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Show NotesDanny spoke at this year’s Flip Hacking Live event! His presentation covers lead generation for real estate investors and how the market is shifting. Are you staying on top of it? This is the audio from the presentation, but you can watch the video on Flipping Junkie’s YouTube channel, check it out in the link section of the show notes.
How many people are sending direct mail? When that potential seller gets your postcard or letter, what do they do? They go online. The next thing they know, they can’t find you online. If you’re not online, you’ve just missed a lead. If you are online, but not optimized, then they’re seeing you beside your competition. You competition has more reviews than you, and looks more accessible to the seller. If you were in the seller’s position, who would you pick? It’s pretty obvious you’d go with the one that has the better reviews.
That’s why you can’t just have a website anymore. You have to have a fully optimized, built out, lead generation machine. There’s no way you can compete with your competition if you get a website, set it up, and then do nothing with it. It’s an on-going thing.
You need a website online that’s credible, trustworthy, and that builds you recognition. Danny and Melissa have generated thousands of leads and deals through their website, but it didn’t happen over night. It was a long road to building their website and grow their ranking. Search engine optimization takes time and practice.
If you’re not at the top of page 1, you’re missing leads. But how can you get it to rank that high? Keyword research is the first step. As a real estate investor, it’s obvious you need to rank for keywords like “sell house fast”, or “sell my house for cash”. Those keywords are what all of your competitors are using as well. So how can you beat the competition when it comes to ranking?
You have to set realistic expectations for yourself. You’re not going to rank for these keywords in the first month. You’re just not. You have to constantly keep working on your website, you have to be adding content that’s going to keep helping you rank, and you have to be patient. SEO can take 6 months to a year to start showing progress in Google. That’s a long time, but it’s worth it. Why?
SEO is the cheapest was to generate leads. How much does it cost to optimize your website? Time. That’s it. You have to invest the time into building it right, but once it starts ranking you’re going to start getting in organic traffic that converts.
The next step, after you have your SEO set up to start getting you organic leads, is marketing. PPC, or Pay Per Click, is a pay to play marketing strategy but it works. Danny uses a combination of PPC platforms, but the one that performs the best is Google AdWords.
Google AdWords places your ad, website, or landing page as a search result that appears above organic results. So if a seller is searching the phrase “sell my house for cash in San Antonio” and your AdWords campaign matches that search, you’re going to appear as 1 of the top 3 results on page 1. Why? Because you paid for that spot.
Now, yes, PPC can get expensive. But the cost per deal is worth it. If you’re spending a few thousand running an ad and it gets you a deal that nets you tens of thousands, is it worth it? Yes! Because you put yourself above the competition who doesn’t have the time or the money to run ads.
Starting to get a taste for online marketing? We don’t blame you. It’s worked for Danny and Melissa, and it can work for you too. That’s why Danny hosts weekly webinars to teach you about the latest online marketing strategies that work. You can get your free seat by following the links in the section below!
linksFlip Hacking Live Recording 2020!
Come and join us in the FlippingJunkie Group on Facebook!
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Episode TranscriptionDanny Johnson: This is Flipping Junkie podcast episode 105. [music] Welcome to the Flipping Junkie podcast. The podcast for flip pilots everywhere. Flip pilots are the house flippers that work more on our business instead of in our business by keeping a 30,000-flip view. You’re now part of a small group of house flippers that considers themselves flip pilots that strive to build the life of financial freedom and time freedom so that we can spend more time doing what we love with who we love. In this podcast, I give you a glimpse of the daily life of a flip pilot so let’s gets started.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Flipping Junkie podcast. Today, I want to share with you my presentation that I put on in front of 600 people or over 600 people at Flip Hacking Live 2017. Justin Williams, a good friend of mine, he puts on that every year in California and it’s a great, great place to learn from a lot of very experienced and high level real estate investors. I was honored to present there, scared as hell too because I am scared to death to speak in front of people. Believe it or not. Podcast is a little bit different because there’s nobody in here looking at me. I’m just on a computer recording this audio. But I presented in front of a crowd of 600 people, and I feel like I did pretty well.
But what I wanted to share in that and what you’ll hear in here in minute is basically how things are changing with the way motivated sellers are contacting people to buy their house and sort of the shift that’s happening that’s causing a reduction in response rates for direct mail, which has been a traditional strong way to get a lot of leads for real estate investors. And so, I wanted to share what’s happening, what shift is happening online because of that and how to take advantage of it. And so, enjoy this episode.
I’m also doing a webinar to follow up that you can get more information about this and how to take advantage of it. Just sellerleadhacks.com. If you go to sellerleadhacks.com, you’ll be able to register your receipt for that webinar where I’m going to take this in even further detail and show you how to do that.
And then also, if you want to take advantage of our professional services at LeadPropeller where we actually can do a lot of this for you to have success for you online with SEO, with Google AdWords, pay-per-click, and even Facebook marketing. We do that. We manage top-level investors’ accounts across the country on those platforms to generate those leads for investors. You can reach out to us at (210) 999-5187. You’ll talk to Josh and find out more about those services that we offer. (210) 999-5187. All right. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this presentation. I hope you like it.
[presentation plays]
Justin Williams: Is it Flipping Junkie time? I think it’s Flipping Junkie time. So, I have known Danny for several years now, right? I’m trying to remember. Four years? Nine years? That was nine years, right? So I’ve known Danny for a long time. I went to a Coachella Valley real estate investment club, and someone told me about you. I looked you up. They connected us, and we’ve been good friends ever since. Are you going to get into the story at all of how we met?
Danny Johnson: No. That’s fine.
Justin Williams: Okay. So I can say it. No way. So, he calls me up one time because he realized I was doing at pretty high level. He interviewed me on his podcast. He’s like, “You only really only in five hours a week and flipping like a hundred houses?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” That was actually right after the podcast interview. He was like, “Hey, can I come down and a bit hang out with you.” I’m like, “Sure.” So I think he talked to Melissa, right? And literally within minutes, he was back on the phone with me saying, “Hey, I’m coming.” And he was there two days later. Anyway, he shows and I asked him what he wanted to do. He’s like, “Let’s go look at some of your houses.” I was like, “I don’t know where they are,” right?
Shortly after that, I think he hung out with Andy for a little bit. He then joined the 7 Figure group last year like a year from today. His business was already doing amazing. Who listens to the Flipping Junkie podcast, huh? Great stuff. Melissa is actually the real flipping junkie, but we still give Danny the credit. His business has blown up. Not only that, but he’s also running multiple businesses which are also taking off doing amazing things. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the one and only Danny Johnson.
Danny Johnson: And the slide. There we go. All right. So, it’s a beautiful Saturday morning in South Texas. I’m coaching my five-year-old son’s soccer team. There’s hundreds of kids, hundreds of parents all on this field. Tons of noise, but I’m hyper-focused on this moment. I’ve got my amino energy pumping through my veins, and we’re throwing the ball in from out of bounce.
The ball gets thrown in, and it hits one of our players on the stomach and just falls to the ground. It’s just a slight tap. But I can see as his mind is working on this… And I know that exact moment that he doubles over in pain because he knows he can get more attention by doing that. He looks up at me to see my reaction, and I wanted to yell, “What are you doing?” as the ball falls on the ground and the other team taps it in for an easy goal.
Now, it’s a noncompetitive league. We’re not supposed to keep SEOre, but Melissa and I are super competitive and we just can’t help it. But a lot of times, the kids—bless their hearts; they’re five years old—will kick the ball really hard and then just stand there, right? And the other team gets it. They should keep going, but they stop and it’s a habit. They’ve got to stop stopping.
Now, we do this as adults too as real estate investors. We have expectations when we send out marketing, and they don’t get met. We throw are arms and say, “This doesn’t work in my market. There’s too much competition. It doesn’t work.” And I see this all the time with websites. Real estate investors will get their website and then stop. They don’t send traffic to it. They don’t do things. And they stop when they should stop stopping. They need to keep going. Times have changed. No longer is it just a benefit to have a website. It’s an absolute necessity, and I’ll show you what I mean.
Who here sends direct mail? Just raise your hands if you send direct mail. I see a lot of people. We do it, too. It works. But let me ask you something. When that potential seller gets your postcard or your letter, more and more what are they doing? That’s right. They’re going online to find out more about you, your business, and your brand.
So what happens when they receive that and they go online to find you? Are they finding you or your competitor? And if they do find you alongside your competitor—your competitor has a lot of good reviews—which one are they going to click on? Ouch. If you’re not the one with the good reviews, it’s going to be pretty painful. We can’t ignore this any longer as real estate investors.
I was just leaving my dentist’s office the other day. As I left outside, I walked past a couple having a conversation. They weren’t millennials. They were my age about. And as I passed them, it was just a couple of seconds. But of that conversation, what I heard was the gentleman saying, “I look for their website. I couldn’t find them online.” So I checked on Facebook. Nothing. And then the woman responds with, “I guess we’re going to have to find somebody else.” See. This is happening more and more.
And if you’ve tried before to have an online presence, have a website and make it work and it didn’t work out, it’s not your fault. There’s so much to know with all the crazy acronyms: SEO, PPC, cost per click—all that kind of stuff.
So, my goal with this presentation today is to show you guys how to have a website and an online presence that brings new leads and deals but more importantly creates an online presence that builds credibility, likeability, and trust because people do business with people they like and trust. Everybody said it multiple times as they presented.
Melissa and I have been flipping houses in San Antonio for 14 years. It’s crazy, right? We’ve generated most of our leads and deals using our website. We generated thousands of motivated seller leads using our website. And most of our best leads and deals and cheapest leads and deals come from our website, but it wasn’t always that way. It didn’t happen overnight. Like Justin was saying, “Sometimes you see people’s success and you think, “Oh. It must’ve been easy. He did it when he was five or 10 years ago.”
But I remember countless evenings for months, driving Melissa absolutely nuts. Lying in bed at night with my laptop, researching how to get my site to rank better. And it was countless times that I would do a search. I would get on Google and I would say, “Sell my house fast, San Antonio,” and I look for my website. It wasn’t in the results. I don’t know how many. It was like countless times this happened.
When I’d be on the second page of the results in the middle and I say, “Great. I’m moving up. I’m going to get on there and do some more things for two to four weeks for that keyword to get my site to the top of the search results.” You’ve got to be at the top 3 of the organic search results to get the line, share the leads that come in.
So I’d work my butt off, right? Every night clicking away on that keyboard, doing things to get my site to rank higher. I was super hopeful after about two to four weeks, and I’d go to search again super excited because my site is going to be there, right? At the top of that first page.
But what will always happen was I would look and I’d say, “Oh, it’s not there. Well, hopefully I’m higher than I was last time on the second page maybe.” So, I click over the second page and my heart would sink and I’d get angry. I want to throw that laptop against the wall because my site wasn’t even where it was. And I click on the third page, “Oh, crap. It’s not there.” On the fourth page, “Where did it go? I’m at the bottom of the fourth page. I thought I was doing stuff that was helping me, not hurting me.” And I’d throw my arms and say, “This doesn’t work. It’s near impossible.” Competition is too good.
I’ve been talking with people here about how many people say they get leads from organic search, and it’s amazing how few people do. I think it has a lot to do with people thinking, “That’s near impossible. The competition out there is too strong.” It’s not the case. It has to do with expectations.
I didn’t give up. I stopped and I would give up for a time, but I would come back and I kept going. And that’s what it took to get to where we are. And so now, this is a 12-month from summer to summer. Last summer to this summer. A single website generated 453 leads for us. And that’s that Pacman-looking think that scribbled right there.
But to show you the number because sometimes that doesn’t really help people. You want to see what it’s costing people to do this, and I think that gets in to the expectations as well. This is a breakdown of our cost for that marketing. Now, high equity is a direct mail campaign we spent 40 grand on. It generated 59 leads. That’s pretty cool. But the cost per lead was almost $700. I look at that and say, “Well, I wouldn’t do that anymore. But look, we got 10 deals at a cost of $4000.” Now, we flip. We do rehabs and wholesales, and almost every deal is way over that. So a flip like 25 or 30 grand or more and our wholesales we’re looking at like $10,000 to $20,000. So it works.
But take a look at that organic search. Now, this is where you type in the search, “Sell my house fast, San Antonio,” or some other keyword like that and I show up in the results at the top. Two hundred and forty-four leads over the same time period at a cost of $46 per lead. That’s awesome, right? Twenty-one deals out of that at $537 a deal. We’re in a really competitive market as well.
That’s sort of like free traffic somewhat. I don’t do all of the SEO myself anymore just because I’m too busy. It doesn’t make sense. We use our in-house LeadPropeller people to do that SEO, so that’s why there is cost for the organic.
PPC using AdWords on Google. We spend money to have our ads at the top of Google using PPC. You can do that right now right away and you pay only when somebody clicks on your ad to go to your website. So we spent $33,500, generated 159 leads at $210 on average per lead, producing the 10 deals at $3300 so still really good.
Now, we got Bing ads, too. We do that. And I don’t know. There’s a lot of investors always talking about AdWords and they never talk about Bing ads. I don’t understand it except for maybe people who are wondering, “Do people even use Bing?” But they do and it’s cheaper. So we spent $7000, 47 leads, five deals at a really good cost per deal.
So that was 36 deals from the website over that time period. What would that do for you and your business? Adding that component that doesn’t require a ton of work from you.
And this is the overview. This is an online web presence for today. So you have, at the center, the high-converting website and you send traffic to that website either free or paid. Paid traffic being Bing ads, AdWords, Facebook ads. Free traffic using search engine optimization and Craigslist ads. And at the end, I’m going to give you a strategy guide for Craigslist.
I was talking to Danny. Where you at, Danny? Yesterday, he told me he was using that exact guide and generated a great deal that’s going to make him a lot of profits really. So I’ll give you a link to that at the end.
Once you get that traffic to the high-converting website, they either become a lead by submitting that form or calling you. If they don’t which is the majority of people, we retarget them using retargeting. So I’ll explain all of this as we go through.
So, the most important part is that central part. It’s that high-converting website. And you knew I was going to say that because I’m LeadPropeller, but it’s true. What’s the point of sending a ton of traffic to a website if you’re not maximizing the number of leads you get from that traffic?
And importance is show here with this calculation. If you have 500 people coming to your website and you have a 2% conversion rate—meaning only 2% of those people actually submit a form or call—it’s 10 leads. But let’s say you do something—and I’ll show you what that something is—to get the 10% conversion rate. Now with even less than half of that traffic, just 200 people, you get 20 leads. Double the leads. This is why this is so important. They’re small numbers, but they make a big difference over time.
So, how do you increase that conversion rate for your website? Well, we’ve talked about it. People do business with people they like and trust.
This is Alex Wentland. He’s a customer in Las Vegas, and he’s pretty awesome. So he’s got this About Us page. And by the way, of all the LeadPropeller websites, the homepage is the #1 visited site, but the behind that is the About Us page. It’s the Our Company/About Us page. So that just proves that people want to find out who’s behind the website. Who are they going to be working with?
So, Alex has a great picture of himself. That’s not a stock photo, looking high powered business suit kind of thing and dogs with sunglasses. It shows who he is as a person. It’s shows his personality. And if you scroll up, he’s got his core values. It shows what matters to him. People see Alex and they say, “Well, he’s kind of like me. I’m going to give him a call.” And it works.
The second thing is you need to immediately tell them what you want them to do when they come to your website. If they go to your website and they don’t know what they’re supposed to do, they’re going to get confused or lost, clicking around, going to different places.
And so Alex here has got this form and he’s got that big red arrow. It’s super obvious where you need to look. It’s point to that big green button that says, “Get my fair cash offer.” They know what he wants them to do and what they’re going to get from that, right? This is also above the fold. And that means when you come to a website, what you see without scrolling is above the fold. That’s all right there. They get to it. They see it. They don’t have to figure out, scroll around, and look to see what to do.
Now, credibility is paramount. So Alex did an awesome job with this. He’s got the Google five-star rating logo, Facebook five-star rating logo, Better Business Bureau credit logo. And if you’re not that, you need to get that because it helps with direct mail and everything else as well. He’s also got a page of full of testimonials including video testimonials. It’s huge. You need to be doing this.
And then, “We’ve been featured on,” which is NBC, CBS, and stuff like that. Those can be had by doing press releases. You can do a press release and get it picked up by these different news affiliate websites and then put these on there without feeling like you’re being shady because you weren’t actually featured on those. So that’s how people do those things.
Now, mobile also matters for conversion rate because this is a subset of traffic to LeadPropeller websites and a full third are just from mobile devices, from smartphones. That’s not even including tablet which is a small percentage. So a third of all that traffic is coming through on mobile devices and that’s for motivated seller leads, not for investor/buyer leads and all these other stuff. What we care most about as investors are those seller leads, and that’s what this is showing. So you’re website needs to be not only mobile responsive—meaning that it looks good on a mobile device—but it’s mobile friendly. It’s easy to use on a mobile device.
In Alex’s site, when you look at it, that big green button is right there and it looks like it’s begging to be clicked, right? Begging to be pressed. And then LeadPropeller sites have the mobile button bar at the bottom. If you’re using other services, it’s not that hard to have this built for you to have this. So when they’re scrolling around your website finding out more about you and what you do, they always have that call to action. What you want them to do right there within reach to tap and use.
So it’s not only just your website though. I’ve been talking about things for conversion on website. This is going to be off of your website. This is what happens in San Antonio when you search “Danny buys houses.” Now, it matters sometimes where you’re searching from because Google looks at the IP address and gives you results based on where you are. But when you’re in San Antonio, when you search this, this is what you see. I’m all over this page because I don’t want people looking for me and finding my competitors.
So you might be going, “How do I get that one on the right? How do I get that big thing up there that shows my company and location, reviews, and all that kind of good stuff?” That’s the Google My Business page. It’s free. Everybody should have this. It’s a Google My Business page. Fill it out as much as you can. Add photos and get reviews. Everybody here needs to be getting reviews. That needs to be a part of your machine, a part of your process. And I’m amazed at how a few people still really actually work on getting reviews for these.
And imagine what happens if you guys are the ones starting now getting these reviews and building up to having 30 positive reviews. The competition is going to look at that and say, “How can I compete?” You guys can be the ones that they’re looking at and saying, “This is impossible to compete with these guys.”
Reviews can be had by not just sellers. You can have friends and family and colleagues give you reviews. Now, they shouldn’t say, “He bought my house,” and be complete lie. It should just speak about your character, who you are, and what your business is like.
Better Business Bureau The other things on this page are the pay-per-click ad at the top. I’m on there, and I’m using extensions for my pay-per-click add to give me those extra spaces. So if you’re doing a pay-per-click, make sure that you use those.
I’m showing up that the top of the search result, organic, under the ads and then my Facebook business page is right under that with reviews. You need a Facebook Business page as well. Better Business Bureau, Google My Business, Facebook Business page. You have to have them. If you can get Yelp reviews, that’s awesome too. I think if you scroll up here, you’ll see the Yelp page.
So we need to be branding and we need to make sure that we’re sending a ton of direct mail. When people go online to find us, they’re finding only us. And everything is saying, “These guys are awesome. Call them.”
So, let’s talk about the traffic to the website. Now that we have a website that we’ve set up to maximize how many leads we get from the traffic we sent to it, let’s talk about the traffic. So you’ve got free traffic, paid traffic, but you also have warm and cold traffic. Cold traffic cost me a freaking fortune on failed PPC campaigns over the years, and I’ll explain what I mean by that.
So warm traffic is people with the right intent. Somebody has a situation where either they need to sell a house right or they’re going to soon. You don’t want people just looking to maybe sell my house to go find your website, especially if you’re using paid sources to get those leads, to get that traffic because it’s going to cost and they’re not going to become a lead. Warm traffic is people that want to either sell now or have a situation that will cause them to want to sell soon.
“How do I evict a tenant in Texas?” That could have some motivation behind it, right? “Sell my house fast.” That word “fast” in there makes a huge difference over just “sell my house.” “Sell my house now.” And I’m going to give you some more keywords when we get in to the pay-per-click.
There’s a big distinction there with warm and cold. You don’t want to be wasting time trying to get people that don’t show motivations. It’s much easier to focus on those very specific ones that show motivation.
So this is the organic search results and paid search results here. “Sell my house fast, San Antonio.” The top four are your pay-per-click ads. And the bottom ones under that are the organic traffic where you show up when you rank using SEO.
Now, SEO is a long-term play and this is where I was mentioning earlier about expectations. This is huge. If you don’t understand this, this is why most people give up.
Now, I got this graph from Neil Patel and I changed it to match what we see in the real estate industry for real estate investors. Now, it’s gap of disappointment in the middle. I hope you can see this well, but that’s over 12 months. This is what typically happens with SEO. The blue line are the returns generated, so that means you increasing your rank in the search results getting up to the top of that first page. The red line is the work you’re doing to try to do that.
And so as I was showing, as I was doing that work to get my site to rank, my results were dipping and I thought I’m doing something wrong. I must be screwing this all up. But I didn’t quit and I kept going. I kept putting that investment required into it and my results started happening. And that’s when I started getting those leads. Currently for some competitive markets, you’re looking at like month 9, 10, 11, 12 to finally get the leads; to finally start ranking at the top on the first page. Most people give up in that slog, that gap or disappointment where they feel like what they’re doing is not working. So if you understand this, it’s huge, right? Because you know it’s an investment. You commit to it, and you guys dominate the search results in your market.
You might be saying, “Well, what exactly should I be doing SEO-wise?” Now, I just did training Seller Lead Hacks like 15 hours. So I could not possibly explain all of that here. But the big idea is principles versus tactics, all right? Tactics are things like doing some things with backlinks or gaming the systems a little bit and they may work for a short period of time. But over time, you could have problems because Google is getting smarter and smarter. So you need to use principles that work and we need to do things that give people what they want.
What Google wants is for people to search using their search engine and quickly find the best results, find what they’re looking for. If we provide that, we’re doing what Google wants and what people doing searching are wanting. So you use content marketing. You use blogging. You make a bunch of articles focused on all these situations that can create motivation to sell the house fast.
This is recently from my website. You might be doing some searches in your market. And if you’re trying to get your site to rank, you might be searching the main competitive keywords like “sell my house fast” or “we buy houses” in your city and say, “Wow. Look at all these competitors.” My website is ranking for 2200 keywords, so you’re not checking all of those keywords. There’s a lot of keywords that are a lot easier to rank for. So doing content marketing allows you to do this. When you have tons of articles being posted on your website, you start to rank. Sorry. I should be pointing over here. Your website should rank for a lot more and you get a lot more leads and deals.
Other than SEO, you have paid traffic. So that you can get immediate traffic, you pay to have these ads. When they click on those ads, you pay but that’s only the time you pay. You have the four placements. On the top of Google search results are ads and then at the bottom, I think, there’s three. You want to be at those top four. If you’re doing PPC, you need to be on the top four and they show you where you’re showing up, where your ads are showing up in PPC. You need to make sure those are averaging to the top four, preferably one and two. And warm traffic only like I talked about before.
Here are some good keywords. These are keywords that show motivation. They are good ones to target with SEO and pay-per-click. But I’m sneaky and I snuck one in here that matches a bunch of searches that don’t show the right motivation. Can anybody guess which one of these match the bunch of…? No. That’s a good one. I think I heard it already. It’s “sell house now.” Look at what “sell house now” matched. Now, there’s modifiers for pay-per-click. So you can do modifiers on these words to make sure they don’t match certain other things. So this matched all of that. You don’t want these people come at your website because it’s costing you money, so you have to be careful, all right?
How do you determine your budget? This is the other big thing that I think a lot of people have trouble with. My friend, Paul Del Pozo… Where you at, Paul? There you are. Hey. So we had a conversation because he was talking about budget with PPC and it got me thinking about direct mail and other things. When people have success with direct mail, typically they have a big budget. PPC is no different.
So how do you determine what budget you should have to have success? And the way you do that is you’re going to reverse engineer what you’re likely to make from a deal using this. If we start with our potential profit from a deal, if we’re doing fix and flip, we might be thinking $25,000. We’ll say, for this example, we’re going to make $25,000 on a deal then we need to figure out how many leads do we need to get that deal. What’s our conversion rate on our leads to deals? And so, we’re going to say 10. It could vary for you so obviously use what happens for you and PPC tends to have a little bit better conversion too for leads to deal, but we’ll say 10. So, we need 10 leads to get that deal. How much traffic do we need to our website to get the 10 leads? If our conversion rate for a website is 10%, we need 100 people going to the website. Warm traffic.
What is the cost per click on our AdWords, on our pay-per-click to get the 100 people over? Now, this varies based on market and keyword and all this kind of stuff. But on average, you’re probably looking at anywhere from $15 up to even $40 sometimes for average cost per click.
I put $25 in here on average to get that 100 visitors. So what we have is 100 clicks to get the deal. It’s going to cost us $2500. Well, we’re going to make $25,000. Who wouldn’t do that all day long, right? But this is how you figure out what your budgets should be. So if we take this a step further and we ask ourselves, “How many deals from PPC do we want per month?” If we want one, I hope your budget is better than $2500.
There’s too many people want to dip their toe in and they just want to say, “I’m going to spend $500 on PPC per month to see if it works. But what happens is you’re splitting that $500 into a daily budget that is usually like 500 divided by 30, whatever that is. It’s really low. And if our average cost per click is $25, our budget is eaten up every day really fast and you’re not getting what you needed to get to get it.
If you want a deal per month in PPC, depending on what your numbers are with this calculation is what you need to set your budget at per month. If you want to do two deals, double it. Sometimes you’ll have better. Sometimes it’ll be a little bit more. But on average, this is what you’re looking at. That’s how you have success with PPC.
Now, just to show you that those aren’t numbers plucked out of thin air, this is my actual account. I forgot what the time period is here. But 80 clicks produced 12 leads so we had a higher conversion rate in the example, 15%. But the cost was $2581. And 12 leads, we typically will get a deal from that. So this is just to show you that those numbers are based on real information.
Now, Facebook is another way to get paid traffic to your website. It’s a completely different animal like the liger. Everybody loves the liger. And the betters will be presenting on that later today, so I’m going to let them explain all of that because would run over if we get into it but it’s a different animal. People aren’t going on Facebook to look for somebody to buy their house, so you have to treat it differently and they will be talking about that.
So moving on now, we’ve talked about having that high-converting website, maximizing how many leads we get from the traffic we sent to it. What happens to all the people that come to the website but don’t submit the form and don’t call you? They don’t become a lead. Freaking jerks, right?
When I was rehearsing this with my daughter, I used more colorful language and she got a big kick out of it. She’s 18 by the way, so it’s cool.
We use retargeting, right? So they come to the website. They leave. You retarget them with ads all over the Internet or on Facebook. So let’s try to think through why they might not become a lead, right? They come to your website and they left for some reason. Why? Some people, maybe it’s the wrong thing. They just found your website. They were looking for something else. That could happen, right? But other people probably have a situation causing them some motivation. They search for these keywords to find you to sell their house. Well, maybe they’re not ready yet. They’re embarrassed. They’re kind of scared. They don’t know if they want to do it and they leave.
Most investors don’t do anything about these people. They don’t even know how many people are coming to their website and just leaving without doing anything. So we want to retarget people because there are people with motivation coming back. If you think about direct mail, when direct mail works, it’s because people are sending to the same list over and over and over again.
Now, some of that is the rule of eight in sales or whatever where you have so many touches before somebody takes action, but I think it has a lot more to do with time and circumstances. So they receive your letter for three times, but life is great. They don’t pair. They throw it in the trash. But on that fourth time, maybe they just got back from going to this house they had inherited, that they put a relative in that’s torn it up and then call them names, and they feel pretty crappy. They get your postcard, and they call you because circumstances change.
Retargeting is the same thing. They might not be ready when they come to the website. But if you retarget them over time, you can reach them when circumstances change.
Now, Facebook we found to be a little bit better for retargeting. I was supposed to be updated. These are from a couple of weeks ago. This is from my website, I think. We had six people come back over a week, I think, at $93 per lead. And then other accounts that we’re managing, 11 leads back at $40 a lead. And this one is three leads at $26 a lead. So people are coming back with this marketing to retarget, but you don’t want to be creepy. I always love this one.
So we’ve all probably been a victim of retargeting, right? When you go to Amazon, you’re looking at a product and then you leave and you go to some other website and they’re just bombarding you like, “Dude, I didn’t want it. I didn’t buy it. Leave me alone,” but they keep doing it. So, you don’t want to be creepy. You don’t want to piss them off. You don’t want to make your brand look bad because you’re just hitting them over and over again.
So, the key with retargeting is to do it over a long period of time and sparingly. Some people are like, “Let’s pound them. Let’s just make sure that they know.” So that first week or second week, maybe once or twice a day. If you’re on Facebook, maybe a little bit less. You don’t want to show up that much. And you do it a little bit more at first because they came to your website. Maybe they do have the motivation and you got to strike while the iron is hot. But after that, I would say maybe a couple of times a week or once a week. Facebook allows you to do 180 days. The Google Display Network, I think, is the same thing, 180. But do it sparingly and it’ll work better.
I told you I’d give you that Craigslist strategy guide here. So if you’d go to Go, please don’t forget the Go part, go.leadpropeller.com and then FHL, Flip Hacking Live 2017. You can get that guide. It just shows you a good strategy for posting free ads to get people to your website, and it worked well for Danny over there and a lot of other people. So that’s free to use as well.
We’ve talked about a lot, right? And we could’ve gone way deeper. But with this amount of time, I just wanted to make sure that you guys understand having an online presence these days is absolutely necessary. Because as time goes on and more and more people figure this out and get those reviews and ratings on their Google My Business page and Facebook Business page, it is going to be harder for us to compete with them.
And if you’re sending a lot of direct mail, maybe you haven’t considered that people… maybe your response rate is dropping because people are going online to find out more about you and are finding other people that have a lot information and are showing a lot more credibility and you’re losing out to them because of that. So it’s very important, and I think we should all be working on it. No matter whether you use us or somebody else, everybody should be doing this.
We talked about the high-converting website, the free traffic, and paid traffic and then retargeting. So, the strategy that I typically recommend is using paid traffic now to get a return on your investment for your website, to get those leads and deals that you can then turn around and reinvest that money into a long-term play of SEO so that you can start showing up at the top of the search results and over time getting those cheaper and better leads. So that’s my presentation. Thank you so much.
Justin Williams: All right. Was that good stuff? Here’s the truth, guys. I met up with Danny earlier. He was like, “Hey. I’ve got this presentation. I need you to help me out. I need you to create a really ugly presentation to make mine look really good. So that’s why Danny’s look so good because I made an ugly, but that was amazing. Thank you.
On a personal note, hopefully he doesn’t mind me sharing this but Danny caught… We were talking on the phone two or three months ago. We’ve been doing a lot of accountability calls with each other. It’s been really awesome. He shared with me. He was like, “You know, speaking up on stage just like a lot the speakers here, isn’t totally my thing.” It isn’t his thing? He’s like, “It’s totally my thing, but I’m going to own it. I know he went out and was like literally took like classes, right? And he’s like, “I have a goal. My goal is to give the best presentation at Flip Hacking Live.” And then he said, “You know, not necessarily the best presentation but my goal is to give the best presentation that I can give.” And I’m proud of you, man. I think you nailed it.
[presentation ends]
Danny Johnson: Hope you enjoyed that. There’s no words to describe how nerve wracking that was to prepare and speak in front of that big of an audience. I appreciate Justin for giving me the opportunity, and I had a great time doing it. I’m sure it won’t be the last time.
And if you want to go to the next Flip Hacking Live at the end of this year, 2018, head over to the show notes page and there’s a link there. You can get early access to that, so you can get your tickets for the next one. It’s an amazing event. It’s pretty much the only real estate one that I even attend every year because Justin just does such an amazing job and it’s not a pitch fest. It’s everybody sharing their real details of how they do high-volume deals as real estate investors and live the lives that they want to live.
So you can head over to flippingjunkie.com/105. There’s a link there for Flip Hacking Live 2018. I urge you to go ahead and get tickets for that as soon as you can because they do sell out and I only have so many seats for that. If you want to try to meet up there, go ahead and head over to flippingjunkie.com/105, and I’m sure I’ll see you there. Flip Hacking Live 2018 is going to be awesome.
Like I mentioned, if you enjoyed the message and that really resonated with you and you want to dominate your local market online, you’ve got a couple options. (1) You can head over to sellerleadhacks.com and register for that webinar where I’m going share some more details on exactly how to do that and show you guys on my screen what’s going on and what you can do to do that.
The other option that you have is to contact our services department here at LeadPropeller to see about options in your market if your market is available and what we can do for you regarding SEO, PPC, and Facebook marketing for your real estate investing business to get consistent leads for you. While you’re busy going out there and getting these deals and making the money, we’re generating the leads for you, working on that for you as experts in those things so that you don’t have to learn all of it. You don’t have to be an SEO expert. You don’t have to be a PPC expert stressing about thrown-away money because of a poorly managed account.
So if you’re interested in that, just give us a call, (210) 999-5187. [music] Thanks a lot for listening to the Flipping Junkie podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll see you next week. Have a great one guys.
