LinkedIn is undeniably one of the best platforms out there to make professional connections. The more you use and explore it, the more things you discover that benefit your business. Updating what we’ve learned about it since March, Scott Carson revisits and adds to how you can leverage LinkedIn in this episode. With new things happening on the platform and with the new year just around the corner, the time is perfect to look at the ways you can use LinkedIn for finding assets and deals that will really help you grow your business. Learn about how to create more connections, present yourself better on the platform, utilize the video features, and more. Don’t miss out on Scott’s great information that will help set yourself apart on the platform.
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Watch the episode here
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Leveraging LinkedIn: More Tips And Tricks To Take You To The Next Level
We’re going to share some nuggets that are going to surprise quite a few of you. We’ve got people that are always joining us, people are reading these for the first time. We do these on a pretty regular basis. We have a variety of people that join us. There are note and real estate investors, people that are interested in note investing. If you miss out on some of the episodes, you can often catch them on WeCloseNotes.tv and then it will get you over to our YouTube channel. Make sure you subscribe while you’re there. We’d love to have you. We’re trying to grow our YouTube audience on a regular basis, so please feel free to subscribe there. We also have these episodes and throw them on iTunes and different platforms as well. You can always follow the Note Night in America podcast.
We’d love to have you read the Note Closers Show blog. It’s our 50,000-megawatt blow torch show that we host out there. We have just exceeded 540 episodes, over 500,000 downloads across our different platforms. We would love for you to review and subscribe. That way you get all the knowledge and you can binge all that you want, but we’ve got lots of great interviews and content. We bring on guests of all types in your entrepreneurial and business focus along with different vendors that we use on a regular basis.
It’s free to subscribe to our show and to our YouTube channel, it won’t cost you anything. It just keeps you up to date with all the newest episodes and training that we have available to you that are out there. We’ll dive into the content. What’s funny is we did a leveraging LinkedIn episode back in March of 2019. There’s so much going on and many different things we’ve been using with LinkedIn since the new updates. We thought it was valuable time, especially it’s a great way to leverage LinkedIn to help you find assets and deals to help you grow your business. That’s why we were saying, “Leveraging LinkedIn Part Two,” for you to go through this stuff.
We’ll do a recap. I always like to ask, “How are you using LinkedIn?” Are you using it to contact special asset managers? If you do, you should see that when you search for special asset managers, there are over 360,000 people that have that in their profile. If you also use it for contacting secondary marketing, there are 1.4 million people that have that popup. There are plenty of resources there. If you’re connecting with other real estate investors like I’ve used this in the past, just type in real estate investors, it pops up 310,000-plus to connect with.
You can also type note investors, there are 240,000 people that pop up when you do a quick search. It’s not secondary connections. This is all doing a search thing first and secondary connections out there. Hold on sales is a category that we’ve been targeting to find a list in and it pops up 32,000 people have that in their categories. It’s something we’ve been targeting and it has some great lists and resources. This is one of the biggest a-has in leveraging LinkedIn for you. Obviously, you want to have a complete profile. Home loan sales is an important thing. If you’re looking for deals and tired of the low hanging fruit that’s overpriced or overbid out, start using this to reach out. We’ll give you some things that will help set yourself apart from adding connections to people. The thing that I always like to ask is how are you marketing? Are you marketing on LinkedIn and on a regular basis?
Are you doing it daily? Are you doing weekly? Are you doing it monthly? If you only do it once a month and resharing something, you’re not going to have any success. We have found, especially with LinkedIn for a couple of reasons, when you do it on a daily basis, it does pay off big time for you a lot better than if you’re doing Facebook or Instagram out there. Even Pinterest, especially with us in the distressed note and real estate space. Honestly, if you’re not targeting notes anymore and you’re just looking at real estate, fix and flips or whenever you’re doing, this can be a very effective thing for you in the long run. You have to do it on a regular basis. Some of you aren’t doing anything unlike those that are on the call.
Important Numbers About LinkedIn
I don’t see you on there at all and that’s an unfortunate aspect of it. I see you sharing on Facebook, but I guarantee if you started targeting and using your marketing, LinkedIn is a much more professional profile space versus FakeBook out there. You’re going to see a lot more activity when it comes to what you’re focused on. If you’ve all got a job or a side hustle, it’s professional in nature. Leverage LinkedIn for that as well too. It’s a great way to connect with other things and grow that stuff. Here are some of the important numbers I think you want to shoot. If you have less than 500 connections, don’t feel so bad. You’re in with 54% of people that were surveyed by LinkedIn. 27% have between 500 and 1,000 of those. Only 12% have literally over 1,000 to 2,000. 3% have between 2,000 to 3,000 connections. 4% have 3,000 plus connections. It’s rare out there.
Let’s talk about some of the stuff. You’ll know the breakdown. It’s the percentage of US adults who say they use Facebook in the survey. It’s 62% men, 74% women and it breaks it down in tiers specifically what real estate investors are looking for as ideal avatars. We’re looking for people between 30 and 65 and you can see the people that are using that is at a large percentage. It’s 78% for 30 to 50, 50 to 65 is 65% and then 40% of 65 plus as our age groups get a little bit older. They’re highly educated, but with income, there isn’t a lot of money there. If you look at Instagram, it is much smaller as far as the number of people using it. Twitter has dropped quite a bit as well too over that. Pinterest is obviously female-dominated, but when you look at the numbers of people that are using this on a regular basis, LinkedIn drives people out there.
Let’s talk about how you can leverage LinkedIn differently. This is one aspect of things people ask me all the time because I bring it up once and I’m like, “How do I do this in a bigger event?” When I’m out meeting people or I’m out at a networking event, I’ll pull up my LinkedIn ID. I usually give them a business card on LinkedIn. If they are, then I’ll pull the Find Nearby feature to connect with others. We’ll also leverage LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn groups are becoming better than Facebook groups. Although Facebook groups seem to get bombarded with ads versus content so you’ve got to be careful with that. You’ll see that on LinkedIn as well. There are some great features that LinkedIn groups allow you to connect with other people that are like that. This is the biggest thing. Direct messaging is one of the best things that you can do to leverage your business.
Importing Contact Lists
If you’re looking for deals, investors or sources, you can leverage direct messaging in mails or messages to your context with short messages and video links. Not that you have to create a new video every time, but we’ll share with you a couple of things out there. You all have different lists in your audiences out there that you have that you can easily export. You either got business cards or a CSV file, people you’ve made contacts with or list you’ve exported. If you’ve been at any of our virtual workshops or our at Note CAMP, you’ve been provided a list. Bank contacts if you’re downloading different than that. If you’ve purchased IRA lists or even having people opt-in to your website. Hopefully, each and every one of you that are reading this has a website with an opt-in.
One of the most important things is taking those emails of people and importing them into your LinkedIn to go out and connect with them. You can spend time one-on-one, but you can actually upload your list of email contacts into LinkedIn as a great way to expand your audience and connect with them there. As far as connecting with people at an event, here’s an example. If I open up my LinkedIn profile, you see down at the bottom, you’ve got the home, you’ve got the connections, you’ve got the plus, you get the notifications and then you have a little business profile case there. When you open up your LinkedIn profile, you want to click on the little people at the bottom, your connections. If you can click on that, that’ll take you to the next page. It will say where you’re adding people.
At the top, view connections. It shows your number of connections and then you see the Find Nearby thing that is always turned off. If you click on it, it will turn on. When you turn it on, it will go out and start finding people that are nearby that you can connect with. They’ll show you different pages of people you can connect with. This only does in a big audience. I have done this from the front of the stage a couple of times trying to get people to use it more and it becomes valuable because I can add 30 to 40 people to my database while I’m talking to connect with them.
I don’t have to give a link. I don’t have to give them a website. If they’re on LinkedIn, “I’d like to connect with you and talk with you. Jump on here and here’s a great way for you to connect with me and let’s connect with others.” It only works when you both have it turned on. It’s not going to go out and find people nearby if they’re not turned on. This is one thing that you can use if you’re at events or networking clubs. Maybe if you’ve got a speaking event and talking with people, this would be something valuable to use. Also, if it turns off, you get 20,000 connections. Many of you have less than 20,000, you can have that there. This is a great way to use it at the very beginning. You can have 30,000 connections on LinkedIn. There are some people who have more than that. Once you get to 30,000 connections, you can’t accept new invitations. People can accept yours, but you can’t accept new invitation. Most of you aren’t even close to that. I get that.
Leveraging LinkedIn: Whatever your focus is, there is an audience out there for you.
You only invite others to connect once you hit that number. If you’re in the top ten of people on LinkedIn, it has roughly 36,000 connections or more. The number one person has 50,000 plus connections. You can import up to 10,000 emails at a time. Most of you probably don’t have that database, which is fine over time. If you were to do and add one person a day for the next several years, how many is that? 3,600 connections? Unless you’re mostly going to add more than that. The idea is if you’re out marketing, you’re going to add more people. You’re in this for the long haul. LinkedIn was around several years ago. I expect it to be around a lot longer, especially as hot as it is, everybody’s pushing this.
LinkedIn Live
This is something you need to jump on and start doing. The important thing you have to keep in mind is you can only have up to 2,500 invites out at a time. If you’ve invited people a few months ago and they have accepted your invite, you can go and do your invites and delete those older invites off so you freshen up and keep it at 2,500. Why is this important? LinkedIn is where you can still connect with decision-makers. LinkedIn has added a video to it and it’s growing in a privy more people every day. If you are already doing video, LinkedIn is doing some cool stuff like LinkedIn Live. Do yourself a favor, go in and apply for LinkedIn Live. It can take six months for you to be approved.
Go on there and fill it out. Start doing that so that you start having these features get approved to your profile. What I’ve seen is they release a little bit at a time. They’re not accepting everybody automatically. I’m still waiting for it to be approved for me, but I know that some people that have applied before I did are starting to get their stuff approved. There are literally less than 300 roughly people using video on LinkedIn on a regular basis. There are a lot of opportunities here. If you think about it, when you open up your LinkedIn profile, I’m sure you see videos. Those are the first things that show up. It’s the same thing on Facebook. Start using this. If decision-makers see your profile, it’s going to be a better fit for note real estate investing because the fact is that you’re actually providing some great content.
Also, your avatars of people are often highly educated, make more money and if you’re using your LinkedIn profile, it allows you to build your online resume and rapport. Let’s face it, where are asset managers going if you send an email blast out to bankers? They’re going to go straight to your LinkedIn profile. It happens every day. We see people that are following us or see people that will check out my LinkedIn profile every day and their asset managers from emails that we send out once a week. I check on my profile and I’ll connect with them immediately and send them an InMail and go from there. It’s a great touch approach.
Build Your Subscribers List
We all know 80% of sales are made out of the fifth contact. This is number 1, 2 or 3 ways to have that extra contact happen a lot faster versus just sending an email out once a month. I always like to joke, build your subscribers list. We’ve all had friends on our Facebook page, followers on our business pages and subscribers on our YouTube channel. One of the things that are important to do is if you’ve got a YouTube channel, share that to your LinkedIn profile or to your subscribers. Ask your Facebook friend, “Do you have a LinkedIn profile? Let’s connect that way.” Those who are serious, great. Those that aren’t, aren’t going to do it. Instagram followers can be a little bit lower amount, but still an opportunity there for you. When it’s opting into your website, connect with them on LinkedIn. I try to do that on a regular basis. We’ve got an autoresponder that goes out, “Thanks for connecting with me.”
LeadFuze And Octopus CRM
At the very bottom, we try to get people to use, “Connect with me on the social media profiles below.” You don’t have to market to your audience to find deals, raise capital, sell assets or buy assets. Whatever your focus is, there is an audience out there for you. The biggest thing you’ve got to do is go do it. Most people aren’t doing it. 99% of people aren’t taking action. That 1%, they’re getting action taken. They’re seeing things happening. There are two tools that we like that have helped us. I’ve talked briefly about these before, is LeadFuze.com. This is not a free tool. It’s $97 a month. It’s a cool thing since LinkedIn took away the ability to export your connections and have the emails attached to that.
It allows you to go on and search LinkedIn, which I like. $97 a month gives you 500 leads a month that you can export. You can actually require the emails to be there or not require the emails to be there. What I like is I don’t require the emails because I got a bigger list. I do search for asset managers and it gives me their LinkedIn handle. On a variety of them, it also gives me their Twitter or Facebook handles if they have them on there. I like it. It’s $97 a month. I believe they’re running a Cyber Monday sale from time to time. The other one that I liked is I’ll create a list in LeadFuze.
I can export that list as leads. It gives me their LinkedIn website, like LinkedIn.com/in/1scottcarson, which is mine. I’ll take those in OctopusCRM.io. I’ll upload the list into Octopus and I can set it up as a CRM to go out and automatically send messages to the people that I want to. This is a Chrome plugin. You can set it up to automatically run in the background while you’re working. It’s nice because I can connect with others. If I pull a list from LeadFuze, I can upload that list and automatically send it out and connect with them. I can include a short message. I can customize that short message with their first name, last name, and some other things too.
Purchase Lists Of IRA Investors
I can send them up the campaigns if I need to, “This is a group of asset managers. Let’s start a campaign just for these.” Octopus will only allow me to connect with 100 people a day. Otherwise, it shuts down. LinkedIn doesn’t like it. If you seize it, you’re adding and trying to connect with a lot of people. It will do it inexpensively. It’s $699 a month as the cheapest, which works well. $999 is the next grade up. They are running a Cyber Monday special. You want to pay for the full year in advance, you get an extra 30% off. Check them out because it’s a valuable tool. These tools have helped us in our marketing automation things in the last several months. We’ve seen some good things from it. Here’s what the nuts and bolts are of this thing. What’s working for us and I highly recommend that you do these things.
We will purchase lists of IRA investors from different counties, from our sources. We get the first name, last name, email address, their address and sometimes their phone number. What we do is we’ll upload, literally import the emails to list the LinkedIn 500 at a time. If I buy 5,000, I can upload it a couple of times. They may take a couple of weeks, but we’ll upload it on LinkedIn and send out invites to them to connect with them. Once they’re connected, I can also upload them into LeadFuze and Octopus CRM to automate reaching out to them at 100 per day. It’s a two-pronged approach there to reaching out to them, which is nice.
Sharing Regular Content
Here’s the thing that you have to do as well is sharing regular content. You’ve got to do something on a regular basis. This is the biggest thing. If you don’t want to use LeadFuze or Octopus, that’s fine, but just start sharing stuff on a regular basis like short videos. LinkedIn will only allow you to upload ten-minute videos. We’re not talking that you’ve got to be a whole show like we do or even a webinar, but short videos. You can literally upload straight from your smartphone. “Here’s the deal that I’m working on,” or “Here’s a life of an investor.” You can always create an article and upload a YouTube video to it, or a short little post or the link to YouTube, which is great. That does well as well.
What has done well for us and what we see more and more people click on is when we create an infographic about an article, a webinar or a deal, those are short. We’re not talking a hundred million words. We’re talking literally short little blog posts. We also see what works well posting in large groups. When you post something, you can see who looked at it, you can see who’s reviewed your profile. That’s where it comes in handy because you post something in a group, post something to your regular LinkedIn and you see who’s reviewed your profile or looked at it. That’s an opportunity for you to go and connect with that person or someone you don’t want to see on there, you can go in and block them.
Let me give you an example. What do I mean by short posts or short blogs? I’m going to my LinkedIn account. You see right off the bat, it says, “Write an article on LinkedIn,” or “You can start a post.” You can post a picture, a video or just type an article if I want to. Never post something, I say, without an image. You’ll get some posts on there. People comment depending on things, but it’s better if you draw attention. Use something good, recycle something. If you click on write an article, this will take you over to write an article for LinkedIn, but you don’t have to.
Leveraging LinkedIn: Having a complete LinkedIn profile description will dramatically help you show up in other people’s searches.
You can hire a VA to do this. That’s what we did. I have a publishing menu, so I have all sorts of drafts out there. I have 50 drafts from 50 episodes. I will link for an image or recycle these. You click on The Tale of Two New Note Investors. I’ve got an image. It’s got a short transcription of the first couple of minutes of the blog and the link to the actual video or the audio when you listen to it and we publish it. The beautiful thing here is which investor are you? Publish it. You can use hashtags if you want. That’s published in my LinkedIn profile. Click and say, “Do you want to share it to Facebook?” Yes, we’ll share it on Facebook. Post that to Facebook. I can also share it on Twitter if I want to, which is great and it’s done.
You could go in and take some articles or some videos and you easily transcribe them with Rev.com for $0.10 a minute and turn them into little short blogs for you. These things do well for us. Anytime I post an article or something, we get a lot of hits. If I click on My Profile, I’d see the people who viewed my profile. I see someone commented on Ten Ways to Find Note Deals. I see a lot of people are mentioned that I’m connected with. This is an article that we shared as well. You can put them through and it’s updating me on people, what’s going on with the birthdays and things like that similar to Facebook.
When I have images up, people click on them, “A happy Thanksgiving.” You’re going to see people connect. I’ve got 17,000 connections. What I’m trying to get at is some ego-based on other things that we posted. If you’re posting and you want your audience to see that you’re posting something. It could be a picture of a property. It could be a deal flow. It could be performing after. If you have a fix and flip you’ve done. You’ve done a wholesale deal. Did you do a deal that you’re bidding on and you’re working through their due diligence on? There’s a whole variety of different things that you can share on there. Share something on a regular basis because it’s going to help you out.
Complete LinkedIn Profile
One thing is you want to also make sure that you have on your LinkedIn is a complete profile. LinkedIn will walk you through it. Finish your complete profile but take advantage too when they asked for your description to make sure that you utilize the full 4,000 characters on LinkedIn. This is that something people just put one line. Add a little description of it as that will help people when they’re searching for special asset managers, secondary marketing or note investors. If your description is in there filled out fully, it will dramatically help you show up in other people’s searches on LinkedIn and that’s a great way to connect with people who are looking at your profile. I noticed a dramatic increase when I went back in and edited that with my friend Marcus Murphy. He’s on a LinkedIn panel. He’s one of the experts there and recommended this at a marketing convention. Many people are leaving that real estate space empty or virtually vacant. What do I mean by that?
If I go to my profile and go to About page, you want to have a lot in there as much as you can. Fill it out and talk about the deals you’re working on or what your focus is. This is a huge amount of real estate space. You can also see that I’ve got some presentations that I’ll post. I’ll link that with SlideShare. Anytime I build a SlideShare presentation or PowerPoint, it goes there. I can see people who viewed my profile. I can click on that and it pulls up. You can see Marvin Somlo, Julia McCurley is a podcasting friend of mine. I can connect with strategic financing BIOLIFE4D. I send Matthew Osburn a link and he looked at my profile.
Second Degree Connections
Those are valuable things to do. You can always ask for recommendations which is a nice thing with your profile, but complete your profile. It’s such a valuable aspect for you. These are important things. When you’re uploading, inviting people, you want them to go to your profile and say, “This guy or this girl is valuable for me to connect with.” “I like what this person is putting up. I like that this person does this. We have this in connection with. They’re a valuable connection.” What’s kicking for us and I mean this in a very direct aspect is two things. We are leveraging our show to get booked on other people’s show to help get the message out what we’re doing, to talk about the note investing stuff. What we’ve been doing leveraging is going on and looking for real estate podcast hosts that are second-degree connections. You could do this for real estate investors or note investors.
I send a short message and I include a short video along with it, just a two-minute max. The video is uploaded to either YouTube or Vimeo. For me, I use both. We make it a private video or the only way that people could come across the video is if they have the link that I include. It shows me how many people have viewed my profile. I started off in 2018 doing this and it worked out amazing. We did this one on video. It’s the “Note Guy” Scott Carson Podcast Guest Pitch, so it gives you an idea. It’s a two-minute video of me just talking.
“I think you’d be a great guest,” or “It’d be great to connect with you. I love to network with you.” I create the thumb drive. It’s not very big. One hundred fifty-four plays may not seem like a lot, but out of that 154, this has helped me get booked 70 to 75 times because of people that clicked on this, watched it, then later turned around and invited me to connect with them. The only people that are able to get this link are people that I’ve sent a direct message on InMail through LinkedIn. You can do this for real estate investors and say, “Real estate investors.” Do you want to add people to it? It does some pop up. We want to hit people. There are 343,000 people there. We want to do secondary connections with new ones that we don’t know.
Connect with LinkedIn members, add a note with a link to that video that says, “I’m a local investor in Austin, Texas. I’m looking to expand my network of people looking for deals in the New Year or looking to buy notes, purchase notes or looking to add cashflowing assets.” It doesn’t have to be long. The beautiful thing is that video is going to give you a little more personality than a normal person sends stuff out. The reason we do secondary connections is that we’re not connected with those people already. Is everybody going to accept your connection? No, but the great thing is some people will and I guarantee it’s a great way to build that “Let’s connect.”
One thing I also do as well is I will include in the description of the video a lot of times a link to my actual Calendly link. I put my email address and phone number, but it’s a short two-minute video sharing, “What am I doing? Let me talk about and go from there.” That’s helped me out dramatically. I’ve been doing this a lot with asset managers. I set this up so that we can talk about it with you guys. We’ve seen some people reach out to us and doing the same exact thing with either connecting with asset managers or seeing event attendees.
Last time I talked about ten ways to find out deals and how we leverage expos and conferences. I can pull the registration list and I’ll send a message saying, “It was great meeting you. I saw that you were at the Western MBA conference. We didn’t get a chance to meet. I’d loved to visit with and to talk more about your business in a way that we do that as well.” It’s a short message and a short video. It doesn’t have to be long. It’s 2 to 3 minutes max, “I’d love to schedule a quick phone call.” The big thing is you want to have that ask there at the end.
This one should be on my YouTube channel, “Help You Clean Up Your Fourth Quarter Profile.” You’ll see 45 views in one month. I filmed this on my smartphone. I put a little PopSocket on it as it sat on the top of my computer. I hit the record button and just me talking about, “I love to help you with your portfolio.” I have four asset managers like it and one didn’t. The beautiful thing is when we send the email out to them, when this is linked to that or we sent a direct message, we see people who clicked on it and then I reached back out to them, “We’d love to visit with you. I’d love to talk with you.”
The great thing too is I could take the same link and I’ve done this as well with a different one than I have. I send an email out to my asset managers. I include a private little video link for people to click on, watch and learn a bit more about what I do. What we’re looking to do to help them, “Let me help you clean up your portfolio and we’re looking for nonperforming first. We’re looking for a variety of things in the new year or this quarter to help you clean up your books.” This is kicking butt and taking names. This is working some great stuff for us. It’s not complicated. The longest thing it’s going to take to set up is for you to record your short 2 to 3-minute video and then setting up your things.
Leveraging LinkedIn: People looking for deals in the new year are looking to buy notes and to add cash flowing assets there.
If you don’t have a big email list, then what you could do is go over to LeadFuze and start connecting with people or use OctopusCRM.io to jump in there and start connecting with people and reaching out to doing a short video of the message. You can copy and paste the same link and the same wording and get it working hard for you. The idea is working smarter, not harder. I know we all get busy with the holidays and Thanksgiving and Halloween. We’ve got Christmas and New Year’s. There are several days left of workdays for the most part. If you think about it, less than that when you figure in the weekends. I think you could do some great stuff. There are some things I want to challenge you to do. You may not be able to do all this, but here’s the thing. If you have not done this, record a short asset manager video, “Here’s what we’re looking for. Here’s what I do.”
“I’m Jeff Wolfe with Wolfe Investments out of San Diego, California. I’m an active real estate investor for twenty plus years. I’m looking to purchase more nonperforming and performing notes for our portfolio. I’d love to visit with you. We’re only buying for our own portfolio. We’re buying the most of the major metroplexes. Here’s what we’re looking for.” Something short and sweet. I can buy one-offs or depending on what the size of the portfolio, may be able to take down a bigger portfolio and go from there. Upload the video to YouTube or Vimeo if you want to prefer that, but YouTube is free for everybody. Set it to private where only people that view your video, you can see that the number of hits will hit to it. It’s not open to the public. Include in the description of the YouTube, just a little transcript of the video.
It’s easy to do. It doesn’t cost you much all. We’re talking $2. What you also want to include is your contact information, your name, your email, but also put a Calendly link in there, a booking link. You may want to create a Calendly booking for asset managers every fifteen minutes over the next couple of days. You can set it up to be the next 2 or 3 weeks. You can set it up to be the full month of January. You can set it up to be at a specific time. The reason a Calendly booking link works well is first, you’ll get their name, email address and phone number. By posting this to LinkedIn and posting to asset managers, subscribing to it or clicking on it and say, “Let’s schedule a meeting.” You’ll grab their email address and be able to connect with them.
I would also be filming another short little video and email out to your asset manager list for those that have lists. It’s the same thing. You clicked on the video. Use one that’s neutral. You’re not going to customize it, but when they click on it and you see who’s clicked on it, and then you could follow up with a private and personal video, which is what I like to do. “Steve, I see that you clicked on my email. I hope your Thursday afternoon is going well. I would love to visit with you to talk about what you’ve got in your books this quarter that you’re looking to get rid of.” I also think it’s important that you posted these videos in LinkedIn groups, on distressed debt or special servicing or even IRA investors if that’s something you want to do.
It’s a great way to do it. I’m talking about the free version. It doesn’t cost you anything extra and then see who liked it, comment and follow up with them. That’s an important thing. You’ll never know who’s looking at your stuff. You don’t have to have a, “I know you from high school and I let you got in trouble,” or “You had your first kiss with such and such.” “You ran the fourth quarter leg on a relay.” What I’m saying is this is a great way. I get a lot of people that comment on stuff I’d never met before, but we have something in common. We’re both real estate investors and looking to do some things.
LinkedIn Challenge
I want to challenge you. We’ve probably got about a couple of true workdays. If you consider Friday and Saturday and Sundays and less if you don’t consider those, but literally not much time left in the New Year. I would highly recommend you flood your LinkedIn a deal a day. I challenge you to do twenty. What do I mean by deals? I’m not talking full out blogs. Fill out articles. You want to include some of those, “Here are some deals that we’ve focused on. Here’s the deal that I did.” It could be a picture, a video or a short article. Do something different for twenty days. I know you’re not going to do anything on Christmas Eve on the 24th and Christmas, the 25th and that’s going to happen. The reason we want you to do this, when people are sitting at home, bored, flipping through things, this stuff will show up.
If you add one person new to your database every day, that’s a lot of things to do. You can add a lot of credibility to your LinkedIn profile and a lot of that activity by doing some simple things. Maybe do a couple of deal videos. If you’re all going to do a deal video, it’s probably going to be somewhere between 2 to 5 minutes. Ten minutes is about as long as you can do. It’s less than ten minutes uploaded directly to LinkedIn. Use your phone. Those will always be better versus sharing a link. Also, put a description on the video if you upload it, “Click on my booking link to schedule a quick call.” Don’t be afraid to ask the ask.
“I like what you see. Let’s schedule a phone call and see how Stonegate Capital can put your money to work.” “Trinity Investments can help you make 2020 a great return year for you,” or something simple like that. I challenge you, do twenty. I know twenty is like, “I’ve never done one.” Get something out but do yourself a favor. I know you’re all capable of doing more because I know I’m capable of doing more. This doesn’t have to take long. This can be 5, 10 minutes of your day and who doesn’t have 5 to 10 minutes of your day? Everybody does have five to ten minutes. You could do a short one, “Here’s what’s going on in my world,” and see who’s watching this.
There are many of you that could do something but you’re not and I will challenge you all to do something good for yourself. I know you’re all busy doing things on holidays. This is a time of year for your full-time thing. I get it, but you’ve all got 10 and 15 minutes. Don’t give me the excuses that you don’t have 10 to 15 minutes to market because you all do. If you want next year to be different, you have got to start setting the groundwork and the habits in place for you to see some grace up first of the year. If you want to market and close more deals, you’ve got to start marketing and that’s what it all comes down to.
Add video to what you’re doing. Add LeadFuze or Octopus to the stuff that you’re using and use them. You all want bigger things. The thing that always frustrates me the most in my years of doing these videos is seeing the same old people on there and not taking action and then struggling, “I’m not closing enough deals.” You can have the free version of LinkedIn, Anna. It doesn’t have to be the expanded version, but all of these things will work with your free version. You don’t have to expand and stuff. Completely fill out your profile. They do have the upgraded premium version of LinkedIn. It’s going to give you more InMails and more connections with third party contacts that may not be connected.
That’s a nice bonus to have. I wouldn’t necessarily do that all year round. Maybe boost for the month and you’d do that to connect with asset managers and then reduce your membership down to the free version. What I’m talking about is the free version of LinkedIn. You need to fill out your complete profile and it will go a lot longer for you. If you just do that one thing, it will help out. As you send out recommendations to people, “If I give you a recommendation, would you give me a recommendation?” That helps out build stuff with banks and asset managers. If you’ve got multiple businesses that you’re in. An example is we have We Close Notes and we also have The Note Closers Show’s profile. You can say, “I worked with them when I was at We Close Notes. Jeff bought some deals from me or vice versa. It worked out close and quick,” whatever it might be.
“How do you do your profile if you have a day job plus no investment.” What I would do is simple. You obviously have your main thing at the top. Whatever you’ve got on your account, put down that you’re also an active real estate investor. An account is not a bad thing and all, I think it actually works in your favor. As a major employer, like a 401(k), full benefit. If your boss will see everything and they get upset with you. I hear that with a lot of people like, “I don’t want my boss to see that I’m doing something else.” Some people have to go in and temporarily block their bosses or the people they work with so they can’t see their profiles. Put one in here and then put real estate investors on here as your second thing. Being an accountant is not a bad thing. It’s like being a realtor. Just say whatever the name of your companies and put it down there, “I’m the managing member of these investments.”
They’re not going to care. What they want to do is see that you’re doing things. You’ve got pictures of assets and pictures of deals that you’ve done or fix and flips or any of your real estate stuff. Put something and stuff that you’ve done. That’s what I’m trying to get at. They’re going to see your profile because they see all this stuff. Your activity and articles, they see that before they get down. That’s why I’m trying to say most of you aren’t going to have anything in here and you can see the one that we just did, two note investors popped up. My invite to the Night and see all the activity. I can scroll down and see this. That’s why I’m trying to say if you start getting the habit of posting some things, anything I have commented on or connected with, it shows activity and that’s what people want to see.
Leveraging LinkedIn: If you want next year to be different, you have got to start setting the groundwork and the habits in place right now for you to see some grace up first of the year.
I’d love for you to do something. We’re going to have one more Note Night in America and then we won’t have anything for the rest of the year until the 6th of January when we return. I know most of you are busy and there are some things, but I would love it if you’re posting some things. Start doing these things. Make it a regular habit. If you have 10 minutes or 30 minutes a day to market, I would spend more time on LinkedIn and doing those things versus posting some of Facebook. The way Facebook is, I would say within the next few years, Facebook is not going to be around or much smaller capacity. This LinkedIn is doing some big push. If you can do anything, go over and apply to get a LinkedIn Live. Just type in LinkedIn Live, “Getting Started with LinkedIn Live. Applying for live video broadcasting.”
You have to fill that out and then go from there. You can put a brief video. What I’m saying is I upload the video to YouTube first and then I use that link in my invite messages. You’ve got to fall below the 140 characters, 160 characters that they allow you. Some take months. You want to be able to use it when it becomes available for you all. That is all that I have for you. Please go use something. This is a great way to dive in and leverage stuff. These things are becoming more and more important. I guarantee you’re seeing more and more people do it. It’s because they’re having positive effects, they’re getting feedback and they’re having great things happen.
What a great way to kick butt in the new year by working on a platform that’s designed to help you succeed if you just use some of the tools that are available to you. Those are the great things that are working on our favor. We wish you the best of luck. As always, if you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via email. I’m glad to answer anything we can for you. We’re getting caught up on our emails. I did not do much. I took the time to recharge our batteries and drive into the last few weeks of the year and start doing some things here for 2020 to get honed on and make the most of what’s going on in the market. Have a great day. We’ll see you at the top.
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