56: Online Lead Generation Part 2: Website Promotion

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Show Notes

This is the second of four episodes where Danny Johnson of Flipping Junkie and LeadPropeller discuss generating motivated seller leads online for real estate investors.

In this episode the focus is mainly on generating traffic to your website. So, let’s get going and talk about how to promote your website to start generating leads right away without waiting for your site to rank at the top of the search engines…which can take up to a year with diligent effort.  We’ll talk about that and SEO a lot more in a couple weeks on the 4th podcast episode in this subseries.

Don’t Expect: ‘Build it and they will come’

The internet isn’t the field of dreams.

Just building a website doesn’t do anything for you unless people know about it.  They either find out about it through promotion: which is what we are talking about today or through finding it online themselves: which is what we are covering in the next 2 episodes.

The biggest mistake real estate investors make with a website is getting a website and then doing nothing to promote it.

Promotion does require some work, but the results can land you great deals that generate tens of thousands of dollars.

Whenever I hear someone say, “I haven’t received a single lead from my website”, it’s almost always because they never promoted it or didn’t promote it long enough.  It’s the equivalent of complaining you didn’t get a deal from your direct mail campaign after you send out 500 postcards one time.

You Need a Plan

Just as you plan your direct mail with who you are mailing, when and how often and which letters, you need to have a plan to constantly promote your website.  You wouldn’t print 1,000 letters and never mail them, so don’t build a website and not promote it.

The ideas I give you today will allow you to create your website promotion plan.

Be sure to listen to next week’s podcast where Danny will share with you how to generate the best motivated seller leads using pay per click (Google Adwords) marketing.

For information about our managed (done-for-you) SEO and PPC management services, call Josh at LeadPropeller at 210-999-5187.

 

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Online Lead Generation for Real Estate Investors Webinar

LeadPropeller Real Estate Investor Websites

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Episode Transcription

Welcome to The Flipping Junkie Podcast. My name is Danny Johnson former software developer turned house flipper, flipping hundreds of houses. Each week we bring you interview, strategies, stories and motivations to help you get started flipping houses and on your way to becoming your own boss and achieving financial freedom. Thanks for spending time with me today. Now let’s get to it.

Alright. This is the online lead generation podcast of the series and we’re in part two now which is website promotion. And so last week we talked about getting motivated seller leads online and online is where I get the majority of my leads. And generating leads online is basically a three-step process. First you have to have a high converting website that’s set up to rank well in search engines. And then next you need to promote that website to start generating traffic and leads right away. So then the third one is working on getting your sites rank faster in the search results and that’s more of like a long term sort of strategy with the website. So basically you get the website, get some promotion, get some leads quickly and then you want to set it up to rank in the search results for long term as that takes time. If you miss the last podcast episode go back and listen to episode 55 of the Flipping Junkie Podcast where I talked about two opposite ways of generating leads online. Those two ways are outbound and inbound and the majority of the focus on that podcast episode was on inbound because that’s where the best leads come from. That’s where my best leads come from. So we spent the most amount of time talking about that and we covered how to make sure your website converts visitors into leads at a much higher rate. So sometimes it’s not so much about traffic problems, but it’s about conversion problems, so go back and listen to that if you missed it, episode 55 of the podcast.

Now all of what I’m sharing during this online lead generation podcast series from my over 10 years of experience generating thousands of motivated seller leads online. So I’ve been doing this for quite a bit of time and there’s a lot of information being shared in these four podcast episodes that I’ll be doing now and much of it is better understood with the visual component and so as I was going through a lot of this material and what I was going to share in this podcast I realized that maybe holding a webinar would be very helpful for a lot of people so that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to set all that up for November 15th and get all that ready for you guys to have a webinar so you can see the visual component of it, see some of the graphs and charts some information and I can show you how to do some of this stuff. So go ahead pause this podcast episode and head over the leadpropeller.com/webinar so that can register for that webinar that I’ll be doing and you don’t want to miss it. So go ahead and do that and so I’ll assume you’ve now paused it, gone on and registered and we’ll get started. So lets get going. We’re going to talk about so you can start juddering leads right away without waiting for your site to rank at the top of the search engines.

A lot of people don’t know, but ranking in the search engines nowadays with the competition can take up to a year even with diligent effort. So I want you to be aware of that. Definitely worth it, but we’re going to talk today about some things that you can do to get leads before that even happened. So we’ll talk about ranking and SEO and a lot more of that in a couple of weeks on the fourth podcast episode. In this subseries of the series of podcast episodes that I’m doing.

So let’s go ahead and gets started with promotion. So the first thing is basically expectations because I think a lot of people starting online with generating leads have the wrong expectations and basically don’t expect to have things work as though it’s build it and they will come. The Internet isn’t the field of dreams. Just because you built a website and published it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get traffic and leads. It doesn’t work that way. Even if it’s optimized, even if you have a website that’s SEO optimized for on-page SEO, just building and publishing is not typically going to get you a ton of leads. The website doesn’t help you unless people know about it and they either find out about your website through promotion, which is what we’re going to be talking about today or through finding it online themselves, which is what we’re covering in the next two podcast episodes that I’ll be doing. So the biggest mistake real estate investors make with the website is getting a website and then doing nothing to promote it. It’s the biggest one and I see it all the time. So promotion does require some wok, but the results that you’re going to get from doing that promotion can land you great deals to generate tens of thousands of dollars. So again well worth it.

I mean I don’t know of many other industries where you can get those kind of profits from a single deal like a single lead can turn into that single deal that generates all that money and so it’s just crazy. So it’s definitely worth the work and the effort. And even if you don’t want to do this stuff you can always hire the stuff and leadpropeller we actually offer SEO and Adwords management services on top of the website systems that we have. So if you’re interested you can look into that under the services tab on the leadpropeller.com website. But getting back to this, the biggest problem that people have is when they set up a website and then don’t do anything and whenever I hear somebody say, “I haven’t received a single lead from my website. I put the website up and I haven’t received a single lead” it’s almost always because they didn’t promote it or didn’t do enough to promote it long enough. And it’s the equivalent of complaining you didn’t get a deal from your direct mail campaign after you send out 500 postcards a single time, it’s the exact same thing. It’s how you’re looking at it. It’s how you’re doing it. So you need a plan that you can execute that you can stick with and just as you planned in direct mail with who you’re going to mail, when you’re going to mail them, how often, which letters, you need to have a plan to constantly promote your website and you wouldn’t print a thousand letters and never mail them. So don’t build a website and promote it. Don’t do that. It’s just not doesn’t work.

Now the ideas I give you today is going to help you create your website promotion plan so that you can get results, get those leads, get those deals and all that so it’s going to be pretty cool.

So ways to promote your website get quick results I’m going to cover today are going to be social media, email signatures, offline marketing, press releases, Craigslist ads and pay-per-click. Actually, I’m going to talk about pay-per-click next week. I started putting it into this one and then realized that it was going to be a two-hour episode so I didn’t want to overwhelm everybody in one episode. So I mentioned I think in the last one that we’re doing three episodes. We’re now we’re going four because of that because I wanted to spend more time talking about pay-per-click, how that works, AdWords being ads and not just how it works but how it works for real estate investors because you can find information on pay-per-click and Adwords on the Internet. But I want to talk about it and how it relates specifically to our industry and us as real estate investors so that’s going to be pretty cool. That’s the next podcast episode.

So let’s just jump right in with the first one I have for promoting the website. So this is assuming you’ve got your website whether it’s leadpropeller website or not that you’ve got published now, what should you do to start promoting and getting out there. And so even if you’ve had your website for a while and maybe you haven’t done these things you need to do them. It’ll help you a lot. So social media and it’s a great way to share with your friends and family what you’re doing. Sometimes investors when they’re new or embarrassed to tell people that they buy houses for some reason, you can’t do that. You never know who has a situation that they’re too embarrassed to share with everyone about. But they’ll go to your website and submit their information. So they may not contact you through social media and tell you these things what they might some of information and people that you know know other people and it just goes from there. So who knows, maybe you post to social media and somebody connected to Kevin Bacon contacts you or something, Kevin Bacon might want to sell his house. So Google Plus and Facebook are good places to post. For an example of something to post for your website, as simple as we just launched our website for our house buying company head over and check it out and then include the URL to your website. Also, “We’re buying houses in the ____” include your city here area so that if you know anyone who wants to sell fast send them our way. We’ll pay cash and can close quickly and more than happy to make an obligation. Cash offer within 24 hours. So it’s sounds a little bit salesy but it lets people know what you’re doing and if they know of somebody – and you can even change it up in your own words to make it more of like “If you know somebody let them know about us, let them know that we’re doing this now, we can help them now. I’ll be glad to chat with them about it.” So you can do that Google Plus and Facebook and on Twitter you got a much shorter message so maybe something like “We just launched our new website for our house buying company.” And then have the URL there. “Know anybody that wants to sell their house fast for cash? Visit our site. We can help.” And then you have the URL so you can do things like that. And the problem typically with people in their social media strategy is that they don’t have one. There’s no strategy for social media. That being said either they’ve never posted anything on social media about their website or they did once and forgot about it.

Social media needs to be something that’s on a recurring basis so you get to regularly post those kind of posts and obviously you can mix it up and add in stories about the flips. You’re doing stories about phone calls you’ve got, just different things that people want to read about so you don’t want to always just be posting things like “We buy houses” all the time. People are going to ignore it. You got post stories about what you’re doing, who you are and all that kind of stuff that people take notice and read about and then also have the website in there so people can find out more and do it that way. But I always include the website in those post, and better yet, post ideas that you can have that you can do or things like before and after pictures of rehabs and things like that because people just love seeing before and after pictures so you can have that, set that up on the blog on your website or something and then post about that to get people to your website.

Posting things like before and afters and content for people that you then post to social media is what’s known as content marketing. And I’m going to cover that and a whole lot of detail in the fourth podcast, so two weeks from this one which will be episode 58 I think it is. Alright. So social media profiles – add your website to all your social media profiles all of them. These are the profiles where you have your name in your short bio all by yourself. Go ahead and throw your website in there and what you do. People need to know about what you do and let them know about your website so they can go there and check it out and get more info. So that’s the rundown of social media.

Now your email signature and this is something a lot of people just don’t do and they should be. In your email signature you should have your website. Even in the emails to people you don’t think would be interested just have it down there as your default email signature that goes out with all your emails. You can set this up very easily in Gmail and different mail programs, Outlook, all those have ways for you to easily set up an email signature and you can just Google how to set up an email signature in Gmail or whatever and find the instructions. It’s a great way to get started on your website some exposure from different people. And as you’re in the business longer, you’re emailing different people. You can have people find your website in the email signature. So you can’t be an investor in stealth mode alright. You never know who’s going to be interested in buying or selling. With your website URL in the signature emails your website has the potential to be seen and shared with more people. It’s not rocket science. I mean all you have to do is maybe have your name and then your website address underneath your name and then you can even have like a P.S. or something, “Do you need to sell your home fast or know somebody that does? I buy a house no matter what the condition. Give me a call for no obligation cash offer” something like that and then have your website address again. It’s as simple as that and it’s just going to be seen a lot more people. Think about the fact that sometimes people will forward your e-mails or copy other people so those people end up seeing that signature and it costs nothing and setting it up takes only a couple of minutes, so definitely no brainer.

Now the next thing I want to talk about is offline marketing, so this is all the things that you do like direct mail, postcards, letters, door hangers, flyers, business cards, all those things need to have your website on them and I don’t I don’t recommend bandit signs necessarily for a website because what you want to do is call them when they’re driving by and sometimes a website is kind hard to remember to write down as someone who’s driving by your bandit sign. And besides that if they’re not necessarily legal where you’re at or you can get in trouble with the city, you can find it a little bit easier if you have a website. Some people don’t recommend having websites on direct mail though and the reason I think that people don’t recommend it sometimes is because of their concern that sellers are going to go online, get distracted and check out your competition. While that can happen, my take on it is that they’re truly more motivated and they don’t want to call somebody, you’re giving them another way to contact you and find out more about you. So if there’s a little bit of hesitation there with your direct mail maybe the website will push them over to contact you. It’s going to allow you to build some credibility and some rapport with them. It’s also a reason for wanting a somewhat short domain name for your website is because if you have it on the postcard or letters or anywhere else, you don’t want to have somebody have to type out something like webuyallkindsofhousesinthestateoftexas.com just to go to your website. It’s too much. It’s too risky. Big of a chance for them to misspell something and then think your website doesn’t work and then you lose credibility. So having a somewhat shorter domain name is beneficial in that respect and something that’s not hard to spell. So if you’ve got something in there it’s kind of hard to spell maybe you want to rethink it. But some investors add QR codes to their postcards and letters so that people can scan them and have them go straight to their website. I’ve not tried this. I think the demographic of a lot of the sellers that I’ve bought from I’m not too sure that they typically do that kind of thing. But I haven’t tested it so it might work well in your area. It’s worth a shot.

When we talk about this problem of when some people say that they don’t recommend putting a website on the direct mail, the issue I think is more of where somebody either types it in wrong or something like or they type it in and they kind of search for it instead of actually just going directly to that website URL. My website is dannybuyshouses, so somebody might just type in danny buys houses into Google and they’re going to see search results. And so the problem then is when they do that there’s a chance that they’re going to go to competition. But there’s a way that you can sort of prevent that sort of problem by making sure that you set up a Facebook page for your business, Google my business page, a listing on Yelp.com that’s Y-E-L-P and other reviews sites. If you set those up with your company name, your domain name, that people would search into the search engine you’re going to end up – if you do those right have them there for a while. And the important thing with those kind of things is you got to have a business address that you have on there that is consistent across all of them and then also on your Website. So it’s important also socially promote those pages as well. The Facebook page the Google my business, listing page on Yelp, all that kind of stuff. So what happens if you get those things to rank well for your company name or your website now when people search like that you’re going to end up showing up for multiple reserves on the results on the first page. So you can kind of dominate that page, so it’s not a problem at that point, so that’s just an idea of where if you find that that’s an issue. And sometimes people don’t even think to search their company name or their website and then reviews or something like that in Google and just see what comes up you might be surprised what comes up. So if you find that you’re not showing there, you need to do some more work setting up some of those what I call local citations about your business across the internet to get Google to know more about your company and Bing also. But we’ll talk more about that in the fourth podcast episode. So that’ll be episode 58. So check that one out when it comes out in two weeks. So that’s basically the off line marketing to put your website on the other marking or not and I think you should and if you haven’t got a domain name yet, maybe use that as a reason to find one that’s a little bit shorter and easier to enter into a browser to go to.

So the next thing I want to talk about is going to be press releases. Now press releases, they sort of fall into SEO strategies more than promotion, but I won’t include it here anyway and the reason is because a good press release can get picked up by reputable news websites that you can then list on your website so sort of like the “as seen on” type logos and stuff like that which is huge for credibility. I mean you’ve got to build some serious street cred with these kind of things. So if you have a press release that gets put out and some sort of like NBC affiliate or something, a local news channel or website post, they pick up that press release and post on the website then you can say “as seen on NBC.” That’s why you see sometimes you see these websites where they have these things you’re like, “Really? These guys were seen on this kind of stuff?” But it’s usually just because they did a press release that got picked up and so then they’re saying they were seen on that, so that’s how that typically works. Press releases can really help to get some back links and things like that which is why I said it maybe falls into that SEO strategies a little bit more. But you can find incredible press release writers on fiverr.com, that’s FIVE and then RR dot com, so F-I-V-E-R-R dot com you can find some for real cheap. They’re cheap enough where you can try a couple of those people and always do your search for them based on reviews and check the reviews to make sure there’s a quick turnaround time and that they did good press releases.

Now some of the Fiverr gigs that you can get even include releasing press releases out to the different news wires and stuff like that. But I find spending a couple hundred bucks on a more legit service to release to press releases is usually worth it and I know a lot of investors use marketersmedia.com and then another one is prweb.com which is a bigger one. It has been around for a long time. They’re more expensive but I think they probably get some better reach. But when considering these things and sometimes it’s not even so much the press release where it’s being submitted to, it’s more of what the press release is about, right? Because if you consider what is a press release, it’s basically something you’re releasing to the press that is a newsworthy story and newsworthy is actually the key there. So even if you pay for PRWeb, the more expensive want to put out a press release and it’s not really newsworthy stuff, it’s not going to matter. I mean it’s all about having something that’s a little bit more newsworthy. So the biggest thing I remember is having a press release written or writing one yourself as I used to do. You really need to try to come up with something that’s actually newsworthy and that can be harder than you think. But just like having a piece written on “Sell your house fast in san Diego” isn’t going to get picked up by too many places. You need a story, something like “Guy loses hand in pinball machine and sells his house fast to an investor.” – I don’t know, it’s just an example. Someone’s ____ in doing that and I’d like to know how it works. But it’s really a lot harder than you might think. But coming up with great press release newsworthy things to get picked up by a lot more places is going to be much more beneficial than finding a more expensive service to release you press release. So consider that. It’s just more important spend more time trying to figure out what you’re going to actually write about or have written about, something that’s going to likely get picked up by more news sources.

Thinking about that, we have we have a leadpropeller VIP Facebook group that all our LeadPropeller customers are going to be a part of when they sign up. I need to set up a post. I’ll probably set up a post in there to have everybody share ideas for press releases so that we can maybe collectively think of some of these things that work well – I’m sorry, I’m thinking out loud here. Okay so more newsworthy it is, the more legit news websites will pick it up so that’s what you want. The benefit there is that you’re going to get those recognition from some of these sites, you’ll be able to use their logos onto your website and say that you were seen on those is going to be big. But the press releases also allow you to have links to your site in them so that helps with SEO also and so that’s the other reason for that. And the more legit the site is the better. It’s going to be a ___ SEO for you. One time one of my press releases made it onto Yahoo News. This was a long time ago and it’s funny because I think my dad still has a printout of that Yahoo homepage with my article on it. It was pretty cool, but anyway let’s move on. So that’s press releases, very powerful. Some people might say that press releases aren’t really all that great for SEO because a lot of times they have no follow links and we’ll talk about that what that is more in the SEO episode, but basically even no follow links help your website. I’ve actually seen some more than news sites have the links they are do follow. So don’t just believe everything that you hear on the Internet obviously.

So let’s get into Craigslist because I think it is a huge one and a lot of people downplay it or just ignore it. I want to spend the rest of the time in this episode talking about Craigslist and how to best use it to get motivated seller leads online. So despite what you might think motivated sellers are searching Craigslist so it’s very easy to get in front of them. Sometimes they’re looking for a place to rent, other times they’re considering putting their house up for sale and they might want to post an ad or something on Craigslist so that’s why they’re there. It’s easy to post ads on Craigslist, but with that ease comes competition, so if you go to your local Craigslist website you’re going to notice a lot of other investors usually, and if you don’t, awesome. That’s really awesome if you don’t see much of other investors. Typically in the bigger cities you’re going to see a lot of other investors post on Craigslist, but you can beat them by being more consistent meaning posting daily always. The thing is really almost every serious investor that has posted ads on Craigslist for deals probably of those investors, probably about 0.1%, yeah, a fraction of a percent there basically, just an educated guesstimate, but I seriously think that maybe just 0.1% of the investors that have posted on Craigslist have done it consistently. I mean, I honestly have not and that’s the thing. You might see those posts on there and typically it’s just different people all the time and if you’re somebody that’s doing it consistently, you’re going to have a much better chance of getting those leads from Craigslist and people do get leads from Craigslist all the time and don’t think that’s just a random thing that happens from time to time. You might even see tons of ads on there and think like, “How the heck is somebody going to go to my ad and contact me instead of all these other people?” Truth is you should let your competition think that way and not you being consistent here. I know somebody in San Antonio that posted a Craigslist ad and landed their first deal that ended up netting them $100,000 profit. That’s crazy I was kicking myself. I was like, “Man, I wish I had my ads on Craigslist” so I could have done that but posting free ads consistently all the time on Craigslist, you have the possibility of doing the same. So the first thing is to basically – we get what ads you should do. The thing might be “Well, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what my ad should say.” And it’s really kind of boils down to knowing the target audience. You’ve got to know motivated sellers and what makes them motivated. So your ads headline should draw attention. Speak to people that would want to sell their house fast because of a specific situation. And this is as it is an all direct mail and other mail and other sort of ads, but here it’s best to try and put yourself in the shoes of the people that are in situations that would motivate them to want to get rid of a house quickly. You want to word your ads and your website for that matter in a way as to join the conversation they’re already having in their heads. I’ve heard direct mail marketers talk about this before where it’s sort of like you’re got to consider the pillow talk like at night when they’re laying in bed with their spouse and they’ve got this issue that’s in their mind, this problem, the situation they’re facing that they’re thinking about and then they turn and talk to their spouse “What do they say? What are the words they use?” That’s the kind of thing that is gold. You have to have that. If you have that so that you’re speaking their language and you are joining the conversation they’re already having, they’re going to pay attention to your ad over the other people’s ads, so it’s huge. Try to spend some time thinking about this.

In some situations the people that we mostly deal with when we’re buying houses are things like foreclosure looming. So you come to the realization that you’ve waited too long to do anything about it. So it’s one of them. Another one would be like a nasty divorce that can be over with soon enough. Another one is death of a relative that leaves you a house you don’t need or want or want to deal with. Another one would be tenants that are ruining your life and that’s a pretty common one. Your house is too big and you want to downsize, so that’s a common one too. How about you’ve bought another house you need to sell your old one fast. That happens a lot too. They need to be able to get their debt income ratio down or something like that. Another one is you waited too long to fix your house and now it’s overwhelming and you can’t afford to fix it. That’s a very common one as well. So this needs a ton of repairs and you’re feeling like “Man, I don’t know if I can sell this the normal way to a realtor. I’m going to post now on Craigslist.” – that kind of thing. So if you focus on writing those ads that target motivated sellers in these situations and present yourself as a problem solver for those people, that you understand where they’re coming from because you’re speaking their language you’ll grab their attention even amongst all the clutter of the other real estate investor ads so it’s huge. It’s powerful. While you should have some general “We buy houses” type ads, you should also include those situation type based ads, so that you can stand out from the crowd and just as an example and obviously the webinar is definitely going to make this a little bit easier to understand because I’ll give you an example of an ad, but seeing it is a little bit better. So if you haven’t registered for the webinar, go to leadpropeller.com/webinar, reserve your seat for that webinar we’re doing November 15th. If you’re listening to this after November 15th, go ahead and go to leadpropeller.com/webinar anyway I might have the recording up or have some other webinars at that time so check it out anyway.

Alright so one simple example ad would be for inheriting a house – so you can have the title “Inherit a house? Not sure what to do with it? We can help. We pay cash for houses.” And then the ad could say “Many people inherit houses that they have no need for. It’s tempting to want to hold on to a house because of the memories. But sooner or later the cost and time involved in maintaining the house takes its toll. If you’re considering your options, why not get a no obligation cash offer from us to buy your house as is. That means we’ll buy it with cash so that there are no formal inspections, appraisals or real estate agent commissions and you can sell it without making a single repair. The process is simple. Visit our website at…” – then you have your website “…fill out the fast cash offer form or give us the call…” – and then your phone number, “We schedule time that is convenient for you to show us the house and then we see the house and make you an offer. There is no obligation. You can get an offer without paying a fee or committing to anything. Visit our website now to find out more and fill out the cash fast offer form…” – and then you have a website. So that’s a great simple ad to the point, shows them the benefit and shows that the process is simple. You definitely want to include some images. So if you include an image of yourself for one thing because I think a lot of people think “Well, Craigslist ads can be posted by anybody. So who’s who?” Who knows who, who’s posting this ad, but have a picture of yourself include some credible information about your business if you’ve been in business for a while and if you’re a BBB accredited. All serious real estate investors need to be BBB accredited if you haven’t done that you should definitely do it. Include that on your website. Include that in your ads and on your marketing. So include some images. Many motivated sellers checking Craigslist are viewing those listings in Craigslist as thumbnails. So if you have an image that’ll show up and catch your attention versus just having that peace sign that shows up if you don’t have an image in your ad. You can quickly create images that have text over them where you can put your website and say something like “We buy houses” or something. You can create those images very very quickly and for free at canva.com. that’s C-A-N-V-A dot com. If you do to canva.com you can create those images. It’s very cool. You can set the background and then use a template for the text that overlays it, just drag it on there and click and type whatever message you want to have on there.

If you’re curious another ad, I guess we could just talk about the simple “We buy a house” type ad so you could title it, “We buy houses in San Antonio and pay cash.” And then your ad copy can be “You read the correctly. We don’t care about location, repairs or situation. We will make you a no obligation cash offer to buy your house. Can you relate any of these situations…” and then you could have a listing of situations that they might be facing like, “Inherited a house that you don’t need, nightmare tenants making your life miserable, mooching relatives living in your house without paying…” – that one actually comes up a lot too, that’s a good one, mooching relatives living in your house without paying “…too many repairs and no desire to fix it behind on payments facing foreclosure. Want to invest in a business or another house and need the cash. Never really wanted to be a landlord and just want to cash out. City complaining about repairs needed and can’t afford to fix it. House too big and you want to downsize. Don’t feel like paying a realtor thousands of dollars in commissions. Don’t want dozens of strangers visiting your house if you put it up for sale or any other situation. Don’t worry we’ve probably encountered it. We’ve helped sellers through situations just like these by making a cash offer and closing on the house quickly. Imagine putting that situation and house behind you. We’ve been helping homeowners in…” – and then you put your city or whatever, “…sell your house fast without hassle for many years and we do it professionally and ethically and then have a link to your website and include that process again about visit your website, filling out the fast cash offer form or giving a call and scheduling the time to see it and making the offer. There is no obligation. Visit our website, you have the website again and tell them to either fill up the fast cash offer form and give you a call.” So that’s a general “We buy houses” type ad.

So let’s get in to where to post these ads because there are several different sections within Craigslist and I want you to have all the information that you need to best take advantage of these Craigslist ads. So you’re going to want to post a craigslist for the areas you’re investing in. Be should include smaller towns and cities within your area not just the main city. So it’s a huge deal. I don’t think a lot of people realize that know a lot of the smaller towns and cities around your city also have pages without all the competition on it. For example, here we’ve got Universal City shirts all that kind of stuff, so you want include the small towns and other cities within your city because there’s a lot less competition. So the sections that you do within those different cities and locations are going to be under real estate services and then under housing and then real estate by owner and then housing real estate wanted those three sections. And then just like a pro tip here, if your ad relates to houses that need repairs you can target people looking for trades people in the service section under household services and services and then skilled tradespeople services sections. So if somebody is going to look for somebody to fix their house and your ad pops up saying “Hey, your house order repairs?” So just think about that’s pretty cool. You might get flagged, but that’s just the cost of doing business, and really it’s just the cost of whoever did it for you because the ads are free.

So here’s where people mess up. They post and ad and two and then wait, then they, wait some more, wait a little bit more, and then they forget about the post and never do anything with it again. Let me save you some time in figuring out when and how often to post ads because you’ve got to do this consistently. You need a schedule. You need to figure out a plan and then either you do it or hire somebody to do it for you which I recommend you do. So create five free Craigslist accounts. You’re going to need different email addresses to do that, create five of them – yeah five, because they limit how many you can post and if some of them get flagged you don’t want all your accounts taken down, so you have different counts. So post three ads from each of those accounts to the different sections on Craigslist that I talked about and that be a total of 15 ads posted on the first day. On the next day, so that’s five accounts, three ads, 15 ads posted on that first day, three in each account. On the next day, duplicate and slightly modify all those ads with different headlines. Change up the text a little bit in the body and change the pictures. Then post those modified ads. Now you’ve got 30 ads posted over the two days. The next day after that, you should be able to log into your account and renew the first day’s ads to keep them fresh and off the top of the list so that people see them more. It’s been a while honestly since I’ve done that, so I’m not sure how quickly you can renew. But in your accounts they have a button in there when you look at your ads to renew them, so you don’t have to keep re-creating them over time so that’s pretty cool. So set up a plan for that and the reason you want to continuously post ads is so that the newest ones obviously show up in the top sections. If you’re in a city with a lot of people posting, your ads aren’t going to be visible for very long on the first page. Now the best times to have those ads posted are when people are typically looking at Craigslist, so if they were just posted there at the top. Most people post first thing in the morning but that’s not really when people are looking the most. I recommend posting sometime around employee break times such as like 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. or evenings around 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. or on weekends. So that’s usually lunchtime, in the evenings or on weekends. So it may seem daunting but after you create your initial ads, it’s just a matter of reposting them really. You can hire that out pretty cheap. It’s not rocket science. It’s more of making a plan and sticking to it. Creating those ads and just keep posting them and it could be two months before you see any kind of great leads coming in but it only takes one lead remember. Even if you might not getting leads and all of a sudden you get one lead and it’s like something that generates $100,000 in profits. It’s crazy. So it’s just definitely worth it. So outsourcing the posting of the ads are going to ensure that you get them done consistently if you choose to do that and that’s what matters is just getting it done consistently posting once, twice, three times not enough. Once your ads are up on Craigslist and you’re consistently doing it you can copy and paste all of those ads into the backpage.com, which is a site that’s virtually identical to Craigslist, not nearly as much traffic. Some places might have more traffic there than others. But just have the person that’s posting those all the time for you, post them also on backpage.com.

I think I’ll probably put together a PDF for Craigslist ads and best practices and make that available for people that attend the webinar just because it’ll be kind of nice to have that in PDF form that you can print out. But if you haven’t yet, go to leadpropeller.com/webinar and reserve your seat for the webinar and I should have the Craigslist ad kind of PDFfor people that attend the webinar. Also you’ll most likely have some ads on Craigslist get flagged and I mentioned this briefly earlier. It’s usually from your competition. What they’re trying to do is shut you down, shut down your ads because you are a competition, so they mark them as flagged. That’s why you want to have several accounts and you want to keep posting ads consistently so they won’t be able to shut you down completely, just outlast them because it does take work also to go around trying to flag people’s posts. So if that happens once, don’t think it’s going to happen all the time. And also consider that Craigslist ads really shouldn’t just be used for buying houses. You can also use them to build your buyers list. So even if you’re not a wholesaler per se, you should always be building a buyer’s list because you’re going to come across leads and potential deals that don’t fit your criteria that you can then sell to other investors. And so, one way to make that easy, at LeadPropeller websites, we have wholesaling templates. We have wholesaling websites that you can get so you can build buyers list and also a list your wholesale deals on them. And then we have that automation with texting – texting you as soon as somebody submits information to it and having autoresponse text being sent to the people that submitted their information. So it pretty much automates a lot of that for you, makes it real easy, so you kind of set it up and let people. See your ads on Craigslist drive traffic to that sites that they can submit their information you can grow your buyers list a lot faster. If you post your deals that you have, so if you have deals like wholesale deals on Craigslist include mentions of your website or image with the website on it to tell people they can find more of those deals and sign up to be notified of new ones as soon as they’re made available by visiting your website. You’ve got to give them a call to action or reason to go and visit the website that’s enticing and that’s a good way to do it. So you can just have your LeadPropeller website, wholesaling website, collect their contact information and information about what they’re looking for, what they want to buy and that’s going to save you tons of time and hassle because they’re basically automated, so you have to take calls and ask them all these questions, just let your website do it. I mean that’s what they’re for. It’s nice to be able to have all that stuff come in without you having to stop what you’re doing because you have a lot of other stuff to focus on getting out there making offers, getting these deals, rehabbing this house all that kind of stuff. So let the website do all the work for you.

Okay, so the next section was going to be pay-per-click. I was going to try and include that in this one, but I didn’t want to feel like I was going to have to pack it in and make it quick and so I decided to put that off until the next episode for the podcast. So I intended to talk about PPC in this one. But we’re going to do in the next one so be sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and listen to the next episode to learn all about using pay-per-click which adwords being ads and so on for real estate investor online lead generation. It’s just awesome. I love pay-per-click. Yeah there’s a lot of competition but there’s a reason why there’s a lot of competition – because it’s works. We’ll talk more about that and let you know about LeadPropeller’s managed pay-per-click services during the next podcast episode. Be sure again to register for that webinar, reserve you seat, go to leadpropeller.com/webinar to reserve it. It’s going to be on November 15th and I’ll cover the key points from these podcasts for online lead generation along with visuals so you can get a better idea of what we’re talking about and get some of that information like that PDF for the Craigslist ads.

But man, I’m not used to talking too much on this podcast. I’m usually interviewing somebody and letting hem do most of the talking. My mouth’s getting dry and all that kind of stuff, but I hope you’re enjoying these podcast episodes. Please leave a rating and review on iTunes if you’re able. I greatly appreciate that and be sure to, if you feel like I’m not covering something in each of these sections that you wanted to hear about or wanting to get more detail on, please go to Facebook.com/flippingjunkie, that’s J-U-NK-I-E and that’s the Facebook page and just leave your messages there and let me know about them, so I can try to cover everything you want to find out about so.

On the next podcast we’ll be talking about the pay-per-click stuff, adwords being ads and then the next one after that will be about SEO content marketing, so on and so forth. So you guys have a great week. Thank you so much for listening to the Flipping Junkie Podcast. I really do appreciate it and talk to you later.