You're listening to the “REI Marketing Nerds” podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords Nerds, a high-tech digital agency, focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition, and live a freer, more awesome life. And, now, your host, Dan Barrett.
Dan: What's up, everybody? This is Daniel Barrett here from REI Marketing Nerds and REIMarketingNerds.com and AdWordsNerds.com, and everywhere else that I am from, it is pretty much all over the place, but, hey, if it deals with getting motivated seller leads online for real estate investors, I am involved. Thank you very much for being here this week. [01:03.6]
This week, we are talking about something near and dear to my heart, which is the online marketing mindset.
Now, if you are at all me and you, you probably are if you listen to this show, the word “mindset” might kind of set your hair on edge a bit, right? It might make the hairs on your arms stand up. I don't have much hair on my head anymore, but it can make the hair on my arms stand up.
That's because look, mindset is a term that gets tossed around a lot and it gets tossed around in kind of a woo woo kind of way, and it's very easy to come away from discussions of mindset just feeling like, Look, I don't even know what mindset is. It's positive thinking or whatever. That's not what I mean here.
What I mean by “online marketing mindset” is the fact that how you think about online marketing, the results that you get and where this fits inside your business has a massive practical impact on how it works for you. [02:08.5]
There are any number of mental models and logical fallacies, and expectations that people bring to online marketing, and some of those can help you and some of them can really hurt you. In fact, I see this all the time where investors will get involved with online marketing, make tons of money and then quit, and the reason that they quit isn't because of the results. It's not because of the marketing and it's not because of what they paid. It's because of how they thought and how they felt about what happened.
I really believe that by having a good online marketing mindset, not meaning you think positively about it and everything is going to be awesome no matter what, no, what I mean is by having accurate mental models that tell you what to expect that having this kind of positive mindset means the absolute world of difference between having lots of success online and not. [03:11.4]
Without any further ado, let's get into this week's episode, which is all about the online marketing mindset.
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Let's think about where we go wrong in the first place. There's a couple of really common conceptions that investors have about online marketing. Whether we're talking about organic like SEO or ranking your website in Google, whether we're talking about pay per click and you're doing Google ads or Facebook ads, whatever it is, there's a couple of major mindset errors that people make that really sabotage them long-term.
One is that they think of online marketing as a store, right? You think about like, All right, I want a Gatorade. This show is brought to you by Gatorade. No, that would be dope. I would definitely take a Gatorade sponsorship, but, let's say, man, I really want Gatorade. I definitely want it to be neon blue. So, what am I going to do? [04:07.3]
I'm going to go to the grocery store, right? I'm going to go to the grocery store. I'm going to walk in. I'm going to find the place where they have the neon blue Gatorade that I want and I'm going to see a price. That price is going to be, whatever it is, two bucks. I'm going to take that Gatorade to the register. I'm going to pay the $2 that was on the sign and I'm going to get exactly what I wanted. I knew the price. I knew what I wanted. I got the Gatorade. Everybody's happy,
But people kind of assume that that's how online marketing is going to work as well. I want motivated seller leads. I'm going to go to the place online that has the motivated seller leads. They're going to cost a certain price. I'm going to pay that price and I'm going to get a motivated seller. Right? When in actuality it's much more complex than that and it doesn't really work that way at all. It's much closer to something like stock investing than it is like going to a store, but we'll get into how it differs in a little bit. [05:02.5]
For now, I just want you to think about people who think about this process as they're just going to go in, pay the price and get the thing. Totally understandable, because that's how most of the economy works, but not actually how they're on my marketing is going to work.
All right, the next mindset that I want to think about is the checklist mindset and this is really common, totally understandable because when you start to learn about online marketing as an investor, there's a lot of guides. There are courses. There are checklists. There are best practices. And so, people think of online marketing as something that has a checklist, something that's going to be kind of connect the dots.
There are known ways to succeed, right? To get motivated sellers, I’ve got to do Step A, Step B, Step C. So, if I do Step A, Step B, Step C, I'm going to get the result that I expect. I did A; I did B; I did C; give me my motivated seller leads. I'm going to get the same result every time if I follow that process. [06:01.4]
And there are things that are like that, right? Computer programming is like that. It's a lot more complex than this, but in general, you go to the gym, you lift the weights, you get bigger, right? You get stronger. That's how it works. Online marketing is much more adaptive and evolutionary than that, so it's not always a case of following the checklist to get the same result every time.
We'll talk about how it differs again, but just think about it, we've got these two mindsets. Now, we've got the store mindset and we've got the checklist mindset, okay? And the third mindset that really sabotages people is the speed mindset.
These are people who are basically thinking of online marketing like, Look, I need results. I'm going to go in. I'm going to do it. If I don't get the results I'm going to back out. Right? So, they think it's going to be a pretty fast process, and if they don't see results right away, they just say it doesn't work and they leave. I would say, where this falls apart is this lack of understanding of how complex systems and competitive systems work specifically. [07:04.9]
If you went to the gym and you lifted weights once or you lifted weights even for a month, you wouldn't leave thinking, I didn't become Arnold Schwarzenegger, so I'm not going to lift weights anymore, right? We have an understanding with weightlifting that it’s going to be a gradual process. When we get online, because everything is so fast, text messaging is fast, emailing is fast, it will be fast to set up, fast to get going, fast to spend money. We expect the whole process to be fast and it just doesn't end up working that way.
So, for all of these people, whether you’ve got the store mindset where you're going to walk in, pay the price and get what you want; whether you got the checklist mindset where you're like, Look, I should be able to do ABC and get the motivated seller leads that I need; whether you think it's going to be that you have this fast mindset where you're going to walk in and get the deals, and if you don't get deals right away, you walk out; these mindsets are poison and they are costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars. [08:03.0]
And that is not an exaggeration. I will get into that valuing some of this stuff a little bit later in this episode, but keep this in mind and I am being literal here, these mindsets cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars over the lifetime of your investing business. So, figuring out your mindset, how to think about online marketing, how to think about how you're going to go through it, these are vitally important.
So, how should we think about these things? What mindset should we have? I'm going to give you a couple of different ones, but I want to frame this whole conversation by saying that online marketing is much closer to dealing with a biological system than it is to dealing with computers the way that typically is. It's much closer to bodybuilding or the stock market than it is to, say, I pushed 1 on my computer and I got a 1 back. [09:03.7]
Things are weird, and they change and they evolve. It's kind of like dealing with some weird kind of alien organism where you’ve got to figure it out. You don't know exactly what's going on, and it's always different and it's changing, and then it turns blue and then it eats your partner, and then you're trapped in space and you've got to trick it to go into the life thing, and then you push the button and you shoot it off into space. The metaphor sort of went off the rails, but you get what I'm saying. It's complicated.
All right, so let's get into some of the more powerful, positive mindsets we can have.
The first mindset I want you to take away from this is the “give-and-take” mindset. The give-and-take mindset. What I mean by this is that your online marketing process is a process of giving and taking information into and from the system. You can think of this as a relationship. You put information into the system. The system gives you information back. It creates a feedback loop that becomes the core of everything that you're doing, right? [10:04.3]
You do something. The system responds. You respond to this response. It's this constant ebb and flow, this give and take, and this process, this continues forever. You are never really done. Even if you set up an online marketing campaign and you cross, and you do tons of deals and you make tons of money, until you retire it is not over, because what worked yesterday doesn't necessarily work tomorrow. Right? What works today, isn't necessarily going to work a week from now, right?
You might have crushed it on Myspace with your Myspace marketing stuff, but, hey, if you're around today, you're not marketing on Myspace, right? I don't know, by the time you listen to this, maybe my space will have made a huge comeback and Myspace is the most popular social media platform, who knows? But I'm guessing you're not doing a whole lot of Myspace marketing, right? The rate of evolution on that is so fast, but you have to be open to continual adaptation and evolution. [11:04.3]
The only constant here is change. There is no set path. There is no checklist. There is no thing that works all the time. Instead, what there is is open to giving information into the system and taking information out.
I'm going to give you a specific example because that can sound kind of general, but I want to bring this down to the nitty-gritty of something you can really use. Let's take, for example, this scenario of you’re an investor. You've been putting a lot of time into your website. You're blogging and you're making links, and you put pictures up and you’ve got video testimonials. Everything is awesome, firing on all cylinders, and your website is ranking. You notice in your little dashboard on your website there, right? Your website rank is going up. Your Google ranks are going up. You're getting higher and higher in the Google rankings. That's awesome.
But you notice you're not getting much more traffic. You're not really getting a lot of clicks. There are more people coming to your website and you're not getting more leads. Why not? Right? The rank is going up. Why aren't I getting more leads? Actually a really common issue. [12:12.8]
That's the information you’re getting out of the system. The rank is going up, but I'm not getting more clicks. I'm taking information here. What do I do with that information? I'm going to think through this, right? People are seeing my website more often. It's showing up in Google, but they're not clicking. Why not?
There's a couple of different reasons that might be, right? Maybe my site title is inaccurate or not interesting enough. If I name my real estate investing site, Dan Buys Cell Phones, that might be a catchy name, but if people are looking to sell their house, they're not going to click on that name. Right? Maybe my name is BC Real Estate Solutions or something and it's just too general. It's not interesting enough, right? [12:57.3]
Do I have a description of my website that people can see in Google that entices them to click? Am I giving them enough to make them think that I can solve their problem? If my description of my website, when they see it in Google, it just says a real estate website, this is doing nothing to get them interested enough to click on the website, right?
Maybe if I said something like, Hey, 100% local, I'm here to help you sell your house when no one else wants to buy it. Wow, okay, that's much more compelling. Do you think people are going to be more likely to click on that than they are clicking on “This is a default WordPress website” or real “my real estate website” or something? Yeah, absolutely, right?
Maybe my rankings are going up, but they're going up for keywords I don't actually want. Maybe I'm actually ranking really well for the word “realtor,” but because I'm not a realtor, people aren't actually clicking. [13:53.9]
Maybe I'm ranking for all sorts of random stuff. I mentioned the video game, Grand Theft Auto once on a website, and now my website was ranking really well for “sell my house in Grand Theft Auto”—which, by the way, is a real keyword and it shows up all the time. You get that little tidbit for free. Go, check your account, see if you're showing up for Grand Theft Auto stuff. It’s super annoying. You see that all the time—but, hey, if I'm ranking for this, it's going to show my rankings going up, but I'm not actually ranking for the stuff I want, so my clicks aren't going up.
So, what do I do? Okay, I can change my site title. I can change my website description. I can see which keywords I'm ranking for and change my strategy. This is the giving information into the system. I took the information and my rankings are going up. I'm not getting the clicks. I gave it back more information in terms of what I did to change things, and now I'm going to wait. I'm going to get more information back. This is an evolutionary process of you engaging with the data that's coming out and then seeing what happens, and then engaging again. This is the core of all effective online marketing, because I'm telling you there's no definitive thing that works everywhere, okay. There is no checklist. [15:10.4]
Let's talk about that because, again, the question is why isn't there a checklist, right? If you're a real estate investor and you're doing motivated seller leads, chances are your business, no matter how awesome you are, it's not universes away from the investor down the street. You guys are probably doing similar types of deals, similar types of deal structures. You've got similar types of marketing, right? So, why does everything change so much?
This all has to do with context. This, by the way, is the second mindset I want you to take away. The context mindset, being aware of context. Context changes everything. Different markets have different costs, have different seller behaviors, have different search patterns, have different marketing channels that will work best, and on and on and on. [16:04.1]
Not to mention that your market, even though your market is different from the market down the street and the market two states over, your market changes from month to month, from week to week, from day to day, from hour to hour, right? Your market is very different depending on when I decide to look at it, right? There's a classic saying that you can never step into the same stream twice because it's always moving and always changing.
Hey, your market might do a certain thing in March and it's going to do a very different thing on December 25. Your market is going to be very different if I'm looking at motivated sellers and how they behave at 2:00 PM or 2:00 AM. We all agree, if you think about your own behavior, you're a very different person at 2:00 PM than you are at 2:00 AM. I know I am. Right? [17:00.0]
So, markets vary wildly between each other, and then even within the market, they vary wildly from context to context, depending on when you look at it and what aspect of that market you're looking at. Something may crush in one market and fail miserably in another. You might do something that crushes in your market in January and then fails in February, right? There is no one roadmap that is going to show you exactly what to do in every single situation because the context is always different.
There are best practices. There are things that give you the highest-percentage chance of success. There are ways to structure your PPC accounts. There are ways to set up your website. There are ways to build links. There are ways to build content. There are ways to make ads. These are best practices that data has shown us over time give us a good chance of success, but they don't guarantee success. [18:02.3]
You always need to learn to apply those best practices to your individual market, your individual context, your individual goals, and your ability to close and your ability to talk to people. Maybe you're virtual. Maybe you're local. Maybe you don't go out to see people's homes. Maybe you do. All of these things make a huge difference.
And so, we want to get away from the store mindset and into that mindset of the give and take, and we want to move away from the checklist mindset and get into a mindset of the context is what matters, and I have to figure out the context and adapt to it.
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The next mindset we really want to get into is the mindset of experimentation and getting better every day. This really addresses the person who's thinking of this as a fast process and I'm going to liken this to a Brazilian jujitsu.
Last year, I started taking Brazilian jujitsu lessons and I love it now. It's so fun. If you're not familiar, it's a kind of wrestling, essentially. You're wrestling. You're on the ground. You're trying to go for chokes and arm locks, and all this really cool stuff. It’s super fun. It's an amazing workout. I highly recommend it. But when I got there and I started, I was terrible, right? Just terrible. Just the worst. I mean, worse than most people that start. [20:04.9]
Not a natural wrestler, not a natural athlete, not naturally competitive. None of this is lining up for me, and if I had just gone for the first week and thought, Look, I haven't been able to use anything I'm learning in this class. Jujitsu just doesn't work. I'm not going to go anymore, then I would quit and that would have been the end of it.
But I kept going and I kept going, and I kept learning and I got a little bit better and a little bit better, and I would experiment with this technique over here and experiment with this technique over there, learn from this person, learn from that person. Now, almost a year and a half later, I’m slightly less terrible than I was when I started, but I had the experimentation mindset. I had this mindset of I am getting better every day. I'm going into class to try stuff, to see what works, to learn from experience and get better every day, because what's at the end of this process is worth it. Okay? [21:09.3]
This is the only way to find what works for you. This is exactly the same in online marketing. You are not going to start where you're going to finish. You're going to start way worse and you've got to experiment yourself to success.
Now, we test everything in our online marketing. I am testing stuff basically all day, every day, whether it's our ads that we're running, the keywords that we're running, our bid strategies, the positions that we run our ads on, the landing pages that we use, the forms that we're using, even down to the color of the buttons that we're having people click.
We test every single element of that because, hey, I'm actually wrong a lot of the time. My intuition about what should work is very often wrong, and it's going to be exactly the same for you, right? So, we have to experiment to figure out where success is hiding. It's just a part of the process, right? [22:02.2]
Something that I talk about a lot is I come from a web design background. I did web design before I got into online marketing, and it pains me to say this, but ugly websites for real estate investors often outperform pretty websites by a lot. In fact, after I've done this for so long and been through this process a lot of the time, one of my rules of thumb is the better-looking a website is the worst that's going to do. No, that's not always true, but it's true a lot of the time. So, how can you figure out if that's true for you? You’ve got to experiment. You’ve got to try it out.
Now, I think most people get that. I think most people get the kind of basic concept of you’ve got to try things, you’ve got to test, but one of the traps that we all fall into is that we view an experiment that doesn't achieve our goal as being a failure. [22:58.3]
Let's say, I'm testing two different websites, a pretty website and an ugly website, and I think the ugly website is going to win, and neither of them do particularly better than the other. I'm like, Oh, that's a failure, right? But you have to reframe that because failure in experimentation is necessary. Failure is the only way you learn and grow.
Someone told me this. I can't remember who gave me this quote, but I thought this was amazing. They said, “Success is a terrible teacher.” I actually think this was from the REI Marketing Nerds Facebook group. Success is a terrible teacher. That is so true. If you just do what you think is going to work and it works, you don't learn anything new. You do not grow. You do advance. Hey, success is awesome, but you are not growing. It's failure that teaches you. It's failure that causes you to grow. [23:56.2]
There is a famous Thomas Edison quote and this is one of those quotes where, I don't know, maybe he never said it, right? Maybe he never said this at all, but I love this quote and in this quote Thomas Edison is talking about trying to invent the filament that's inside the light bulb. And Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb. What he did was he made it economically viable by creating this filament that would make this a much more economical process to make these, to manufacture these light bulbs. He worked on this for a long time.
The quote is “I've not failed 700 times. I haven't failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways of making this light bulb will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work,” and this is really how I want you to think about this process. You run an ad that you're really sure about and you think it's going to be awesome, and it bombs, it is not a failure. What it is is an education that is going to show you the way to what will work. [25:09.3]
Not meeting with success shows us the way forward. This is the way it has always been. It's an incredibly important if you're getting into this online marketing space, because most real estate investors get discouraged early and they give up. They give up, which is really terrible because they are not understanding the value of what they're going after and how difficult it should be to get that valuable thing.
So, just to review really quickly, I've got one more piece of this that we're going to get into, but I want to come back to this issue of mindsets. We set up these three mindsets in the beginning. One is the store mindset. I'm going to walk into the store, pay a price and get the thing I expect. The mindset I want you to take away about online marketing instead is this idea of give and take, this continuous evolutionary process of learning and growing, and then having to work your way around problems. Okay? [26:09.7]
The second mindset is the mindset of the checklist. There should be a list of things I have to do. If I do those things, I get the leads that I want when, in reality, there is no checklist. The mindset you should have is the mindset of context awareness, understanding the context changes everything. Every market changes. Every market is different. Things are constantly moving, and so we have to adapt to that context and evolve along with it.
Then, finally, the mindset of this should be fast. I'm going to get in there, see if it works and then get out if it doesn't. Remember that, instead, what we have to have is an experimentation process, this experimentation mindset, this understanding that failure pushes us forward and that the thing we're working for is valuable enough to justify the effort. All right? [27:05.3]
Now, if I'm going to say that, if I'm saying the value at the end is worth it, how do we value this whole process? Because I know what I'm telling you right here is basically this is going to be difficult. So, how do we know it's worth it? How do I know if I'm going to jujitsu class every week and I'm getting my butt kicked, which, by the way, I am. Hopefully, I'll still be doing this podcast in 10 years and I can look back at this episode and be like, No, I'm a black belt and I'm amazing, but I'll tell you right now, it's tough. So, how do I know the end of that process is going to be worth it?
Let's talk about valuing our online marketing. What is online marketing worth? What is all this effort and experimentation and mindset stuff? What is it worth to me as an investor? And I'm going to walk you through a basic thought process. These are based on real national numbers. I pulled these out of some of our client accounts today basically. [28:01.6]
Let's say, you're targeting a single keyword in your market that generates about a thousand searches a month, so we're doing something like “sell my house” or “sell my house fast,” whatever it is. We're generating about 1,000. This keyword generates 1,000 searches a month, all right?
Now, if we rank our website top spot in Google for that keyword, we've ranked really well. We did a bunch of work. We did a bunch of SEO work. We worked on, we blogged, whatever we did, we got the top spot for that keyword. That's probably going to generate around seven and a half leads a month. It’s not that much, right? Seven and a half leads. Yeah.
Now, over time, we're generally going to need about 20 of these leads to close a deal. All right, that's based on our clients. Your close rate might be a little better, might be a little worse, but it's generally around there, right? So, you're generally going to need 20 of these leads to generate a deal. [29:02.6]
So, that means we've got this keyword generating seven and a half leads a month. That means this keyword is going to generate for us, this one keyword, about one deal every 2.6 months. That's about…I have this as being four and a half deals a year, close to five deals a year. Let's assume that that's true. We're generating about four and a half deals a year. Again, we're not setting the world on fire, but this is one keyword in a broad channel.
Now, if our average deal value, meaning what we take home from one of these deals, is about $10,000. That means that that one keyword is worth about $45,000 to your business over the next year. Four and a half deals times $10,000, $45,000 in profit from a single keyword. Over the next five years, that one keyword is going to be worth $225,000. [30:00.0]
All right, one keyword 1,000 searches a month, seven and a half leads, but one deal every 2.6 months, about four and a half deals a year, $45,000 a year from a single keyword. By the way, I'm not skewing these numbers. These are real-world numbers.
Let me give you kind of a hypothetical example. If I took out a TV commercial in your market and I just got on there, this is like some James Bond villain kind of stuff, but let's say I'm doing this. I get on the TV commercial and I announce to everyone in your market that I have hidden $45,000 somewhere on Main Street in your town and that the first person who finds that money gets to keep it. So, it's the same amount of money. It's $45,000, the same amount of money we generated over a year from this keyword. I just hid this somewhere in your town. It could be anywhere. It's on Main Street, though. The first person to find it gets to keep it and there are no rules. Okay? [31:00.0]
Now, what do you expect would happen? How much competition is there going to be? How hard do you think people are going to fight to find that money? Do you think somebody might get in a fist fight? Do you think someone's going to have a sword? I think the likelihood of someone having a sword is probably fairly high.
All right, so we're in a pretty competitive situation. I think we all expect that. I think we all expect some kind of a Purge or Battle Royale type of situation where there's a lot of competition for this $45,000. So, why do we expect there to be so much competition for the $45,000, but we expect there not to be that much competition for the online keywords that we're targeting that are going to generate that same amount of money every single year? Right? If there's something that generates that much money, do you expect it to be difficult to attain? I know I do. It's difficult to pick stocks that give you a return of even a couple of percent. [32:05.8]
Now, am I saying this is impossible? No, of course not. And, of course, look, we generate deals every single day for our clients. Real estate investors all over the world, all over the country are doing this every single day. So it's not impossible. In fact, it's relatively simple, but it isn't easy and it's not going to be fast. Right? This is just the reality, because if you think about what the value is, one keyword generating $225,000 over a five-year period, you could have hundreds of those if you really work at it.
And so, this is something that is intensely valuable and would change the entire structure of your business. And, of course, it's going to be hard, just like it's hard to get my black belt in jujitsu, just it's hard to get a body that looks Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, right? [33:02.4]
Just like it would be hard to take your homemade flamethrower and go out there and find that $45,000 that I shoved in the mailbox at 123, Main Street, Middletown, Conn. Please don't do that. That was a joke, but you get what I'm saying.
So, even though it's technical, even though it's complicated, even though there's all this computer stuff, in the end, your success here is really going to be about your mindset and what you expect, because if you get in there and you expect to fight and you expect to do the work, and you expect to grind and you expect to give it the time and the effort and the investment than it needs, you're going to do that because you know the value at the end of that process is worth it.
If you get into it thinking it's going to be easy and it's going to be fast, you are going to get frustrated really quickly and you're going to back out of that competition, and I'm telling you, this is why people leave so much money on the table. They get frustrated and they give up.
I want you to be able to take what we talked about in this podcast, apply this to how you think about your online marketing, and I want you to go out there and make a ton of money, because it is out there. You just need to be able to have the right mindset in order to pursue it. [34:11.8]
…
That is going to do it for this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always, you can find all of our past episodes, show notes, more information, all sorts of cool stuff at REIMarketingNerds.com.
And if you want help with your online marketing, if you want help finding motivated seller leads online, that's us, AdWords Nerds. We are the company that will help you do that. I'd be happy to get on the phone with you or have someone from my team get on the phone with you for free to help you put together an online marketing strategy for your market that works. You can get that at AdWordsNerds.com/Strategy.
Finally, if you want to stay in touch, the best way to do that is the REI Marketing Nerds Facebook group. I am in there every single week, posting trainings, posting reactions, posting news about what's happening in online marketing for real estate investors, and you can get there at AdWordsNerds.com/Group. [35:13.6]
As always, thank you so much for listening to this show. I could not do any of this without you, so thank you, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your week.
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