EP 510 – Ten Tools To Help You Dominate

Winning in the real estate market means being able to reach the people you ought to close deals with and educate others about being better in the industry. Scott Carson is definitely winning it using the top ten marketing tools that have helped him dominate in the industry. Scott talks about these inexpensive tools that bring quality and great benefits. By allowing most of these apps or tools to work together, you can save so much time and become more productive. Learn more about these tools and how to set them up as Scott takes us further into each of them.

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Ten Tools To Help You Dominate

I talked about ten tools that helped me dominate. I thought I’d share that because I think a lot of these tools are very applicable to our business. Whether it’s the marketing side of the business, it’s the reach out, it’s the automation aspect of things. These are things that we use on a daily basis here at WeCloseNotes.com and with the Note Closers Show. I thought it would be a great topic for you. You definitely want to grab a piece of paper and pen and write some notes down. These ten tools have helped us grow. People think that we were in a huge staff. These have allowed us to run a very lean, mean and tight machine here at WCN. We use these with our podcasts. We use these with our video training. We use these with our workshops. We use these to market deals. We use all these tools in a variety of fashion. I think you will get a lot out of this episode. We’re not talking an arm and a leg. That’s the most important thing is that it’s relatively inexpensive, very cheap. More importantly, it saves you a lot of money and time for the most part.

Calendly

The first tool that I want to talk about with you is Calendly.com. This is a calendar application that you can do on your computer or on your cell phone and it’s a free cost for the most part. It’s very easy to use and it becomes in helping you monitor your time. I use it to time block my time each day and the right thing. If I’m going to have guests, I use this to schedule. I like it when they send me that link because then it will remind me. It will send me the link. Not only with the podcast but I use it when I’m reaching out to asset managers too. I sent an email out to asset managers. I’ve already had some use my Calendly schedule that I use just for the managers to start scheduling fifteen-minute blocks with me. If they’ve got anything on their books they can get rid of, they can schedule a quick phone call, they can look at their schedule and mine instantly, know when we’re available to talk. Also, if I have guests on, I can get their information. It’s not just their first name, last name, email and phone number. I’ll ask, “Do you have a link to your headshot? Do you have a link to your bio? Do you have your social media handles?”

That’s a great way where they can actually type that all in there. I don’t have to go back and I’ll try to hunt and find that stuff online. I can literally go into my Calendly schedule and there’s all the information for the person that I meet, whether it’s a link or it’s a straight photo. It’s such an easy thing for me to use. One of the most important things is you can set up the automatic reminders. If they get a text message, they get an email. How often they get that an hour before, 24 hours before, a week before. That’s helpful so you don’t have to go back and do that. You can set that schedule up once with everything and you go. It’s basically free. If you add multiple calendars, you can start paying for it, but it’s one of the most valuable tools that we’ve had to help me stay organized.

I’ve got one for a podcast schedule, one for talking with students and other investors, one for talking with asset managers. Another one when I do events, like a special purpose event like I did with Note CAMP. I created a special Calendly link for those three days and custom whether I want to be 30 minutes, fifteen minutes, an hour and fifteen. How I can customize and block up my calendar, what hours I have available, what I don’t have available. They were able to go in and pick their time. It was easy scheduling. All the speakers versus trying to track them down. I sent the link out to everybody. If they were late or they got the last left. If they jumped online, they were able to pick which time they want. Calendly is one of the top ten tools that we love.

Canva

You have known me talk about our second tool on a regular basis. It saves a lot of time as well is Canva.com. I highly recommend if you’re in real estate of any sort, using Canva to market for your images, to market your properties. We’ve been using a lot when we have assets available for sale. We’ll go in and create a nice-looking flyer for it. There’s a ton of images on there that are cheap or $1. I’ve had Canva for a while so I have a little bit different plan than most people do. Canva charges $12.99 a month for the most part. It’s still well-worth it. It can be used on a regular basis. I use it for episode art. I use it for logos, for designing websites when we want to create custom images.

All of us that have different social media tools or social media websites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Buffer. The same photo is not going to fit the same way with the header or the footers or whatever else. The good thing is Canva has everything in there, proper pixel size, proper size for everybody to use. That way you can customize it. It fits perfectly versus you have to crop it or squeeze it. Also if you’ve got a different thing that you’re doing, a different image, the pixel size, it needs to be exact. You can go on and custom size your thing. We’ve used this for flyers, events and marketing, besides just the images. The last few to create some nice things in there are out there. Also if you’re creating something and you want to send it to somebody for them to use, you can share projects or share images. If Shannon creates it, then she can share the image with me and go on and edit it as well and she can see it and I can see it immediately instead of having to share one login. That’s a nice thing when you’re working on a deal for somebody.

Lively

The third tool that I love using is Live.ly. We use this a lot with our video streaming when we go live on the podcast. Many of us have our personal page, we have a business page, we might have a group or two that we run on social media. We also have Twitter accounts. We also have LinkedIn accounts and it’s a lot of work for you to take and share, especially if you’re starting off a video doing a live stream, webinar or a lunch and learn. Have somebody go do that for you and share it to different groups. Live.ly will help you automate that. When we go live on Facebook, it recognizes we’re going live on my Facebook page. It will share it to my business page and my personal page and any other pages that I want to, whether it’s in the Note Closers Show or WeCloseNotes.com group. It shares it across those pages to the groups. Also, we have a lot of special purpose Note Closers groups across the country as well. I can actually have it shared across those 40 groups and it does it automatically.

You have your Twitter account or your LinkedIn account connected, it will automatically post a notice on Twitter and LinkedIn that you’re going live, which is a nice thing. This is pretty inexpensive at $19 a month. I don’t know how many videos you’re doing, but you’re doing it at least once a week and you’re sharing across the board and you’re doing it on multiple pages. $19 per month is less than $5 a week. It’s less than the price of a good latte at Starbucks. This shares it across the board and then automatically does it instead of having to hunt and peck and share it afterwards, it allows us to get a lot of great info and people watching the same time.

Marketing Tools: It’s easy to find potential listeners or even investors if you’re looking for people to listen to your topic or that fall on your niche.

Repurpose.io

Repurpose.io is a great software as well if you’re using videos or have an audio podcast or video. This is a great thing. I had an interview with the founder and creator of Hani Mourra out of Toronto. If you share a video to Facebook, it will help you automatically upload that video to YouTube by setting your presets, your descriptions, your keywords, even uploading your artwork to it. If you do a podcast, it can actually connect into your podcast feed, pull that into YouTube and create a YouTube video with a still image and template that you can use as well. This won’t work with a personal page. If you do a business page, Facebook automatically creates the wording of what you’re talking about.

Once you upload a video to Facebook, you go and you click one button to enabled captions. It will pull the caption up there and create a nice either square or horizontal video that you can use on other platforms using the captions that come across. Because a lot of people are watching videos and just reading versus listening. It will also create custom videos for Instagram, Facebook Stories, Twitter LinkedIn. It’s cool to how I can create these custom images and custom headers and footers to go along with it so you look sharp. This is $20 per month. Some people were charging $1,500 a month for this same service to create these Instagram stories with the title and then the wording you want across. It’s so much cheaper and just as effective and looks good. It takes a little bit of setup time. The longest time to do is set up your workflows, where you’re pulling the video from, where you’re pulling on you from, where’s it going to, what you want that to look like. You can share a variety of different things. We pull videos that drop it into our Dropbox or in our Google Drive or upload directly. This saves hours and hours of work.

For those of you that are doing Facebook Lives out there, you’re marketing, it takes forever to download from Facebook. Repurpose recognizes it. You can hit a few buttons and then by the time you get your workflow done, it’s uploaded to YouTube in a shorter time than what it would take to download the video from Facebook. Those four tools help us a ton. Number five, LinkedIn. Many of you know we have a LinkedIn account. This is something that has helped us out tremendously even after they took away the ability to export your contacts and include their email address. LinkedIn, the free account works well from basically everybody out there. This allows us to focus on business niche. You say audience for our podcast when we target people that way. One of the things that we like to do is you can go on to LinkedIn and just type in real estate investor or note investor. It’ll pull up a huge list of people in those categories. That’s one way we’ve helped grow my LinkedIn profile to over 16,000 connections. I think I’m in the top 5%, 10% of connections and then get over 15,000. I use this with asset managers on a regular basis. Whatever you’re looking, asset managers, secondary marketing professionals. It’s a great tool that we use to help expand our database and connect with people.

I’ve got connections to banks and had deals using the free connections and just asking if you can talk with them. I’ll often post articles on LinkedIn and this gets a lot of play. A lot of people like my articles and I can see if they like look at my profile. That way is a great way to connect with people. That’s a funny thing. People can see who’s looking at your profile. It’s easy to find potential audience or even investors if you’re looking for people to read your topic or to follow your niche. LinkedIn groups is a great way to leverage all the connections on LinkedIn. There are some big groups out there that have 190,000, 200,000 members, 50,000 investors, 100,000 investors. It depends on what niche you’re focused on, but that’s a great way to be posting to and adding people to your database. I’m talking about a free account.

If you want to upgrade to a paid account, that’s great. There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think you need to have a year-long. Maybe if you’re doing some prospecting, have a paid account so you have a few extra and the ability to send some emails to asset managers in your InMails. That might be something that’s worthwhile for a while, but for the most part, your free account will work fine enough for you. Just make sure it’s 100% complete and you have an updated photo. I see a lot of people that have uncompleted or partially completed profiles and nobody’s connecting with them because they’re like, “I don’t know if this is a real profile.” Put your face on there and the first and foremost in the back image and then you’re allowed to put a lot of information in your LinkedIn profile information. That’s a great thing.

Buffer.com

Buffer.com, we’re excited. I’ve got a special episode with the head of PR from Buffer, Hailley Griffis. It will be a special episode. Buffer allows for us to preschedule or automate our postings. Shannon handles our buffer account for the most part, but it allows for us to take the images we’ve created or the posts or the articles and Shannon can go in and schedule so that they go out across the different platforms at different times. We use Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter. You can use Pinterest, your business, your personal accounts. There’s a bunch of other accounts you can link into it as well. It’s such a cool tool.

Restream.io

Basically, most people can get the eight social accounts and 100 posts a month. That’s three a day. That’s not bad at all. That’s what most of you would need anyway, just to set up your Twitter account, your LinkedIn. Most people are like, “I’m going to have to share.” No, I’ll just go to Buffer and set it all up at once. You can see the times and it’s such a great tool. It’s only $15 a month beyond the free account on what we pay for. The free account comes with three or four profiles, but for $15 a month. You go out and get in front of your audience or your online social media stuff. Seven. This is something that we’ve been using more is Restream.io. We you use it for a variety of reasons. One, if I’m batching video recordings or podcast episodes or interviews in a day. I’ll give an example. I recorded ten interviews over two days at the mastermind I did here in Austin. I didn’t want to blast those a lot in one day. What we did is we uploaded the videos and then we released one video via Restream.io to our social accounts, our Facebook, our YouTube, our Twitter accounts. You can upload 40 to 50 different ways to stream your video through Twitch and to so many other great ways to share and link.

When you have LinkedIn live video available, you have the ability to do that, but it shares it and it looks like you’re live. You can set up events with the paid version. You can schedule things. When we are traveling and I was not going to be able to do live episodes because of traveling. I had these episodes, a group of them batched. What I did is I set up Monday through Friday, I want this video. Videos are shared without me thinking about it to my social media accounts. Of course, once I shared it to Facebook, Repurpose.io and Live.ly kicked in to pick those things up so I was able to make easily share it across the platform. It allows me to schedule the live streams across multiple platforms. Some things I don’t even recognize where I can restream to if I had an account with it. YouTube, Facebook, both my personal and business profiles. Of course Periscope with Twitter. Live video will incorporate. I want to use Restream to do a live stream, I could literally bring in and share it and then answer people from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter as they’re commenting live on them as well. It’s pretty cool. It’s $19 a month. I pay that $19 a month, that gets me five events I can have scheduled at a time.

YouTube Community

Also, I can upload 25 videos to it which is pretty cool. That gets me across four or five different platforms. I could add more, but most of the platforms, for the most part, YouTube, Facebook, and Periscope, which is with Twitter for the most part. If I wanted to add Twitch or some of these other accounts that allow for video live streaming, I could do that as well at no additional cost. YouTube, but not just YouTube videos. The YouTube Community. Video is such a huge thing these days and YouTube made some great adjustments and added this little feature to your homepage that most people don’t know about. It’s a community and the community feature allows for you to post notices that go out to your subscribers.

Marketing Tools: The tools save time and help automate the business.

People can go to your community and see what you’ve posted, your comment or follow along. It’s been a cool thing as we have grown our YouTube audience, I think I’m at 2,600, 2,700 subscribers. I want to grow that to over 10,000, if not more than that. This is a great free feature to communicate with subscribers, wish them a Happy Holiday, Happy 4th of July or Happy Labor Day. I ran a poll and asked what days they listen to video or watch their videos and that’s helped us out with some of our posting and scheduling. It allows you to announce new episodes and new videos are available.

If you upload a video, they’re going to be notified, “Scott uploaded a video.” This is still a great way, especially at the five-minute mark, “Check out our new case study video that we did, our new lunch and learn that’s going on.” You get a lot of free to post links, surveys, even images to your audience and as a cool feature that YouTube just added. That’s free. That’s with every account. If you’ve got a Gmail account, you’ve got a YouTube account and you have a YouTube Community link on your page if you upload videos. It’s a great way to share and grow your audience out there.

Google Trends

Number nine, Google Trends is something I’ve used. I’ve been spending a lot more time on when I’m trying to come up with a blog article or a video name. I look at what’s trending out there, what’s doing well, what’s not doing so well. It’s free. It allows me to do some effective keyword searches and see what works well. I’ll give an example. I looked at cashflow versus financial independence for an article that I rolled out. Actually, it was pretty close. Cashflow is a little bit higher than financial independence, but I can look at the last twelve months, the last three months, the last week to see how specific keywords are trending and look at related query, see what are the people looking for. What are some of the other subtitle things they’re looking for that I can add into the words to help boost that for my search engine optimization so that it does well on Google. I’ve already noticed an uptick and some videos that we’ve used for that have helped us out with it. If you’re posting, creating a blog or video, Google Trends is something that’s helpful when you’re looking at topics and names. You can do a whole variety of things and this is also free.

Text Marketing Messages

The last tool, it’s probably the most tool that we use on a regular basis. This is Text SMS Marketing. You have known me talk about this. Some of you have seen if you’re watching a video on YouTube or on Facebook, you’ve heard me talk about, “If you’d like get more information, just text the word, NOTES, and send it to 72000.” That’s a MOBIT thing. “If you want to get on my deal sheet, text DEALS to 72000.” It’s a great way for you to be able to communicate. I use this when I’m speaking. You can also use another service call to FixYourFunnel. It doesn’t use five number like I use. That’s one of the things I love about it. FixYourFunnels needs a ten-digit phone number, which is fine. I like using the five-digit phone number because it’s easier for people to remember 72000 versus 480-512-565-whatever. I have ten different keywords that I use. I think FixYourFunnel allows you to use one to begin with. It’s a little bit cheaper. I use this primarily if I’m out speaking or if I’m giving a presentation. I know a lot of people were going out and attending meeting groups or REIA clubs and giving short presentations or doing lunch and learns.

If you’re going to places that they’re not going to give you the registration list, then I use this because about 20%, 25% of the audience will actually pull up their phone to text NOTES to 72000, and it automatically sends a link to the presentation. I can also send on a link to YouTube channels so they can download training and all that good stuff. That’s a great call to action. FixYourFunnel is $49 a month. That gives you one keyword, one phone number. I’m paying $127 a month with MOBIT and that gives me up to ten keywords that I can use. You’re going to pay also a per text message sent out to your contacts. It’s something to keep in mind too. It’s just not the monthly thing. If you’re going to send a response out to your audience. If it’s just text messages marketing, something that you’re going to do on a regular basis. It’s going to cost you. I think I pay $195 for 5,000 outgoing text messages. You want to make sure it stays under that 160 character for a text message and make sure you’re sending out to good phone numbers because people have to opt-in for. That’s why you get them to text in first so that you can communicate out with them.

It’s been a great way for us to share our classes, share our workshops, share our special events. Because I can send a text message, “Listen to this new episode of the podcast. We’ve got a workshop, a flash sale. We’ve got a deal. Are you looking for deals in Kansas? Here’s the link to the lead page.” Those ten tools have done a lot to me. The best thing I’m going to say is they’ve allowed me to save a lot of time and money. Some will cost a little bit. If you figure in $19 and $20, $127, I’m paying less than $200 combined for those ten tools. Those ten tools allow me to run a marketing staff of not only myself and Shannon who handles some stuff, but us to do a lot of stuff automated so I don’t have to worry about hiring another assistant or another VA to do this stuff. These are simple things that you can use out. We have a VA manage some of these things. Of course, we have and still do. Those are some things you need to do as well. It was the tools makes it easy for them to share. Why does it make it easy? Because then that saves you time that you don’t have to hire them for 40 hours a week. Maybe it’s ten hours a week to set up these things. Maybe instead of needing four people, you have two people or one person because you’re effectively using the tools. What I tell people is if you build it, they will come.

These are the ten tools that have helped us build our 50,000-megawatt blow torch of a podcast and our training systems so that we spend more time on good stuff versus working on marketing. Set these tools up. Saves us hours, saves us time, helps us automate and schedule versus me having to stop what I’m doing at 7:00 PM to post something. Hopefully you go out and take that. Once again, I’ll do a quick recap of those ten tools. First one is Calendly.com, Canva.com, Live.ly or Repurpose.io, LinkedIn, Buffer.com, Restream.io, the YouTube Community feature. If you’d like a 25% discount on Restream, message me, send me an email. I’ll get you a link to my 25% off your $20 a month membership. Google Trends, MOBIT or FixYourFunnel for text message marketing. Those are the ten tools that we highly recommend that anybody should be using to help you with your marketing and get to knock some things out. Help you anywhere from time blocking your time to be able to communicate faster and easier with your audience.

Notice we didn’t mention a CRM tool or ESP, Email Service Provider. You need that regardless, but these are the ways to communicate or share your time or time block your time, be able to communicate easier and faster with your audience. That’s what we were looking for. Your audience of real estate investors of note investors, funder sources of bankers, of your contacts at local clubs, with people that you meet out speaking or networking. You want to have an easy way to communicate with those people to save you time, money and be more efficient. That’s what we’re all looking for. Hopefully you enjoy those ten tools that help us dominate. If you take them and start implementing them, you don’t have to do it all at once, but do one at a time. You start sharing some of these tools. You’ll be like, “Why didn’t I not start using these tools?” Go out and make something happen. If you use those tools, I guarantee we will see you at the top.

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