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 Ad Words 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: Hello, everybody and welcome to this week's REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWordsNerds.com. How are you, wonderful people, wonderful real estate investors of all shapes, stripes, and colors? I'm going to be honest. I've been having a hard time getting going today. [0:01:00.1 ]
I know you know that like some days, you just can't quite get the engine going, and I've got a whole bunch of stuff on my plate this week and I am redoing, in its entirety, our SEO coaching training that we do as part of our REI Marketing Mastery coaching programs like a year-long advanced coaching program for investors looking at the scale of their online deal acquisition, and completely redoing it from the ground up because the old one is a couple years' old. And I'm really excited to do it because I think it's going to be by far and away the most accurate, the most advanced, the most effective training of its kind in this marketplace. I don't think there's anything like it for investors. Really, really excited to work on it, right. This is a project I'm excited to do and I just can't seem to get going. I just can't seem to focus, you know, and in those times, a lot of times I like to come on here and talk to you because you know I like doing this podcast, and I like this kind of one-on-one connection we can have in this format. [0:02:11.0]
And there's something on my mind and kind of specifically on my mind because of the difficulties that I'm facing today and I think if you are any kind of entrepreneurial person, especially real estate investor, you're going to run into this kind of issue. So I think it's a good time to talk about it. And that's this issue of getting better versus being good. This is on my mind because I just did, I think I mentioned this the last podcast -- I came back from St. Louis. I was out there at the REI Black Book offices doing some training for their students, and it really occurs to me that there's a pretty big difference between the people that come in, who want to be good, and the people that come in and are looking to get better. And I want to dig into this because I think it's critical for this kind of marketing specifically. You probably know, I think I've talked about this before, I'm not a huge fan of like you know philosophical business stuff. [0:03:03.6]
I'm not a huge fan of like mindset or you know anything that's kind of like too woo woo, right. And I always want things to be practical. I want them to be pragmatic. I want it to be tactical. Those are definitely where I am most comfortable, and I get the value of all that other stuff. I think you need it, but it's just not what I'm into. But this specific mindset, mental model, whatever you want to call it, it comes up all the time, and it comes up all the time in a way that I know it really trips people up. And it prevents them from making as much money as they should and it prevents them from being as successful as they should. And that kind of hurts to watch. So, let's dig into this, right.
Anything that you are doing that is new and challenging -- so let's say you are rolling out online marketing for your real estate investing business. [0:04:00.1]
It either could be search engine optimization. It could be pay per click. It could be you know Adwords or Facebook or Bing. It could be anything, really, right. Anything that's new and challenging in this kind of marketing is challenging because of course there's a lot of money on the line. There's a lot of money to be made and so a lot of people going after it, and so it's challenging, right. Not to mention that the technical kind of challenging there, just mastering you know a new system and a new way of thinking and a whole new set of skills, right. So there's a lot of challenges to be faced, and that's to be expected. And when people jump into this, real estate investors jump into this and they're like look I want to get, let's say two to three deals a month; that's where I want to be. Now, two to three deals a month online is generally means you're getting between 40 and 60 leads a month from your online channels, okay. so 40 to 60 leads a month, cool. Let's say that's our goal and I want to get there using my online marketing. [0:05:00.2 ]
You start digging into it and let's say SEO is the way that you go. You start getting into how to make sure that your website is being crawled and how to understand how the search results page drives traffic and how to understand how the traffic in your market is directed and what key words are really important and which ones aren’t and how to understand you know how dense your key words need to be on each page, and how to understand how they need to link to each other, and how to understand doing link building, and how to understand doing outreach, and how to understand doing on and on and on and on, a million different things, right. And a lot of people come in and they say like look I know it's going to be hard, right. I know there's a bunch of people in front of me. I know I want to go out there and I want to kick their butts. I want to dominate my market. I want to be #1. I am going to go out there and I'm going to punch everyone in the face, and they want to be good. That's what that means, right. They want to be good. And of course everybody wants to be good, right. I mean we all have goals. We're all driven by generating a certain outcome, whether that's for us or for our businesses or for our families, right. [0:06:05.2]
We all want to be good. And so, they come in with that idea, that they want to be good. And whether they say this or not, whether they admit this to themselves or not, everyone's got a timeline in their head. It should take me two months. It should take me six months. It should take me a couple weeks. Right? I see this a lot when I you know I enjoy jujitsu and I like going to jujitsu lessons and jujitsu is great because it's a real ego killer. Right? No one ever gives you an easy day and it's very easy to tell if you're progressing or not. And I struggle with this in that situation because you know I've been going, whatever, maybe about two years now on and off, so not consistently, but you know I've been in there a significant amount of time and I'm still a white belt. I'm still right in the beginning and that's on me. Right? [0:07:00.9]
I don't go enough. I don't practice enough. It's totally on me, but it's easy to feel like well, I should be further along than I am, and that "should" in your head, that little voice that's saying "You should be doing better. You should be further along," well that's that timeline, that story you have deep down. Right? You have expectations of yourself or for the results that you're going to generate, and those expectations are not always accurate. And in fact, if you haven't done something before, I can almost guarantee your expectations are inaccurate. Right? Even when someone like me gives you an estimate, let's say, something I say a lot is if you're doing SEO, it's going to be six months before you start to see results. Well that's based on average performance. Right? But if you're in a tough market, it's probably going to take you longer than six months, and so if that timeline in your head, that six month timeline or you know my two year timeline, I should be a blue belt right now in jujitsu, but I'm still a white belt. [0:08:02.9]
That timeline in your head doesn’t get revised. You start to get frustrated. You start to think, well I'm not any good at this, or you start to think this doesn’t work. Right? You start to think, well maybe my jujitsu teacher isn't really that great. They're not really structuring it the right way. You might think, well, maybe SEO is kind of just not really working in my market. It's not going to work in my market. It doesn't work for me. Then you start to run into the cognitive dissonance that emerges when your timeline that you have in your head starts to meet reality, and the problem with people that have the be good mindset, that they want to be good. They want to be the best. They have that timeline. Well the problem is, that usually throws them off the path. These are the people that leave jujitsu class and they don't come back because they get frustrated, and the people that give three months to SEO and leave because you know well I saw some you know improvement but I didn't get any leads from it. [0:09:01.4]
And that's fine. Not everybody has to do everything. You don’t have to pursue every goal. You don’t have to be the best in everything. It's fine. But if, for example, getting leads online is a major part of your investing strategy, abandoning that because you got frustrated is a real problem. It's a real problem. Now, let's contrast that with the get better mindset.
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Dan: The get better mindset is really just about seeing relative improvement. You think about the be good mindset and that's about being good in an absolute sense. I want to be the best. I want to be at a certain level, and if I'm not at that level, I'm frustrated. I'm hurt. I'm you know angry. I'm resentful. Right? I should be here, remember the big word in this mindset "should" I should be here and I'm not, and therefore, everything is bad. Alright. Now the get better mindset is not about that absolute position of I should be at the best, the top. Instead, it's about where am I now and am I improving over where I started. So, if I go into jujitsu and I say like look, I've been here for two years and I'm really not that much better and I'm not a blue belt and I'm just not progressing because I started as a white belt. [0:11:04.4]
I'm still a white belt. I'm not a blue belt. I'm going to get frustrated with that. but instead of if I look at like look, I can't go all the time, just you know my schedule, I can't get to the school all the time. I can't practice that often, so I'm going to go when I can and am I better than I was the last time that I came. Am I better than when I started? So I'm not worrying about my absolute position, what belt I am, I'm just thinking like am I making some progress. And if say it that way, it's like, well, yeah, like you know I was never able to do a triangle, which is one of the basic kind of submissions in jujitsu. I was never really able to do it. I don't have a great body type for it, but you know, a couple of months ago, I said I'm really going to practice that and work on it a lot and I learned some tips and I was actually able to, you know, I wasn’t able to pull it off, but I was actually able to like get it going for the first time and so that's a real improvement. So I'm like, oh cool. I am really improved over where I started, and the get better mindset, because it's focused on relative improvement, never falls into that trap of frustration and resentment and anger. [0:12:11.9]
Instead of focusing on where I feel like I should be, I'm focused on where I am and noticing the improvements that I've made. I think about this, you know there was it's kind of like a famous story here at Adwords Nerds because we had an SEO client who you know started from nothing, right. They didn't have a website at all and wasn't ranking at all for anything. And we took him from nothing to like literally like hundreds of key words ranked on the first page for his target markets. He had five target markets. We were crushing. It was a major success. I mean, he went from nothing to ranking and getting some traffic and really being in a strong position, and this was over like three months. So for SEO that's very fast. So he made a lot of fast improvement. [0:13:01.0]
And we actually went to him to get a testimonial. So I went to him in this mindset of this is a huge success. We took you from nothing to pretty significant gains in a short amount of time. but his mindset was look I didn't really get a deal from this. And we said like yeah, like you need to push it further in order to really get lead volume and deal volume, but you would never have been able to do that if you didn't get to where you are now. That's like saying, well it's like I just started lifting weights and I can't win Mr. Olympia, and it's like well no, but you've added you know 10 pounds of muscle. You needed to do that in order to get to the Mr. Olympia thing. He was just totally not happy, just by the results that we had gotten, and then later on we found out that he deleted his website. So not only did he not appreciate the gains that he had seen, which were actually like really extreme for that market, that kind of service, he actually made sure that he would never be able to profit off of the work that he had already put in, which is really shocking to me. [0:14:14.4]
And this is a really good example of rather than worrying about is he getting better, he was worried about being good. And the thing is, if you're focused on getting better, if you just focus on that relative improvement, you keep setting those intermediate goals, you just say am I 1% better this week that I was last week over and over and over. Well those gains compound. It's 1% including the gains that you added from last week, and so that 1% gets bigger and bigger in terms of absolute value. And you start to progress faster and faster and pretty soon, you are good. But if you spend your entire time worrying about whether you're good right now, it's actually a lot harder to get to that point. [0:15:00.1]
My friend, Nick Peterson, who is a great dude but also used to compete in Strong Man competitions and so on, he would also say if you focus on the process, the goal line comes to you. And that's very true. You know, when we think about SEO, we think about pay per click, or I think about any kind of marketing, I'm not thinking I have to hit the goal immediately. Instead, what I'm thinking is what are the processes that we can routinely implement that are going to get us there. And I worry about are we implementing the process right. In my coaching program, I teach a sort of a process called The Kink in the Hose that we use to manage Adwords accounts. And I teach it to my students because I know if they use that process every other week, they will eventually start generating deals that profit. Some do it right away. Some take time. but you will get there if you work the process. So I teach the process because that's a thing they can control. [0:16:03.8]
You can't control what your market does. You can't control whether you're good when you start, but you can control whether you're focused on being good or whether you're focused on being better. I hope that makes sense and I hope you get value out of this.
I enjoyed this break from procrastinating. As always guys, you can see all the podcast episodes that we have at AdWordsNerds.com/podcasts and please make sure you're in our free Facebook group. I'm posting in there every single week. We post podcast episodes with a ton of other content, blog content, video training. I do live sessions in there. It's a really great group of really great investors sharing tips and strategies that work for them. You can get there at AdWordsNerds.com/group. That's AdWordsNerds.com/group. I will see you guys next week. I hope you have an awesome rest of your day, and I'll talk to you soon. Cheers.
