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The basics of real estate SEO fall in line with general on-page SEO techniques. Sure, elements like slugs and image alt-tags are essential, but you probably already have a basic familiarity with them.
This article will dive deep into these essential strategies and provide you with a highly detailed and hyper-current understanding of how to best leverage them
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail-Right podcast. It’s episode 376. And as usual, my amazing, amazing, amazing podcast partner has had to be patient for approximately 25 minutes as I completely lost track of time. So here we are. I’m present. Who’s the hero of this particular podcast? My partner, Jonathan, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience, man?
It was okay. I was captured with my email. Endless list of emails, isn’t it? Thanks for that, Rob. I’m the co-founder of Mail-Right.com. We build beautiful websites on WordPress semi or full custom. Plus, we got a suite of marketing tools that get you some fantastic leads and keep you in front of your web-based customers. Over to you, Robert. All right.
My name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound rem. Com and a 14-year veteran in general of the real estate marketing industry. I specialize in attraction marketing and SEO. Without any further ado, we’re going to get into my home sweet home territory today. We are going to talk about real estate SEO on page trips, tips, strategies, and hacks that are still effective, if not really effective in 2023 because Google has definitely been changing some of the things that they are measuring and or the weight of some of those things, and some things are getting continued to gain traction. So without any further ado, let’s get into… This is going to make some people’s eyes glaze over. So, John, I’m going to stay away from the highly technical speak and stick to stuff that people can understand simply. So here’s one of the biggest hacks in the entire world, everybody, on the page. Here’s something that Google did five years ago. They went to a natural language recognition system, otherwise known as semantic keyword recognition. But they have to make everything as complicated as possible for you to understand. Everything. So they didn’t say, we’re better at recognizing what you’re trying to say, nor did they tell you how they’re doing it.
So guys, guess what? They’re doing 80 % of their semantic or of their natural language recognition of the title of the post, the title of the page. And what else do they look at? The subtitles in Google speak, because they got to be dumb this way. It’s H2s, H3s, and H4s for the handful of you that are highly technical. They take those signposts inside any piece of content that they’re reading. And what they do is they then take the keyword density and they recognize all the relatable keywords to the signpost that you put up. Otherwise known as semantic keyword recognition. But what does this mean in the absolute most basic layman’s terms? It means that actually, 80 % of your content recognition comes off the title of the page. If you spent two hours thinking of the title and researching it and 20 minutes writing a thousand words, I’d probably tell you, well done. Well done. That’s the way to do it. Titles and headers are everything in SEO right now. Everything. They also pick up something called semantic keyword depth comes from how many headers do you have in your content. So in other words, how many H2s, H3s, and H4s?
How many signposts that you have with content under them that Google can mix up the keyword density and understand? Did you actually produce something relevant for that signpost? Because if the answer is yes, if they look at the keyword density and discover that the right number of words are being used, they will go, Oh, well, then you might be a valuable resource for this thing, this other thing. So this is in on… Do you have any… Jon, any questions, any comments?
No, but I think you’re making it pretty clear because I think Google, haven’t they got the most PhD people of any company in the world. And like you say, they seem incapable of writing literally anything in reasonably easy language, don’t they? They just don’t seem up to it, do they? It’s like a glorified university department, the whole company, isn’t it?
Yes, it is. And that’s basically what Google is. It’s a data science factory, and they do a very good job of employing a lot of data scientists and rocket scientists and professors and really high level intelligence that basically tries to sort. They are sorting through the whole world’s set of information. It’s one of the most complicated jobs that’s ever existed. It’s taking the entire world’s worth of information and categorizing it and organizing it for all of us. That’s what Google does. So so that’s a step number one. And it’s got to be one of the biggest. Now, here’s another way, though. If you were looking for a creative way to send other little signposts, you might ask yourself the question, Well, are there any other ways that Google picks up these signposts off the page, Robert? Because we see content with all this different stuff in it, like images and videos and blah, blah, blah, blah. And the answer is yes. More and more often right now, John, on page signals include multi media. So graphs, charts, images, though images have been overused. And most people don’t know how to put a creative image inside their blog post.
So they’re for the most part a waste of time and space. Infographics are still big, still productive. So all those things, multi media elements are huge on page SEO factors. Another multi media element, which is oftentimes spreadsheets, clickable elements on a page are all multi media factors that improve the signals that you send. But a real strong signal is a somewhat creative or self took image that is properly tagged, that is still an incredibly powerful signpost inside of content. All of our best training content on my site, John, forever has been all the stuff that I image tagged that was real estate quotes and real estate memes. I’ve ranked for those posts for five, six years now straight, like without break. Anything with lots of images, with lots of sign posts that make it clear about what’s on the page Google tends to love. But it’s a lot of work tagging all those images and doing that stuff. So saying that you’re going to do 50 images like I did for those two posts. Now, if somebody had said, oh, Robert, you’re going to rank for five years off that work, I would say, okay, it’s worth it because it was worth it.
So it’s a give or take. So real estate SEO strategies, like the image optimization is another big hack. Image compression, which is on my… I have a blog post about this. You can see what we say about that specifically. One of the things that I’ve noticed that is really taking off that is an interesting on page trend is actually how to titles. Kyle handy, who some of you listening to this show will know, he gets 80,000 visits to his site per month off how to videos, how to blog posts. He has got far more traffic than I do. And I think it’s because he makes his posts simple. He speaks directly to real estate agents, and it’s all how twos. Have you ever looked up Kyle? Yeah. He came on the show with us at some point, didn’t he?
Yes. I have to try and have him back.
You should, man. He’s a big deal now. B y traffic and audience size, he’s a huge deal. You should get him back.
On if you can. He came on the show. That’s what helped him.
Right. We launched his career, man. Kyle Handy is 100 % due to us. No, I’m just kidding. That was a very big joke.
Don’t get upset. Don’t write.
To me. Don’t call me. All right.
But get to it. I think the images is really important to the alter tag, the description. And I think what you’re saying is linked to the first point in having the titles, spending time on the titles, spending time on the subtitles, tagging the images and also putting some video on the page. That’s a lot of work. Writing something, researching the title, the sub headers, having some decent images, using Canva. Canva tip. If you want to get some good images, Canva is a great resource. And then getting some video. But we’ve been hammering on about video for about two years now, haven’t we? I think the audience probably is getting a bit tired of us talking about video, but it’s really related to this. If you want a really great page that Google is going to love, get all these factors and plus some video. Would you agree, Robert?
Yeah. On page signals, ladies and gentlemen, are definitely all important, but we’re trying to appeal to what I believe, and this is not necessarily supported by documentation, but I believe that Google has been leveraging AI more and more and more inside their search ranking. And I think without proof, I think without proof, I think that the way the AI is working is user behavior based. What could an AI track that would be user based that Google has data access to? How long does somebody stay on the page? How do they interact with the page? How do they interact with the page? Do they keep coming back to the page over and over again? These user interaction signals, which used to be less than 3 % of the algorithm. Now, the last time that I saw a lot of other SEOs document it, they had raised up to 8 % of the algorithm. Most other SEOs agreed that was about 4 or 5 years ago. My guess is that user behavior signals are now 20 to 30 %. And I think that by the time everything is said and done, there can probably be upwards of 50 %.
So when you’re creating something on the page, if you want to know what I think the biggest hack is, how do we make something that’s going to make somebody stay there a second longer? And that plays directly into your video comment, John. Somebody will definitely stay on the site longer if they watch your video. Maybe as long as 30 seconds to two minutes, depending on how good of a job you’ve done. So video is very important because 30 seconds to two minutes is forever in the world the internet. Really great real estate sites rarely have hang times from users for longer than one minute to one minute and six seconds. And that’s above average. Average is 30 seconds for a real estate website. Oh, my God.
So you should start tracking your own analytics, John, and seeing how your sites do in comparison to those numbers I just gave you. Without any content from a client, our sites average between one minute and 30 seconds, so three times better than the norm, all the way up to two minutes and 20 seconds, which is really high on the normal scale. And clients who are installing content, oh, my God, they can be upwards of three to five minutes. I have clients with the average hang times on their websites for five minutes, and those clients are doing extraordinarily well because remember, that’s averaged out over the many thousands of people that come to the site. So if you’re saying five minutes, that means that the average engaged user is on there for 15 to 20 minutes, and the person who accidentally ended up there and like, o opsie, and left immediately in one second, that averages those two people out or three people. All right. Let’s get the time. We’re a few seconds away. You know what, John, I’m going to make a judgment call. We’re going to go to a break a minute earlier. We might cut this show two minutes short because I’m on a very tight timeline today.
So, ladies and gentlemen, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, please stop, take a moment and do me and John a favor and leave us a thumbs up, whatever. Give us a chance to get your feedback. More and more often, John, I’m hearing people reference the show. I used to say to you that I never heard of anybody referencing the show when they called into me. I got to tell you, I’d say for this year, the numbers between five and 10 % of my inquiries mentioned the show. So it’s happening. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. We will be right back. Stay tuned. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need MailW rite. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight. Com. Welcome back to the Mail. R ight podcast. Today is episode number 376. We’re deep in my field of expertise, which is why John is a little quieter than usual.
We’re talking about SEO hacks that can go onto your page. So if you want to get some bonus example, title tags, things like that. Title tags are great titles to blog posts. That’s what we’re talking about. It’s blog posts. So let’s say you’re doing a blog post and you’re in need of a good title, you can always hit the Inbound rem website and get some ideas that we had for free. Same thing goes for headings, which is the H2s and the H3s that I mentioned, which is just the little sub sections of a blog post. And then we’re going to start talking about things that don’t make sense, metadata. Skip that for the time being. But one thing that we did that was really cool, I thought, John, you have to let me know what you thought, we did include something that I had never seen on any other blog post about SEO strategies, which was user interaction strategies for real estate SEO. And then we included a list of things you can add to a page that gets people to interact with the page. Did you read the post? Did you see that bit?
And if you did, what did you think of that? And if you didn’t, what do you think of that anyway?
I didn’t read it that specific bit, but it was linked to a question I was going to ask you anyway. Because what’s your view of mini surveys and mini quizzes, asking free question set up? People seem to like it. And have you utilized that on a regular basis with your clients doing mini quizzes, surveys?
No, I’ve never used it, but that’s more a lack of bandwidth to apply it inside our ecosystem. So would I use it? Yeah, potentially, maybe I would absolutely use it. There’s no I think it could be a good strategy. Here’s how I would use it. If the desire was sincere to serve the audience, but you needed to do some research before you could potentially help people, that’s what the survey was about. I would do one of those within no seconds flat. If it was a sales survey that was meant to set somebody up for a sales call, I’d be a little bit more reluctant. I’m not saying it doesn’t work. I’m not saying it can’t work, John. But I really am not like, as time is going on, I’m becoming less and less a fan of push strategies inside the world that we live in right now. They’re just not very popular. And they’re getting a lot of resistance from the audience at large. What’s resistance? Dropping out of the forum and never looking at another email that you ever sent again, unsubscribing from your email marketing list. The list goes on. Those are all signs that you have missed the mark with your marketing.
You have strong open rates inside emails and things like that. Those are all great ways to decide whether or not your marketing is hitting its intended target. How do your response rates, are they above normal? Do you know what normal is? Now, guys, here’s some example for some user interaction features. Toggle drop down boxes, video, which we already said, social media share. There’s lots of tools that you can plug into most WordPress sites that allow you to have social media iconography right on the page. Most of our competitors don’t do that. John and I’s like, you can’t get that versatility on the page. Comments and responses, once again, not all that common with our competitors. Calculators, newsletter signups, contact forms, drop down FAQs, IDX and interactive maps, internal links, external links. Download like infographics or ebooks, which we do use, John. I’m pretty proud of that fact. Quizzes and surveys, which you already asked me about. Image or client review carousels.
We.
Do use those as well. Work extremely well. Podcasts, we do not use those, but we’re doing a podcast so you and I both inherently understand the value. And chat boxes. These are all things that you can do to enhance the value of your website to the world at large. I know people that have incredibly small amounts of traffic, like 100 people per month as an example, John. So they’re not doing that great at attracting people to their podcast, to their profiles. But believe it or not, that very small stream of traffic oftentimes generates some business, like some business. Like enough, one or two clients per year for having 100 people per month listen to you, saying that you’re going to get a few clients off that is pretty incredible. Digital marketing works usually by the tens of thousands. You’re measuring the success of videos by thousands of views. Do really heavy informational content. And I’ve noticed that your views drop, but your response rate goes way up and the quality of your leads is very high. My close ratio, most of my clients close, it’s like 50 %. It’s ridiculous. Honestly, it’s ridiculous. It’s an incredibly large number.
So you’re not spending your time qualifying or quantifying leads. You’re spending your time talking to people who are already qualified to some degree or another, probably a very high degree. John, that’s been the tips. There is another pro tip that the head of my branding content team, his name is Ben, everybody. Some of this stuff, Ben comes up with himself. I no longer come up with everything. I do 80 % of it. I do a video, John, and then Ben creates a blog post out of it. He does this world class job. If you’ve read my blog, you’ve seen his work. He’s absolutely insane in terms of the level of quality of his work. Best I’ve ever seen. But one of those things he does is every now and again, he finds something. He usually adds his own little piece to the blog post. And he did so on this post. And I thought it was very clever, and I’m going to repeat it, but I can’t take credit for it. He took that idea that interactivity was really important to Google, and he said, You should be asking for input from your clients. Ask them on the blog to communicate to you.
Ask questions of your audience inside your content. Now, our content is really deep and I don’t know if it’s working correctly for us or not, but I will say this, we’ve started to get a lot more interactivity off the blog, off the website. I do like it. Whether or not it’s really impacting us well for SEO, that remains to be seen. Whether or not it’s increasing lead count, without question, it’s improving both lead quantity and quality. So does it impact us well? Yes, it does. Does it have the desired effect of improving our SEO? Not sure about that. But for those of you listening, making sure that you’re trying to engage your audience, John just gave a great example. Put a button on there that says, Take a quiz, help me out, let me do some market research. Would you be willing to do me a favor? I’m trying to do some market research. Anything that engages your audience is probably going to be number one, maybe a high quality sign for SEO, probably would be my guess. But for sure, creating interaction between you and your audience is one step closer to creating a customer relationship.
Would you agree with that, Jon?
Yeah. And I was thinking of some fun quizzes. I f you did a bit of evergreen content about a certain area in the city or region that you’re covering, and you say, you could have three questions. What are the main things? Do you love the parks, the mountains? Why did you move to Rio? Did you move for the skiing, for the biking, or for the gambling? It’s just some fun questions and getting some into reaction on your post. I’ve seen a few people do. I haven’t done it on my own properties. It’s something maybe I should look at because I think it just gets them engaged a bit.
I agree with you. And honestly, that everything you’re saying is right on the spot on. I especially love asking clients on real estate or geo specific blogs, some of the stuff that John mentions, verged on genius. Why are you thinking of moving here? But here’s one thing I would say. It is far more likely you’re going to get response if you try to figure out what the broad categories are and make it as fast as just clicking in a button. Don’t make anybody type. Just put in radio buttons where you can just click a button, put that in. You want it to be done in five or 10 seconds. There’s no way you’re going to get anybody to hang on to your blog longer than that. So super fast. But like John said, really specific to both the area and the blog. I think that’s brilliant. I think that would work very well.
I think it was going to happen in the next couple of years, Rob, with AI, is when they choose a particular of those three examples I gave you and they clicked it, the content will change on the page.
Yeah, you know what? You’re probably right. That would be if they haven’t done that, they would be doing that. And since we’re going to spend… So, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to cut off the show today at about 27 minutes because John and I have three minutes of something I need to talk to you about real quick. And then I got to go. But the bonus content today is just going to be talking about some future hacks. I’ve been talking about this one a lot. I’m going to contribute mine. You just gave me a great one. I think you’re right. I think AI or some chat GPT background thing is going to switch up the content based on your answer. I think you’re 100 % correct on that. Here’s what I think, though. I think that chat GPT is also going to change. We’re going to see a little bit more traffic go back to Bing. We’re going to see people in the Google Ecosphere using chat GPT or GPT tools a lot. And here’s what I want you all to hear. You heard it here first. We’re going to watch people translate that into ads, a lot more audio ads.
It’s going to be audio ads. You’re going to speak a thing into your phone. The AI is going to recognize what you mean or think that it knows what you mean, and it’s going to translate your search better. It’s going to have a better intuition about your search than Google does, which means that for a little while chat, GPT is going to start taking over voice search a little bit more, in my opinion, which is going to lead us to more audio ads. So that’s my prediction.
The future. I’ve got mixed feelings. Well, not mixed feelings. I just think how it’s being presented at the present moment is understandable but a little bit shallow because what I think is going to happen is, I think it’s going to affect the middle, but I think there’s going to be a certain degree of searches that AI or chat is going to answer. But people do want to learn. If they’re serious, they do deeper searches. It’s more research. You’ve got a whole group of searches, which is a quick answer. They’re just looking for a quick answer. And then you got a whole smaller, but they’re further along the purchase journey where they’re doing comparative searches and they actually want to go to sites that show some leadership, some knowledge on the subject and give them information. They’re doing a deeper dive. What do you think of that? Is that making?
Since Rob? Yeah. No, I do. I think it does make sense. I don’t disagree. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Jonathan and we are out of time for today’s show, so we’re going to wrap it up. Jon, if somebody would like to reach out to you, how would they do that?
I’ll go to the mail hyphen write. Com website and book a demo with me and Adam, and we can show you our great platform. Back over to you, Rob.
Beautiful. And if you’d like to learn a little bit more about me, go to inboundrem. com. Click the About or Services pages, and either one has a long video either about me or the company. Either way, you should be able to learn all that you need to know. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for tuning in. We really appreciate it. We’ll see you here next week and we’ll be talking. We’ll dig into something exciting for real.
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The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman
https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
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Robert Newman
InboundREM
https://inboundrem.com
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With Special Guest Devon Higgins of Photoup
Devon owns a real estate marketing business and is also a Realtor himself. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and has been in the real estate space for over 10 years. His main business involves working with real estate marketing professionals (specifically photographers) and empowering them to provide more value to their agent clients through photo editing, property websites, virtual tours, and virtual assistants. Outside of work, you can find Devon spending time with his wife and 2 daughters, enjoying the outdoors, and socializing with friends & colleagues.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Episode Number 376. Host, We’re super excited to have Devin Higgins today with us. He is the CMO for FOTO Up. I’m also with my amazing co Jonathan, and I’m going to give both of these superlative humans a chance to introduce themselves. So we’re going to start with our guest today, Devin. For those that don’t know you, why don’t you introduce yourself to the Mail-Right audience? Yeah.
Hey, everyone. My name is Devon Higgins. As Robert said, I am the CMO over here at Photoup. I am also a realtor based out of the Grand Rapids, Michigan area. But Photoup, my main business, deals with real estate marketing and digital marketing for both real estate agents and media professionals who are in the real estate industry. So we’ve been around since 2012 and excited to talk to you guys today. Beautiful.
And for those who don’t know, the British accent coming to you through the airwaves, and I’m using very old language here because it’s probably through fiber these days, but I’m going to say airwaves anyway, and say that that gentleman is the founder of the show, founder of his own company, and my co-host on the show, his name is Jonathan. But, Jon, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself?
Thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mail-Right.com. We build beautiful websites and WordPress for real estate agents, semi-custom, and full-custom. Plus, we got a host of digital products and services that help you get yourself noticed online and get some quality leads. Back over to you, Robert.
My name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound rem. We’re an inbound marketing and SEO company that focuses on real estate. All right, so here we go. Today, because we’re talking to arguably a photograph expert, we’re going to talk a little bit about that, as all of you who are listening to the show can probably guess. But before we get into it, Devin, did I understand correctly by reading your bio and talking to you pre-show that you also maintain a real estate license as well as being a tech founder? Is that correct?
Yeah, that is correct. My journey into the real estate industry started back in 2014. I joined up with a couple of guys that were starting a social enterprise real estate photography business. I did not know much about either at the time but knew that I liked the guys and liked the mission of the company and I was curious about a social enterprise. So joined them at that point, at that point in time, we had a very small number of clients being real estate photographers sprinkled all throughout the US and only about five editors over in the Philippines, which is where our operations headquarters were located. So I came on at about early stages of the company, again, pretty small, and helped them with their sales and marketing of growing the team of editors along with our client base, where we now today still do photo editing. It’s still our bread and butter of the business. But we now have over 200 editors and thousands of clients all over the US and the world. We’ve grown as well from not just doing photo editing, but also doing things like video editing and virtual staging. We also have property websites and a virtual tour product and are trying to really be the end-to-end solution for the real estate media professional or real estate agent.
And then along that line as well, about two years ago now, we had just been in the industry for so long. I had known so much about the media aspect but just didn’t really know enough about the agent side of things, so got my own license here in Grand Rapids. So I started trying to understand that as well. And from there, we’re now trying to create our own separate brand that’s not specifically for media professionals like photographers, but actually going directly to agents themselves to help them get some of their media up to par. So yeah, that’s short and skinny for me.
Awesome. Well, that’s very impressive. 200 photo editors is… That is a lot of people to be running… Never mind. The company I founded, it does the same thing. We’re only 20 people, but it is already a lot of work scaling those people in that other place to do the job. So I’m just thinking, okay, what if I was 10 times bigger? I’m like, that would be a lot.
It’s not an easy task, but it’s a fulfilling one. Again, the social enterprise piece that I mentioned earlier is really we’re there to help folks over in the Philippines stay within their country, provide better opportunities for them to provide for their families, not have to go into foreign overseas worker programs. And there just aren’t a lot of young creative jobs in some of these developing markets. So by us being able to provide that, it’s a win win. Low cost, high quality editing service for our clients and high paying, great jobs for young creative individuals over in the Philippines. So yeah, excited about what we’re doing and we’re always trying to continue growing just like everybody else.
I love that. And I like the way that you’re thinking about working with the Philippines. As a call center services guy, I’ve been working in the Philippines for decades. So never really thought of it like that. But then again, looking back on it, I’m realizing that the proliferation of US businesses and how we’re is changing the culture and in some ways for the better. I’m extremely ecstatic to hear somebody give me a couple of social enterprise lines that I have never heard before. John, you sound like you look like you’ve got a question.
No, I didn’t. You don’t mind me asking me intrigued, where did the idea of utilizing resources in the Philippines come from? You said you got involved, was it the original founders? Did they have ties to the Philippines or was it evolution? Was it like a lot of things, it was initially a, I wouldn’t say, mistake, but something happened. And then you built on building resources in the Philippines. I just wondered what led to that.
Now it’s a great question. It actually was a trifecta of serendipity, I would call it. The two founders, actually, three founders that initially started it, one of them was a real estate photographer up in Anchorage, Alaska. The other was a realtor up in Anchorage, Alaska. And the third was a guy down in Colorado getting his MBA in social enterprise, the real estate photographer and real estate agent up in Alaska. The agent had run a small website building company and had a connection to a guy over in the Philippines. And the photographer said, Hey, do you think you could connect me with anybody over there that might be able to do this stuff for me? And they said, Yeah, let’s work together. Let’s see if we can build you a small team of editors because he knew that there were highly talented people over there for relatively minimal cost. And then the guy down in Colorado was starting up a social enterprise doing wedding editing. But a similar type of deal and also over in the Philippines working with scholarship students. So those guys all somehow had a mutual friend that was the connection point that connected them all together, said, You guys should talk.
And photo up was born, bringing the business side of real estate and photo editing from Alaska over to the social enterprise side in the Philippines connection with scholarship students from the original founder who was down in Colorado. And the rest is history. I came on shortly after they had all met and got the juices flowing and they needed sales and marketing help. And I was the guy to be able to help them take everything to the next level.
I have it to you, Rob.
So do you have sales and marketing? Great. My stream yard tends to slow down on me for reasons that I haven’t quite figured out. So hold on a second here. Let me… No one is. Oh, well, listen, can everybody still hear me? Yes. Okay. All right. Well, at least we got that going for us. All right. So let’s move on a little bit. I’m curious and I’m going to throw your curve ball, something I didn’t cover in the pre show notes because I’m an SEO guy. I love talking to clients about leveraging photos to actually get traffic back to their website, which is not common inside the industry I work in, the real estate marketing industry. It’s not a lot of people saying that. But I’m curious, when you talk to people about use cases for better photography or edited photography, what are some of the top things that you mention to them in that conversation?
Yeah. Photography in general is the launching point or sometimes the landing point for real estate marketing. There’s so many different tools out there for real estate marketing now, some of which I mentioned, video, virtual tours, virtual staging, all this stuff. But still, the photos are the key point of getting anybody interested in a listing. There are obviously many ways to take photos. You could take photos from your iPhone. You could take them on a point and shoot camera. You could hire a professional to shoot with their DSLR at a certain level. You can also hire more of an architectural photographer to come in and set up a bunch of different lighting techniques and spend a day or two at a property or space shooting very high end, beautiful photos. There’s a varying level and degree in terms of the quality that you might be looking for based on any space that you’re trying to shoot. I would say the typical client that we work with is a real estate photographer who’s doing this day in and day out and trying to shoot anywhere from two to maybe 10 homes a day, depending on the market that they’re in.
We then again work with very high end photographers who maybe only shoot one or two jobs a week and really spend multiple days out there prepping the site, getting lighting correct, waiting till the perfect moment to get that most beautiful shot. We then work with a lot of folks who are just jumping into the industry, who are starting out going off on their own and trying to create their own business as a real estate photographer and don’t know much about it at all. So we vary the gamut in terms of levels of photographer and folks that we work with. But at the end of the day, the photography itself is going to be the gateway into any real estate listing that a realtor might have.
And for those photo ignorance out there, which oddly, I am one of them, I’m curious to know, can you give me a couple of very easy low hanging fruit… So somebody sends you a photo to edit. I have been always the one to take a photo on my phone and just post it, submit it, do whatever, never edit it, never look at it twice. Can you give me a couple of common things that people would want edited out of… When you say editing, what are you actually talking about? Because I legitimately don’t know.
Standard editing that we do are things like white balance, correcting the verticals in a room. We also do things for free in any of our images, things like adding a TV image to a blank TV screen that might be in a room. We also remove any cords, messy cords that might be ight be under a desk or around an entertainment center. We remove those. We also do things like adding a fire into a fireplace that’s in a room. If the fire wasn’t on to begin with, we have editors that can throw a nice looking fire into that, whether it’s a fireplace inside the house or a fire pit outside. Then we do things exterior side by doing things like greening the grass. If it is shot the beginning of spring, the grass is mushy or mucky and brown, we make it look nice and bright and green. We also do things like sky replacements. So if the home was shot on a day where it was overcast or you maybe even had some rain outside, we can take that gray sky and put a nice bright blue one in with nice puffy white clouds for you.
So all that stuff comes included in the standard editing that we do at photo up. And then you get into the premiere photo editing, too. You can do things like converting a daytime shot into a dusk or a twilight shot that looks really nice and looks like it was taken at that twilight hour. We do things like doing object removals. You wouldn’t believe it. Maybe you would. But a lot of the times we have to remove cars from driveways because the homeowner just decided to leave their car parked in the driveway and the home looks a little bit nicer when it’s photographed if that big truck is not planted right in the middle of the driveway. So removing realtor signs is another big one that we remove. Removing just garbage cans even from the sides of homes. So we do a lot of removals on that side. And then like I said, too, we also do things. If a home was shot and the home is empty, we do things like adding virtual staging. So virtually placing furniture into a room to make it look as if it was staged physically, but have it just all be done digitally, which is going to save you time and money in the long run.
Well, that was a very long list of things that I hadn’t thought about and a couple that I didn’t realize were possible. So I’m actually really glad I asked the question.
I’m glad you did, too.
We’re going to go to break here, ladies and gentlemen. And in Murphy’s Law, for anybody that watches the YouTube channel, I was thinking, Oh, I’m going to fix my camera during the break. And no sooner than the break mark popped up, then my camera just automatically fixed itself. Anyway, technology. All right. So, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to be right back. Wherever you are, wherever you’re watching the show, do us a favor, like it, share it with those photographer friends that you have, and let everybody know that John and I are incredible humans. No, I’m just kidding. Anyway, we’ll see you in a second.
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Go to mail. R ight. Com. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail Right Show. I honestly have already forgotten what episode it is, maybe 379. We’re here with Devin Higgins, who is a social enterprise entrepreneur, a real estate agent, and many, many, many things, also incredibly knowledgeable about the editing of photographs among probably, I’m sure, a whole quadre of services that his company offers. However, the service that we were talking about for the first part of the show was definitely photos and photo editing, which is more along the lines of my curiosity about what you would pictures how you would edit them because I was legitimately confused and I was given a very long list for so that was very cool. Before we go any further, though, I do want to add something in because I’m going to throw a little bit of a footnote in from my expertise. When you’re on a website and you’re using photos, you can use photos to tell stories. Now, most of the time, my stories, Devon, are informational. What I have my clients go out and do is take pictures of stuff that go well beyond the house because you can see so many pictures of so many houses because that’s what everybody has been putting up digitally for the last decade or so.
So.
Oftentimes, there’s little things you can take pictures of and sort them through, let’s say, a photo carousel on a website. That would be local amenities or if you’re working in communities, which is really easy, pictures of the gate, pictures of the code box, things that people don’t think of that effect the living or the lifestyle elements of the area that you’re specifically talking about. Taking pictures tells a story. I’m a big storyteller, and my belief in inbound marketing is that it’s best done when you’re being very informative and relatively interesting. And you can do that with videos. You can do that with pictures. You can do that with a written word. It’s all possible. I think that with what Darren just shared with us, telling a story might be changing whether the picture was taken during the day or the night. If you feel like the home is going to have a better story told at a particular day, an example that would be a home with a magnificent view. You obviously want to take those photos and display them during the day. Tell the story about the home, about the lifestyle connected to the home.
Certain other types of lighting, though, might… Let’s say it has cabanas or chairs. And I know you’re not going to get that a lot in Michigan, but we would get that here in California. So let’s just say part of the lifestyle is actually like a sunset life. In California, yes, you sometimes hang out at the pool during the day, but by the time all that’s done, your margarita is out and the barbecue is going, that’s a sunset activity. So you take the photo at sunset, and you can use these photo editing services, apparently, to change the time of day that these pictures appear to have been taken at. So what I heard when you told me the list of services for photo editing is I heard a whole list of ways that people could tell a better story with a picture. That’s what I heard. Absolutely. So those of you listening to the show, this might be an interesting way for you to change the way that you’re thinking about your pictures. I’m always a believer that you want to tell the best story possible, whether it’s an individual listing, what you’re doing on a website.
You also want to be informative and useful. And for that, you’re going to have to do a little bit of research, listen to John and I, stay tuned into the show because you need ideas to keep that what is informative. Everybody thinks real estate is a very one trick pony, and I’m here to tell you it’s not. John, I’ll be out here.
Yeah, sure. All right, sure. So, Debra, you’re dealing with a lot of professional photographers and people taking video. Are there any trends that you have noticed in the past 18 months around how photography is being utilized or video? Because I’m sure in the industry photographers are looking at other photographers, and I would presume that there’s like in web design, there’s certain trends that develop. And I would imagine in video, that’s the same. So A, am I correct? And B, if that is, what are some of the trends that you have noticed in your team?
Yeah, totally. Great question. I think even probably the biggest change that we’ve seen, and it’s not even in real estate, it’s just globally, was before 18 months and it was COVID. It upended everybody’s lives and changed the way that marketing, specifically in real estate, was done. Our primary service was and still is for the most part real estate photo editing. But we saw a huge push into video, into virtual tours, into virtual staging because people just weren’t physically able to go into homes during those COVID times. So what we’ve seen after that and getting through COVID and now as we’re all getting back to normal is starting to see those trends still continue. People actually really enjoy going and looking at a listing from the comfort of their own home and computer or phone and getting a lot more information other than just pictures. But you can get a lot more information through a video, through a virtual tour by seeing a couple of different rooms that are virtually staged with different types of furniture. So you can really get a feel for whether or not you want to spend the time and effort to go walk through a home instead of then probably what you were doing before COVID was going through, if you were a buyer, going through 5, 10, 15, 20 different homes until you made that final decision to put in an offer.
And obviously, going through COVID now, you’re probably putting in multiple offers on listings. But just saving your time and effort of physically going through a space by getting more digital content that gives you a much better understanding of what the home looks like and feels like. So the digital media, I think, was the biggest change that we’ve seen in the past, really, two to three years that is a continuing trend even today.
I totally can see that. And that’s why you’re going to try and provide more services directly to real estate agents, and also your professional photography clientele as well. I totally understand that. Are you also looking to provide any services? And I don’t know, you might have decided not to. Are you going to provide any services around editing, around agents, YouTube, or TikTok, or Instagram video needs, or have you looked at that, or have you got any plans in that area?
We definitely have looked into it. The problem is it can be very hit or miss, and it’s not as broad as maybe things like video editing, photo editing, some of these bigger services that are more well known. What we have done, though, is we’ve created a virtual assistant program where you can literally hire a member of our video editing or photo editing teams and have them work for you as essentially a full time employee. So have them edit your photos, have them edit your videos, have them do things like social media marketing, have them help you with your TikTok videos and edits. Have them do even things like lead generation, email marketing. So really trying to become the back end support for either an agent or a media professional to help them run their business by having the cost savings and availability of somebody who speaks great English and has a great skill set over in the Philippines.
So do you spend a lot of time on training? Because I would imagine this is crucial, finding the right people, but also turning people that have potential into a real way player for your company.
Absolutely. When we started out, man, we were looking for anybody and everybody with photo editing experience and trying to get the people with experience in the door. We need experience. What we found out over the years is it’s much better if you have a great personality fit with at least photo up than what we do. If you’re eager to learn, if you’re excited to do something creative and you want to learn additional skills, you’re going to be a great asset to photo up and to another company down the road. If we can teach you, which we obviously can, the photo editing, the video editing skills, and we give you the training materials to learn some of these other skill sets that are valuable for a real estate agent or a photographer, we basically give you a launchpad to become a back end service professional, media assistant, virtual assistant, whatever you want to call it, for some of these other people who are looking to hire somebody to add to their team.
That’s great. Over to.
You, Rob. We’re going to switch over here a little bit because we’ve been talking about photos. That’s your primary business. We deeply appreciate all the information that you’ve given us. It’s been a great ride so far. A lot of things that you’ve talked about that are actually making me take a beat and think about not only as a guest on the show but also as an entrepreneur because I also work out of the Philippines. I have 13 employees there. So you’ve given me a lot to scratch my chin about and think on. But having said that, the thing that John and I are hammering away at because video has been is the future of real estate marketing. It just is. We can talk about photos and they are an incredibly viable medium. But I look at website analytics all day long. And if you look at what drives traffic, what drives engagement on a website, not like a listing site, like a listing service, but a website, it’s almost always video when you can find it. Eighty % of the media that was consumed last year was video on sites that have video, especially ones that are doing full walkthroughs from an age.
And oftentimes you have hundreds of thousands of views and maybe 20 or 30 views on each individual picture. Video is just a more kinesthetic way to transfer information. And as people get used to it, they’re really starting to favor the medium. So having said all that, I’d love to hear your thoughts on where do you agree with that in general? Do you think that video is as big of a deal as I just suggested it was? Has that not been your experience? And if it has been your experience, how are you going to… What little ways are you dipping your toes into the video pool?
Yeah. So you talk earlier, Rob, about telling a story, right? And there’s only so much story you can tell from even just photos and video is that next level of storytelling, right? Can I get a feel for how the house flows? Can I see myself sitting on that couch? Can I watch the water running out of the faucet? Can I see the fire going? There’s just a lot more story that can be told via video, and we’re seeing that as well. I have some stats that I brought with me here. Seventy % of homeowners now say that they’re more likely to list with an agent that does video for their listing, right? Four hundred and three % more inquiries are driven from listings with videos that’s coming directly from NAR. So these trends are not going away. They’re increasing. I think from an agent perspective, video can be daunting. It feels like a very big task. Oh, my gosh, how do I get into video? How much am I going to spend? How hard is it? And this is where the clientele that we work with right now can help you out. They’re photographers, they’re the professionals, they know how to do it.
But if you are trying to keep it under a budget, you have a ton of power with that thing in your pocket that you carry with you all day, every day. And we’re able to utilize a lot of the video that you can shoot right from your iPhone or Android, sending that content over to our team of video editors and putting it together in a nice-looking walkthrough. I mean, really just taking a room step by step, trying to keep that camera as stable as possible if you don’t have, let’s say, a tripod or a Gimbal or a stabilizer, which are all great tools to have, but you can get a lot of value out of literally just walking through your home with the phone that you have in your pocket and then getting that video edited by a professional team. That’s where I’d say I want to encourage Realtors to be able to go out there and empower them to be some of the media professionals, but also work with the professionals as well. There are a lot of folks out there, professional photographers who are great, who are going to be able to provide you with a high-quality level of service.
But then I know that every listing doesn’t demand that. If you’re in Michigan like me here, a $200,000 listing might not require all the bells and whistles. In California, you guys are probably saying the half-a-million-dollar listing doesn’t require all the bells and whistles. It’s just a different level. So I think being able to, though, provide good quality marketing for your clients, that’s what you need to do for every listing, regardless of the price point. Be able to provide an extra level of media that is going to catch people’s attention and get people to come and walk through that house.
Copy that. I love everything you said there. Remind me, I’m going to put something in the chat here. I have a non on-air question for you. So you agree with what we said about video? And so, John, we’re easing up into bonus time right now. So do you want to break the segment up or do you just want to…
I think we might just keep on going.
Got you. And we’re going to spend the last few minutes, for those of you who are watching and listening, I’m going to spend the last few minutes diving a little bit deeper into the video. So I would imagine because you just indicated so that photo up is moving in the direction of also staffing up on the video editing side. Was that a correct assumption based on something I heard you say?
Absolutely. Yeah, we’re seeing an increase in that. So we are adding video editors left and right now to help keep up with demand.
I got you. So you’re starting to see the same window of opportunity for your own particular business as you did all that time ago with the photos or you and your team, the other founders, everybody collectively saw that opportunity. And now you’re seeing it again today in the video space. Is that what I’m hearing you say?
Yeah, 100 %.
Okay. And if you’re going to give me the same rundown that you did before because I am actually moving into thinking about doing video editing for some of my higher end customers. And I’m curious to know what would be some common video editing questions questions, comment, what do you do with video editing? Because once again, I don’t know the answer to this.
Right. How we look at video editing is threefold. We have a standard video edit that is very I mean, clean. Has a nice title of the address, the amenities in the home, nice clean cuts, start to finish, has an intro and an outro of a realtor logo. Pretty standard. We then have a premiere or premium video edit that is going to do things like motion graphics, really engaging the viewer to draw them into the listing, having a lot smoother and nicer transitions, have better range of music in the background, having maybe a realtor give an intro and an outro of the property, physically being on camera, talking about the listing. Then we have that third tier where if you really want to get into video editing at that next level and you’re doing a ton of video. You’re wanting to do not only video for every listing, but you’re wanting to do an agent video, a brokerage video, videos of all the other things and services that you as an agent provide. We have the ability to hire a video editing virtual assistant that works for you full time, can do all sorts of other video editing for you that you might want above and beyond just your average listing.
So those are the three different levels, at least, that we have and we see right now.
So if you’re going to hire somebody, literally take advantage of one of these virtual assistant roles, can you give me a range of what that would cost?
Yeah. So how we set everything up is on a monthly fee, and our monthly fees range anywhere from $1,295 to 1695. And that’s going to depend on the contract term. So how long do you want to work with that person and their skill set? What skills do they have? Are they just doing photo editing? Are they doing video editing, photo editing, or virtual staging? Or are they doing more VA administrative tasks for you? Social media marketing, lead generation, email marketing, that thing. So that’s the range that we have and we’ve seen a lot of adoption in that space.
Got you. I would think so. That’s a very reasonable cost.
If you.
Know the.
Cost, the early cost of a good video editor.
In terms of just quickly, in terms of an hourly rate, and these people, they’d be working for you eight hours a day, five days a week, you’re looking at roughly anywhere from $7 to maybe $10 an hour. Very tough to find somebody that does quality work over here, for better or worse, at those rates.
My mind is going, but not in the way it should be. It’s going in an entrepreneurial way because that raises some other questions. But go ahead, guys.
Keep going. Yeah, sure. Because I think your service is fabulous, actually, because I think you’re filling a vacuum because I think what I observed, and I’d be interested to see if you agree and also Rob agrees, there seem to be two points, but nothing in the middle. And what I mean by that, there was the age and that he utilized his phone. He does a quick walkthrough. He puts the phone in front of him. He talks into the phone. And then you had this high-quality drone luxury property, full production videos. But it didn’t seem a lot in the middle because of cost, the inability, because the agent would probably want to do that themselves. But then I know the amount of time editing takes in audio or in the video. And the amount, if you’re a busy agent, the last thing you’re going to want to do is edit videos. And that’s why I think it’s a major reason why that middle area is… And to hire somebody domestically that knows what they’re doing. You’re looking at 30, 40, 50, up to 100 plus dollars an hour. And for a lot of agents, depending on the type of property they’re promoting, it just isn’t viable, is it?
Totally. And I think you bring up a great point, Jonathan. Really, what it comes down to is opportunity cost. Where is my time best spent? Is it editing photos? Is it editing videos? Is it taking all of these photos and videos, or is it hiring and working with somebody who is a professional in that space? Whether it is the photographer themselves or whether it is a VA or whether it’s partnering with a team that can take all that stuff off of your plate. I think my goal and our goal as a company is to be able to provide professional-level marketing on every listing. When I started back in 2014, I think the stat was around 15 % to 20 % of all listings in the US were shot with professional real estate photos and professional marketing. That rate has now increased. We’re up to maybe 40 %, sometimes 50 or higher in certain areas. But across the board, that average is about every other home that is shopped professionally or marketed professionally with a professional editing or professional marketing service. If we can continue to raise that water level and reduce the barrier to get really high-quality marketing, I think that’s our goal as an industry in general.
If we can provide a higher level of value to our clients, that they’re saying, Wow, they really pulled out all the stops for me in my listing instead of just, Oh, I saw him walk in with his iPhone and then immediately throw those photos up on the listing, that is going to dictate a different level of service than the guy who brings out the professional media crew. But again, coming back to the fact that that thing in your hand, the device in your pocket is so powerful now that you can do almost anything in terms of marketing and in terms of media from your phone. And that’s only going to continue to increase as we move along here.
Agreed. Well, guys, we’ve done a good show. We’re ending. We’re closing on the last minute or so. So I want to use this last minute once again, directing people to whatever your pet interests are, where you want them to go, and where you think you can be useful. Devin, why don’t you go ahead? If somebody wanted to reach out to you if somebody wanted to learn more about some particular part of your company that you’re focused on yourself right now, where would that be?
Yeah. So to find me, you can go to photo up. Photoup or. Com. It’ll both get you to the same spot. And then check out our website. We have a lot of information on there in terms of our services. We have a lot of great blogs with a lot of the content that I talked about today. We also have a little chat feature that you can ask for me personally, if you’d like to, or talk to one of our supporter sales team members. We have a phone line that goes directly to our sales staff, including myself. So if you want to give us a call, feel free. We also give anybody who signs up for an account 10 credits to be able to use any of our services. We’re currently, right now, running a special little promotion that any agent that signs up for an account will get one free, virtually staged image, too. So if you’re interested in any of that stuff and you’re thinking you want to give it a try, come on over, sign up for an account, give it a go and let me know what you think.
Cool. Jon?
Yeah, sure. I just want to point out to the listeners and viewers that we’re looking for some local evangelist real estate professionals to join the Mel Wright family. Basically, get your website hosted and also custom designed the homepage, and the About Us page. And all we ask is that you utilize the service and you then promote it in your local area and become a joint partner with Mel Wright. If that’s interesting, go over to Mail-Right and book a demo. It’d be me or my co-founder, Adam, and we’ll show you and we’ll see if we have a good fit. Back over to you, Robert.
Beautiful. My name is Robert Newman. I am the founder of Inbound R AM. You can just go to Inbound RAM. You can look in the… For those of you who are doing the video, you can just look over there. Just go to InboundREM, and you’ll learn all sorts of stuff about real estate marketing, inbound marketing, and about me if you really want to. I will say this, John’s beta offer is rare in the world of technology. If you are looking to get in on the ground floor someplace, this would be a great time. And I think that no matter what our audience has done, Devon, you probably want yourself a customer in the form of me. So when we get off the show, the airwaves here, I just want to ask you to stay on for just one more second. All right, everybody, thank you for joining us today at the MailWright Show. We have loved talking to you. I’ve been having consistent technology issues for which I am sorry. But we’ll catch you the next time and we appreciate you guys.
We discuss with our special guest Greg McDaniels the importance of quality photography connected to being a successful real estate Read more
Agents need to do more than blogging to get results in 2016. We discuss this during this show with our two Read more
Greg McDaniel literally began his career at his father’s knee. It would not be an exaggeration to say he has Read more
Personal agent photography is really important but usually semi-forgotten. We have a great guest "Preston Zeller" on the show who recently Read more
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Generally speaking, it’s smart to take a two-pronged approach to your blog content strategy. The very best real estate blog ideas focus either on lead generation or broad engagement.
#1. Neighborhood Guides
There was a time when simple neighborhood pages generated leads. Now the game has changed. Neighborhood guides need to include lots of helpful content.
#2. Local Real Estate Niches Articles
So far we’ve covered neighborhood guides. Another excellent blog topic is anything related to your real estate niche. Take this article on Victorian homes from Ruby Home. It generates 2500 monthly visitors. It ranks #1 for the keyword “Victorian homes in Los Angeles”, for which 50 people search every month.
#3. Financial and Tax Information
You may be surprised to hear that many potential clients do not have access to this information, especially in a highly-readable format. People get frustrated because they can’t get a straight answer from anybody, and that’s a huge opportunity for you.
#4. Living In” and “Moving To” Blog Posts
Welcome back, everybody, to the Mail. Right Show. It’s episode number 375. Wow. John and I are going to talk to.
You about it. You poor man. You’ve had to pull up with me for, I think, 175 episodes plus, probably.
Before we get into this, everybody, we’re sitting here before the show and John, we’re talking about how our weeks have been. And he looks at me and he goes, and I’m coming to him, Oh, my God, you’re so busy because I’ve seen all these calls in his calendar, and he comments to me, Well, how do I say this, Robert? When you’re so focused, I don’t know what the hell he was trying to say, but I honestly think that everybody is what he was trying to say is that usually I am a bike bike. Half way being an asshole.
You’re just very focused, more focused than me in some way. I’m a bit of a dark, closer F my way, don’t I? But I can waffle a bit, can’t I?
You can at that. But hey, everybody, we’re here 375 times. And no matter what John and I say, we’ve done this 200 times together, maybe more. Maybe I think it’s actually about 220 times because I’m pretty sure I joined on Episode 155 or 154.
Yeah, right on that.
So we’ve done this 250 whatever times, but you haven’t done it with us and you may not know who we are. So as per my usual, I would love for my co host, the lovely British gentleman that you can hear on your headset or on your speaker to introduce himself.
Thanks, Rob. I’m Jonathan Dingwood. I’m the joint founder of Mel Highford Wright. We build beautiful custom, semi custom, real estate websites on WordPress. Plus we offer a load of digital services and products to get you more leads. And the beauty of WordPress is you own your website, you’re not renting it off somebody. That’s a great idea, isn’t it? Back over to you, Rob.
It is indeed. And hey, everybody, my name is Robert Newman. I’m a real estate online marketing consultant. I’ve specialized in real estate SEO. I’ve been doing it for 14 years. I have had a very lucky impressive career with the number of people that I’ve worked with. In California, I would say I’ve worked with 50 % of the top 2 %, mostly on building websites and doing SEO. So John and I got together.
And you’ve kicked your sanity.
Well, maybe, maybe, John. Maybe. So John and I got together a while ago when he had me on his guest podcaster. And we’ve been doing this ever since for years now, just talking about real estate online marketing. And today, what we’re going to talk to you about, everybody who’s listening, is we’re going to talk to you about four blogging ideas for real estate lead generation. So I want to be clear with everybody who’s listening to the show. You can write a lot of blog posts, and 95 % of them will not generate you any business ever, even if you had 100,000 people come to the website. There are certain things that you can talk about that either set you up for conversion or take you over the plate in terms of getting a conversion, getting somebody to call you, things like that. They’re oftentimes not what you think because the sexy articles are the ones that you can draw 100,000 people with. And the ones in my experience that produce calls are the ones we are getting one or 200 people to the site. But they’re really specific articles aimed at really specific people. And once the article is read, you’ve made your impression and you get the phone call.
Do you have John’s nodding? But I want to hear your thoughts on that, John.
Yeah, I think that’s spot on, really. I call them vanity metrics, the vanity how many social media posts consumed, how many visitors you get to a website, which is important. If you don’t get any visitors, you can’t convert them. But on the other hand, I’ve seen loads of websites with loads of traffic, but it’s the wrong type of traffic which had very little interest or very little intention of buying the product or service that the website is supposed to be promoting?
I agree. So here’s what we’re going to do, everybody. John was kind enough to select an article from June 21, 2022, which is for real estate blogging ideas to dominate markets on inbound rem. It says it’s under real estate blogging ideas. And this is the post that we decided to reverse engineer for the sake of this show. One of those first subjects that we talk about that’s in terms of a blog post is neighborhood guides. But there was a time, and I had a lot to do with this article when it was written, Jon, I actually wrote an original article that this one is based off of. And a lot of the stuff that I left there is still here. So there was a time when you could write a decent little neighborhood page and get leads. And maybe in some places, in some markets, that’s still true. For the most part, however, you’re not getting a lot of leads that register with your site, no matter how good your neighborhood information is. Or at least most realtors don’t have the will to make a neighborhood information good enough. There are still a couple of Realtors out there who are mostly content background people, and they’ve set the entire industry on its ear because when they write a neighborhood guide, it’s like 3,000, 4,000 words.
It’s a deep guide, has pictures. And both of these agents have been consistently generating leads for years. As a matter of fact, they’re two of the highest GCI, highest producing agents I’ve ever seen or heard of. I wrote a book on them.
Can I ask you why you think this is? Because if you’re a newbie agent, let’s say in your second, third year, this is something that you could do yourself. I would suggest you really need to have a WordPress website because if you’re renting it off your broker or one of these platforms where if you totally stop paying, you lose the website. But it’s something that if you spend a bit of time and produce a really nice bit of what we call, and I think you call it as well, evergreen content, you can just update it once a year and it just keep paying for itself year in, year out, won’t it?
It does, especially if you write the right pieces.
But why do so little of them do it?
Well, I think that a lot of realtors don’t understand what an information, like a good informational piece of content looks like. And the ones that do generally speak, think to themselves that they understand how much time it takes. Because if somebody was to say it would take me 20 to 40 hours to write a page, on our blog post, we use this example called Tanglewood. And we link to the page that we’re using as an example because not even we as a professional marketing company have done the job that they’ve done at Houston properties because they are off the hook with how deep their content is. And so somebody who knows how to write would look at this and go, Oh, my God. Somebody spent 40 or 50 hours writing the original version a week. And they would be correct. Houston properties has made the realtor Paige Martin millions of dollars. That is not an over exaggeration. The number is in the million. She feeds a team of 30 salespeople off this website. But they have been working at and writing great content for a while. Why do I think that realtors don’t do it?
I think the initial investment of time and energy is too high. It’s too intimidating. And that’s assuming that you know what you’re doing, John. I think that some real estate agents, especially some listening to the show, because you all are amazing, because I think that some of them are going to go, Well, I could probably see making an investment. And when you start talking about investment for high end SEO, when you’re talking like $5,000, $6,000 a month, I just ran across Tim Stout. You remember Tim Stout, our previous guest? He went with an SEO company called Andor SEO. I want to say they’re doing nothing even close to what we’re looking at. I’d say they’re doing one fifth of what a page on Houston properties is. And Tim’s paying $5,000 a month for that.
Yeah. Before we go on to the next one, do you think Because we don’t want to discourage people because I think there’s still some great opportunities here because so few other agents are prepared to put any effort into this. So I know a couple of agents in Northern Nevada who understood a bit about websites and educated themselves. And there’s a couple of names in my mind that I’ve done quite well. But can you give some tips, some ips, insights about what you think should be in a good neighborhood guide that maybe could give a quick outline? So we’re giving some advice to our listeners.
Absolutely. If it’s going to be a good neighborhood guy, you’re going to have all the points of lifestyle interest associated with that neighborhood. I mean, the stores may be ranked by usefulness, usability, such as I have a Costco right down the street. That’s one of the first things I tell every single person about living in Van Nes is I can walk to my Costco. It’s enormously important thing for me. I actually do walk to it occasionally. Number two, schools. Number three, if you’re older or talking to somebody older, some note, notation as to not only the hospitals, but how friendly and easy to use are they? Another thing that is oftentimes commonly asked of realtors that you could throw into a neighborhood guide is information about that. Some people are so intent on their animals that they are, Is there a good vet in the area? And then last but not least, if you’re dealing with a younger audience, you might even go so far as to make notation of are there marijuana dispensaries in the neighborhood or around the neighborhood? Things of this nature.
That’s very California, isn’t it?
Yeah. But you’re right, John, because I have a friend that’s buying a nine million dollars studio city home. And one of his main questions was, How far is this house to the closest dispensary? You never can tell in California. With money, with things.
I think the Vets would be more my cup of tea. You got to look after your Prairie friends, haven’t you?
Sure. And I agree with that. It’s just what you have to look out for in a neighborhood guide is if you’re listening to this show, the thing that blows my mind is I do write some great content. What I’ve had the experience doing, John, is reading other content that other people have written for years. And I have a pretty good understanding of what some of the more creative things are that people have ever thought of ever inside the real estate business. And one of the things that I can tell you is that really somebody is going to think of something that everybody is interested in for the first time. They’re going to get it on a neighborhood guide, and that’s going to drive them a whole bunch of leads. Whether it’s not just restaurants, but reviews to restaurants, your personal reviews to restaurants. I think that the next step in neighborhood guides is connecting a neighborhood guide to your local service profile and starting to put down your own personal reviews as part of that neighborhood page. I think that’s the direction that we’re going for a strong content page. But now, let me tell you something else, John.
If you do those things, take all that time. There is no doubt for those of you listening to the show the numbers are incontrovertible. Go to my website and figure out how I am a science guy, I’m a marketing guy, I’m a numbers guy. I make all my decisions based on the math that I’m able to get my hands on. And this guide that you’re talking about, these content pages, they generate more leads over time than any other method that you can try. They stay relevant, just like John said. Just like what happens to… Okay, Robert, you have to update it. Sure. But once the big thing is written, you go through, you spend 30 minutes every year. And if you have hundreds of these pages, that is a long time. However, like Paige and I’m forgetting his name right now because I’m tired. But the other guy that do Ruby at home, between the two of them, they’ve sold a billion dollars in real estate. That is with a B people, not an M. And they’ve done it all using content marketing and very little paid advertising. So when you’re wondering to yourself, what’s possible?
The answer is you can create generational wealth by doing this well. That’s what the answer is.
So should we go on to number two then? Sorry. Yes. Local real estate niche articles. So give us an outline of what that is, Rob?
So talking about Tim, Tim had Lake Homes on his website and was targeting very deeply homes that were on lakes. And I think he’s probably making his money, if he’s making any at all, off that specific search. So niche real estate is niche neighborhoods, niche home types, niche people. We’ve got probate people here in California. That’s niche. You’ve got other things as well. It’s t doesn’t… There’s a hundred different ways. I’m probably going to go back and talk about niches again because when you’re talking about niches, I wrote an article that had 150 different niches in it. And funnily enough, John, I can only remember like five or six. But I remember when I researched and wrote the article, I’m like, Holy shit, there’s a lot of different ways that you can make money because anything can be a niche for you. It doesn’t have to be a home type. It doesn’t have to be a neighborhood. It could be a Gotham properties here in LA who I used to consult with. Their niche was training their salespeople to be actual expert real estate transaction consultants. And they were brilliant at it. They had a deep level of knowledge about what you could do with a piece of property, how you could financially maneuver it, 10 31s, living trusts.
These were all things that they talked to their clients about. They basically raised the bar of technical education very high and actually created this mystique around the salespeople that they were actually educated like a doctor or lawyer would be. When you went to them, you were getting advice from an investment person, from a real estate officer, all of it. And it was pretty incredible. It was so incredible. The guy who founded it got bought out almost instantaneously. He created a huge curriculum, John, and then he got bought out within six months. It was pretty crazy.
I think we’ve spoken in other episodes about if you’re starting out, it’s totally understandable. But as soon as you get any traction and understand what are the type of customers, properties, locations that you like dealing with, the more that you can focus on a niche as a real estate agent professional, the better you’re going to do in this industry. That trying to market to everybody seems to be the right idea, but it isn’t. It is. It’s not a good idea.
At all. There’s a list of names of people that focus on niches. So it’s Jeffrey Hyland before he passed, Maurice O’Mansky, Josh Flagg, my client, Jacqueline Thompson. Every single name I just mentioned to you is probably top 50 in California, top 50 producer in California. There’s a few people, really old school people such as Joyce Ray and a few others that don’t seem to appear, don’t focus on niches, but they’ve been around for so long. You would never be able to replicate your success if you tried to do it exactly the same way in the exact same cities. You’d have to wait as she has had to wait for 30 or 40 years before you started to see your business grow the way that hers is. Everybody else, even here in LA, even in Hollywood, they’re focused on niches and surprising niches at that. They’re not the niches that everybody thinks. Like Jeffrey and Mauricio, while they would do the listing and take the listing, I think they focused their actual energy on luxury condominium high rises, like their actual marketing energy, their shaking hands and going places and meeting people. All of that was more focused around buildings that had units that they could sell from between two and 25 million.
And so that’s a niche. And everybody who makes a ton of money is doing it. Some people like Christoff, too, have targeted… He is focused on Beverly Hills for almost the entirety of his career. Just Beverly Hills. Now he has many other places.
Do you think, obviously, there’s a lot of other factors, intelligence, hard work, commitment, blah, blah, blah. But do you think this is one of the key factors? Because you know and I know that only about 20 % of individuals in the real estate industry make a really good living from it. Do you think identifying a niche is one of the key factors that will determine if you’re going to become one of those 20 %?
It certainly does. But I’d say mindset and self education of the others. Yes, understanding that you have a niche, but understanding and being disciplined and diligent about targeting that niche, talking to that niche, showing up for that niche. Jacqueline focuses on a single neighborhood, Shady Canyon. It’s where 80 % of her business comes from. It’s only 300 homes. And she’s one of the top producing agents in the country. The same thing goes for other people. But just because the market is small does not mean that there isn’t a very, very large degree of work that that agent has put into building up the untouchable reputation that, like, Jacqueline has put up because she’s doing it. She’s marketing to these people. She’s mailing, she’s knocking on their door, she’s walking the street, she’s putting her signs up. She’s doing probably… Brian Tracy used to have this old sales methodology that he used to train on called the five touch mechanisms, and he pulled it from other sales trainers. But the psychology of a sales process, Jon, is that somebody has to be introduced to you five times before they’re ready to buy. And things have not really changed in the digital age.
We’ve just transferred those touches online. So when you’re working a neighborhood or a niche, or anything, you target the hell out of your audience and just try to keep introducing yourself to them so every single person in your niche knows who you are. That’s really the only objective. It’s the only objective I have with them about who I am. Not trying to sell everybody a website. I just want them to know who I am. That’s what I think. And when it comes to blogging, because we’re talking about blogging, guys, when you have a niche, it gets very hard for me to talk to you about what that niche is going to be or what you should be blogging about within that niche. Paul Kaplan is one of my favorite people to talk about. He sells modern homes here in California. He does it specifically out in Palm Springs and Palm Desert. That’s his niche. And he talks about modern homes on his blog all day long, 24 7. That’s all he does, is talk about modern homes out in that part of the country. But sometimes he talks about them in other parts of the country, too.
He talks about the history and where you find these homes and why he likes them so much and what’s unique about them. And I can go on and on and on and on. And so that’s what you talk about when you have a blog. And he gets a massive amount of word of mouth. He sells a ridiculous percentage of the modern homes that are for sale in Palm Springs and Palm Desert because he committed to a niche. He loves the niche, which is interesting. He actually just likes it. Give him a chance to sell just a regular old house or modern home. And I haven’t confirmed this, but I think that he’s going to go, Oh, yeah, give me the modern home. If his schedule is full and he has no ability to service and he has a modern home over here and a non modern home over here, he’s going to go sell the modern home. I’m pretty sure.
That’s great. Shall we go for a break, Rob?
Yeah, let’s please do it. So everybody, thank you so much for humoring me. And John, last night was one of my deep, deep, deep, deep insomia nights. I only got a few hours of sleep, so I may be a little lost in the sauce. It happened every so often. So thank you for bearing with me. John, thank you for bearing with me. Wherever you guys are at, where you’re watching the show, listening the show, do us a favor and give us a comment. All right? We’d really appreciate it. We’ll be right back. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need Mail write. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight. Com. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail Right Show. We are on episode number 375. And as usual, John and I are all over the place talking about so many things, but we’re talking, trying to talk about really good blog ideas for real estate lead generation.
That’s what we’re trying to talk about.
I think we’ve been successful so far.
Okay, I’m going to take your word for it. We talked about neighborhood guides, and the second thing that we talked about was blogging about a very specific niche inside the real estate space. So now let’s talk about financial and tax information. Okay, now niches and speaking deeply inside your niche. So everybody needs to hear me on this. All these ideas work, all of them. But if you want to say, Robert, what’s the most effective strategy, short term, long term, all term? It’s absolutely the one we just covered. It is picking a niche, discussing it, really getting into what people care about inside that niche. And everybody hear me. What do you think, John, if you had to guess, if I was to say, here’s an idea for how to write for a niche, but this is the number one thing you should do. What would you think you would need to do to write about a niche? What do you think one of the things is that you could do to find some interesting ideas to write an article when you’re talking about a very niche market?
Well, you caught me out here. Nothing occurs, part of having a passion for it, which you touched in the first half. Yeah, you caught me out there, to be honest, Robb.
Nothing beats talking to people that actually live, work, and exist inside that niche. Nothing beats it. Nothing beats it then thinking that you have an idea for a blog post and calling a business owner that may be in an area that you service or calling a past person that you did a transaction with. All of you, every single person, you included, Jon, we are content machines when you train your mind for the discipline of remembering the questions.
That people have. I think that’s a great insight there, Rob, because it fits in because doing a podcast, doing videos about the niche, just building a whole… Getting those five touch points, which you outlined before we went for our break, it all links in, doesn’t it?
Yes. But the number one thing I do, I do research, I do keyword research, which is part of it. And you can do keyword research, but I teach my clients. Keyword research is secondary because you’re going to tie a subject into a type of title that people are searching for, and then you’re going to match the content to the title. But what you really should be doing is you should be out there talking to people, remembering the questions that they ask you. And for those of you listening to this show, anybody that’s a professional salesperson, John, me, anybody that promotes a business, you get sick of answering some of the same questions because it’s an absolute fact that if you’re selling something, eventually you’re going to have the five or six questions that everybody asks you and you just get a little bit tired of answering them. Those five or six things are your number one blogging subjects because at a minimum, you can send somebody to a digital place to answer those questions. At a maximum, you’re now driving in a lot of curiosity, curious people who appreciate you answering those questions. So much so, the expertise that you have is so well established in their mind that they pick up the phone and they call you.
So going the route of highly specific information, especially if it’s based on questions that people who work want to buy homes in that niche, want to sell homes in that niche, want to look in that niche. Million dollar homes are great for one thing. They get lots of lookaloos. You could build on a massive list by trying to sell a single five or 10 million dollar home or one that’s in the top two % of your market, and the smart realtor would create a mailing list around it, have conversations with everybody, understanding they probably weren’t going to sell that home, but they would create a large amount of dialog and then come to market with a couple of smaller homes in the same area, like the same niche. You take the top of market and then you collect all the information from all the people who just want to look, want to gawk, who want to dream, and then you let them dream. And then you say, by the way, now that we’re done dreaming, I’ve got this really cool thing over here.
Well, the other thing is, before we go on to the financial taxes, the other thing occurred to me, as you were saying that, Rob, is that this is so fantastic because it’s self fulfilling. What I mean by that is that the more you talk about the niche and all the things you’ve outlined, the more these people consume it that you’re targeting it. They’re pre qualified in themselves, aren’t they? The more they consume it before they approach you.
Correct. Financial and tax information, closing cost, property taxes, 10 31 exchange information for specific areas. A lot of financial and tax information will surprise everybody listening to the show. Some of it doesn’t change state to state globally. Some of it’s federal, some of it doesn’t change. Unfortunately, though, a lot of it does. And your consumer, whether you know that or not and you should as a professional real estate agent, but your consumer will know that, especially they bought or sold a home before. And the financial and tax information is something you get burned by once. And then generally speaking, people are willing to do a much deeper dive than you’d ever think looking at things like closing costs and property tax and really understanding what they are, what can possibly input the sale. And why is that? We all get handed a big stack of paperwork, but as one of the line items, eventually we’re going to have our closing fees and things like that as part of that. And we’re going to see things like 1 % on for something, which is going to be here in California, it’s going to be $10,000 that we just took from you, Mr.
Newman. Thank you for the 10 grand. You’re like, what? It’s not small. The numbers are never small in these things. A quarter of a % adds up. 1 % really adds up. More than 1 % I would recommend that everybody’s paying attention to it because this is a 20 to 25 year transaction for most people. And in California, it exceeds a million dollars almost every single time. So it is simply not small. And you should be paying attention to where your 10 and your 30 and your 40,000s are going.
Well, I think I’m not. Well, yeah, I think you’re spot on because I think, like you say, a lot of housing in Southern California, a million dollars. The property tax, a lot of people are in for shock, aren’t they, in the next few years, aren’t they?
Yeah, they.
Sure are. Not a pleasant shock.
Another financial tax information is things like probate. And I can go on and on. There are lots of different things to do around financial information. In my article, we listed an example of an article that we wrote three, four, five years ago. I don’t even know it’s still on the first page and we never updated it. It’s basically property taxes in Atlanta. And we still somehow remain on the first page for this article for years and years and years talking about property tax. And we don’t really get that much competition. The people that want to competition with us are like nerd wallet and property base. They’re not actually direct competitors of ours, and they’re not direct competitors to the client, so it doesn’t really matter to them. They’re not competing for your real estate prospects’ attention. They’re competing for some other reason. They want to sell back services or something.
I’ll tell you another good subject, but I just want to see if you think it’s a good one for agent to write about is HOA fees, about how are they how can you tell if your HOA is just ripping you off? How do you judge you’ve been charged for it? Because they seem to be all over the place, don’t they?
They’re all over the place. And the second that somebody comes up with a comprehensive national website that covers that, that is a social media platform that covers all these HOA dialog that has proper… I’ve seen one or two of these, by the way, John, but nobody really has the experience growing a digital brand. They don’t understand how expensive and how time consuming it’s going to be. But the minute that somebody does, that’s a $10 million idea right there because everybody should be having a conversation with everybody else that’s ever managed, used, but dealt with this HOA so that you know in detail what to expect. You shouldn’t have to attend some meeting in the basement or the rec area of your own building and do it at eight o’clock on a Tuesday ight, all so that you can just basically learn what your fellow homeowners are going to try to force you to do on a piece of property that you’ve already bought. It’s ridiculous. It’s a ridiculous system. And so, yes, everybody’s dealt with those HOAs where there’s just random.
I don’t see on any of the Northern Nevada agent websites any outline of what is the price? Are there any guidelines these HO should follow? Blah, blah, blah. Because when you look at different properties, it can vary from $180 to $600 a month.
That’s just tip of the iceberg in California dollars. There are places here whose HOA fees move you a very long way into what your mortgage payment is. I’ve seen them be as much as half the mortgage payment. Or more. Some HOAs in some communities here cost equal amounts because they’re providing security, they’re providing many other things that go along with the fees. And along with that, you come with all the crazy California laws where you have to insure everybody and make sure everybody’s making over $15 an hour and blah, blah, blah. So it adds up. So for those of you listening to the show, number three is that tax information. Go to my blog post if you’d like to see more. Now, number four is engagement blog posts. And this is our bonus content because really, we’re out of time. This is the end of the show. John’s going to separate it. We’re going to have a little piece of a bonus content. Move on to either the mail hyphen, right blog channel or move on to just Google YouTube inbound rem. Either way, though, you’re going to find an article. Now, the last way to make a lot of money using content for real estate lead generation ideas that involve blogging.
And this is very low hanging fruit, everybody. Relocating to, moving to, or living in. I just gave you the three top titles. Those are keyword titles with the digital landscape shifting the entire country and its population. Those three keywords are massively used, plus retiring in. So it’s moving to, living in, retiring to, and moving to, right? Relocating to. That’s what’s happening right now. All the fan companies letting all those people go. Everything that you’ve heard about or read about in the news is propelling a large movement in our population, maybe as much as 3 % to 4 % of the population is on the move right now. And that means that these guides get a tremendous… They’re both sexy, they get traffic, and they get you leads. It makes them a trifecta in terms of writing about. Like, anybody that has a website or a YouTube channel or a Instagram channel, it’s not trying to explain to your audience the pros and cons of moving into a neighborhood, relocating to a neighborhood, you’re really missing out on a big revenue stream possibility. I wouldn’t even understand that as a real estate agent. Van Isis is a really blue collar city.
And I don’t think that very many people, except ones who are struggling with home price, move here. It’s one of the only places.
I’ll give you an example. I like to ski, Rob. And I normally ski at Hefner in late time. Every time I go skiing and I’m on a ski lift. I start chatting to the person next to me. We’ve moved to Northern Nevada. We’ve moved four months ago, a year ago, three years ago. We moved from the Bay Area. We’ve moved to Northern Nevada because we like the area. I must hear that f there isn’t… When I go skiing, I must hear it three times during the day. I’ve moved to Northern Nevada from the Bay Area.
And that would be what John just said was an opportunity for content piece because now if I’m the realtor and I’m sitting here on a ski lift and that’s the reality, I get to do this. I get to say the surprising reality of skiing in Reino for those who’ve just relocated. I’d have to rejigger the title, but I have a blog post based on what you just said. I do. And the blog post would be, what does it cost? Where do you go? And how do you get into skiing? And I’d aim it specifically. I’d mention the amount of times I’ve had people from the Bay up here talking to me. So I figured I’d just make it a little easier for everybody else. And now I’ve got an article that’s targeted at people moving from the Bay, headed into Reino, doing something that they love skiing.
I’m not normally a better man, and I might be wrong. If we did a search to find a really good article, what you’ve just outlined on any Northern Nevada website, Lake Tahoe based or the Reino area, I bet we won’t find one. Probably not.
Is my guess. I don’t think that we would find one. I don’t think that we would. So, ladies and gentlemen, that’s it. We’re done with this subject. But let me just summarize this and close this out by saying, if you don’t understand that we are living in the information age and that providing the best information is actually a marketing strategy, please do yourself a favor. Sign up for some beginner digital marketing courses, some beginner courses in SEO. We are deep in the weeds in the information age. John and I are just talking about little signs of that. People consume more information on video. Hey, you know what? Chatgbt may change that and say that Microsoft stuff starts to propel audio ads inside their search results and that they take a much larger percentage of the search market than they used to have. But guess what? It doesn’t actually change what John and I would really be talking about. Not really. It just changes where it’s happening. That’s it. That’s the destination. You’ve got to say to yourself, where do you stand on being a personal information provider? And for those of you who are still in that, I just want to pay somebody and get my leads.
And if I’m going to share any of my expertise, it’s going to be inside a single conversation with a person that I’m talking to already. Guys, that is a dying and dead strategy. You are living in the past. I hate to break it to you, but that’s the truth. John, how would you like people to get in touch with you have a strong client.
Thanks for that, Rob. I just want to point out, if you’re looking for a good platform for your website, plus a CRM, Mel, right, we’re a third cheaper than real geek bold leads, most of the other CRM website systems that you’re looking at, at least a third cheaper. So if you’re looking and I’ve been at it for about five years now. So if you’re looking for a really good platform that you own, plus it’s great value, go over to Mel hyphen Wright. Com and have a look at what we got to offer. Back over to you, Rob.
Ladies and gentlemen, listen, thank you so much for sharing your time with John and I. We appreciate it. We’re both a little crazy, trust be told. But I think that most people are in their own different ways. We’re just our own brand of crazy. And we really appreciate your patronage. The numbers, as far as I’ve always heard, keep growing. I occasionally do promote the show. I occasionally don’t promote the show. When I do promote the show, my numbers, my side of it, they go way up. That just means that I know a lot of people are listening. And I occasionally get that feedback too, John. And I just want to say, everybody, we know your time is valuable. We know how hard the job is that you’ve chosen for yourself. We really appreciate you giving us to listen. And if we can ever be of more service to you, just drop, please either email me at Robert@inboundrem or Jonathan@mail hyphen write. Com. Either way, you’ll get a response. You’ll discover that we’re what we sound like, just two guys doing our best to one, build businesses, no doubt about it, but also number two, provide good advice and help while we do it.
Would you agree, Jon?
Oh, yeah, especially from you. You’re the one that’s got the 15 years experience. But I think the main thing is, yeah, I think there’s great opportunities still out there if you’re a committed real estate agent professional. I think it’s still possible to build a really great business and use your website and your online marketing to really get that success for you. I honestly do believe that. And the great thing, if they listen to quite a few of our episodes, I think we give a great outline of the things they’ve got to know, not only through our discussions, but through our guests. I think we’re given a lot of value, Rob.
Me too. And I certainly hope that we have. But if anybody disagrees, you can always talk to us. I don’t know what our response will be, but we’ll listen. All right, everybody, thank you so much for tuning in. Jon, take on. If you’d like to find out more about me, I am a shameless plugger in a different way than Jon is. I’m visual. You can see it on my shirt. You can see it on my background. Just go to foundrem. Com, see, John. I went back with new branded logos so that I don’t have to incessantly do this. This is who we are.
It’s very impressive, Robb. We’ll see people next week.
Bye. Bye.
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The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman
https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
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Robert Newman
InboundREM
https://inboundrem.com
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We discuss with our special guest Greg McDaniels the importance of quality photography connected to being a successful real estate Read more
Agents need to do more than blogging to get results in 2016. We discuss this during this show with our two Read more
Greg McDaniel literally began his career at his father’s knee. It would not be an exaggeration to say he has Read more
Personal agent photography is really important but usually semi-forgotten. We have a great guest "Preston Zeller" on the show who recently Read more
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If you want to learn more about the new KvCore features, you need to watch this video! InboundREM has released a comprehensive review of the new features, and it’s worth your time to read it. By the time you finish watching this video, you’ll have a much better understanding of the new features and how they will impact your business.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to Episode 374 of the MailR ight podcast with a recent purchase by Inside Real Estate of Boomtown. We are going to spend a little bit more time and energy talking about KV Core than we usually do. Specifically for this podcast episode, we are going to talk about the updates they announced at the end of 2022 in November, and we’re going to dive into those and dissect them. Before we jump into what is a very specific and very meaty topic, I’d love to introduce… My name is Robert, by the way, and I’m the founder of Inbound rem, but I’d love to introduce my co host, whose name is Jonathan, for anybody who may not know him, and let him tell you a little bit about who he is and why you should listen to him. Go ahead, Jon.
Thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of mail hyphen write. Com. We build beautiful websites on WordPress. Plus, we offer a CRM and a suite of other digital marketing tools to convert possible leads into actual customers. Back over to you, Robert.
Beautiful. All right. I’m the founder of a company that does everything exactly opposite in the way that all these companies that we always talk about this. I’m a content provider, a storyteller, and I have an expertise in SEO, search engine optimization. So we produce great content. We help get it found. So here’s… Oh, wait. I’m putting it on my screen like you all can see my screen. So here we’re going to jump right into it. But before we do, John, I want to make sure that everybody understands the way that these big real estate prop tech companies release their updates. First and foremost, the vast majority of these systems haven’t updated themselves in any significant way in at least five to seven years. In KV Core’s case, the last major batch of actual updates that changed the core functionality of their CRM took place in 2016. They’ve had five or six years of what are called hot fixes, and they’re releasing them as product news on their website. But were they product updates? Not really. They were more like people fine tuning the system that they’re already in, big customers, big teams coming in and saying, we want this one little thing added to this very specific piece of functionality.
Kb Core going, okay, developing it into the platform and then launching it to everybody who probably isn’t even going to use it and calling it a product update. Was it really a product update? No, it wasn’t. I mean, yes, in the most technical way, yes, it was, but it wasn’t meant for everybody. It wasn’t meant for the average user. It was meant for somebody specifically.
I think what you’re saying is it wasn’t a real improvement to core functionality.
Correct. So let’s just dive into this. So, ladies and gentlemen, you can’t see it. It’s off screen. I’m going to put it on my screen so it appears if I’m looking at you in the camera. But the update announcement came in November 9, 2022. And then I did some YouTube videos, and now we’re doing a podcast. So first of all, one of my main beefs with KV Core has been that they have not done any design updates since they launched the product. Not really. And this still remains true. We’re not going to talk about design updates unless you’re talking about listing design. Certain pages have been enhanced in terms of user experience, but their websites have not been redesigned. Everybody listening to this show really needs to understand that. What they’ve done, the first set of enhancements, and almost all of the enhancements, are going to be around the property display features of the site. One of the things that they did is they allowed sold listing carousels to be leveraged on the homepage. Normally, such a small enhancement would not cause me to say, Hey, John, can we do a podcast on this? But I think that KV Core got this one right For a very long time, social proof has been the way that you generate yourself more results.
Kv Core, one of my main… You can’t customize their systems. Not really, not very much. They’re one of the least customizable solutions on the marketplace. So you might wonder why they’re so popular. It’s because they manage to do cheap and efficient very well. And so the cheap and efficient part is something that real estate agents love more than enough to give up customization, uniqueness, things like that. So one of those updates is you can now, on the homepage, add listings with a sold banner on them once they’ve been sold. I do not know if you can do it throughout the site. It would appear based on the notes on their own blog.
The answer to that is no, you can only do it on the homepage. Still a feature that I really love that connects into social proof. So, Jon, what do you think about that feature?
It’s okay. It’s about okay, isn’t it? I think one of the main things is it’s an enterprise level product. Which was at the same price as some of its broker level competitors. And then they decided to do some deals with some large brokerages. And they did some very large package deals with agencies, brokerages that had tens of thousands of agents, regional brokerage, and they discount it heavily. And it’s offered to a lot of agents as part of their monthly digital package, which they have to pay for as part of their breakage charge. And they get their half to pay for it anyway, or it’s highly advised. It’s either they’re forced to buy it or it’s highly advised and they buy it because the normal price is quite expensive, but they get it at a tremendous discount, or they think they’re getting it at a tremendous discount.
Agreed. Okay. So that’s another thing, guys, that I’m just going to add on to John’s. One thing that everybody needs to understand about KV Core, and I’m going to read it to you right now, our featured area is effectively to showcase your local expertise while capitalizing on how consumers search today with automated community centric highlights. The trick here, guys, is automated. So if you are on a team of 50 and you have a KV Core site that your broker is giving you and all other 50 people are located in your area, you must understand that the automated data that is being presented on your website will be presented on every KV Core website, and thus it’s repetitive. It will never rank for SEO. My supposition to anybody listening to the show is that it devalues your information or brand. We live in the information age, and I still just I will never understand as long as John and I do this show, why people don’t understand that that being information and informational and unique is a brand. It’s an enormous brand for real estate agents. It’s a huge brand. So why would you just pile on to people that are literally telling you, We’re going to do the same thing for everybody.
It’s going to be automatic, but it’s cheap. Well, yeah. I mean, if you want to drive an Edsel, drive an Edsel. Sorry, hugely weird reference there.
I think one of the main concerns with this, and I wanted to see if they’ve updated this through your own recent research, one of your main criticisms of it was the performance of the platform. You said it was so bad that you just couldn’t price. When you were even last time, you did an extensive testing of the system, you just couldn’t stand it because the performance… I think one of your strongest statements, you said you just found which is slow. So what do you think? Do you think they’ve improved that at all?
I haven’t looked at it. I haven’t logged into a cloud version of their CRM since I did that review, which was probably a year or two ago. So the original review still stands. It’s still a cloud based system. They’ve added a lot more people onto it. It’s possible that they’ve deeply expanded their server base so that each individual user can have a faster, more seamless cloud use case out of it. I do not know. Kv Core is oftentimes given to agents like… I just took on a new client today, John, that had 22 agents, and they’ve handed KV Core to their client and can’t tell me if anybody’s ever logged in. It’s one of those things that you provide as a broker, sometimes at $35 a seat, where 90 % of the people that you’re getting it for don’t use it. And even if they pay for it themselves at $35 a month, they don’t use it. And the ones that are using it, which is probably well over 110, the number that I saw published a few years ago by KV Core was 110,000 daily users. So that’s slowing the system down. Now, let’s just say they become far more popular and they have 300,000 daily users.
That means that their server capabilities must be way more than what they were previous. Have they kept up with that? I have no idea. I don’t know at this answer.
You need some cloud resources if you’re running that amount of people into app. And it’s quite intensive. The other factor is it’s all embracing, it is powerful, but it was aimed at a broker level or some in a brokerage that was a digital manager, in my opinion. It’s the same level as Boontown, which they have pulled out recently. They’re merging, aren’t they? Or Zink, I always pronounce it C IA. Zink? Zink. I always struggle, thank you. Zink, which is another, what I see as a brokerage, one of 100, 200, 500 level product, which is what Boone Town was a Broke Ridge that had 100, 200, 500 agents. And KV Core was not quite there, but similar. But then through a lot of discounting, eXp, they did a deal with eXp and their main agents to promote it on YouTube. It’s been sold as a single agent type tool or small power team. Those origins are not really for that type of scenario in my mind. What do you feel? What I’ve just said?
I would agree. Sorry, I was trying to think, I was going to go deep in the weeds, but I’m just going to say, I know I agree with you.
It’s just my interpretation. They just nd I think if you’re going to look, if you’re a single or a married couple or small boutique power team or experience broker with four or five junior agents, I think you’d probably be better off looking at something else, basically. But that’s just my opinion. I think bold leads, real geeks, something like Mel R ight, or something like that. I’m not sure that, but it is enormously popular, isn’t it?
Well, by far and away, the biggest system with their purchase of Boometown, they are now, besides Placester, they might have the largest install base. And I’ve heard rumors that Placester sold off a big percentage of its customer base to Brand Co. So I don’t know that to be true. I don’t know what the arrangements are. I don’t know what the contract is. I just want everything to be clear. It’s just something I heard that is unverified as of now. But if that’s the case, then Placester actually tried to take care of the problem that you and I pointed out. Remember, hundreds of thousands of agents calling in for customer service? They sent that customer service contract to Brandco and tried to offload it from them entirely. That’s what I heard. So whether or not that makes Inside Real Estate the largest user base by far. probably inside real estate, hundreds of thousands of agents, I would guess, making it nobody even comes close to touching them. Having said all that, it’s also, of all the big systems, least customizable. If I was going to list it, pros and cons or give it an overall score, it would come in one of the lowest.
I might even place CHIME above KV Core, but it is easy. There’s so much content produced about it. Now, John, this is something I’ve talked to a lot about. I’ve oftentimes said it’s not so much the system itself, it’s people’s ability to use it. Now, what KV Core has that nobody else has, as all the high level entrepreneurial minded content producers that sat here and are producing teams all over the US for eXp, and they’re under a multi level marketing system, which means that that attraction of agents and is amazing major part of the revenue model, if not the biggest part of the revenue model. So they sit here and do content explaining how to use these eXp sponsored tools ad nauseam. So now KV Core, even though it’s one of the worst sites, it is actually one of the easiest to learn how to use at the highest level because so many great people have done so much great content surrounding it. So now I always have to rejigger my reviews when it comes to KV Core because it’s more usable than the other systems, even though it’s got all these features because so many people have done tutorials on how they’re producing deals using those individual features.
That makes it more adaptable and profitable than other systems. But it’s not as feature heavy or as fast or as friendly in many ways. So we’re going to come back from our break in a second. We’re going to go to break, I suppose I should say first, and then we’re going to get into a little bit deeper into this. And one of the things that we’re going to cover when we come back is an incredibly powerful subject that is going to be… We’re a few months off. In 2023, it’s going to be something that’s in every single Realtor’s inbox, if it’s not already. And you all need to be aware of it. It involves texting. Kv Core finally got out in the head of everybody else. I’m really impressed the fact that they’re one of the first big people to address this problem. So without any further ado, we’re going to go to break. John, if somebody would like to look you up, how would you like them to do that? Actually, not you specifically. Let’s just say that somebody wanted to compare Mele R ight against KV Core. Where would you recommend they go to do that?
Let’s go to male hyphen right. Com. All right, perfect.
And ladies and gentlemen, inbound RMM is not really comparable. We’re a different thing. We’re looking for high end, elite users that want to set themselves free from systems. So different type of client. But if you’d like to research me and understand what we do, just go to inbound rMM.
That was one of his clients.
Yeah. And we’ll take care of it. All right, we’ll be right back. Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need MailW rite. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight. Com. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 374 of the Mail Write Show. We’re so grateful that you’re here. John and me are reviewing… We’re having a dialog about KV Core, and we’re having a dialog about its updates, which is the first in many, many years. One of the first things that they are leading the pack in, is they are the first to insist on compliant text messaging options inside their platform. No longer can you send out an unlimited, unsupervised stream of text from KV Core. Their language that they use to what is scaling down a feature, not scaling it up, but scaling it down, is a master class in marketing because it says we are helping to ensure you are compliant in your marketing efforts through new opt in language at various customer touch points.
The new worry free texting enables you to take advantage of KV Core’s direct messaging capabilities, worry free exclamation point. So what is that telling you? John, these guys have understood that their clients are abusing text message marketing. It’s one of my biggest frustrations in today, 2023, the leading edge concerns, drop my historical stuff. I get calls and text messages all day long. It’s illegal. Anybody not hear me? It’s illegal. You should not be texting anybody on the text message marketing system. You must have them opt in the same way that you have to do it with telemarketing. You have to opt in.
I’ve paid people. I’ve never done business. I must have about 10 text messages a day, sometimes a lot more, from companies, business loans, health insurance, blah, blah, blah. I’m pretty sure I never signed up for a lead magnet for most of these people. They’ve just brought in a list and they text me.
Which is illegal. And eventually there was a guy out there by the name of Zin marketers. Eventually, he’ll nd what he did is he took all these companies to small claims. He used to do it for tele marketers, John, and he made hundreds of thousands of dollars every year because he won every single case. It is illegal. The fact that we as a consumer do not operate, act on it is just an anomaly. Here’s what you guys as real estate agents and every single person who leaves the show who’s done real estate for longer than a year is going to nod their head to this. You have a concern that very few other professionals have. Your competing realtors are not your friends. Sorry, I’m trying to change this inside the real estate industry. But realtors are competitive and oftentimes they’re snotty. So they will literally, if you break a rule that they themselves are following and you just don’t happen to know that you’re breaking the rule, they’ll turn you in. You’ve got probably five or six of your competitors on any email or marketing list. I know I do. I have every single competitor of mine the CEOs and CMOs.
They’re all on my marketing list. I know that. I don’t know if they’re looking for me to stumble and fail, but with real estate agents, there’s definitely something going on there that says that your own competition is going to turn you in. Google ad words budgets are constantly hacked and inflated by agents. I know because I run paid accounts and I see how Google is catching the fraud because it’s fraud. If this same person whose competitor clicks on your ad 15 times, that’s a form of fraud. They’re just trying to make you pay 30 or 40 or 50 bucks or whatever it is, and they have no intention of doing anything with you. And they think, hah, spend the $50, you bastard. Sorry. So, like, John is barely keeping it together. So this, from a compliance standpoint, this is great. From a marketing standpoint, they just took something away from you and sugarcoated it, like big time. It was the Wild West.
I got a buy, they weren’t. They must have had a few minutes to get that worded like that. I have been touched.
Right. I told you a master class in marketing. I mean, that’s the sweetest way anybody’s ever said, hey, we used to let you do whatever you want. Now you can’t. But that’s what that says. And yet they were like, well, anyway.
On to another feature, which I think you highlighted in your excellent video. Rob’s got excellent video on the Inbound YouTube channel on his late you set up date review, go and watch it, folks. But I think I watched it a couple of times. And I think one of the things she talked about was their map widget, which they’ve updated. Do you want to quickly give a description of that improvement or added feature?
So the map widget, which I’m looking at on the screen, it is pretty freaking cool, man. They’ve gone ahead and updated into Polygon searches, which is where you can draw a map. Here’s what I like. The user experience, the UX, and unfortunately, John, if I said specifics and you watch my video more recently, please catch me at the end of this. But I’m going to say this, one of the things I really enjoyed, just in general, was the experience on the old map system on KV Core was standard. It was like with all the money they have, you could never understand why they just weren’t doing a better job. This new map experience, I felt, was very slick looking. I just felt that way, and I’ve never felt that way about anything with KV Core. Those of you that have followed me who’ve watched my reviews know I’m very even handed. It’s very rare I say this many non complimentary things about a provider. I think they got the math function right. I think it’s very cool and very nice and I really enjoyed it. Now, what did you think, Jon?
Yeah, I thought I want to say it’s a major improvement, but for what it does in UX design and usability, it’s a nice feature. Is it groundbreaking? No, but as an additional feature, my only concern about this is that there are they’re taking over Boone Town, they’re marketing hard, they’ve got this deal with eXp. There’s a lot of info on YouTube about it. They’re pushing it hard. My concern is performance because, like I say, it struck me because you are when you’re talking about these on your YouTube channel or in this podcast, you choose your words more carefully than me. Most times I’m a bit wilder, but you had quite strong wording when you were talking about utilizing their system. You said it was awful. It was really rough experience, and that was down to the performance.
It was to the performance. There’s nothing unique about it. Even in their update that they are releasing to all of their customers, which I wish everybody could read. I think that one of my Southern relatives, which I haven’t talked to in a long time, but they’re saying they’re painting a dirty pig old. It’s an old Southern saying. I’m just going to jump into that. Some of the things that they announced that we’re not going to really cover in depth here is the listing machine and design center. What they allowed you to do is slightly better brand your listings on their service. That’s it. A couple of updates that they literally are making it sound like this major upgrade, beautiful feature. And maybe it is for KV Core. They haven’t even caught up to what standard inside the feature. So yes, it’s an upgrade for them. I agree. Is it an upgrade in general across all of the KV Core people, like, No, not doing anything interesting here, not doing anything unique. Go ahead. John really wants to say something.
Yeah, you’re going to have to tell me if I’m being fair here because I am a competitor in some ways. I’m a top of the tiny independent. I think if you’ve been made to pay for it, if you’re in your first year and you’re part of the XP or you’re part of a brokerage, and part of the monthly digital fee that your brokerage is charging you, or you’re being highly encouraged to use it because it integrates with the brokerage, blah, blah, blah. Try and use it. The problem is I know they’ve got the improvements, more customisation by look, but it looks old fashioned. It’s not going to really brand you. But if you can’t afford anything else and you’ve been made to semi pay for it, you might as well set it up and use it. I don’t think it’s not going to unless they got your email address, it’s not going to show up high with Google because of the factors that you will know about because that’s your expertise, content marketing, SEO. It’s not that KV call is inherently bad in its structure. You might probably know a bit more about that than me. It’s just that, like all these platforms that you don’t own, you would be bonkers to spend a lot of money putting content on it.
The only way that, apart from knowing the address, the only way you’re going to get traffic is to pay traffic through Facebook or Google. My problem with that is, which has improved the map you’re pointing out, a little bit more customisation through the templates offered, is my main problem until they brought the these updates is, yeah, you drove traffic to it. I think because of its look and that, the performance concerns, I think to convert those into email, into something you could remark, it’s going to be lower than other platforms. Is this making sense?
Yeah. And I agree. And that’s some of the other things that KV Core has announced as far as updates. This idea that they will provide templated in mass updates. Another thing that they did was they basically created a print system where you can digitally print your listing pages out of a printer at your local location and then take those printed flyers to listings and then hand those out. It’s not unique, but it’s cool. I like it. The all new Core Social is just KV Core finally acknowledging that social media is a strategy that should be paid attention to. But what they did is they took a library of content that they themselves produced, give you free access to it, and all the agents get to come share it. They effectively are trying to lock their user base into something that most brands, people like me influencers, we are trying to produce really incredible content so that you will share it. Kv Core is telling you, Oh, to use our system right, share our content everywhere.
Well, Bill Wright has that functionality, but the way we’re mittled. I totally agree with what you say, but when it comes Facebook page, because of what Facebook has done, it just will not generate. But you’ve still got to have a reasonably active Facebook page because you’re going to have possible client to check you over. And if you’ve got a Facebook page, which they will expect, and it’s not being updated, it’s not going to look well. Our system will also push so much content to Instagram. We suggest that you mix it with individual content. The reason why we still push and it’s still part of our system is a lot of agents don’t understand about the volume required. So most think producing one or two pieces a week. We provide a mixture of semi content a week. We cannot offer individual programs, which costs a lot more. So we offer different options. I see where KV Core are going from, but you are correct as well. It’s filler to some extent, but it can be useful. But you are right. You got to mix it with individual content where either they’re hire experts like you have on your team or they hire on the low end male right, at least they’re doing something, can’t they?
Yeah, and I agree with that. At least they’re doing something. And by the way, John did say something magical in one of his earlier statements. I’m going to point out the magical thing he said. I think the KV Core is a great place for agents who are working for other big teams, who are new to real estate. Man, don’t try to become an expert social media person, extra digital marketer in your first year. Not unless you have a background in it, a love for it, a passion for it, for something that’s really driving you. Other than that, learn the real estate business and let, yeah, use your KV Core account, press the auto post button. Use all the tools the providers give you to try to make the job easy so that you can develop your own opinions about posting content, see how your friends or family or audience responds to it. I have no doubt that if you were to contact KV Core or MailR ight or any other company that does social media suggested content, that they probably have given it to their clients, their clients have used it, and in some cases gotten response and made money.
No doubt, zero doubt, none. It’s just when it comes to your you’re trying to establish your own footprint, really lock in your audience, my opinion is always the same thing. It has to be your own authentic voice in most of your messaging. Even if you were to use, like John said, even if you’re going to use templated content, alter it, adapt it, put your voice into it, whatever. Make sure that people understand that you have something to say about it. Like, if you’re doing a meme, nothing wrong with posting somebody else’s meme, but at least take the time to post a sentence or two about it so that with a hashtag or two.
It’s just the volume. When they hire you, they’re hiring your experience and your team’s experience. You interview, you learn about the agency, the brokerage or the individual broker agent. They specialize, you customize the social media to the individual requirements of each customer. It’s a bespoke service you’re offering. Mail rights are much lower. We can offer a bit of that, but we do not We’re aimed at a different type of clientele in the real estate industry.
So there is one thing that they have done that I don’t have much experience with. Here is one place that KV Core decided to go in a different direction than every single other provider out there. I admire them for doing something different, John, regardless of how it treats and functions. They announced something called Amp Stats. Amp Stats plays into KV Core’s mass popularity and the fact that so many eXp brokers are using them. If I had to tell you, I think that 30,000 of their customers are probably eXp agents. That makes them the eXp preferred broker, which makes their they build functionality to do recruiting straight into the platform. I don’t know. What they’re doing is they’re allowing you to vet candidates faster, check their past production as part of the platform, do net income comparisons. You can check their income, which is going to tell you if they’ve been doing splits, not just the number of transactions they did, but how good they are doing double sides, things like that. All of that allows you to make the choice as a broker about whether or not you’re going to select this candidate, assuming it works correctly and that it does what it’s supposed to do.
I don’t know the answer to any of those. What I will say is that to the best of my knowledge, they’re the first platform to introduce something like this. I love the try. I love the swing. I love the…
I don’t know. Maybe you know. Does eXp, is it set up with their preferred list of digital vendors? Or is it exclusive deal that KV Core is done with eXp?
I don’t think it’s exclusive. They do have a large set of people that they work with, Keller Williams, eXp, just to name a few. Basically all the big brokerages that still like hammer recruitment, usually KV Core is the place that they go. Keller Williams and eXp are definitely the top two. But between those top two, that’s 220,000 licensed realtors, which makes it 10 % of the real estate agents in the country. So it’s a pretty big swing, just saying eXp and Keller Williams.
That.
Is most of what they have here. There are some things that they said were upgraded functionality to the listing feature. I went through the set of listed things very carefully. What you could basically say is they changed a couple of small things, put some gold paint on the pig and called it a fresh piece of meat. It’s not true.
Well, I think we got to do a shout out to the listeners now. If you’re utilizing their platform, please outreach to either myself through the Mel Wright YouTube channel or inbound marketing email me or message Robert and just tell us what your experiences have been lately with the performance because t’s the performance I think is one of the main concerns of Robert myself. Robert based on his testing experience, me about what some other people have said to me directly is that it’s not been a fantastic experience. But please share yours with us about how you found the platform because that’s one of our major concerns, isn’t it, Robert?
It is indeed. No doubt about it, John is correct. My email is Robert@inboundrem. Com. You can message me about your experience with KV Core. I’d love to hear it. If there’s anything that’s really unusual and we feature it, like, if you give me a piece of information that we decide that I decide is relevant enough to update my review with, we will credit you, which means that you’ll get a backlink, which is a big deal. All right. So thank you, everybody, for tuning in. John, we’re way past. We really got deep in the weeds with this. This is my jam, this stuff, getting deep in, trying to interpret it for all of you who listen to me, follow me, try to make sure that you understand what is exciting and what’s not. That’s it. That’s my hot take. John, if you wanted people to contact you to either ask a question about comparing your system to KV Core or just asking you some questions in general, how would you like me to go about doing that?
Yeah, go to the mail hyphen write. Com website. I just want to point out, folks, for the basic system for one agent, we are the third of the cost to real geeks to KV Core, unless you’re getting it highly subsidized. We are one of the most cost effective platforms out there.
Plus.
You have the insurance state. It’s a WordPress website. I have one of our template solutions, but we offer option for semi to full custom solutions. And we give you a cast iron guarantee that if you get fed up with us, we will migrate your WordPress website somewhere else. So you’re not locked in and you lose everything. We’re one of the few providers. Like I say, I think the functionality that we offer is equivalent to most of these platform. It beats out a third of the cost. Back over to you, Rob.
Beautiful. And ladies and gentlemen, if you’re looking for some higher end customized solution, content base, setting yourself free from all platforms forever for the rest of your career, you can reach out to me at robert@inboundrem. Com, or you can simply go to inboundrem. Com and hit my About page or my Services page. Either way, you’ll find ways to contact me or my team and schedule a call. Everybody, listen, we so much appreciate you. We appreciate your patronage to our blog, to our blogs, respectively to the show, which is a collaborative effort between the two of us. Everywhere that you engage with us, John and I appreciate it. If there’s anything that we can do, anything at all to improve the information that we’re trying to provide for you, let one of us know. You’ll probably be surprised by how responsive we are. That’s it. John, anything else you want to add?
No, I think we’ve offered some good information. We’ll see you next week.
Bye, everybody.
The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman
jonathan@mail-right.com
https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
Robert Newman
InboundREM
https://inboundrem.com
We discuss with our special guest Greg McDaniels the importance of quality photography connected to being a successful real estate Read more
Agents need to do more than blogging to get results in 2016. We discuss this during this show with our two Read more
Greg McDaniel literally began his career at his father’s knee. It would not be an exaggeration to say he has Read more
Personal agent photography is really important but usually semi-forgotten. We have a great guest "Preston Zeller" on the show who recently Read more
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Just as real estate agents need to learn about each individual client to find ‘em the perfect property, real estate marketing requires offering up the right digital content to viable leads online.
Sure, that might sound like a tall order—especially when you don’t know exactly who is visiting your website or browsing your listings.
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The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
Jonathan Denwood & Robert Newman
jonathan@mail-right.com
https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
————————————–
Robert Newman
InboundREM
————————————–
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail.-Right podcast, and video cast, wherever you’re looking at it, we are here for you. Me and my partner, John, are extremely excited to be having a discussion with you about landing pages. What are they and what ones work? We’re going to do what is an effective landing page, but I think that first, we have to explain what a landing page really is, and then we can move into what an effective one of those might be for real estate specifically. Having said all of that, it is my strength, my man, the man with the magic behind the production of the show is John, and he’s sitting here waiting desperately to introduce himself to all the new users and listeners for the show today. So, John, take it away, my brother.
Oh, my God. He’s got caffeine. What are you swelling down? I don’t know. It must be pure caffeine, I reckon. Thanks, Rob. He’s shaking his head. It’s pixelated now, Rob. It’s pixelated. So I’m the joint founder of mail hyphen write. Com. We build beautiful websites on WordPress, semi or full custom that you own. You’re not leasing them. Plus, we got a suite of digital marketing tools that will help you collect and generate some quality leads. Back over to you, Robert.
Beautiful. All right. So ladies and gentlemen, landing pages. What the hell is it? Google defines it as a page that somebody lands on on your site. It’s an entry page. It’s the first page that somebody sees. More increasingly, as the digital era stretches out to the horizon, landing pages used to be the landing page on most websites was the homepage of the website. That’s not true anymore. These days, on most of my sites, less than 21 % of people land on the homepage. They’re landing on internal pages on the site. That’s the first page. Again, a landing page is defined as the first page you see introducing you to a new offer or service that you have not yet been introduced to and you land on it. There are a lot of different types of landing pages because they are as robust as there are types of humans on the planet, literally. Probably there are that many on the internet. So when you land on something, John is chosen the subject to be an effective or results-driven landing page. So let’s define that. In real estate, results are usually defined as getting a lead. I personally don’t do that marketing, so I don’t have much to say about those landing pages.
But I’m going to participate in the question because I have 14, or 15 years of experience and I know what all my competitors are doing for the most part. By the way, my name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound rem and we are a real estate SEO and website development company. I personally have many year’s experiences doing it and hundreds, if not, thousands of projects that I’ve personally participated in, which is where my knowledge comes from. The landing pages. When we’re building a landing page for a lead generation effort, what you’re generally doing is you’re trying to make an exchange between the client and you. In other words, we’re going to give them something, usually access to listings is what’s historically relevant with real estate. But there are many other ways that you can go about it. Not using these systems and platforms that everybody loves to use, can’t do it there. But you can do what’s called a content magnet or content drop. I have one of those on my website where I’ve got a little line that says, Hey, here’s the top 50 memes. I give you 49 for free, but the 50th, you need to register with the site and see the meme and you register behind a blurred image.
Say I gave you 49 for free. And if you want to see what the number one meme, real estate meme in the entire world is in 2023, you have to register with the site. That’s an example of a content magnet. You’re something that magnetizes people, attracts people, and then you have to give them your information in order to exchange. Unfortunately, and I’ve done this plenty, that doesn’t really create really great leads. But all of you listening to the show are really used to not really great leads, so I’m not a lot worried about it. You’re usually getting low intent, medium intent leads anyway. So this is going to generate a low to medium intent lead, and that’s exactly what you’re used to. I can go on a long time because there are a million different types of content pages that one can do. But I’m going to let John take it away and have a discussion about what he thinks are effective lead-generation pages. And then I’m going to share with all of you how I, as an inbound or information marketer, content marketer, how I use these pages, which is different because I’m not trying to close somebody on giving me their information on one of these pages they land on.
I’ve got a different mission and I’m going to save it so that you all just stay tuned by your little phones waiting and waiting and waiting for that little piece of information. All right, Jon, take it away, sir.
I haven’t got your experience of a marketer. I’ve got a fair bit of experience as a WordPress developer and agency owner. What I found, and I fall into it, is that if you want effective landing pages, you got to understand what you’re getting into. I totally agree about the value of lead. A couple of shows ago, we talked about people’s misunderstanding of the word lead. I really think it’s at the crux of so much frustration and confusion in the real estate industry, what people classify as a lead. I classify as a digital website generation paid advertising lead. In no shape or form is it going to compare to a personal recommendation from a previous customer to somebody that they have a relationship with, recommending them to you. The real estate, it’s not in the same ballpoint. And if you think you’re going to get that from any digital marketing, you’re deluding yourself. And this is what is going to cause you a lot of frustration and a lot of disappointment. So they’re totally different beast. You’re going to get a higher volume if the digital marketing is working and you need automated processes to do the initial outreach because otherwise, you’re not going to be able to deal with the amount of low to medium quality leads that it’s going to generate anyway.
Unless you’ve got a personal assistant, unless you’ve got a team on board to deal with it, you’re going to have to utilize marketing optimization process to do that outreach after they get the lead magnet from the landing page, which you described. I think that was number one I wanted to point out, because I really do think even now, it’s this semi unrealistic expectation of what that word lead means when it comes to digital marketing that causes so much disappointment and frustration, Robert.
What do you think.
I’m waffling?
No, actually, I think you’d waffle a lot, but not today. Just kidding. I’m just joking. Everybody that was. John opened up on that one. So I’m just going to say this. I actually think that one of your passions and one of my passions is we really need everybody, the people that you guys talk to on the phone, everybody. We need them to change their language. We need all of you to change your language. What is a lead? Well, you might as well call a lot of what you’re going to collect off these efforts. I wouldn’t even call them leads. It’s an information gathering process for potential prospects. That’s it. If you eliminate the I’m going to get a sale today or in 30 days from your mindset and change it to say, I’m going to get a large list of prospects that might be a viable transaction in the next year or two, number one, your expectations will be in line with reality, like what you’re likely to get, what all of you are going to get. Number two, you’ll be able to move your budget in line with what your expectations are. Because somebody says to you, Hey, you got to pay me all 12 months of whatever my rate is upfront, and somewhere towards the end of the agreement, we’ll get a deal.
And that’s after you’ve chased a lot of leads. But the good news is that once the funnel starts, you might have quite a few. All of that’s true. If you’re doing a funnel correctly, if you’re working leads correctly, all of that’s true. But it’s also true that most likely you’re going to have to spend a long time holding on to these leads before you realize your profit. And once the profit starts, you have to keep consistently doing the system in order to keep that pipeline alive. You turn everything off and likely you have a year’s worth of pipeline left if you’re working it correctly because that’s how long this all takes. But you all, John, everybody is not being educated correctly. They’re not being told that this is what the expectation is. And the amount of brokers and agents that I have call me, it’s a staggering number that don’t know this fact that you’re sharing.
No, it’s quite even.
I would put it that high. Eight to nine of the 10 people I talked to would not know.
Well, because we’re pretty upfront. I think we’re pretty honest and pretty frank. And I think a lot of people in the digital marketing area, unfortunately, for understandable reasons, don’t feel they can be frank about it, can they?
Yeah, I agree.
But get back to the landing page. The biggest mistake I’ve made is there’s a balance. It’s got to look reasonably okay, but you’ve got to have really concentrate on less is more when it comes to landing pages. And I’ve been the number one person that had to learn the hard way with this. I’ve always resisted and it’s time consuming. That’s one of the things that you should get from a platform is that their library of landing pages, they should have heatmapped them. A lot of them don’t, but that’s part of the deal. They should have tested them and had them heat mapped. What I mean by heat mapped, there’s technology you can put on the landing page to see where somebody is moving their mouse around, and that will indicate how their interest, the message on the landing page. And that’s one of the things, you can’t do this if you’re knocking up these landing pages yourself, because it just isn’t worth the time and energy on it. But what I found, where I’ve hired an agency that specialized in this area, is that I’ve underestimated how bare bones we should have these. One headline, one key message with a really great lead magnet, putting too much copy on.
It takes knowledge to reduce the amount of copy, but still get over the message that you’re trying. That will induce them to give you some information to get the lead magnet. And that’s a bit of art form, really. And I’ve always tended to put too much copy on multiple calls for action. I’ve always gone down that route and I’ve always spit me on the ass, really, Rob.
Understandable. So, ladies and gentlemen, and you too, what I want to do is I want to spend a second talking about a different type of landing page with a different purpose, different message. Because landing pages, when you intend for them to land on them, the landing page that has been made most popularized these days is ClickFunnels. I’m going to talk a little bit about that in a second. We’re going to go to our break, and when we come back, I’m going to mention what the difference in different types of landing pages that you may have heard of are and what makes them work exceptionally well. Stay tuned. We’ll be right back. Wherever you’re at, give us a thumbs up, give us a like, tell us we suck. Whatever it is that you’re feeling thinking, we would really appreciate to hear it. He’s pointing at me. You can’t see it. For those of you who are watching on video, you saw that. John pointed his finger at me. You can edit this out. He gets to edit this shit out. It’s not fair. All right, here we go. We’ll be right back. Thank you for tuning in.
Do you want quality leads from homeowners and buyers right in your own neighborhood? Then you need MailR ight. It is a powerful but easy to use online marketing system that uses Facebook to generate real estate leads at a fraction of the cost you’d pay from our competition. We stand behind our work with a no question asked 30 day money back guarantee. So don’t delay, get started today. Go to mail. R ight. Com. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. This is episode number 273. John and I are talking about landing pages. It is just the exciting fireworks subject that you wanted to complete your day. Thank you so much for paying attention to us here on the R ight Show. I can.
Tell you have full reviews. I did put the word in effective, did I?
All right. Well, effective requires that people understand what they are. And I would guess that the vast majority of our audience doesn’t. But here’s the other part of this. Effective. What are you trying to communicate with landing page? We’ve just discussed ad nauseam, trying to get a result. Now, the most popular website in the world, there’s two of them that have landing pages designed to get you a result. Sell a product, sell a service, right out of the gate, one page. That’s click channel s or Shopify. So both of these companies operate off a similar principle. You drive somebody into a single page and you can do all the things you need to do on what is basically a huge website in one page. And why does that work? The same way that Google just transferred all their search results into infinite scrolling. We have a natural predisposition to not want to turn the page, but we’ll scroll forever. We’ll scroll until we’re dead. We just won’t turn the page. Think about it. Think about it for everybody who’s listening to this show, think about your own. Do I want to go to the second page?
No, that’s so much work. Do I want to keep scrolling? Well, of course I want to keep scrolling. There’s more things to look at. I don’t know what psychology that is. I just know it.
To be true. I think it’s also linked to the increase in usage of mobile devices, phones, and tablets, isn’t it? Could be.
One way.
Or.
The other, it’s reality, though. Infinite scrolling is what ClickFunnels works off of. To some degree, it’s what Shopify works off of. And it allows you to transfer all the same information that you have on a website, but you’re pulling it into a page. You’re doing really clever sales language. You’re usually adding your social proof to the same page. You’re trying to make sure that nobody leaves the page. You’re not doing a lot of external linking. And all of that is ClickFunnels. I buy that on those Shopify and ClickFunnels sites all the time off Facebook ads and things like that. I am what we would call a mooch. For the very small handful of things that I buy, I buy almost as soon as anybody puts them in front of my face. So here’s one of the weird things that I buy. I have bought almost all my competitors’ courses. I n almost everyone, they say, Oh, I’ve got a new course. It’s the best thing ever. We can generate 10,000 leads. Blah, blah, blah. I’m like, Okay, where’s the buy button? I want to see what you’re doing. I need to look at it and say, Are you doing something I have not.
Figured out? You just blew out the eardrums about this. Oh God, you’re definitely wrong.
Okay, so how everybody else does it. How do I do it? When somebody lands on a page that we’ve built and designed in a perfect world, what they leave with is an incredibly… So a lot of my landing pages that are successful are either blogs, blog posts, or area pages. Now, on the blog posts, we don’t have the clients with the financial bandwidth to make the best use of a blog post. Because how would you do a great blog post? Well, you do it the same way that I do it on an inbound rem where I have a book that I wrote and I have content drops that we’ve spent. I spent $5,000 writing my book. I spent a ton of money on it. I’m redoing the cover art as we speak. And this is a free eBook. It’s not supposed to be overly sophisticated, but nonetheless, I spent a small fortune on it because I wanted it to be super valuable to the people that downloaded it. It is not something written in haste or that has not been read nine different times. And the idea behind the book is to educate people about how valuable inbound marketing can be, content marketing for realtors.
I needed to express that idea in a way they get excited about. We don’t have the ability to write a book for our clients. We don’t have the ability for… And most of our clients can’t write a book for us so that we can do a content drop off the blogs, which would turn your email list into an incredibly high value tool, which is what mine is. My email list drives so much engagement.
It’s.
Dumb. I just get tens of thousands of people responding to my emails because I don’t sell anything on them. I just educate and try. I bend over backwards to try to provide some value. And now my team, now my brand and content team does that for me. So what is the landing pages that we do that are successful? And I love this about our sites, we get a lot of success off our area pages, which are where we focus on a county and then there are cities inside the county. And we’ve usually built custom maps onto that page. So somebody can interact with the maps, they can interact with the county. They get a lot of directional support about where they can go on the website, what they can find there. And really, it’s more an information site. It’s information on the neighborhoods. It’s not houses, it’s not houses, t’s not listings, we don’t do listing sales sites, we do informational sales sites. And that strategy has proven to be incredibly successful. We have an above average bounce rate off our landing pages, John, our directional landing pages, but they’re not meant to sell anything. I’m not trying to get a lead off that landing page.
If I was doing that, I would apply the same strategy that ClickFunnels does. An infinite scroll on my most popular pages that takes you all the way down and then tries to force you to register. But that goes against my marketing and sales philosophies. We want to nurture somebody through amazing content and let them reach out to our clients organically. Very unpopular concept.
I would say I don’t find that. I always think it’s a middle road. I think if you’re looking to get the last bit of juice out of the landing page, you follow click funnel. Don’t get me on Branson. He’s a really smart cat. I find some of his marketing… He’s hardcore marketing. He’s really hugely successful, wish him well. Guy knows what he’s doing. He goes a bridge too far for me. I find it too much in your face. But maybe that’s who am I? He’s a multi millionaire, but good luck to him. That’s what I say. But I think it’s the middle of the road. I think you’re utilizing your SEO with your clients. You’re utilizing non paid traffic. I think you could utilize Google and Facebook to take somebody to the landing page, but you’ve got to keep it simple. Having too much copy, one tag line, one quick, and you haven’t got a lot. I think the type of people that come into your client’s website is a little bit more sophisticated because it’s not paid traffic. Hopefully, the people that come into the website, they’re coming either you’ve come up in search and they’re on the hunt in a way, or they come to the website before.
So maybe they’re a little bit warmer. I don’t know. I don’t know what you feel about what I’ve just said.
Well, I opt for myself and for my clients both. I made the mistake through of my 14 year career in marketing here. I’ve chased the big numbers for 12 of those 14 years. And so I’ve made this mistake, and I’m sure countless people here that are listening to this show today who are fans have made the mistake too. But just because you get 10,000 visitors does not mean you get three times as many clients. I’ve learned that the hard way. And I apply the same knowledge to my own website. I just opened up my Google Analytics, we’ve had 2,800 users. At various times in my career here, I’ve had as many as 10 to 20,000 users hit the inbound rem site. I’m no longer really interested in that. I just want highly focused users. If you want to say put in the search, I want to compare all the top real estate lead generation systems. I very much want to come up for that search. And I think I do. But if you want to say say, what is real estate lead generation or real estate lead generation, the broad search, I would not mind coming up for it, but it’s not a priority.
It’s not something I’m focusing lots of time and money on because it’s pretty simple. If you want to make a comparison and you’re ready to spend an hour or two doing it, John, you know my work, you’ve seen it. It’s pretty good if that’s what you’re trying to do. But if you’re just looking for basic stuff, probably not going to be your cup of tea.
No. So I think like what Rob said, when it comes to the landing pages, how do you fitting into the content that’s already on the website, I think people, regional guides, area guides are a good way. I think properties that you’ve just signed up for selling at the right price that are not being marketed yet and advertising them and taking them to a page. You’ve got to be really careful about the balance of the information that you offer on the page. It’s got to be enough to induce interest and get them to sign up. So you send them the full details. But on the other hand, it can’t be too much information because they’re not going to bother to give you the contact details, so you can send them the full details of the property. So you’ve got to keep that. It’s a goldilocks scenario. You’ve got to just give them the right amount. I think also, like what you said, your regional area PDFs that give more information. Education and then based are a great idea. A lot of people give Quazer automatic pricing reports. You give the detail your home, there’s services that would generate that.
I think you can offer, but it should be a custom report where you do it manually and you send it to them. Using something like Bombom to do a video and have the videos attached to the email with the report is a great idea to personalize it, to get that that, hopefully get that person to call you. I think that’s a great idea. I think some of these ideas, when it comes to landing pages, can be effective. What do you reckon, Rob?
I think that I agree with you 100 %. I think that many of those things we’ve tried are trying. My overall commentary on landing pages and websites in general is, ladies and gentlemen, including you, on boys and girls, everybody listening to the show. Guys, we have spent a lot of our time and energy over the years creating low value real estate marketing systems all under the assumption that if we provide a very small little teeny tiny piece of functionality that will get somebody’s information and then we can market more aggressively to them, call them, text them. That’s what I mean by market more aggressively to them. I really believe, guys, that right in front of our eyes, we’re watching the world shift. I believe that very deeply. I do not think that people want to give out their information. I think that more and more they’re becoming unwilling to give out their information unless the value proposition is high enough. And so instead of just waiting until you’re bleeding money and bleeding everything related to your marketing, guys, I’m telling you now, try to provide something unique. Try to be useful. I say it into the book, until I’m blue in the face, find something on the page.
Do you have contingencies? Do you have maps, amenity lists, stuff that you developed over the years, something you can develop? Do you work with HOAs and have a list of their fees? Create a PDF with this information on it and attach it to your page, make it downloadable, and watch your SEO sky, like, ranking skyrocket. Because it’s useful, user interaction will drive ranking and your clients will love you. It’s a triple win and it gives your customers something that they want. And they’re willing, again, if you give them something that’s high enough value, they will give you their information. And then once you have it, please, for the love of God, everybody, stop using automated texting. Stop doing low value systematic things. There’s no faster way to get to turn people off, in my opinion, than to send them low value marketing communication. I just don’t know about anybody else but John, but if I told you I get 30 or 40 call calls on my phone per day, I don’t think I’m actually over exaggerating. And I think that most real estate agents are the same way. So why they would contribute to text pollution is literally a mystery to me.
Why would you do that?
Well, I think the only thing I wouldn’t say I disagree with you. I think it’s really in the detail because I think you’re totally correct. I think a lot of people are really, really abusing text messaging, and it’s going down the same path as email. But a lot of people were writing newsletters, emails out. They were saying, Oh, that’s dead. Just utilize social media. And they’ve learned the hard way that utilizing somebody else’s platform and relying totally on somebody else’s platform. We’re a great believer in video, but I wouldn’t utilize YouTube as the total mythology for generating digital leads because you could get kicked off any of these, and anything can happen to these platforms. But email, having an email list, it’s old school, but you own it, but you shouldn’t abuse it. You are right. But if somebody has come and they’re looking to find out about a specific property that you’ve just are starting to market. And I think you can text someone saying, I’ve just sent you a bomb bomb. I’ve sent you the details of the property. Do you want a tour of the property? Do you want to have a conversation with me?
And sending one or two texts is I think that’s fine. I think if you send them a regional guide that spent a lot of money, leave it a couple of days and they’re having a text message saying, Did you find the guide useful? Is there any more information you’re looking for? Offering service, offering extra value. But I do agree with you when it’s not around that and it’s just bombarding people. I’ll just send thousands out and we get one or two % because I don’t see that working. So hopefully I’m not waffled there.
No, I don’t see it working either, and I understand you’re qualifying so that everybody’s clear. I do believe in direct marketing. That is where advertising can work. But here’s how I usually leverage advertising. When me or my client or the combination of the two is produce something really cool, we usually drive a lot of people to that really cool thing. I also use a slightly gray hat tactic where we scrape email addresses off the volume of traffic coming to a site. When you have a high value content site where every page is designed with intent and provides value, people tend to remember who you are. So collecting their email address without necessarily getting it on a form is valuable. I’ve added 10,000 people to my own email marketing list, and we beat the industry open averages by about 300 %. So I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that the handful of clients that I’ve had, same thing is true. We send market updates and done by the client, and that’s all we’re sending. And by the way, if I was to leverage paid advertising, I would do retargeting and display advertising with Travis Tom, over at Y Lopo.
Pretty much all the savvy, bleeding edge marketers are also using retargeting and redirecting somebody’s eyeballs to something. My something would be, Hey, remember this amazing content over here? Remember the fact that I have an updated market report over here? That would be my content. Just keep driving people to your amazing content because when they hit the top of their decision making funnel, if you’ve been in front of them a lot and you provided a lot of value, probably about 60 % to 70 % get the call. I think the.
Other factor is a lot of people forget about this. I feel if you really follow this, folks, you won’t go far. Everything you send out or your website sends out, your emails you’re seeing that, just try and place yourself in your prospective client’s shoes. If you’re in their shoes, would you want to get it? Would you find it? Would it help you in your in the purchase of the largest purchase that you’re ever going to be engaged in for almost 80 to 90 % of the population, it’s the biggest financial purchase of their life, their home. Is anything you’re sending them, does it help them? Does it educate them? Does it help them? Does it make it easier to buy the right house? If it doesn’t, for God’s sake, don’t send it out.
Yeah. And here’s what we’re working on an inbound rem. I’m giving everybody a bleeding edge look, literally like you can almost still hear the ow as the knife cuts the skin. Everybody, listen up. It is what’s the list of resources you need to sell your home on average. And what I mean by that is who are all the people that you’re going to contact? And some of the things we’ve already come up with, such as tax resources, probate, 10 31 exchanges, some of these are common. Here’s what’s not common, ladies and gentlemen. It’s not common for somebody to give you a full and complete list all at once. That’s what’s uncommon. It’s not that the individual elements that I’m going to say should have rang any bells for anybody in particular. But what if I was to tell you that we’re going to do a 200 point list on every single thing you might possibly need to list your home, down to painters, landscapers, all the possibilities as a template so that you could pass that off to each and every single person listening in their home. Works anywhere in the country because it’s so complete.
That’s what I’m talking about. That’s value. My agents and people coming to my website will probably download that incessantly because it’s free and they can use it. But guess whose logo is on it? Guess who made it? Guess whose copyright is on it? Moah. All right. I think that we’ve used our time really well here today, Jon. I’ve enjoyed the conversation. Obviously, I’ve been on one It’s just I’ve got a weird super adrenaline filled life on the other side of this podcast, and it’s just been nonstop. I want to say thank you to all my clients that listen to this show. Inbound R AM has already had a couple of record, literally backbreaking months in the early parts of 2023. We’re barely able to keep up with it. So do us a favor, like the show, Jon, if people would like to reach you and talk to you or beta test with you or any of the amazing things that you offer, how would you like them to do that?
Yeah, we’re looking for some community to be a site agents that know if they get themselves prepared in the next year, that in 18 months, they’re going to be inundated with new clients. But you’ve got to do the work now. So we’re looking for some agents. We got a great offer. For the right agent, we will build and host a website. We will customize your homepage, your About Us page, host it for you, maintain it for a year for free. You’ve got to utilize our platform, give us feedback, love it, and tell other agents about it. That’s the deal. And it’s a great offer. If that sounds interesting to you, and it should, go over to Mel hyphen Wright. Com. You can sign up for a quick chat with me or Adam, and we’ll see you for a good fit. And hopefully, we’ll work with you and get some great results for you. Back over to you, Rob. For those of.
You that follow the show, you’ll know how rarely I mention inbound R AM on here. It’s actually pretty rare. I just say you can go to the site, look at it. So I’m going to make a rare announcement for inbound rem. We have actually had such a strong opening to the year that sooner than later, probably in the next couple of weeks, we’re going to close our calendar for new clients, potentially for two to three months. I f anybody’s listening to the show while we scale up and produce the clients that we already have in the queue, if anybody’s listening to the show and they think they want to get, they might want to explore our services, which are definitely on the mid to high end of the marketing market, please do me a favor, reach out via my About page, which you can find on the website. Sorry, Services page, which you can find on the website. Either send me a message directly or go to my calendar, which is on my About page and schedule an appointment with me directly. Anyway, thank you, everybody, for your support. John and I deeply appreciate it. John, thank you so much from me to you.
I really appreciate you selecting the topic and as usual dealing with me and poking small fun as I very much deserve. All right. Thank you, everybody. We really appreciate it.
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