EP NNA 78 – Attracting Investors In The Virtual World Of 2020: From Networking Events To Lead Magnets

NNA 78 | Attracting Investors

NNA 78 | Attracting Investors

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has moved all of us to the virtual space. The only way to keep going in this environment is by adapting. On this episode of Note Night in America, Scott Carson breaks down the different ways to network and leverage virtual events to attract investors and funding sources for your deals. He also discusses using lead magnets, tripwires, and other organic sources to help you replace the in-person networking we all miss.

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Attracting Investors In The Virtual World Of 2020: From Networking Events To Lead Magnets

If this is your first time reading this, we’re honored to have you. We’ve got a lot of great stuff to cover. I encourage you all to ask questions as we go through it. We’ve been doing this show for a couple of years. You can go to WeCloseNotes.tv and that will take you directly to our YouTube channel which we highly encourage you to subscribe while you are there. Thank you for joining in. We’re going to dive straight into what we got going on. Attracting investors, let’s face it, everybody. It is a different time right now. Our 2020 reality and networking has become a series of Zoom calls is the way to look at it. Whether it’s a one-on-one call or you’re a part of a group networking or you’re doing virtual summits.

Our reality has turned into you’ve got to be online. You’ve got to be doing things virtually. Otherwise, if you’re not networking or doing other things, you’re getting steamrolled by the train that runs us all over. That train has the name of 2020 out there. If you embrace it and understand the options that are available to you to do some things, you could do some cool things. I know we’re all used to going out once a week or one night a week or one night a month to our local networking events or meet up groups or clubs or online summits. God knows there are enough online summits out there. Everybody is a summit expert.

What Are You Doing To Connect

We’re proud of the fact that we’ve been doing so much for years now. The fact is that you’ve got to tweak how you’re interacting with people. Otherwise, you’re often going to feel like you’re wasting a lot of time showing up and not getting much out of what you’re doing. Let’s ask the question here. What are you doing to connect? There’s a variety of things you can do. Hopefully, you’re still doing some of the basic things that you were doing before all of this hit or you’ve implemented some new things.

Sending an email blast out to your investor community. An email blast out, not to IRA investors you may have pulled or bought a list, but your warm contacts, the people that you’ve networked with prior to this. You’ve taken all those business cards. I’ve got to stack them somewhere and put them into a spreadsheet for you to able to network with them. Sending at least monthly on a minimum, preferably weekly, but doing something to connect with people on a regular basis. You’ve worked hard to get those business cards. You press a lot of flesh. You travel. You spent time and money away from your family, away from doing the things you want to do by hanging out at these events.

Somebody says, “I like going to events.” Who doesn’t like going to events? If you don’t do anything with his cards and you show up and you’re not taking any type of action to continue those conversations in the hallway, continue those conversations that you had at dinner, over lunch, or over the coffee that you had while you’re at these events, it’s hard to replace those. If you don’t do anything about it, you lose those contacts at a rapid pace. A lot of times we’ll bring people on and do a live back and forth.

I do a lot of Zoom calls throughout the day. I do a lot of 3 or 4, sometimes up to ten video calls back and forth with people. I also do a lot of videos where it’s me teaching something with a show and I share it via Facebook or YouTube, Instagram, TV, or even sharing short videos on LinkedIn. I do varieties across the place to stay on top of my mind. People always say, “Scott, you’re everywhere.” I’m not everywhere. I’m sharing something. I’m re-purposing it in a variety of ways.

It’s simple to do this on a regular basis. You can do webinars like Note Night in America started out a webinar several years ago like we do every Monday night or you can do events once a year, twice a year, or podcasts whatever. Maybe it’s lunch and learn. Maybe you’re talking about a deal you’re reviewing. Maybe you’re doing a video blog every Friday on your cell phone as you’re walking. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as the most important thing is being consistent. I’ve had anywhere from as little as three people on to as many as almost 800 on the show. I’ll go through some numbers of what we are doing consistently with this stuff here, social networking. I don’t mean going out and networking. I mean going out and social sleuthing as you are up attending virtual events. A lot of virtual events will have their private Facebook group and connecting with people in that group or connecting on LinkedIn with other investors. There are great ways to reach out to people who do that.

I like LinkedIn because you can type in and identify real estate investors and note investors is what we’re talking about and connect with 50 to 100 people a day. You can send out about 1,000 to 2,500 invites. If you’ve got a free account or brand-new account, that number should be limited on a monthly basis. Still, you have to start somewhere and growing that database is a valuable thing for you. I do a lot of shows as you may know and that’s a great way for me to get out my word to another audience.

One of my biggest things is guesting on other people’s podcasts. That’s a great way for me to get in front of other people’s audiences. It’s like a speaking event. Me going out to a summit and I’m speaking to somebody’s stage virtually whether it’s 100 people or 10,000 people. It’s a beautiful thing. Small groups are great but big followers as well. I evaluate them all equally. When someone’s got 1,000 subscribers, that’s great. They’re brand new. They’ve got a few episodes. It’s still somebody I’m talking to. It’s still greater than one. It’s something that’s going to sit out there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week advertising for me.

How Are You Attracting Investors?

We talked about how are you attracting investors? Some of the things we discussed are ways to track people into your audience. You have to shake it up a little bit. It’s sifting through the people that are players and then the pretenders. There are a lot of pretenders. Ninety-five percent of people out there are pretenders. I’m going to throw that out there for you. You have sometimes you got about another 20%, 5% to 10% are doers, 10% to 20% are people on the fence, but about 75%, 80% of people aren’t going to do anything.

It’s sad to say that, but that’s the average of everybody out there. Most people are about 20 percenters are the ones that are going to do something in some fashion. I would focus on a little bit about the private money formula. This all comes down to attracting investors. It’s not like I’m going to put up a billboard out there on I-35 here in Austin, Texas with my smile on my face and say, “Buy my deal.” That’s not going to work. Talk about the private money formulas and taking a look at your existing database. If you know the numbers from the Law of Averages, in what your database and your marketing, it can help you determine how much in private money is in your existing database and why it’s valuable to expand on your connections and to Always Be Marketing, ABM. You’ve heard of ABC, Always Be Closing, Always Be Marketing.

You’re technically are closing people on you on a slow drip. We’re not talking about, “Fund my deal.” We’re talking the whole Gary Vaynerchuk aspect of things, the whole jab, jab, jab, right hook. Give a little bit of information, act the hook when you have something. You get people to build trust and value what you’re doing, but you’ve got to attract people. 2020 is a different era. If you’re going to a regular job and you’re around the same people every night from 9:00 to 5:00 or 8:00 to 6:00 or whatever your day might be, they aren’t your ideal clientele for investing or not looking to invest.

You’re going to have a hard time raising capital if you’re not doing something from that 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM aspect of things. Not doing something a little bit extra to attract that extra audience. You don’t have to do a lot extra. If you did 5% extra each day, five emails, five phone calls, five posts, five simple connections. You can go a long way in 30 days. We’re all familiar with Elon Musk talking about how to get away. Why did he work 80 hours a week versus 40 hours a week? He said, “I would speed up my learning curve and speed up my success rate.”

Always Bring Cash

I was working twice as harder as most people. I had success twice as fast because I got through my mistakes and I learned from it. I did that extra. Whereas most people, 90% to 95% of people are going to have the least amount if not zero to help them find their dreams. Let’s talk about this. If you take a look at the private money formula. This would be some good stuff and valuable to you all.

Looking back at your time circle and I’m talking about your circle as more than the people you meet. A lot of us and I only say this because we all have some people who we know that we network with or we talk on a regular basis but aren’t in our database. They’re in our circle, but they’re on an outer circle. What I mean with the outer circle is there’s not a way for us to talk to them except face-to-face. That’s not an effective way in this world. I hate to say it, 2020 is a beast of its own that we have to look at and realize you’ve got to evolve. If you haven’t evolved, you’re going to be struggling. Not only maybe already, but moving into 2021.

NNA 78 | Attracting Investors

Attracting Investors: If you’re not networking or doing other things, you’re getting steamrolled by the train that runs us all over.

 

I’m throwing this out here a little bit, a great example and I’m a little inexperienced here. I’m good at marketing. There’s a restaurant that we love to go to. We’re friends with the owner. It’s an amazing restaurant. She’s always busy. I was like, “You can market a little bit more with what you’re doing by capturing a little bit more information. Have people fill out a little comment card where you get their name, their email, and their cell phone number. You can put them on a database and send them bonuses or discounts to comment on your off-peak times.”

I was like, “I even went out of the way. I’ve spent a little bit of money on some marketing for them to help them out to put those things in place.” Their staff was good for the first two nights. They captured about 70 leads between those that came in and then they’re to-go order. I’m like, “That’s awesome.” I left town for a week and came back and how many people were in the box when I got back? Five more, they completely dropped the ball.

I told them. I said, “For me to help you out with this, you’ve got to do this on a consistent basis.” I gave them a month. It wasn’t enforced. It wasn’t worth my energy at that point. Guess what happened? COVID and now they’re like, “We wish we would have done this.” That’s the thing I want to put in place. If you’re doing well and you’ve got your own funds to fund deals, congratulations. That’s a beautiful thing. What happens when you run out of your own capital or what happens when you’ve got to pivot things, to find a bigger deal above and beyond what you’ve got in private capital at your fingertips, you got to do some new things.

One of the biggest mistakes I see from investors out there that are using their own funds initially is they only look at what’s in front of their faces. They don’t develop that extra circle of funding. This is very important and I’m going to go through a lot now. You’re not going to do it all. You can pick one or two things to add on a monthly basis and start implementing it. I don’t care how old you are, how seasoned you are, how much gray hair you have or how little hair you have.

Everybody can do this variety of things, but you have to start doing them. You have to start implementing these things. Otherwise, you do face being a dinosaur and going extinct. Let’s talk about the number of people in your circle. The first thing I want to do is you’re using MailChimp or Infusionsoft or AWeber or something to email out to people. I’m not talking about emailing asset managers and banks. Some of you guys have done that. I’m not talking about your warm investor market, people that you have on business cards, not IRA investor lists. I’m talking warm leads from business cards or connections you’ve made at your local meetup groups, your networking, going to events or whatever it might be over the last couple of years as a real estate investor. What’s your active number of that? It’s got to be in your email. A box of business cards doesn’t do you or them any good. Take a look at how many Facebook connections you have.

How many friends you have in your personal? How many people do you have that follow or like your business profile page if you have a business profile page? I have roughly somewhere between 4,900 and 5,000 on my Facebook profile. On my business profile, I have under 33,000 people that follow my business profile. That’s over a large period of time. In my email list, I got about 60,000 people in my Infusionsoft that we use. If you look at your LinkedIn connections, that will be the next thing you’ll take a look at. How many LinkedIn connections do you have?

Five hundred, less than 500, more than 500, 1,000. Look at those LinkedIn connections and realize, “You’ve got some opportunity there.” I’m not telling you to decipher. If you’re connected on LinkedIn, that’s one thing. It’s separate from an email list, but still how many connections do you have? How many people do you have? Some of you are using text messaging, like SMS texting. It’s a spreadsheet with their cell phone number that you can send a text out to.

Some of you would like, “How many contacts I have on my phone? I don’t know how to count to them.” That’s fine. It doesn’t necessarily count. If you aren’t using text messages, that’s fine. ESP stands for Email Service Provider like MailChimp, AWeber, Infusionsoft, and Benchmark. That’s what ESP is, Email Service Provider. Not Yahoo, Google, or Gmail. Do you have a YouTube account? How many people subscribed to your YouTube channel if you’re using YouTube? Most of you have at least a YouTube channel and you may be posted a few videos that we’ve talked about doing, but how many people do you have as subscribers? I know some people are working on their channel. I need to hit 100 subscribers so I can customize my YouTube channel. That’s a beautiful thing.

The thing you got to keep in mind is these all have different sets of open and engagement rates. They all have different engagement rates. Looking at email, which is what most of you guys will have the minimum of having. If you send an email blast out via MailChimp or something like that, your average open rate is going to be roughly about 20%. It’s not going to be 100%. If you have 1,000 people uploaded in as investors into your email list, if you send an email blast out, you may only see 200. You don’t get 100% open rates. It’s almost physically impossible to do that. If you’ve got a small list, okay, but that doesn’t do any good. The bigger your list gets, the lower your open rate is. Real estate on average is somewhere between 17% and 21% open rate.

Facebook connections, Facebook, we all know filters who see our personal profile. On your personal page, 5% to 10% of your audience sees your promotional stuff. Anything you post on there, it’s only a small percentage of the algorithms showing up. It’s not much at all. On your business page, it’s about the same thing. Many people I know here have a personal page where they post everything and they have a business page that they rarely post to. If you don’t ever post your business page, it doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to see it. When I’m talking about sharing, I’m not talking about sharing Bill Griesmer’s cat video. I’m talking about sharing the wildfire things. I’m talking about sharing something valuable about your business. If you’re not doing that, nobody knows what business you’re in.

Take a look at your LinkedIn connections. LinkedIn is a different algorithm for it. It evaluates every post individually to see if it’s valuable. Your live videos that you uploaded to LinkedIn are going to do higher. Your native posts, if you’re sharing outside links, those don’t do as well. With LinkedIn connections, what they say is if you’re posting more than twenty times a month, it’s not going to help you anymore. That comes down to tell me, do you need to post something at least once a day, whether it’s an article or something, and then having a comment because it evaluates what the article is, what the comments are and how many likes. It’s a weird thing. Posting an article, something valuable to your LinkedIn profile once a day is valuable for you.

If you have a text messaging list you’re going to, this is one of the most valuable things that you can have because the text messages if you’re going to be sharing something short and sweet and to the point, it’s about an 85% open rate. A lot of you got text messages and email notification from me. You got another email, an hour reminder. You got a text message reminder from me, a 30-minute reminder. Some of you also saw my posts on Facebook and you find me on my personal and my business page. Notice that’s roughly about seven because I posted on LinkedIn as well.

If you follow me on LinkedIn, there was a post. If you follow me on Facebook, there were two more posts. It’s three so far. Email twice, it’s five. The text message is six. Those that follow me on YouTube will get a notice of an email, have uploaded a video. Everybody gets a notice. The same thing, it’s about a 20% open rate on that stuff. Some people, if you’re up to doing live video, it’s organically. The thing you got to keep in mind, there was not one thing on here that’s 100%.

There’s none of this or I’m going to wait. I’m going to send one email out. I’m going to have all the money I need. It doesn’t work that way. First of all, you’ve got to build the list. More importantly, in building that list, you have to connect with people in a variety of ways. Either you’re following each other together, you’re connected, you’re having a conversation one-on-one or whatever you’re doing that connected and follow you and you follow them. There’s a whole variety of ways to engage. What I’m trying to get here is you’ve got to touch base with people a little bit more often than what you’re doing to engage with people to raise capital. You have to attract investors in ways. Let’s talk about how much private money you have in your circle. We’re going to take the low hanging fruit here.

How many people are in your circle? If you take a look, take your total email contacts that are in your email service provider, that your investors and figure everybody averages at least $1,000 or more. We’re going to say everybody in your contact list in an email service provider is worth $1,000 at least. If you take 1,000 private contacts, that’ll be the average amount of OPM that’s potential to you. Let’s say you’ve got 5,000 email contacts in MailChimp worth at least $1,000 each so 5,000 x $1,000 comes to $5 million in OPM. That’s great potentially to you. For some of us, it’ll be more than $1,000 per contact. I have a little bit more seasonal crowd, the more sophisticated crowd. You may live in a higher area where your audience is a little bit higher. Maybe it’s $10,000 or $5,000, but I’m talking on average per contact. Some people have nothing. Other people have a lot. It will average a lot.

NNA 78 | Attracting Investors

Attracting Investors: One of the biggest mistakes from investors out there that are using their own funds initially is they only look at what’s in front of their face. They don’t develop that extra circle of funding.

 

What you have to realize though is you don’t have $5 million. You have potentially that. If you send an email out and you’ll get a 20% response rate, only 20% of your audience is paying attention to what you’re doing. That means you have $1 million in potential money in your private money formula. That’s the thing to keep in mind, look at your emails, and be like, “I haven’t even set up my MailChimp yet.” I get that. “I’m not even marketing for investors. I already got investors throwing money at me.” I get that. Kudos to you. Don’t sit on your laurels. The reason you’ve got that is because you’ve networked with or connect with other people in a variety of ways. It’s a different world. You’ve got to do something. That’s why we harp on using MailChimp or something to be more effective.

Part of the reason I’m changing who I’m using as an email service provider because I’ve seen some issues taking place with Infusionsoft. It’s not directing and I’m tweaking things up to get my open rates up a lot more. That’s with your open rates. That’s with email, therefore. If we sent a text message out, we had a 96% delivery rate. Before I logged on here, I saw that we had at least 65 people that clicked on the link to register for the webinar. Even though most of them have already gotten an email. They’ve seen my Facebook page. They may not have even clicked on it.

We saw that I had 60 people that use that link to register. Even though they’ve been barred. What does that mean by that is that people get busy? People are on their phones or at a doctor’s appointment or out waiting on their spouses or sitting on the couch. They may not want to click on that link to register for an event, but they would in a variety of fashions. You have to come from a different point and spread your web. Here are some of the ways that me and my colleagues, some of the marketers out there, are networking with people to collect information to add them to the databases.

Zoom Calls

Zoom calls, I talked about doing this. If somebody registers for a Zoom call, I’ve got their contact information. Whether I connected with them on Facebook or I send them a text message or they follow me on LinkedIn or whatever. I require registration all the time because I want to know who the heck is out there. If I require registration, it gives me the ability to follow back up with them. It kills me when I see people doing webinars. They’re doing online events and they don’t require registration. You’re blowing into the wind. Even on the few free events I do, I still require registration because I’m going to be delivering valuable content. It’s the same thing for all of you.

You’re not selling anything on there. You’re still giving content and valuable time in what you’re doing. As you are going into events, maybe you’re doing a virtual summit or virtual workshop, people are using a variety of chat rolls or using Zoom rooms. I’ve been a part of some big summits. I’ve been using different things in these chat rooms or chat rolls to connect with people. We either send them an individual message because I see what they’re doing or I’m in a Zoom room with them. There’s a small group of us like, “I’ll get your contact information so I can fall back up with you.”

Webinars And Virtual Summits

Webinars, it’s the same thing. Maybe you’re using StreamYard or GoToWebinar. Whatever it is, whether it’s a webinar like Note Night in America or it’s your own thing, it’s your watch and learn, be consistent and do it on a regular basis where everybody knows what to expect. That’s why we do these on Monday night. Some people are doing webinars or videos on Sunday nights or they started doing them on Sunday nights and they fell off. I’m not going to name any names, but you know who I’m talking about or they’re doing them on a Friday afternoon or something.

Doing something consistent on a regular basis where you connect with your audience is one of the most valuable things you can do. The most valuable thing in the last several years is that we do these webinars. Monday nights, we do a regular webinar. It’s been one of our best ways to network with people on a regular basis. We roughly add about 20% new people each Monday night to our database because we do it in a variety of fashions. Some people you’ll see in our emails are like, “I like the topic this week. I’ll jump on there.” I’ll enter a text message, “I follow you on Facebook and saw what you’re talking about or saw your LinkedIn posts. Whatever it might be, you have a ton of connections.

You never know what’s going to be that hot button to get on this. It’s why you got to do it consistently and do it at the same time so you run your schedule. A lot of people have come up with virtual summits. The two biggest things that aggravate the hell out of me in these last several months is that everybody is a virtual summit expert. Everybody is a podcast coach even though they barely have a podcast out for a while. I laugh about that, but we’ve done our share of either mostly paid summits, but we do very cheap. It’s still some investment. That’s a valuable person. Whether they pay $1 or $999, it’s still much more valuable than zero. Free has no value. Free people don’t show up. A lot of people are doing free summits or online virtual summits because they want everybody to opt-in. Even though they got a low attendance ratio. I consider that deadwood. I don’t want to waste my time. If people aren’t going to show up, I want people to show they’re going to connect with them.

Live stream, people are doing Facebook lives. Our buddy, Desi Arnaz, does a Monday night at 6:00 PM Central Live stream for 30 to 45 minutes. My friend, Bonnie Frank, was doing a live stream on social media. My buddy, Russ Johns, has a live stream every Monday through Friday on LinkedIn Live. That’s a great way to connect with people on a regular basis. We did it. We started off with a lot of that, connect with people, and built a big audience originally for it. When we tweak some things and make things work, now you can use live streaming live on YouTube. We go live on Facebook, whether it’s live for your public profile, your business, you can do to the group. You can jump on Instagram TV. If you are lucky enough, you can do it on Periscope, which is Twitter. You could even do a ten-minute video or less on LinkedIn. Some of you may be getting LinkedIn live. That’s a little harder. I don’t have it yet and aggravates the hell out of me. The three major things could be those three things where a lot of people are hanging out. It’s all a matter of showing up and doing things consistently.

Free Stuffs

Let’s talk about some of the free stuff. Besides those free things, there are some other organic ways to do it. Facebook groups, not just your group, and you could start a group. You’re going to be in real estate for a long time. You might as well start a group and start inviting investors to it or people that are interested in what you’re doing. It doesn’t mean you have to do a lot of things. I’m a part of a lot of Facebook groups anywhere ranging from 25 people all the way up to 42,000 people. It’s free to do that. It doesn’t cost you anything to do it as long as you start promoting it on a regular basis.

With Note Nation, we have somewhere between 900 and 950 people at a given time. It’s a great way for you to be part of it. Meetup group is cheap. It’s $35 a year. You can start a Meetup group as little as five people in a city. What I love about Meetup, you type keywords or interests of the group. Meetup will go out and start directing people to your groups. That’s a great way to network with you. At one point, we had started 50 Meetup Groups across the country that were doing virtually and then Meetup shut us down because they were violating their ordinances. Now they’ve gone and changed things now. They’re like, “Are you sure you don’t want to start a virtual group?” I’m like, “No.”

LinkedIn groups are free to start as well. There are also some big groups out there on Meetup that we talk about networking with. If you’ve been through a three-day virtual workshop or one-on-one coaching, you understand the importance of us like jumping on, finding Meetup Groups in the cities that you are a part of, connecting with 100 to 1,000 other investors is a great way to find potential investors. It’s the same thing with LinkedIn groups. LinkedIn groups get a bad rap a lot of times. There are some big groups out there. There’s not a lot of interaction. It’s still a great way to network with people in specific groups when you look at the membership area and making those one-on-one connections.

If you’ve got an email, a newsletter opt-in, and creating an opt-in is free. If you’ve got a free MailChimp account or free email account, they usually allow you to create a list for free. That’s something that you could take and create that list that will give you a new URL or a website. They click on the website. It will take somewhere they can opt into your list. This is free to do. You can be creating one for your LinkedIn connections. You create one for your Facebook friends. You create one for your Twitter or whatever. You need one for all of them or you create unique individual ones for every place so you know where people are coming from.

You want them to opt-in with their email, their phone number, and their first and last name. You don’t need addresses. The least amount that you ask for, the better off it’s going to be. I always like to at least get a first name and an email address. You saw something and you opt-in to a newsletter, “I want to get into your buyer’s list.” That’s what an opt-in is. You can create an opt-in in MailChimp or if you post the link and say, “Opt-in into my investor list, click here. Give me your information when you opted in.”

If you want to pay for something, MailChimp had an upgraded account. There are lots of other options for you. You can create a simple Google form and some people have done where it’s the same questions to opt-in. You need to be posting and have an opt-in to your website of some sorts and also with your social media, “Get on my buyer’s and investors’ list. If you like the deals I’m posting or you want to be up to date on more deals.” We had Bryan Ellis from Self-Directed Investor Magazine out of Atlanta, who’s doing the greatest things. He sent out newsletter weekly. He would have five articles on it.

NNA 78 | Attracting Investors

Attracting Investors: If you’re looking for a book to give away, use white label.

 

He would pull these articles off of DSNews, HousingWire and all these groups. He built a huge database of over 100,000 investors, who opted into his newsletter. All it was here are the articles of the week. Here’s a short paragraph. When I think about each one, he was adding content. It wasn’t costing him hardly anything, a little bit of his time in research. He’s five articles writing a paragraph on each and then sending it out to his database. It’s one of the smartest things I’ve ever seen. That was pretty much free organic growth. Now it didn’t happen overnight. It took him a while, but he steadily grew his database every day.

It’s like adding a penny every day. If you add one investor per day or you doubled your investor one day one, two day two, four day three, eight-day four, you would very rapidly see a lot of growth happening. There are some cheap tools. There’s going to be a little bit of investment, a little bit of costs on your part. Stay engaged with people, start talking and connecting with people. You could go like a survey. SurveyMonkey is the one that we use that you could send a survey to your database. SurveyMonkey has got a free version like ten questions. You could use surveys inside Zoom. If you get the free version of Zoom, we’ve done surveys before. You can use a Google Form. SurveyMonkey is going to cost you something. It’s one of the most valuable things that we collect especially when we do Note CAMP.

We got 20, 25 questions and about 30% to 60% of the audience will fill that survey out. We get us to know a lot more information about our audience. That’s a great way to engage with people, knowing what their interests are, what states they’re buying in and all those things. You could use a text messaging service like MOBIT. It’s a little expensive like, $1,500, $1,400 a year plus your text messaging or you could use a service like EZ Texting, which is pretty cheap for one keyword like notes. You could pay basically $49 a month. That’ll give you 1,000 outgoing text messages.

It’s also a great thing to use if you’re out speaking or talking to people or you put it on your business card, “Text the word, Deals, to 474747.’ You want to make that number easy. It’s an easy thing to remember, text Notes to 474747 to get on my database. You could share that to social media where you don’t get people’s emails or you can share it to your website for people opt-in. I use it when I podcast especially if I’m guesting on other people’s shows. “If you want to get more information, just text Notes to 474747.”

I do it when I’ve been publicly speaking, whether it’s on a podcast guest or I’m out speaking at a REIA club in the past. I’ll use texts Notes to study 72000 or text Notes to 474747. It’s a great engagement tool to capture about 25% to 50% of your audience. The whole point is you got to try to get people to click in. What are some of the things that you can provide? You’d say, “Get on my list,” but a lot of people will opt-in or click on something if you give something back. We call those tripwires. We’ve seen, “Get my free eBook or get my free report.” There are a variety of things.

Newsletter is common one, “Get my newsletter. Get my blog by RSVP-ing. Give me your email and join my blog.” It’s a common thing. We see that all across the board. I opted into 100 different newsletters a few months ago on a different email that I use so I can see their marketing and seeing what they’re doing to get people clicking on. Quizzes, our friend, Juliet Clark does quizzes. Opt-in and she’s going to ask you 10 or 15 different questions and qualify you. Whether you’re a high or low probability, be the right type of client to work with. She does that a lot for people.

Checklists are hot because people don’t want to read a lot. They want an easy 1 to 2-page checklist that will give something, “Opt-in, I’ll give you my checklists.” What’s big right now, “Opt-in, I’ll give you my software or my equipment checklist to be a podcaster. I’ll give you my due diligence checklist or I’ll give you my 30/30 marketing matrix.” You can see what you can be doing 30 days in a month. eBooks were big or report, “I’ll give you my special white page, my white paper.” eBooks are a little harder these days because most people aren’t reading the eBook. Some people are, but there aren’t.

If you’re looking for a book to give away, maybe you use a white label. There are a lot of people that have written blogs or articles or eBooks that let you white label. It allows for you to slap your logo, your name, or your title on that paper. There are a lot of properties, by the property, not real estate. I mean books or other books that their trademarks have expired. They have a lot of great books or great articles you can use that are out in the public domain for free. If you go to ProjectGutenberg.com, you can see all the number of books that you can use and relabel them. There’s not a trademark. You’re not to be violating anything that you can use, that you use it to market. Some people have used like, “Here are my top five books.” They white label them or slap a name on it and it’s a great download. People like that.

I get it a lot when I’m speaking to other groups. They’re like, “Can I get your slides? Yeah. You can get my slides.” They can go to SlideShare. SlideShare is owned by LinkedIn. I’ll upload my PowerPoint on there. If they click the download, they’ve got to give me their information. We’ve got to capture it. You email me and I’ll send you back an email out a PDF or you texting and say, “Slides” and I’ll text you back the link of my slides. How are we going to get people to capture? You’ve got to add something valuable.

Case studies are hugely popular deal. We’ve done this before. I highly recommend if you’re starting off brand new and you’ve got some different case studies that you’re working through a bunch of different deals. This is a great way especially for people that are wholesaling or getting a lot of stuff that they’re on the books to look at. This could be something that they do on a regular basis. We’re not talking, “We’re doing a Lunch and Learn once every two weeks, on Tuesdays or Wednesdays or Happy Hours. We got our hotlist, text me or I’ll send you the list of deals that you have this week.” You see a lot of challenges taking place like 3 to 7-day challenges where they’re doing videos or Facebook Lives.

Tony Robbins did this before his big Unleash Power virtual event with 40,000 people. He did a seven-day challenge for two hours a day in the afternoon. My buddy, Roland Frasier, who was a mentor of mine, did a five-day buying business challenge. He did it where it was free for a part. For $49, you could have gotten the VIP access or you could have $97, you could opt-in for full two weeks of training and go from there. There’s a whole variety. I’m not telling you guys to create a training program. I’m saying is you can learn a lot by seeing what was going on and use the same things,” Check out my three case studies. We’re going to do a case study day to break it down. We’re going to do a five-day blitz on case study blitzes,” something like that.

Investor List

One of the easiest things is, “Get on my investor list. As I have deals, I’ll send you the deals that I get.” Replays videos, you see this often where people will run, “You got to opt in to get my videos.” They may not upload them to YouTube. They may use or they may put it behind a password protected. We do this with some of our training. It’s always password protected. You’ve got to be opted into something for us to send the replay videos. If you’re subscribed, did YouTube, you’ll get a lot of stuff, but you’re not going to get usually the paid training. That’s usually, maybe it’s a video series, “I’m doing a quick video series on how we set up our marketing or how we set up our vendors.” There’s a variety of things that you guys can do in your own market. You can even like “We did a 40-city thing. The Note Nation Top 40 Tour where each city has had over 100 views on YouTube. We had over a couple of 1,000 people opt-in. It was a great thing that we did over two months.

Those 2,000 plus people that opted in, some of them were already on our database, but we got a lot of people that were organically seeing different things and opted-in to things. If you’re putting on an event, maybe you do a virtual event. Many people when they check out NoteWeekend.com, which we have a class for Saturday. There is a link, click here to register. They’ve got to give me their name, their email, and it takes them to a checkout page. That one extra step has resulted in over 550 emails and leads opted into our database. Adding that one extra step and you could put a checkout page, but that doesn’t help you catch anybody that was interested but didn’t complete all the way through to fall back up with things.

We use LinkPages. You can use ClickFunnels as well for that as well. I’ve got an eBook. I wrote my eBook, which has been a great lead that 73 pages that we give out. We give it as a free gift on the show. If they want to order the book, all they got to do is pay shipping and we’ll send them the book for free. We’ve also got our own white-labeled book. We wrote another twelve-page eBook that we allow people to white label to use this with our coaching students, our one-on-one coaching students will get a copy of this eBook. They create their own title or uncover. They finish the last couple of pages. It’s simple and is a great lead page that I see a lot of our students are using in marketing in a variety of ways.

We’ve got some great things that we’re using checklists, whatever you want to do. We’ve got a whole variety of things that you can use to opt-in or your audience to opt into what you’re doing. Now, if you want to talk about some paid promotion things. If you pay a little bit of money, you can often get a little higher rate. Now here’s the thing that you have to realize. Every type of genre has a different value per click. Real estate and finance have a higher dollar amount on cost per click because we’re dealing with either coaching or real estate or raising capital. Whereas things that don’t cost much like podcasting or general information is going to have a low value per click of $1 or $2. Finance and real estate have a $21 to $51 value per click because it’s higher-end process. You’re dealing with a higher caliber individual.

If you want to run Facebook ads, you could do this. You could go to every Facebook ad out there, everybody’s a business page and see exactly what ads are running on a daily basis. This is a new thing that Facebook put in place. I can go to any of my competition, go down to their page to see exactly what they’re running on a day-in and day-out basis. What ads are running and the ones I like, I can tweak or the ones I dislike, I’ll make sure I’m not going to use that.

NNA 78 | Attracting Investors

Attracting Investors: You can get some great ideas from seeing what your competition is running or what other people are doing out there.

 

We had a buddy of mine here in Austin. He’s a great Facebook ads guy. He talks about, “Post a couple of videos, let it run organically.” A couple of videos like we did with Note Nation, then pick out when you see something that hits where it gets more views than others, then you pay to promote that video $1 a day where people will then start to see a little bit more. You’re going to do some easy split tests. If you want to do a big-budget, $1 a day with video promotion or you create some infographics in Canva and share that in different places.

We have a question, “How do you find your competitor’s ads?” Let’s say Propelio. It is a company out of Dallas, Texas. I type in Propelio. You are able to see what ads they are running. You can do that with a lot of groups, but still a valuable thing. You can see what your competition is running or see what other people doing, you can get some great ideas from it out there. You can see what the competition is doing, which is nice. On Facebook, you’ve got a list, a big database of emails, or cell phone numbers. You can upload them to Facebook and you go out and find those people on Facebook. If there’s a profile that shows up with that email address or that phone number. You can upload this list and create a customer list.

You’d also create a lookalike audience. That’s similar characteristics to that audience as far as interests and keywords and be able to market to them. I’ve got some buddies that are paying or buying huge lists, uploading to Facebook, and then finding out how many people uploading 500,000 contacts and seeing the 300,000 or 400,000 people have Facebook audiences and then running ads to those 400,000, but then also creating lookalike audiences across the country in those cities.

You can do the same thing and run ads on Twitter or you can run ads on YouTube, but you’re not going to get charged on a YouTube ad unless they watch it for more than 30 seconds. If you run a video ad on Facebook, you get charged it for eight seconds. You can also run some LinkedIn ads, which are expensive. If you want to pay a little bit to boost things, boost events, boost other things, you can do that. You can even run Google Ads. I haven’t paid for Google Ads in 3 to 4 years has got competitive. It’s hard to do that, but there are other things, especially when you can niche it down smaller of a niche and minimize, or focusing on some keywords. That’s the beautiful thing about the note industry. It’s a smaller niche. It costs you less to market to the niche than it does a bigger list of a more general nature-based. The thing I’m trying to get at is there are a lot of things you could be doing up there. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Pick one thing and start sticking to it.

I’ll give you an example. We’ve stuck with Note Night in America for several years now. Every January, we start a new link. We surpassed the 1,000 RSVP. A thousand people have opted into the show in 2020. We’re about 33 new people give or take on an average basis. That’s once a week, that’s 120 new investors in our database every month. That’s not bad, ladies and gentlemen. What are we going to end up by the end of 2020? We’ll end up around 1,200 to 1,300. In 2019, we did 1,900 that we finalized. We might have a couple of big webinars or we may not. It varies, but that’s consistency.

Once a week, we do video for an hour. When I first did my first show, I had 20 people. LinkedIn, we’ve grown from 6,000 to 22,000 subscribers. We keep adding this a little bit per day, 30, 40, 50 people per day. I’m reaching out because it’s a great way to connect with people. Now, it used to be great. LinkedIn would allow you to export your connections. They still let you download your connections but they won’t give you the emails. It used to allow you to download the emails. We are coming up on the anniversary of I call it the LinkedIn massacre where they stopped doing that. It’s hurt a lot of people, but it is still a great way to connect businesswise with people and get them to click on other things.

It’s the same thing with YouTube. We upload a couple of videos a week. Sometimes they’re twenty minutes. Sometimes they’re ten minutes. Sometimes they’re an hour long. We have average since we got serious about this, with some things with our YouTube page or YouTube channel is that we average roughly three new subscribers per day. On average, we’re subscribing or getting three new brand-new subscribers on average per day that’s net. They may have ten in one day and 2 or 3 people that unsubscribe. That is still seven in that one day. We’re still averaging a three net a little bit per day. Now the thing about YouTube subscribers is they’ll watch your videos. When you upload something and they’re going to catch an email and be able to connect. We’ve also got some other cool tools.

Going back to LinkedIn, that’s 16,000 in two years. It’s 667 per month. You can divide that by 30 days. It’s adding 22 new connections per day. Everybody can go in and connect with 22 people on a minimum. Podcasting is a little bit more advanced. When I looked at my numbers, as far as downloads per episode, we average about 2,100 plays per episode. Now some of them are much bigger. Some are less than that, but when you have the way you figured out how many subscribers, you have two podcasts that are listing on a regular basis, that’s what you do. The number of downloads, individual downloads and the number of episodes. We average about 2,100 subscribers. It did start off. We had 2,300 listings to the first two weeks of our show. You have to realize its consistency. Text message opt-ins. This one you might find interesting. We had 3,000 people over three years.

If I go and speak at an event or I’m in a meetup group, or I’m speaking at a conference, I usually will collect about 25% to 30% of the room by opting in to my slides or something. I have on that by opting in on this. I’ve even taken that and narrowed it down for those that haven’t opted into anything in the last six months. We had clicked on it and we still have roughly 1,400 of you that are clicking on the text message ads. We see about a 20% click-through ratio. If I didn’t send you a text message, you wouldn’t be here. My email database, we’ve got 60,000 plus people on that. We average about a 15% open rate per list because that’s a whole bunch of different lists out here. For my Note Night in America webinars, I send it out to 15,000 people. On average, we get about a 15% open rate on those emails and then another 10% to 15% when I send out the replays.

What I’m saying is that made it seem like big numbers if you’re at zero, but you’re going to be in real estate in a long-term. You’re going to be providing value long-term. You have to do a little bit each day to get a hit. Your investors are out there waiting for you to connect with them. They’re waiting out there for somebody to reach out to whether it be emailed or be a video or Facebook. We have enough of negative energy out there with all the political, the election and all the racist stuff that’s taking place. Who’s doing this? Who’s doing that?

We need positivity. Everybody needs it. It is doing well. Are you going to have some Negative Nancy and some haters out there? You may have some trolls but you will never have somebody say something negative to you who is above you. Most people are going to say something negative because they’re envious or they’d be beneath where you’re at level lies. If they do say something negative and they’re going to be ugly online, you need to pray for them because they have something wrong going on in their lives. Pray for them. Bless their hearts, as we say here in Texas.

What I’m trying to get at is some of you who have been around for a while or you are brand new, “I don’t need to do that. I don’t want to do that.” You need to do something because by choosing not to plan, you’re planning to fail. Don’t be like our friends at the restaurant here who struggled for months because they’re like, “We’re good. We’re busy on Friday, Saturday nights.” You don’t know when that is Friday night’s or Saturday night’s going to go away from here. You’ve got to pivot the biggest capital isn’t in sales, it’s the lists.

The social thing that you have to keep in mind to make you valuable more than anything else is what your network looks like to you. It’s not in the power of one platform that you’re spread out. We have all these people that are building these TikTok channels with 100,000 subscribers facing and worrying that this is going to get shut down. This is why you need to do a little variety of things, share and do something. I’m not talking cranking out a video a day. Start cranking out a little bit of stuff, a little bit here. I know a lot of podcaster or people or videographers who will do videos. They’ll do it all on Saturday. One Saturday a month and they’re good for the month.

Just do something and practice at it. By not practicing at it, you cannot get any better at it. You have to embrace the suck. If you’re wanting to learn how to tap into the stuff into deals in the first quarter, then you definitely want to be a part of the Virtual Note Buying Workshop from December 11th through the 13th. You can start by going to NoteBuyingForDummies.com and encouraged to be a part of that. As always, we do have our next coaching program rolling out here. It’s an eight-week program with a lot of other bonuses afterwards with two days of one-on-one Zoom coaching one-on-one for you and your business partner with me truly for two days. A two-day one-on-one would be here in Austin, maybe in your neck of the woods. It depends on what’s going on in there, but we had a lot of great value for coaching. If you’re looking to take your note business to a whole different level. We’ve got some people in on here, our previous one-on-one students if you’re looking for a recap, please let me know.

We’re doing something new. We’re doing eight weeks live coaching. We’ve done that in a while, but we’re going to do that to help people dominate the fourth quarter and roll into Q1. If you’re interested in finding out more information about our new coaching programs, shoot me an email, Scott@WeCloseNotes.com. It’s a bit of an investment and we do set up payment plans. We do have a paid in full discount too for you. There is lot of great stuff for you to go out and dominate here in the fourth quarter. I want to say thank you for coming to the show. We’ll see you at the top.

 

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