EP NNA 54 – 60 Plus Ways To Promote Events

In order to be seen, known, wanted, and even needed by your target market, you must do what it takes in terms of best practices for promoting your products and services. In this episode of Note Night in America, Scott Carson shares over 60 ways that he and his team promote their different events, webinars, training, and podcast. He also shares some creative ways to get the biggest bang for your time and buck when looking to get the word out on what you are doing across multiple platforms for free or for those on a small budget.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

60 Plus Ways To Promote Events

Sixty ways to promote your event. We are a big believer that we own our niche. We all own our niche hopefully, but in the note space, we own the niche when it comes to marketing for the most part. I’ve been teaching real estate coaching in notes since 2004 since I started working with Bob and Jimmy Caleb back then. We started a mortgage company, The Boy Pops. I was a banker before that. When I left banking and went to work with them, it was a matter of time where I started teaching other investors how to market properly. I was very fortunate to have a great apprenticeship with a couple of other people that helped me identify some opportunities to use in marketing and owning our niche out there.

I started doing teleconferences. This is on the phone like conference calls. This started in 2006 with two groups. A webinar is much easier than a teleconference. You want to talk about chaos to many people on a phone, not meeting themselves, it gets loud and noisy. We started teleconferences in 2006. I did my first class or workshop in 2010. We had 28 people the first time around. Second class, I did it about three months later, I had three people. That was an in-person workshop to promote what we do. We started the webinars in 2011 and we’ve done anywhere from 300 to 700 people on it. We know how to do some promotion. We did our first online workshop in 2015. We started with 75. We’ve had up to 300-plus people on a workshop.

I’m excited that’s worked out. It helped us evolve. We did our first online conference with Note CAMP in 2016. We had 337 people in that, but we had multiple conferences that range anywhere from 248 to 1,500-plus people. We know how to attract people to events. Our topic is all about 60 plus ways to promote your different events. By events, I mean a variety of things. It doesn’t mean you need to put your own conference on. If you’re marketing in real estate, we’re all in the media business of some sort. You’re either trying to get eyeballs or earballs in front of people. When you’re going to do a webinar, talk about what your focus is or sharing what are you buying or what are you investing in or your deal flow.

I know a lot of people are doing small live pieces of training and small workshops. We see that increasingly happening across the country. Lunch and learn, this has been successful for quite a few people. Whether it’s online, through a webinar or in person, come in and learn about what we do. Come and look at the deals that we’re working through. A lot of people are looking to put networking events in their local communities. It’s something that they can do once a month, once every other week. These are some ways to help promote that. A one-day mini-summit, some people are doing these in a variety of different fashions.

They’re looking at, “Let’s talk about my portfolio. Let’s talk about a way to see exactly what we’re investing in,” if they’re starting to fund or anything else like that. If you’ve got a podcast, a lot of these things can be used to promote your podcast, not only online or recordings but also podcast events or other things that are going on. If you want to do something big, a conference and an expo is something you can do to use these things to drive traffic whether you are part of it or whether you’re speaking at it or anything.

1-5: Creating A Website, Mailchimp, LinkedIn, Facebook, Landing Page Creators

I’m going to try to explain it if it’s not clear, but for the most part. I got 64 ways for you to promote here. This will work if you’re promoting your business. I don’t care if you’re a loan officer or realtor or an investor. A lot of these things you can do on a regular basis to promote. Let’s start with the first round, 1 through 5. One, here’s the first thing you’ve got to have to promote an event. You have to create a website. It’s easier than it’s ever been before. You could use Wix or something like that, but creating a website will help drive people to it. You’ll have something to drive people to get signed up. It’s your main focal point you first need to have to get rock and rolling. That’s Leadpages or ClickFunnels. Both of those are great websites or landing page creators.

You see MailChimp. You see Infusionsoft creates landing pages. These two things are the ones we use the most, and a lot of the online marketers use it. It’s very easy to use, plug and play, block and drag. You don’t have to be a WordPress expert. This comes in handy. We use it on a regular basis to promote our different events. The host of the webinar is another thing to drive traffic to your audience, Zoom, GoToWebinar, Webinarjam. There’s a variety of things. You could do a regular webinar as we do with Note Night in America. We do it all the times with a sneak peek prior to our Note CAMPs, prior to our social media days, prior to our podcast and mass media summits.

Promoting Events: A great way to sell initial tickets to promote your event is by sharing it with your existing clients.

You can do pre-event stuff, “Here’s an event prior to it and get rock and rolling.” Doing something that you bring people together is a great thing. The reason you require people to register, you should never do an event where you don’t require to register because if they registered now you have their information to market to them on a future event as well too. One of the biggest things we’re doing, building the database. Three, once you’ve got a website up, have a date and time plan, you create a Facebook event page. This is free. You can either pay to promote it or invite up to 250 people to your event as well as your friends. You can take that event and shared across your different groups, different Facebook pages and things like that. Tagging your speakers, you’re going to have more speakers, put it on the agenda.

The Facebook event page is very helpful. It works when you’re going to be promoting as well for driving people to that so they can see what’s going on on your website. You should be promoting in Facebook groups. There are so many Facebook groups that you either be a membership or open, some will let you promote, which is okay. Find groups that fall in line with what your main messages or what your event or your marketing is all about. The LinkedIn event, this is new. LinkedIn has a new ability like a Facebook event page. Also, you can share it with groups. You can share it to your profiles. It’s a cool thing to do that, but that’s 1 through 5.

6-10: Eventbrite To Bumpsale

Moving on here, 6 through 10. Eventbrite is free to do. You can post this and create the same event across multiple cities. They now have a category that if you’re going to do an online event that you can go on the search. That works well too. That’s still free. You can link it directly to your Facebook page too to help sell tickets. We’ve done this with Note Night in America and other events we’ll do. We’ll go out especially to some of the bigger markets and create online events. Posting in the city with a city address where it’s like saying, “Online webinar at 123 Main Street,” gets better traction than posting that as an online event.

Eventbrite is free. People are looking at it for events. It’s a cool thing and it’s an extra way to get your word out on what you’re doing. One of the things that’s important is always a good thing to do if you’ve got existing clients or members or something like it that you’re a part of. A great way to sell initial tickets to promote your event is by sharing it with your existing clients. “I’ll give you a bonus, half price or 25% off,” or something to your clients, members to promote it and someone will share it as well too. That’s a great way to do it as well.

Eight, this is one thing that we do. At the bottom of my signature, you see where it says, “Scott Carson, text notes to 72000.” That’s a call to action. You can put a website in there, WeCloseNotes.com or I have texting opt-in with MOBIT. I’ve seen it used in a variety of ways. Scott Carson texted my first name in Zoom and notes to 72000 is my last name under my profile. That’s one way that you would do it on there as well. You could use other things like Be.live or OBS allows you to put in bottom thirds and things like that as well too for it. I like using Zoom and that’s one of the simplest things that you can do, that we could opt-ins from our YouTube videos and things like that. Replays on a regular basis.

Extra early bird pricing. This would be something that you offer up as an extra bonus on the front end, especially if you’re six months out or more than three months out, get the extra early bird, giving them the lowest price possible to get something in. You can have run promotions. You want to have timelines where it’s not the same extra early bird pricing. This is good for a week, good for a month, good for the end of the month, good for this weekend only. It’s an important thing to do. It will also help drive traffic into ticket sales into your event because people will start to take notice.

We even realize you’re trying to get in front of everybody’s eyeballs multiple times so that they can start seeing, “I need to sign up for this. I see this.” Let’s face it. Rarely do we see an event and immediately sign up immediately for it right then and there. Most of the time, we don’t do that. First, the second or third time we see something before we decide to get around and doing it. Ten, you can offer Bumpsale pricing. It’s Bumpsale.com. It’s a cool plugin for your websites. It allows for you to start pricing off at $1 or $20 and to increase by a specified amount, whether it’s $1, $5, $10, you give a bump up for a sale.

It’s a great tool to see initial pricing, but also it gets people excited, “I’ve got this $1. I got this for $5 when it’s normally $97.” People will share when they get a discount. What’s nice about Bumpsale is it will create the HTML coding and place it into your Leadpages or your ClickFunnels. You want to create a separate landing page for your Bumpsale away from your main page. We’ve done that and it’s worked out well. I would always create an event manual most of the time. The thing about creating a PDF, people like to have something that they can print and take with them whether it’s the profiles. They’d like to jot notes down in on it.

11-26: Event Manuals To Meetup Groups

You can have the bios. You can have websites. This gives you something also that you can create, but the schedule on there. You can also create ads for it, sell ads to sponsors. This is a great thing. People liked the event manual. Whenever we have done it, people have loved it. When we haven’t done it, people have always asked for it. Sometimes we’ve been limited on the time so we didn’t get one to put out. We always try to strive to have an event manual, some may be before or this is something that you do even after if you’re going to use transcriptions or blogs or things like that with replays.

Email blast sequence, you need to jot down your email. You will all have a database. Hopefully, you do. You’ve got to figure out, “What’s the first email that’s going out? If they click on it, what’s the second email?” If they didn’t click on it, how sooner are you going to send that same email back to them to get them to click on it? What you’re going to see is roughly somewhere between 10% and 20% open rate, if not more the first time around. The second time, it’d be 6% to 10%. The third time, maybe 2% to 5% if you’re sending it to the people that didn’t open it. First, people who opened the first time, they don’t get the second and third email, they get a different email.

Having an email blast sequence right now and what are you going to talk about, what do we focus and how often are you posting is an important thing to promote. It’s very critical. It’s still one of the best ways to promote your event. Another thing that I like using when I have my speakers or people that are going to be on one of my events or my meetings, have them use a Calendly tool because this way in my Calendly, it’s a meeting tool that links in. It gives them the spots they can pick from. I’ve asked them what their bio is, their headshot link, any social or hashtags they like or anything like that. I have it all in one spot. It makes it easier for me or my staff to take all that information and share it out quickly. “So and so is here. Here’s their bio. Here’s their headshot. We’re excited to have them speaking at the event.”

As you get things booked, that’s a great way to use in promotion besides having their words, everything in one place. Since we use Zoom so much with webinars, Zoom allows you to create twenty special links. If I have twenty speakers, I can give them each a Zoom link to share with their audience for free or to share everything at the sneak peek where their staff or team can come in, watch him speak during that session. You can see who promotes, how many people clicked on it, how many people are registered. We’ll track it when you export your list like, “So-and-so came from Melinda, came from Juliet.” That’s a thing most people don’t know. It caps out at twenty unique lead-gen links for people to use.

YouTube videos, we talked about Zoom links and pre-emails beforehand. Take your videos, throw them up on YouTube, but then add links to it inside the description. Add end cards, keywords, description links. It’s important. You don’t need the longest hour-long promo videos. Short videos work well, 5, 10 minutes sneak peeks could be a little thing. Quick little bios, quick little interviews on YouTube with your speakers or about a specific subject you’re covering can come in handy for you as well to promote out. YouTube is the second largest search engine. Google is number one. It’s important but you’ve got to have the links, end cards, keywords all in there.

You can use TubeBuddy to help you with that, to help you streamline some of that stuff. They’re easy. Most of us have a YouTube community. If you’ve got a YouTube channel, you usually have a community or are able to communicate with your followers and some fashion and subscribers. I have a YouTube community page of mine. I use the images. You can use a poll or you can use video to communicate with them. I like it as well. It’s an extra way, extra touch to do that. If you’re going to do an event, you should have three different ticket options.

You should have general admission, VIP or backstage pass. The reason for the general admission is for those who want to come in, learn and maybe a little tighter on their budget. Midway, you add some bonuses. Maybe throw on the replays for that. It’s an easy up sale. Also, add a little extra bonus, maybe they’re part of the mastermind you’re doing or they get extra coaching or something. Having the three-tier approach, people love in threes. Those that will say, “I get more value from this,” those that paid for a higher ticket are going to be probably your ideal clients to follow up with.

Those that are in the general admission, they’re going to show up. They’re maybe me not ready quite to purchase. You can always go back when somebody buys a ticket with a sale. I saw you did about general dentistry. You don’t want to pick the upgrade before we get rock and roll in there for you. You need to create infographics number eighteen for each speaker. Take their headshot. That’s what’s so important about having their Calendly. You take the logo of the event or whatever you’re doing, their headshot, who they are, their title and maybe when they’re speaking or a link to the events, “I’m speaking at Mass Media Podcast. I’m speaking at Podfest. I’m speaking at Note CAMP.”

We’ve used these all and the speakers like it because it’s easy for us to use, not only for them as we sent it out to them, but also use it in the future. Provide discount codes for each speaker or affiliate links. Some speakers want to feel their links, others want a discount code they can give to their audience. Either works well. It’s why you’re going to need a CRM tool like Infusionsoft or Merchant account. They can do that. Provide that, except that on the frontend and have that ready to roll when you have a speaker you RSVPed. It doesn’t take too long to do. It’s important to do because a lot of them are like, “Don’t be afraid to give away half the ticket sales.”

I feel it’s because if they’re promoting, half of something is a whole lot better than 100% of nothing. Here’s the thing too, with these infographics, you want to share these. We use buffer on the front end during and after and share it to Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, even Pinterest. Not every speaker will share themselves, but if you tag them, a lot of times accept the tags, the people are checking on their profiles like, “I’m cool with you tagging me, but I may not share it.” Other people coming at an event may or may not share what you’ve got going on.

Another way is posting to different meetup groups. Meetup groups are a great way. There are so many different meetup groups with interest in the niches across, or you’ve heard me talk about this probably before If you’ve been on one of my Note Night in America or talking about Note Closers Show as well too. Meetup groups have multiple ways for you to post to their audiences. It’s free to join the meetup groups and they will often have mailing lists that they publish. Discussion boards or message boards that you can do. Sometimes all three, sometimes maybe one, sometimes none.

Most of the groups will have at least two of those, if not three of those that you can market to. It’s an important thing. If you’re doing an online event, you want to attract other people or you’re doing a live event, go to local meetup groups in the area. I would talk first if you’re going to be offering something up, talk to the person that runs those meetup groups, make sure you’re not stepping on anybody’s toes. You may need to offer them an affiliate discount code or a discount to their members. Keep that in mind.

I like doing short 5 to 10-minute preview interviews with speakers and posting those to social media. That’s a great way to get the momentum going. “We’ve got Jason Bible on here from Mr. Texas Real Estate.” We’re going to talk quickly about what he’s going to share at the upcoming Note CAMP. We’ve got Patrick Precourt, our keynote speaker, “What’s quick three nuggets you’re going to share while speaking?” There are local colleges that would benefit, there’s somebody to provide education, maybe a student pass, “Send me a copy of your student ID and we’ll give you a free ticket.” We’ve done military passes, “Send me a copy of your military ID, we’ll comp you into a workshop.”

People love that and appreciate that. It’s a little extra discount. It’s better to have somebody there than nothing. You got to require them to be there is a big thing. Your speakers, the people you’re having on or a part of this. If they have a mastermind group or a membership that they’ve sold, those people are buyers. I’m not afraid to offer up a discount ticket or a free pass to your membership group you’re speaking to. It’s a great way to promote, “I’d love to be on. You’re speaking out, I want to hear more about what you’re talking about.” Their cheerleaders will come on and be cheerleaders to them at your event as well too. This is a great way to promote as well.

If you can find somebody who’s willing to share it, has a group, they understand that you’re busting your butt and that they should bust their butt as well too to help promote the event if possible. Everybody is going to pimp up their list and that’s totally fine. You realize you’re doing most of the promotions for the things, but if they see you, the speaker sees you doing a lot of things, oftentimes they’ll share with their audience as well. It’s also important to doing Facebook Lives, videos in different groups. You can restrict your phone. You can share it directly to different groups you’re a part of. It doesn’t need to be that long. You can share it. You can use Live Leap to share in a lot of cases. You have administrators across multiple groups. Otherwise, you need to join it individually and share it one at a time.

26–30: Offering Affiliate Discounts And So Much More

26 through 30, if you see big groups, large groups, maybe there’s a discount. There’s like Austin Chamber of Commerce here. I would say, “We’re doing an online event for business” or something like that. “Here’s a special discount if you’re an Austin Chamber of Commerce or get 20% off for being AARP members.” Facebook groups, associations, meetups, LinkedIn groups, these are different things. The reason you would maybe do an affiliate discount or tracking code or something like that is you can see where everybody comes from and see what your best bang for the buck is when it comes down to where everybody’s coming from. You could do a mini-summit on Instagram Live while I go for an hour straight.

You could bring on 3 or 4 speakers, probably three-under fifteen minutes each and do a mini some of the 60 minutes promoting your major event. We’ve seen this done. Our buddy, Adam Scheibel, likes to do this for his events and it’s a great thing. It draws attention not only from your profile but you the people you have on their profile. If you’re doing this, make sure you check out your speaker’s Instagram profiles if you’re going to do this. In that way, their audience is notified when they go live on your summit. It’s a great way to drive engagement that way too. I’m a big fan of using Octopus CRM with LinkedIn and sending that custom messages 100, 150 a day direct to people that fall in my line, asset managers, podcast hosts, real estate investors, note investors.

“I’d like to invite you to this event. I’m hosting. It’s great to meet with you, connect with you. We’ve got this in common.” I like to include a link to a short video that I answered certain app, but this has done well for me. It’s a tool that I love using and some people are like, “You’re not building a relationship. I’m working to build relations, “I’ve got a special event I’m doing. Here’s a link to that event. The normal price of this if you’re interested, it’s half price for you. Use this code.” You can use another service called LeadFuze to help you build custom ones that you can market out to your Twitter profiles. Facebook profiles, sometimes even pull a pretty decent list of emails off of LeadFuze.

Most of the time, it’s going to give you their LinkedIn profile link that you can upload to Octopus CRM as well. Those two go hand-in-hand. You can also use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It will help you build lists and go that route. Sometimes people like that you spend some time messing around with it. It’s not free, but it’s something that can help you drive traffic and promote your event out to people on LinkedIn that you feel would benefit from it or your ideal clients. That’s the beautiful thing about LinkedIn.

Promoting Events: Meet up groups have multiple ways for you to post to their audiences.

Association list, if you’re a member of an association or a group or something like that, a lot of times you may be able to purchase the list of members and market to those lists with a discount or an email blast out, “Fellow self-storage investors, I’m hosting an online self-storage summit. I’d love to talk with you about. Maybe you’re interested in speaking,” something like that. You can also reach out to your potential sponsors. They will often have a database, “Let’s do special discount code for your clients or your list or your promotion to your database as well.” A lot of the sponsors will come on to promote once or twice out. You’ll need to make sure you have a pretty clearly written email. You don’t want to be too long, but something short and sweet that they can share across their social media or their email blast.

You can get your speakers to email blast to their list as long as it’s beneficial. You want to track code so you can say, “Thank you very much.” One of the things that I like to try to do is use a tracking code. If a speaker does a blast and one of the people on their lists signs up or somebody else’s, give them a kickback. A percentage of sales, even though it’s not their stuff. That will help ensure some stuff. Links, images, you need to have the infographics. You need to have the emails prewritten so that they can plug and play easy templates for everybody out there as well.

This is one of the things that speakers always ask me, “Do I have anything I can promote? Let me help promote it, but I need an email.” You need a couple and you need the timing of it. You need to plan it out ahead of time. If you’ve got enough of a runway before your event, maybe sponsoring or speaking at other speaker events are available out there, “I’d love to speak at your event.” Sometimes you can be either a speaker, “You’re speaking at mine. Can I speak at your event?” “Can I sponsor your event and get stage time?” “If I can’t sponsor your event, can I have a booth in the hallway?”

You see that happen in a lot of events where there’ll be a sponsor and they’ll have a booth and be able to communicate with people that are in the event live or virtually or, “I’m a sponsor at your event, can I get the list of contacts there?” I’ve done that before. Do it via webinars, with workshops. I’ve sponsored different networking events where my whole goal was to get the database, these 300 or 600 or 900 people on a database that was worth me paying the $300 or $400 or $500. I could send an email blast out to those otherwise afterward. Going to the local networking events or BNI groups, Business Networkers International.

Some we’ve done to grow our local database. The good thing about BNI is you’re going to get business owners that are spending money on marketing. If you’ve got something that you want to connect with local businesses or a local event, whether it’s in person or online. Show up to that BNI group. I wouldn’t offer it free because free still has no value, but you could offer a BNI discount or something like that to those who interested. You could go to BNI.com, find out all the BNI groups in your area and connect with them, phone numbers, emails, a lot of times. Oftentimes, the BNI groups will give you the written list before you leave there, which is a great tool.

Going to live, local real estate clubs or meetup groups, other networking events, Chamber of Commerce, Rotary events, things like that. It’s the same thing. Sponsorship, sometimes they want you to buy a membership to their stuff, do it. It’s well worth it, especially if you can network and build context. You’re going to have to have some stuff lined up, business cards, flyers, maybe some banners or something like that. It comes in handy, especially if you’ve got along with ramp-up. My buddy, Chris Krimitsos, who runs Podfest, he spends about ten months out of the year traveling and speaking at other events to drive people to his events.

Chamber of Commerce networking is if you’re doing something business-wise or something local, joining the Chamber of Commerce often can be a great tool. Especially if you’ve been on an active chamber is or one of the types of events they have or subgroups that might fit in with what you’re doing. Local small business administration offices are a great place because these are the guys that are helping small businesses. They can put you in touch with people that are your ideal clients or people going through the same thing or other places that can help you promote your event. If your event is valuable, you may be able to add some people to it pretty inexpensively.

This may sound old school, but posting event flyers at different places. I go into JuiceLand a couple of times a week to get a juice after my workout. They’ve got a message board with flyers. There’s a guy that goes through there and post flyers once a week and takes them down, puts up the newest events. That’s what I’m talking about. Coffee houses like Starbucks will have them. Grocery stores will have an event, community page. If you’ve got local vendors, your local insurance like Quest will have events, we’ll go drop off flyers so they can hand out to their clients that come through. If you’ve got a community group, a community house, like if you’re in an apartment complex, you’re doing something there, post there.

Your local gym a lot of times will have community events that you can post things there as long as your membership. They want to encourage community members to share what they’ve got going on. That could be something very valuable for you too as well. This is old-fashioned. This will cost some money, but it’s still pretty inexpensive. Posting the ads in the penny savers to free newspapers a lot of times or even writing an ad in a newspaper can be a pretty awesome skill depending on what you’re doing. If you’re in real estate, still posting like a handyman special is a great ad or, “I’ve got a weekend workshop. I’ve got a podcast on this. You may want to check it out.”

31 And Beyond: Direct Mail Postcards, Press Release, Friend Bonus, And Advertising Videos

Let’s face it, you want to be posting for your event, your online, whatever it might be or event people may be at. Some of these things we’re going through more for an event versus does for a webinar or lunch and learn. The idea to this is that you’ve got plenty of opportunities and plenty of ways to promote what you’re focused on or what you’re working on. It’s not all online. It’s old fashioned posting ad in penny saver. Some places, depending on where you’re at in the country, some of those things will still work very valuable for you.

Direct mail postcards, this is something you may want to do to drive people into a networking event, to a local expo or something like that. We’ve done this where we dropped out postcards that say, “We’re going to be speaking in three weeks at the REI Expo, bringing this card as a discount. Bring it to Booth Number 47. I’d love to have you come out and hear me speak at 3:00 on a Saturday.” That’s worked out well for us in the past. Direct mail can be expensive, especially if you start adding postcards and postage to it. Talk to some of the events. If you’ve got a big enough runway mailing list, all you need is one or two people to show up and interact with you, whether they sign up or have clients or something like that to make it valuable for you.

Some speakers of your groups may have a Facebook page or they have their own groups that you can post on. You may want to make sure to get permission to tag them or they’ve got their own groups. “Aaron Young Harris,” who is an inner circle thing. “Aaron speaking this week on this. It may be something you’re interested in.” Conference and events prior to your event. We’ve talked a little about this. Look at the different conferences. Look at this in the bigger events that are going on. They may offer up opportunities for you to get a booth at or they may be able to come up and you go hand out flyers or go hand out and be at an event or do some cool marketing prior to the event.

You can often get a sponsor for a booth. For Steph, she got her for movie podcasts, she could buy a booth basically at Pop Cats’ big dog, primarily cat expo takes place in Houston for like $300 where they’ll have that 10,000 people come through. Great to have a booth for her to sponsor her thing to get things off and running for her. She was putting on like a weekend event later on. She could buy the booth and promote a weekend event later as well and still be able to get in front of a lot of people there. Speakers preview emails, “I would be doing this 2 to 3 weeks out to your database.” If you’ve sent out, “Here’s what’s going on.”

Start doing reviews, who’s speaking here? Start doing a little preview where you’re bringing some of this different real s together, the short videos, their infographics or their bios. Tell them why they want to hear. Your database trust you so share why this is important. Here’s why it is or here’s a previous interview I’ve had with this person before about this and they’re going to talk about this and this at the upcoming event. Your email list, you want to highlight accomplishments and short preview videos. If it’s not worth hearing this guy speak for $99 or $149, don’t worry about it.

What I’m trying to get is you want ad environment, “I’m excited to share lecture, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad speaking at Note CAMP this year. Here’s a short interview I did with her beforehand when she spoke in the last one.” I like using guest appearances on similar podcasts. If you don’t have a podcast, if you’ve got an event or something you’re working on, a real estate area, local real estate investors, often a real estate, “I’m a local note investor or I’m a local fix and flipper or I’m local insurance.” There are all different things. There are many podcasts out there. There are 800,000-plus podcasts, but only roughly about 250,000 are still active. I guarantee you can find something in your area. Oftentimes, many podcasts are looking for interviews of some sort.

You want to make sure that you’re doing this at least probably a month out. Find out what their schedule is to publish so that you’re not, “Coming down to promote my event next week. We don’t publish for two weeks. That’s not going to be effective.” Maybe the next event and go from there. This is something that we’ve seen this done where people are paying for podcasters to read a quick 30 to 45-second ad. “I’ll pay $500 to read this 30 to a 45-second ad on your next twelve episodes or your next five episodes.” If they’ve got a large enough audience, that may be valuable enough, “Jim Bob over here is talking about the REI Expo coming up in Dallas. I listen to Jim Bob. Jim Bob is a good event I’m going to sign up for.”

We’ve talked about papers, newspapers, local magazines, oftentimes Austin Living, Texas Living. There are some different things that you can use to promote events. It’s going to cost you a bit of money or you may need to see if they needed a news article written. Do you have some to offer up to a reporter, a journalist? We had Christine Haas from Media Max Out talking about this on the Mass Media Podcast Summit. Putting an article together or something that’s interesting or relevant what’s going on. It makes it easier for you to get published. I contribute to Podcast Business Journal on a weekly basis to share something. It takes me 10 to 15 minutes to write a 700, 800-word article and I share it there. It helps to promote stuff.

Austin Business Journal and I mean like journal event pages, they will often, “What’s going on in the community page?” You may also see this for other events or other driven stuff. KVUE.com, our local news online website, they have what’s going on where you can go and post different events that are taking place. Also, you may be able to advertise on other websites. We use this with some thumbnails for posting an event. We’ll go and find a couple of things. We’ve used this with known MLS. We’ve used this with Podcast Business Journal. We’ve had a couple of the things we’re doing in the future where we create the thumbnails for an easy ad and maybe swapping ad space or sponsorships.

They’re running our thumbnails on their website. People will pop. You only click on their website. They see us pop up. Pages of magazines, newsletters, you’ll see a lot more of this online advertising taking place these days. It makes it easy especially if you’re using retargeting to go back and forth. You can always write a press release. I would use this for major events. I wouldn’t say ran a press release if I’m doing a webinar this week, but something major happened in your business, something major happening. You’re putting on a conference or a summit or you’re speaking somewhere, something critical. The press release is a great way to get some word out in what you’re doing. It could cost you a little bit of money, a couple of $100. You have eReleases, news wires, a variety of press releases out there.

We’ve used this very strategically in our business. When we had a major event, a major milestone, we use a press release in a couple of different ways. When we closed on a big trade, we’ll see that happening. We’ll do an email blast along with the press release as well. We were in Newswire or something like that as well. Check out the release. Another way is Craigslist events ad. I know this sounds crazy, but Craigslist still gets in front of a lot of people. If you can do the event stuff, you can post, “We’ve got an upcoming webinar or upcoming event, the upcoming summit in a couple of weeks. I wouldn’t do it more than a week or two weeks out. If it’s an in-person event, you probably want to start promoting it ahead of time, at least a month. If it’s an online event, two weeks.

You can post very cheaply, very inexpensively across multiple Craigslist pages and drive traffic to it. You could always purchase an email list. I would not go and say, “I’m going to pay to go out in somebody lists.” Those don’t work. They’re worthless. I’m going to do a list swap. What I’m saying is a lead list. You could go to Exact Data, Melissa Data, two of those and find out what kind of list they have that fall in line with what you’re trying to promote. It’s a great way to build a database initially. You have to be careful about emailing out to them a little bit of time drip marketing ends. You want to give yourself some lead time. You may pay as little as $0.06 to $0.14 per lead to get a big list.

Talking to those two companies, they can help you with the list and tell them what you’re looking for, what you’re trying to do. They can often sometimes cater something that works well and valuable to you. That’s going to cost you some money. You can use Facebook and Instagram to geotarget other events. We’ve done this for a variety of different events in the notes space or even the podcast in the marketing space. There was a big conference going on and we can’t make it to, we’ll geo-target within a mile. It’s a five-mile radius around the event location. Running like $20 a day or $30 a day. It’s cheaper than a ticket and airfare out. We’ll try to target them where it pops up their phone if they have an interest in this and that.

It’s a pretty easy thing to do. You can do this with real estate deals. You can do this at other events, especially if you’re targeting specific things, getting people to opt-in. I’ll give you an example like Traffic & Conversion Summit is coming up. It’s the largest marketing event taking place in the country, about 10,000 people. You can believe I’m going to be doing some Facebook and Instagram targeting within five miles of the San Diego Convention Center for real estate marketing and also podcasting. You can always post images and run an ad on Instagram and Facebook as well too.

Promoting Events: If a speaker does a blast and one of the people on their lists signs up or somebody else’s, give them a kickback.

That’s going to cost you some money. They talk about if you’re into something on a regular basis, $1 a day is all you need. I would highly recommend that. It allows you to able to split test things. You can run a couple of different, create a couple of different infographics or images and then promote that out. That’s come in handy too. One of the things that people have done well in like a lot of our images that we bring in movies and quotes and things like that. We can create that and then use that as the ad space and the ad image that does well to people liking that.

Another thing is you can always invite a friend bonus, people that have signed up, “Invite a friend for free.” You do invite a friend bonus. I know somebody that’s interested, invite your friend. For your people that signed up creating, I’m attending an infographic for them saying, “I’m attending. Are you?” That’s a great way to build influencers especially micro-influencers. It’s also worked into people sharing your image and often doing free social media posts, which is awesome. The more posts you get, the more eyeballs you’re in front of, 80% sales going up in the fifth context. Maybe it’s three-year contacts and two from people that they know, like, “They got him, her and them. I need to sign up for that.”

We talked about adding a friend. You may also want to do an email blast out to your people sign up, here’s a special ticket and get half off. If you want to add a friend. If your friend wants to come here as a special half-off ticket or a promotion, if you don’t want to do an add a friend for free, you can always charge for it as well. Instagram keyword targeting, messages, and posts. You can follow specific hashtags and keywords on Instagram. You can see who’s posted either the most popular or also the ones that are the most recent.

I’ve used that to track down other note investors or real estate investors or the podcasters. I’ll give an example. The real estate podcast is one thing that I track. If anybody has it in their hashtag, I’ll look and I try to follow it because I’m learning new marketing things. I also connect to their audience, “Have you thought about having somebody on to talk about note investing? Have you thought about maybe coming to this event and we’re doing this event online? Have you thought about it, we’ve got an event? If you’re interested in notes, we’ve got an event that’s coming up.”

You can either do direct messages, even see if people are commenting. I’ll go and follow those people who are maybe going to send a direct message, “I’m posting an event there.” You’ve got to be careful about that. You’re not spamming everybody, but it’s a great way to start conversations. How long have you been a real estate investor? How long have you been a note investor? There are some conversations you can start with that. Do the same thing on Twitter too. You can use Instagram, Twitter to build your audience up. You can connect with people, grow your following, and it becomes a cool thing that you can do.

YouTube advertising videos, you can create short 1 to 2-minute videos or go straight to YouTube and figure out some easy ad videos on there. That’s going to take a little better production. You can’t do anything cheap. It can be a valuable ad spin. I see some of the same ones. I know it’s working for people, I see that over and over again. The more beautiful thing is sometimes training and things work well for that. Depending on what you’re offering an event, training, seminar. It can be very effective. Google ad words, you could put out there. We’re not going to talk about that. That’s not one of my 60, but I would do it on YouTube.

I would take your videos that you’re sharing and Facebook lives and then I would restream them. I would re-share them across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. Post it in LinkedIn. You can use Restream.io and you can do it once or you can set it up with Restream to automatically repeat on a regular basis. You may want to reach out to local morning shows. If you’re in a big enough market that has its own TV show and the more like San Antonio Live or Austin Live. When you’ve got an event upcoming, reach out to them ahead of time. I’ve got an event coming up. I didn’t know if you’d like to have me on to talk about that and why it’s so valuable in your local area. It can be very helpful.

It’s the same thing if you’ve got your favorite TV show or favorite radio stations in an area, some of them have drivetime shows. You can get up early in the morning. I’ve done this before in Tampa. I got up and was on the 7:00 AM event beforehand. I’m going to be live here. It’s a great thing to do. Number 64 is our last one. You want to use some survey or some quiz that you can ask from your audience there, 10 to 25 questions. The fewer the questions, they’re probably the higher hit rate. The more valuable make the questions either.

Important Links

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

Here’s How »

Join Note Night in America community today: