appears, scroll down and simply select the box next to the “I deliver goods and services to my customers at their locations” option, and your business will have a listing without an address.

Can you use a virtual address for Google business? Virtual business addresses are allowed and can be registered for a Google Business Profile without violating any rules. In fact, a virtual business address often provides more legitimacy than just listing your home address online without going through the appropriate steps to register with Google Business. If you’d like more information about this, let us know in the comments below and we can further assist.

Can I hide my home address on Google business? Yes, do the following:

Step 1: Log in to Your Profile

Step 2: Click the “Info” Tab

Step 3: Click the Pencil “Edit” button (next to your location address)

Step 4: Select “Clear Address”

Step 5: Click “Apply”

Step 6: Confirm that your address was removed

Verification! If you’re noticing you don’t have access to some of the tab information and editing, it’s more than likely because your business has yet to be verified. Be sure to go through this process by clicking on any of the verification links that Google provides in your account in multiple areas. Once you take those steps, Google will send you a postcard with a pin # on it.

This pin will be used inside your account to verify that it’s you/your business at that location. Again, you’ll be a little limited on some of the options during setting up your profile until verification is approved. Any edits after you save your listing will also not appear until you’re verified. Be aware, the verification postcard is exactly that, a postcard, and it’s rather unassuming and very easy to get lost in “junk mail” and such.

Service Areas:

The next section to focus on in the Info tab are the main areas/locations you service and sell real estate? This is extremely important and is also where Googling: “Realtors in Reno” or “Realtors near me” will populate those who have their GMB properly set up and fully complete, as well as a few additional things they’re doing to get them on top (that we can assist with).

Hours of Operation:

This is your own choice if you want to be available 24 hours or during certain days and times unless, of course, you have an office location that does have specific hours of operation. These times and days can also be changed and edited at any time. Something to consider if you’re virtual or focus more on a service area rather than an address location is if you choose to not be open “24 hours.”

Prospects will potentially move on to the next agent if they’re viewing your GMB listing after hours and they’re ready to get the information and resources they’re looking for.

Phone Number:

Simply add in your phone number and turn your call history on. This also allows you to track the calls you’ll be receiving from your GBP.

Website:

If you don’t have a website, then Mail-Right can help you with this too with one of our plans you can find here that are specifically for real estate agents and brokers. Mail-Right’s websites will provide you with the SEO you’re wanting and needing, and complement your business on Google and other search engines.

Services: This is also a crucial area to focus on. Add in the services that you provide as a real estate agent such as Real Estate Agency, Real Estate, Realtors, Finding a Home, Listing Your Home, Selling Your Home, Buying a Home as some examples.

From the business:

You can add attributes to make your profile even more relevant. For example, you could choose “Identifies as women-owned” and add “Online appointments” to your service options.

The bottom section of the Info tab and the From the business area is the description of your business. This does show up on the Google searches under your business listing, so if you scroll down under your listing, you’ll see this description. Be sure to use search terms and keywords in this in an organic way to maximize the SEO, or we can do it for you with one of our plans. You can add up to 750 characters in this description.

Reviews: Moving on from the Info tab is the Reviews tab. As you probably know, these are the testimonials and recommendations from your clients. People check Google reviews – this is a fact! In fact, over 80% of people trust an online review as much as a personal recommendation. In addition, the more reviews you have, the better ranking you’ll receive from Google. You’ll also get to a point where you will populate in searches higher than your competition because of the reviews you’re receiving. Be sure you’re replying to your reply to your reviews in a timely manner.

Use cordial communication, thank them for their input, and especially for the good reviews, be direct, use keywords, and continually use “…best Realtor in ______” (add the area you service) in your replies so that adds Google juice to the search algorithms. “I’m humbled by the fact that you say I am the best Realtor in Reno…” for instance.

What about bad reviews?!? Google likes when you’re directly on the replies and that you give the person the opportunity to reach out to you so you can find out more about the situation and see if you can grow from this experience and improve in any way. Thank them for the feedback, and maybe a few details about the possible reasons they maybe had a less than exceptional experience. You can also ask some friends to honestly add reviews after the bad review to counter it. There are always legitimate reasons why you may have not met the person leaving the review’s expectations.

You may not have been willing to overprice their home, or maybe they put you in an uncomfortable situation. As best you can, share this so when people read through the reviews, they’ll see your response. Most of the time, you’ll probably find that there are very few replies back to the responses you give to your reviews, whether good or bad reviews.

What else can you do with these reviews? Compile your reviews, testimonials, and recommendations in a document or form that you can then also bring to your listing appointments. You can organize them based on what you know about the prospect. If pricing is important or a timely sale, but those reviews upfront so they can glance at them and it’ll relate. After your listing appointment, you can leave them a little gift, let them know their home is beautiful and that they’ll be making their neighbors proud by having you sell their home for them…then include those reviews that you have saved in a document form.

Also, you want to take advantage of your happy customers at closing, and ask if they are open to you sending them a few simple links that help you grow your business. Let them know that you’d like to also share their testimonial with other people so you can help more people as you did for them. Then, follow up with an email and/or text to your happy clients on closing day with those Google, Facebook, and Zillow Review links to make it easy and convenient for them. Make sure they know it’ll only take a couple of minutes and help you a lot!

Include the closing disclosure/settlement statement since they’ll need it for their taxes. You can always give them a few ideas on what they can share, but really…what made this a successful and pleasing transaction? What simple details can they add to it that they loved about working with you? Take Note: You don’t want every review to have the same type of copy on it, so be careful about this because Google is looking for genuineness with these reviews, so duplicate review text will possibly trigger some negative juice to their algorithms.

Reviews Pro Tip: Google Business has a link for you in your account that you can use in your emails and texts with your clients. If you go to your Home tab, scroll down and you’ll find it under the Performance section if it’s your first time using it and you don’t have any reviews yet, the section will say: “Get your first review” and you’ll click on the “Share review form.”

Photos:

Photos are a really important factor in your business account. You’ll want to try and add at least 100 high-quality photos and even videos, that will market you positively. Photos are proven to drive more customers, and Google says that people are 42% more likely to request driving directions to a business if its Business Profile has photos, and 35% more likely to go to its website. Don’t be afraid to use the Google Business app on your phone or mobile device…it’s convenient, accessible, and makes life easier for you and your marketing! Don’t have 100 photos to add? It’s OK to build this up over time. You can also take photos/screenshots from your other sites that you have reviews on and add those to your GBP listing, such as your happy clients at closing or in front of their new home, new listings in the area that you have permission to share, parks, trails, outdoor recreation areas and the like. What are things, people?

Conclusions In this post we have tried to give a clear and simple road-map connected to how you setup your “Google Business Profile” and also give you some insights on whay its so important to spend time and engery on this if you a real estate agent professional. One of the great things about this is that Google is offering all this power and free promostion to you for free also by seting your Google Business Profile the correct way you be of about 10% of agents that claimed and spent any time connected to setting up and configuring their Google Business Profile. Also it the fundemental first step you need to do if you plan to use the power of Google Local Service Adverts which in our option one of the most powerful and affordable ways you can get quality local leads at the present moment that really turn into commision checks!

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How Google Updates Have Affected Real Estate 2012 thru 2022

How Google Updates have affected Real Estate 2012 thru 2022 is a primary concern in the Real Estate industry. The Panda update’s primary purpose was to penalize the websites with low-quality content, duplicate content, thin content, low-quality user-generated content, content mismatching search query, high ad-to-content ratio. Real Estate Agents should properly execute their website to veer away from low google scores.

Google Updates have affected Real Estate 2012 thru 2022, and one major update was the ‘Mobile’ update. Easily navigate Websites and other technologies through the Realtor’s mobile phone.

How Google Updates have affected Real Estate 2012 thru 2022 that even the ‘medical update’ also known as ‘Your Money or Your Life’ explained by InboundREM Robert Newman played a huge part in the Real Estate industry and all of its aspects.

The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show

Jonathan Denwood

jonathan@mail-right.com

775-372-6322

Robert Newman

InboundREM

https://inboundrem.com

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Top 10 Real Estate Video Mistakes Agents and Brokers Make

Robert Newman: Welcome back ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail-Right podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about a piece of content that I actually produced for my, primary YouTube channel inbound, YouTube/inboundREM. And the title of the content is the top 10, real estate video mistakes agents and brokers make basically I counted down the top mistakes that I see agents do with video. And, when John and I were talking about it, he thought it would be a good idea for us to talk about the, with the mail right audience. And, here we are, hopefully, you guys agree, John, why didn’t go ahead and introduce yourself to any of the new listeners and audience members that we might have.

Jonathan Denwood: That’s great. Thanks, Robert. I’m the joint founder of mail-right? We build custom or semi-custom websites for estate agents on WordPress. So you own your main digital asset. Plus we’ve got a suite of fantastic technology, which we bolt onto your website. You own it, you own the data. As you know, it’s better to own something than to lease it a concept, which you should clearly understand. If that sounds interesting and it should do, contact me on the mail-right website. We can do a free consultation and demo. I’m sure you’re going to be impressed back over to you, Robert.

Robert Newman: All right. So let’s come out, swinging everybody. The number one mistake that I see with agents and brokers on real estate videos. Now I’m going to preface this just the slightest little bit 82% of the world spent their time last year on video. It’s the number one piece of consumed media. When I’m making my recommendations for mistakes, I’m not making them from a branding perspective. I’m not a branding expert guys. I’m a, I’m a conversion optimization, an SEO guy, an inbound marketing guy, all those things I am. I’m not usually focused strictly on a brand unless your brand is information. So having said that the number one mistake that I see people making because it removes the ability to get responses from your videos is not personalizing your videos. Number one, mistake. Okay. Number one, mistake, If you want to generate a lead, a contact, a connection of a video, you must be present on the video, not a little screencap that shows your number and your address like as part of the video is like a picture of you in a beautiful suit. No. Jonathan Denwood: Would I look good in a nice suit Robert?

Robert Newman: You look great in a nice suit. Why don’t you ever wear it?

Jonathan Denwood: Don’t know, kind of casual for this. There we go.

Robert Newman: I don’t know, John. I’ve never seen a picture of you in a suit. So I would imagine you look, you look like a fancy English bloke.

Jonathan Denwood: That’s the kindest thing he’s ever said to me in almost over 2 years. Robert Newman: So what does personalizing video mean? Let’s, let’s dig into it because personalizing video can mean driving in a car can mean doing market updates. It can be, but you’re in front of the camera. People are getting a chance to know you, which is the idea behind personal social media, which I think people have missed is, real estate companies and brokers. And like are always thinking that they’ve got to make a commercial quality video. Like the everything’s got to be crystal clear and they’ve got to be dressed, right. And their makeup and their hair are done correctly. And the sound is perfect. And they’ve got the right background. And the more of those layers that you add into your requirements, the harder the video becomes to do all right, everybody notices that right. All that is required for video to be really successful, to help you with SEO, to help you with leads, to help you with building a brand, as long as your brand is authentic and its personality traits and not surface s**t.

The number one thing that you can do is talk to the camera and then display your expertise. If you don’t have the expertise for those of you who are listening to the show that is brand new agents or in your first year or second year, my recommendation is, is that you treat your first two or three years of your career like somebody would treat a PhD, become an expert as fast as you humanly can. When you’re not selling a deal, I would be down at the city planner’s office, learning everything that there is to know about the way that my city was built, how the houses were built, who built them? When did they build them? What did they build them with? I would start there. I would first become an area historian and make sure that my knowledge was way beyond what everybody else’s is, which is why I said the city planner’s office.

If all you’re doing is looking online for other digital content, you’re actually following in the footsteps of somebody else. I can tell you from personal experience that very few people take the time to get the information for a unique story. I can also tell you it exists, like the guy that built Van Heights there’s a story about him down at the city planner’s office, from when he built Van Heights in 1907. And it explains what we did, how he licensed this area of the LA county basin out who was here, which was almost nobody back then, how we ended up with the only major city hall of any city that’s local to Los Angeles county. All, those story-based answers are available at a library or the city planner’s office. So, if you do a little bit of research, you can at least sound like you’re fascinated with the area that you service.

Now, John and everybody that’s listening. I have some sad news, the guy that championed this cause originally was not much of a digital marketer, but he was a legend in real estate. He had published, I think, six or seven books on architecture in LA County alone. He was literally probably one of the most knowledgeable city historians that I’ve ever run across. He just didn’t publish his information digitally. And that was Jeff Hyland who unfortunately passed from cancer at the age of 73 from Hilton and Hyland. So is my sad duty to pass that information along to our listeners and to you possibly John. But he, he was the original 20, 30 years ago when he started Hilton and Hyland, a lot of his super-wealthy clients were coming to him. They knew that nobody knew LA architecture. As he did, nobody. He really was one of the very best. You just wouldn’t see it online, but his clients would know it, which is why they would hire him over and over again. If you have that kind of knowledge, you should be doing a video with it. Anyway, so John that’s number one. Do you have any questions? Do you have any comments you’re unusually silent today?

Jonathan Denwood: Well, on a technical front, I think the other factor which is counterintuitive is for an effective video you need really good sound. I think what Robert has said is there’s either the personalized video. When you’re looking at the camera, you’re doing a podcast, you’re doing a combination of video or a podcast. You are doing a video, which is information about, and I agree with Robert, the more you can become an expert of your area, the more value you will offer to your clientele and value rather than price. If you’re just going for the price, that’s a downward spiral. So you should be, be offering more value and just saying, we offer the best service. Well, unfortunately, every real estate agent says that or believes that, that they offer the best service. So you need to show something more than that. And that’s through knowledge as what Robert, but on a technical thing, what people won’t put up within a face-to-face video or any type of video is really bad sound. They just, they will just bailout. So that’s one aspect that you have to keep in consideration.

Robert Newman: Sure. I can’t say that I necessarily disagree with that, but it does play, it opens very nicely the segue into a mistake, number two, which I kind of covered in mistake, number one, which is don’t overanalyze. The number one mistake or the number two mistake that I see agents and brokers make is getting lost in the sauce with things like this. I’m not saying that it’s not important. I’m not disagreeing with John. I will say this. If you’re trying to measure what your priorities are, your first priority is to get used to doing video. And everybody’s like, but what if my first video is bad? Or what if they can’t hear me? Right? Well, these are valid concerns. John is not wrong. However, if you’re not producing video at all, if you’re not getting off the bench, then, that’s a far worse mistake day than producing something that may not be the greatest.

I, as part of my video on this series, showed something that Christoph produced 11 years ago, which looks nothing like what he produced today. And 11 years ago, his Camera work was shaky. As a matter of fact, I think in that first video, there is a single segment where his voice gets a little lower. It gets a little warbly because he hadn’t quite figured out all the sound on the video. It has nothing compared to his normal production value. He hasn’t dressed the way that he’s normally dressed. Like it was a completely different beast. Yet. Even 11 years ago, it had 2000 views. I don’t know what the result was of the video. Because it was promoting a very specific investment piece of property that he was trying to get off the market. So I don’t know if that was successful or not.

What I will say is what I really admired about him is he sat down at lunch from me about 11 years ago and he told me I’m going to do a video. I’ve heard that a lot. And I was just like, okay, whatever. And then almost within 30 days, he was out there producing his first videos and he will acknowledge at so many times, maybe even 30 or 40 times, he said, my first stuff was not great. As he said it, he said it on our podcast I think, he literally said like it just wasn’t the best, but the only way you get better is by getting off the bench and doing it. Gary Vaynerchuck me, every single influencer that you hear listen to see, they will say the same thing. Get off the bench, start doing the work and the work will get better. So you’ve got to get the work done. That’s the first thing don’t overanalyze. That’s mistake number two. Do you want to zing me there?

Jonathan Denwood: Just quickly? I totally agree with you. What I meant by the sound is don’t become what I classify as a sound Nazi. On the other hand, if you are doing a video about a property, jump in your car, don’t do it outside. When the wind’s blowing a gale and they won’t be able to hear a word. It just needs to be reasonable. The sound. I’m not saying like, I just said, you don’t need to be a sound Nazi you just need to keep your audience in mind. That’s what I really meant, but I totally agree with you, Robert

Robert Newman: Lovely third mistake. I see people making videos and it’s a little vague in my notes. I’m realizing, it says not adding your personal information. And I spent the first, couple minutes of this podcast, talking to our audience about how, oh, you’re not supposed to do this little thumbnail at the beginning of the video. Well, what I mean by not adding your personal information is actually in the description. When you create a video. Many of my favorite people that I follow, they put every social channel, they put some affiliate marketing links, they put their phone number, they put their email address. And I agree with that. Give everybody every opportunity to reach out to you. Should they want to video is the idea behind it is to make up a personal connection. One of my tops, actually, that’s not even true.

When I was just doing consulting, which was for a couple of years of my career with real estate people, all we would do is a video with personal stuff in it. I wasn’t even doing the work. I was just telling ’em what to do. And we would get calls off the video. That’s how I knew before I even started my agency, that it was effective. It was a really effective method. Now people call me off my videos. They reach out to me of my videos. They reach out to my clients who put the phone numbers. Actually, at this point, I’m doing that work. I’m putting the phone numbers in. So they reach out to the client off that work. If you don’t put it there, you’re eliminating all of this communication I’m talking about. They won’t try to look you up. Like they may know your name off the video, but they for many people. It is simply really convenient to go into the description and go, ah, this is how I reach you and then reach out to you. So number three, mistake. I don’t see people putting their personal contact information inside the description notes, John.

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, I’ve just learned on reflection, I’ve been terrible about that. And I produce a lot of videos through this podcast on my other podcast. Plus I do a lot of videos in general. You just pointed that will be resolved from this week. Every week the phone number contact details will be in every video. Robert, thank you for that. Robert Newman: Sure. So here’s mistake number four. If anybody here going to think that they’re going to post more than one video a month. Here’s the benchmark. There are very cheap, very effective YouTube plugins that make the optimization of videos easy as opposed to hard. Now, what is video optimization? For me and my agency, which do this professionally, it’s an eight-point optimization process, which by the way, John doesn’t follow. the eight-point optimization process is a thumbnail, which John gets, is a description which he gets, a video index which he does not, the personal contact information, which you just mentioned, which he already called out for himself, that he doesn’t do, location tags, which I think he does sporadically. So location tags, and here’s what is absolutely not done. Uses machine-generated closed captions, whereas you should use manually closed captions.

Now you’re not going to do ’em for these podcasts, John, you’re not going to do ’em for an hour-long podcast where you and I are talking to each other, it doesn’t make sense. but when you’re doing five minutes neighborhood videos, which almost everybody listening should be doing, what you’re going to do is if you close caption it manually, very few people know this, but Google gives a secret bonus credit to the optimization of the video that says that. Now they ignore the closed captioning if you’re using machine-generated because they know, already through scientific study that it’s only 90% accurate and they’re not interested in 90% accurate. Yes, it works. When you turn on the button, they know that it doesn’t do it precisely. They’re perfectly aware of it. So what do they want? They want the same things that ever all users want. They want perfect. They want word-for-word accuracy.

So if you go in there and manually type, what was being said on the video, Google looks at that as an entire page of unique content connected to both the video. And if you use another SEO strategy where you say the video has a home, you can send a signal which is called canacalizing the URL that the video goes onto, which now tells Google that you designed the video for this webpage. Guess what? It counts content towards that webpage. So you have a huge, hidden bonus mine of content. If you manually close, caption the video. Now, most of you that it won’t make sense for a money skillset. And many of you are going to not listen to me anyway and use like rev or, one of these automated companies, and you’re going to push a button and for a dollar, you’ll automate it. And that’s all fine. But for the handful of you out there who are already producing video, and you’re looking for some kind of trick or tip that the SEO guy has this is it. You just are it. So file it away, pay attention to it, start to use it, and watch your video beat out most other people’s.

In cards and, in screens are the other two points of my optimization, which we, I don’t know if we use those either on the Mail-Right show. So there are eight points that you go through. but guess what, here’s the point of number four, Vid IQ for $10 a month, no longer means you got to come back into Robert’s podcast to hear him talk about those eight points. It automatically tells you what they are. Except for the closed captioning, which is why I spent so much time on it. They tell you what those 10 things are or 8 things. All you got to do is follow along. And it’ll tell you what your score is. It’ll even give you some extra credit bonus stuff like sharing on social, which guess what you, YouTube does have a metric that lets your videos rank based on how many times it’s been shared socially. So it’s not one that I focus on, but it is a real metric. So Vid IQ for $10 a month shows you all of that.

My thing about video is why would you make it? If people aren’t going to watch it. So if you are going to make it and you do want people to watch it, let’s just say, you’ve done that mental journey. Well then why in the hell wouldn’t you pay $10 to give your video like 80 to 90% more likely that it’s going to get found. Like doesn’t even make sense. Even John who’s, who’s already like a fairly good knowledgeable guy doing a marketing podcast. Didn’t necessarily do all the things as an SEO guy. Even though I know most of what I should do I do it all? No. So even if you’re an expert in the field, you’re not oftentimes doing.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, I’m going to, I, I don’t, I use YouTube. I, myself, they’re both competitors, but I just need to hire, somebody to help me. It’s not aware of it. Robert, it’s my excuse, which will be the same excuse as our audience will say in their mind is time. So one of the things before we just go for our break, I’ll just say that you got to be realistic listeners and views your busy real estate agents, but this is important. So if it’s important and you should be doing video, maybe consider getting somebody to help you do these things that Robert just pointed out, and, I’m going to do the same. I’m in the process of hiring somebody to help me with various tasks, which I’m aware of, but I’m not doing on a consistent level. That individual, which I’m just about to hire will be helping me up my game, around some of the things that Robert’s just pointed it out. And some other things that have not been consistent and you should consider the same when you’ve decided that you’re going to do this, and then you’re doing it on a consistent level, hiring somebody that can do some of these things that are not in the public eye will, in the end, be very beneficial. I think we need to go for our break don’t we Rob?

Robert Newman: If anybody, whatever you’re watching us on, please leave us a comment. Hit the notification bell if you happen to be watching the whole show on YouTube, we would really appreciate it, let’s go to our break john. Robert Newman: Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen to the mail-right show John and I are really honored that you’re listening to the podcast today. What we’re talking about is the top 10 real video mistakes that people make were down to, number four, which was, use a plugin. He uses Tubebuddy. I use Vid IQ, as far as I’ve heard, they’re about the same in terms of quality and purpose. So I’m not really advocating for one versus another. For any of you who want to support me as a producer for the first time in my entire career, I included an affiliate link in my top 10 videos mistakes, to Vid IQ. The only reason I put it there is because I use ’em. I love ’em. I’ve been using ’em for a long time and they’ve had a major impact on my business. So if you want to sign up for them and you feel like it, do use my affiliate link or use Johns, if he decides to post some in the Mail-Right video. Alright. So having said that mistake number five, Improper YouTube description, which I think that my guy got wrong, actually. I don’t know that. I said I don’t know that. Hold on everybody.

Okay. I got it. So the number was not adding your personal information. Number two is overanalyzing the improper YouTube description is actually correct. So my guy did get it correct. So my bad everybody that’s listening. So YouTube description should actually contain, a number of, elements to it. All right. It is an optimization part of the video. Okay. So Vid IQ does not really talk about descriptions. They say, oh, you should have 250 words, but they’re not telling you what the words should be. So what is an improper YouTube description? Well, one you should clearly outline in brief little paragraphs, what the video is about.

Most people go to video platforms, go there to watch the video. All right. But every once in a while you get somebody that really wants to read what the video is about. I’ve done that on longer videos myself. I’ve also opened up descriptions to see if there’s a video index, which is another part of my descriptions. Now a video index allows you to leap around the video and, skip to the pieces of the video that are going to most appeal to you. The idea behind producing any content, whether it’s video or blog post these days in the digital world is you got to appeal to the microscopic attention spans that people have. I’ll bet, everybody listening to the show that you’re stopping and starting and jumping around, listening to this podcast, you probably aren’t listening to it all the way through. That’s just nature. That’s just the nature of being in a digital space.

Jonathan Denwood: I’m sure our audience is dedicated and listens to every word we say, Robert.

Robert Newman: Oh, oh yeah. All right. Well, we’ll see anybody that wants to amuse me incredibly drop a comment tell John whether he’s right or wrong. So, not having a description. So video index is important, making sure that you encapsulate what you’ve done. You should probably hire somebody to do this for you if you feel like you don’t have the time using no description is an incredibly large mistake. And of course, at the end of this description which is different than adding your contact information. If you’re going to do nothing at all, at least add your contact information.

Once you’ve gotten past that, get used to understanding that Google is still using text to decide what your video is about. They’re using close captioning, they’re using the description they’re using the video index. The more clearly that they understand the video, guess what you get access to everybody neglects to realize where YouTube is doing this because it’s not search, which a lot of people don’t know. So why go through all the work you ask? Good question. I say, here’s the reason they put you in the browse feature when they really understand what the video is about, especially newer content. So oftentimes when I launch a video, I’m getting a hundred extra views. Don’t really know where they come from. They’re not coming from my subscribers. When you look at Google Analytics, they’re going to say, oh, it’s coming from brows features.

Why is it coming from browse features? They really understand what the video is about. If you have any credibility, as a video producer for the next few days, they’re going to serve you up to people that are broadly searching in your category is a really solid way to get yourself introduced, to brand new people on your channel. And the only way that it happens is if Google really clearly understands what the video is about and trusts your past record of producing high-quality content, those two things. Well to get to that, trust your record you need to be doing this feature because they understand that you’re producing detailed high-quality content at all times and that you always have been. It’s of high quality. That’s why it’s even tracked by Vid IQ.

Jonathan Denwood: I’ve got two insights linked to what you just said. Robert, number one with YouTube buddy, in their, help and knowledge base, they really give you some signs when you’re using about the description about the title should be, in the first paragraph. And they strongly advise that. And in buddy boss, they actually give a tool that advises you about what keyword should be in the description. The other thing is in our interview, episode 312, where we interviewed a couple of video experts, Jess and Jackson Willy Jackson, Willy he’s got his own YouTube channel and he’s got a whole group of videos that really are into this in a lot more detail. And I’ll make sure there’s a link in that.

The other thing is playlists. if people, you can put your separate videos into playlists on your YouTube channel, and what you find is if people really like your content and they really like one or two of your videos, they will tend to do a binge. They will tend to consume, especially if they’re trying to learn about the area, they’re thinking of moving to an area and you are providing some really good insight about your town, your region. They will probably binge. And what I mean is they will probably consume 4, 5, 6, 7, or as many videos as they feel they’re getting useful information from. If they do that, that’s really a strong signal to YouTube about the quality of your channel. And it really will benefit it being shown to a lot of new, additional people.

Robert Newman: Beautiful. Thank you for that, especially that, that adds about Jack, I had forgotten and so great addition, John. Mistake number six, not promoting your own content. I already covered this like for two seconds earlier where I said social is a signal for YouTube. so when you produce a video, you should be sharing it on your LinkedIn profile, your Twitter profile, your like anywhere you have one follower, your mother, aunt, uncle, I don’t care. Just share it, share it, share it, share it, share it. There are all sorts of rate new services for those of you who, don’t know like, so there are cheaper ways to share Hootsuite costs, a small fortune to share an all platform simultaneously and I long ago gave up on their platform.

However, there are new ones out there called Hellowoofy and Hero posts that both are much cheaper and do the same thing. They post to all of your platforms, simultaneously so you enter the content once you have to take a little time to do the data entry, but especially when you’re sharing like a YouTube link and a single thumbnail that you probably already produced for the video. You want to share that with all of your social audience. Maybe even a couple of times, depending on how broad your reach is and how you feel about the quality of the content that you just produced. My stronger stuff, stuff. I’ve spent many months on research, deep research projects, I’ll share ’em 5, 10, 15 times over the span of six months to a year. No problem. You should be doing the same. John.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, I think, you could use these services or you could link it. I really, I really think you should look at an offshore virtual assistant not to help you with some of the office work. This is where you are in your second, third year, and look, from somebody offshore probably The Philippines is a good resource. Cause English is there, would I say it’s the main language of the Philippines? I think it’s, you could say it’s the official language of the Philippines. Robert Newman: What is Jonathan Denwood: English? Robert Newman: No it’s a secondary language.

Jonathan Denwood: What I mean is in the court system in, the government it’s a similar situation to Malaysia. The Philippines was, controlled for a period. It’s more complicated in the Philippines, because Spanish and American English kind of dominate because, where Malaysia was dominated by Britain. So they’re kind of quasi-official. English is a quasi-official language in both countries, but I think it’s really the great value to hire somebody from the Philippines to help you with some of the back door work and to get more consistency when it comes to the things that we are discussing in this podcast is something that I’ve changed my attitude about. secondly, don’t go for the cheapest for God’s sake and spend time in interviewing them and being reasonably generous, what you pay, because you will not always, but normally you do get what you pay, but compared to the US, it’s still excellent value over to you. Robert.

Robert Newman: I agree with it. John said 80% of my team, including some of my higher-quality writers all, come out of the Philippines. It’s a solid place, to do this work. I do a massive amount of interviewing qualifying. It is not necessarily a task for the, yeah, it’s not necessarily a task for the undetermined. There is a lot of people that message you about jobs. There’s a lot of qualification that goes into it. You got to, it’s a skillset. So worth it though. I will just say that John’s estimate is low in my book. A high rate, my team is 750. I have a couple of supervisory people that I pay far more, but other than that, that’s great pay in the Philippines. You’re paying them three times as much as they can make locally like doing good jobs, not s**t jobs, good jobs. You’re paying them about as much as a doctor makes there.

Jonathan Denwood: In US terms for what you’re paying, it’s excellent value. And you can obtain somebody of a much higher quality than if you are paying a lot more money and that’s how your mindset should be. Rather than I’m going to get somebody at some, figure that I can brag about in my local real estate office. And it’s going to save you bags of time. Cause obviously that person’s going to be motivated to stay with you. They’re going to be a better quality individual. So you really want to listen to what Robert’s got to say about that. Robert Newman: Yeah. It’s I, I will summarize all everything

Jonathan Denwood: We need to have an episode-

Robert Newman: On virtual assistance.

Jonathan Denwood: Just about that, because you’ve got a lot of knowledge about that. So I think our audience would find that really useful if you think so leave a comment on this video or the Facebook page, and we’ll do it. Robert Newman: So we’ll, we’ll skip that, but I want to close with one thought. So here’s the one thought to close with these? Think of it this way. Some people in some parts of the world treat life-changing income with the kind of, attention and concern that you’d expect. That’s what I find. When I find a dedicated person, it is a life-changing income. They treat the opportunity that you’re giving ’em the same way. And I never have the US resources treated the same. I’ve paid us resources, 60, 80, a hundred thousand dollars. And you know what, they, they just don’t have the same intensity or focus as the guy I’m paying $9 $10, $11 an hour to, in the Philippines. And it’s understandable because life-changing income here in the US is $300,000 a year right now it’s not the same. And or at least where I live it is.

So I can’t get, I obviously can’t get there. Like in terms of paying somebody that I don’t know, that I pay myself that. So you then have your, guy that it is that for them. My main guy who runs my projects lives in his own house that he bought with income working for me. I don’t live in my own house. That’s what I mean, John it’s life-changing and they treat your opportunity. They work on the weekends. They work whenever you ask ’em to, they get on your hours. When you find the right person, it’s insane. You never get that in the US and they never complain, right.

Jonathan Denwood: Be like me. Robert Newman: Okay. We’ll let that on

Robert Newman: All right. So, mistake number seven is not adding a location tag. All right. Location tags are incredibly important for real estate. This isn’t actually a top mistake for outside the real estate space. This is a top mistake for real estate, hyper-local. How many of you heard the term so important? Well, you’re sending a signal to Google about where the video has been produced. One of the most powerful things about video is you can declare to Google. This is a video about Van Heights, this is a video about such and such a subdivision. This is a video about such and such condominium building. You tag it with the name of the location. If it exists inside Google’s database, they connect the video to all parts of the search that have to do with that location. So look, and Google is getting better and better at this location stuff they’re launching a satellite.

Jonathan Denwood: Can I ask you a quick question? We actually need to wrap up the podcast part of the show. Sure. But the link to that, I know we’ve got two more points, but we can add that to bonus content or we can leave it for another podcast, but when it comes to this, for locals, do you think it has any relation with Google when somebody’s doing a search on their phone, will that video show up based on the location of their phone? Robert Newman: At times? Yeah. Jonathan Denwood: To the location of the video put in this information you just said.

Robert Newman: It does depend on, so there are some location elements, it could affect hyperlocal based on your location. And the video could come up as part of your hyperlocal, depending, on where and how you produce the video, like where you put it and how many different places you’re pushing it out. But absolutely location is a factor inside. How and what type of content does Google serves up to you? No doubt about it. So using that general much broad answer. Yes. It’s impactful.

Jonathan Denwood: So I’m going to wrap up the podcast and are we going to have some bonus content and you go through the last two or do you just want to wrap up the podcast now? Robert Newman: I need to step away for one more second, but then I’ll be back to finish the bonus.

Jonathan Denwood: So let’s wrap up and we’re going to have bonus content folks, which, after Robert, finishes the podcast, you can go over to the Mail-Right. YouTube channel and you can watch the end of this great episode where I think with Robert’s help, we’ve really produced some fantastic knowledge here. We’ve had a bomb Fest of knowledge. Haven’t we Robert?

Robert Newman: We really have, and thank you everybody for tuning in. You can find, you can follow me on YouTube since today is definitely a piece of my content. I’m going to do something. I don’t do a lot. I’m going to plug myself a bit and follow me on YouTube, which is YouTube/inboundREM. You’ll follow my website inbound, the word inbound REM rabbit, Edward Michael.com. And you can, reach out to me or just come to my website and drop a form on my, like any of my contact forms. And, maybe, if you remember this, I will know you came from the podcast because I just wrote a book my first and I’m in the process of getting it published on Google.

It is a book that is talking about the two or three world-class content marketers that actually exist in real estate and how they’ve probably pulled down about a billion dollars in production between the three of them. So total sales, not GCI. However, I analyze what they’ve done and teach you how to do it yourself. That sounds interesting to you. Remember this and say, Robert, send me your book and I will send you a book I’m going to sell for $40 for free because you remember. All right, so let’s go to, let’s wrap up.

Jonathan Denwood: We see you soon. Folks. See you next week.

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From Call Center Manager To SEO Expert We Interview Robert Newman Founder & CEO of InboundREM

Jonathan Denwood: Welcome back folks to the Mail-Right show. Yes, it’s me, Jonathan Denwood the founder of Mail-Right. Robert is with us, but I’m doing the intro for this particular show folks because I’m going to be interviewing Robert and finding all the secrets that Robert has been trying to hide. It’s linked to the interrogation that I got last week. So I thought I would take the opportunity to get my own back and we need to know more about this character that you’ve been listening to for over two years now. So Robert, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the audience Robert?

Robert Newman: Sure. This audience probably knows me best for being an SEO expert and an inbound marketing expert that’s focused on residential real estate for the last 16 years. I publish a lot of content on YouTube and my website that helps realtors, become masters of the digital space and create leads for themselves.

Jonathan Denwood: Thanks for that, Robert, and I’m the co-founder of Mail-Right, We build websites for real estate agents semi or full custom based on WordPress that drives now almost 45% of all websites. You need to own your main digital asset and not lease it. And that asset is your website. I think a concept that most of you agents will understand. If that sounds interesting, plus a suite of other marketing tools that we bundle with your website, go to the Mail-Right website and sign a demo and a chat with me truly. I’ll be privileged to help you out. So Robert

Robert Newman: Yeah,

Jonathan Denwood: Interrogation, time now it’s linked to our discussion about what should be on your, about us page last week. So Robert, people that have been listening to the podcast, as you said the start of your professional career was around telemarketing managing large telemarketing teams and centers. So maybe we’ll start there. I think like last week you said that your childhood, that your parents were kind of semi hippies, maybe give a brief outline what our childhood was like and maybe before you got into telemarketing and then we are delved into that. How does that sound Robert?

Robert Newman: Sounds great.

Jonathan Denwood: So give us a brief.

Robert Newman: Brief, brief.

Jonathan Denwood: Well, a reasonably brief description of what your childhood was like before you got into telemarketing.

Robert Newman: So I was raised in Southern California. We bounced around a lot. I was born in a hoax hospital in orange county and then my parents moved probably I want to say six times between the ages of 3 and 11, Santa Monica, a thousand Oaks Culver city, just to, to name a few. So we bounced around a lot. My parents were on the hippieish side, they were definitely part of the free love culture, and they were fuzzy logic people. And for those who are listening, who may not know that terminology, they were on the cusp of, they were both in technology, but they were both in technology 30 years ago. So they were dealing with, huge eight-millimeter tapes. My dad wrote, the original helped write some of the original code for the day and night tellers, for the first interstate, which most of the people listening to the show probably don’t even remember who those people are anymore.

So I was raised in that environment and one of the most interesting things that I’ve said in other places that have impacted my entire life, my career, everything is that they didn’t, allow media in the house, no TV. They were really religious about it up until the time I was about 14 or 15. And, the only thing that they made easily accessible to me is a personal library that they created. So by the time I was 11 years old, I was reading at a collegiate level and I was reading Heflin and a lot of deep sci-fi. And, they had all sorts of books that I don’t think you would normally give to children like the joy of sex and, and the bastard, which is a really like almost adult-like series and just all sorts of stuff.

This copious amount of reading that I was doing, it did two things for me that have impacted my entire career. When I hit a challenge in my career or my professional life, I seek books. And when I was young and I had problems in my personal life, like high school problems, which we all had, I read books and the ideas that I was getting were from very advanced authors. Like I was reading like really deep psychological stuff, Freud and young, by the time I was 12, 13. So, somebody’s like, I’m going to hit you. And I’m like, you’ve got a problem with your. So like this, it’s impacted my entire life. Unfortunately, it made me an outcast in my early years. I had very few friends in school. So that certain kind of set me on the path of always kind of walking my own road and doing things the way that I was going to do them because I had zero social support and zero social relatability from anybody that I was surrounded with.

Jonathan Denwood: Right. So did both your parents work and if they did you said they were both in the tech sector. How did they make their living basically?

Robert Newman: Well, my dad started off, managing, data backup stacks at night. And then he found somebody that was willing to mentor him and trade him into coding. So he started coding, and he was coding in Cobal and then he eventually, moved into management relatively fast before I was even out of the house, which was the age of 17. He was already moving into management, which is where he spent the whole latter half of his career is getting into higher and higher and higher-end, project management in, what we would call the digital space now. But at the time it was just coding. So that’s what he did. My mother passed when I was 17, but before she passed, she was doing the same thing that my dad did, but she was always on the management side. My mother was always better with people than my dad was. She was a huge personality and people automatically gravitated to her and before she was already working her- every single time she would someplace she would just instantly start getting, well, not instantly, but she’d get promoted into management slots pretty quickly. I think

Jonathan Denwood: So fundamentally in tech, but also in the alternative lifestyle kind of area of the bay area.

Robert Newman: Not the bay, we were always here in LA which means that they were both working for a lot of banks. Banking is big here in Los Angeles and, at a certain time, not so much anymore, but at that time, you’re talking 30, 40 years ago, banking was kind of leading or at least matching the lead for information technology, revolutions. They were trying to process payments and they were doing stuff with check and coding and bickering coding and all those different things. And so at the time, it was a fairly revolutionary industry.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. So have you got any brothers and sisters?

Robert Newman: I have a single brother, stepbrother, technically. My father remarried and had a child when I was 22. So I have a brother that is separated by me in the age of 22, and we were raised entirely differently. So, my dad learned all the lessons from me, like what to do, what not to do. He and my mother were so young when they had me, they were out partying a lot when I was, a kid. So, I mean they were 20, I was seven and they were 25 when they got married and I was 7. They were really, really young parents. So anyway, my brother, yeah, I have one brother.

Jonathan Denwood: All right. That’s great. And, I think he does. Does he help in the business at all? I think he does a bit. Doesn’t he?

Robert Newman: He did, actually, up until recently, I don’t think I’ve had a chance to update you. He actually got himself a job at a major white labeling SEO agency and, took a significant pay, increase that inboundREM couldn’t afford to give him. But yeah, my brother worked for me for three and a half years and I mentored him on the SEO skill set, and he’s now taking those tools and applying them out in the big, bad world on major accounts.

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, that’s great. So you said you were a bit of an outsider at school. Also, you’ve been quite open about some of your addiction problems that have been part of your life in the past. Before you got into, telephone marketing and telephone marketing centers, did that addiction rear itself before that? Or was it after a period of time you got involved in that industry?

Robert Newman: I don’t do anything normal, John. No, actually addiction for me only came into play. So my actual blood family, my adopted father. So, my actual blood family, has a very strong, addictive history and I ignored that, but I really didn’t come up. I was not much of a drinker or drug user. I had been raised around it so much that the whole idea kind of turned me off. Because that’s what my parents were doing. It was the culture at the time. There are just all sorts of, marijuana wasn’t as hip as it is now. Like, so I was already being raised around that. I had no interest in doing it. So I was actually a real cling cut. So like 18 through 28, my addiction–

Jonathan Denwood: Which isn’t unusual for people that have been brought up in that, to my understanding in that culture, they tend to be a little bit anti it to some extent.

Robert Newman: Yeah. So what happened for me is that, I actually got a divorce from my first wife and then that was when my drinking problem started almost right after the fact.

Jonathan Denwood: So it was a what? Around dealing with stress and depression was it?

Robert Newman: looking back on it. Yes, you could say it was a type of depression. I made choices that I didn’t think I would ever make was never one of those people that said, oh, I’m going to get married and I’m going to get divorced. I was always one of those people that said if I’m going to get married because that was never a goal of mine. If I’m going to get married, it’s going to be once and done. so when I opted to step away from that relationship, I broke my own heart quite significantly, and took me seven years and a lot of self-punishment for me to come to the understanding that basically I was dealing with a broken heart that I had caused.

In the meantime turned into a total, a wreck of a human many, many run-ins with the law over drugs and alcohol, warrants in different places, trips to jail, never doing the programs that were assigned to me by the state or the city or whatever it was. Just always getting myself in trouble. Lost business, lost relationships, just all the stories that you hear that relate to addiction can definitely be applied to me.

Jonathan Denwood: So if you don’t mind me asking, what was the turning point that turned that around? What was, anything you identified any individual moment inside, whatever it might be that made you decide that maybe another path would be a slightly better choice?

Robert Newman: Well, it was, in the program, they call these God shots. But I definitely had a really dramatic one. I was in a shelter and I had managed to drink myself into homelessness and I was in a shelter down in long beach and, I had no money, so I wasn’t drinking and I, never could quite get myself around panhandling or stealing, so that wasn’t the kind of alcoholic that I was. But I was sitting here in the shelter and I had every intention of getting a job, getting some money, and just going straight back to partying that that was my whole objective when I was in this shelter. And there was a guy in this bed next to me. They closed the doors and make everybody go to bed. And it’s like a shared dorm room kind of experience, like a bunker kind of like, a military, whatever the barracks there we go. It’s like military barracks with everybody set just literally just a few feet away from each other.

This old guy who was a real sweet guy seemed to be struggling with his breathing at night. And, I slept next to him before. And this particular time I hear this breathing, then I hear this big rattle, and then nothing. So I actually reached over and kind of put my hand on his neck after whispering, hey, you okay? Are you okay? Cause we’re not supposed to talk or move after lights go out and they’ll kick you out of the shelter if you do that. He was dead. The guy was dead.

The weird thing was, is, I mean, he was sweet, he wasn’t one of those like dangerous addicts. He was just one of those self-destructive addicts. And, I just had this moment of clarity, man. Like I looked at him and realized like, in my head, you go to this place where you’re like, oh my God, I can’t believe this guy did that to himself. And then I realized, wait a minute, I’m in the same shelter in the bed next to him. How can I possibly like there for the grace of God go I. Like I literally had that moment where I said, if I don’t make some internal decisions that are dramatic, I am going to be this guy, whether it’s tomorrow or 15 or 20 years from now, this is me. For sure. I just had this sudden sense of certainty. Like a bolt of lightning hit me right through the head. And that’s when I actually made the first, I tried to give up drinking like 50 times prior, but not with like a high degree of certainty that, oh, if I don’t do this, I will die. Like, that’s what happened for me in that moment. Like I just said, if I don’t change, this is me.

Jonathan Denwood: That’s great. I think we’re going to go for our break. When we come back, we’ll be discussing Robert’s journey, professional journey, from call center wizard and manager to SEO expert. We will be back in a few moments. Folks,

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. Jonathan Denwood: We’re coming back. We’re having a bit of dive with my, co-host for the past couple of years, Robert Newman of inboundREM. So we did a bit of a jump cause we because I think you’ve been open about your addiction and your recovery from it. So obviously, we jumped a little bit. So from being brought up by your parents, you then got into call centers. What were some of the lessons that you learned from being involved in that industry? On reflection, what were some of the key things you learned around people management and marketing in general Robert?

Robert Newman: So many, I learned how to be– like how to take being an introvert and deal with people, manage people. I had all of my brutal lessons about people management and like all at a very young age, I was already running or helping run like small call centers when I was, 19. And so I was, but they’re the same things they are today. Usually, you have people at the lower end of the societal spectrum, oftentimes they’re dealing with mental, emotional addiction problems. The people that do call center work are usually not. It’s like, let’s put it this way you’re not going to find somebody with like an MA in some kind of tech that came out of f**king Oxford or something like that. You’re going to find people that are high school dropouts, who are struggling, who took this job as a last option.

That kind of means that they’re going to give you that they insist that you deal with them at a human respect-based level. It’s a very interesting career path to choose. And I got really brutalized. Like I remember once, I said the word folks in the middle of a meeting of about 30 people, and one of the, black ladies at the meeting literally stood me out in the hallway. And for 20 minutes told me exactly how racist I had just sounded. And I’m raised by hippies who loved everybody. Like we had gay friends, we had black friends, we had everybody in my house, there was never any, any exclusionary. And so I was just like I mean, I’m 19 and I’m getting dressed down by like a 40, 50-year-old black lady. And I’m just like, I was just like, oh my God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t, I did not mean to offend you.

So it really taught me a lot of things about human beings. And the other thing that it taught me, which is what plays in today’s career, interestingly enough, telemarketing done well, my mentor, Billy Halberstadt, who was my first mentor at the age 20. He was the first person that introduced me to spreadsheets and the concept of calculating how many calls everybody was making, what our closed percentage was. So from a very early on, and he was the most effective we were working for a little alarm distributor that was working, for AT&T and we were blowing the doors off Southern California. We were beating everybody. And Billy was running all of the calls, the appointment, setting the outbound telemarketing for them.

I was assisting Billy and he was teaching me why he was so effective because he would look at scripts and he would look at changes in those scripts. And then he would look at our numbers and then he would say, did this change here? He also taught me about tonality, which is one of the first times I ever started to realize how deeply it’s not what we say sometimes, but it’s how we say it. And so all of those elements and the list keeps going on and on and on, like, there are so many things that you don’t– like mirroring as an example, mirroring behavior over the phone, which is also something that Billy told me. I got super lucky. My first mentor was a studious guy who had read all the available books. He introduced me to Tom Hopkins, which goes back to what I already shared with you.

He gave me some books to read as my mentor and I dug deep into those things. And so, so I’ve started applying professional sales tactics, in telemarketing as well. And then teaching professional sales tactics, because most of the people in the call center were just reading from scripts. They had never learned any professional sales tactics like alternative choice closes, assumed closes, or, trial closes. And the list goes on and on and on. And all these things that professional sales trainers will teach you really weren’t being used in call centers. So I made a career out of that. Like I made a career out of what Billy taught me. Tracking statistics, which belief or not we didn’t have it wasn’t digital. So Billy was way ahead of his time. And so I used that whole methodology of figuring out how to track things. How we used to track things. John, you’ll love this, you know how we used to track calls?

Jonathan Denwood: I have no idea how you did it.

Robert Newman: Tick marks on a piece of paper. Every time somebody made a call, we had them make like a little, I don’t have a clean piece of paper, but we had, ’em make a, like a little just tick mark, and then we’d just have, ’em do five. So we would literally have them track their own calls by tick marks because this is way prior to digital. There was no such thing. So we’d tick mark, their calls. We’d take what, what was called their call sheets at the end of the day. And part of my job as the assistant was, to calculate the tick marks. Like I’d add up all the tick marks and then I would throw them into, there were, I don’t even know if we called it Excel at the time, it was all brand new. Like this was all brand new computers were, were fairly new back then. So we were like, I’d add up all the tick marks throw them into Billy’s little spreadsheet. And then he’d look at the numbers, how many appointments were set, and then he’d try to calculate that into how many deals the salespeople had sold.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. So we dealt with that bit and we’ve dealt with a little bit about your years of addiction and so after your experience with a gentleman in the shelter, how did this lead to getting involved with SEO and the start of your present business inboundREM?

Robert Newman: Well, I was running, some of the largest call centers in the Western United States. There were about seven of them, about 1300 people. It was definitely the largest independent operation that existed, on this side of the country. And, by independent, I mean, it wasn’t like a big telecommunications company or anything like that. And so I was unofficially kind of the CMO for the company. There were people that were in charge of a lot of direct media filming stuff. And that was at the corporate office and I was in a satellite office, but I was basically running all the things related to marketing. And I had a three-person web development department. Those three people were doing 20% of our revenue and I had 1300 other people. So we’re basically saying three people had about the value of 400 employees.

When I saw that on paper, everything I’ve ever done, thanks to Billy. I’m looking at the numbers, I’m looking at the statistics, I’m tracking what’s happening. That I already had been thinking about digital and thinking, oh God, I’m in a shrinking industry. It’s not like what it once was it’s annoying calling people on the phone. They always don’t like you. Even customer service calls are tough where they’re calling into you. So when I saw those numbers, that’s what changed the game for me, John? I said I was just like, so I’m going to reveal something on this show that I’ve never really talked about.

The company in question was a corporate entity of Mantra entertainment, but it was, better known as girls gone wild. And so while the founder of that company was in jail, I was running all the call centers, or at least during part of that time, I was running his call centers for him. And he was, an addict, in his own right, and very unstable. And, I lasted longer than any other call center manager. I lasted a year and a half, but then my time came when he called me from jail and fired me. Because that’s what he had done to every single other call center guy before me. So, when that happened, so you’d

Jonathan Denwood: You’d take care is a badge of honor then?

Robert Newman: I said, I lasted longer than anybody else. And, and he did try to rehire me, which I said, no, because he was nuts. Or actually, I shouldn’t say that, because we’re public. I should say that he was going through a hard time and he was unstable to be fair. So, I will say that, when that all happened, John, I had had it in my head. Like I’m going to get into digital when the time came and that call came through. I just knew even as I was packing up my desk and walking out the building, I’m like, I’m going to get into digital. This is the time I’m newly sober. I just out of this really stressful job, so I sent out 300 resumes, and the first-

Jonathan Denwood: What time period are we talking about? When was this?

Robert Newman: This is about 15 years ago. 16 years ago sent out 300 resumes. It was like 2006 or 2007. It was right in the middle of the mortgage meltdown. And so I sent out 300 resumes, no surprise everybody was panicked. I got no responses from my resumes. Plus I had no tech experience. And then finally I changed things on my resume, which is why I decided to share it on the show. This is funny because I sent out 300 resumes with Mantra entertainment. I ran all the call centers. Nobody called me not one call, a couple of emails back, nobody called me. I was panicked. I’d never had this heard of a time getting a job. So I changed my resume and actually revealed that it was girls’ gone wild and the funny thing is, that the first person that actually called me was John Crabb, the founder of one of the three founders of agent image, one of the biggest developers of real estate websites that exist.

He was curious about the Girls Gone Wild thing. He was basically, did you just apply for a tech job at my company? Like that was basically his, question. And I said, yes. And I got very lucky because we had this incredible conversation, which I’ll never forget that outlasted hours long. He pulled me into an interview. He had me meet the entire sales team at agent image. I managed to convince all of them that I was a good risk. And then they brought me on for 30 days as a project manager. And then they let me start, their online, sales division, as a salesperson. So, that’s how I got my start.

Jonathan Denwood: Right. So obviously,

Robert Newman: Oh, online marketing, I did say online marketing, right? Like yeah. They had a division they had never done before that was related to online marketing. So I started selling those services. I was the first person in that division to do that.

Jonathan Denwood: Obviously. I’m from England I’m English. So I’m not aware, obviously, you’ve mentioned just quickly. Obviously, we need to wrap up the podcast part of the show. We’re going to be continuing the discussion a bit longer though, but just to finish off the podcast, obviously, you’ve mentioned this TV show a few times, but I’m not actually aware of it. Because obviously can you give a brief outline of why, so obviously in your heart, the way you expressed it, it’s a little bit notorious this TV show.

Robert Newman: Not a little bit. Right now I promise you half the people listening to the show are laughing.

Jonathan Denwood: But I’m not aware of it.

Robert Newman: All You got to do is Google it. But here’s the premise. So girls gone wild turned teenage rambunctious into a national phenomenon. They would get in this bus and they’d basically drive around with this big girl Gone Wild logo on it. And they go to spring break and places where young people congregate and then young, women would go into this bus and take off their clothes for a cameraman and they would film it and they’d create these DVDs and then they would sell these DVDs on cable. Okay.

At the height of Girls Gone Wild, we had a 7 million per month cable budget. So I was running all the call centers that supported that unbeknownst to many people. We had a contract with vivid, which was an adult entertainment producer too. So we’re doing cold calls for both Girls Gone Wild. And so 13,000 people, there are about 150 people in customer service and everybody else was doing outbound calls or what was called product add-on calls for other vendors, which is just where they would add Girls Gone Wild CDs onto the tail end of another offer. So we were just everywhere. I mean, we built up a massive marketing machine. Massive, which is surprising like all this is telling anybody that’s listening is that you did not turn on any US cable TV-like from 2004 through 2008. Like you just didn’t.

Jonathan Denwood: I was listening to the radio my biscuits in my tea. This sounds a little bit more outside. So basically it was a kind of soft porn kind of show.

Robert Newman: Not basically, that’s what it was.

Jonathan Denwood: Right. Thanks for the picture. We’re going to wrap up. We’re going to wrap up. I’m not sure if I want that picture in my mind but there we go. So we’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show. I’m going to delve a little bit more into Robert’s background. Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed this. If you have left a comment, on the YouTube channel or on the Facebook page, which you can join an all free. Like I say, we’re going to continue the discussion for about 10, 15 minutes, Robert. What is the best way for people to learn more about you and what you’re up to Robert?

Robert Newman: Well, minus all the detail that we just covered in this interview, you can learn everything that, that I’ve shared with the world about, inbound marketing and about real estate SEO on my website, inboundrem.com. If for some reason, some of you want to contact me, you can do so on my about or services pages and schedule an appointment to talk to me. Mainly if you’re on the middle to the upper end, of your own market, and you’re looking to change your marketing, get rid of all the recurring page services that you love to hate Zillow, Trulia, like KB core sync. The list goes on Ylopo. If you want to take ownership, I would be a good call to start maybe researching that.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. And if you want to contact, Mail-Right, our perfect customer fit is somebody between their second to the fifth year in the industry, either individual or a small power team. And you’re looking for a company to build your digital presence on WordPress and also want to help with Facebook and Google paid to advertise. Mail-Right is should be your partner. And please go over to the Mail-Right website and look at what I and Adam have to offer you we’ll be back next week with either we’ll be discussing a subject internally between me and Robert, or we will have an industry expert, to give you more insight about how you can be more successful in 2022. We’ll see you soon folks bye.

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“How to get actual customers from your real-estate biography pages”

Robert Newman: Welcome back to the Mail-Right Show ladies and gentlemen, today’s episode is number 326. John has stuck in with me almost 180 of those episodes. Unbelievable. And what we’re going to discuss today is we’re going to talk about how we’re going to turn one of the most unused unrated pages that every single person listening to this show has guaranteed you everybody’s got one. And we’re going to tell you how to turn that page into a page that actually produces you leads wherever you have it up. So, without any further ado, the page in question is your biography page. All right, your real estate biography page. You’re about page if you’re looking at a website, your introduction or cover page, if you’re talking about LinkedIn, every single one of us here has written differently about pages or bio pages everywhere from 150 words, all the way up to, 15,000, depending on who you are.

So really deeply excited about this. But before I just jump into it and start to explain how people are missing the point with these pages. I want to introduce my co-host for those of you who might be new to the Mail-Right Show John is a WordPress development vet. He’s got two companies, one of which is in the real estate space. They make an amazing real estate product that they are targeting at agents that have been online for, or working for 1 to 5 years. He and his partner are really good at numerous things actually, but, they have a particular history with, Facebook and can answer a lot of questions about that like, is it still effective? So without any further ado John, why don’t you go ahead and finish it up and say hello? Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, thanks for that Rob. So basically if you’re looking to, have a semi or full custom individual look and design for your own website, we do that on WordPress. And then, and we’ve got a host of marketing tools that can help you market yourself online to your local market, or we can help you run some campaigns, either on Facebook or using Google local adverts back over to you, Rob.

Robert Newman: All right. So here is a statistic that most of you would not be familiar with. all I do all day long is look at real estate websites and it is always surprising that when I share the reason that we decided to talk about this today, John, or the reason I suggested it as a topic, it is literally amazing to me that every time I do a review without fail every agent that hires me as we’re looking through their numbers, they get surprised by how many people have actually looked at their about page. It’s always in the top 10, always. And sometimes it’s as high as number 3 or 4 in terms of the most, viewed pages on the website. And I’m talking about big websites, not just small ones, not just somebody who has a couple of hundred people coming in. I’m talking about websites that have thousands and thousands of visitors. And you still see the about page be number four and number five on the website.

Where it is that people have gotten that these pages aren’t valuable is, a mystery to me because let me tell everybody here, who’s listening to the show. Here’s what I’ve learned after doing digital for 16 years, wherever there are eyeballs if you are tracking or looking at like a website and a page wherever there are eyeballs there is a possibility. So if you have a homepage that gets 10,000 visitors and you don’t think anything is happening on that homepage, or if your website gets 10,000 visitors and you’re just not getting any calls, messages, nothing. And you’re like, man, the website is broken. No, the website’s not broken. You’re just not connecting with your audience in the right way, which, is what we’re going to talk about today is how to do that through your real estate biography. So, just out of curiosity, John, how much time have you spent on your biography, on your various websites?

Jonathan Denwood: A lot more than I used to, on my other business, which is WP-Tonic, I have a video of myself and a brief outline about me and then my key team members and on the Mail-Right website there’s the about us page has about my background and, Adam’s background. Robert Newman: OK. For all that, I talk about this. I posted a blog post that, actually is coming close to ranking, on the first page for real estate bio. All right. But of Google. but the interesting thing was my own about page I hadn’t touched in quite a long time and I had been eliminating sections like I was a squirrel hiding chestnuts because I wasn’t getting response off it the way that I wanted. So I just kept eliminating pieces. Because I felt like I was talking about stuff that people didn’t want to hear. And I was, you know what I was talking about, everybody listening to the show, John, do you know what I was talking about? Jonathan Denwood: The mind boggles actually when it comes to you, Rob. Robert Newman: Okay. So I was talking about all the really rich and famous and successful real estate agents I’ve done business with within the past. I don’t ultimately think that passage a name or two anybody gave a rat butt. Okay. I don’t think they cared and it certainly didn’t increase response. So here’s what I’ve noticed about my own channels and about my own mediums. Because when I got into inboundREM, I really had a chance to run for the very first time, John, with my own ideas about how I was going to do marketing. I’ve always been working for other people, consulting with other agents, always like a higher gun, never just doing it all on my own.

The number one video, one of my own videos that are made me about $200,000 in contracted business is a single video that I did back in 2017. And the video is on my homepage. Most of these videos, most of the time are ignored. Anybody listening to the show knows this is true. John’s looking like he’s actually waiting for me to tell him what the hell it is I did. And you know what I did, I skipped the jargon. I filmed the video in my garage with the garage, clearly visible behind me. Clearly, I’m in a garage. My toolkit is behind me, this massive toolkit. And I just, oh, so

Jonathan Denwood: You’ve got a massive toolkit then Robert.

Robert Newman: John! Keep it clean. Jonathan Denwood: I’m just asking about your toolkit in your garage, you are the one that brought it up.

Robert Newman: So anyway, so, here’s the thing I talked deeply about why I was establishing inboundREM mind you, this was right at the beginning of me starting an agency wasn’t the beginning of my real estate marketing career. It was actually 10 years into it. It was just the beginning of me saying, Hey, I’m going to do an agency thing and I’m going to build websites and, and do SEO campaigns that some of the real estate industry will be able to afford. And, the crazy thing was, since I stuck all to personal stuff, it was all personal. None of it was professional. I keep getting calls off that video because, and now drumroll please, ladies and gentlemen, the most important thing that you can do, thank you.

The most important thing that you can do when you create an about page, the most important thing. It’s not that you shouldn’t mention professional it’s that your professional is a byline. And the main piece of information is who are you? John is a boxer, an entrepreneur, a cancer survivor a guy that, that really, like diligent dyslexic. This is who he really is. So, and I’m really, I’m an alcoholic I’m these, these different things. And I was raised by hippies and it’s impacted my whole entire life every single business I’ve ever run was how I was raised. Cause I was raised without media. I was raised without TV and I didn’t realize how impactful that was until I was much older. Now whenever my life gets harder ever, I get in trouble. My, go-to every single time is to pick up a book every time no exceptions.

I’m having trouble in a relationship. I go out and find a relationship book. If I’m having trouble in business, I go out and read business books. Why am I sharing that with everybody on the show? Like why are we talking about this? Because the object of our, about page on our own website, the object of most things, except maybe LinkedIn, which is a professional only site, is to make a connection to the person who’s visiting your website. You want them to understand who you are as a person. They probably got there, or there will be plenty of other information on your website that will clearly indicate your accolades. As an example, social proof, I have 50 reviews that are posted on my website. They can figure out who I am that way quite easily. They’ll see that I’m super knowledgeable that I’m this, that I’m that, but who am I as a person? That’s what you’re about page is supposed to say.

Jonathan Denwood: Who are you, Robert?

Robert Newman: I just shared some of that. So here’s what we’re going to do for the second part of the show, because we’re coming up on our break in a minute or so here, but the second part of the show, the wind-up, if John still gives me the runway is I’m going to start to give everybody the tools to do an exercise on how to get to this information. Just like John just said who am I? And now I’m going to use John as a model. Now, John truthfully, and honestly have, have we discussed this at all? Have I prepped you anyway, shape or form?

Jonathan Denwood: No, you, you would never do that. Listeners and viewers. He never preps me about anything on the show before. If he ever did that, I’ll be shocked I’ll fall off this chair. But just to finish off, I just got a couple of quick comments about what you’ve just said. I think what a lot of real estate agents, what you have to realize is just being proficient in what you do is great. And it will probably make you stand out in truth and it’s sad, but it’s truthful, just being really proficient and organized and doing what you say you’re going to do. Probably what will make you stand out from the crowd to a certain level, even in 2022. But the thing you have to understand if you’re a real estate agent now in 2022 is you’re in media.

We’ve all through social media we’ve all become a celebrity for three minutes. What was that American artist that said that [inaudible12:26] Morehart, that predicted that we were all going to be celebrities for three minutes, Robert Newman: 10 minutes.

Jonathan Denwood: 10 minutes. Was it, well, if it’s 2022, it’s probably gone down to three minutes. It’s the Tik Tok generation. so what I’m saying is you’ve gotta accept that to be successful as a real estate agent in 2022, you you’ve gotta accept that you can’t be the secret agent that you’ve gotta be out there and you’ve gotta build a brand and the brand is about you. So I think this is probably going to be one of the most important conversations we’ve had on this show for quite a while, really back over to you, Robert.

Robert Newman: Okay. With no further ado, listen, I will say this, this is free I’m going to go do an exercise. That’s going to give me an example. Not the only example, not, not the way you have to do it, but an example of how to get to your story. The things that matter, because I’ve studied psychology a lot. I’ve read a lot of those books mentioned earlier in the show. And now unlike many other times in my life, I’m not proposing an idea that I have not tried. I’m telling you that this works. It’s worked amazingly for me, all my stuff that produces results tends to be on the personal side. All the stuff that I do, that’s really great and glitzy and glammy and, and like the 10 ranked real estate lead generation companies. And I spend a hundred hours on it. And like, I get nobody contacting me. And then I do a little video saying, yeah, I was raised by hippies and I get like 10 phone calls. So it’s important.

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Robert Newman: Welcome back to the Mail-Right Show ladies and gentlemen. So I am going to run you through, how to get to a personal story. I’m going to use John as our case study, he has not been prepped we’ve not researched this. We have not discussed this in any way, shape, or form he is a blank slate. So

Jonathan Denwood: You are not the only one that’s said that.

Robert Newman: So here’s the thing ladies and gentlemen, usually a lot of who we become as an adult has a lot to do with where we started in our life. So, I usually frame that in the idea in my head as zero to 18. It’s not a matter of like, that has to be the way it is, but then I would usually say, so, John. You don’t sound like you’re from here. Did you grow up someplace else?

Jonathan Denwood: No, I was brought up in Northeast London,

Robert Newman: Northeast London. So what part, like what city was there? I don’t know how they do it. There was a village or the name of Northeast London.

Jonathan Denwood: Burrows a bit like New York has Burrows.

Robert Newman: Okay. Jonathan Denwood: I was brought up in the Burrow of Redbridge, the nearest, in a suburb, a commuter area called barking sides, which, is Northeast London. Robert Newman: Barking sides in Redridge so and do they have, do the schools in London work the same way that they do here? Did you have like grade zero through six that you were in? Jonathan Denwood: No we have, an infant, which takes you up to seven. We have junior, which takes you up to 11 or 12, and then we have senior, which normally takes you from 11 to 16. Or if, if you’re going to do your A levels, you normally stay on to 18. So 16, 18 is what you classify as high school, either you stay on at school an extra two years to get what you are called, A levels, which are the main, gatekeeper to your ability to go to university or not. Robert Newman: Got you. So you’re going to school you’re in Northeast London. When did you figure out you were, had a learning disability?

Jonathan Denwood: Never did at school? No. My mother had dyslexia and she, was quite concerned, she could see clear signs that I was very adept at hiding it. Because I was a bit, ashamed of it. It’s like all children, you just want to be like everybody else. And when you get to an adult you want not to be like everybody else. So I was very astute and had all sorts of morphologies to hide my dyslexia. But my mother knew there was a problem. So she kind of put up a bit of a stink and they sent me, bless their hearts to special needs for the emotionally disturbed children for two and half years which is a [Inaudible18:27] way did help because the quality of the teachers, this unit, attracted were normally the most dedicated. They did manage to teach me, how to read and, not quite my writing still looks like a doctor. But they did help. Unfortunately, after the two and a half years of being an observer of extremely emotionally disturbed children, which I wasn’t one, I just had dyslexia, but they really had some very disturbed children at this school. They sent me back to, the normal education system that had induced the problems I was facing at the beginning. But that’s another story.

Robert Newman: Okay. Well, that’s, that’s an interesting part. I mean you’re saying that from an adult’s perspective, but I gotta feel like you took away some lessons from all that as you got to adulthood, I’ve seen it, but I don’t want to reveal it to the show. I want you to try to think it through yourself and kind of say like, if you say were those early years in north London being just, being held back, being around these kids, do you feel like that impacted you?

Jonathan Denwood: Well obviously yes. I’m a strange concoction because a lot of people would say I’m very extroverted. I run podcasts. I’m on YouTube, I’m out there a lot, but really I’m very introverted at the same time. So it’s a strange mixed part of me that is very, craves attention. And, I’m not very good at dealing, with situations where I’m not the center of attention. but in some ways, I don’t like the attention, but what I mean by that is I’m not very good at coping in situations where I feel that I’m been put on the sidelines a bit and I think that comes from my childhood basically. And it took me a while. Which can be for good or bad because I can be a bit or used to be, a little bit destructive to get attention if it was necessary. Robert Newman: Okay. So for everybody listening, what I’m running you through is an exercise to try to figure out how or what you might speak about when you’re writing your biography. All right. Yeah. That’s what we’re doing. I’m not going to reveal what I’m doing as we’re going on. I’m just going to do it. John’s going to talk and then we’re going to, we’re going to go back and take a look. Now, this is zero to 18 and there’s plenty more ground I’m sure that we could cover. And

Jonathan Denwood: I just wanted to say, I think the one thing I learned from being a dyslexic and this is not uncommon is that I’m very, used to failure and I can accept failure, or don’t let it, once I accept was the right word, I don’t let it get me down for too long cause I’m quite used to it. So, I just get up and I just put my foot in front of another one and keep moving forward.

Robert Newman: So for the listeners and viewers, here’s an interesting, another thing I’ve picked up from these books. Okay. I’ve read lots of clinical studies. I’ve read guys that have studied, motivated, and like the science of the mind. A fascinating thing about the human character is that people with minor disabilities, something that slows them down but does not stop them, tend to be far more proficient at going farther in life than people without for the reason that John just said. If your life starts off with, everything’s just bloody hard, like always hard, you’re always failing. You get used to it. You get used to trying and trying and trying and trying and trying until you succeed. That’s it. Whereas other people get hit in the face a couple of times and they fall to the ground and they never get up. So here’s what I heard you say, John, I did hear you say that the early part of your life was wildly impactful. I heard you say that your dyslexia has been wildly impactful and I would probably talk about both those things. And I would talk about them in the context that we just said, being dyslexic has allowed me the space to persevere inside the business world because it probably played into it, John. It’s a personal character trait that doesn’t relate to business directly, but it probably does impact the fact that you started multiple businesses. You’ve been an investor, oh, you might even get married again. Who knows?

Jonathan Denwood: [24:00 Inaudible] I can’t afford that the last attempt cost me a small fortune

Robert Newman: Those of you who can’t see John just broke out in a sweat just literally right now. So these are personal tidbits about your character makeup that people would want to know. I always suggest complete and total honesty. I also love the fact that John was in England. He’s moved over here. I happen to know some of his other adult stories, but we’re going to, we’re going to pull that curtain back and go into mid-adulthood. When you’re doing this exercise for yourself, you want to spend the most time thinking about how childhood experiences might have impacted your, adult life. Cause that is what you want to talk about on your real estate bio. Did your parents influence you? Mine did a lot, but that’s just because they were weirdos that were never around. So their actions hit me hard and I became a weirdo who doesn’t ha like has a big chosen family but oftentimes spends a lot of time by himself. So big surprise, right? It impacts who we become.

So John, that’s the first part of your story. The second part of your story is between 18 and 25, a mid-adult young adult. Usually, those are our college years. Oftentimes many of us meet our first mate or spouse. However, you want to phrase it. Some of us start to have children and go off on that route. The ages between 18 and 25 are the second stage of human development in our current society. And they tend to also be impactful, not as much as a youth, but especially if you go and you have a collegiate experience or something like that, it does still really impactful. So John, when you were 18, did you still live in, in London?

Jonathan Denwood: No. I joined the British army, Robert. Robert Newman: Well. I didn’t even know that. Okay. So you joined the military, you did that right at 18?

Jonathan Denwood: Yes. Robert Newman: Okay. And, and you were in the army, you’re a soldier, or were you like in logistics? Did you see combat?

Jonathan Denwood: No Infantry? Robert Newman: You were in the infantry? Jonathan Denwood: Yes.

Robert Newman: Okay. So, where did you deploy to?

Jonathan Denwood: I had two tours of Northern Ireland. And I went to penguin land. I went to the Falkland Islands, not during the Falkland war. It was afterward.

Robert Newman: Okay. So you went to Northern Ireland? Forgive me. My dates are crap and I don’t actually know how old you are. Don’t remember at least. Jonathan Denwood: I’m 58. Robert Newman: Okay. So yeah, that’s 40 years ago. Was that before the peace treaty with Northern Ireland?

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, definitely. Well, we weren’t at war with Southern Ireland. We were at war not, well, I don’t know. It was colonial. It was on reflection

Robert Newman: Civil unrest is what they would usually call.

Jonathan Denwood: Well, It was worse. It was a form of continuous colonialization of Ireland.

Robert Newman: OK. Okay.

Jonathan Denwood: That’s political ain’t it. Robert Newman: Having said that. Did you have any experiences from that time in your life that stay with you?

Jonathan Denwood: A burning, I won’t say hatred. A burning. I don’t know how to put it. It’s not hatred, but, a dislike for authority and the British establishment. That is bullshit is bullshit English, the British people almost every day.

Robert Newman: Okay. Oh, you joined the military, with what sounds like idealistic youth and then. Jonathan Denwood: No, I just wanted like most people that joined the army, I just wanted, my father tried. My father was a war hero. He won the military cross, which is the second-highest to it’s only the Victoria Cross that’s higher. And he really tried to persuade me not to join. The more he tried to persuade me, the more decided I was. And he was totally right to try to persuade me not to join, but, being an arrogant, 18-year-old arrogant little [Inaudible] I decided to do it. Robert Newman: Okay. So you joined the military, you were two years. Did I hear you say?

Jonathan Denwood: No. I was in there for five years, but I, after four years, they did allow me to, I had to buy my way out. I had to give them money to let them get out of the fifth year. Robert Newman: okay. Jonathan Denwood: My father loaned me the money. My father is a pretty successful business person. And he wouldn’t give it to me. He said to teach me a lesson and I bought myself out of the army. They wanted me to be an officer they were very supportive of my dyslexia, given fairness. They were, in some ways very progressive, but the last thing I wanted was to be a British officer. Cause I despise the British upper class. I absolutely despise them. Robert Newman: Why do you think? Where did that healthy amount of despising come from?

Jonathan Denwood: Because they are cancer. Britain could become an enormously great country again, it’s got enormous strengths and possibilities there and it’s held back by a ruling class.

Robert Newman: Okay. So

Jonathan Denwood: Who is in my opinion, traitors to the memory, to the collective. My family has lived in Britain for over a thousand years. I see them as, traitors to the country.

Robert Newman: Okay. Jonathan Denwood: That’s why I came to America because I couldn’t stomach it anymore.

Robert Newman: Every single thing that we’re talking about, so I’m going to take a beat, but I’m going to circle back around to this. So all this stuff, your midlife right now has at least in this little interview and this exercise, it’s sounding more impactful. Like you did four years in the military, which. Jonathan Denwood: Most people so I don’t bring it up. Robert Newman: I didn’t know, Jonathan Denwood: I treat a, I treat it as a compliment that people say, well, you are not the type. And I take that as a compliment because the last thing I want is people to think I’m the military type don’t take that as dis- I’ve got the greatest respect for those.

Robert Newman: I feel like you’re talking to everybody else. I don’t take it any particular way. Yeah. Yeah. My best friend did a lot of tours in the Navy. He’s an old punk just like I am. And we both made our youthful indiscretions. Like you did. We both thought we knew the way, better than everybody else. You get so tired of telling your parents, right.

Jonathan Denwood: it did give me focus and it did teach discipline and focus. So there were benefits, but I think I could have chosen a slightly different path to get those elements out of it.

Robert Newman: All right. So, we’ve learned a lot about John and his midlife, and just for the sake of time

Jonathan Denwood: We need to wrap up and then go for bonus content.

Robert Newman: So when we come back, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be wrapping it and I’ll be doing, 25 to 50. Let’s call it. Which by the way, everybody, I hope you’re understanding we’ve now got a great biography ahead of us. We’ve got, we’ve got enough from John. We’ve got, we’ve lived in London, we’ve developed a healthy disrespect for authority. However, we so developed a strong connection into discipline. Strong sounds like strong attention is being paid to society. Some kind of interest in engaging in, because if you’re going to get so upset, you’re going to leave a country based on their politics. There isn’t anybody in the world of,

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, it took 20 years. I went into business when I came out of the army, and at 27 I had over 30 people working for me.

Robert Newman: Beautiful. All right. We’re going to talk more about that we are going to go to our break ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast part of the show, John, if somebody would like to look you up, how would you like them to go about doing that?

Jonathan Denwood: Well, if you’re not being put off by that going to the Mail-Right website, and book a demo, and I would love to show you what we do for agents around the website and all the other great things that we got as Mail-Right back over to you. Robert Newman: And ladies and gentlemen if you’ve just become fascinated with the interviewer in this conversation, you can find me on inboundREM.com, as I’ve indicated earlier in this podcast, I have now redone my about page and it is significantly personal. So I walked my talk. And if any of you would like to see an example of what I mean by this, go to inboundREM.com/about, and you’ll find–

Jonathan Denwood: I’m going there right now.

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The post #326 Mail-Right Show: How to Get Actual Customers From Your Real-Estate Biography Pages appeared first on All-in-One Real Estate Sales & Lead Generation Solution.

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With Special Guest Ricky Carruth Top real estate agent in Alabama. He also started speaking, writing, and coaching in 2017 through his Zero to Diamond free real estate coaching company with a mission to reduce the failure rate in the real estate industry by bringing awareness that it’s not about the deal, it’s about the relationship. Ricky is the No-Pressure Agent. Born and raised on the Gulf Coast, Ricky has been selling real estate since he was 20 years old. Starting his career in 2002, he has been through this roller coaster of a market and back. After tons of life lessons of ups and downs, Ricky has emerged as the #1 agent on the Gulf Coast since 2014.

His dedication to his clients, hard work ethic, and market knowledge are the key attributes that have placed him a step ahead of the rest. Top real estate agent in Alabama. He also started speaking, writing and coaching in 2017 through his Zero to Diamond free real estate coaching company with a mission to reduce the failure rate in the real estate industry by bringing awareness that it’s not about the deal, it’s about the relationship. Ricky is the No-Pressure Agent. Born and raised on the Gulf Coast, Ricky has been selling real estate since he was 20 years old. Starting his career in 2002, he has been through this roller coaster of a market and back. After tons of life lessons of ups and downs, Ricky has emerged as the #1 agent on the Gulf Coast since 2014. His dedication to his clients, hard work ethic, and market knowledge are the key attributes that have placed him a step ahead of the rest.

Here is a Full Transcript of Our Great Interview With Ricky

Robert Newman: Welcome back ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 325. We have a world’s record holder in terms of person who’s been on the mail right show the most. we’re back with Ricky Carruth which as far as John and I are concerned, he can keep coming back on the show over and over because he is got such incredible things to share. But for anybody, the one or two–

Jonathan Denwood: He’s a pain for punishment though. Isn’t he? Robert?

Robert Newman: Well and John’s on his pain meds today guys. I don’t know what’s going on with John, but he’s on one. So, but anyway, we’re here with, we’re here with Ricky. Ricky, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to the one or two people who may not know you.

Ricky Carruth: Yeah, for sure. Good to have me on, a fourth time. You guys are, it’s always an interesting conversation, so yeah, no I’ve been selling real estate for 20 years. I’m in Alabama, right on the beach right next to Florida. And, no, that’s about it, man. I’m just a hard worker, just trying to get better every day. I’ve got some interesting things, right. To share with you guys updates and stuff for the show. So, yeah I’m basically on a mission to help as many people as I can. Right. And then at the same time, you guys know not, I want to do it at no expense to the people I’m helping.

Robert Newman: So ladies and gentlemen, I’m gonna, expand on Ricky’s, introduction. He’s at this point when he first came on the show, he was in the inception of becoming, a real estate coach. He’s now probably one of the top followed real estate coaches that exist, I haven’t checked your numbers lately, but they were, they were impressive a year ago when we talked to you last and I’m certain that you’ve just grown in popularity. At this point, when people call me from my consultations, your name is brought up frequently, which wasn’t the case when we first met with you. So Ricky is an amazing coach. He practices circle prospecting. He gives out some information about the real estate technology that he uses in his endeavors. And that’s just a couple of the subjects that he covers that I’ve seen. I’m sure there’s many more, but that’s what I’ve seen.

And John guys for those listening is one of the top WordPress web developers, that I know of. He’s a master of his art. He has two companies. He has another podcast that’s wildly popular that talks about, WordPress. But John, why don’t you go ahead and share why you do this show?

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, Thanks a lot. Yeah. I’m big into WordPress. I run the biggest word press podcast at the presser moment that has between five and 10,000 listeners per month. This is a pretty big podcast, not as big, but I’m amazed at the great support we get and the amount of people we get to listen to us. But I think it’s the quality of our guests, not our insights, Robert. Robert has enormous amount of knowledge and I run mail right. We provide custom WordPress websites, to agents that want to own their most important digital asset plus a host of boat on extra functionality that, that agent can utilize to empower their digital marketing over to you, Robert.

Robert Newman: Well, it’s not gonna be over to me. So, ladies and gentlemen, I have a couple subjects that I wanna talk to Ricky about, which I’ve already shared prior to the show starting, but I wanna start off, asking Ricky to share with us, actually, John, I’m gonna have you take it away. Cause I don’t remember the title of the video. I did not watch it, but John did, he was really, really impressed with it. He wanted to ask.

Jonathan Denwood: I looked at a few of them, but I thought this was a, quite a good one. Okay. I’ve gotta tell you, this is an infuse. Robert is struggling. He’s been out and about last night, the Rotter, there we go. So he’s like a cat for the musical cats. So there we go. So, I watched this video and I thought, so can you tell us, and it was called, you got to change your way to play the game intriguing title, Ricky. And I thought the video. So can you tell us what the videos was about and why you wanted to make the video and the point you were trying to make?

Ricky Carruth: Tell me what you got out of it. I’m looking for it on YouTube.

Jonathan Denwood: Oh, sorry. What did you say?

Ricky Carruth: I said, tell me what you tell me what you got out of it. Cause I honestly is it on YouTube? I can’t find that.

Jonathan Denwood: No I’m sure it was on your channel. No, no, I’ve got it wrong. Now if I’ve got it all wrong, Ricky. So if you wanna, if I’ve got, I apologize if I’ve got it wrong,

Robert Newman: John, John, let me, let me save you this particular time. So ladies and gentlemen and Ricky I’m gonna pick up the ball. We’re, we’ll find this video and then we’ll talk about it for all of you listening to podcast.

Ricky Carruth: Find that video, John I’m searching YouTube when you said it earlier. I was thinking, it sounds like something I say, but I don’t–

Robert Newman: So at the beginning of the show, what I asked Ricky so when we first met or when I first met Ricky and it was me and John collectively the market, the real estate market, it was very different. I think that we did our first show with you Ricky, before the pandemic even hit if I remember correctly. So since then, we’ve had a pandemic we’ve met with you twice and the strategies that you’ve used and in that time, right in the middle of a pandemic, you also decided to switch brokerages in the midst of all of this market change. So there’s two things that I am really interested in knowing. So we’re here a year later. When did you change over? You changed over to from RE/MAX to EXP if memory service me correctly. Is that right?

Ricky Carruth: Yea, it was March 10th. So the shutdown happened, like March 15th or something like that. So it was literally days before the entire shutdown of the US economy. Robert Newman: Okay. So what has your, like here we are March, so yeah, we’re almost exactly a year later.

Ricky Carruth: Two years, Robert Newman: We’re two years into it, there are lots of people that are thinking about changing, like brokerages, where they work, how they work, which I think is an important part of any conversation about real estate, because EXP is a digital broker they’re in the cloud. It definitely is one of those places where the mechanics of doing business theoretically are different. So I am curious to know, you’ve now made this change a while ago. How are you feeling about it? Did you change the method of you, the, how you did business in any significant way? And do you still, I mean, I’m not asking you to pan anybody or, or anything like that, but do you still appreciate the way that you’re being supported a year or two later?

Ricky Carruth: Well it’s a good question so first off there’s a lot of misconceptions out there, right? So EXP people say it’s a digital, it’s a virtual, it’s a cloud based brokerage. Well, the fact is all brokerages are right. Every brokerage uploads, their documents to the cloud, they get electronic signatures. They communicate by texts and email, so on and so forth. So we’re all digital. Everything is in the cloud, no matter what brokerage you’re with, it’s just a matter of where you’re working. So again, another misconception EXP, doesn’t say you can’t have an office. They just say, we don’t care if you have an office, if you want an office, go get an office, get it approved by the state, commission, get it approved through us and have a branch of our office. They’re fine with that.

I own a branch office. So I have an office, right down the road where I have a team that works and I have employees and everything else. Through my organization that I built with EXP around the country. We have many, many branch offices, all around. And so it’s really, instead of really the misconception that it’s different it’s really the same thing, right? It’s the same thing, but better. Because you have to think of EXP as a platform that you can take and build your business on your corporation, your company. So like a traditional, it’s not a traditional brokerage. They basically have gone out and they’re classified as a brokerage, but in reality, what they’ve done is they’ve created the infrastructure that you can take and go build your company on. Okay.

So let me go deeper with RE/MAX. I was with there, it was there for 10 years. Okay. I paid them a half, a million dollars over that 10 years and nothing to show for it whatsoever. It just went into the RE/MAX deep dark hole, and I have nothing to show for it. I can’t grab anything tangible and sell it or give it to you or show you. It literally just went into making the corporation rich. So EX P founders, in 2008, when he decided to do this, the biggest part of it was he realized that all the agents are out there in the industry, working their ass off to help people buy and sell real estate, right. To come back to pay fees and commission splits to the brokerages, making these corporations rich, and the agents get nothing in return.

Okay. Nothing. Okay. The ones that give support and training, great. All brokerages do. So take that off the table. What else? You got nothing because your clients are doing business with you because they like, you has nothing to do with the brand of the brokerage you’re with. So they said, well, if all the agents are out there working their ass of to help our corporation become wealthy and, and get rich, that it’s not fair that the agents aren’t cut in on that action. Why can’t we build a model where agents are actually partners with us. That was the infancy of EXP was that they wanted to be partners with the agents. So how can they do that? Well, they created a model where if you’re out there just selling real estate, like you normally are at other brokerages they award, you with being a partner in the company and giving you equity in their business.

So here we are, I’m two years in, okay. I paid a half, a million dollars to RE/MAX, nothing to show for it. I’m two years with E XP. I’ve paid ’em 40,000 total for the two years, they gave me 50,000 in equity, which is right now worth 150. So I’ve got 150,000 worth of my own company. Where I’ve used their platform to build my company. That’s worth 150,000 right now. So that’s the first part of it is that it’s an infrastructure for you to go build your business. And if you wanna go out and just sell real estate and build equity in the company, great, they’re a $5 billion company Agents own two and a half billion of it. Right? So the agents, the 73,000 agents, that’s growing by a thousand a week the agents are a half 50 50 partner with the corporation. That was the original plan by the corporation for the agents to actually be a 50 50 partner with them.

Now, why would the company give up half, half their corporation? Well, the two and a half billion that’s still left is still worth five times more than RE/MAX’s entire company. So they created a scenario where everybody wins, not just the corporation, everybody wins. So there’s that part of it where you can actually build equity in your own company and build it up and use their infrastructure to build your business. Then there’s the platform that you can expand. Now, like every single agent, in EXP gets their own franchise. They basically say, here’s a franchise, here’s a franchise, here’s a franchise. And you can literally open up an office if you want to. And you expand nationally and even internationally immediately for no money, no liability, no broker responsibilities, nothing.

So I brought in 150 agents over the two years, that’s turned into a thousand agents so far, I brought on three brokerages, two were a hundred agent brokerages, one in LA, one in Fort Lauderdale, 38 agent in New Jersey. So you have the power just a single agent to actually bring on entire offices from anywhere. And all those agents get added to your organization that you make money every time they sell something. And as those agents go out and build their organizations, you get credit. I’ve got 25 agents in South Africa, 34 in Canada, 4 in Australia. So I’m able to expand, not just national and acquire entire brokerages. I can bring on agents from other countries and build my influence in these other countries. And we’re growing in these other countries. So my group is, we’re almost to a thousand, I’m in the high 900s growing by 75 a month. And I probably bring in three or four of those a month. The other 70 are brought on people in my organization. Right. I don’t even know who these agents are.

Now it creates a situation where you can actually create your own empire and be your own Gary Keller. Whereas Gary Keller has 200,000 agents at Keller Williams. But he probably knows 500 to a thousand of them if he has the memory of an elephant. But he’s making money on 200,000, he doesn’t know those agents. They’re just in his organization. Same thing here, the thousand agents I have, I probably know 300 or 400, the other five or 600. I don’t know who they are, but I make money every time they sell something and this is going to continue to grow, right? So it’s put us in a position where we make money like Walmart now and Quicken loans.

Quicken loans has the cheapest rates in town. Okay. And your local lender can’t come down to the same rates as Quicken loans. Why? Because Quicken loans is dealing with volume. They’re making a little margin on millions of transactions, same thing with Walmart. They undercut the price cuz they’re buying in bulk and they make a little margin on millions of transactions, not like your mom Pauls, where they’re just getting paid on a couple. So they have to charge more to even make ends meet. And so they’re putting in position to do the same thing because my a thousand agents are closing 500 deals a month. So I go out there and work my ass off to go sell a hundred properties a year to make all the money. Or I can get a little margin on 500 deals a month without even touching any of those deals.

And I can scale the 500 to 10,000. There’s a guy getting paid on 10,000 deals a month. He doesn’t touch any of the deals. I can’t scale from a hundred as a single agent. I can’t go any more than a hundred a year as a single agent. and so they’ve put us in a position where we can make money, like a Quicken loans, like a Walmart, where we’re getting paid small margins on hundreds and even thousands of transactions instead of working our off to make all the money on one. So there’s many different facets to this us. There’s many different avenues of, how you can use this platform. Cuz it’s a platform, right? It’s not like an everyday brokerage. Like, oh, we switch from RE/MAX to EXP or go to Keller Williams or go to century 21. You just look at the commission, split the numbers. If you’re gonna make more, that’s not what this is.

When you figure in the equity, they give you back. That’s gonna expand over the years. When you figure in what you can do with the rev share if you want to recruit, you don’t have to recruit. You don’t have to build your own brokerage, but let’s say in five years you do wanna expand, well, you have the opportunity to right. But by that time you have so much equity built up. That’s multiplied. Listen they profited 65 million through three quarters, last year they haven’t reported the fourth quarter yet. RE/MAX is down 19 million compass is down 300 million, Redfin loses money, Zillow loses money. They’re up 65 million. They got a hundred million sitting in the bank. They own success magazine, right? Tony Robin’s son runs success magazine. They, we own it.

We own veil of the virtual world. We own showcase IDX. So when you own the stock, they’re giving you equity in the holding company that owns all these other companies and all the other companies they’re gonna buy in the future. So this guy’s very innovative. The people running this ship and it’s just, there’s nothing you can really compare it to anything else. They’ve created a platform that we can go out and really build something mass. Every day regular agents can go out there and build something massive nowadays.

Robert Newman: Beautiful. Well, I guess that’s a thorough report. We need to go to our break when we come back, either John or I will queue up another question from Ricky, but I think it’s safe to assume that Ricky doesn’t have any complaints about the support he’s receiving. I’m always curious about EXP I want to do a full disclosure I own a little bit of their stock. So I don’t wanna, I don’t want people to think that I’m shilling without telling anybody that I’m shelling I’m really actually just curious to see how the model is going. I like the general concept that I saw years ago when they first came on the marketplace with people like you, Ricky and I have many contacts. You’re you are not the only one who have left and gone over to EX

Ricky Carruth: I mean, you see big, big teams, big teams, like we just had a hundred million dollar team. The number one RE/MAX team in Alabama and Birmingham come over a couple weeks ago. I think it’s Charlotte, North Carolina, where EXP was actually number one in volume over all the other companies, here in my market two years ago, EXP had, there were number seven on the chart in terms of market share this last year we’re number three, we went from seven to three. you’re gonna see because the model’s so attractive to, to agents, not just team leaders and brokers, but even new agents, what their mentorship program and all the stuff that they offer for new agents that it’s such an attractive model with equity and the opportunity to expand that you’re gonna see these big producing teams continue to come over, which is gonna do nothing but catapult us into getting closer and closer to outselling everyone. We’re picking up all the top agents in each market. It’s just a matter of time before we’re the top a top agency in the world

Robert Newman: Don’t know that I disagree, but before we go any further, we’re gonna be right back for whatever platform any of you are watching, viewing, listening to us on. Please do John and I favor and Ricky too go ahead and give us a thumbs up. If you’re on apple iTunes, go ahead and leave us a comment on apple iTunes, wherever you are. If you have something to say about the show, if you want to ask some additional questions, if, for some reason, Ricky, loses his mind, decides to come on time number five, do you have any additional questions for Ricky? You can find Ricky all over the internet, just do Ricky Carruth real estate and you’ll find his YouTube channel and his website and his, his coaching, his coaching company and just everything else. And John, you can go to mail-Right.com and me, you can go to inbound REM.com stay tune ladies and gentlemen will be right back.

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Robert Newman: Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, we’re here with Ricky Carruth its episode number 325. Before the break we were talking about how Ricky has, is feeling and has felt about a transfer over to EXP from RE/MAX that he made two years ago, I’ll summarize and say he feels pretty good about it. The next question that I have, which, John, do you, are you needing? Jonathan Denwood: No, I think I better keep my mouth shut because I’ve managed to find a video that I’ve come to the conclusion that Ricky never made. So I dunno what that means to me. I’ve never done that I apologize, Ricky.

Ricky Carruth: Let me spiral into something here. and maybe this will spur on some, some conversation, while we’re here I didn’t mention this cuz I wanted to kind of do it, live with you guys to kind of give you an update of where I am right in my business and kind of what’s going on the direction I’m going in and everything. Which you guys will probably find very interesting, but for 20 years I’ve been a single agent. I was the number one RE/MAX agent in Alabama. I’ve closed a hundred deals a year for the last eight years. Last year was number eight. And I finally, come to this place where, I’m gonna step out and I’m in the process of building a team to take over my residential sales. Whereas I’m gonna take that step back outta residential production and go out and pursue commercial sales Big apartment complexes, strip centers, whatever stuff like that.

So that’s one that I’m making and, and I’ve actually consulting with people who have helped other agents build billion dollar teams. They’ve done this many, many times helped me structure the team to do it right. And also I’m consulting with commercial people on that end, who are doing a hundred million dollar deals who are basically telling me everything they know and showing me the ropes on that side. So I’m kind of stretching myself and, not just saying, okay, a hundred deals a year kind of passively and, got the EXP thing going. My coaching business is going well and all these things are going great. And I’m happy where I am. That’s not where I’m at.

I didn’t know what I was gonna do with my real estate business. If I was gonna throw it away or just give it to somebody and say, pay me referrals or what, because it’s not really worth my time anymore to go on listing appointments and to continue showing property. It’s just, it’s not where I’m at anymore. And so I didn’t know what I was gonna do. So for me to step out and go build a team is really fun to me because now I can take my 50 million dollars a year business and actually turn it into a company that I’m running from like more of a CEO position and ramp that up from the 50 and the goal is to get it to a hundred million. And that’s a lot in my market.

We did like 2 billion in sales in my area, in the Gulf shores, orange beach area. So a hundred million is 5% that’s a big market share for one entity in MLS. So that’s the goal there, right? And then in, in terms of the coaching, this is our first round. We started January, first of doing completely free one-on-one coaching where I’ve actually certified coaches, zero to diamond coaches who actually call the agents once a week, 30 minute calls this is all free. So I revamped the zero to diamond program and changed it from a 90 day action plan to a 60 day challenge. Another key, fact here is that now zero diamond.com is a social media platform where when you go and log to zero to diamond it looks like Facebook, right?

There’s a wall, right there, there’s, there’s a news feed where, you can post, you can post on your profile, you can follow people, friend, people, DM people like their posts, like their comments, create groups, all that stuff is right there within that zero to diamond ecosystem at zerotodiamond.com. Whereas the 60 day challenge is attached. And it’s more set up like a, like a course with week one, week, two week three, and then we have the application for the free coaching. So the free coaches, they help the agents through that 60-day challenge, and then as they go through the 60 day challenge, then we’re gonna take a month off. And every quarter we start a new batch of agents. So right now, as we speak, I’ve got 22 certified code coaches. And we’re coaching about 110 agents through the 60 days right now, nothing but incredibly positive reviews. And everybody’s just extremely over the top, happy with how everything’s going.

The agents who didn’t make it to the one on one, they’re still doing the 60 days. And they love. I’ll end this whole rant with a survey that we did, we did a survey about a month ago. Because we wanted to really dig in and see exactly what kind of impact zero to diamond has had on the industry. So we found in the survey, of course there’s a lot of incredible stories about people that were making 150 that went for making that, to doing the program, to making 650, the next year and people that are making 350, they’re making 850 and people are making a hundred thousand making 350, just all kinds of stuff like that.

The most interesting part of it was that seven out of 10 agents say they get more listings and close more deals. 87% say they have better time management, which means a lot to me because it tells me that they’re probably spending more time with the family and doing things that they like to do. 75% say they read more and 99% say they enjoy being a real estate agent more. And that was the biggest one for me. Because at the end of the day, that’s really kind of what our goal is, is to reduce the failure rate, but also try to help people, enjoy it. Because we got into this business to set our own hours and, to have freedom and to enjoy our life more and make more money and to be happier.

A lot of agents feel, like their business is controlling them and they’re working until 10 o’clock and they’re stressed out all the time and it’s not really what they thought it was gonna be. And so what we’re trying to do is help agents on that side of it, get back to the reason why they got into real estate, and really kind of take control back, from their business and create a scenario where they enjoy being a real estate agent, their closing more or spending more time with the family. Right. So said a lot there probably gave you some good ammo.

Robert Newman: You said I of course ran right over to zero to diamond and registered and logged. It’s interesting I haven’t been here long enough, to have any comments about that. As a general commentary, I love your story arc as a human being, I don’t know that I have something that’s specific to the show except to let our listeners get to know me and you a little bit better is that all I hear is a guy saying, he’s decided he’s gonna level up and that this is what leveling up looks like to you. And I like a, serial entrepreneur who has, a few different interests of his own, and I understand what that’s all about because you’re just always looking for whatever the next level is for your particular thing.

I’m doing the same for some of my primary business and some of my ancillary businesses and the Mail-Right real estate bit was, John doing the same. And, he doesn’t talk about it much, but he also does investing in some other stuff too. So he’s always on his own, his own way of, leveling up. So we’re all on this journey and I hear this is your journey and I’m excited for it. I haven’t added the chance to research it, but I will get into it and look at, how you’re coaching, clients are talking about you now I will say this, go ahead, John.

Jonathan Denwood: I think we’re getting close to the end of the podcast, but I think in the bonus content, I think if, Ricky’s okay about it, we can have another 10, 12 minutes. We can delve in some of the things he’s observed in his coaches around practical things that they, see patterns that they improve the agent’s performance. Because I totally believe the things you’ve said, Ricky, cuz, you always struck me as a straight shooter. So you’ve made some powerful statements about improvement. I would like is your insight about how you and your coaches manage to get those agents to improve. And I think that would be useful to the Mail-right Audience, what do you reckon of it?

Robert Newman: Sure We’ll follow your lead. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, this time around, unlike the break, I’m gonna let the guys, sing themselves off the show. So Ricky, if you’d like, since you have changed so much and things are so different for you, where would you like people to go research either you or your companies or your other coaches? Where do you send people if they were interested in following it?

Ricky Carruth: I mean anywhere, really, whatever your favorite platform is. I mean, I do a lot of stuff on YouTube. I’m actually going a different direction with YouTube where I’m actually creating the content now as opposed to, editors and stuff like that. And I’m trying to be more thoughtful there. I wanna do better on that platform and it’s actually worked really well for the past couple weeks. It’s been just purely content. I’ve created also Instagram so you can follow through I post on my stories quite often, follow me through my day and everything. Everything’s in the link of my bio in terms of, I have a discord, I have a text community. I have, the free coaching platform. All that stuff is right there. I drop a podcast every day, seven days a week on iTunes and all the other podcast channels. Jonathan Denwood: You do

Ricky Carruth: So. Yeah. I mean, zero to diamond.com is a good place. Instagram is the best place to get me. I answer all my DMS there every day. So, I get tons of messages from agents all over asking all kinds of stuff. So if you want to have that more personal connection, Instagram is the place for that. Otherwise, check out zero to diamond.com and connect with the other zero to diamond agents and, and chase that 60 day challenge.

Robert Newman: Go ahead, John, how would you like people to

Jonathan Denwood: I thought I was a pretty old worker, but this guy, beats me I dunno. Well, Robert doesn’t care because he’s roaming last night, but it makes me feel he’d have to quit. Like, no, I dunno what to say, Robert. I think we better end the show on [Inaudible31:14 ] from Ricky about my performance. That’s all I’m gonna say.

Robert Newman: Well, ladies and gentlemen, if you wanted the numbers, Ricky, has, 81,000 subscribers, his channel has millions of views at this point. He has got 1,288 uploaded videos on his primary profile and he started a second channel. So something that John and I talk about frequently that I only, I look at this and I know a couple of different things, no matter what you told me right now, I know that you feel like YouTube is effective. You wouldn’t invest this much time and energy into it. If you didn’t feel like it was moving the needle for all of these businesses that you just mentioned. And you’re investing in it deeply. I, I do the same. I don’t know that I wanna do it to the level that you’re doing it, but you’ve had tremendous success on it.

If anybody wants to, to follow Ricky, I strongly see that you go there. I can’t even begin to imagine what the value might be to a brand new agent. You could probably just watch Rick’s videos and basically get coached up to the point that you could make a really good living in real estate and all of it for free. So his statements about this being free, I find them to be true, especially with all the content, he has on the channel.

If anybody would like to reach out to me, I am not free. You can go to inboundrem.com. A conversation with me is free. I also try to give away my time. I just do it one person at a time. I do have a lot of, content about, reviewing, existing real estate technology. I also have a little bit of commentary on my YouTube channel about EXP not much, but some, so anybody can check me out on YouTube, Robert Newman, inboundREM, same thing with my website, inboundREM.com with no further due. We’re gonna go to our final break. We’re moving over to the mail-right YouTube channel. And you’ll be able to see the last 10 minutes of the show there. And, I forget what John says. We’re gonna talk about but we are gonna talk about that. See you soon.

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324 Mail-Right Show Effective Digital Marketing Advice For Real Estate Agents in 2022

We discuss what we think will be the most effective digital marketing tools and strategies you the real estate agent or broker can use to promote and get quality leads in 2022Robert Newman: Welcome back, everybody hold onto your seats. We’re on episode number 324 of the Mail-Right podcast today. John and I are gonna talk about it, I’ve already got him laughing. I’m three seconds into the show. Jonathan Denwood: It was just that introduction. I didn’t know what you were gonna say there. He is in a funny mood today, folks.

Robert Newman: I am, I had a really long call with like really two high-level digital professionals and it kind of got me a little bit buzzed in enthusiasm. We’re gonna invite them to the show. I’m gonna keep it a secret to who they are, but hopefully, they’ll accept. And then John and I will talk to them publicly with all of you and I’d be really excited for you to meet them because they were really cool. So, ladies and gentlemen though, this is episode number 324 last week, John kind of took the floor and talked about where the state of the real estate, what the market was, and he had a lot more about it, to be honest. Today’s episode number 324 is gonna be what digital marketing strategies are gonna work in 2022. And I’m actually gonna break this out into two categories. Okay for the people that are here. And since this is more my, well, that’s not necessarily true, but this is a strong area for me.

Jonathan Denwood: Well, I took up most of the time last week.

Robert Newman: There we go. That’s actually the truth. John’s being more honest than I am. The truth is he just is like, Hey, I took up all the time. Why don’t you take up most of the time? I’m like, okay, I can talk forever. Let’s do this.

Jonathan Denwood: I can testify for that listeners and viewers.

Robert Newman: Yeah, you can. Yeah, you can. All right. So buckle up buttercups here we go. We’re going to discuss digital like 2022, and I’m gonna break it into a couple of categories. The categories that everybody knows, you already know all these companies. And I’m just gonna kind of say, really few fast pros and cons. I’m gonna do this quick. And then I’m gonna tell you some of the cutting-edge stuff that I think is gonna work. I’m gonna cover the usual players. And then John has agreed to let me take the stage very briefly and discuss the strategies that I focus on, which are gonna work in any year very well all the time upmarket, downmarket doesn’t matter. And we’re gonna discuss some of those because they will work very well for you in 2022 if you decide to invest in ’em.

So first though, the usual players who are the usual players, direct marketing companies like KVCore, sync, real estate webmaster, boomtown Sierra interactive. Now Sierra interactive and real estate webmasters fall into an unusual category because you can do SEO on their site. But here is what we’re seeing in SEO unless you have a personal message attached to your site. These search sites that do really, really well for SEO, such as real estate webmasters and Sierra interactive are not performing as well on lead generation. You’re not getting as many leads nor as strong as leads. Hear me on that. So do you wanna necessarily make as big of an investment in those real estate search sites as you once did? That’s questionable.

The direct marketing companies that are out there. The only companies that are really probably going to continue to Excel in 2022 are the ones that are layering in ancillary technology. That right now mostly is Ylopo, but many other players are getting into the mix. So what do I mean by ancillary stuff like automated texting, automated checking of a lead? When they give you a secondary email address, what they can do is they can go out and check the email and then find out where the real email address is and give you a whole buyer profile. Even though technically the person tried to be clever and not give you their real information. That’s an ancillary, layer technology yet. Another one of the ones that Ylopo is using.

Now Ylopo has become overbooked. So please don’t listen to the show and go, oh, it’s all Ylopo. No, they, have huge momentum and most of their markets are crowded with these strategies that they’re using. So I’m starting to hear a lot of consumer feedback that they’re not as effective. That doesn’t mean that you can’t see a strong ROI. That doesn’t mean I’m not recommending ’em either. It just simply means that I want you all to be aware that this is a company that is now reaching maturity. Their strategies are reaching maturity, and many of them are not nearly as effective as they once were. Okay. So, you have lower quality websites, which everybody loves to, to bring up to me. And I understand there are literally 1.5 million of you who could be listening to the show and asking me questions about Wix, Squarespace and the list goes on. Anybody under the sub $200, easy agent pro, real geeks.

Of that entire stack, a real geek still remains a shining gem of a company. You can actually for the investment that you can make with them, they can succeed in direct marketing and they can succeed in SEO. They are one of those companies though that without the direction of their former founder is, a little harder to work with them than it used to be. So do I recommend ’em in 2022 until they go out of business I’m suspecting that in some way or another? I’ll be recommending them.

Jonathan Denwood: Can I ask, a quick question? Because that’s high praise from you, even though you quantified it a little bit from the next sentence, why do you think they shine out more than some of the other names that you were talking about?

Robert Newman: Mostly because it’s price versus value. That’s why they shine out. So they’re cheaper by far, they’re half the price of Sierra interactive. Who’s another very good company. They don’t have the diligence in development shops. They’re not trying to sell you and not like, like me Sierra, you want a really high-end sight? Sure, we can build it, but it’s gonna be 9, 10, $15,000, that’s a big number for 99% of the, well, 90% of the people listening to show. And for the other people, you have to justify the investment. Real Geeks is beautiful. $700, $200 a month, it’s reasonable. It’s in the reach of almost everybody listening to the show and it’s not gonna put anybody in major credit card debt. If they’re a brand new agent.

Jonathan Denwood: I’m sorry to interrupt. Obviously, you haven’t mentioned Mail-right? But the other factor

Robert Newman: I still don’t know well enough. I know all these other systems like the Back of my hand.

Jonathan Denwood: But another one that we kind of position ourselves is Agent on Fire. You’ve never really mentioned them at all. Don’t you rate ’em at all?

Robert Newman: Not really but here’s the thing there’s there are so many companies, Agent Fire, Realty NA. Like, I can go on and on and I can go on to ail- Right. And, here’s what I will say about Mail-Right John drives strong, crazy, but I’m always even-handed with everybody. Here’s what I like about Mail-Right? I still haven’t really deeply looked at the technology. John’s like development stack requirements to get up to the par of some of these systems would be very high. Maybe he’s achieved it. Maybe he’s not. I haven’t looked at it close enough, but here’s what I love about Mail-Right. That is true from my heart to anybody listening to the show. So you can still get John on the phone.

John is an incredibly well-versed WordPress developer. He’s deep, deep in that world. I strongly recommend that anybody who’s thinking of going in the direction and starting in the direction of building WordPress projects, you can talk to John if you’re in real estate, you can get some advice from him. Yes, he will talk to you about Mail-Right? Yes. He’ll show you Mail-Right if it works for you, then sign up for it. WordPress development is, complicated I wish it wasn’t, but it is. What plugins do you use? How do you build your site? Who do you have building your site? How do you support the site after it’s built? Do you have a way of checking the plugins? Are they being monitored managed and that’s without even going into the functionality that, you build to do real estate specifically? So all the things that I just mentioned before I even got into real estate, John is really, he’s a great resource.

Jonathan Denwood: So Thanks for that. I really appreciate it. But when it comes to Real Geeks, you know what species is the price point compared to some of the more advanced systems that you were talking about. Some of the other previous names you were mentioning, which have some very high ticket numbers as well, haven’t they, but for the price for what they offer and because of their background, you think of that lesser price group, Real Geeks kind of semi shines out for you. Would that be right?

Robert Newman: Yes. Again, it’s a value proposition. They have a reasonable CRM. You can text, you can do a lot of cool follow up out of it. And once again, you’re still spending less than $200 a month. It connects and does Facebook ads all for the sub $200 a month range its value for money. Most importantly, though, their websites are well structured and for SEO, for everything, they have skipped all the fancy graphics. They don’t even allow them to be built onto their platform. I’ve got a client that called me the other day, spending $5,000 a month and driving it into real geeks., website. But the real geeks’ website kind of looks like all the other sites, which is a pro and a con.

However, you stick with, like, if you, if, as a website developer, you keep telling your real estate clients, I don’t care what you tell me you want, I’m gonna build you a well-structured site. That’s gonna work well in the search engines and everything else. That is a very hard message John, many people will not buy from you when you give ’em that message as a real estate agent, which is fine. The ones that do get a well-structured website, that’s gonna work well in search engines. It’s not very pretty, It’s probably not what a branded or luxury agent’s gonna look at, but it is absolutely something that’s functional, which is gonna serve 50% of the real estate market. They have one of the broadest market appeals that is out there because.

Jonathan Denwood: Can I put this to you and we might have a little bit of time to discuss it before we go for our break. I have some real problems with this whole conversation, really. Not with you personally or anything or what, you’ve said. I just wanna explain why I have a problem with it. Because these sites, as you totally know because you really understand this and it’s the bread and butter of your business. In coding terms, it might be SEO friendly in some of the technical sides of SEO it might be friendly. But I also see websites divided between those that are designed for buyers and those that are designed for sellers in a way.

Without quality relevant content that really Google likes, they can be as technically proficient as they like, but they have no value to Google. That’s how I’m seeing it. I don’t know what your response to that attitude is. Now, without investment on why you’re writing content ought to be useful for people coming to your website. And then they might look at properties that you are displaying for your IDX feed. But without that value proposition, I find with a lot of these conversations and I find with a lot of real estate websites, that’s fundamentally missing, that core value proposition.

Robert Newman: Okay. So that’s gonna be the second half of the show because I’m gonna cover the stuff that we do, which is all about content and such, but I’m gonna answer the question halfway, and then we should probably go to break. The halfway answer is this so very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very few real estate websites are built with on-page technical SEO signals that are correct the right amount of links that guide to the right amount of pages that have the right titles that also connect in a kind of silo way like neighborhood city building that kind of way. Things like that, like an organized way that Google understands.

Because so few real estate sites are actually built in a technically SEO proficient way. I’m not talking about content, just talking about SEO. Google really likes the ones that are now there’s very few of those, as I’ve already said, that real geeks sierra interactive and real estate, the webmaster is, the only people that have the chops probably to do it on a consistent basis and they don’t necessarily do it. Union street media, and some other like very independent, small shops, they might have the ability me definitely. But we’re nothing like I don’t plug inbound REM because I’m not a competitor to any of these places that we’ve mention

Jonathan Denwood: You are like Mail- Right, You’re a boutique player, aren’t you?

Robert Newman: Right. So all of us in the boutique area, you might get somebody who could do a well-branded site and do it in a technically SEO proficient way. But these guys that are churning out, 20, 50,100 projects per month, maybe more who knows you and I don’t know, I don’t know. Like who knows how many they’re churning out? To do it at that scale, there’s only a small handful of players now could that change? Sure. There might be a product line that Placester has that they could build because I’m pretty convinced they probably could with the direction that they’ve gone. But that doesn’t mean like when you look at their lower end product John, like the same price range, like $140 a month, that’s their new pricing. I looked at their new pricing. You look at their new pricing, nobody’s getting a technically SEO sound site for $140 a month. Jonathan Denwood: I wouldn’t have thought so.

Robert Newman: So, they have a concierge product though. That’s a much higher-end product that, attaches an account manager. And as I haven’t yet published my reviews, but I’m going to, when I do, I’m gonna say this, this level of performance that you’re gonna get probably is gonna come down to how skilled are the people that they’re putting you on the phone? Like, what kind of advice do you get? What kind of consultation do you get? How do you decide to build it?

Jonathan Denwood: I still get to the point, which you’re gonna cover in the next minute after we go for our break is yeah, can have a technically structured optimized, SEO, the structure, the navigation system, the meta-tagging all the technical SEO bits. But if there’s no real content on the bloody side, and you’re not using paid traffic to drive traffic to that web website, and you also don’t invest any time, effort, or money in the actual content, you’re still not gonna get any results. Are you?

Robert Newman: Well, that’s what I was gonna cover in the second half. But, let’s put the pin in here, ladies and gentlemen, we’re gonna come back, whatever you’re watching us on, please do us a favor, hit the thumb up, leave us a comment. John works so bloody hard on the show and I show up. So we should, absolutely positively be listening to you and hearing your thoughts, and getting what you want us to talk about. Cause John and I will just go on ad nauseum about whatever entertains us that particular day as those of you we love to keep coming back and, and probably realize, and we’re so grateful for you. So thank you very much. Stay tuned. Here’s what I’m gonna be covering in the second half. I’m actually gonna talk about my daily look. And for those of you who stay for bonus content today, I’ve got some gems for you because I’m gonna cover bleeding edge stuff that nobody knows about deadly serious, even John doesn’t.

Jonathan Denwood: There’s very, there’s very little that I know about actually. We’ll be back in a few moments folks.

Robert Newman: Welcome back to the Mail-Right? Show ladies and gentlemen. The second segment of the show is gonna be cover the show or talk about strategies that are gonna work in 2022. John and I got onto the big popular ones. We talked a bit about real geeks and then John, was starting to cover, hey, even if you have an SEO, technically proficient site, really, if you don’t have anything on it, that is, content-based. Is it really useful? That was effectively how I recognize the question. And I’m gonna say this. No is the answer. It’s not enough anymore because do these sites work? Do these technically proficient SEO sites work? Yes, they still do. Okay. They get you in front of organic search, both long-tail and primary keywords on Google.

Once people come to your site, though, I have to ask the question. I’m gonna ask John and John knows the answer cause he’s driving in this direction, but I have to ask the audience, the question, think of this to yourself. If what you’re driving them to is neighborhood searches. And all you have on your entire website, that’s personal to you is a bio. And I’ve seen hundreds of these. There’s no information about you. There’s just a real estate website and neighborhood searches, which might be a little bit more specific than a cheerleader, which is great. And maybe the recognition that you got on the search engines is in some markets still relevant. For most people though, when they’re looking at these search sites, they’re gonna do searches. They’re gonna use your site. They’re gonna find your site. They’re gonna maybe even register with your site. Now you have a lead, but did they make any personal connection with you? No, they did not. Did they learn anything interesting? No, they did not. And they’re gonna probably forget both you and the domain that they found as soon as they’re off it.

Now maybe if they come back to your site, five different times, you have a chance of them registering based upon brand recognition and having that lead be of value for those, you propped up this site, these kinds of sites for many years, I have no doubt that you’re still getting results. I will bet all of you listening to the show that you have watched those results in terms of lead quality and lead quantity dropping slowly over the last five years and now rapidly over the last two. That’s my bet for every single one of you listening to the show, you can tell me if I’m right or wrong, I’m guessing I am right.

Now to address your question, John, the answer to the question is today’s marketing in 2022 is about personalization, personalization in content personalization in the video, letting people know who you are, all effective marketing strategies are, heading in the direction. So John and I talk ad nauseum about the video. So needless to say, that’s still number one in the 2022 video, but it’s a personalized video. It’s not fancy listing presentations on your YouTube channel. it’s something that’s featuring you, letting people get to know you, but the same thing on your website, John, to answer the question, doing a deep content page is great and that is step one and it still does work. It doesn’t work as well as it used to. Text-based Content is not unfortunately drawing in the same kind of results as it used.

By the way, for everybody listening, this is what I’ve been doing for 16, straight years. I speak from this is my area of expertise. I speak from a great deal of data-based insight onto this subject. Jonathan Denwood: I just wanted to see if you agree with this Rob. I totally agree with what you just said, but I also link it with top quality. Can’t be done overnight, unless you’re gonna hire people like you to write it and know about. What I see is what you’ve just said, link to top quality, what I call evergreen content that has some real value. And we’ve had episodes where we’ve discussed evergreen content. So if you go to the Mail-Right YouTube channel and do in search for evergreen, it will come up. But that’s what I see in a video about the team about you, why you are different, and really top-quality evergreen content. What do you think about that, Rob?

Robert Newman: Well, that’s true. So in terms of strategies that are gonna work in 2022, the direction my entire agency is going for every single reason that we ha– I go where the market goes for everybody listening I quantify myself as an inbound marketer, but really what I love is telling good stories which is an element of inbound marketing. John is calling it evergreen content. It’s telling a compelling enough, or it’s giving a compelling enough answer on a subject. So real database, data, data, friendly format, friendly information on things like property tax. Because another thing about SEO and 2022 is formatting page formatting interactivity on the content page itself, like, can you interact with it? These are signals that Google has gotten really, really good at collecting.

It does play into the evergreen story though. Do you have all a really good content piece? You just, reorganize the formatting? It doesn’t really change the concept of writing a really good content piece. It just changes how you’re presenting it. Do you have a good infographic that summarizes all the points in the content piece so that when somebody’s looking at it, they’re like, oh, that’s an interesting point about this neighborhood or 50 famous people who’ve lived here I didn’t know that? Or 50 years ago, this neighborhood was established by a guy that, was the descendant of a slave owner or something.

Just, some really interesting, detailed facts that people didn’t know because it catches their attention. They pay much more attention once you have one aha moment on an evergreen page here, I’ll tell you all, something that is listening to of the show. A great evergreen page of content only needs to present one aha moment. You need to try to get it early on in the page of the content so that somebody goes, oh, I didn’t know that. And here’s what happens, John. They pay a hell of a lot more attention to the other 90% of what you wrote. They’re like you wake ’em up with something that they actually learned. The problem with the internet is we’re not teaching anybody anything anymore. We’re regurgitating what everybody else is already taught. That’s the problem.

So you have to have good researchers and educated writers who are really trying to give an unusual and excellent answer. Now, everybody listening to the show, if you do this with email, if you do this on your website, if you do this on a blog, if you do this on a YouTube channel, these are all inbound marketing strategies. And I hate to say– I’ll ring this bell until it shouldn’t be run anymore, which is, this is still the best, most profitable marketing strategy long term that you can pursue. Now in 2022 is the best year I’ve ever seen to get into it. Why? Because we’re in for some market shifts, content marketing, evergreen marketing, as you said, John, it tends to be more stable.

Jonathan Denwood: just to finish off and I just wanna get your response there. I call it evergreen content. This is content you’ve invested time, either your own time and your own money, or you’ve got somebody like Robert, or we do some of this at Mail-Right, but we do it at a, a lesser price level than what Robert team does it at. But investing– the reason why I say evergreen content is important, cause it’s possible when it comes to blogging, Rob blogging is great blogging– What I mean by blogging is regularly writing about things that your target audience would be interested in and would find value. And writing blogs still has enormous value. The reason why I don’t– unless you’re going to hire a team like yourself, or a copywriter that has experience of the real estate industry, they’re not cheap it.

If you’re not gonna hire ’em, you’re gonna have to do it yourself. And you’re gonna have to dedicate yourself, doing it the same time and just doing it once a month, probably ain’t gonna push the needle. So you’re gonna have to do a lot more regularly and try and fit it in with the rest of the bloody things as a real estate agent you are expected to do. And I don’t think most agents can do it. For understandable reasons, it’s the first thing that gets dropped because they’ve got other things to deal with. So I don’t think regular blogging unless you hire a team like yourself else, you are better off investing the money on really great evergreen content because I think that will pay dividends. And it’s realistic.

Robert Newman: I agree. There’s no disagreement. And in terms of investing in content, oftentimes like you end up getting out of it what you. want with us it’s not so much, I don’t do a blog of post month, which kind of funny that you mentioned that, but, but quality here’s one thing that we do agree on. I don’t know that I agree on quantity. Once a month would be an aim, but here’s the critical factor in that thinking you, if you blog a lot, you can get lucky and hit a topic that maybe there isn’t, like a lot of strong results in. And so your content doesn’t have to be quite as good. And so you can back in some traffic. That’s, a great reason to blog more frequently.

If you think that you have the skill and ability to have a good shot at ranking each and every single time you write something because you’ve spent so much time on it, it’s high quality. You’re gonna send all the signals in such as manual outreach, backlinking, maybe a social push onto social channels. Maybe even you add a YouTube video onto the same post. So now you have three or four different levels of signals. Your images are properly optimized. That’s another level of signals. So now you’ve got five levels of signals into a high-quality piece of content. That to me is the better investment. It’s quality, focus, concentration on what you’re trying to say. End users in my experience and John, we may disagree on this, but I’ve noticed a proliferation of people paying less and less attention to s**t that’s being put on the internet. Like they’re just not it’s you really either have to set yourself apart. Or in my opinion, you probably shouldn’t be bothered.

So, that’s just an opinion I wanna stay what that opinion is based on. It’s not enough to get somebody, to browse a piece of content. We need to make an impact. We need to get them to pay attention. We need to at least get them to watch your video, the personal connection bit. Because if we get all that going and we get that personal connection, guess what everybody listening to the show, I’m going to say something that is so contrary to what we all believe. One of the big things that are gonna happen in 2022? People are gonna use their d**n phones to call you a lot more. Your phone’s gonna ring a lot more. Believe it or not. Some of this digital stuff is driving people towards a phone call. Now there are lots of reasons for it. We could do a whole nother show for all those reasons.

Jonathan Denwood: I totally agree with you. But I think, I think what is, and just to finish off before we go on to bonus content is I notice with my other business. I’ve got Mail-Right and I’ve got another business folks, is you get, you get the person that hits your website that, looks at the home page. And if your proposition, isn’t what they’re looking for, they bounce, you got other people that might spend five minutes, like three, four minutes looking at some of the crucial pages. And then they bounce. They’re probably not going to come back.

Now the person that’s come to you, cuz they’ve read about you or they listened to a podcast or they’ve seen you on local radio or they’ve been following you on Instagram. Doesn’t matter what it is. And they come, they know what you are about. And it’s come to the time where they’re interested in your service, they come to your website. Those types of people when I look at my Google analytics, look at every freaking page of the website. They crawl in every part of it. They know the bloody– I’ve had customers that signed up for my services, Rob that pointed out grammar mistakes to me. And I’m not good at grammar cause of my dyslexia, but I have everything copied, read, and checked over. But they still find things or they find contradictions deep in the frequently asked question section that nobody has visited in donkey years. They’ve literally read every freaking word on that website. Rob, would you agree with that?

Robert Newman: Oh, Totally. I had a client the other day that came in and, and read my terms and conditions and pointed to about 50 different errors and inconsistencies in it. And I’m just like, who are you? Like who reads the terms? So yes. I agree with you. So, ladies and gentlemen, this has been an interesting first half. We’re gonna go to the second half. We’re gonna take a–

Jonathan Denwood: Well Bonus content

Robert Newman: Bonus Content. Sorry, my bad John’s right. Bonus content. I’m gonna cover, this is guesswork, bleeding-edge s**t. Okay. But it’s gonna be its bleeding-edge that I’m using that I’m looking at that I think is gonna not just move the needle, but destroy the needle, and it’s gonna be very uncommon that anybody in real estate is gonna hear me. I’m gonna tell it you anyway. And then you’re gonna come to me and pay me a small fortune to get me to do the same thing for you. For those two people that might be proactive and listen to the show and really hear me on this. Maybe you check these services out without a Robert or John and you go out and these two, these things I’m about ready to discuss. They could change your business. So stay tuned.

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Lead generating digital marketing ideas in a cooling real estate market? Robert Newman: Welcome back ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 323 of the mail rights show. Can you believe that John has been at it for that long and I’ve been at it for about 200 episodes? today we’re really excited or I’m really excited because John wants to surprise me at the beginning of the show, but what we proposed and had discussed as a show idea was how to market yourself digitally some concepts, or actually maybe not even digitally, just some ideas and how to market yourself during a slowing real estate market. Now, whenever that happens, because, it doesn’t seem to be right now, but, anyhow, so John, go ahead, hit me. How are you gonna kick this off and amuse yourself by surprising me this morning?

Jonathan Denwood: Well, obviously the title of the show is how to get lead generation in, a cooling real estate market. What I want to cover is; are we going in 2022 to be facing a cooling real estate market? And that is really up to micro economical conditions. And I think because of the inflationary situation, is that gonna be long-term medium, or short? And there are different experts that are being discussed that I personally think the inflation environment is gonna be reasonably short to medium. I don’t really buy into, that it’s gonna be a medium to long term factor because we are just about and got to quantify this statement just about, in some ways, getting over a two year very difficult period around the virus. And that has really shaken up the whole economy and people’s lives in a big way, right?

But obviously, inflation has taken off anybody going to a supermarket or going and buying anything, trying to buy a new car or any, anything can see that prices have increased substantially. Okay. Obviously, the Fed’s reaction to that is that they have publicly stated that they are, and they want to increase interest rates. Every half-point increase or 1.4 increase normally has a direct effect on the pricing of housing. How far they can increase those interest rates is another topic that we could discuss for the whole show, because the Feds’ ability to really increase interest rates without their being a major economic downturn and reaction to that action is probably quite questionable how much they can increase interest rates. I think they would attempt to do it. I feel at some stage they will have to reverse the policy because there’s gonna be a sizable market reaction. If they, keep on increasing, interest rates. When that happens, none of us can tell.

I think the other biggest factor on the housing market, that, which is a result of the pandemic, which accelerated this process is what has happened to the commercial real estate market it is quite obvious, even though if we have a full recovery from the pandemic, that the amount of people that will be working remotely, that will not be going back or not going back very often to a centralized office environment is a trend that will continue. The need for commercial office space I can really never see it fully recovering. Obviously companies, individuals, companies sign reasonably long, contracts. So even if their office is half empty or two thirds empty, they cannot just walk away from their commercial contract unless they go bankrupt, or unless they can come to some agreement with their landlord that allows them to walk away from their contract and get a much smaller office, which would fit, what I see as an ongoing scenario, that a lot of people are gonna be working remote, or it’s gonna be a hybrid situation.

How does that affect the domestic property? Well, commercial property has always been the way that most hedge funds and most pension funds, and most large institutions or investors have placed; they’ve placed their money in bonds shares, and in commercial property. And they’ve got great returns from it, and it’s always seen as a pretty solid asset class. That future is now in great doubt. You only have to go to any major city and you’ll see much of the retail outlets, malls, normal retail outlets, office complexes. You’ll see a lot of retail properties empty and empty for very considerable periods of time. And most of them probably will never find a tenant at the kind of rates, rental rates that are being asked. Obviously, there will become a time where rentable rates will have to become more realistic and that will now allow smaller enterprises to move into retail units.

In general, when it comes to offices, which is the real bedrock of the commercial outlet and malls, I really don’t see those markets really recovering. I really honestly don’t so where are they gonna put their money? well, they’re gonna look at the domestic market, the housing market, and it’s a market, which they’ve never really looked at because it’s got real, difficulties, but I’ve been looking at some statistics and really this really has affected the number of properties that are on the market, especially on the Sunbelt and on the west coast of America. There are statistics that almost 40% of housing that’s been bought has been bought by large investors. And they’re buying it before it even, it doesn’t even get into either its new development or it’s, an individual that has a portfolio of domestic houses.

It’s not even housing, that’s reaching the market it’s been bought before it even goes onto the normal market, but that does affect the market because that property that would normally go on the market isn’t there. And that is exasperating the shortage of properties that are available for people to buy on the semi-free market. Obviously, they have to get a return on these properties because they plan to rent ’em out or flip ’em. Obviously, you can increase rents, but there is a, there is a level where people just cannot pay the rent, all levels that you are requiring because people’s wages or incomes will not sustain. They can’t pay the rent basically. So how all this pans out and how this affects the real estate market in the next two years is the big question.

So I just wanted to give you and the listeners. What I see as the real big question of the next 18 months, 2 years, how do these large institutional buyers will their influence continue? Will they still be buying an ever-increasing percentage of domestic properties? The reason that’s driving them is the money that they would normally put into a commercial property. They can see the writing on the wall. There is no real future in building office blocks or buying new commercial property that at best is 50% empty. And the prospects of getting any quality tenants is 0 Robert.

Because of the way real estate is, once again, nobody’s, complaining about this because home prices are up. And I mean, even small mid-range markets like in the suburbs of Texas, you homes that used to sell for 180,000 are selling for 300,000 and that’s just a two-year jump and, and prices. So you’re, you’re getting all these. So when a realtor is getting an extra $120,000, that’s an extra three, four grand in commissions. So obviously you can afford to pay whatever, a few hundred extra dollars per call, there’s gonna be a time, the Merry go round stops and everybody’s gonna be in trouble. Zillow’s gonna be in trouble. I mean, they’re not gonna be in trouble everybody’s gonna take a kick in the teeth and the market’s gonna adjust and everybody will figure it out. I just think, and the purpose of this show is definitely to start having the conversation with everybody that’s listening. Trust me when I tell you right now, we’re in the last gasp of the market being this crazy nutty thing. I think I think by the end of the year, we’re gonna see some major changes happen.

Jonathan Denwood: 80%, my heart totally agrees with you in my mind, 70 to 80% agree with you. I honestly feel the only variable, the only two variables that will affect this that I’m not saying it won’t crash. What I’m saying is these two variables might keep this thing rolling for a bit longer than we think is that the feds will not be able to increase interest rates to the level that people are anticipating in. And secondly, these and in the end, and I’m not an expert, but I’m just giving you the viewers, the listeners, my honest opinion, these institutional investors that are buying domestic properties. I don’t think it’s gonna work out as well for them as they think it’s going to and I think it’s a totally different market to the normal commercial real estate market that they’re used to. And they’re looking at the domestic because of all the things I said in the first half, because they don’t see a tremendous future to the same extent around commercial properties and bonds don’t yield stocks. They’re at crazy values now anyway.

Robert Newman: No stocks have dropped about 40%, man.

Jonathan Denwood: Well, some have and some haven’t. So we have Titanic sheets going in different directions. So it’s a very confusing situation. So I’m just pointing out that this crazy market could continue a bit longer than it should do because of these, institutional investors. An enormous amount of VC money is been put into some of these players. It, just gonna be really interesting to see how all this pans out, Robert,

Robert Newman: I don’t disagree and I could be, wrong. And without some of these huge market factors, I would’ve been right long ago, the pandemic, and other things. And you know what, where I get myself into trouble audience, John, everybody is I’m an incredibly long term thinker. I don’t really pay attention to what’s happening in the market. I’ve already seen one major crash and that any number of Hills and valleys inside the real estate market and you know what, everybody who’s listening, I pay zero attention to any of it. And the type of marketing that I tend to tell people to do, which is long-term. Yes. Is it more effective at times than others? Of course, it is. But the beauty about high-value content-based marketing is that it always comes back and provides value.

Since you have it, you already have it up. Let’s say it’s doing nothing for you without spending a single extra penny one day, all of a sudden your phone starts ringing off the hook, and it’s stuff you did a couple of years ago. And you’re like, oh my God, where’re all these calls coming from. It’s not like direct marketing where you always have to have 30 grand in your pocket to then put into that platform. And maybe if the market is bad, you lose all that money. Content marketing maintains its value. And so do all the marketing strategies that I put in place for myself. Do I get as many calls one day versus another? No, I had a quiet November and now I’ve had the busiest December and the busiest January of my entire five-year history running inbound REM. And is there any rhyme or reason to that? No, there’s something going on with real estate agents to the people listening to the show, you guys are reinvesting or rethinking, whatever it is about your career, realizing the pandemic is gonna extend out a year, whatever it is, but my marketing hasn’t changed my message hasn’t changed.

That’s why I get myself in trouble is because I have strongly and always leaned heavily on types of marketing that don’t respond, like are Bulletproof against the ups and downs of the marketplace. And that’s what I want.

Jonathan Denwood: I just wanna finish is that obviously, Zillow closes down their wholesale side of their business.

Robert Newman: Yeah, they did.

Jonathan Denwood: I was listening to, a YouTube video and there was some figures there that there are still substantial, institutional investors that are buying substantial blocks of properties. Personally, am amazed that they’re still doing that. If I was in their shoes, I would run to the Hills. I cannot see, this working out that well for them. But if the facts that I heard this morning are correct. The figures that I was listening to are correct, this market could continue a bit longer than what it should do, because if they’re dumb enough and yeah, they’re institutional invest and you would think they were highly sophisticated, but the truth is they’re a bit dumber than we think.

They’ve kind of been driven by what’s happened to the commercial market. I still in my heart don’t think this is gonna work out that well for them. And I’m just saying that the cooling of the market might not happen until much later on in this year then. On the other hand, I do hear whispers about mortgage companies and banks they’re really not lending the way that they were. And I think they’re getting the jitters as well. I really think they’re getting a bit worried because they don’t want to end up in a situation that they found themselves in in 2008. That’s the last frigging thing they want. So I’ve heard on the grapevine that they’re getting the jitters as well. So there’s a lot of confusion out there, isn’t it?

Robert Newman: Oh yeah. And, and smart institutional investor money is pulling back right now. And for the first time we’re seeing all that pull back com not only in stocks and bonds, but we’re also seeing it come in crypto. We’re seeing a come in, every single, every everybody is pulling back. The only people that seem to be rushing forward based on the input that I’m getting from my clients, I expected a slowdown in January for real estate. I’m being told by many clients in many different states that are not happening, that everybody is back to being incredible.

Jonathan Denwood: I wouldn’t buy, I’ll give you an example. I’m not gonna tell you where I live. There’s a house and it’s a very strange layout physically. It’s a very strange layout and it was bought in 2 0 15 for $150,000, and they’re trying to sell it now it’s on the market now for $550,000. And I wouldn’t– I might consider 300 maybe, I might consider 350 because it’s a really wacky layout. But I certainly won’t give you 550,000 bloody dollars for it. And it’s been on the market for about 10 days and I’m just watching it to see if good luck to ’em. If they can find somebody that’s prepared to give them $550,000, of their hard-earned money or find somebody that’s prepared to lend them the money to put 550,000 good luck to them.

Robert Newman: Right. Well, I think this is a good place for you and we’ve lasted by our stop time. And I think this is probably a good place for us to consider. Let’s see. How long yeah. Well, we’ve been at this for 40 minutes or so. So for everybody that’s watching the show, listen, John and I would love it if you’re watching it on YouTube if you’re watching it on the Mail-Right it’s YouTube hyphen Mail-Right.com. Please go ahead and, drop us a message there. John is one of the most clever and experienced WordPress developers that I know. And if you’re trying to get started with a real estate website, like you’re, you’re going towards independence for the first time ever. John is probably a great solution.

For real estate vets and people who are GCIs over 150 to 200,000 already, and are looking for ways to bulletproof their marketing. You have some questions you can probably find out. You can probably have a consult with me at inboundREM.com. And I just have contact pages there and you’ll get a sent to either my assistant or an automated calendar, either way, schedule a call with me either one of us love to talk to you about some of this in real-time. Like if you’re a real estate professional, like what’s happening, what can you do? Do we actually offer any solutions or do we just have some advice for you? Is there anything you’d like to add to that, John?

Jonathan Denwood: No, that’s great let’s wrap it up, Robert.

Robert Newman: All right. So with no further ado, we’re gonna say goodbye. We appreciate you, coming to our show today and, we will see you hopefully the next time.

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With Special Guest David Mount thereduxgroup.com

Moving From Entrepreneurial to Purposefulness

https://www.thereduxgroup.com/

the same thing we were talking about different technology. And you were talking about things that you had looked at and you seemed to have a very dialed in numeric approach to looking at operations. Did I come away with a correct impression in your opinion?

David Mount: Yeah. I would say that’s definitely accurate and it’s grown over the years. Right? I feel like where I am now is vastly different than where I was a year ago or two years ago. A number of things have really changed the game for us that I think have helped me grow in big ways. When it comes to knowing the numbers, tracking systems, measuring ROI, as a small team, you don’t feel like you don’t have, a title or whatever your title is. It’s like everything in the kitchen sink because you’re a small team. So you have to figure it out and whatever’s urgent you have to go to it. And so I feel like over the past year or two, I’ve really started to think more like a director, than a, all in one, do whatever you can.

Because we don’t have a marketing director, I’m functionally the marketing director, before we didn’t have a recruiter, we just hired one a year ago. And I was functionally the recruiter and, Chris and I would determine which agents we would wanna make offers to, join our team. And so as we’ve gotten leverage from certain leaders, I’ve realized where the gaps are that I need to stay the marketing director and, make sure that our operations and marketing is really dialed in. And it’s caused me to have to take a step back a little bit and dive into spreadsheets. And really take a look at, okay, how much are we spending on this? If we talk about marketing, how much are we spending on this? What’s the ROI? What have we closed? What do we have that’s signed, but not on the market yet? What do we have that’s active and coming soon and what’s pending like projective revenue. So those things are really key, but honestly, I probably didn’t start doing that until under a year ago.

So even at a team our size, it’s taken a while to get to the point where it’s like, as dialed in as it really should. It’s much easier if you start that way versus have to backtrack and go back six years.

Robert Newman: So, when you started creating, let’s just call it a process to look at the numbers, to come up with this data you were going back all six years in order to do that. Is that correct?

David Mount: We haven’t gone back all six years. No, I probably went back probably a year, two years for the marketing sources that we’re still using. Our marketing has changed over the years. So going back all six years, probably wouldn’t be super helpful, just because we’re not using those marketing sources anymore.

Robert Newman: Gotcha. And so you said that this last year has seen a lot of growth and change for you. Did you just tell us what that growth and change was or is there some other things that you felt were, so the way that I’m viewing this question is we’re talking to a guy who’s gone from let’s, whatever you did the first year, a hundred transactions let’s pretend that’s the number. It doesn’t really matter. But you’ve gone from certainly a much smaller level, of transactions all the way up to many hundreds. And so I’m thinking in my head, so what are you seeing like process-wise that you had to go back and reexamine as you’ve grown? Like what are those steps?

David Mount: Yeah, there’s a couple systems that we’ve implemented this year and, a lot of it has to do with people. Okay. So we hired, talent acquisitions manager. Who’s essentially our one HR person. And she’s amazing. She’s helped us systematize our recruiting and it helps honestly having a third person just having me and Chris was challenging because we talk every day, we think so much alike. I think Chris is in his forties, but we’re both close to the same age. We’re both white males. Like we think relatively similar. And so getting a recruiter who has been in the business a long time, she’s amazing. Like just having somebody to do like a lot of the legwork for us in screening candidates, she comes from that industry. It just helped level up our perspective. And our system absolutely when it comes to just even the one thing of recruiting, which is just one spoke in the wheel of, systems to improve the business. So we’ve added a lot of people this year, not just agents, but also staff. And I feel like every time we do the next iteration is always better than the previous one.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. We probably need to go for a break. Rob.

Robert Newman: Alrighty. Okay. Well ladies and gentlemen, we will be back. when we come back, I’m going to actually, you know what, I’m gonna, segue, saying what I wanted to say, which is this. so digital marketing, John and I talk about lead generation a lot, but digital marketing or marketing in general or building a team, in my opinion, digital marketing is actually just as relevant on the recruiting side. The building of the business, the building of the reputation so that agents wanna work with you. Oftentimes the agent’s first exposure to a brokerage maybe not in your case, David. In many cases, it’s gonna be, they see you online and they think that you’re moving and shaking in some way or another. So it seems the earth in terms of, if you got into a conversation with them, potentially it would be a little bit easier or at least they would know who you are. Maybe know what your mission is, how you serve your local market, things of that nature.

So I’m sure that people are wondering why I ask you to come on the show because it’s a little bit outside our [inaudible] but, I don’t really perceive it that way. I perceive the whole thing as one big pie. My top clients are small brokers, just like yourself. And those guys are, just as concerned about recruiting as they are about getting the next lead or closing deals or handing off a couple hundred leads to their agents. Cuz that’s part of the business right. Growing. If that’s the track that you’re on. So anyway, so ladies and gentlemen, we’re gonna go to a break. We’re gonna dig a little bit more into that. I’m gonna give both John and David a chance to actually talk and we’ll see you back. Whatever platform you’re on do us a favor. If it’s someplace you can smash a like button smash, that like button. Do john and I that courtesy David as well. We would really appreciate it. We’ll see you in a second or you’ll hear us in a second. All right.

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Robert Newman: Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen to the mail-right show. We’re here with David Mount, who is an agent and the COO for a rapidly growing, brokerage, under the EXP banner in the Virginia area. I’m just gonna say area because you, you listed off all the places that you serve. We’re talking to him about how he’s, he’s maintained his growth. Now, David, I do wanna ask one question of you because it is a digital marketing show and we do focus on digital. You do actually use digital. It’s just not what you’re saying is the main driver of your growth. Since I happen to know that you’ve been using BoomTown for a while, because it came up in our conversation, I’ve just looked up your site. You’re still using ’em so I can verify personally you’ve been using ’em for at least six months to a year minimum probably much longer. So how do you leverage that? So you’re not doing traditional, but how do you leverage the digital that you have?

David Mount: Yeah. One thing that’s been really helpful for us and this is so basic for a lot of people, but as something as simple as having a Facebook group or a Facebook page and advertising our listings on there. we did a big push back when Facebook got a lot better organic reach back in 2015, 2016 to increase our followership on Facebook. And so I think we have something like 2,520, maybe 2200 followers on our Facebook page. And so I was just on a listing appointment even like a month ago where I was talking about the marketing that we do for listings. And he was like, oh yeah, I see it on Facebook. Like, we’re good. Like I’m glad you’re doing that. Like, we’re good. You don’t need to tell me any more about it. Like I trust you. So even something as simple as like having a Facebook page where we’re putting marketing out there, and our followers are seeing it that helps a lot, cuz he’s this sphere of influence person. So we’re connected on social already and it’s just further verification that they can trust us. So that’s one thing.

Another thing that we’ve really made a big push for this past year is reviews on Google. So Google organic or, Google’s kind of taking over the real estate agent space, right? You Google a real estate agent, in Carlsbad, California, you’re probably gonna get a Google local services listing or ad that shows a top three agents. And one of the biggest ranking factors is how many reviews you’ve had on Google. And so we’ve made a big push this year to get additional reviews, from our past clients. And some of the things we’ve done just to incentivize that is giveaways. So we’re offering prizes to people who can honestly give us a five-star review, give them more entries into a raffle for a prize. And then also doing competitions with our agents saying, Hey, we’re gonna give rewards based on who gets the most, five star reviews for the company in the next month or two weeks or whatever it is. So we’ve done two of those giveaways and then two somewhat different competitions that incorporate the review aspect, to help us get more, Google juice if you will.

Robert Newman: Okay. So that’s the action what’s the result then? So you’ve done two, two giveaways. You’ve really pushed for this. How, has that impacted your reviews.

David Mount: Beginning of 2021? I think we had something like 53 reviews on Google. And if you check it today, you’ll probably see 329. I think I saw this number about under a week ago. So 270 something new reviews, five-star reviews on Google in the past year. So it’s helped immensely. Robert Newman: Has that impacted your ranking at all? Have you been tracking your ranking inside the local Search packs?

David Mount: We’ve been tracking our leads. So our leads have definitely increased, from Google local service ads, since we have gotten a lot more reviews and typically what we see is right after we get the reviews, we start to get more leads. So it’s like, there’s a recency effect of you get more, you get more right away.

Robert Newman: Interesting that might be the very first time that anybody’s popped that idea into my head. That’s a really interesting number. David Mount: That’s what I’ve noticed. It’s not a hundred percent traceable, but it’s something that every time I know we, cuz I get all the notifications when we get five-star reviews. When I see those, I also see the leads coming in real quickly after that. Robert Newman: Okay. Well for those listening, a couple of points to this. So what David is talking about is the– many of you are still not familiar with the new sponsored ads that Google place, because there’s a whole bunch of different ads that you can do. You can do display ads, retargeting, you can do traditional ads. Google now has all these different ads. Well, they added in February of this year, a hyper-local search pack for real estate specifically that says, hey, I’m a qualified professional in an area. And it comes up over the local search packs over the organic search packs. And so you can put a sponsored ad in that pack. And if I’m hearing you correctly, David, what you’re saying to our audience is that every time you get a review on your organic Google, my business profile, it ends up it, which does link to your sponsored profile.

So your sponsor profile does show your reviews, but you get maybe 10% of the information as you would off your actual Google my business profile. That’s what they allow in the advertised sponsored pack, but it does show your reviews. It absolutely shows those. So if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying the reviews automatically propagate into my paid sponsored ad. Then I seem to get a flurry of calls every time I’m getting a new review off my sponsor though, is where, what you’re saying that you’re where you’re seeing those results, is that correct?

David Mount: Yeah, I would say every time there’s a big flurry of new five star reviews. It’s not usually a call right after just one, five-star review, but if we get like 50 in a week’s time period, then we’ll usually notice a bump right after that.

Robert Newman: Fascinating. Okay. John, I’m not gonna let you go through the whole, meeting without saying a single thing because we’re 25 minutes in. So this is the point where I say serve up a question, sir.

Jonathan Denwood: Well, I was just wondering, it was a consistent theme in our 2021 interviews, David, there were two things video and finding a niche, finding for a single agent or for a boutique brokerage. So it’s a two-part question. Firstly, how big is video or is video something you are really looking at in 2022? And secondly, do you have a kind of niche for your own boutique brokerage? Is there a particular client or a particular property or is it just generally property in your specific area?

David Mount: Yeah, that’s a good question. We started off, and that’s one of the other ways that we grew our team relatively quickly was through, marketing or prospecting a specific niche. So, Chris’s background, the founder of the Redux group. He was an investor for a long time and was knocking on doors for distressed properties. Making cold calls, connecting with people who, were underwater and who needed to sell fast. And so we started out on the real estate team by the time Chris opened the real estate team, really targeting short sales and distress sellers. So that was the beginning of our niche that really helped us start to grow. So it was myself I personally didn’t play into that niche very much. It was Chris and then another agent on our team who listed a lot of those properties that ended up being short sales for the most part. And that was one of the big pillars of our business for a while.

Now, since then, equity has increased immensely over the past two years. As most of us are, quite familiar with. And so we’re not seeing very many short sales and we’ve pivoted away from that niche because the market has shifted. And so that was one of the niches that definitely helped us, but we also had to be nimble and change course as market conditions changed.

Jonathan Denwood: The first part video, what’re your views around video. And is it going to increase or have you got new plans to utilize video? David Mount: Yeah, I think, video is a hundred percent the wave of the future. And I think that if any agent wants to, create a system for organic reach that goes decades in the future, like you have to be on video. Now I say that, but our company has not yet gone where I would like us to go when it comes to video. And I think this is important for people to understand too, whatever strategies you pick, you have to have the right personnel and the right budget to be able to go all in. And so I personally in our assessment and, in terms of strategy. Chris and I feel like we have to have a marketing director who can like be the owner of it. Create the video strategy, make sure that we’re following it, tell Chris where he needs to be and what he needs to say, so that he can, have some leverage on time.

One of the guys that, that I really respect on video a lot is Kyle Whistle, out in California, I think he’s in the San Diego area. he does an amazing job with video and, I think he even has some courses, like a coaching product that he sells on it, I’m sure we’ll buy, whenever we get to having the bandwidth to be able to do that. But as a team, I think especially for an individual agent, it’s much easier to just like jump on it and create a system for yourself. As the organization gets larger, it requires more personnel, more expertise, and leverage to be able to do it. Cuz our leadership team tends to get stretched in a lot of different directions and managing a lot of different, priorities. Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. I think we need to wrap out the podcast part of the show, Robert, and then go into bonus this content.

Robert Newman: Beautiful. All right. Well, for those of you, who’ve tuned in, I’m gonna, I, I do have a closing thought. So if you haven’t already checked him out, he’s in your own environment, Kyle Handy is also real good with video and he’s part of the EXP. EXP to me is, one of those companies that is helping a certain percentage of the real estate industry move over to a different concept. And he’s right there with you and he’s leveraging video heavily as his whistle. So he’s another person for you to check out. He’s, probably a little bit less polished, but I think his information is bar none like in terms of what he provides informationally on video and we’ve had him on the show I think. so I think he’s pretty amazing and you might wanna check him out and for everybody listening, I think you might want to check him out because he’s just doing some cool things with video that’s it.

And I like him because he’s nuts and bolts. He’s not like a video editor, maestro or anything like that. He’s just a guy with a camera that, tries to give good messaging, which I feel like anybody could do. I like low barrier of entry, like strategies where you just say, okay, I sit down at my desk and I say something that’s as low as the barrier can possibly get. All right. So for those of you, who’ve been listening to our show via, podcast, please, if you’re on Apple, give us a review on safari, if you haven’t done so already, we would really appreciate it. I don’t know where the rest of you might be. You might be on my website, you might be on the mail-right website, if you are on either one of those platforms and it occurs to you, we’d love a comment on the place that the video is or the podcast is housed. And, if anybody would like to give you a little bit of accolades or push any of your digital stuff as a way of saying thank you for coming on the show and sharing your knowledge, David how would they do that?David Mount: If anyone wants to, reach out to me or are you saying-

Robert Newman: How would you, how could somebody get in touch with you? All right. Let’s do that.

David Mount: Email is, the easiest, David@TheReduxgroup.com. Robert Newman: Awesome. And John, how would you like people if they were so inspired to, reach out to you? Jonathan Denwood: I think the main thing is if you really wanna leave a comment and be more involved in the podcast is to join the Mail-Right Facebook page, just like it and the videos, our live interviews are posted on the Facebook page and you’d be notified. Otherwise just go to the Mail-Right YouTube channel. And we’ve got a lot of extra material on there back over to you, Robert. Robert Newman: And if anybody would like to, reach out to me, check me out, contact me, you can do so on inboundrem.com. The channel that I pay the most attention to since we are talking about video is I pay a lot of attention to my YouTube channel. I probably interact with my audiences more on that channel than any other channels that I have. So we are gonna be moving into bonus content here. There will be a video that will go along with that. That’ll get posted to the Mail-Right YouTube channel. John is usually kind enough to, make some mention of me or link somewhere in there. So you can also find me that way. And even if you can’t, it doesn’t matter to me like, comment on the video, let John know that his hard work is, appreciated.

David, are we gonna be able to keep you for maybe five, 10 more minutes? All right, John, are you, are you down for that as well? Yeah. Okay. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for tuning in. We really, really appreciate it. We’re hoping that you were off to an amazing start for your 2022. I know that I am. We’ll talk to you soon.

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If you’re wanting to be successful in 2022 with your real estate business, then one can’t deny that social media needs to be at the top of your list, and for multiple reasons. Now, we know from experience that there are agents all over the spectrum with this. Some of you have absolutely accepted the fact that social media is here to stay and it is in fact, already producing leads with the effort you’re putting into it.

Others perhaps, realize that it’s a “necessary evil” in order to stay in business, but aren’t certain what steps to take, and are maybe overwhelmed. And we’ll leave out another group that very few can relate to who have been doing real estate for decades, and they just don’t care about social media because they have such a large network of die-hard clients, and they’re looking to retire soon anyway (and then you can capitalize on obtaining their clients with your awesome social media marketing and branding skills).

So are you ready AND wanting to maximize your real estate brand on social media this year? If yes, then you’re in the right place because we’re going to give you five quick tips that you can start to immediately put to use, which we also hopefully inspire you to take the next steps on a successful real estate adventure.

#1 Brand Yourself

Social media is more than just about you…but it’s important to remember that you are the brand! It’s like that saying: “Your smile is your logo, your personality is your business card, how you leave others after an experience with you is your trademark.” Branding is crucial to your local market. To clarify, branding is the “why” people hire you, while “marketing” is the vehicle or tool that’s going to help you distribute your story and brand to them. Possibly contrary to today’s real estate logic, you need to find a niche (we also discussed this in our other video Five Best Real Estate Marketing Videos and Tips for 2022 if you want additional details).

The more focused you are, the more you’ll be able to connect to people, the easier it will be to integrate it into your social media, and the more leads you can generally generate. To give you some ideas on what you can create a niche for, here are a few to consider: Geographic areas, neighborhoods, certain types of clients or demographics, different types and/or styles of homes (luxury, ranch and land, condos, farms, townhomes, single-family, barndominiums…and/or Craftsman, Colonial, Cape Cod, Victorian…you get the point).

#2 Choose Your Social Media Platforms

One of our philosophies at Mail-Right is: “Do a few things and do them well.” You can be a jack of all trades, master of none, or a jack of few trades, master of one. We’d prefer that you get good at 1-3 social media platforms, versus trying to take on doing 7 different social media platforms and sucking at all of them. Select a couple of them, and then put your attention on those, trying to master one of them. Once you master one of them, move on to focusing on the next, conquer it, and so on. Before you know it, you’ll get really good at 2-3 platforms, and you’ll notice the return on your investment increasing!

When people ask us which platform they should start with, we simply encourage you to start with what you’re already on and familiar with. For most, this would be Facebook or Instagram. Both are owned by Facebook, and both basically have every generation on them for the most part (that are purchasing homes anyway). The third platform one must consider is YouTube. The other reason we suggest these three is because you can repurpose your content and copy on them rather easily. We’ll go more in-depth about these in #4, so keep reading. One last thing, be sure to familiarize yourself with the technology and tools that are available to you from these platforms. You can do a lot nowadays with the free apps they provide, as well as their desktop tools, so take advantage of them.

#3 Social Media Needs to be About YOU

Before we get ahead of ourselves, you need to know that there is a fine line between making it ALL about you, and having your branding and social media represent you and who you are. Remember that it’s called “social” media for a reason, so give people a backstage pass to what your life is like as a Realtor®. You cannot afford to be an invisible agent if you want to be a successful real estate agent. Plus, people want to know what it’s like to be you, what you do, what it takes to juggle your busy schedule, where you hike and go on walks, books you’re reading and why, houses and features in houses that you love, if you have kids or are married or have a dog, how you overcome the challenges…you get the point

Also, don’t forget that you need to make your clients and prospects the heroes in your story. We’re currently seeing a lot of the same posts from agents on social media that are a single, static image of all the homes they’ve sold this past year…and wow…what a missed opportunity! Who’s the heroin that? Besides no one being able to see what those houses actually look like because it’s so small, nor if they’re really that real estate agent’s homes they sold; what if instead, you made a quick, little video with the homes and the happy clients of those homes…do you see the difference here? This is what we call a “two-for” because you’re branding yourself, but also highlighting your happy clients

! A little more strategic and intentional effort can go a long way. A static image with 50 homes on it will not connect to a consumer’s emotions like a home that pans to its happy clients…can you feel that difference even just reading this? Imagine if you have multiple shots of homes and happy clients that you can include in this video that’s even more impacting! In addition, the algorithmic weight that you’ll be putting out there will be much greater, you’ll be connecting to people on a much deeper level as they see and hear your happy clients laughing and smiling, and you will in turn also reach more people, get more engagement, and increase your SEO. Does this sound like a good return on your investment?

#4 Know About the Different Social Media Platforms

We previously mentioned three of these platforms that you can focus on (Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube), mostly because you’re already on them. But know this about social media: It’s a pay-to-play game now for the most part. Organic reach is next to nothing on most platforms, usually between only 1-7% at best research shows. And if you have the average number of followers (300-500 depending on the platform), then that’s a “whopping” 25 people you might be reaching with all that hard work you put into creating a video post or Story.

So what’s the solution? How can you strategically use one or more of these to market your real estate business? One important factor is to understand if the platform is aimed at short-form or long-form videos. Short-form can be 15-60 second videos for Stories and Reels for instance. Long-form videos would be more for YouTube, and even Facebook allows these. Once you know the difference between short and long-form, you can create your videos specifically for that platform, then repurpose it for the other platforms (we also discussed this in our other video Five Best Real Estate Marketing Videos and Tips for 2022 as ”batching,” if you’d like to learn more). Which platform are you going to focus on and master? The easy answer for most is again, the one you’re most familiar with. Here are a few highlights for each:

• Facebook:
  • You can have both short and long-form videos on Facebook, but it’s mostly best for short-form (3 min or less).
  • Pay for leads $100 to $500 per month connected to custom lists and retargeting (we can help you with this if you don’t know what it means).
  • Simply “Boosting” posts are like the pre-school of social ads, in which they will make you feel warm and fuzzy, and get you some results (otherwise they know you won’t keep paying them), but they are not a long term solution to generating higher quality leads.
• Instagram:
  • You can have both short and long-form videos on Instagram now, but it’s mostly best for short form.
  • One of the best platforms for your personal branding, and a great solution to giving that behind the scenes look at your life as an agent…plus people love this type of content.
  • Use hashtags to help you get more views and grow your following (we’ll share more about this in another video)
• YouTube:
  • The king of long-form videos and for a reason!
  • It’s the only platform that counts a “view” as 30 seconds, whereas the other platforms count 1 second as a view. So it’s incredibly more effective in this area.
  • It’s owned by the largest search engine in the world (Google), and YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world…hint, hint!
  • It’s great for attracting people both inside and outside your town, city, or state, depending on your particular niche and focus.
  • It’s a great starting point for repurposing your content and videos to the other platforms that prefer short form.

#5 Be Prepared

It’s been said (and we agree), that if you fail to plan then you plan to fail. Don’t fall into this rut. If you’re ready for the challenge, then create yourself a basic social media calendar and content library or folder system. If this is too overwhelming (we know it is for most, or you don’t have the funds to hire someone to do your social media management), then consider the Mail-Right program which does this and more, but isn’t overwhelming. Here are a few more tips that will help you amplify your branding and marketing with your social media:

• Batching: Set aside time to batch (a productivity hack for time management and efficiency)
• Know when you’re going to post, what you’re going to post, and how often you’re going to post
• Done is better than perfect
• Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction
• Be in the moment (be ready to capture things on the fly that may happen during the day)
• Do a few things and do them well

When it comes to being successful in real estate this year, then implementing these five crucial tips will help you maximize your branding and marketing efforts, so you can generate real leads and get the return on your investment. Remember to brand yourself, know which social media platforms you want to master and get good at, and balance out making it about you (but also make your clients and prospects the heroes in your story). Integrate those short and long-form videos on the appropriate platforms you’re working on, and be prepared by integrating the above information. We’d love to hear what you think and if you have any questions. Which area is the most difficult for you? Which do you think you can accomplish? Lastly, let us know if you’d like to schedule an appointment so we can walk you through a demo of our Mail-Right program if you’re needing help with the above too, and are ready to step up your real estate game.

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