EP 526 – Ten Awesome Tools To Scale Your Note Business

NCS 526 | Note Business Tools

NCS 526 | Note Business Tools

 

Scaling your business will be much easier and quicker when you make use of some readily accessible tools. Today, Scott Carson helps scale your business more conveniently by breaking down ten tools to help market and grow your note business. These tools allow you to dominate in your niche and market your services the right way. Your marketing success depends on your strategies and with these tools you will learn how to respect your own schedule, earn the right audience, and build business integrity.

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Ten Awesome Tools To Scale Your Note Business

I want to share something with you because we’ve got some great stuff here that we’ve been using. I’ve been testing and seeing immediate results. There are some things that we’ve used before. I am not sure that we’ve discussed some of those on here as a coaching call. I wanted to dive into this content wherever you are located and dive into these things because I’m seeing some great things out here and it’s something that you can use. One of the things a lot of people think of this is when we share something, they think of one thing and they don’t necessarily think of using it in other ways to help their business. That’s where I wanted to come with that I know. We talked previously in the past about ten of our tools that we use. These are different ones that we have used and have discovered, been shared with or started spending more time on it as we’ve had some time to dive into that. You will definitely enjoy what we’re about to share with you. I call this the Ten Unique Ways to Market Your Note Business. It depends on what you’re doing or what you’ve used in the past, you’re going to enjoy this.

Creating Landing Page

What’s great about these is it’s something that we’ve used and we continue to use these. You will enjoy it because it’ll save you time, money and if not, make you some money because it’ll save you some time and resources for you. A lot of people forget about this. We get so used to having one website that we forget about the opportunity to create different landing pages. This is a big value thing that you need to look at any type of real estate business, any type of notes, debt, fixing, flipping and wholesaling is having different landing pages. What does that mean? We Close Notes is our main website, but we also have a variety of different landing pages that we have for specific things. You can use MailChimp and link the landing pages. You can use that for your CRM. It will create a landing page for you. Infusionsoft, we incorporated this.

What’s also nice is that you’ve got two of the major ones out there. That’s LeadPages.net, which we use a lot of. We’ve used LeadPages for the different Note CAMPs, for some of the Virtual Workshops, we’ve used that for webinar replays in the past. LeadPages is easy to use. We use ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels is a great landing page creator as well. Social media firms that represent clients said they build a landing page on both LeadPages and ClickFunnels for their clients in case one of them goes down. If one of them is updating and one of them goes down for a period, they can easily switch over and reforward the link to it. I have LeadPages, I have ClickFunnels pages. It has a cost. It’s not free to have, but it’s a valuable thing because we use it for a variety of things. For you out there that are doing stuff, you need to have a lead page that is separate from your website. It’s a separate thing that you share to Facebook. You market it to your social media and you post it to LinkedIn. Every time you’re telling your story and trying to get the word out, if you don’t have the money to buy or to get a new website created, LeadPages are a cheaper alternative to set something up. It’s simple to use.

Sample case studies, I’ve seen this used a lot. People will share their top three deals and have an opt-in page for their clients. They also have an opt-in page for investors. They have a separate landing page for the business, for their investors, for the clienteles they have at a different networking club or different travel aspect. Assets sales, I’ve seen people plug and play assets on a Leadpages or ClickFunnels landing page because it’s easy to do. Educational stuff, you’re going to be using education on there. It’s a great place to post. We use ClickFunnels for our Note Buying Blueprint. It’s NoteBlueprint.com, if you want to click on there. It houses all these videos and all these training for our membership area and it’s easy to use. It’s a little bit more robust than LeadPages. It’s got some more options than LeadPages does, than ClickFunnels does. You need to have some different landing pages. Think about this if you network in different states, if you have different vendors, if you do a website, you want to have a link that forwards them to a different landing page if you have different assets in Ohio or Michigan that you could swap out without having to update your main website.

We’ve seen more people had four or five different landing pages. Their main website stayed pretty much the same. They just changed the link that it forwarded to for their deals that they could swap in and swap out of stuff. You’ e got to have that landing page for content. If you’re going to do an event or you’re doing some asset sales or a special thing, you may want to create a landing page just for those deals or as an opportunity to do that. If you’re going to add an education or going to do a workshop or a lunch and learn or maybe a networking event, creating a sample landing page is very simple to use.

It allows you to customize especially LeadPages, it’s easy to drag and drop and move things around. Remember, our Mastermind page as a lead page or Note CAMP Bootcamp, the commercial or the actual residential stuff have all been lead pages. We’ve seen great hits off of them. We’ve seen anywhere from ten people showing up for a webinar replay, we’ve shared there all the way to 6,000 hits to LeadPages. Atlantis is one of the top ten landing pages in the month of October 2018. We use it. It’s not very expensive for the most part. A lot of marketers are using ClickFunnels and/or LeadPages or using both. We use both for a variety of reasons because Leadpages is easy to use. We use ClickFunnels for our coaching stuff. That was number ten.

Updating LinkedIn Profile Summary

Number nine, this is something that I’ve heard banged in my head over and over again by our buddy, Marcus Murphy, who works at DigitalMarketer, who’s also in the LinkedIn Advisory Board. This is updating and using your LinkedIn profile summary. LinkedIn is great, but did you know that you’re going to have 2,000 characters and it comes out about 350 to 400 words in your profile summary? That’s a very searchable thing on LinkedIn. LinkedIn becomes more and more searchable as people are using it to find jobs or connect with people. You’d be silly not to have that much information, you use that to the max of your ability.

It boosts your LinkedIn SEO because you can use it for keywords and things that you’re involved with. It’s like keyword prepping. At the bottom of the section, it allows you to upload images. I’ve upload SlideShare, PowerPoint presentations that I get asked on quite a bit. You can upload videos to it. If you may want to upload your videos or your lunch and learns or deals before and after. It’s a great thing to post different events, videos and things like that to help drive stuff in marketing. This is completely free while the number ten may cost you something. The thing to keep in mind is that it’s updating your LinkedIn profile summary and it’s completely free and you might as well use it.

You might as well max it out for up to 2,000 characters. Talk about what you’re doing, talk about what your focus is, share a little bit about you. You might want to take one of your about you videos and transcribe the video and then drop that in there and see how it works for you. 15 to 20 minutes of videos should give you enough. It’s a lot more than what you need. You can narrow it down and edit it down to make it a very strong profile. I’ve made some tweaks to my summary and it helped me a lot to do. It’s relatively easy to go in and do. Once again, the free version of LinkedIn, it works for, you don’t even have the advanced version to be able to update it.

Amazon Author Page

Number eight, another free thing to have is an Amazon Author Page. What does that have to do with anything? It’s free. Amazon is becoming more and more a search engine, whether you like it or not, with different things that are available. There are people on there searching for things. You might as well promote your business on there of some sort. What do I mean by this? Amazon.com, go on there and create an author page. If you’ve got eBooks or videos or something like that, create an author page. It doesn’t cost you anything. It’s free. You can add your bio, you can add your eBooks to it. If you’re a coauthor on a different book, that’s a part of that. Go ahead and post that in there as well. It allows you to upload five or six photos and then also a video. You may want to put your About You video and we talked about putting on your LinkedIn profile.

NCS 526 | Note Business Tools

Note Business Tools: We get so used to having one website that we forget about the opportunity to create different landing pages.

 

What I like about this is I’m an author of a couple books and co-author of a couple more, but I like the fact that it allows for you to link your RSS feed to your blog. I don’t have a blog, but I do have a podcast, which works a lot as a vlog. What I simply did is I took my podcast feed. If you’ve got a YouTube channel of YouTube videos, you put your YouTube feed under there and it will upload every time you upload a new content. Every time we have an episode on The Note Closers Show that goes live, it automatically uploads it straight from our RSS feed on our hosting platform. We have all these 500 episodes uploaded to Amazon.com. It’s starting to show up in search engines. That’s the beautiful thing. If you’re on regular marketing, maybe you’re not writing about real estate. Maybe that’s just a hobby, you’re writing about something else. It would be silly not to be doing this. We all like free.

We have seen people that have started to come over that, “I came across you on Amazon. I saw your book, ordered your book. I reached out and started listening to the podcast.” I was like, “That’s a cool thing.” I didn’t know about this. I had a buddy of mine ell me this at a Podcast Marketing Mastermind event. I immediately did it and I share it with a few people, but I haven’t shared it here with you. It’s a valuable thing for you to do. If you’ve got a book, if you don’t have a book, it’s pretty easy to write book, take it, do a couple of webinars, transcribe it and go from there.

Instagram Live

Next one, Instagram Live. This is something that a lot of people forget about. One of the most powerful things that everybody could do is you can create your own mini-summit. It’s very easy to do. It’s so easy, I forget about it sometimes, but it’s effective, especially if you’ve got a pretty responsive audience. You can do up to a sixteen-minute video on Instagram Live and also bring others on. My buddy, Adam Schaeuble, from the Million Pound Mission and Casting the Pod shared this with me. I thought it was brilliant because what he does is he’ll bring on and in an hour time, three other people besides him and he’ll have them on fifteen-minutes each. He’s in the fitness industry. He talks something about work-outs and he brings out different podcasters and they share the podcast, doing a preview to it being released or a post-view once it’s released to share people to drive to it. The great thing is he’ll bring on him plus three others and an hour period of time gives the other three people fifteen minutes. He starts off five or ten minutes, fifteen and then fifteen and then fifteen. He then has five or ten minutes in the back end to wrap it up. You can only have one person on with you at the time. He’s got to make sure that these other people are scheduled to come on. They’ve also got to be following him.

They also request to be online on here and they must follow you. That’s the one thing. If you’re going to be doing this and people go, “Make sure you go and follow me. When I go live here, I can see you pop-up and you’re going to ask to join. You’d be live on this.” The nice thing is when I go live, it alerts all my followers when I’m live. If somebody jumps on and they’re live on my little mini-summit, they’ll share that they’re going live across there. It’s a great way to draft off each other’s aspect. If you bring on three people, you drafted on three people’s lists and it’s a cool thing. It allows you to connect to the viewers. You can always see who’s viewed it or has viewed it. It’s a great way to go back after you’re done and connect with viewers, especially if you’re doing a mini-summit on real estate or note investing. Maybe you’re at an expo and you don’t want to have a ton of content, it’s nice you can do an Instagram Live with somebody, sit in a quiet spot, maybe in your hotel rooms and doing this live directly back and forth to each other to engage.

I found a great basic here. We have one lady start a Live. Somebody sent a request to being in the live video. It popped up where she clicked on it and then he then came live on her live stream and it’s a split camera. It’s usually 50/50 or you’ll see yours in a smaller screen and the person you have on in a bigger screen or vice versa. It will split the screen, which is pretty cool. This is a cool tool. I don’t think anybody’s using enough of it and we’re going to be using more of this in our note investing base. One of the things that we’re thinking about doing specifically as we’re sharing and selling assets off, having the realtor, having a title, you could almost do have your vendors get on there if they’re on Instagram and share a little bit about what’s going on. We’re doing this coaching call on Monday night. It’s a possibility you could bring on and do some three mini one-on-one with some students if you wanted to. If you want to do a live coaching, that’s what Adam does mostly with the stuff. He does a live coaching call on Tuesday nights at 8:00 Eastern, brings on three people in an hour, coaching them through something and then that’s his thing. He shares it to his story to save it.

Calendly

Number six is Calendly.com. We talked about a lot of times, you have to be a master of your schedule. If you don’t respect your calendar, nobody else will respect it for you. The thing that you’ve got to keep in mind is I have enjoyed Calendly.com. We use it for a variety of things from not only booking one-on-one calls with me, but also booking scheduled speakers for our Wednesday night podcasts. We also use it for Note Night in America on Monday nights as well. I use it for block for either I’m going to have a guest on or if I have people that want to speak with me throughout the day that I put in hours in the morning to three hours in the afternoon. This way they can connect with me and I can collect information from them. Calendly is pretty inexpensive, but I love it the most. Once I started using this, this helped me control my schedule. I time block my calls for investors anywhere from 15 to 60 minutes, depends on which category. I can paste my link or my thing and text it to people, get them to opt in if we’re exchanging back and forth. It’s nice because I can collect info of people who have reached out to or are scheduled with it all in one spot.

Specifically what I like doing is when I use the podcast, I’ll ask more questions on that link than I do in others. I collect their phone, their email. If they have a social handle they would prefer to use or a focus of the call, I’ll give an option. It’s nice because you can change the questions asked. If it’s complicated, you can make it very simple. It auto-populates the name, email, phone number. I like to add a little bit extra so that way it makes it easy especially with our podcast. I collect their headshots, I collect their bios, their preferred social media handles and then any other links they’re promoting during my podcast or during the episode that we’re talking about. If they have a website, I can go to look at about their business. We use it for a variety of reasons. It comes in handy and I absolutely love it. I’ll share how we’re using a little bit more on something else here.

Getting A New Service Provider

The fifth tool as we’re getting to the top five now is a new service we’ve started using as a substitute for what we do mainline with our Mobit account. If you text, Notes, to send in 2000, maybe you’ve opted into that, that’s our Mobit service. What happens when you go out and you’re meeting new people collecting business cards, but they don’t have an email address. You’ve got a list of people that attended but you didn’t get their email address. You just got their phone numbers, which is frustrating. This happened in a couple of groups that I’ve gone to. When I’m going out networking and I get their list of emails or phone numbers, I’m like, “Damn all.”

I went and found a pretty cheap alternative to be able to reach out and test drive it and it’s been worked out and it’s EZTexting.com. You usually get 200 free text messages when you first sign up for it, which you can go through pretty fast. This allows you to upload a list. You have heard me talk about Slydial and Slybroadcast. This is a similar service, but for text messaging. For $49 a month, you’ll get up to 1,000 text messages. It’s pretty appropriate for most people. One key word and you upload the list, you can upload their first name, last name, email, a cell phone number. You can maximize it. It’s great for a new list because you can then send out a text message if the emails or the text message bounce back, you know who’s clean. I can direct people to your calendar link.

This is one thing that I did is I got a list of 268 people that we’ve networked with in the last two weeks from different events I’ve gone to. I said, “I want to remind you, this is what I do. I’d love to visit with you one-on-one if you’re interested. Here’s my link to my calendar. Let’s talk.” I also included a link to a little short video, a one-minute video which had my face and smiles on it. I ended up getting 85% received. Out of those, I had immediately twelve people respond back and schedule time with me to talk about real estate and deals like this. They also got some other cool tools that you can use to help you with some great opt-ins and other things like that. I like to mass-upload phone numbers because a lot of people upload emails to our database but if we don’t get emails, then we’re SLL.

NCS 526 | Note Business Tools

Note Business Tools: One of the most powerful things that everybody could do is to create your own mini summit.

 

What I’ve done is upload phone numbers, get them to opt-in to something and that’s why I’m grabbing their emails. They can schedule with me on Calendly. I’ve got their email address besides just their telephone phone number. I can send the same message, I can customize if I have the first names and the last names. I could customize it to Joel and Fernando and Laura and anybody else out there. That’s a cool thing to do. Some people have used some other text message note investors are using. They get the cell phone numbers of their lenders or their borrowers and they send a text reminder, “Rent is due.” You’re seeing more and more of that on the business space, which is great.

Survey Monkey

Number four is something that we use about every month for some reason. It’s a nice data collection being a little bit more advanced than Calendly. It’s Survey Monkey. How many of you have ever sent a survey out to your database, your listeners, your investors, the people you network with? Not many of you have. It’s about a 30% response rate with surveys. It’s not 80% open rate like a text message, but it’s also a lot better than an email blast of people connecting. We’ve used Survey Monkey for Note CAMP on a regular basis. Since we started with it, we collected more information about those attending our different events. It helped us out tremendously by being able to help us take a deeper dive into the experience levels of our students, how many times they’ve been on before, where they’re marketing, what their needs are, what they’re looking to accomplish. Do they have funds to invest? What are their favorite states?

It has helped us out with also our vendors and sponsors for those events too. It helped us specifically create several hotlists of people that are invested in specific states. We can pull that when we asked them specific question. I know many people have used it when we ask if people had an IRA or if they were looking to joint venture. Yes, no, maybe as a great list to use also. This is something everybody should do. If you’re in real estate, the more knowledge and more information you have about your database like birthdays, experience levels, how many deals they’ve done, even how much are they looking to invest. There are some questions you can add there to help you do some deeper dives down into your audience so that you’ve got a great list. You may not need to do too many of these. Once you’ve got enough people in your database or have answered your questions, it could be on your hotlist when you have a dealing to get funded or a list of assets coming in. Now you’ve got people to reach out to. All our Survey Monkeys, we keep adding to it and it’s come in handy with us moving assets and there are massive sales.

LinkedIn Recommendation

Number three is one I know that we’ve used pretty much everybody. I have heard about this and it’s the LinkedIn Recommendation when you’re asking for Recommendation on LinkedIn. I don’t think many of us use it enough. When I looked at my LinkedIn profile now, I was like, “I’ve given a lot of recommendations out to people, but I haven’t received as many as I’ve given.” It’s an easy thing to get a great little testimonial from somebody, your clients, your friends, funding partners, people you’ve worked with, your peers, your vendors as a great way to boost your LinkedIn profile but also take it a little bit further. These are easy to invite.

If you’re connected on LinkedIn, you can send anybody a LinkedIn recommendation. Would you write me a LinkedIn invite that we worked together? Here’s what I was doing here and we were at separate locations. It’s a great way to do it. This is very similar to getting a five-star review or getting a testimonial on your website, a positive Yelp review, a positive iTunes review, a positive Amazon review. I like them because the marketing is done for you. You’ve got the headshot, the person’s name when they did this and a short little quote there from most people that can be a good infographic that you can copy-paste and create a social image about it. Maybe you have a bunch of these that you worked with. Maybe it’s a video that you play constantly on one of your landing pages. Maybe it’s a video that plays on your main website. Maybe it’s something that’s on your YouTube channel. Maybe it’s something you just add to your executive summary when you’re passing that out to investment clubs.

It’s a great way to add testimonials and recommendations and social proof that you know what you’re doing on your websites. This is a great thing. You can share this to Facebook. I like sharing these to LinkedIn. You should be using this more so, and many of us dropped the ball because we forget about it. Anybody that’s reading this, if you send me a recommendation and send me an email that say, “Scott, I would love a recommendation from you,” I would be glad to do that for each and every one of you as long as you do one in return for me as well. If you’re connected on LinkedIn, go on there, look for the recommendations, ask for a recommendation and I’ll send it and then I can easily send a recommendation back. As long as it’s done, it’s a win-win across the board.

Many of us have used it before, but I don’t think we use it enough. We get so bogged to be on LinkedIn. We forget the fact that we can take that and use it in other places. It’s a great way to help you market your skills, your services, who you are and what you are out there for everybody. It’s a great recommendation for you. If they’re not going to answer, they’re not going to answer a recommendation, but if you’d like to have a recommendation from me, ask for one via LinkedIn and I’ll be glad to respond back and I’ll ask you to do the same thing as well. Think about that, your joint venture partners, your funding partners, your vendors, there are so many things that you can do with this to make it effective for you. That’s a thing to keep in mind. That was number three.

Short Videos

Number two, this is something we all forget about is short videos. Use short videos to market your note business. What do I mean by short videos? I’m not talking about recording a webinar about an hour-long or doing an Instagram TV live thing, which is not bad. If you’re getting people to respond, let’s face it, our phones allow us to do an audio record where you can send that. It’s handy to take a short little video and customize it when you’re sending that text message or when somebody opts into your website. What I’ve been doing the last few months is a simple thing. There are services out there like BombBomb and some others that are expensive. This is a simple thing and you can see on here that someone opted in my website, Eugene, “I want to get more information on something now.” He gets an autoresponder but I got the link to, “So and so opted into your website,” Eugene from Los Angeles, California.

I pulled out my cell phone. I took a one-minute video and this works really good about a minute and I sent that video as an attachment to the long text message. I sent it to Eugene and said, “Thanks for opting in the website. I saw that you’re interested in this on the website and I would love to visit with you. I’m going to include my link to my Calendly below so you can pick out some time to schedule and let’s talk.” This guy has already opted in my website for something. He’s getting an update, white pages or something like that back to him, a report for more information. He got a personal text message from me and it’s got my cell phone number, I got his cell phone number. He can watch that and then he can click on the link and book.

People are raving about this like, “You took the time to send me a short video. I’m actually talking to Scott Carson. You sent me this video.” I customized it, “How’s the weather in LA now? I hope it’s doing well,” and I talk about the time, “It’s Monday at 10:39 AM. I’d love to visit with you regarding this, use the link below and let’s talk.” We go from there. If they’re using a landline, he puts a landline and not a phone number of they’re cellphone, this isn’t going to work, but this is just an extra touch and extra way to reach out and connect with your investors. Connect with your database. Maybe you’ve got people that’s looking to buying assets. Maybe you’ve got people who are looking at selling assets. Maybe it’s people you’re connecting with and going from there. If you’ve got a list of things from people, we’ve used this also short videos in a variety of other things.I use some short videos like this for my smartphone because we’re all on our smartphones. When I see somebody comment something interesting in a Facebook group that I like, I started pulling up the video to comment via video that way. I’m starting to see an increase and engagement on those and also increased views and responses, which is nice too. That can boost you to the top of some different Facebook groups if you’re posting a video.

NCS 526 | Note Business Tools

Note Business Tools: LinkedIn Recommendations is a great way to help you market your skills, your services, who you are, and what you are out there for everybody.

 

Everything is on video. Make it easy straight from my smartphone. One thing we’ve also been doing is I’m starting inserting videos in the emails a little bit more about what the email is about. I use the video right from the top for some of you know that when we send emails with replays, we put the video replay at the top a little bit. I’ve been doing it a little bit more so. It’s the same thing I did straight from my smartphone, a short 5 to 10-minute video, “It was great meeting you at the networking event.” Especially when you’ve got business cards, like you’ve got a stack of them. Individually you could do that. If you’ve got a bigger list or they give you the list or maybe you want to upload a video to the meetup group or the Facebook group or whatever it is. I do a short little video and then I upload it to YouTube as unlisted so nobody else sees it unless they’ve got a link.

I’ve been using this link, a very short video. I use a two-minute video, I call it my pitch video. We send this out to asset managers or put a link when I send it out via LinkedIn, “Here’s what I do, here’s what I focus on.” People were like, “You did take the time to network with us or to connect with us.” People have liked it. It’s a great way to talk about a deal. Some of you will be seeing that. We’ve been refilming videos on short, a little bit of, “Here’s a deal that we’re working on. Here are the aspects.” People who watch those, which is great. It’s fine by me. It’s driven up our engagement and some of the things and so maybe you need to include a short little video instead of a longer written email to your database. It’s a great way to get people build rapport with you. These have been pretty valuable. I’ve seen with all leases. I took the time with this because these are some things that can set you way apart, not only just in your notes and real estate business, but in other aspects. If you have a job or hobbies or passionate you’re doing, this is a great way to set yourself apart and get people rocking and rolling for you. Hopefully, we have given you some ideas to help you do different things.

Upwork

For the number one tool out of these top ten tools that you’ll like, it can surprise you a little bit. I was reminded more of it and I’ve used it before. I said, “Let me jump on this and dive into it again because it’s a great way, not only to save time but also save money and help you exponentially grow your business in a whole lot smarter way versus you think any of you got to go out and hire somebody full time.” What am I talking about? I’m talking about using Upwork.com. We’ve used this to hire several VAs and I was very surprised. I was thinking it’s $5, $7 an hour. I’ve got a couple for $3.25 an hour that are killing it and doing well.

If they put in 40 hours a week, it’s $140 to pay for them to do a lot of grunt work on different things. It’s been a great way if you need seasonal work and short term projects or even longer-term projects. Many of you need somebody to help you pull data entry and jumping in and surfing on county websites. You could record a short video showing exactly how to do the job or you need something to do some basic stuff for you. This is a great way to do it. They’ve changed some things up which made it very easy for me and even some auto generated forms and job postings that I was able to use. Many of you are looking to raise capital or find other investors. Jumping onto the county record, this is a perfect job for somebody to do. Maybe you’re scrubbing lists or you’re doing due diligence. I’m a huge fan of a NoteProz.com but you still need help with pulling photos or doing video stuff. A lot of the things that we’ve had assistants do before that were working in-house, we’ve now outsourced Upwork.com and it’s saved us a bunch of money. We’re talking about making it six times cheaper.

If you’re paying somebody out of college, $20 is the starting rate for somebody out of college because otherwise for $15 an hour, they can flip burgers. I’ll be a barista at Starbucks and that’s okay. I don’t mind paying $20 an hour. That’s what we started people off in the past as assistants that work in-house. If I find somebody at $3.25 an hour, I exponentially reduced my overhead and made it much more affordable now. I need to find more stuff to outsource to them. I need to find more ways to get them involved on not only short-term projects but on-going long projects. I’ve talked to a lot of my peers in the industry over the last couple of years, people that are doing some big things, not just in the note business but also in real estate and fix and flipping or things. They’ve always got a team of VA, especially when I talk to people that are traveling more so I get a little jealous on some things.

Top Ten Recap

I’ve got VAs helping me across the board. If you’ve got a full-time assistant, they need to have at least a part time virtual assistant to help them be more effective and be able to help you. Of course, they can’t go to the bank, they can’t drop off something at FedEx. They can’t go by and pick up coffee for you, but they sure help you can get the job done so you can go enjoy yourself at Starbucks later or whatever you need to do. Upwork.com, I’m a huge fan of them. We hired somebody at $3.25 an hour who’s doing an exceptional job we’re paying almost $24 an hour to do. We’re pretty excited about that out there. Let’s do a quick recap. Once again, starting at number ten is using some different landing pages. You’ve got a landing page for a deal. If you got a landing page for a specific property, that’s an attractive thing that a lot of realtors like to do. I’m going to create a website just for your property with before and after photos. LeadPages, ClickFunnels, we use both of them but you can use MailChimp, Infusionsoft. You can start doing that as well. Have different landing pages.

Two, increasing and completely filling out your LinkedIn profile summary at the full 2,000 characters. It adds a lot more information. Also, it adds a lot more SEO to your LinkedIn profile and becomes searchable. It’s a great way to boost your LinkedIn. Not enough people are doing this. We’ve seen an increase in profile views since I updated this over two weeks ago. Eight, if you’ve written anything that’s online, create yourself on Amazon author page. It’s free to do and you can add your RSS feed to your blog, your podcast or your YouTube feed. You could add your URL on your author page and they’ll upload every new episode that you download or you can upload to Amazon and it’s free to do.

Doing an Instagram Live, whether it’s a short live with an investor or a vendor on a deal or doing a mini summit with three other people at fifteen minutes each. This is a cool tool to be using plus it’s linked to Facebook so you might as well use it to connect with your viewers, connect with your audience and to do some things. It’s easy as one, two, three. Start an Instagram Live. Make sure the people that are coming on, they already follow you, that they request to jump on their time. You bring them on one at a time and it’s a great thing and then you can boot them off as well. You can stream, pull from their audience, they’ll pull from yours and vice versa.

Control your schedule. Calendly.com, tool number six, I’m a huge advocate of this. I brag on this all the time. We use this for a variety of things, not only the podcast but our coaching calls and students, new people. You’ve seen me use it a couple of times through this aspect of this. Calendly.com, own your schedule, control where everything is at. EZTexting, I’ve talked about Mobit in the past or FixYourFunnel. EZTexting is a great way to get started for $49 a month to get 1,000 texts. As you are growing things, people sometimes don’t like to give away their email, but they will give you a cell phone number. This is a great way for you to mass text people and be able to get them into your database anyway. Direct them on the link because you can put whatever you want in the text message, put a link to Calendly. Schedule a one-on-one. You can include a short video as well or a photo. I love this tool. It’s handy.

Survey Monkey, you don’t want to make your surveys 30 questions, but 5 to 10 questions. The more data you can get from your database, the more home and more in tuned you’ll be and use it as an opportunity to go above and beyond. This is the one thing too. One of the things that we’ve done over the last year is asked when people’s birthdays are with the idea that every month we’re going to send out a bunch of birthday cards. We’re not going to do it specifically on the day. We’ll do it the first week of the month for those that are coming out. This is something we’re going to implement in 2020. It’s a great little extra way to say, “Hi,” touch base, “I hope you’re doing well.” Go from there. You could add about investing, the number of deals, we’ve used with our Note CAMP boot camps and made it attractive for people to fill it out because they got a lot of the information. I know people use this to raise capital. People have used this to connect with people that are buying their top three, top four markets and so it’s become a great way to help build a hotlist for your database.

NCS 526 | Note Business Tools

Note Business Tools: Transcriptions help boost you YouTube videos.

 

Number three, using LinkedIn recommendations. We forget to ask about this. We forget to ask for referrals. Give me a testimonial. Send me a LinkedIn email or request for a recommendation from your vendor, from your peers, from your cohorts in crime and people that you’ve worked with, people that you know. It’s a great way to boost your profile and then take the actual images, screenshot it and share it on your website, on your executive summary sheets, your marketing, your website, your business cards. There’s a great way to turn them into videos and turn them into other Instagram images as well for people out there. Number two, using short videos, ten minutes or less. You can shoot a customized message to somebody on your messenger, about a minute long. Taking and doing a posting short videos, ten minutes or less into your videos or your email blasts out to your audience. If you’ve got a hot list of investors, say, “Investors, I’ve got a hot deal that I’m looking for funding on. Here’s the situation.”

I did a short ten-minute video on a Tampa Bay note deal in one of my workshops and I just shared that video doing the whole marketing octagon. The short video got everybody fired up because they can see the emotion coming from me versus just a text message. If you’re going to do it to your database, record it and then upload it to YouTube, but leave it as unlisted so your regular viewers don’t see it. You can keep it private as you’re sending it out to different groups. Number one was Upwork.com. We all need assistance. We all need people to pull stuff. If you want to take your business to the next level, the next year, take the time between now and the end of the year to hire you a VA, to go out. I’ll give you an example of what we have our VAs do. One thing is with the video, we take our transcription. If we can get it transcribed and they go in and upload the first 4,000, 5,000 characters into our YouTube description, that boosts that up. They’re creating blogs for us off our videos. They’re also going out onto specific counties across the country that we invest a lot in. You can use them to go and find IRA investors, people that have a self directed IRA account.

We did this cool thing on our Virtual Note Mastermind. You could pull a whole list of companies that have been assigned a deal, sign a note. We’re having VAs go on there and say, “Here’s 3,500. Go find me a name and an email or contact name or contact email or a website for these contacts, for these banks asset managers, for these companies that have been assigned stuff and go do it.” Most of them are working off hours and at $3.25 an hour, they’re doing it six times cheaper than when we hire somebody in-house for you. Plus, they don’t have to have an office. Plus, they often have computers and they’re doing themselves that you don’t have to provide for. That’s number one out there. You could do something not only for your note business, but you could do an easy text message, especially for your meetup group. You get a text message reminder out 30 minutes before or an hour before or the day before. If you’re still working your full time job, you’re able to send a text message out to or short a little video of, “It was a great business with you. Take care of your arm.” My trainer, he sends me a short text message when I’ve pulled a muscle or something like that, “Just following up, making sure you’re okay.” A little bit extra goes a long way. If you’re a realtor, you can say, “I’m just sending a short video to confirm that we’re going to be meeting at this property,” and go from there.”

It’s a great way for connecting with people or they opt into your website and sending that short video of, “It was great meeting you. Let’s meet for coffee.” Why? Because they can now see a face when they go to meet you in person. That comes in a whole lot of handy. People see my face way too much, but it’s an extra touch with people. You can say, “Thanks for visiting. It was great talking with you.” These are tools that are designed to help you in a variety of different fashions. The most expensive one would be either LeadPages or ClickFunnels. We talked about how it’s $49 a month for the text messaging and they’ll give you some freedom to test around with it first, but they’re all designed to help you out in any sort of fashion that we can. We’ve been using them here in a variety of different ways. Some are longer than others, others are brand new but I’ve enjoyed using it. Some of the things that were simple that we talked about, the LinkedIn Recommendations, that’s all easy out there. If you like that, send me a recommendation and I’ll be glad to respond and vice versa. It’s an easy way to boost some credibility to your LinkedIns and Facebooks for you as well.

Hopefully, it was valuable. These are ten cool tools to help you dominate or help you in your note and real estate business and helping you market some things. Hopefully, you take advantage and use them. If you don’t use them, I can’t help you. It drives me crazy. Maybe you’re not going to use them all, but everybody in here could use three, four or five of these things to knock some things out for you if you need help with time blocking because you struggle with time blocking, there’s Calendly. If you’ve gone back to a paper schedule, that’s completely fine. That’s great. You may still want to add Calendly link because you’re communicating with people. It might be a good thing just to have them because it sends reminders. One of the great things I liked about Calendly is it sends reminders a day out, an hour out, two hours about and it’s a beautiful thing. It’s great stuff.

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