Back in January I posted about only being able to stick with my real estate marketing budget until August. I had to draw the line in the sand some where or I’d keep repeating the same thing over and over and just hoping it would start working. Isn’t that the definition of crazy? So my partner and I have one month to get a deal done to extend my marketing to the end of the year or direct mail as …
Internet Lead Generation: Website Customization
Website Progress For the past two weeks I’ve been slowly personalizing my new buyer, seller and company websites. I do a little here and a little there, as time permits. When I take this approach to big tasks, the job seems much more manageable and less intimidating. The service I signed up for to create these sites did a wonderful job of setting them up with all the content, squeeze pages and layouts. They are created from a template, and …
Internet Marketing: So Much To Do!
I’ve spent the last two weeks going through some of the modules in the internet lead generating course. It’s not that anyone thing is hard, it is all fairly easy things to do and most of it is free. However, it seems like I should be doing 100 things at once and I’m starting to feel scatter brained. I hate this feeling because I waste so much time thinking about what I should be doing next instead of just …
Changing Your Phone Number
My partner needed to reclaim our marketing number so he could use if for his Realtoring. The reason being is that he had the Google voice number already linked to his cell phone and you can’t have more then one linked as far as I know. He wanted to keep those calls separate from our investing calls so we decided to use a prepaid phone and new number on our marketing. Let me tell ya, changing your phone number …
I Did A Bad Bad Thing
For everyone who is sending out direct mail, have you ever accidentally sent letters to people who have called and asked off your mailing list? I recently did and it pisses people off something fierce to say the least. I haven’t checked the laws on this but I’m pretty sure it falls under similar things such as do-not-call lists. Either way it’s good etiquette to not mail to people who have asked you not to. Because I simultaneously use and debug …
Marketing Monday: Hit In The Pocket Again!
This year is starting off as an expensive one already. The Payroll tax reduced my JOB’s paycheck (and my wife’s) by more the $100 per check; – $5000! Wells Fargo informed us that they didn’t charge us enough money last year to pay our property taxes through the mortgage escrow, so they tacked on an addition $150 per month to pay back the shortage; – $1800! Oh and our Property Taxes went up this year; -$1000! If you are keeping …
Marketing Monday: Getting Back Into The Swing of Things
I’m finally getting back into the swing of things and have been putting together some mailings using the new system. There have been a lot of starts and stops for one reason or another but after 3 weeks of trial testing Beta 6, I’ve got most of the errors out. Even still, there are some areas that I’ve been reworking because I found them to be either confusing, not working as intended or Chris or my partner have suggested …
Meeting Minutes: Sweat Equity
This post is part 3 of 6 detailing what my partner and I went over during our annual meeting this year. The point of this meeting was to come up with a plan that will create a more consistent and profitable business for 2013. The items we covered in our meeting are listed below. To view prior posts related to this series click on the link for that topic. Budget Sweet Spot Areas Sweat Equity Mail Campaigns Education SI Lead Manager …
Meeting Minutes: Budgeting (And VOTE FOR ME!)
****************************************************************************** First things first, it is time for the second annual REI Club, Best Real Estate Investing Blog contest!!! With the help of all you last year I managed to finish in 2nd place. We actually almost pulled off the victory but got beaten by a final day surge for the winner. So this year lets push for the top spot. If you like my blog and appreciate all that I share, head on over and vote…. —-> Vote Here <—- ****************************************************************************** “Narrowing …
Marketing Monday: I Spent How Much??!?!
Some where along the way I apparently lost track of how much money I was spending on my marketing campaigns. I forgot about the dollars and only focused on the number of mailers I wanted to send out. On average I was sending out about 750 letters per month which out paced my plan by about 250 per month. It’s good to get out more mailers for sure, but by deviating from my plan it has handcuffed me a little …
Marketing Monday: Early Postcard Returns Are In
10 days have past since I sent out the first batch of 530 postcards. My hope was to match the response I was getting from the yellow letter marketing I was doing before, 12%. Well, I must say I’m extremely disappointed with the response rate so far. We have gotten 1 call, yup just 1! The only interesting part of this call was that it was from a deaf person who was using some sort of service that translates …
Marketing Monday: Will Postcards Pull Better Then Letters?
I am always looking for the best, most efficient and biggest bang for my marketing buck. My current setup is that I send out “yellow letters” that I print from my lead management program using a custom font that I had created from my hand writing. This has worked great but is a tad labor intensive. My friend Sharon Vornholt told me about a company called PostcardMania that she has been using recently. She sends out all her marketing through this company …
Marketing Tools: Bandit Sign PVC Hammer
My partner and I go out every few weeks to put out bandit signs. In the past we would put them up using metal H-Stakes or hang them on telephone polls using a sign stapler. We found that the signs would only stay up for as little as a week end in some areas and a max of a month in other areas. The signs we H-Staked into the ground would either get blown down by the wind, covered by snow …
Is Your Response Rate Better Then Mine?
One thing you should always keep track of when sending out direct mail is your response rate. Over the past year, I knew I got phone calls from my mailings but I never really knew how well or poorly my letters were getting people to call. I also had no clue as to what percentage of people where calling off the first letter, second letter or third. So I wrote up a quick script to pull the data from my …
I Need To Make A Flyer….How?
After about 2 weeks, we finally got the signed contract back from the realtor for the house that we had our offer accepted on. I’m not sure why it took so long, but when you get a Realtor (or anyone else) in between you and the seller, delays will happen. Many times that “middle man” can kill your deal by how they present it to the seller. Ours worked out, but it could have blown this deal up easily! Now …