Ep 160 – Content Spider Marketing

NCS 160 | Content Spider

NCS 160 | Content Spider

On this episode of the Podcast, Scott discusses the importance of weaving different webs across your marketing message.

Listen to the podcast here


Content Spider Marketing

I want to spend today’s episode diving into a really important concept and a game plan for not only your note business but also for your real estate business, for any type of business that you’re doing. So many people come out of the traditional workforce and they start working for their own and they’re like, “I got my computer. I got my notepad. I’m sitting here in front of my computer waiting for the phone to ring. What do I do now? I want a deal. I’m excited about breaking down the deals. What do I do now to raise capital?” The best thing, honestly, that you can do is always keep everything in mind as marketing first. I know that’s hard to do if you’ve never been down that road of having a market for yourself.

Many times, when we are in the workforce, we have our specific job duty. You’ve got to do a specific this. You don’t do anything else because that’s somebody else’s job. As an entrepreneur, as a note investor, marketing is your job. You have to start thinking marketing everything. In today’s world where this is the TV channel and everybody is sitting around looking at their TVs these days, even during commercial breaks. Commercials are coming back now for TV because people like that, so they can stop to look at who texted them or who Facebooked them or live streamed or posted something.

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Content Spider: We had the opportunity where everybody is looking at their phones waiting for you to provide them with something.

Never before in the world, in history alone have we had the opportunity where everybody is looking at their phones waiting for you to provide them with something. Literally, if you use the concepts that I’m about to share with you correctly, you will have people coming to you, you will have leads coming to you, you have investors, you have buyers, you have funding sources coming to you organically. We’re talking with a shoestring budget to make this stuff happen. For years, I’ve been recycling my marketing, re-sharing, repurposing my ads.

An ad popped up on Facebook that reminded me two years ago, we came up with a concept for the “I want you to be a note investor” image. I can’t take credit for this. I can only give half credit. This was actually put together by our good buddy, Chase Thompson from the Note MBA podcast. Chase took my face and put it on Uncle Sam. We were actually in Washington DC at that time teaching a workshop. Two years ago, we got it on this big imprint board here, which is a great marketing piece, great image. The thing about this image, besides this “I want you to be a note investor,” it really only serves a singular purpose of being an image.

While it’s great, everybody loves it, we used it quite a bit, it’s not as effective a marketing piece as I would like it to be. What’s funny is there are some real estate clubs out there that have actually used that image and posted it on their meet-up groups, I’m not even a member of them, which is funny and with my face, which is great, which is totally fine. Especially if we had a workshop, we see a lot of people doing email blast out to the database of everybody that was there. We see people posting to Facebook, we see people posting videos, people doing a really good job. What you have to keep in mind is you have to think that one thing you’re doing can be used across mobile platforms. We call this the content spider, the content web.

One of the guys that I like to follow who has a huge following is Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary, for years has talked about the concept of using one thing and then using it across four platforms. Honestly, everything is bigger in Texas. Chase and I agreed that the content spider, why is it a spider? Because it has eight legs, not four legs. We’re a super insect. We’re the spider that’s going to help you spin webs across the platform. Every platform, every social media application has a different kind of avatar or person that uses that specific thing. For example, LinkedIn is used mostly by executives, professional, networking site. You have CEOs that spend their time on there and Twitter. Twitter is more up to date in the moment messaging service. Sharing what’s going on recently. They’re limited because of the 160 characters. Meaning you post little short videos or you can post links to videos, you can post images. The big use of hashtags in Twitter helps you find other #realestateinvestors or #notes, #lifeofanoteinvestor, #garyv, whatever. It allows for you to dive in the conversation no matter what it is.

I’ve had conversations with people that were Dallas Cowboys fans during the Dallas game because I started tweeting #dallascowboys. During the World Series, many people are familiar with the Marlins Man. The Marlins Man is a guy who’s a big Miami Marlins fan. He’s an attorney in Miami. He used to be a divorce attorney. I think he does something else now. He shows up to almost every Major League baseball game. In the play-offs, he came wearing his bright Miami Marlins jersey. He’s usually sitting right behind home plate. I’ve engaged in conversations with him via Twitter just back and forth. Actually, Twitter is how Gary Vaynerchuk really launches Wine Library TV years ago by just spending time and having conversations one-on-one with wine fans, wine lovers.

Your marketing, you have to start thinking one to the many, but it’s also the one to the many to the one. The idea is to get a lot of people engaged and engage in one-on-one conversations. That’s the best way for you to really establish rapport, establish really good clients. I don’t say come across and try to sell, sell, sell. “I need funding, I need funding.” Provide good content about what you’re doing and then you will build trust, then you will build rapport and then you build a following in your own tribe for the most part.

One thing to keep in mind too, this is something that takes time. It’s not going to be an overnight success. There are specific things that can go viral for you. If you want to watch an interesting movie about social media virality, go watch Ingrid Goes West. It is all about social media stalking and how the power of social media sometimes can be good. It can also be evil if you use it for the wrong ways. The biggest thing that you keep in mind is if you’re using social media to tell your stories, share your message, share what you got going on, in a good way, trust me, people will follow you. If you’re a note investor in your own Facebook, you probably have seen some videos from our buddy Adam Adams out there. He’s on Midwest tour of his assets in Ohio and Cincinnati, going to the Buckeye State. He shared some great, very, very good videos about the houses he’s looking at. Meet with his attorney, meet with fellow note investors, doing a really great job. I had a conversation on my way to the office this morning with Adam. I called him up, I said, “Great videos. You’re doing a really good job recapping stuff and what’s going on and as you’re going. Have you thought about transcribing that video and get it written up?” He’s like, “No, I’m just trying to figure out how to get the thing edited first.” I said, “Use this service, Rev.com, it will transcribe it for $1. If your videos are five to ten minutes long, each one will cost you $5 to $10.” He’s like, “I forgot about that. That’s a good idea.”

Ultimately, the more you’re marketing can hit the different senses, the more people are going to take notes. People learn differently. A lot of people learn visually. Some people learn better by hearing instead of watching. Other people learn better by reading instead of watching. Anytime you’re going to hit a person with eye, ears and mouth, the better it is for you. Actually I guess you could say, the more technically semi-viral will go because you’ll hit a different aspect of how people learn. Some people learn by writing. Some people learn by listening. Some people learn by speaking. Some people learn just by watching it. Video is going to be your fastest and easiest thing because a lot of people love that short, two to five minutes. As we get older and as the world evolves, we have a shorter and shorter attention span.

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Content Spider: I want to focus on the aspect of how to really spread your web across platforms to hit different things.

I really want to focus on the aspect today with you guys of how to really spread your web across platforms to hit different things. Trust me, some of the things we’ve been talking about, you guys are like, “I don’t handle that. I don’t want that.” Trust me, things evolve over time. Many people didn’t have a Twitter account, now it’s a big growing thing. If I never had a Twitter account, I wouldn’t have 19,000 followers on Twitter that I reach out to. You’ll be like, “I’ll stay off of Facebook.” That’s great, stay off the second largest social media network besides Google. Google is not really a social media but what I’m trying to get at is it’s a large platform. You will be silly not to tap on those potential clients, potential followers, potential tribesmen. “I don’t want to do video. I don’t want anything in YouTube.” That’s your fault then if you don’t want to be a part of not only the first, largest search engine because YouTube is owned by Google and Google will prioritize YouTube videos going up there first. Why not be on the second largest search engine in YouTube? That’s the biggest bang for the buck that we see on a regular basis because we have so many videos online.

Before I dive into the content spider and help you guys walk through the thing, for those who are listening on the podcast, if you’d like to shoot me an email at Scott@WeCloseNotes.com and have it state “Content Spider” and we’ll send you a couple of worksheets that we’ve put together on the Content Spider to help you map out your marketing plan. You don’t want us to be looking at buying or selling, it could just be learning and sharing information. That’s ultimately what we see is one of our strongest points is that we share a lot of contents. Hence, that’s why we have this podcast, this Facebook Live, the YouTube videos of what we’re doing. That’s why we share so much because at leads in conversation, it becomes an easier sell if you can provide content and really true value to somebody on the frontend. It builds rapport immediately with people. I’ve had plenty of times people said, “We have watched your videos for six months. I want to take a class.” That’s a lay down sale. “I’ve been following you, your videos and your deal flow. I want to get involved in your next joint venture project.” Great, awesome. We market on a daily basis with these videos and these trainings and the images we put up on a daily basis.

We got a really good one. I had to think about this one this morning. Forrest Gump, “Mama always said notes are like a box of chocolate. You never know what checks and strategy you’re going to get.” We’ll use that in our marketing. I’ll give you an example of just that crazy idea that came to my head last night. Nicole is going to go out probably on to do a quick search for Forrest Gump for that quote with Tom Hanks sitting on a bench, holding a box of chocolates. We’ll probably slap our logo on their somewhere with an infographic. That’s a funny infographic. We’ll put a link on that infographic to Note CAMP Live. NoteCAMP.live. Note CAMP Live is our four-day, online, virtual, every seat’s a VIP note convention. You can go to NoteCAMP.live and check it out. We got 30 plus speakers. That really falls in line with the box of chocolates if you think about it. We got a whole different flavor of speakers at NoteCAMP.live. We can advertise. We’ll tag some of the speakers on it. We’ll do it by tagging other speakers on there. It will not only draw off of our social media presence, it will also draft off of theirs. Their followers, their friends, their family will see those posts and interact and will draw a bigger crowd, a bigger tribe.

One of the things that we see most people do, especially when they’re right out the board, is they’re looking at deals. Jen took in pretty much over 100 bids on performing notes, which is great. A lot of people are like, “Is it going to be accepted?” Once we claim the spreadsheet and see who’s the highest then we’ll recheck to the seller and say, “Here you go.” What can people be doing to raise more capital because several people will comment, “I only have $50,000 but I want to make offers of ten.” What happens if all ten get accepted?” They’re going to go, “Oh, shit. What do I do now?” It’s really easy. Let’s go through, “What will I do now?” in your marketing in the content spider to help you raise more capital.

What I want you to do is if you’ve got a piece of paper, draw a circle in the middle. Leave room on the outside of it though. Let’s say you’ve got a deal that you’re reviewing and you want to raise capital for it. The first thing you can do besides doing the due diligence on the assets as far as what’s the payment? What’s the values? What’s it worth? What’s your bid price? What’s the rent rate? What’s the potential exit strategy on a variety of reasons? These notes got some bids on, they’re performing. It’s a pretty simple exit strategy like looking for somebody who maybe wants to split cashflow with me.

A really good thing you could do is literally flip your phone around, do either a Facebook Live or just record a video that you’ll upload to YouTube or Vimeo. Let’s just say you’re the shy type. This is your first video. You’re probably going to botch it a few times. That’s totally okay because what happens every time you botch something, you get a little bit better. You need to, as Chase says, “Embrace the suck,” #embracethesucksofwork. Trust me, you’re not going to be good as me even though sometimes I feel like I’m just winging it sometimes. You’re not going to be good as the professional people out there who have all these things. You don’t need a lot of tools or camera equipment to make things happen. Your smart phone is a phenomenal video. All you do is flip it around and do a little selfie video or have somebody hold the phone for you.

The biggest thing I think in a smart phone is make sure you film it wide. It’s easier. You’ll get a wider view. It will look nicer when you upload it to YouTube and Vimeo because that’s more of a wider screen. “Hi. My name is Scott Carson, everybody. I hope everybody’s doing well today. I want to take a quick couple of minutes to share with you this deal that I’m working on. I’m really excited. It’s a performing note in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The borrower owes $55,000. They’ve been hitting and missing their payments from last year. We really believe we can get this thing reinstated because we found out the borrower’s trying to open a gate here to help pay for the mortgage and pay some things. They’re trying to get back on work, which is great. With that in mind, we think we can get this reinstated based on the purchase price of $15,000. In fact they can start making payments at $500 a month. $500 a month times twelve comes to $6,000 a year. $6,000 grand a year incoming divided by our purchase price for a bid amount of $15,000 is a 40% cash-on-cash return. That’s not bad. We’re looking for a JV partner to come and fund the deal and then split cashflow with us.”

NCS 160 | Content Spider

Content Spider: We end up evicting or foreclosing and we’re selling the note off or selling the property at that point as an REO.

The idea is not to hold on to this note for 30 years but after the borrower has been making payments on time for twelve months, look to potentially sell the note off to a performing note investor who will pay us $40,000 for the note or $35,000 for the note. We’re splitting cashflow and then splitting the backend sale of the note sale proceeds. There’s a variety of other strategies the borrower could default, so we end up evicting or foreclosing and we’re selling the note off or selling the property at that point as an REO. They could reinstate. There’s a variety of exit strategies but we believe that the two major strategies are going to be either reinstatement or we foreclose or Cash for Keys and then sell the asset off. Either way, it looks like this would be above average returns or somebody’s lazy assets. If you’d like to get involved, drop me a quick email at Scott@WeCloseNotes.com or just leave comments here in the video. You can always text me directly at 512-585-3810 and I’ll be glad to send you my non-disclosure agreement and my investor questionnaire, so we can see about getting some deals done together. Until then, we’ll see you at the top.”

I have done hundreds and hundreds of videos similar to that, very easy for me. What I used to first do was script out the deals. Script out with just a few high points of what I was going to talk about so I didn’t miss anything. That video was about four minutes long. I talk fast. Some of you talk a little bit slower, which is okay. If you’re giving good content about the deal, people will watch. An important thing is you want to try to keep your video initially two to five minutes in length. That’s the first we are going to talk about. We’re going to do a deal video here. One thing to keep in mind is that’s a video but it doesn’t do you any good just being on your phone. You have to do something with that video. I would do two things to it. I would upload it first to YouTube. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. The important thing when you’re uploading in YouTube, a lot of times YouTube or Facebook video, they will automatically take an image or one shot of the video and make it your infographic.

There’s a great service that we use called Canva.com. Canva is basically free for the most part, except sometimes they’ll charge you $1 for an image, $1 for an infographic or something. Use Canva. We mentioned Canva on the first episode and somebody from Canva reached out to us, power of SEO optimization. Use Canva to create you a nice infographic. The beautiful thing is Canva gives you all sorts of different structures, whether it’s for a LinkedIn post or Facebook post or a presentation or whatever. It allows for you to choose the exact, accurate size that you need for where you’re posting, which is phenomenal. The second thing you want to create is an infographic. Why? Because that infographic can become your thumbnail for YouTube for that video, so it looks much more attractive. You may want to use a title like with our Monday note webinar Note Night America, the title was The 11 Biggest Lies in the Note Industry. What did I do? When I think of lies in movies, what pops up? Liar, Liar. I found an image of Jim Carrey and I posted the eleven biggest lies and created a nice little infographic.

You may want to use something floral or something with real estate or something like that. You might even want to pull a photo of the actual property you’re talking about. I wouldn’t share the full address because you don’t want that to be at the public. If you find a good photo of the image, there you go. That could be your infographic. The thing is that infographic, you want to make that your thumbnail that everybody sees on YouTube. You also go over to Instagram and post it there where they link back to your YouTube video. The important thing is you may want to put a little bit of discussion in the mentioned stuff as far as what you’re talking about on Instagram. You want to use some keywords, some hashtags as well: #realestate, #noteinvesting, #SDIRA, #retirement, #cashflow, #money, #entrepreneurship. There’s a variety of different hashtags because if anybody is looking for self directed IRAs or cashflow, they’re looking doing a search criteria on Instagram, they use those hashtag, you want your image to pop up. What happens when it pops up? They’re going to click on it.

Instagram does not allow for you to put hyperlinks in the discussion. What you can do is put the website or the YouTube link in your profile. You’ll say, “The video link is in my profile.” People then click on your profile, they follow you and click the link, it takes them to the YouTube video and they learn more about your deal. What I would do since your video is going to be probably less than fifteen minutes long, is upload it to Facebook. I would not take the link from YouTube and just share the link on Facebook. That’s okay, but it’s not going to give the most amount of traction. Facebook likes to promote their native videos. It takes you a few minutes to upload the video to Facebook and then it’s there permanently. They will promote that much faster and easier than just sharing a link that takes somebody outside of Facebook. Upload your fifteen-minute video to Facebook. If you click on the video, you’re probably going have to go re-edit the thumbnail that they use.

That’s okay because you already have one.

That’s exactly right. You already have one so you can upload your infographic that you created for Instagram as your infographic for Facebook. You can also post to Facebook groups and if you wanted to, you can also do Facebook marketing where you could promote your video to other people who have an interest in real estate in your community, your state, your city or the nation; other people that have that #investors, #retirement. You can post a lot of great things on Facebook groups. You can create a custom audience of your followers or like your followers as well. You can upload lists into Facebook, your whole database and market directly to those that have a Facebook profile as well. Facebook is a very, very powerful tool if you know how to use it properly. Most people are just posting something there or sharing or playing Farmville and wasting it. Don’t waste it. Facebook is a big, big thing.

Next thing you could do also though is going back to your video, what will help with the search engine optimization is if you take your video and you go to Rev.com, upload your YouTube link to it or share the file to it. Rev will go out and transcribe your video. What does that mean to transcribe? They literally take the audio and turn it into written word and they’re pretty good about it. Three to five minutes will cost you about $5 because they’ll do it for $1 a minute. You’ll be silly not to get them transcribed there. What are you going to use with that information? You get that word file back, you want to take a look at, tweak it and make sure it’s saying the right things that you said, and then take those words into transcription and post that into your YouTube into the description page.

Now, you have the written words. Now you have a blog post for the most part. You can go over now to LinkedIn. You do a couple of things with LinkedIn. One, you could share your YouTube video, say, “Check out the video. Here is our recent daily blog,” or just like an update. Share the video, it pops up, “Here’s a quick little video on our most recent deal that we’re working on.” We’ll also go on and do a post or an actual longer blog post on LinkedIn. Two things, instead of just posting, I will go ahead and do a blog on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is going to ask for you to have an image. Lo and behold, you have one that you created for Instagram. You might need to adjust it down, tweak it up a little bit in Canva to make it fit more appropriately so it looks better as your main image. What do you have below that now? You put the words that you had got written on Rev.

What I’m going to also do is at the bottom, I would upload your video link. Share your link and they’re embedded. Very easy to do, all you got to do is just take the link from YouTube and share that in there. Now you have a really nice blog with an image of the property, the words and the videos people will watch. That’s your first four. Those are going to be really your primary four there that really going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

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Content Spider: ActiveRain is a social media website for real estate investors.

Another thing you can do, you can go to ActiveRain. ActiveRain is a social media website for real estate investors. It’s free for the most part. It was originally started by Trulia and then two years, the number one Keller Williams agent bought it and is working on it and is trying to create it to make it more social of a network instead of being personal. You get points for posting things on ActiveRain. What we use ActiveRain here primarily is for two things. One, to find real estate professionals in the markets that we’re looking for i.e. realtors, foreclosure attorneys, stagers, insurance agents, that kind of stuff. We also post there regularly. The more you post there, the more points you get, the more you rank up.

ActiveRain allows you to have a blog. What I would do is go to LinkedIn and basically do the same thing in ActiveRain, create your ActiveRain blog. Why do that there? Because there’s a lot of realty professionals that are on there. This will work to help make you an expert on there because especially when you reach out for doing a CMA referral or a BPO referral, they’re going to look at your profile and see what type of activities you do. If you got three, four, five potential deal blogs on ActiveRain as well, they’re going to take you seriously versus somebody who’s never logged on. ActiveRain, I want to make sure I have a good headshot. On Facebook, all the stuff, you want to have a good headshot, have a good profile as well. Fill up the profile completely. Yesterday, we talked about big rocks and unfinished bridges. Not filling out your profiles is doing a half-built bridge.

Another thing you can do, a very active network right now for investors is BiggerPockets. At BiggerPockets, you can post a blog in there in the marketplace about your deal as well. Basically, doing the same thing, tweaking it up a little bit, maybe you change it up, add a little paragraph or switch it around. BiggerPockets use basically the same thing we do. Same thing, we can actually upload the word, the picture and a link to the video. It’s the same information you’re using across three platforms. That one piece of content is all we’re really recycling. That’s six legs so far.

A couple of other things that you can do as well is, MeetUp. MeetUp is one of the easiest platforms you can act with real estate investors and other people who have interests similar to yours all across the country. If you are a member of a local real estate investment club, hopefully they have an online version of the group called @MeetUp. Most of the MeetUp groups allow for you to post to the discussion board or a lot of them also will offer you to send a Meet email out to every member of the group. What do you do there? You take your same deal and post that to your MeetUp group, whether it’s locally or it’s one in an area where the asset is at or others you’re a part of to have big followings. Let me give you an example. One of the best ways we could use to raise capital is we go to post in the large MeetUp groups in Southern California. If we got a deal that’s going to bring in a 24%, 25% yield to us, why would we not post in a group where people will would slice their grandmother’s throat for a 6% ROI. They’re looking, they have money to invest but oftentimes they can’t afford to invest at San Diego, LA, Orange County or San Francisco Bay Area.

Find some big groups at that neck of the woods that have an open discussion board and even open up email list that you can email out to as what we’re posting. Many times I have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in literally hours from posting a deal blog in that local market. Use MeetUp, pick up a bunch of groups there and share. Especially here in Austin, Texas, let me give you an example. There are realtors here for years that have been flying out to California saying, “You should come invest. Come live in Austin. Come live in Houston. Come live in Dallas because you get three times the size of the house for a third of the cost that you would in California.” Where has that led? That’s led to California coming east. If they’re doing, why won’t they do that to invest? Trust me, they will. Same thing on the MeetUp group on the discussion board and group email. Two things on there. It’s done, it’s out hitting hundreds of people if not thousands of people out there with the same thing. We’re missing one major leg, which is going to be the biggest bang for your buck still to this day. What is that, Greg?

Your email marketing.

An email to your database. MailChimp, Infusionsoft, Constant Contact, or whatever you use, you need to use something to communicate to your database. Why do you want to send it out via a CRM tool or an email service provider? So you can track the open rankings, track how many people watched your video or clicked on the email. The thing is, you could do all this roughly in a day. A lot of you if it’s brand new, that looks like a lot of stuff there. The longest thing it’s going to take you is initially doing the first video and waiting for Rev to get back to you. Rev usually has a 24-hour turnaround timeframe for the most part. Very easy to do. The clearer you are with what you discuss, the better mic that you use, the better and faster they are about getting that transcription back to you.

One thing we didn’t talk about is Twitter. What I would do is I wouldn’t really post Twitter separately. I would just go over and link my Twitter account to my Instagram account, which you can do. If you go to post Instagram, oftentimes it will let you post to Twitter and Facebook at the same time. I would not post it there. Instagram is now owned by Facebook, which is nice. Actually, I guess I would post it there. I’ll also go and make sure instead of just posting the image, make sure you upload the video to Facebook as well.

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Content Spider: The most important thing too is that you’re giving your information.

That is a variety of different things, all off of your three to five-minute video. You could do one thing a day. The most important thing too is that you’re giving your information. You’re asking, “If you’d like to get on my deal blog, email me, opt-in, go to my website.” Ultimately, the whole idea is to grab somebody’s name and their email, at least their email. What you want to do with your opt-in videos, your opt-in links is keep it short. Don’t ask twenty questions; first name, email, cellphone. Why cellphone? Cellphones means you can pick up the phone and call them and also cellphone, if you want to get really sneaky, you can do slide outs out to them or you can do voice drops, “You’ve got my recent deal we’re working on. You may want to take a look at it. I’m getting ready to upload my most recent deal video to Facebook or YouTube. Check it out here.” Those are some great things that you could do as well to go above and beyond of what most people are doing.

Some people do half of these. Some people do one of these. One is better than none. Are you going to have a million people watch your videos? Are you going to have a million people comment on your video blogs? No. Even when we do the Facebook Lives, on average, we’ll get about 200 to 300 people who watch the videos within the first 24 hours, but it grows. A lot of videos we upload a week ago are now at 500 to 1,000 views. That’s great, 500 to 1,000 people looking at your message, looking at you deals. It’s not going to happen overnight. You could get one today and two tomorrow and three the next. You’re growing in the right direction.

If you never upload anything though, you’re never going to get beyond the starting dates. Every great journey starts with the very first step. Your first step is pulling out your smart phone or your android, whatever it is, take in a video and upload it to YouTube. You upload it directly from YouTube. Sometimes a lot of people are like, “Do I need all these editing materials?” Honestly, that’s great but at least get some content up there. You can get better editing the videos later on. Delivered content is better than waiting around for it to be perfect. If you don’t upload anything, nobody is going to see anything. People sometimes like the raw videos. You don’t need to have perfect make-up, the perfect face. They’re really not there to get off on you personally. They’re there to get off on the information you provide in the deal.

You could bring in attractive people to your videos. If you’re scared of being in front of the camera, okay, great. Reverse engineer it then. If you want somebody to talk about your deal instead, maybe what I would do is instead of you doing the video, you write out exactly the deal numbers and you go to Fiverr.com. For $5, $10, $20 you get somebody who’s your spokesperson to do the videos for you. You tell them exactly what to say, they repeat it and now you got a nice professional video that you can download and then upload to YouTube, upload to Vimeo, upload to Facebook. It all depends on really what your strength is. Some people are fine for the camera. Some people are better writers. Some people are better about dictating them straight to the information.

The thing that I would avoid, oftentimes, you’ll get a bit of staleness with Fiverr, people talking about the deal because they’re not as passionate. They’re doing a hundred of these things in a day to make a living. It could be interesting if you got some of the fancy things. If you had Christopher Walken talking about the deal or have somebody that did the lip-sync thing talking about the deal. There’s a lot of great thing you can do on Fiverr if you’re scared of being in front of the camera. The idea is you’re going to have to do something to start to get that money cart rolling your way. I always believe videos are the horse that pulls the cart or marketing is the horse that pulls the cart to help you raise capital. A lot of people are like, “I need to raise capital before I make any offers.” That’s just falsehood. Use the good deals. Use the deals that you’re working on even if you have funding lined up to help people learn what you’re doing, to share your message, to raise more capital.

We have a question, “Is Rev good? When you post to the description it’s used for keyword searches.”

Yes, Rev is good. It’s very good because they’ll make it very clear. That’s why you want to write it. Especially like me when I speak so fast, I oftentimes blow words together a little bit. Sometimes have different accents too. Using Rev.com is really great to help avoid that stuff to really give you clear SEO optimization. Do you remember the first websites we used to have and SEO optimization was taking your website into the very bottom? Typing in all the potential keywords and making the font the same color as the background image.

Yeah, but that’s illegal now.

It’s illegal now but that was the way a lot of websites got a lot of stuff to begin with. It was something that happened when I was coming out into college, seventeen years ago.

We have another question, “Where does Vimeo fit into host content?”

Vimeo is another video-hosting website. It’s very similar to YouTube. I like Vimeo because it has a few more fancy features to it. I had to use Vimeo because my YouTube account got shut down awhile back. We tried to go out and buy posts and things like that. They don’t like that. I lost 800 videos over night, five, six years of content. I had Vimeo up. Vimeo is actually where we upload most of our videos because we can edit, we can track it, we can see things more. Nicole does a really good job of taking the same videos and uploading it to YouTube as well.

If you have a WordPress site, it’s lot easier to post because it gives you the embed code and you can post it on to your website and people can see it there too.

NCS 160 | Content Spider

Content Spider: I can click on one or two buttons and see exactly who’s watched me from where and how many posts.

It’s a little bit easier especially because YouTube, you have to dig to find the embed code. YouTube has a lot of great tracking and looking at your content on how many people are clicking on it. I just like the stats, especially in Vimeo. I can click on one or two buttons and see exactly who’s watched me from where and how many posts. It’s not a search engine like YouTube is. I still have to upload my video somewhere else, so they show up on and the Google search easier. That’s why we upload the same videos to YouTube as well. Vimeo is not free. It costs a couple of hundred bucks a year, but it’s got some really cool tools that you can use with your infographics or your logos.

One thing that we’re going to start doing a little bit more, they just added this now with the business pro that we have, we can literally put separate links for people to opt-in in the middle of the videos where it goes into our database immediately, which is a really nice feature to have. Initially starting off, if you’re on a shoestring budget, just upload to YouTube and then the YouTube editor is YouTube.com/editor. It’s pretty easy to cut and paste a little bit of stuff on there, or just send it to Fiverr, upload your video there. You can have somebody that edits your videos relatively cheap and inexpensive.

The content spider, we’ve been doing this for years. This is not hard to do. One thing you can also do if you’re working full-time, you don’t have time during the day, is if you got all your stuff done on a Sunday, your video, your blog, then you can go to Hootsuite or Buffer.com and pre-post when it posts there. You can set up your post to automatically post to several of these websites. That’s a nice feature to help you automate your stuff if you’re working a full-time job.

One thing you can also do is you post something and you want to draft off somebody’s traffic. Just tag them in a post or share them in a post. If you’re talking about Scott Carson, share it on my post. What you don’t want to do as some people do, who are using our stuff for their stuff that they’re not doing. Somebody tagged me in a post yesterday about their event. I’m like, “No, un-tag.” You’re not going to use me to promote your event where I’m not speaking at it. It’s not going to happen. Keep that in mind. Be respectful on stuff. It’s important. You can use hashtags. A really popular hashtag is #garyv. It’s something on entrepreneurship because he does have a big following. A lot of times especially if he’s driving or just in the back of a car, he’s constantly on his phone searching hashtags in Instagram or Twitter. He’ll often reach out and communicate. We’ve had some conversations back and forth that way, but short conversations back and forth and visit a little bit at different events.

Greg, your dad dealt with that too initially, thinking about, “Do I want to post and put myself out there when I put scumbags away for years?” It happens. The thing is, this is why it’s good to have a business partner, it’s good to have a spouse. Some people, they rely on one business partner to do the posting.

Let’s talk about cost. YouTube, free. Rev costs you $5. Fiverr, if you wanted to somebody to do that, let’s just say it costs you $50 there to have it really nicely done. YouTube, free. Twitter, free. Instagram, free. If you use Canva.com, it’s probably going to cost you $1. Facebook and Facebook Groups, free. Have you ever do some Facebook marketing? Let’s say you’re going to do $50, that’s $10 a day to promote your video. You’ll probably hit 4,000 people with that video. It’s well worth it. LinkedIn is free. Your MeetUp group is free. BiggerPockets, that’s $99 a year to have that. ActiveRain is free. Twitter is free. Your email and database, MailChimp, let’s just say you’re paying $50 a month. You’ll have free under 2,000 but you’re going to go beyond 2,000 contacts pretty fast with MailChimp.

All in all, $205 is really your cost to set up your marketing full-time. We need to add in the Facebook Ads to that. We could do that if you want to, but initially just getting us up and going, that’s $200. That’s enough there to really get you cranking and rock and rolling. That’s $1 a week if you post a new video every week. It’s $5 for Rev every time. You’re talking $6 to $7 every week. You spend that more on coffee or Red Bulls or green teas at Starbucks, why would you not market yourself?

Think about this. How many people are walking around right now, have a Starbucks cup, marketing somebody else’s information? I know I am, “Go Texas.” I know I’m wearing a t-shirt, Popeye, from virtual race that I ran for Yes.Fit. I got their logo there. We all are walking billboards. It’s time that you started getting your mobile billboard out there as well because this is where people’s eyes are looking at this.

Funny story, my son came home yesterday. Those little video games they play, something to do with the controller, there are these little toppers for the knobs. He couldn’t find the ones of his controller. He emailed them and they sent him a sponsorship application asking him to fill up this application and he’ll get a response within three to five days. They would send him new ones that would fit his controller, plus marketing packages for free, as long as he would wear it and wear around school and basically advertise and promote. Plus, he would be getting a weekly to monthly compensation as well.

He’s basically an affiliate?

Yeah. That was all because he asked a question.

That’s smart. For a company to get info out to their clients and let their clients be the warm-up advertising. How many people are walking around with a Note CAMP t-shirt or a We Close Notes t-shirt? I know many people that have used our t-shirts. I’ll give you an example. Robert Woods with Note MBA podcast, he made a comment one time. He came from Vegas at a Note convention a couple of years ago. I gave my Mastermind students there a t-shirt to wear. “We Close Notes” across the breast, and in the back it had a picture of our house paper logo and #whatdidyoucloselately. He was walking through the Las Vegas mall and people keep looking at his chest. Two things, he’s like, “That was smart marketing.” Second, “Now, I know what it feels like to be a woman.”

We’ve had Gerald Hubbard before, a buddy out at Dallas, wore a shirt that said, “Note Wars” on it. He wore it at the Fort Myers Beach and he landed a half million dollar investor. Why? Because it looked like a Star Wars logo. We have one coming out before Christmas, a new t-shirt. You’re going to really love it. “May the notes be with you.” We’re just waiting for the right time to launch it.

That’s the fun thing sometimes about the marketing. That’s why we did the whole Note CAMP t-shirts or we did the chive one. This is what I remember the most of the ones that we did for a while. Chive was famous for “Keep calm and carry on.” We did the whole “Keep calm and invest on” t-shirts in green because green is our logo. Also, green is one of the primary colors with “We Close Notes” on the back. We piggybacked, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” “Keep Calm and Invest On,” and a lot of people really love this one. Joe Markovitz, I think, was just recently caught wearing this on St. Patrick’s Day because it’s the only green t-shirt he had. We’ll probably have some Note Closers Podcast t-shirts come up. Black with a green logo on is what we’re thinking.

NCS 160 | Content Spider

Content Spider: If you don’t have a website, don’t let that stop you from posting.

You are a walking billboard either for somebody else’s product, why can’t you be a billboard or a marketing company for your own deals, your own note business, everything involved with that? We didn’t even talk about having a website on there. If you don’t have a website, don’t let that stop you from posting. Just have people link back into your LinkedIn profile. A lot of people can use your LinkedIn profile as your major website because it’s going to have most of your information anyway while you have your website being fixed or created. You can use Wix.com to create a pretty simple website. It’s not the most friendly thing but it’s also one of the easiest thing versus the beast that WordPress is.

I like “Notes and Nachos,” being something creative versus “We buy houses,” “Sell me your house,” because those look cheap. I know there’s plenty of people that wear those, that’s fine. Ron LeGrand has been famous for giving those t-shirts out and throwing them from the front of the stage as freebies out there. One of the funniest things I ever did, I was speaking in Philadelphia right about to start football season a couple of years back; Philadelphia, in front of the stage and a couple of hundred people in a Distressed Mortgage Expo. I am a big Cowboys fan. I went to the local Dallas Cowboy store and bought five white t-shirts that were rolled up so you can see the logo. When I got up on stage, I threw up a, “Who’s here a big Philadelphia Eagles fan? Who’s ready for football season?” All these people stood. I’m like, “Who wants a t-shirt?” I threw these Dallas Cowboys t-shirts at the people. It was the funniest thing, when they open them, “Shit. Screw this.”

The guys threw them back at me, which is great. It helped me market myself as a Cowboys fan, market about something besides real estate to get people cracking up and laughing. Anytime you make people laugh, anytime you can be humorous when you’re marketing, it will make things so much easier in what you do. It makes people take notice. One of the funniest things people like still is Homie the Clown, “Homie don’t play that.” One of the best posts we’ve ever had was the Instagram post on 24 Hours to Note CAMP. The last one, it blew up a couple of thousand likes across the board.

Then this next virtual one, everyone just loved the drinking from a fire hose.

I did boost that a little bit for $10 a week. It drove up a little bit. Still, if you have crappy marketing, you’ll spend money on stuff that nobody is going to like. Any other questions or comments about content spider, drop me an email, we’ll be glad to send this out to you. What we’ll do is we’ll take a picture of this and share it for you as well. If you could read my chicken scratch, if you want that, we’ll make an infographic about it and send it on what you’re doing. Hopefully, get started somewhere.

If you’re looking for some books on digital marketing, go grab Gary V.’s Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. It talks about how to create your message in a busy social media world. If you really want something that’s going to really drive you bonkers but give you so much information, Ryan Deiss with DigitalMarketer in a book called Digital Marketing for Dummies. This will give you a lot of the A-Z. It will literally drive you bonkers. There’s literally a lot of information. You can probably read the first ten pages and get enough information out of it. I know I do. There’s plenty of blogs out there on marketing. Kristie Whites we had on the podcast last week talking about some basic stuff that she’s doing for entrepreneurs.

Just do something. I don’t care if your spiders got two legs or eight legs. At least you’re doing something getting the word out, sharing your message. Trust me, you’ll raise more money, close more deals and gain more follows by doing something than just sitting in your home, twiddling your thumbs and. If you’d like to get more information on note investing and listen on the podcast, you can always text the word ‘notes’ to the phone number 72-000. We’ll send you a link, you can opt-in to that and you’ll be getting over 80 hours of videos and how to focus on the three F’s of note investing, how to find, fund and flip. We hope it had been valuable. Go out and make something happen. We see you all at the top.

 

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