EP NNA 81 – 5 Key Phases Of Marketing For Note Investors

NNA 81 | Note Marketing

 

NNA 81 | Note Marketing

Everyone is on the marketing business, no matter what you niche is. The problem with many real estate and note investors is that when it comes to marketing, they often give up right out of the gate. Whatever their reason, it is an especially regrettable missed opportunity to take their business to the next level. As 2021 comes around the corner, it is high time you take a second look at marketing and take it seriously this time. In this episode, Scott Carson breaks down the five key phases of marketing for note investors in the 21st century. He also shares why it’s important to include email, video, LinkedIn, podcasting, and live events to your marketing game plan in 2021.

While you are here, you can get 20% off of your lifetime access by signing up at http://NoteProz.com and using the code WCN20%.

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

5 Key Phases Of Marketing For Note Investors

I’m glad to have each and every one of you joining me here as we discuss marketing in the 21st century. We’re going to change things up with a little different introduction. Thanks so much for being here. I’m honored to have you guys join me here. Thank you so much for being a part of Note Night in America. This marks one of the three final Note Night in America for 2020 then we’ll be done for the year. The third one we’ll do an online networking and a Note Night America Christmas party.

You’re here for us to talk about marketing in the 21st century. I want to dive into that. I was asked to speak at a hedge fund symposium about marketing and what we do. The host admires what we do for marketing and thought it would be a great idea for me to come on and talk about what I thought they would do well at as far as what they need to focus on to raising capital, to doing some big things in launching their fund, raising capital, finding deals in the new year. I thought it would be a great topic for you guys on Note Night in America.

One of the biggest things I want you to keep in mind when it comes to marketing, this is an important thing, is the rule of marketing. Most people don’t ever follow up. When I see real estate investors and note investors start to market, they often give up right out of the gate. They don’t have a long-term mentality in mind when it comes to closing. You’ve heard the Glengarry Glen Ross, “Always Be Closing,” ABC. I love that movie, a great movie. It talks about how you have to follow up as a marketer. We’re all in sales, marketing and media these days. You look at the American Marketing Association talking about at least 48% of people never follow up with a prospect. They get a lead and they never follow up.

I’ve seen that for decades as a real estate investor. Many people will take a class and do a little marketing, and then they never follow up with a prospect where they send out letters or door knockers, or they reach out to banks and leave a voice message. They never follow back up, 25% never make a second contact and stop. Only 12% or 1 out of 8 only make three contacts and stop. Only 10% of salespeople make more than three contacts. If you’re going to be raising capital from a warm market or cold market, reaching out to banks, reaching out to your warm market to raise capital or other known investors to find deals, you’ve got to follow up.

We’ll talk about some of the things that I believe are going to be the best follow up. You have to realize too that it’s a process. It is always a process as the touchpoint. How often can you touch base with somebody in your warm market? It leads to a lot of things. I always say, if you’ve got 1,000 people in your database and you figure an average of $1,000 in private capital. Some will have some money. Others won’t have some money, but across the board, that’s the minimum we usually see. If you send an email blast, only 2% of the money that you’re going to raise will happen in that first email. You only have about a 20% open rate. Three percent of sales are made on the second contact, 5% of sales are made on the third contact, 10% of sales are made on the fourth contact, 80% of the sales happened after the fifth contact.

The biggest thing about marketing is you’ve got to be in front of people. I don’t know how many of you guys have watched my videos for more than five times. Many of you have. You’ve been following me for 3, 6, 12 months, sometimes longer. Some of you aren’t. Sign up for stuff or opt into some things. That’s great. My biggest thing that I learned from a marketing genius, he shared this with me, you’ve got to follow up with people and stay on top of people where they’re at, not where they are not. That’s another thing with what’s going on right now. You have to realize, we’re all in a different business. A lot of us are real estate investors, note investors. We’re all in that business. In the 21st century, Scotty is here to beam you up. I’m giving all she’s got for you.

We’re all in the media and marketing business more so than anything else. I don’t care what you’re doing, what your niche is. If you’re reaching out for raising private capital, if you’re reaching out for deals, you have to realize in this world, you have to add that media side of what you’re doing. We are all in the media business these days. Whether you like it or not, that’s what we are in, media and marketing. It’s one of the most important things to keep in mind. It’s going to separate those that do it from those that don’t. If you do embrace this, you will stand out from the audience. You will be everywhere. It will be one of the easiest things that you can do versus the old way of marketing, the old way of having one conversation and one conversation.

Planting Seeds

The way of marketing in the 21st century is having one conversation with the masses that leads to those one-on-one conversations with prospects, people that want to give you deals, and people want to give you private capital. There are a lot of things that were going on. We all know everybody’s looking for your eyeballs. It’s never more apparent than during the holidays. You think about it. You’ve got YouTube Live now, Facebook Live, Netflix, Hulu, iHeartRadio, Amazon Prime. There are many video channels out there reaching out for your eyeballs. As I say, your e-balls in a lot of cases too. As an investor, when I’m talking with new students, I always ask them, “How long have you been a real estate investor?” They’re like, “I’ve been for 10, 15 years.” “How long are you going to be a real estate investor?” They’re like, “I’ll probably be until the day I die.” I’m like, “Okay.”

The thing to keep in mind with that is all of us are going to be here at least a year if not longer, maybe 5, 10, 20 or 30 years as real estate investors. You’re in it for the long haul. You’re going to be here for a long time. They always say, “When is the best time to plant a tree?” The best time to plant a tree was many years ago and then today. I’ve used this story before that I heard in 2019 and I thought it was so valuable. This guy in India used to walk across this forest now, but years ago, it was a desolate sand bar with nothing, no plants, no animals, nothing would grow there. It was vacant.

As a real estate investor, when we come from a job and we start doing things, we often feel that way. It’s like a desolate desert. It takes a lot to get stuff growing there and it does. He started planting one plant, one tree a day. Fast forward 30 years now, it’s forest. It’s got all sorts of animals and water running through it. It’s a very fertile ground. That’s the thing that you have to keep in mind. I’m talking to everybody. I don’t care if you close zero deals or you’ve closed 1,000 deals. You have to start planting those seeds. You have to realize that those things that you do marketing-wise will be around longer than one day or, “They didn’t say anything. I’m going to take it down.”

In this day and age of needing to get instant feedback, “I’ve got to get a like. I’ve got to go viral,” nothing goes viral. It only goes viral if you do it over and over again. I challenge you, 2020 has been an increasingly hard year for many people. They’ve had to completely swap how they did the marketing, how to change things, how to find deals. It’s been difficult for everybody involved. The difference between those that have pivoted and done well, and those that haven’t found success is that they’ve embraced the suck, embraced the learning curve, embraced doing new things for business than what they were doing previously.

That’s the biggest thing that you have to do. Everybody on here has to embrace doing something differently in the new year if you want to accomplish your goals, yours truly included. I’ve been tweaking things and working on things. We are constantly working on things. We’re all fighting out there to find more deals, raise more capital, grow your network, and expand it. I exceeded 23,000 connections on LinkedIn. I’m excited about that. We went over 4,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel. We all want to become a trusted source for our network, our audience and our tribe.

We all want to close more deals, make more money, and leave a long-term legacy that people will think about us long-term. You guys may know me. I’m big into movies. One of my favorite movies and one of my favorite characters is Rocky. When we think about how Rocky started off, he was a bomb. He was banging people’s kneecaps to collect. When he got this one chance, he trained him. He had to do things a little bit outside the box. He had to go into the freezing cabinets and punch against the slabs on his own. He’s breaking ribs on these hanging half cows.

It’s ugly and gritty and he figured it out. That’s how we all start off. We’ve got to figure it out by punching through things. Over time, the more we keep punching them the way, getting coached and trained by the right coaches, the right people to mentor us, you end up becoming much more polished. At the end, he’s standing there, polished, champion, world title holder, but nobody thinks about how he was starting off, barely making the rent, not much. Many of us, that’s us in business.

NNA 81 | Note Marketing

Note Marketing: If you’re not sending an email blast out to your database at least once a week, you’re losing out.

 

There are many analogies to that. You think about Sylvester Stallone. He wrote Rocky and he had an offer for $300,000 to sell the movie script. He was like, “No, I want to be in the movie. I have to be in the movie. I have to act in it.” There are many things he could have done along the way to give it up. Looking back now, he’s stuck with it. Nobody’s like, “Who’s this actor, who’s this writer?” He honed his skill. He talked about sitting in his house. I was fortunate to see him be interviewed by Tony Robbins and sharing how he worked on his craft. He worked at it and got better at it. A lot of us, that’s the same thing we’re doing to market our business. We don’t focus on it on a daily basis. It’s like, “I’m going to get to it when I get to it.” I get it. It’s overwhelming. There are a lot of things out there. There are a lot of distractions.

I’m here to tell you to narrow those distractions down to find something that works well for you and go from it. We have an eight-second attention span. A goldfish has a nine-second attention span. If you think about looking at your phone and see how many times you check your phone during a TV or you’re on your phone, or you’re distracted. You have to learn if people get distracted, you have to do something different and stand out from the crowd. Many people are getting all upset about the social media stuff. I’m going to leave Facebook. I’m not going to do that. That’s fine. Where are you going to be marketing at where your people are going to be? Are you going to be landing the fish in where you’re going? Are you joining the crowd and doing nothing?

I’ve never been afraid to shake it up a little bit. You guys know my personality. I want you to be a note investor. I don’t mind slapping my face on there or the 50 Shades of Note Marketing we did a few years ago, or the whole Note Civil War we did with Fuquan. It was one of our biggest webinars on Monday night with over 800 registrants, or the strip down marketing, taking my head and put it on a body. I wish my trainer was that good. The WCN Crew or the Facebook Note Nation page that we put together and bring communities together. Note Night in America, we’re honored that you guys are here. We’ve got the podcast, the Note Closers Show that’s exceeded one million downloads and over 645 episodes.

What you have to realize is those things don’t happen overnight. Getting good at marketing, you didn’t just flip a switch and it happened. I had some great coaches. People have mentored me, but also when you look at Note Night in America, and then the Note Closers Show, 650 episodes and celebrating our anniversary as a show. It came from doing it over and over again. We’re not talking a huge amount. It’s an hour a night on Monday nights, or anywhere from eight minutes to an hour on the podcast. There are a lot of things to do.

If you’ve been in my workshops and you’ve heard me talk about the different marketing I’ve done. I don’t want to scare you on this. This is where you take one piece of content, an image of a property on Instagram, and then you share it to LinkedIn, or you jump on over to Facebook and share a post there, do a Facebook Live video, taking the video and get it transcribed and turned into a blog or a video that you put up to YouTube, and taking the blog and writing an article. Sharing an article to Twitter or meetup groups or Pinterest. More importantly, emailing it out to your database.

There are a lot of different things that you can do. People are like, “Scott, it seems like a lot of work.” It can seem like a lot of work if you’ve never looked at it, but I’m not going to sit here and talk with you guys about every little thing. That’s not what we’re here for. I believe that if you want to have the most impact in the next months and meet 2021, your audience, investors, note buyers, note sellers, bankers are not in all these spots.

There are some investors everywhere. We all have a tribe and different leaders for a tribe, but you don’t need to learn Pinterest. You don’t need to learn Instagram. You don’t need to spend time on Facebook and posts in there. A lot of times, our audience or our ideal people we’re looking for aren’t in the spots and the social media things. It’s great to share it, at least build a little bit of an audience. You need to spend the time and focus on where your best bang for your buck is going to be in.

The E-mail Blast

This is what I’m sharing with you. We shared a lot of spots, but I want to share my approach for how I dominate my niche. You would agree that when it comes to marketing, we dominate. I’ve had my peers or my competitors come to me and asked me if I would be willing to market for them. That says a lot. When you start seeing competitors starting to replicate what we do, I have to chuckle a little bit because imitation is the purest form of flattery. They like it enough what we’re doing that they’re going to go out and start doing it.

My approach is I approach each day with a marketing first mindset. When I rolled out of bed this morning, I was a little like groggy. It was cold outside and in the house, a little bit of extra blanket on. I turned the heat on. It was like, “What am I going to focus on? What am I marketing? What’s on my calendar this week and next week through December, whether it be in the last day of November, what is my day when I need to be marketing first?

It’s not waiting until the end of the day to get to marketing. I approach each day with a very big thing. What am I marketing? I have Note Night in America. Even though I didn’t know what the heck I’m talking about. Until about 11:00, I had a couple of ideas until I settled on this. I still recorded a podcast episode. I was interviewed on other podcasts. I also have a virtual assistant who’s working about twenty hours a week on different things that I give her to do. She takes some of the things that we focus on in a daily basis here. She applies them by sharing them across different parts. If you want to make six figures as a real estate investor and as a marketer and things like that, you’ve got to hire an assistant. You can’t do them all. The best value of your time is not doing it all. You need to delegate it to somebody else.

She posts to my social networks with my stuff and the images on Buffer.com. She finds me speaking gigs or podcasting guesting opportunities, listing notes or meetup groups on different things for our webinars. She does that. She creates a lot of my images in Canva.com. Some of my thumbnails you see. I don’t spend a lot of time as much as I used to in Canva because she’s going out there and making me look good.

My marketing does three core things. That’s the biggest thing. It expands by networking rates in the areas that I want to focus on. It also helps me find deals. I get referrals from a lot of investors. I also get referrals from banks that I market on LinkedIn. It also helps me raise capital because we’re getting the word out in what we’re doing. Not everybody that’s on here is in my database. I have a variety of people in my database. Some people I market to for the whole thing or the things I’d only do specific niches. That’s how everybody’s list should be.

You all have different tribes at any given time. I dominate my niche. I think we can agree to that. It’s hard not to come across me if you’re in the note space. We’re proud that we’ve worked hard and we will continue to work hard in 2021. I’ve had some good people. I’ve also been very coachable along the way. I don’t spend a lot of time on Pinterest. I don’t spend that much time on Instagram besides auto-post because I don’t find those being active areas. I don’t spend a long time on my personal Facebook page or Facebook for the most part because it doesn’t help when you only see a little bit of your audience seeing your posts. Facebook will limit who you’re seeing. I don’t spend a lot of money on Google ads or Facebook ads either because it’s not effective for what we’re trying to do. Where should I or we focus if you guys were on there?

Email marketing and you still have to have a database, even though that’s old, it is still an effective use of your marketing. If you’re not sending an email blast out to your database at least once a week, you’re losing out. That’s a fact. If you’re not sending it out once a week, you are falling behind, and your email list is growing stale. You’re becoming less relevant to your list every day. Whether it’s an email list you’ve got, a business card stack, people you’ve met at a networking club, whatever, you’ve got to be emailing out to your database.

NNA 81 | Note Marketing

Note Marketing: One of the easiest things to start off your video series is finding a website that has a bunch of frequently asked questions.

 

I know this is going to scare a lot of you but video is one of the most powerful tools that we see taking place. It was part of what led me to do when I started doing the podcast and other things a few years ago with Kevin Shapiro from the Shark Tank when he speaks in Las Vegas at an event that I was attending. Gary Vaynerchuk was talking about how video is the way. You have to embrace it in your marketing. Otherwise, people are going to keep scrolling right past you. I guarantee you, that’s the case. You look at what you stop and watch, it’s video, it’s images. It’s something to get your attention. It is not text anymore.

LinkedIn is the hottest social media platform for us as real estate investors. This is where the people with the money and the deals are hanging out. This is where you need to connect with them, not Facebook, not TikTok. You won’t shake your booty or learn how to twerk. Your idea is using LinkedIn to connect with the right people, with people that have capital. This is where your CEOs or CFOs or people that are a million plus, they spend their time on LinkedIn networking and doing some great stuff on there and paying attention to what’s going on. LinkedIn is where it’s at. It’s not me saying this. This is where you see things.

The fourth thing is podcasting. I’m not telling you guys to start a podcast. That is not what I’m telling you to do. Some of you maybe should. Some of the others, there’s the opportunity of appearing on podcasts as a guest and leveraging those audiences. If you can’t travel, you can’t network, you can’t speak, those could be some things that you need to talk about. Some events, in this crazy virtual world, you might need looking to start some events on a regular basis. I’ll talk about it. Nothing difficult, nothing complicated, nothing expensive.

Let’s first talk about email marketing. You have to get something, some email service provider, a CRM tool. Something that you’re sending out a regular drip campaign. A drip campaign is you’re sending out once a week, once a month, once a day. Once a week is ideally the best for you sitting out on a Sunday night or a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Something you can send out on a regular basis. Weekly emails to your contacts, to your investors of what you’ve got going on. You’ve got to think about this. People always worry about, “What the heck am I going to say?”

Only about 20% to 30% of your database is going to open your email. It’s not hard to figure out what you would say on a weekly basis. Email, use it on a weekly basis and it still has a 4,400% return on investment to your database. If it costs you $75 a month to send an email out to your database and you send one email out a week, but you ended up getting one investor at $50,000 to respond, to fund a deal, or you got your asset manager send you a list and you close on one deal, come on. I see many investors try to go snitchy.

They tried like, “No, I’m not going to pay. I’ll try to use a free MailChimp account, upload contacts, and then remove contacts.” If you’re going to do that, would you want to do that? Would you buy a new car and then take the tires off, and put the crappy tires on? No, you wouldn’t do that. You need to be using it on a weekly basis. Now you can use MailChimp, Keap, Infusionsoft or AWeber, just pick one and use it. MailChimp is pretty much the easiest one. Sorry if you’re having trouble with it. You’ve got to spend time on it.

Here’s the biggest thing to talk about. You don’t have to write a huge long email. It can be very simple. Talk about case studies past or present, yours or somebody else’s deals, new deals you’re working on. I’m looking at a tape of assets. I’m looking at a performing note, a nonperforming note, just sharing your journey and holidays. Every month has a holiday to talk about, or there’s something going on in the industry, or there’s a news article that comes out that’s important to your database on DS News or HousingWire.

One of the best ways to do that is sharing what the comp is going out. Bryan Ellis out of Atlanta, one of the best private money capital raisers out there for years, had an email that went out on Friday with four articles that he pulled throughout the week. He wrote a little paragraph what he thought about each one and then shared it. It was important to real estate investors and other people in his database. He sent that out and he grew that database to 100,000. If he needs to raise capital, he can raise millions of dollars for projects with an email blast and a video talking about the project or inviting them to a webinar. That’s the biggest thing. It’s sending it out on a regular basis, weekly basis to your database and communicating what’s going on, sharing your journey, articles, deals, case flow. We’ve all got deals. Everybody you’d meet on a business call and virtual networking, wherever am I be, taking that information and put it in your database. Those are the most valuable things you can do.

The Content Reel

Adding video is a second phase that everybody needs to be doing if you want to be long-term on this. You can do a Facebook Live. It’s easy to do. It’s free to do straight from your phone. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s free. One of the best things that we did for the podcast was 149 Facebook Lives before we launched it to a traditional podcast. It’s built an audience pretty fast for us. In the first year, we had over 150,000 views on our Facebook Lives. It built an audience. It started off with 2 or 3 or 4.

Now Facebook Live videos are good for about 24 to 48 hours. It doesn’t get much longer than that because you get so bogged down and only about 10% of your audience is going to see it. If you have groups or you’re a part of groups, you’ve got a business page, you can market to those groups. You can market to your list. If you’ve got a business page, you can upload your database, your email, and send an email blast out to them, a post or to create a lookalike audience to the list that you upload. It’s a very valuable thing. It’s one thing about Facebook that’s valuable.

As I said before, video on Facebook has about a 24 to 48-hour life cycle. You’re going to see somewhere between 1% to 5% view rate based on your connections and how people are interactive or not. YouTube is the biggest tool here. It’s also free. If you’ve got a Gmail account, you’ve got a YouTube channel. You guys have embraced video and done some good things to get beyond that first 100 subscribers to have a customized link. You can take your Facebook Live video and download it, and then upload it to YouTube. It stays around longer.

The nice thing about YouTube is it’s the second largest search engine owned by the number one search engine. When you upload a video and you have it go public, YouTube is going to go out and start searching for eyeballs for you. They’re going to look for people based on the keywords, your title, your description, the tags in the video. It is 24/7, 365 days a week advertising. We consistently see about 6,000 views on my YouTube channel on a monthly basis. That’s somewhere around 200 to 500 views a day.

We’ve already hit 6,500 views for the month. People average about 10 to 15 minutes on my channel. We average 3 to 4 subscribers per day subscribing to my channel. That’s how we got to 4,000 in a few years. You have to realize you put a video up, it’s going to try to put video in front of the people, the right people to see that. When you know how that works, the keywords, your channel tags and stuff like that, it is one of the beautiful things. I love uploading my Facebook videos. We’ll go live on YouTube. I replay it. We’ll do case studies in one of the most powerful videos for you to post before and after.

You can record a short little video and go to webinar or Zoom, and make it go live and practice, and then upload it there as well. What does well is your 2 to 5-minute videos. They do well with small call to actions. Go to my website, opt into my hot list, join my investor list, or text notes to 474747. You get on my list. Two to five-minute videos fall in line of using the right key or terms and descriptions of what you’re wanting to use to attract the right audience. It’s going to put you in front of the right people up there if they’re searching on YouTube.

NNA 81 | Note Marketing

Note Marketing: If you have a database, you can upload that into LinkedIn and it can find those people for you to connect with them as well.

 

One of the easiest things to start off your video series is finding a website that has a bunch of frequently asked questions, FAQ’s and that could be your first round of 20, 30, 40 videos of what FAQ stands for. Those are great questions or hot topics in the market. As always previous or current deals you’re working on always do well as case study videos. “I’ve got a nonperforming note, here’s what happened, or I’m looking at a note here in Ohio, Columbus, and this is what I’m seeing in the due diligence side of things.”

You can get a monetized channel. YouTube can pay you $100 a month or something like that off of things or you can run ads. It’s fine. For us, we run on getting traffic on YouTube. It does well. Are you going to have 6,500 views in your first month? No. You want to use a tool like TubeBuddy. It’s a good tool to use, especially if you’re serious about it. You can see how you compare it to other people’s channels.

When you upload a video, it will give you some keywords and terms based on what your title is that let you see were ranking well. AnswerThePublic is another tool that you can use. When you type in a question, it will give you all sorts of things and comments that can be asked about that topic to help you find questions and other things as well. Some people will talk about, “I like to use Vimeo because I want to keep my videos private.” That’s fine. Starting off, just start sharing, “We’re here.” As you are starting off, share to YouTube. It’s the best thing initially.

As you start growing your audience, there are some other places you can go. I have a Vimeo channel as well, but for most of you, you need to get the word out on what you’re doing right now. That’s going to be sharing either on Facebook Lives or doing YouTube videos. This is free. It doesn’t cost much. It isn’t hard at all to start figuring this stuff out. It’s not difficult. Just sharing it, but making sure you have a good description, good tags in the video, and even setting your channel up for some specific keywords as well.

We talked about email. We talked about video. You may need to hire a VA to help you out with your email blast. It might make sense to have someone to log in and write your emails for you. Sit down and talk with him or her and cut with a content posting schedule. I know quite a few students of ours have set that up. They’ve got a VA that logs into their account minutes and creates a content for them. It’s the same thing with video. What am I going to talk about? Just do a brain dump, an idea or you have a question, or somebody asks a question, or you see FAQ’s. Those are great videos to start off with. Those are often some of the best things to help drive engagement and seeing videos pop up or seeing views pop up on your channel.

You don’t need to add 1,000 or 20,000 views. Our average videos see between 100 and 500 views in the first 3 to 4 months. At the end of the year, we usually see somewhere between 500 and 1,000 views regularly. I got about 2,000 videos out there on YouTube. A lot of it are classes and other things, but the views keep coming. You don’t realize it’s seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year advertising for you. We have people on YouTube late at night and other things searching questions. If it’s a question you’re going to type, make a video about that question. It’s free. YouTube doesn’t cost you anything. Facebook Live doesn’t cost you anything.

The Professional Platform

LinkedIn is essential for what we’re doing as note investors and real estate investors. Forget the Facebook groups, forget your Facebook posts. Too many people are asking you what type of vegetable you would be. Too many people are complaining about who is winning the election, who won the election, who got chewed out on who. They hate other people out there because you voted for Trump or you hate people because you voted for Biden. It’s a toxic atmosphere. I don’t think Facebook is going to be around in the next 24 months. It’s becoming too ugly an area. I try to avoid that for the most part, except Note Nation and a few other things we post there. I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the negative.

If something is negative online, usually I unfriend or block them. LinkedIn is the professional side of it. Here’s the big thing. If you’ve got short videos, your videos, your ten-minute or less case studies, your emails, your articles, content that all works well on LinkedIn. It’s easy to connect with the right type of people. You can go to LinkedIn right now and type in real estate investors or note investors or ask special asset managers, chief credit risk officers, and find the right people to be a part of it.

If you do this on a regular basis, connecting, you can have a free account to connect to the ideal audience, investors’ groups. If they fall on a specific niche, it’s a great place to start building your database a little bit. We’re not talking five hours a day. We’re talking 20, 30 minutes a day on LinkedIn. Short video because LinkedIn will only allow video of ten minutes or less once you’ve got LinkedIn Live. Who knows how the heck you get approved for that? That does well. People liked the engagement. They like what you see. It’s something, it’s in their face. If it’s moving, they’ll watch it.

Videos does well on LinkedIn. There are some very large LinkedIn groups, 500,000 people in some of these investment groups. You don’t need a lot of people when you post something in these groups for people to comment and be a part of it. It’s adding value. The same things that you talk about in your emails, you can also talk about on LinkedIn. Talk about them on video. Hopefully, you’re starting to see a bit of a trend. The same thing you’ve used once, you can replicate or tweak it a little bit to make it work for the platforms.

We also use LinkedIn on a regular basis for deal flow. You guys know that. We talk about reaching out to banks and asset managers. You’ve seen me do this on our call and banks thing. We use OctopusCRM.io. It’s a Chrome plugin. I pay $21 a month for it. Every time I’d get up in the morning, before I get started, I clicked on LinkedIn. I clicked on the Chrome. I’m starting the Octopus little icon. It pulls up and it’s sending out 100 invites. It’s all set up because I’ve customized it. After about 100, it’s too many requests out for the day. We’ll wait until tomorrow and we’ll send it out. Plus in LinkedIn, if you’ve got a database and email list, you can upload that into LinkedIn and it can go out and find those people to connect with them as well.

I’ve grown my LinkedIn from 6,000 to 23,000 people in three years. I doubled it the first year from 6 to 12 and added 11,000 people in 2019. It comes down to 50 to 100 connections sent out on a daily basis. About 20%, 30% of them will connect with me immediately. I give everybody about 3 to 4 months and then I’ll go back. If they haven’t looked at their LinkedIn profile in three months, I start uninviting them and unconnecting with them. It’s a process, but it still bears so much value. When you see you’re getting 50, 100, 200, 300 views on your posts, that’s engagement, that’s adding value to your tribe, adding value to your audience. Most of it is me replicating by repeating or reposting or my VA posting on a regular basis to Buffer that automatically shares it to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter images, case studies, whatever, all across the board.

Twenty-six percent of Americans listen to at least 5 to 7 podcasts on a weekly basis. There are a lot of large syndicators and real estate companies seeing the value of starting a podcast. When you look at Facebook Live, people will absorb about 1% to 5% of what you’re posting on Facebook. On YouTube, they’ll absorb about 11%. On podcasts, people listen to 86% of the content. They’re absorbing 86% of what you were saying, whether you have your own podcast or you’re guesting on many people’s podcasts. They provide loyal listeners. They have a very loyal listeners and audience base. I looked at to date we have right about 15,000 downloads for the month.

If I upload ten episodes and I get 15,000 downloads, that’s an average of 1,500 listeners per episode. That’s pretty good. A lot of people will do a couple of episodes. They worry about only having 100 people. I’m happy if I get one new person listening to a show. I had ten people respond in some fashion, whether it’s a podcast post, email, a YouTube video, something they saw dealing with my podcast, or they heard me on somebody’s podcast is one of the most powerful tools that you have now. As I said, 26% of Americans listen to 5 to 7 podcasts weekly, 86% listens or absorbs. We talked about that.

NNA 81 | Note Marketing

Note Marketing: It’s much more effective to be on two or three podcasts in two to three days versus flying out and speaking to 50-100 people.

 

I reuse my Facebook videos or YouTube videos as podcast episodes. I don’t do all the editing myself. If you’re going to do a podcast, try to be able to realize it’s going to be a little bit of an investment for you. You can do a lot of stuff, but your time is better spent doing other things. I outsource my production. I’ve got a couple of sponsors that pay for my production, and we use them to market out there as well. I use all that they’re doing and creating, episodes, blogs, infographics. The production company is going into feeding what I give to my VA and what I post on LinkedIn. One thing goes 4 or 5 spots.

If you don’t want to start, I’ve got buddies that look to get speaking gigs on podcasts. That’s a different animal. If you think about this, every time you guest, there are a lot of podcasts out there. There are 1,001 real estate investing podcasts out there. I’ve looked earlier and those are in existence that have stuff out there. I didn’t look at how many of them have done episodes in the last 90 days, 6 months. That’s a potential 1,000 plus audiences, whether it’s 10 people or 100,000 people for you to be on it. I know many of you love networking and like going to your real estate clubs, your meetup groups, your expos, and trying to speak and trying to network with audience.

The Loyal Audience Magnet

That’s the way I look at podcasting. It’s a much more effective audience for me to spend time being on 2 or 3 podcasts in 2 to 3 days versus flying out and speaking to 50 people or 100 people. When you look at the cost and if you know how to use CTA, Call To Actions and using some of the things in your presentation and what you’re talking about. I don’t share the same thing on a regular basis at all. I have a couple of different things I do. I might guest on podcasts at least 2 to 3 times a week, if not more because it’s a database, it’s an audience that I’m now in front of. It’s becoming one of our most powerful things besides me having the podcast, but also me guesting on other people’s podcasts to be a part of that.

I prefer at least four or more guests podcast spots a week. There are many opportunities out there. If you know how to talk about something or if you talk about case studies, there are deals out there, “What’s your best deal,” or talk about notes or your biggest flop, your worst investment or your best investment, business, entrepreneurship, systems. You start adding in entrepreneurship, business, and marketing podcasts, and other things that you’re doing in your business. There are side hustle podcasts. There’s a whole lot more opportunity for you to share about what you’re doing.

I throw this like you’re being called into the front of the room and you’re speaking in front of your meetup group. Appearing on a Zoom call with somebody in front of their audience. It’s the same thing. All of you are capable of doing this, talking about we’re going through. There are a million different podcasts out there. We leverage real estate, investing, business, entrepreneurship and marketing. Those are the five niches that I focus on because that attracts people into my right type of fund.

They go to my website, they check out my podcast, they send me a message and connect me online or giving away a book or a list or something like that. You are all capable of doing that. It’s not hard to do at all. Target your real estate, your business, your entrepreneurship shows. You’re all capable of doing things. There are many different niches out there. Most of it is done via Zoom. Some of it is done via the phone, but most of it is done via Zoom and internet. It’s not difficult to do 30 minutes to an hour of talking, having a conversation back and forth with somebody, and then it goes in front of their audience. That’s awesome.

It’s much better than the radio because the radio is come and gone, but that podcast stays around, and you’ll hear people over a month and 90 days and track that down. It’s one of the things that you want to do. I always have people reach out, “I heard you on such and such podcast.” I know it works because I see it done. Some people are like, “Scott, why are you telling us to do this? Aren’t you creating competition?” I don’t believe so because only about 1% of you are going to do anything, and that 1% is going to make it a good thing. It adds variety.

I still dominate my niche. You’re not competing against me and I’m not competing against you. That’s not the way I look at it. Only 26% of Americans listen to podcasts. This is why we talk about being on there, but also leveraging video because the other 74% do spend time on video, but they’re not listening to a podcast. It does not have to be difficult. You could use a thing like Listen Notes, or going straight to iTunes and doing a search for real estate investing and seeing what’s being around.

The Network Builder

I’ll search people’s name and see what podcasts they’ve been on and reach out to those podcasts as well. Another thing, being like a crazy year that it’s been in 2020. You have to look at doing some event. I don’t mean this being difficult or complex. I’m talking about very simple. When I first started off and I was getting serious about what I was doing, I would sponsor a summit. I would pay $2,000 to $5,000 to have a booth at an expo, noteworthy or a secret knock. We spent thousands of thousands of dollars on sponsorship, REI Expo, Think Realty, Noteworthy, Distressed Mortgage Expo. I could go on and on, but most of them spent hundreds of thousand dollars sponsoring events.

That is all valuable if you know how to use it, but there’s also a big name. We all know that REI clubs are also a great place to speak at or your meetup groups. A lot of real estate clubs, a lot of meet-ups have not met or shut down and not embrace the online aspect of things because of what’s going on with the Corona. If Corona is going to win out, you have to realize and leverage. This is the biggest pivot for a lot of real estate investors, taking that weekly or monthly networking online and offering a value, offering a place for people to connect and have some dopamine level.

You see this with people that are networking a lot online. They’re doing well. Those people that don’t have that human interaction struggle. Don’t get me wrong. We all want hugs. I want high fives for some of my best friends. I miss them, but I can’t. Thank God for Zoom. Aaron Young of Laughlin Associates, one of my best friends, him and Michelle are very dear friends of Steph and me. We spent an hour and a half getting a chance to visit with them because I haven’t seen them forever, and networking and talking about things. It’s the same way if you have a local group of investors networking, embrace it, embrace the suck.

You do a regular webinar like Note Night in America. That could be one way. It could be Zoom. It could bring people on or you could do a meetup group. It’s the same thing 1, 2 hours, doing it virtually the same night, same timeframe that you do it, 30 to 60 minutes. It doesn’t have to be too long, maybe 90 minutes if it’s a meetup group. You’re having people to interact. We’ve done a great job. Note Night in America is becoming one of our best marketing tactics week in, week out. Even when everything else we do. I still add about 20% new people each week to my database from posting a couple of spots, emailing out, posting to LinkedIn and posting it to Facebook. I’m sharing 1 or 2 posts. I still get 20 to 30 new people on the call. They register. You want to require people to register.

You might want to do a monthly lunch and learn. Maybe you have been part of our calling banks that we’ve done four hours each month. Lunch and learn is some of the things I’ve done in the past for 30 to 60 minutes by case studies. That’s a great opportunity for your database. Here’s lunch and learn, big untapped audience around lunchtime. We get 75 to 100 people on a call and bank thing. That’s a very effective tool for people to hear, learn, ask questions and be a part of it. The most important thing, if you’re going to do something, do it on a regular basis. One of our students does one webinar on Note investing at 6:00 PM. It’s from 6:00 to 7:00. He’s out in the Pacific. He does it from 4:00 to 5:00 Pacific time. He does a great job talking about notes and asking question.

You can do virtual one events, maybe bring 3 to 4 people together for a one-day lunch and learn or a one-day summit. You can bring your vendors on. This is one of the things that we do with Note Weekends. It’s easy. Invite your peers, see if they’ll promote for you. One of the best things I’ve seen uses a Dream 100. It’s 100 people that you would love to have on your event or your podcast or your videos, and draft off their audience, draft off the groups, draft off their pages. The fastest way to grow a list is reaching out to people and it doesn’t take a lot. Zoom has a free version. I pay Zoom each month.

NNA 81 | Note Marketing

Note Marketing: If you’re going to do something like a live event, do it on a regular basis.

 

It’s easy to do a live stream. It’s easy to put people together. It doesn’t take a lot of work. You’ve got to mess around a little bit. If you want to grow a list and we all want to grow a bigger list, you’ve got access to all the free things that you need. Because you’re interviewing people and talking with people, vendors and experts, you become the expert. Let’s not be afraid to reach out to the experts. That’s what I started doing when I was doing the Monday Note and then it evolved in Note Night in America.

That’s one of the most powerful tools I can tell you. It is being on a regular basis. Do I always make Monday night? Not always. We’ll skip here and there but being consistent. When I looked at the registration lists, 1,050 people have registered for Note Night in America in 2020. I’ll start it over first of the year and we’ll see how many new people come on my list. They join it. People unsubscribe. That’s fine. What you have to do is put yourself out there. I’m not talking about you do some big summit but do something on a regular basis to your tribe, to your meetup group. Whatever it might be, you can do it. There’s nothing difficult about it at all.

Zoom is pretty damn affordable for some of the basic things you can do. Record it and it becomes a video or a podcast episode. It could become an email you send out with a link to it, “Did you miss it? Check it out.” That’s one of the things that we’ll do, send an email, “If you miss Note Night in America, here’s the replay.” In recap, those are the five things that all linked into one. The one thing that you should all be doing is a weekly email to your warm market. This takes about 30 minutes to do. Once you get your first template set up. Weekly videos to YouTube and Facebook. It doesn’t have to be too long. We’re talking roughly about three hours of timeframe. If you’re going to take an hour, you’re doing it three times a week. That’s not too difficult at all.

You will hit the delete button a couple of times, but I’m taking three hours. That’s a little long, but three hours roughly on the weekly video to get the biggest bang for your buck. If you want to be a guest on podcast, you can reach out and be a guest 3 to 5 hours. You’re going to be on three shows, three hours, and take 30 minutes of research to send an email, send an invite. You might need to put together what’s called the Media One, talking about what you’d like to talk about. Everybody that’s on here can talk about real estate, their past, their present, their future. You post daily on LinkedIn and connect with ideal niches. That’s 30 minutes a day. It’s not too difficult to do at all.

You look to speak at different real estate investment clubs or meet up groups monthly. This takes roughly about four hours for you to do if you’re doing this on a monthly basis. There are many real estate investment clubs, not only in your market but Meetup.com. You can go on there, find them and reach out to them, “Who do you need?” That’s one of the big things that we do, “Are you looking for speakers for your groups? I don’t mind doing it virtual. I don’t mind providing an hour of content or 45 minutes of content.” It’s a great way for you to get the word out on what you’re doing or host your own events annually. It can be virtual or online.

It’s a whole lot easier to do these days than they’re used to be. It doesn’t have to be anything big, four people, an hour long, two hours long, whatever. It’s going to help you guys. This could be your meetup group I’m talking about. Your local vendors together talking about what’s going on in the Columbus market, the Oklahoma City market, the Michigan, the South Florida, wherever you guys are located. It’s easy to do. What I’m talking about is if you figure this all up on a weekly basis and figure it out, it’s going to come down to average about 2 to 3 hours per day in marketing, and a little bit each day.

Once you start get rock and rolling, it’s going to be a lot less, less than 30 minutes a day. If you can budget 30 minutes to 1 hour, 3 to 5 days out of the week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays, take Friday off, spend an hour on Saturday or in Sunday, your business will skyrocket in the next 90 days. You start putting things in place to talk about. One thing I wanted to throw out there is I do have a couple of opportunities in December 2020. We’re looking to do a couple of live episodes. I’m doing some live coaching with you up there to come and be on for 15 to 20 minutes to talk about where you’re at in your business, and where you want to go in 2021, and helping you plan that out.

I’m looking to do a couple of episodes. I’m looking 4, 8, 12 people that would be willing to come on for 15 to 20 minutes each and doing back to back episodes or an hour filled with 3 to 4 people. If you’re interested, drop me an email at Scott@WeCloseNotes.com. We’ll talk about no matter where you’re at, you could be advance or brand new, I’m looking for a good broad mix out there to be a part of our podcast episode.

It’s not difficult. All of you are capable of doing these things. Weekly email to your database, you all need to be doing that. Doing 1 to 2 to 3 short videos on YouTube about a topic or frequently asked questions or something that you’re struggling with. It’s not hard to do. Do a guest appearance one to twice a week. It’s pretty easy to do. Posting daily to LinkedIn and connecting to their niche, reaching out to meetup groups, networking on Facebook. We started with the meetup message boards. You can connect with people all across the country. If I had to start all over again with no list, that would be the first place I would go. It would be Meetup and LinkedIn to build an audience. Host your own four-person event, “We’re going to talk about this, this and this.” It’s a great way to do it.

You’re seeing a lot of virtual summits take place out there as a way to pivot. You don’t need to pivot, just talk about what you’re doing. Talk about your local market. Bring on a title company, a realtor, hard money lender and a mortgage broker. Talk about what’s going on in the market, the numbers and closings, and things like that. That’s going to be a great, valuable thing for you to do in any market that you’re out there.

We have a couple of things that are upcoming. December 11th through the 13th, 2020, that’s our next three-day Virtual Note Buying Workshop. We’re still running a 25% off special. You don’t have to do anything. Go to NoteBuyingForDummies.com. It will take you straight to the checkout page discounts already figured in there. It saves you about $150 off of that. It doesn’t take away any bonuses. You get the replays, the previous event, the 300-page manual, and some other things for you to take a look at and get rocking and rolling. That’s our final workshop of the year.

One of the great things too, if you get signed up for those that took advantage, we are going to do again this time around the four-week coaching. If you’re a WCN Crew member, you can jump back into it. Not only retake the class at no additional cost for WCN Crew membership but go through the four-week coaching again. We’ll spend two weeks in front of the class and then two weeks after the class. We’re not meeting the week of Christmas. The four-week coaching kicks off this Wednesday, helping people get some momentum going into the new year.

A lot of people love this last time. It’s the bonus for being a part of the workshop or the WCN Crew member again. I know some of you are planning on being on there. I’m looking forward to kicking it off again. Our first Note Weekend class is going to be in January 2021. We’re not doing 1 December. We have the three-day workshop and I don’t expect you to do anything in the last two weeks of the year when it comes to classes. If you haven’t signed up for Note Weekend, you can get the one-day class in January plus the replays for $25 is half price. Sign up for one of those two on NoteWeekend.com or NoteBuyingForDummies.com.

How many of you have thought about your marketing for 2021? How many of you have started thinking about what you’re going to implement a little bit more in 2021? I’d love to know if anybody wants to share their thoughts, where they’re going to work on a little bit more here and starting to do some things. I’d love to hear from you, what you’re focused on. The first videos are going suck. You’re going to screw up. We all have to get somewhere.

My first round of videos were horrible. Practice makes perfect at it. That’s the only way you’ll be able to get ahead. The reason I’m good at what I do now is because I’ve done it thousands and thousands of times. I don’t expect you to do thousands of thousands of videos. When you look back at the number of videos that I uploaded. When we celebrated hitting 4,000 downloads, I average nineteen videos a month. That’s about one a day being uploaded. There are some that are ready to bunch and others were off. One little short video each day, what’s going on in your life? What are you working on? What are you excited about? It doesn’t always have to be about notes.

Those things that we talked about, the videos, the LinkedIn, email blast, be a podcast guest, it can help you in other avenues, not just in your real estate or note business. Those things will help you implement in whatever else you’re working on. If you’ve got a full-time job or other things you’re doing, they’re all there to help you accelerate in a lot of things. Thank you so much for being on Note Night in America. Thanks for being part of it here. Go out, take some action and we’ll see you all at the top. Thanks.

 

Important Links

 

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

Join Note Night in America community today:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.