Marketing for real estate investors has never been easy in the first place, and now marketers are faced with the challenge of staying on top of the dense new media landscape. Video content marketing can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t need to be so. What you need is for results to drive your content, and the rest really matters less than you think. Scott Carson interviews Josh Culler from Culler Media about some of the effective ways for real estate investors to market using video. Josh sees video content as a great way to widen your reach, increase your leads, and convert those leads into deals that will make money for your business.

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Results-Driven Video Content Marketing For Real Estate Investors With Josh Culler

Video has been around for years, but most people have been scared of it because it was costly. It’s very inexpensive these days and I’m honored to have Josh Culler from the Culler Media Group and REI Marketing join us in this episode. He will share some of his insights into why video is so valuable and how he and his team can help you by doing all the dirty work and the heavy lifting for you in case you’d want to add a video to your marketing.

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We’ve got a special guest joining us who is out there doing some amazing things for his business, working with a lot of other real estate investors and entrepreneurs to take their whole message and marketing to a whole new level. Many people are stuck at home and figuring out what the heck to do. This episode is dedicated to you all. For those of you that are like, “What am I going to do? How do I get this out? I need to do something more for my business to get the word out.” We’re honored to have an amazing guy. I’ve known this guy for a while. I met him when he was working with another buddy of mine on his podcast and marketing. This guy has gone out and it’s killing it, doing some amazing things, not only for himself but other people as well too. He is the Owner and Founder of Culler Media. It’s a results-driven content marketing for real estate investors. He’s also the Owner of REI.video. It’s a platform for investors to have their videos produced by him and his team. We’re talking about the man, the myth, the video legend, Mr. Josh Culler. Josh, tell the audience a little about yourself and how you got into what you’re doing now.

First of all, I appreciate you having me on the show. I had Scott on my show, the REI Marketing Weekly, which started as a newsletter and then I had way too many people asking to turn into a podcast. I decided to do that. I’m not sure why it took me so long to do it, but I did it. I love podcasting, so it’s always a pleasure to be on other people’s shows as well. I appreciate you having me on. A little bit about myself. I’m 26 years old and I’ve been in the real estate investing industry since I was nineteen years old. I’ve been a part of about 1,000 real estate transactions. I was with a wholesaling company where three guys were partners. The company was doing wholesaling throughout the Midwest.

I swung back and forth between departments. I was in sales. Many of you know Gary Harper, who hired me on board for that. I was working with a competitor of theirs for about 6 to 7 months, which gave me the full background of real estate investing and everything that’s going down. I have wholesaled on my own, I flipped one property on my own and will never do that again. Through this whole process, I realized that I don’t love actual real estate. I love what it can provide, which is financial independence, it can provide a legacy for your family and that stuff. The only investing that I do is private money lending which is where I want to be. It’s good.

Other than that, the reason why I niched into this investing industry with my media services when I did go full time was because of the network that I’ve grown in this industry and the knowledge that I’ve grown inside of this. I’ve been in the marketing world for real estate investors for quite a while. Culler Media works with some of the top influencers in the countries. My clients consist of Mike Hambright, Don Costa, John Martinez, Gene Guarino and many other influencers that you guys may or may not know. I work with those people to get there, whatever it is, their podcast or their video content up and running. As Scott said, we launched a platform called REI.video, which is a platform where you can film your videos and then submit those over to the platform. My team gets those edited, produces all the heavy lifting for you and sends it back to you however you want to use it.

You’re hitting the timing of the market. We’re all in the media business, whether it’s fixing and flipping, wholesaling or note investing. These days is all about the media side. Everybody is clamoring for eyeballs and your balls, as I like to say. If you’re not upping your game and evolving, it’s not the world of, “Let’s send our five million yellow letters or postcards to find the thing.” It’s all got to be top of mind, eyesight or ears at listening. You’ve seen that happen. I’ve known Mike Hambright and John Martinez for years and it’s interesting seeing them evolve in their business and going more of the video side too.

Mike has been a client of mine and he has his content marketing more dialed in than any client I’ve ever worked with. It’s incredible seeing the growth that he’s had on. A lot of people think that this content of marketing game relates to podcast subscribers, YouTube subscribers, Instagram followers or LinkedIn connections. With all my clients, the reason why you opened it saying that our company does results-driven content marketing, the results are relevant to whatever you’re going after, which for Mike is to get people into his mastermind or get people into his platforms. With John Martinez, it’s to get people into his The REI Sales Academy. It’s all relevant to the actual person that’s running their business, but don’t get caught up with the vanity metrics as I call them with the followers if that’s what your specific goal. You’ve got to remember, if Instagram decides to shut down tomorrow, you lose everything if you haven’t built an audience somewhere else as well.

You and I talked about that when I’m on your podcast about spreading the message across different platforms.

You don’t want to be a one-trick pony.

All those one-trick MySpace ponies, friend feed and meerkats, we could go on and on for some of those things. It’s great to be spread out, but you want to go where everybody knows your name. You want to go to the cheers sections for not just who your ideal clients are, but where your existing clients are already hanging out.

In addition to that too, we talked about influencers and a lot of those platforms are influencer platforms. Those are the people that have masterminds. They have online courses or they want to monetize their podcasts and ways to make money on the education side. Scott, I’m not sure about your audience specifically, but a lot of active real estate investors are out there. You’re a wholesaler or flipper and you’re thinking like, “I don’t have a course on my platform. I don’t have a mastermind that I run.” It’s still the same principles. You still need to create content marketing with results that driving that. For you, it might be to get more leads in the door to close more deals.

That’s what your driver would be for your content marketing and your content marketing is going to look a little different. You’re not going to teach people how to flip houses. You’re going to teach your sellers how they can get out of pre-foreclosure, how they can sell a house without having to do repairs to it, and how to sell their property to a home buying specialist like you as opposed to with a realtor, pros and cons with that. It’s still educating. That’s all it is. The only definition for content marketing is answering questions that your target audience has, period.

There’s no other purpose for content marketing. A lot of people think content marketing is all the free stuff that you put out. It’s true. There’s a difference between content marketing and advertising. Don’t get me wrong, content feeds everything in marketing but it’s the little silo inside of this massive umbrella of marketing. Under the umbrella of marketing, you might have advertising and then content marketing. Understanding that content drives it if you don’t know. For instance, I started a Facebook Ad and I had to film a video for that. I had to have good contextual content to feed that ad, but advertising is going direct to your consumer, chasing after them, whereas content marketing is more of building longer-term relationships that know, like and trust factors. It allows you to build authority, credibility and allow people to latch onto you and get value from you in a world where everybody is being sold.

As we like to say, that’s where the money comes in. It seems like it’s such a huge ocean that people get intimidated and they don’t know where to begin. Why don’t we talk about a couple of things that people can do it very simply? Let me give you an example. I talk all the time that people need to be sending at least an email out once a week to their database, once a week to their clients. There are four principles. There’s always a holiday going on each month for the most part. You can talk about Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Your real estate meetup group is meeting once a month.

You can talk about the meetup, who’s speaking, what you’ll learn, how you’re implementing it or, “Come on out and meet with me there.” Talk about something fun you’re doing. If you’re stuck at home, what are you doing to work out? The menu of the week that you’re cooking. Four is you ask. If you’ve got to deal with your work in one or it could be a throwback deal that you’ve worked on somebody else’s deal. Those are the four things. There are four weeks each month, rinse and repeating but people still struggle with it. What are you seeing as the top three things people could talk about or dive and start doing their videos on? Let’s talk about the timeframe and the amount of it.

Let’s start first of all with where to start. I have a podcast called The Content Marketing Playbook. This is not specific to real estate investors. The principles of content marketing stay the same no matter what industry you’re in. That’s what I talk about on that podcast. In the podcast, there are multiple episodes I have where I talk about where to start with a podcast and video content. What I always tell people, there are three essential things, but a fourth one that sometimes I add-in that you need to be thinking about when you’re going to start with content marketing. The first one is, who is your target audience?

This is Marketing 101. If you don’t know this already, you have no business getting into content marketing at all. Go and start with that. Know your audience. Who’s your avatar? Demographics, age, interests, likes and where are they located if you’re in a very specific niche market. Those are things that you need to know. Who’s your audience? Number two is where are they at? This is extremely important because you don’t want to put content or any marketing out to a platform where your audience is not, because it’s going to be throwing money directly into the trashcan. You don’t want to do that.

We talked about going to these multiple platforms all at once. That’s not always the best thing to do to go to twenty different platforms and people will say, “You never know.” I want to tell you like, “You do know. You know they’re not there so don’t do it.” If you truly know your target audience, which that stuff number one, you know where they’re going to be at. You know where they’re going to be spending their time. That’s where you want to put your content marketing out. If you’re an influencer and you’re marketing to active real estate investors, Facebook is one of the biggest places that they’re at right now. They’re also listening to podcasts. As Scott and I talked about on my show, they’re going to LinkedIn and Instagram. They’re starting to merge over there. These are the places that you need to evaluate where they’re at.

 

Number three is the context of the content that you’re going to put out. If they do listen to podcasts, then create a podcast. That’s what you’ve got to do. A lot of times, entrepreneurs are not sitting down for full one-hour podcasts and listening to that entire thing in one shot. You need to snip that up into four different segments that are fifteen minutes long. Think about it in that context. I want to go back to number one too. You get this through your head. You, more times than not, are not your audience. A lot of people that tell me like, “I should be on Facebook, but I don’t want to be on Facebook because of my audience.” You may not want to be on Facebook, but your audience is there. If you’re going to do marketing the right way, you need to do that. You need to bite the bullet and figure that out.

A lot of times, you’re not your audience, so don’t think about what you would do. You need to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and figure that out. The fourth thing that I sometimes throw in is knowing yourself. Are you good at the video? Are you a good writer? Blog that stuff. A lot of times, I leave that out because it doesn’t matter if you’re going to do marketing the right way. If you don’t like being on video, but your audience loves video, then you’ve got to suck it up and do it or find somebody on your team that can do it.

The biggest thing is to fail forward and embrace the suck because nobody is born good on camera, to begin with.

Everybody starts at zero. Kim Kardashian, one of the biggest influencers on planet Earth started at zero. You’ve got to start somewhere. It’s always funny. I’m a big Gary Vaynerchuk fan because of how real he is. I’m not a fanboy. I love the stuff that he puts out and the value. If you go back and you look at the very first video he ever put out, it’s the crappiest looking video of wine library TV. He’s got a text that comes through over the video and it covers his entire face and says, “Welcome to episode number one.” The audio is horrible. The video is super pixelated but that stands to tell you that everybody starts somewhere. What we’re doing right now, I love this. I might have a nice little setup in the background. I’ve got light here. I turned the overhead light above me off so that I get some nice contrast behind me but that’s me. That’s my preference.

Nowadays, people are more okay than ever in greenscreen and you could throw whatever background you want on behind you. People know that it’s not real. People know you’re not in a high rise in San Francisco with the golden gate behind you. People are cool with that. The understanding nowadays, thanks to platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories, people are more okay than ever with raw content being put out and you and YouTube was one of the starters of that. You go look at some of the largest YouTube channels on the planets. A lot of them are crappy productions. The aesthetics of them suck. Just because you don’t have a studio and fancy equipment, that shouldn’t stop you from putting content out. One of the most powerful content creation tools that you can use is a cell phone. If you have a cell phone that is less than four years old, you have an extremely powerful marketing tool in your pocket.

If you have a cell phone that is four years or older, you are a grandma. You’re listening on a grasshopper.

You’re listening to this by way of the radio if that still exists but that’s the whole point here. Put out content, you’ve got to start somewhere and it’s okay to put on produced content out. It is okay with it. Focus on the value that you’re delivering more importantly than the aesthetics of it.

I’m a big believer that the easiest content to start with is your FAQs. The questions that people ask daily, people love that. Having a Q&A session, it’s much more formal and easier. As you said, if you’ve got a cell phone, do a Facebook Live. Put a little thing on the back here of your phone so you can clip it and hang it someplace and then talk about what you’re focused on. Regularity is the biggest thing, more so than anything is being consistent in what you’re doing and doing it. Do you want to talk about some of those things, Josh?

You gave me an idea to provide value to your audience. I film a video on my phone all the time. I use a $30 microphone from Amazon and then a little handheld tripod. It could stand up on your desk or whatever to hold your phone. If anybody wants one of those, shoot me an email, I’ll pay for it and ship it to you. Reach out to me, Josh@CullerMedia.com is my email and I’d be happy to ship one or both of those to anybody that needs those. Something that you talked about that I wanted to hit on was one of the biggest things that I run into with people creating content, not putting content out is they ask, what do I talk about? What do I even put out? You talked about FAQs. I’m a big fan of that. If you are not logging questions that your target audience is asking, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities.

Every time a seller asks you a question about working with you, write that down. Write down the specific question. If you get an email or a text message from them or whatever, log all those questions. That is the starting place for you to put content out. If a seller asks you, “What is the closing process when I work with you?” Shoot a video specifically answering that question and put that out. I’m going to give you a couple of ways you can create other ideas for that and then why this is important. Logging those questions as I talked about, that’s a big piece of it. You can go to Quora, go to a platform called AnswerThePublic. It’s one of my favorites. The way they lay everything out. You can type in a key phrase or keyword and it’ll spit out a stupid amount of data for you. These are all the data that they spit out. These are all additional keywords or key phrases that somebody looks up in addition to what you searched. AnswerThePublic.com is a place to go to. You can look up to sell my house.

For me, it would be content marketing. What are the questions that people are asking about content marketing? That’s the content that I need to shoot about. Those are great places to start. Quora is the essential content marketing platform because it is people answering questions and then getting answers for it. Search specific key phrases and keywords. The reason why this is important to do especially if you get a question consistently, if every single seller is asking you, “What’s the process of closing with you? How do I get paid? What’s the difference between selling to you versus selling with a realtor?” When you create video content about that and you put that on your website or your Google My Business page, this acts as your 24-hour salesman, which is incredible. You don’t have to pay your content to answer these questions. People can go to Google at 2:00 in the morning and search, “Why sell to a real estate investor in Dallas, Texas?” Your video pulls up, answers their question and now you’ve built rapport with them without even answering a phone call.

You’ve automatically built rapport, value, credibility, authority and all these positive things with your seller. When they get on the phone with you, it’s almost they already know you and they know they want to sell to you. Everybody that I work with a lot of active investors and they do this. Everybody that I’ve shot videos with, they say this works. That’s a big piece of it. I love it. Content marketing can be your 24-hour salesman’s answers. They don’t take weekends. They don’t get sick and they don’t catch the Coronavirus. They can answer any questions that your audience has.

I have told people that this is not what I did. For those that can’t figure out FAQs, go to a website, go to a real estate investor website, somebody you follow and I guarantee 90% of them will have some Frequently Asked Questions tab or training class and use those and tweak them for yourself. Think about the questions that you had when you were first getting started, “What’s this? What’s that?” When you’re going to a real estate club or virtual one in these days, people are asking questions, take note of those questions, write them down. What’s also a good thing? If there’s been a speaker or somebody that spoke your club, go up to them and say, “I’d love to interview you. I’d love to have you. Let’s talk about this a little differently. I know you’re busy, but I’d love to schedule a time for an interview on my show or interview you to my audience.” You and I both love the fact that when we have somebody on, it allows us to pick their brain interruption-free.

Something that goes back to making the statement of you is not your audience is you’ve got to remember that active investors, for instance. Your sellers, I’ve found that more times than not, they don’t even know what a real estate investor is. They think it’s a suit on Wall Street. It’s your job to let them know what you are and what you do. Most people aren’t familiar with that. Everybody is familiar with selling with a realtor, but they’re not familiar with selling to an investor like yourself. They have a lot of questions. This is your opportunity to be able to answer those questions for them. Whether you think it’s trivial or it’s a super elementary question or not, answer it still.

If you think that a question is stupid that a seller has, you may think it’s stupid, but they don’t and this could be your opportunity to answer a very elementary question for them that they couldn’t get from any other investor that they called. You answered the question for them and they’re like, “This guy knows what he’s talking about. He’s willing to talk me through this and walk me through the entire process.” Whether you think it’s an elementary question or not, advanced questions, simple things, short things, still answer the questions. Your videos don’t have to be five minutes long. They could be 1 to 2 minutes long. A lot of times, especially if you put that two-minute video on a landing page will help increase your conversion rate by up to 85% or 86%. Do it.

We’re doing a video and some marketing. What are some effective ways for people to grab those people that are listening or watching and things that help them get them into their pipeline? Besides the video, what are some other things that people should be doing for content or following up?

Let me ask you this, Scott. Do we want to talk about active investors or more on the influencer side because we can go multiple different directions?

Let’s get people with active investors.

 

There are a couple of things that I would highly recommend for active investors. Number one, populate your website with video content as much as you possibly can. Something that I see a lot of people doing that’s working well is they’re creating specific pages for a specific pain point. If you have a very high rate of pre-foreclosures in your markets, then create a specific page specifically for your website that’s about pre-foreclosures. Shoot a video on pre-foreclosures, what are the options when you’re in pre-foreclosure? Directed towards the seller, you’re answering their question, put that video at the top of your webpage, transcribe the entire video and then go through and lightly edit it.

If you’re going to do transcriptions, don’t go to Rev.com. Go to Temi.com because it’s $0.25 a minute as opposed to Rev, which is $1 a minute and you get it back in for hours. Temi is owned by Rev.com, so they use the same APIs. Throw that entire transcription under the video and you will see a lot of results. A good thing that you can do is to upload that video to YouTube because YouTube is a search engine as well. With that transcription that you get, add closed captions to that YouTube video and then embed that YouTube video on the page transcription underneath it on the same page. Hopefully, that makes sense. That’s a good way to get some traffic coming your way on specific pain points as opposed to making it generalized. If somebody is up at 2:00 in the morning and they can’t sleep because they’re in pre-foreclosure, they’re not going to go search a very general term. They’re going to say, “What do I do when I’m in pre-foreclosure?” They’re going to use that verbiage. If your content shows up with that specific answer to their question, then they’re more likely to give you a call than somebody else that says. “We buy houses.” Keep that in your brain there.

Another thing that a lot of people are not taking advantage of is Google My Business. If you’re an active real estate investor, you need to have a Google My Business page. Google My Business works very similarly to social platforms where you can populate your entire profile. You can add posts, almost like a social media feed to that. You can add videos, blogs and all kinds of stuff to your feeds. Populate all your content there. It’s owned by Google, the largest search engine in the universe. It can’t hurt.

Here’s the thing, “This sounds crazy difficult to have captions in your video.” This is a simple thing you can do. If you have a business page on Facebook, upload your video to Facebook and then go back in and edit it and enable your closed captions. Facebook will read it and they’re good. They are about 90% effective in the closed captions. When I speak loud, sometimes it says, “The nose closures,” instead of The Note Closers Show. It will do it all, then you can download that video and it’s got the captions already in it and then re-upload it to YouTube or use Repurpose.io for $25 a month to make it automatically happen. There’s a whole variety of things. Here’s the biggest thing, everybody. Don’t get so bug down in, “It’s got to be perfect.” Get rid of that perfection mentality. If you think about, “I’ve got to be perfect,” you’re going to be broke. Perfection equals broke. Delivered is the most important thing. The iPhone was on version 14 or 15 with how many software updates. If they waited to be perfect the first time, we’d still be sitting around on our freaking Nokia.

We’d be able to have a lot more phones that don’t break but let’s be real. I like you going into that because people are afraid to produce content that doesn’t look good. I’m not saying this because I’m a stupid Millennial but it’s a generational thing too because even when I was growing up, people didn’t produce their content. If you wanted to shoot a video, you had to hire a crew to come out and shoot your videos. A lot of people get stuck in that day and age like, “You can’t do that, so don’t worry about it.” Don’t be afraid to pop out your phone.

This is another segment we can go into, Scott. There are two ways to create content. Number one is produce, which is similar to what we’re doing but not. What we’re doing is on hinges on both of these. Production is where you plan to sit down in front of a camera or shoot a podcast or whatever. That’s a preplanned thing. The other way is documenting. Documenting is my favorite by far because this is something that’s already happening. Let me give you an example. If you’re a real estate investor, you got an appointment and you’re going to go pre-look a house. The seller calls you and says, “I want you to come to look at my house.” You’re inspecting it and you walk through the house.

Let’s say, for example, you see mold in the ceiling. You take your phone out and you record a selfie video of you talking about what you’re going to do with that mold in the ceiling, “123 Main Street and I got mold in the ceiling. Here’s what I’m going to do about that.” What happens with that is it’s not going to help you buy the house, but what about dispositions? It’s going to help you get to that disposition a lot quicker because people are going to see what you’re doing. It’s going to build credibility and authority for you and what happens is you’re letting people know that you’re a wholesaler. If there are other wholesalers in your markets, then who’s one of the first people they’re going to call if they already know that you or a wholesaler and you can buy a house from them.

You could build a team of bird dogs by putting content out. I see this happen all the time. I see this happen with investors that put out a lot of videos of them at houses. If there are newbie wholesalers, they got a contract locked down. They don’t have a network yet. They don’t know who to go to dispo the property, but they know that you put videos out on Facebook that you buy properties, then they’re going to look at you and give you a call and say, “I’ve got a deal for you. Is this something that the interest fits in?” That’s the power of content marketing. It’s not meant for your sellers, but it’s also meant on the disposition side too building that credibility and the authority.

It’s a step above, whereas wholesalers may find the best-looking picture to send an email blast out. You send a picture out to your database, but you’ve got walkthrough videos like, “Here’s a thing, rehabbers. This is not a deal killer, but this is why you’re going to get this better.” You can see the backyard. It looks like Jumanji so bring your bushwhacker. We’ve all heard of the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s the same thing with video. Video is worth a million words.

That’s all documenting content. It’s the stuff that’s already happening. You’re already walking through the house, so why not shoot a quick video while you’re doing it? That’s content you can pull out. You can send that to your email list. When you film that property instead of sending photos of the house on a pro forma, send a video of the walkthrough showing the cracks in the foundation, the mold in the ceiling, the roof leaking and all that stuff, send that out because you’re going to have people that are more likely to trust you as well and that’s powerful. A testimonial is another way of documenting content. When you’re at the title company closing on a deal and Mr. Seller is sitting across the table from you say, “Do you mind if I shoot a quick video with you asking about your experience with you?”

More times than not, you’ll find that if you provided a good service for them and they were happy with what you did, they’re going to say yes. You’ll have people that are squirrely and they’ll say, “No, I don’t like being on camera.” Ask them, “Do you mind if I talk about your situation? I won’t use your name. I won’t use your address. How I was able to help you out of this problem.” That’s called a case study and that’s documenting as well because you’re shooting a video talking about a deal that you did for somebody. You could publish that. That’s another good way.

Testimonials and talking about your vendors go a long way because a lot of people aren’t savvy. If you can say, “I’m at First American Title Company with Ginger here, who’s my closer. She did an amazing job.” That’s going to help referrals because like, “Nobody else has done that for Ginger.” Ginger is like, “I’m going to call Josh or Scott, I’m going to call George who did the testimonials for me as a way of giving back.” That’s building a network of referrals. It helps out tremendously. You’ve seen issues with people that are not afraid to film it on their phone, but they don’t have the time and aren’t technologically savvy. Let’s talk about what you’re doing with REI.video.

I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk about that. I’m not going to a sales pitch. This is a platform that is meant to help real estate investors be able to get video content out if you do want to produce. If you do a property walkthrough or if you do a testimonial video and you want it to look a little cleaner on your website than posting it raw. I built a website called REI.video. I’m working on the dot-com domain and we’ll see how that goes, but it’s not yet available. You shoot your videos, take out your phone, record that property walkthrough and testimonial.

You’ll throw that into Google Drive, Dropbox, Mega, One Drive or whatever online storage platform you use then you go to the websites. There are only two options. There’s a monthly option where you can send unlimited videos. If you’re doing more than ten videos, this is worth it or you can do single video edits where you submit that, you have a short form to fill out. We can add closed captions, we can add video wrappers, titles, music, cuts, graphics and all kinds of crazy stuff. We send it back to you in less than 48 hours, unlimited revisions, so you get the exact video that you’re wanting and you’re looking for. We can even let you know where to distribute this and how to distribute the video and stuff.

It’s a good platform and low price compared to what other platforms are out there. This is specifically built for real estate investors, which is why it’s called REI.video for you to be able to do that. That’s one of the things I noticed, Scott, was people were filming their videos. They know that they should be doing it, but then they look at them and like, “I don’t want to post this directly to my Facebook page or directly to my website because it doesn’t look clean. I stumbled around at the beginning. I messed up in the middle of the video and I don’t know how to edit.” That’s what this platform is meant to do, to take that heavy lifting out of the process for you.

It’s a needed service because people can understand that A, B to C and they don’t have the time and experience and you’ve got the experience. You’re filling a big need for investors and people that want to market. We talk about this because we’re all in media, all marketing and the more effective you can do, a little extra add does take you a long way. Don’t let that stop you from at least doing the first part in shooting the content. Let’s talk about the myth of virality, going viral. Many people are like, “I want to do a video. I want to have thousands and millions of views.” I’m like, “No offense. If you’re getting 30 views from normally posting, that’s 30 eyeballs that didn’t see yourself to begin with.” That’s a good thing.

There are two elements to this. Number one is I always tell people, “What are your goals for the content?” because that should be the driving force of what you’re looking for. Let’s say your video does go viral. You film a video, you post it on Facebook, and it gets 300,000 views. If you don’t get any leads from that nor close any deals, the video was completely worthless. Here’s the reason why. It’s because it didn’t prove anything. It didn’t convert anything for you. If you post a video and it gets 30 views, but you close three deals from that then that was a very highly successful video. That’s why even one of the first things that came out of my mouth when I jumped on the show here was don’t pay attention to vanity metrics. A vanity metric is something that doesn’t lead to a direct conversion for your content or your marketing period. One of the funniest questions that I get, Scott, is when I do the production.

This was early on in my career when I produce a podcast or I film a video for somebody and got it posted from that kind of thing. I’d get questions all the time like, “Why didn’t this hit 100,000 views in the first week? We launched the podcast, why isn’t it gotten 50,000 downloads?” I’m like, “That’s not how it works.” When I go in with clients, the first thing that we do in the content marketing plan with them is to create the goals for them like what is the purpose? Why are we doing this right now? If your goal is truly to get 50,000 downloads on your podcast, and that’s what we create the plan around. For most people, if you’re an active real estate investor, that should not be your goal. Your goal should be to close deals because that’s what your business does. If you do have a mastermind, if you do have a podcast and that’s one of your primary sources of income, then you need to focus on that. Don’t worry about viral videos.

 

That’s all smoke and mirrors. That’s dragging you away from focusing on what is going to produce results for you and produce ultimately income for you. That’s the true meaning here. The truth about viral content is that there is no secret sauce. I’ve seen the most idiotic, stupid videos go viral and that’s normally the ones that go viral by the way. Ridiculous videos that go viral or podcasts or whatever piece of content you want to put out. There’s no rhyme or reason. It’s not that they posted it at 6:00 PM when everybody’s home. It’s not that they posted on a weekend or they added the right number of hashtags with the perfect formula of the social media cocktail. That wasn’t at all what went down.

I’ve also seen some incredibly produced video contents and podcasts go up. I’ll even be honest with you, there are some videos and podcasts that I and my team were produced that we thought were going to go crazy and they didn’t. There’s no rhyme or reason. There’s also content that we’ve produced that’s like a missile through the roof and gotten 100,000 downloads in the first week and we had no idea why. For you to hear marketers and marketing agencies say that they can do this for you. It’s false. Don’t get caught up in that. Don’t get tricked into somebody that’s a marketing agency saying, “We can get your social media following to 100,000 in less than two weeks.” There’s a way that they’re doing it and it’s not an ethical way. Going back to the metrics, if you get 100,000 followers on your Instagram and nobody’s converting, then it’s worthless. There’s no point in it. You threw money down the table or the trash.

There are a lot of people up there like, “I’ve got 100,000 followers.” If 99% of them are over in Bangladesh and don’t speak English or their bots, that’s fake. Never pay to promote 10,000 views. That stuff doesn’t work. I only say that because I’ve done it before. Nobody showed up. You had followers and then in six months, all those followers or fake accounts were closed or removed. The only time a silly video would work like the cat riding around the Roomba, that’s a funny video but it’s not going to convert anything unless you put it in affiliate code to a Roomba sales thing with description or a cat collar thing or something like that. It’s a funny aspect of things.

You’ll also find that most brand content doesn’t go viral. You’ll have Super Bowl commercials that go viral if they’re hilarious and funny. That’s more primarily focused on brand awareness because those companies can afford brand awareness. Doritos Kids throw up a commercial because they have millions of dollars at their disposure to be able to throw into marketing like that. You missed a real estate investor that’s in Podunk, Texas. You can’t afford to do brand awareness, so don’t do it. Focus on things that are going to convert.

That’s what a lot of people get lost in the weeds. Going back, if you do spend the money and build a following of 100,000 followers on Instagram but you don’t convert that somewhere else and get that data. If Instagram decides to shut its doors tomorrow and whether it’s another Cambridge Analytica, that happens and the government finally says, “No more Facebook, no more Instagram,” you’ve lost everything, you lose everything. If you didn’t put effort into building that audience somewhere else directly to a conversion. Keep that in mind. That’s why I’m so focused on results-driven content marketing. If I get a client that I build a following of 100,000 followers on Instagram and then tomorrow Instagram shuts down, they’re going to look at me and say, “Now what?” I’m going to say, “I don’t know.”

You said something important, know what your plans are and what is your ultimate goal to get people to invest with you? Either send you deals, buy deals from it, give you money to fund deals is important to get downloads or followers. Having a goal and sticking to that goal is still the most important thing. Otherwise, you’re going to flop from one thing to another and get frustrated and say, “Social media marketing doesn’t work. Content marketing doesn’t work,” because you’re all over the place. This drives me bonkers. The biggest thing is, “I want to be all to everybody.” Niching it down is the most important this you do.

Something important to understand about that is that’s truth number one. Truth number two is the more you niche, the less audience you have. You’ve got to keep that in mind. Scott has a defined audience and The Note Closers Show is about closing notes and not every single person on the planet is interested in note investing. He’s specifically niched into people that A) are already investing in notes or B) interested in investing in notes. That causes his audience to shrink. The more that you niche, the more conversion you’ll see but the less audience appeal you will have. That’s important to keep in mind and understand. That’s truth number two, the more you niche, the less audience you’re going to have. You’ve got to keep in mind again, what are your goals? If you’re an active real estate investor, you’re not going to build a YouTube channel of 100,000 motivated sellers. You’re not going to do that. You might get 30 subscribers from Bangladesh, but that’s not true. If you get people closing deals from those YouTube videos, then it’s a successful channel. That’s what you got to focus on.

Focus on your goal and focus on your niche. I never expected to have 100,000 subscribers. It’s not that many people in the industry. I dominate the 10,000 or 20,000 people that are out there that are doing this on a regular basis. We see that on a month-on-month data basis, you have 20,000 to 25,000 downloads on the podcast. We passed 20,000 for the month. We may get to 30,000, I don’t know. It depends on the people that are listening.

Let me ask you this, how long did it take you to get to that point, from the start of the show to the time you hit 20,000 downloads?

The 20,000 downloads were in month 6 or 7. We had 10,000 on the first full month, 15,000 the second month, then it dipped down to 6,000. It all came from being consistent. That was the first and foremost. Any times we’ve had any dips where we’d gone a week or two without uploading, it dips down. It’s a matter of the consistency that I need to stick. It’s also versus recording it and throwing up on iTunes. We’ve also taken an extra facet and been much more dedicated. We make sure when an episode does come out, we carve time each day to at least reshare it across the platform. That’s helped increase it from being 150 downloads or 300 downloads a day, up to 600 or 900 downloads the first day.

A statistic that’s going to make you laugh here, Scott. Ninety percent of podcasts that started, die off within the first six months.

I know that.

The reason being is because people are impatient. They want to see instant results. This is why I always tell people content marketing is not advertising. You can get instant results with advertising. I could run a defined and well-built Facebook Ad and get deals closed left and right. You can do that. It is possible but with content marketing, that’s not how it works. Content marketing is work meant to be consistent and stay flowing. If you start a podcast and you don’t get 1,000 downloads within the first month, don’t give up and keep going. You need to get to that goal. That’s why it’s so important to establish and define that. We’ve started a couple of podcasts for people way back in the day where we didn’t ask them what their goals were.

They wanted to start a podcast because everybody else was doing it. Within months 2 or 3, we got a call saying, “This isn’t working. We’re going to stop.” That’s because you’re not well-defined. It’s important to understand that. Be patient and like you said, consistency is the most important thing. Stay consistent with it. Stay focused on your goal. If you don’t get to a place in 1 to 1.5 years where you want to be, maybe you consider like, “Is this truly not where my audience is,” and go somewhere else. Stick with it, that’s important.

We keep track of video views on a YouTube channel. We don’t see a lot of hits, but we see consistency going from when I keep started keeping track of it in January of 2017 with 2,000 views. It’s consistently hitting the 3,000, 4,000 to 5,000 mark on views, which is what I want.

If you even go to my social media profiles, my YouTube channel, my podcast and stuff like that, I’m not getting groundbreaking numbers. My podcasts are growing faster than anything. If you go to my YouTube channel, I’ve got 30 subscribers right now. If you go to my Instagram, I have 700 followers or something like that. This is why I don’t frankly care is because I’m converting a lot of people through that content. I get 10 to 15 emails a week from people that heard my podcast or watch my YouTube video and said, “This brought value to me. How can we work together?” That’s truly why I don’t care because it converts. A lot of people rebuttal that with, “Josh, the more quantity that you get, the more people you’ll have reached out to you.” That’s not always true. It’s not like I snap my fingers and make that happen. You’ve got to grow into that like Scott has here.

You’ve got to be patient. Water it, nurture it and realize it’s a process. Eighty percent comes after the fifth contact. Sometimes people need to watch it for 3 to 6 months until they get in that ready position to buy, enact or to sell with you. We could sit here and talk for hours about this, Josh. We’re coming up on the end of our hour here. What’s the best way for people to reach out to you to connect with you? What’s your preferred social media? What’s the best way for people to reach out to find out more about what you’re doing, Josh?

Facebook and Instagram are good. Connect with me. Just search Josh Culler, I’ll come up and you’ll see me. I’ll either have my hat on or my hair done. You can email me directly, Josh@CullerMedia.com and I’d be happy to answer any questions that your audience has and hopefully brought some value to you guys.

 

Josh, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for bringing it and delivering some great stuff into our audience.

I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

I’m honored to have you. Follow what Josh said, get started. Pull out that cell phone, take some selfies, take some contact, answer some questions and get it posted. Get it out there so you start adding value to your ideal client’s lives. That’s one of the biggest things. Keep giving and it’ll come back tenfold. You’ve got to give it time to grow and nurture, and let people realize that you’re not going anywhere because you never know where they come across you. You want to be their top of mind, top of funnel, top of the web search. We’ll see you all at the top.

Important Links:

• Culler Media Group
• REI Marketing
• REI.video
• The REI Sales Academy
• The Content Marketing Playbook
• Josh@CullerMedia.com
• Quora
• AnswerThePublic.com
• Rev.com
• Temi.com
• Google My Business
• Repurpose.io
• YouTube – Culler Media
• Facebook – Josh Culler
• Instagram – Josh Culler

About Josh Culler

 Josh Culler has been in the investing industry for 7 years and has helped over 100 investors in their marketing efforts.

 

 

 

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