EP NNA 44 – Things You Can Do Anywhere To Find Deals

Times have changed in terms of marketing and acquiring clients. As an asset manager or investor, it is vital to have a LinkedIn profile, a website, an email service provider, and a professional headshot amongst others, because social media is a major part of how businesses thrive these days. Scott breaks down some of the key things that new note and real estate investors should be doing to help them find deals. He goes in-depth about useful and necessary platforms such as MailChimp, Facebook, and YouTube, and encourages networking events since they draw you to more people and help enhance your marketing.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Things You Can Do Anywhere To Find Deals

The things I’m going to talk about are expenses or free for the most part. These are items that you can do from anywhere, whether you’re in Kyle, Texas or Dallas or Portland, Oregon or in Seville, Spain or Barcelona, Spain or London. You could do these things from anywhere. Actually, some of these things I did while I was killing time over there. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t kill much time between the food, the wine, the sites and the travel. When I was on a long bus ride, I spend a little time to do some of the stuff, but you can be doing it from anywhere. This will help you find deals. It will also help you raise capital on the simple things with your side hustle. For some of you it’s like, “Scott, you’ve told this before.” Yes, if you’re a full-time note investor, this may not be the one for you.

Connecting To Your General Database

There are always some good recap and a couple of new nuggets I drop into that I’ve started to see some things from, but these are all things that I still do. The proof is in my mouth. It’s not, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Let’s start off with a checklist. Pull it out. These are things you must have if you’re going to be doing this on the side hustle. I thought about this because I had several people like, “I signed up and I started calling asset managers.” I’m like, “Do you have this?” “No, I want to start calling asset managers.” I’m like, “You’re shooting yourself off. You’re cutting your nose off to spite your face.” You can’t do that. You’ve got to put some foundation then. Do you want to build a big house? You won’t start building a roof. The most important thing is a good solid rock foundation.

These are the things that you must have. It’s a little bit different ones a number of years ago, but first and foremost is you have to have a complete LinkedIn profile. The free version of LinkedIn is fine, but you need a completely filled out profile. The second thing you must have, it’s the 21st-century and you’ve got to have a website and you’ve got to have someplace on your website. You close to the top right end the corner with an opt-in or a place to capture emails. You could have a tripwire or like, “Get my free report,” something to get people to opt-in and capture emails. You’ve got to have a website. The third thing you’ve got to have is an email service provider. What I mean by this is you need to have something you’re using on a regular basis. If your last email was last January, you need to dust that off and go ahead and send it up.

You don’t have to pay for it. A lot of times, these email service providers like Constant Contact gives you 100 for free, MailChimp will give you 2,000. You’ll realize that you’re going to start paying for it. This is the one aspect of this that you’re going to have to pay for. It’s not that expensive but use it. If you’re uploading asset managers from lists that we’ve talked about before, downloading your contacts, you’re going to exceed the free contacts. If you start paying for something, you can you take more notice to make sure you use it. That’s what we do. If I’m paying for something, I’m going to make sure I’m using it. Otherwise, Steph in six weeks will be like, “Are you using that yet or can we take it off?” This may sound simple but I see so many people botch this. Have a professional headshot. Make it look good. I don’t care if you’re taking a selfie, but make the picture look good.

If it’s you and your spouse, don’t be all crowded together and make sure the light is good. Make sure you’re not on a table with dirty dishes or make sure you’re not wearing something ugly. There’s not some guy behind you. It’s a professional shot, preferably against a solid color background. Let’s leave the gold boas and pink boas off though. You’re in business and other things you got to have is an entity, the LLC or S Corp, and you’ve got to have the corresponding social pages. What I mean by that, Facebook and LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube for your business. You can use NameCheck.com to check those down, but you’ve got to have an entity name. You’re not doing brownies and lemonade stands. You’re in the business of note investing.

Take that to the next level. Don’t tell me, “I just want to use my IRA.” It’s fine if you’re not in business. You are in business. Keep that in mind. You need that. You’ve got to have an entity. You’ve’ got to have an LLC. You need to have a personal Facebook page and a business Facebook page. Don’t argue with me on this. “I don’t want to do that.” That’s fine. Go do something else. When you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you, “I need you to take this pill once a day for the next year for you to survive. I need you to take this pill once a day for you to be able to be happy. You’d be able to walk.” Would you do that? Of course, you would.

The note doctor is in here and I’m telling you, you need these things. You need a personal and business Facebook page and you’ve got to have your face on there. If you don’t have that, I’m sorry. The only exception is if your spouse is working with you, then your spouse is okay to have that. You need to have a YouTube channel and if you’ve got a Gmail account, you’ve already got a YouTube channel. It’s free. You want to go on there, use your logo and try to get some subscribers. You need to know what you’re looking for. The worst thing you can do as a note investor or any type of real estate investor is run all over and try to do everything. It’s the worst possible thing you do.

Focus on what you’re doing. If you’re going to be in the nonperforming notes space, be in the nonperforming. Be in the first, in second, the owner finance. I’ve got a guy that got on the phone with me and he’s like, “I’ve been buying and banging my head against the wall trying to find owner finance notes.” This is money. It takes a lot of marketing. If you go to the bank side, it will be sent to you. He wanted me to teach him. You can opt-in on my website and we’ll send you some stuff available, but if you want to do it and you probably want to come in, get some training. “I’ve been doing those for five years.” You’ll still be doing it in five years and still banging your head.

I know most of you are like, “Scott, that’s pretty normal. You’ve talked about those things before.” What I mean is to do these things in the way I go through it. I spent some time on this stuff for the webinar. It’s important that you’re doing these things first. Your website is critical. I’m not saying you can’t connect, you can’t find some things but it’s going to be a little bit harder when you don’t have a working website. You can use WordPress. Leadpages is pretty cheap. WordPress, you probably want to find somebody that puts a WordPress accountant. I would not use Wix. Wix is a waste of time and money. Leadpages is a little bit better but it’s going to be something simple.

It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to have blogs or podcasts on there. You need a home page with your entity name, maybe your photo, but you need to have a page for your vendors or your trusted partners. You want to throw in a page with your contacts a link to where they can opt-in. Your social media links are where they can connect with you and about you is an important page. I think it should be right behind your homepage, about your company. Put some pictures of you and your staff. What’s so exciting about it? It’s like your executive summary. It’s like that paragraph from LinkedIn that you’d be filling out. That should be in there for about everybody else and their contact information.

Leadpages is pretty simple to set something up until you pay for something. It’s going to cost you some money. Have somebody put a website together for you, probably a couple of grand but keep it simple. Four or five pages is all you need. They might have seven or eight pages as you grow or do different things but keep it simple. I’m not talking about going and getting a website for your distressed buyers or website for your private funders or a website for your note business. You just need one website. The biggest problem that most people think is that a website will draw clients. A website is just a place where people go to. Just because you’ve got the most amazing website out there doesn’t mean anybody’s going to find it. If you don’t have anything to send them to.

What you need to be doing is to send them to your website. It used to be that you could get away with not having a website as long as you have a complete LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is still an important thing, especially with asset managers. A website, more and more people are saying, “Send me to your website.” They want to see that you’re actually walking the walk. You’re wearing a tuxedo with a black tie, not that tuxedo t-shirt. A LinkedIn profile is where asset managers go. When you’re connecting with asset managers, this is a spot where they go. They’re going to check out your LinkedIn profile. Upload an updated photo. Use the same headshot across the same place. Your LinkedIn, your website, Facebook. Use a current updated photo. You don’t need two profiles, “I don’t want my boss to find out what I’m doing.”

Finding Deals: Having a YouTube channel is important because video is important. It’s leading the way and it’s a great way to connect with an audience.

Is your boss paying your retirement? No, tell him you impose this honor because you’re trying to make sure you have a side hustle. You need a side hustle because they’re not paying enough. Your boss is buying a new car and you’re still driving the old truck. If you’ve got an existing LinkedIn profile, just add your real estate stuff below it, “I’m a distressed asset investor. I’m a real estate investor.” Simple things. Add your LLC, create a LinkedIn profile for your business, but go through and fill out a full profile. Add your projects, add your college, where you went to school. Add your experience, it’s like an online resume. Put deals or other projects, things that you’re donating to, patents, awards, nominations. Fill out your whole profile. Link in your LinkedIn to your YouTube account, bring in YouTube videos. On the LinkedIn profile, besides your website are the two most important things you need to have. If you don’t have an updated photo on LinkedIn, you’re only shooting yourself in the foot because if you don’t have a photo, I don’t connect with you. If you don’t agree with me, then fine, go do something else because I’m not sitting here telling you this stuff. No offense, I don’t care what you think. You don’t know better than me.

I’ve been around long enough. I’ve seen plenty of people come through. If you want to try to nickel and dime and cut corners, that’s fine. Go learn from somebody else because the next thing you need is your social profiles. You need your Facebook page, your personal and create a business profile for posting updates. LinkedIn personal, we talked about that’s necessary. LinkedIn business, for you or your business. It’s your business. You have an entity, you are in a business. You don’t see Mark Zuckerberg doing, “I’ve got my personal page.” No, he has a Facebook profile. That’s a bad analogy but you get what I’m saying.

A YouTube channel is important because video is important. Video is leading the way and it’s a great way. There are a couple of things that YouTube changed up. It’s a great way to connect with an audience that follows you and your tribes. There are a couple of things that we’ve been doing that has been cool. It’s optional, but these areas are growing. Twitter’s been around for a while. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you’re okay with that. An Instagram account, I think you need to have it especially since we’re in the real estate side of things, pictures are so big whether they’re looking at assets or looking at deals.

People comment, “We love your photos, Scott.” They didn’t say “We love your email.” They love the photos, places we went to. We got so many people that shared that. I do that to keep track of where I have been. It also comes back here. We were in Hawaii or we were somewhere else, “I’m doing notes and overage recovery. Should I integrate them or have separate websites?” I would say if you’re doing an overage recovery, it’s for separate businesses. You want your note in a real estate business. Basically, you have your notes and real statement one website for the most part, but the overage recovery is totally different.

Let’s talk about your YouTube channel. Many of you are like, “I’ll have a YouTube channel.” All you need to have on your YouTube channel is five or six videos. You want to take the time to fill in these short videos and trust me, the reason I’m telling you these short stories is you’re going to use these over and over again. These are the things that if you take a good time, we’re talking short and simple. They’re not long at all. Your first ones are about you, your background, your experience. Two, what are you doing? What is note investing? What is an overage collection? What is fix and flipping? What is a distressed asset? What are you doing? What’s your focus? What states are you buying it and what’s your buying criteria?

Is it nonperforming first or seconds? What are the values you’re looking for? That one is going to be one that you’re going to probably share a lot with the asset managers. About who you are is some of the most watched videos that we have on my profile from people going, “Who’s Scott Carson, the note guy?” “Who’s Charles Wilson, the investor?” “Who’s Paul Cooper, the investor?” “What is Totes of Notes?” Another thing should be talking about your team and saying, “It’s just not me, myself and I, and the three of us are doing the business.” I have a very big team who I focused on. I have the Singer Law Group. We’ve got Madison Management. We’ve got Richmond Monroe. I’ve got Carnegie Services.

Talk about your staff, your vendors and your strategic partners. “For those that are in the mastermind, I’m part of a note mastermind group.” Talk about your team. That’s a very powerful video to have. With case studies, people remember stories about a deal. Every deal has something interesting. That’s what they have the whole thing on the Loan Tales that we’re working on. I got to reach out to a few more people who have not gotten back to me and scheduled a time for videos. That’s the thing, it’s the whole idea with Loan Tales. It’s 50 stories of people and their case studies. People remember stories. When I go out and speak at night, people remember the case study about the lady who named her granddaughter after me or the duplex in Phoenix that people were stealing the electricity on both sides or the borrower in San Antonio who signed the property over to me and his pit bull almost attacked me. People remember stories, share your stories, share some case studies.

I would also throw in private lending, “Are you looking to put assets to work? Are you looking to invest? We’d love to visit with you.” It’s something simple. It’s not soliciting. It’s something simple talking about what private lending is. It’s a little educational video. You can use PowerPoint to outline these if you don’t want your face on the video. What works best is your smartphone. Don’t be difficult, if you don’t want to do a PowerPoint, write down the details in an index card, tape it here and record yourself talking and looking at the screen. These are not going to be long videos. We’re talking two to five minutes for the most part. Easy to use, but once you film them and upload to YouTube because you’re going to go back and share these over and over again. Why are these things important? They’re important because the fact is you want to look the part as a note investor. You don’t look like the guy who just pieced together something. You want to look the part that you’re doing what you’re doing. You may not have closed notes, but you should look like you’ve known what you’re doing.

The more you look the part, the better off you’re going to be and we all have to start at some point. “I don’t have any case studies.” Go out and find some. Go talk to local investors on some deals. Jump on the WCN Crew Facebook group and say, “Here are some case studies that they want.” Take the extra step to polish up your business because if you do a little bit extra than everybody else, everybody likes to throw things against the wall and see what sticks. Take the time. Work on your logo or work on your website a little bit extra to polish it up. You’re going to stand out from the crowd of people doing the least amount of work and you’re going to use these things that I’m talking about. Your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook group, your YouTube channel. You’re going to use these things repeatedly. You might as well spend a little bit of time with a couple of experts. If you need some help with a video, record it and send it to somebody on Fiverr to do work on. If you’re doing 5% extra each day, it’s going to go a long way in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and 100 days. Look back in three months like, “I did do a little bit extra.”

If you can commit to work on your hustle and polish up some things, you’re going to be in a lot better place especially in the last quarter of the year. This is all polishing up to get to the end of the year. What are asset managers doing? They’re taking vacations just like you and I are. June, they got kids in school or kids out of school. June, July, the first part of August, this is the slowest part of the year as we’re in the middle of the second quarter. It gives you an opportunity to build some great things and build momentum to the fourth quarter. You don’t want to be waiting until November. You have to take advantage of the 90 days to get your hustle on. Your 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM is doing these simple things that you can do in the off hours if you’re part-time to help you in 2020. The things I’m talking about are not hard items. You need to spend the time, sit down and complete them.

Here’s your plan of action. Do eight weeks of emails to your database. That’s one a week. You want your emails going out into your general database, not asset managers. You’re going to have some mix in probably there before. It’s three to four paragraphs max, “How’s it going? Here’s what we’re working on. I would love to connect with you.” It’s something simple. Use your email service provider. Pay for it if your list is big enough. What do I mean by that? That means adding your business cards from people that you’ve met at meet up groups and REIA club meetings and your database or people you connect with on BiggerPockets. Wherever you met, take their contact information. You might even jump on LeadFuze to pull some asset managers stuff. You may want to use that to pull 50 to 100 at a time or 1,000 is what we use it for. Share the emails across your assessments. If you write an email through MailChimp and send it out, take the link and share it to across your social media. Share it across LinkedIn, share it to BiggerPockets, share it to your Facebook group, “Here’s my most recent email that went out to my database.”

I’ll talk about what to expect on the eight weeks of emails. Of course, you want to include your headshot so people know who they’re looking at. I can’t stand when people send an email out and they have their entity name, but I don’t know who their entity name is. It doesn’t give their name and their headshot anywhere. I also hate websites that don’t have an About You. Tell me who is Totes of Notes? That’s Paul Cooper. There’s Paul’s face. While we still want to hear the business, people still identify with a face. This is why I like images or headshots on business cards like the realtor headshot.

Finding Deals: Don’t do three different case study videos in one email. Give them a little bit each week.

All people should have that. That gives you an opportunity. It’s marketing. We’re all in marketing. I don’t want people to think, “I don’t know who this person is,” and toss the card. When you’re doing your emails out to your database, have your social links at the bottom, not the top. The last thing you want is to say, “Follow me online.” No, if they’re interested, they’ll scroll down and connect with it that way. Also, make sure you have LinkedIn. If you have your headshot there, have it linked. They click on the image it connects to your LinkedIn profile. Put posts on here, “Connect with me on LinkedIn. Click here to connect.”

You also want to have an opt-in link button somewhere, “Opt-in to our database. Find more information.” What’s great about MailChimp is it allows for you to create lists in there. Opt-in links are very simple to use. One of the most effective ones that I’ve seen is when Catherine Brennan came in and we helped her write her email. She said, “Here’s what I’m doing. Many of you know, I’ve been an active real estate agent investor. I’m an agent for ten years. I have sold over $130 million in real estate in Chicago, but many of you did not know that I’m an active real estate investor. If you’d like to find out some of the deals that we’re doing, click here to get on my hot list.” There was an image of the hot list, they clicked on it and they were subscribed to her database. You’ve got to have that in the top half. I prefer the top right corner like her website.

What I would also do when your emails are going out is to insert a YouTube video, only one video time at the bottom. It’s great if you do what we talked about, who you are and what you are in your videos. That’s the outline for your eight weeks of emails going out to your database. What I’d also do is continue it. When you’re writing your email, schedule it to go out the same time, the same day. Don’t have it go out Monday. Why do you want to use an email service provider? It goes out at the time that you want. If you can, write it during the week until it goes out. Sunday night is a great one, but if you wanted to go out at 7:00 PM Central, that’s one time. That’s a little late for people in the East Coast but too early for people in the West Coast. Using a MailChimp or Infusionsoft, you can pre-schedule the email to go at 7:00 PM across the time zones. MailChimp does it cool. Preschedule the email to go out. Have somebody review it, run it through spellcheck. Once you’ve got a good solid one, save it as a template so all you’ve got to do is change out the guts of the email, but right before a pre-schedule email. Do not send it out 2:00 AM when you’re doing it. Pre-schedule it to go out at a later time. Don’t do it early in the morning and don’t do it late at night. 7:00 PM is probably the latest you want it to go out.

Here is the eight-part series. It’s your Hello email. Attach the, “Who is Paul Walker?” video, “Who is Jeffrey Wolfe, the Wolfman?” video at the bottom there. They will read it but they also click on the video to watch it. The second email is more about what you’re doing. I’ll talk to my previous email and my short email from a week ago like, “I’m doing this. Here’s what we’re doing.” Three, “I talked the week before about what we’re doing. It’s not all me by myself.” You may want to preview it. “In my email next week, I’ll talk more about the team and the team I’m surrounding myself with.” What’s great is that after Hello email, when you send the second more about what you’re doing, you want to include a link to the video, your Hello email link that MailChimp provides. You can also say, “If you want to, you check out my previous video.”

“Is it a video inside the email or a hyperlink from a screen capture image?” Either way, whatever’s the easiest thing for you to do. Some people want to put a link. I think putting a screen capture or if you can embed it into your email, that’s going to be the best thing. They don’t have to go off the thing. If you don’t know how to do that, then take an image, a screenshot of that, as long as it’s not you with a stroke phase, but then the link when they click on that picture, it takes them to the YouTube video. Your third video is about you, your team and your vendors. Don’t do three different case study videos in one email. Feed them a little bit. Give them a little bit each week.

You don’t want to have diarrhea of the mouth and go, “Here are twenty case studies for you to watch.” Do one per email. “Check out our case study. Did you miss that? Check out our case study about the haunted mansion or the house that backed up to the cemetery.” Eight weeks is opportunities, inviting to meetups or scheduling meetings. Over eight weeks, that’s two months. I know I get that. You may want to include, “I’d love to if you’re a local here in St. Louis,” or “If you’re a local in Tampa, come on out to our local Meetup meeting.” That’s basically eight weeks of emails. “I’m going to be at the Del Mar race track for the meetup group on the first Monday of the month. I’ll buy you a beer. The beer is on me.” That’s your eight weeks videos.

Include a link to the previous week’s email at the bottom. If you say, “Did you miss the email? Here’s a link to go back and you can watch it.” You can do that. It’s free to do. It’s pretty easy to do. This is why you want to use an email service provider. They’ll provide a link for you to look at stuff. You don’t want to go into Gmail and Yahoo and send an email out. That’s a waste of time because you can’t see opt-ins. You can’t see people that click on the links. You can’t see people that unsubscribe. You can’t see people that click on, “Do you think it would be valuable if you send an email to your database and you’re able to see that they clicked on your LinkedIn link?” Yes, they clicked their LinkedIn link. LinkedIn will tell you who’s clicking on your links. If you go to LinkedIn, let’s see who’s trying to connect with you. Connect with those people.

Dialing For Dollars – Connecting With Asset Managers

That first part was just going onto your general database. People you meet, strangers you become friends with, networking. That’s what it comes down to. Part two, it’s all about asset managers. Do not start calling bankers unless you call 50 at a time. Do not start calling bankers unless you’d have a complete LinkedIn profile on a website. Some of you are going, “I called ten bankers.” Do you have a website or LinkedIn profile? No, so they’re not going to call you back. It actually makes more sense to email asset managers either with a direct email or connecting with them through their LinkedIn profile. If you start dialing for dollars, that’s only valuable if you have the other assets set up. If they get a voicemail or they get something from you there and sent an email, if you don’t have a LinkedIn profile completed, you just wasted your whole load. You shot your load and then you didn’t get anything done.

Use LinkedIn to connect and send short messages with a link to your YouTube video, what your focus is. Say Jeffrey Wolfe is the asset manager, a secondary marketing professional at ABC Bank in San Diego. I sent him a short message, “I just want to see what you had in your books. I want to connect.” I’ll have a link. Remember that video we talked about before, what your focus is, that’s what you would include and you want the background to be nice. Don’t be standing outside in the sun sunglasses on. You want to be standing somewhere nice. People like your background. Use your app, you can use the LinkedIn app to avoid limited numbers. If you have very small connections on LinkedIn, we’ll run into, “They won’t let me do any more,” take the time to type it out on a notepad. You can connect with people and copy paste that as a direct message to them.

If you’ve got to pay for LinkedIn for $99 for the month, do it. It will help you get your numbers up and get beyond that. Otherwise, use the free LinkedIn account. Honestly, you can very easily knock out twenty of these copy-paste in an hour at a time. I’d say more but some of you struggle with copy-paste. What I mean by copy-paste is that the thing you type once it fits in the right numbers, you save that to a Word doc or Excel. That’s what you copy and paste besides, “Hi John or Jeff or Mary.” Asset managers are going to your profile to check out what you’re doing. They see your LinkedIn. Part of what I want you to do is if you’ve written an email, that’s why we talked about the emails first to your database, post those links as “Here’s my newsletter.”

Post that to your profiles as an update or as a blog. In that way, they see, “They are actually posting something. This is interesting.” I’m getting into the story of Paul. I’m getting into the story of Charles. I’m getting into the story of Jeff, of Laura, of Beth, of Katie. I like their stories. I want to work with you. I like them. If people like you, they’ll send you more deals. We have a question, “I’m a consultant. If I have in my profile that I’m a real estate agent, should I have a second profile or just change what I do?” You don’t need a second profile, just one profile. Just put real estate agent and investor or real estate investor and agent. That’s all you’ve got to do. Put your link down at the bottom there about what your company’s name is. Having two LinkedIn profiles is the stupidest thing you could have. It takes away from your general database and some things especially how LinkedIn works to go out once you’ve added your profile or pulled in emails to you. Just add that paragraph that you’re a real estate investor because you can customize it.

If your LinkedIn isn’t complete, don’t do it. Don’t call bankers. Don’t email asset managers. Finish your LinkedIn profile. Have a good photo. Take the time because this is one of the most important aspects of your business. Do you think Domino’s Pizza is going to go in and start selling pizzas when the place is under rehab? No. They want it to be complete. The restaurant will look nice. Your business is technically your website and your LinkedIn profile. You’ve got to have that. Make sure that there’s a front door and a back door and a restroom. You may go, “It’s just a facade. There’s nothing there.” This is an easy thing to do at any given time. It doesn’t need to be from 7:00 AM to 2:00 AM. I would do this Monday through Thursday. If you’re sitting and killing lunch, you’re killing time or watching the game, I’ll probably be doing this. Steph’s like, “What are you doing?” “I’m just adding connections.” I’m typing in people’s names, note investor, real estate investor. I’m connecting with people. You can add asset managers. That’s what I’m trying to get at. You could add 200 asset manager connections in a week easily by copy-pasting and adding connections.

Finding Deals: There’s only one you, so be yourself. Don’t be somebody else.

You probably will only get about 10% of people connecting with you but still, we did that to 200 invites out in a week and you get 10% that accept it, that’s twenty asset managers. This is the hot list to call or to email directly if you’ve got time. If you don’t have time to call, maybe you do it during your lunch break or maybe you sneak out and make a phone call or you follow up with an email. Do that. You could do 50 per day and knock it out. If you connect with them and you can see their emails on their profile, then send a personalized email or the mail merge and include their name. If Wesley Williams is connected and Wesley’s email says, “Asset manager,” I don’t get cheap and just send a bulk email. I want to try to personalize the first and last name, “Wesley, it’s great visiting with you. It’s great connecting with you on LinkedIn.” Expect to have to follow-up again and again.

If they’re leaving phone calls or sending emails, the reason you use a CRM or an ESP, Email Service Provider is you see who opened the emails. Those that open up, you can see that. Those that didn’t open it up, you’re going to have to email again. I would probably send an email to your asset managers once every two weeks. If you do it every week, you’re going to get frustrated. If you do it every other week, it would be better. If you send an email to your asset managers, post the email as a blog to LinkedIn, because asset managers that are coming across your information will go there and say, “You did send this letter out. You did send an email. You do have a video on here. It tells me what you’re looking for.” Include videos and case studies about you, your focus. Include those videos that we talked about beforehand in the email.

Continue Marketing

Part three, continued marketing. This is something you’re going to do on a regular basis. It makes it part of your checklist that you do every week. This is something very simple. Just do one more new five-minute videos per week. You can do more than that, but one should be the minimum. I don’t care how old you are. I don’t care how seasoned you are, how much hair you have or don’t have. Everybody can do one video per week. You go, “I’m introverted.” You’re in business. Get over it. The things you can share, new assets you’re working on or new case study or a previous deal you’ve done in the past or the previous house you flip. I don’t care what it is. Share your journey, “I’m working on this this week. We’re going to San Diego for the Magnify Your Wealth Summit. We’re going to be going to Note CAMP Commercial,” or “I’ve got Bill Griesmer who runs The COREE group in Columbus. Let’s talk with Bill and what Bill’s focused on, or the topic at the REIA club at the HEB REIA Group in Arlington.”

The most important thing most importantly is to be yourself. Don’t try to be Scott Carson. Don’t try to be Gary Vaynerchuk. Don’t want to be Jeff Wolfe. Don’t want to be that guy. The world can only handle one. You don’t want to be a Bill Griesmer. There’s only one of you, so be the one of you. Don’t be somebody else. The most important thing is to make sure you’ve got good lighting. Sometimes you don’t need a social light as I have. You could literally take a lamp and take the lampshade off. They’ll often give you good light coming in. Make sure you’re doing steady videos. Steady the camera. Somebody may hold the camera while you’re filming. Get your selfie stick or tripod. Trust me on this. It will be helpful. Don’t upload bad videos. Trust me, your good videos will go a long way. Our number one resource for things that we see is our videos. This is why we do so much video with the podcast. Why we do this Note Night in America webinars and record them is because they’re the biggest bang for the buck each week.

Continue To Grow

Continue to grow, part four. You may go, “That doesn’t seem like a lot once I got it down.” That’s right, it probably isn’t. You can attend one networking event per week. If you’re in a smaller town, if you’re within an hour of some place that’s got a networking group, spend the hour and jump in the car. Use that opportunity to your spouse or business partner or carpool with other investors. That’s always a good thing to do. Lunch or evening, if you’re working during the day, you can’t make lunch. Obviously, if you’re working at night, maybe you make the lunch one but trust me, it’s always worth going to no matter what. You may want to sit home and watch the NBA finals or you watch WrestleMania or Monday Night Raw, whatever you want to watch. You’re one connection away from having amazing things happen. One person, one investor, one nugget away from something clicking and going off in your business. If you’re near a big city, look for Saturday events in big cities, Quest Trust Company, obviously Houston or Dallas or Austin are doing big thing. Find out what’s going on in a bigger city.

For those who came in the Mastermind, I’m looking for bigger events, not only in Austin but Dallas. I can market online for connections. You have REIA Clubs doing Sunday lunch and learns. I’m not telling you to go to these things and buy. I’ve done something that was a networking event. Our friend, Adam Adams, loves to go on the apartment bus tours because he’s raising capital from doing that. It’s a phenomenal thing. Our friend, Wayne Snell, loves going to local REIA Club meetings because he’s not only eating and drinking for free most of the time, but he’s also meeting some great people. The thing is to go and connect with people. Don’t be a wallflower. If they’ve got a networking event, people are in the lobby networking, talking, just go up and introduce yourself. Don’t be scared to say anything and go sit and hide in the back. You just wasted your time.

Follow Up

Half of going to a networking event is actually building the business card, building the database. It’s important to do that. Make it a game and add them to your database. If you go with two people, divide and conquer, “You go work that side of the room and I’ll work on this side of the room and we’ll take our contacts and put them together.” I still do this. My friend, Tom Hazzard from Podetize, he goes to the event, I go to the event. He gets a stack of business cards, I got a stack of business cards and we share. We expanded our audience, doubled our take on connections and we still do this at events. It’s worthless if you don’t do anything with it. That night is even nice or the next day, but take the time to send a follow-up email to them with links to your website and your social. Send a personalized email. “Jeff, it was great meeting in San Diego Del Mar. I’m looking forward to learning more about the artwork that you’re doing, but I’m also interested in hearing more about your real estate investing. I would love to connect with you. I actually have a blog that I do. I would love to add you to it. Here’s the link to it. Here are some videos about what I do.” Send that in 24 hours. Let’s try and get it sent in 24 to 48 hours at the worst. Many people never sent a follow-up email and they shoot themselves in the foot.

Bill Griesmer, one of the best guys that work in a room to get business cards. He’s constantly at events going, “Can I swap cards with you?” If they don’t have cards, text and get their information. I’ll sometimes take business cards and say, “Fill your information on this and give it back to me. We’ll swap it out.” I do this at events when I’m at a booth. One of the most valuable is if you don’t have a car, “Fill this out.” Do you want to get my free report? Fill this out. There are other things you can do, but that’s the easiest thing, business cards or just take some blank business cards. Why these things though if you’re a note hustler? Most of these things are things that you can do at off times. You’ve got a busy season that you’re busy until 7:00 at night. Here’s something you do an hour or two hours at a time.

People respond to the stories. That’s why there are YouTube videos. That’s why there are articles. People like to see, they like to read and they like to listen. You don’t want to go, “I bought a house that’s worth $100,000, paid $15,000 for it, put $35,000 into it. I made $50,000.” It’s, “I had this great little house a hoarder lived in,” or every house, every deal has something interesting or how you got it or came across. These things we talk about will help you not only find investors by growing your database and it will be in general transition of them not only giving your database but more. The fact that they see you doing these things is going to lead to them going, “I want to learn more.” You’re doing more than everybody else I see. I go to the real estate clubs and 95% of the people I go to aren’t doing anything but you are. I want to invest with somebody who’s doing something.

I don’t care how many you’ve done, “You look like you know what you’re doing. You’ve got a team around you. You’re part of a Mastermind group. I like it.” Asset manager’s banks are going, “You look like you know what you’re doing.” Very rarely am I asking how many deals have you done. It’s only if you start doing something stupid or you look stupid. Your audience is going to continue to grow if you do this. You could give yourself time to grow. This is not zero to six days since success. It’s not a get rich quick scheme. This is to build wealth. If you were looking for somebody with fake Lamborghini’s and Gucci’s, go waste your time with them. They can take your money and not doing anything. Me, I’m going to give you the nuts and bolts and just straight up tell you like it is.

The thing is, as people start to connect with you, you take the time. I’m not saying Facebook stalk them, but go and connect with them and go, “I would love to connect with you.” We still do this, but I always crack up like on the cruise. “We met some people there. Let’s go to your Facebook profile. Let’s connect.” Our table mates, we’re connected with them. They’re going to come to an event we’re doing later on the year, something fun. If you like somebody or they get along with them, why not connect with them, whether it’s on Facebook or LinkedIn? BiggerPockets is such an untapped source. If it weren’t such horrible about what it allowed you to do, I would spend more time on BiggerPockets. Connecting with twelve people in a day is the max and it drives me bonkers. These items are all simple things, but they’re effective. The thing that we’re talking about is they start seeing you on these other things. They see you on your LinkedIn, they see your email, they see your YouTube video, they get a notice for you. YouTube has this great thing of community where you can send an email and it goes out to everybody that subscribes to your YouTube channel.

I send a link out and lo and behold, 30 people signed up off that one link that was specifically for my YouTube channel. These things I’m talking about are pretty cheap. The only thing we’ve talked about that will cost you anything is your email service provider that you’ve got to pony up with and your LinkedIn if you’re going to pay for one month of things or your BiggerPockets account. That’s pretty inexpensive, but these simple things are the lifeblood of the business. It’s the red blood cells of your circulatory system of making things happen. New blood is rotating through. Fresh blood is going through your arteries. It’s not sexy but it sure works. If you do this as your side hustle, if you’re looking at this thing like, “I need to get into it, what do I need to do?” To be doing these things, you’re going to have faster success than somebody who’s not doing it. “I need to know specifically how long is this going to take.” I don’t know what your timeframe is. They say the magic words, “What’s the least that I have to do?” I said the least that you have to do is nothing.

Finding Deals: If you don’t focus on the nuts and bolts, eventually they’re going to become weakened and your business going to fall apart because you didn’t focus on the small issues.

You don’t have to make phone calls. You don’t have to send emails out. You don’t have to connect to anybody. You’re going to get what you put into it. The more you focus on this, the faster you can get where you need to be, the more connected you’re going to be. More people are going to take notice of what you’re doing and start doing things, not only nationwide but around you. It’s what’s important. You guys can do some amazing things. I believe in everybody out there. These are things that everybody can do. Your spouses, you. If you have kids, they can actually help you out with it. Rinse and repeat. Share your videos and emails to BiggerPockets, repost them on LinkedIn. Grow your community on YouTube. If you post regularly, you can connect with people. You can post notices. Grow your business profiles on your Facebook business page.

Actually, if you have people that like your business page and you post things there, they’re more likely to see your business page than they are on your personal page because Facebook likes to hide things that only about 10% of your audience sees things. You can see who’s checking out your LinkedIn profile. I use that to connect with people. I connected with two asset managers who are checking me out. I connected with three note investors who are checking out my profile. I start sending emails to those that just opened your emails. I’ll look back, I only want to send an email who’s opened up my last five emails or my last six emails because I’ve got a big database, but it doesn’t mean I want to send emails out to 60,000 people and only 13,000 are opening them. I only send emails out to those who open my emails. If you send emails on a regular basis, you should probably do this on a regular basis.

If somebody hasn’t opened your email at all, you probably just want to kick them out of your database because they cost you money. The other thing is that you’re going to higher open rates, more responses and call to actions, people will actually do what they say they’re going to do. It’s going to reduce your spam and costs along the way too, which is important. “Keep It Simple, Silly,” the KISS method. One email into database per week. That’s going to take you about an hour of time putting together. A little bit longer the first time but trust me, when you figure out, “What am I going to write about this week?” That’s it. One email to asset managers. That can take you an hour per week to pre-write that. One five-minute video can take most of your 30 minutes and having to redo it five or six times. You didn’t learn how to ride a bike the first take. Don’t be so hard on yourself.

I still screw up a lot of times on video all the time. I was sending a text message to somebody who had opted into something with a video and I had to take it three times because I screwed up on it, online marketing or reposting. What I mean by that is sharing it to your Facebook, your LinkedIn or what you’re writing. That’s 30 minutes of sharing or less. Going to one meetup per week is roughly three hours of time. If you’re going to copy-paste to 200 different connections of their special asset managers, secondary marketing professionals or real estate note investors, that will take you roughly four hours. If you add that up, that comes a total of ten hours per week and that’s the lifeblood of your business. That’s where everybody should start. That’s the basic marketing, basically lifeblood and simple things to start getting the word out. It’s going to take some time. There’s some ramp-up time. You’re not going to be a ninja overnight. You don’t become an iron chef on your first macaroni and cheese dinner.

That’s what I would recommend for you to note hustlers out there that are on the part-time basis. Some of the guys that are full-time, sometimes we get away from things. We get so bogged down into diving into assets. You’ve got to make sure that you reserve a time to get the nuts and bolts done. If you don’t focus on the nuts and bolts, eventually they’re going to become weakened your business going to fall apart because you didn’t focus on the small issues. Better yet, you do this a couple of times and you set this up for your assistant to do a lot of this stuff. It’s not that hard to do.

We have a comment, “I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me to either invest or sell. After about six months of emails and videos, it takes a little bit of lead time.” It does. Six months is a very common thing. We get that all the time. People are like, “I’ve been following you for six months.” I’m the note hustler. It’s not difficult. It’s not meant to be overwhelming, but it’s ten hours. For some of you, it’s going to take fifteen hours or ten hours of work the first time because you got to figure it out. That’s going to get better and better. If you make it a game and focused on those easy numbers in a checklist, you’ve done it.

If you’re not subscribed to my YouTube channel, please go subscribe there. Also, if you’ve not left a review on iTunes for the podcast, I would love it. It’s my call to you. Please take the time, go to iTunes and leave a review if you enjoy what we talk about. The thing that you’ve got to realize is this works on any type of real estate you’re doing. Residential, commercial, realtor, mortgage broker, title. If you do these things and you are tweaking it for whatever your little niche is, it’s going to work for you. It’s going to help you drive some great stuff up there as well. Hopefully, that’s helpful for you. Go out and make something happen. Please do something.

I don’t do these for my own health. I do these to help you accomplish things because I know you’re capable of doing some things and doing bigger things. Sometimes you want to stretch and do bigger things. Stand up and stretch. We can all do a little bit more. I can do more. There are things I can do to help my business get a little bit better. I encourage you to do that. I look back and this is the lifeblood of what we do. It becomes second nature. I’ve got to get an email out. I’ve got to get something out. I get marketing out for Monday night. I’ve got to do it. I’m focusing on stuff like, “What are you doing on LinkedIn?” I’m just killing some time here, waiting on a woman. Go out, make something happen and we’ll see off the top.

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