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Difficult market? No problem! Learn how realtors can achieve a full six free with expert tips and innovative tactics to stand out.
With Special Guest Steve Shull From Performance Coaching.
Are you feeling the pinch in a complex real estate environment? This video is here to help! We explore practical methods for realtors looking to maintain their hard-earned full 6% commission despite market challenges. From leveraging technology to refining sales pitches, gain valuable knowledge that empowers you as an agent. Take charge of your career—tune in now and uncover strategies for thriving in any market!
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode 455 of the Mailright Show today. We are ecstatic and blessed to have a guest with us. Steve, we’ve been very particular over the last year about the people we allow on the show. So today’s guest is Steve Shuhl. I’m not sure, and this is my wrong; I wonder if you’re the founder or if you merely work for performance coaching. You could start there.
I am the founder.
Okay. So you’re the founder of performance coaching, and the subject that we decided to talk about today was how realtors can still get a complete 6% in a challenging market. Before we go any further, Steve, why not introduce yourself to our audience and explain why you feel you can give advice that would get that result?
Awesome. Again, thank you for having me. Again, my name is Steve Shoal. I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I attended the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, on a football scholarship. From there, I had the good fortune of playing four years in the NFL for the Miami Dolphins, playing under Don Shula, the winningest coach in NFL history, and a knee injury ended my career. From there, I went back on an MBA at the University of Miami. From there, I went to Wall Street, spent five years on Wall Street, and worked for Solomon Brothers as a fixed-income institutional salesperson. Then, in 1991, I changed everything in my life and I moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, moved out to Southern California, and started selling residential real estate in 1991. With a partner in my first year, we closed 53 transactions. And then, in my second year, I was on track to close 100 transactions Connections. And I went to a gentleman, Mike Ferry, who was putting on real estate seminars at the time that I had been attending, came to Mike with the idea of starting a real estate coaching program.
And Mike liked the idea. And in 1993, we launched the first real estate coaching program in the country, in the world, whatever. And I’ve done that ever since. I went out on my own in 1996 for performance coaching in 2007 and opened up with two partners. My brokerage, TELUS Properties, was there for five years. That brokerage ultimately sold to Douglas Element. And here we are in 2024. I’ve been coaching for 32 years. I’ve logged over 60,000 hours of one-on-one coaching. I can safely say I’ve coached more real estate agents than anyone on Earth, and I’m here today.
Copy you. Well, we’re overjoyed to have you, Steve. Your history makes you a legend, for sure. Just the fact that you were there with Mike before his son Tom split off and became the guy that he is is astounding. And for those who missed that, I referenced Tom Ferry, who is Mike Ferry’s son, for all of you following along. All right, John, why don’t you introduce yourself? A hard act to follow. I’m going to go last.
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of mail-right. Com. We are a digital lead platform for real estate agents who want to do their campaigns, or we can do their campaigns. It’s a CRM, an email text platform. We also produce a fantastic-looking website for our agents. Back over to you, Rob.
It’s funny, Steve because I usually get to say on every single podcast that I am the most experienced SEO guy in the US because I still, to this very day, talk to three or four real estate professionals every single day. And I’ve been doing it for 16 years. That’s only half as much time as you’ve been doing it. I am no longer the most experienced anything. I may know more about SEO, but I have yet to talk to more real estate agents and have not logged 60,000 hours. You win the prize, my friend. Thank you for this particular session. You feel like you’ve got some good advice, and it sounds like you would have some great advice. So why don’t we dig into it? John, why don’t you lead us off since you’re the one who did the show notes?
Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Rob. So Steve, after you agreed to come to the show, I watched some of your previous and recent interviews. You did an interview on a panel show about a year ago, and one of the topics was how you prove your value. I think it was around when you were discussing when you do a presentation, and I think you used a concept… Use a specific concept about you being the apparent choice when presenting.
Yeah, I thought it had always been my favorite.
Yeah, the favorite. That was the concept that you used. And then it got around And that concept led into really proving that you can get your full 6 %. And you were quite passionate in some of your statements in that panel show around getting that 6 % and the process of proving your value around that. So I just wondered if you’ve had any more thoughts about that particular concept, because everything that’s occurred afterwards, there’s a lot of agents that are very concerned about them not being able to get anything like that because of all the changes in the industry. Like I said, I don’t know if you got any new thoughts about what you stated during that roundtable.
Yeah, absolutely. Along with Chris Voss, who’s a former FBI hostage negotiator, and Chris wrote the book, Never Split the Difference, which I’m sure a lot of your listeners may have read. And I hooked up with Chris a little over eight years ago when I read that book because everything in that book, everything about hostage negotiations, applies to the world of real estate. And we adapted all of his material into the real estate world. And one of the concepts that we talk about is the favorite or the fool. And the entire real estate industry, and this is where what we do is very different from the rest of the real estate training world. The entire real estate industry is built on a false premise. And that false premise is that you win or lose business, a) based on your value proposition position and b) on your ability to articulate your value to a potential seller or a potential buyer. That’s not how it actually happens. When that seller calls you up, the call that every real estate agent wants to get, hi, we’re thinking about selling our home and we’d like you to come out and talk to us.
When you get that phone call, that seller already knows who they’re going to list their home with or they’re leaning strongly in a direction. And so they have a favorite. Now, it’s not 100 % of the time when you’re the favorite, you have an 80 % chance or better of getting that listing. When you’re the fool in the game, you have a 20 % chance or less of getting that listing. So what we’re coaching agents to do is find out, am I the favorite or am I the And in a 15 minute Zoom call or phone call, you can get to that outcome. You can find out whether you indeed are the favorite, you’re the person they want to work with or you’re the fool in the game. It’s not about telling them all the things you’re going to do for them. It has nothing to do with anything. And the kicker here getting to your question, when you’re the favorite, when you’re the favorite, they’re going to pay you what your fee They’re going to pay you what your fee because they want to work with you. And it’s based on trust, not value.
And this is where, again, agents go down the wrong path when all they’re trying to do is preach their value and convince people with what they’re going to do. It’s not about value. It’s about trust. And people pay a lot more for trust than value. And so when I know I’m the favorite, when I find out I’m the favorite, then I know, again, it’s not 100 %. It’s not a guarantee. They’re going to pay my full fee. They may push back once. They may push back twice. However, there’s a difference. They’re only fishing. They’re only making sure that they’re not leaving any money on the table. When you’re the fool in the game and they bring up the commission objection, they’re going to try and make you wrong. You have to be able to hear, are they just fishing for why you cost more, or are they trying to make you wrong for why you charge more? There’s a big difference. And now we wrote this book before the NAR settlement. Now, the way I view this, and this is not polyam in any way, shape or form, everything that’s happened since the NAR settlement is really an opportunity for agents to get a pay raise, whereas most agents think they’re going to get a pay cut in this new environment.
Look at it very differently. Pre-nar, the way it’s always been, the whole system bought into this 5 to 6% range on commissions, and 90% of the agents probably were charging somewhere between five and six. Obviously, it’s been going down and down and down. And everyone just accepted that’s the way it is. The most you’re going to get is six. And the average would be five. And Obviously, some people would work for less than five. What the NAR settlement did, it basically decoupled the commissions. In essence, the seller is going to pay their agent, the listing agent, And the buyer is going to pay their agent, the buyer’s agent. And now you’re free to charge whatever you want. You’re not confined by this five to six %. Now, most agents act like they’re still part of that system. However, they’re not. They’re doing that to themselves. And for the longest period of time, the agents I work with when they were when we were charged, they were charging six %. They were keeping three and a half on the on the listing side, offering two and a half on the buy side. Now, as a listing agent, my fee is going to be three and a half % on the listing side or more.
There’s nothing to stop an agent from charging more. And oh, by the way, the reason I say this is an opportunity for a pay raise, most sellers are used to hearing Earning five or six %. When you say to them, my fee is three and a half or my fee is four %, that’s not going to shock them. That’s not going to shock them. So A, on the listing side, three and a half minimum and on the buy side, three % minimum. So now if I’m a top agent, I’m looking at if I understand what I’m doing, I can be earning six, six and a half %. And the agents we work with, they get this consistently. It’s a standard. It’s what they charge everyone. And so that’s why I look at this as an opportunity to get a pay raise.
There’s a lot of… There’s many questions, but I’m going to ask Robert to come in. So what’s your response to that, Robert?
My response is everybody has to wait for my response for exactly 30 seconds while we go to break. And when we come back, I’m going to dig into some of the many points that Steve touched on in his commentary. We’ll be right back. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. It is episode number 455. If you missed the first half of the show, let me tell you, Steve is already demonstrating why he coaches the best of the best inside the real estate industry. He was explaining how basically, the way that I interpreted it, was numbers is a mindset. Every time you break free or the standard gets shaken, top agents will figure out ways to make more, not less. Jonathan, just so that you know, I agree with that. It’s been my experience. You have a large amount. Let’s see if you agree with these numbers. Steve, I think you have 20 or 30 % of the bottom performers that will probably end up surrendering their licenses. I think you have probably 20 to 30 % of the top realtors that will make more through this opportunity. They’ll figure out ways to… You use the language uncoupling from the system that NAR put in place.
I just think that they’ll look at all the shakeup as an opportunity to figure out ways to make more money doing what they probably already did well.
Yeah, change is always the seed of growth. And this is a massive change. This is a massive change for everyone. And a lot of people are just looking at, they’ve already resigned themselves to making less. However, that’s self-imposed. They are doing it to themselves. No one’s doing it to them. And as a real estate professional, no one’s ever going to understand your job. Everyone thinks you’re overpaid. Everyone thinks they could do your job better than you. They just don’t have the time or they’re not inclined to do so. And everyone is always reaching into your pocket. And not only do they reach into your pocket, they think they’re entitled to reach into your pocket. And so it may be my biggest passion as a real estate coach, that is getting you paid what you’re worth. And you can absolutely get paid what you’re worth, assuming you do the work. You’ve got to back it up. You’ve got to be competent. You’ve got to be trustworthy. You’ve got to be a straight shooter. But if you put in the work, you can absolutely get paid a full fee in this environment.
Yeah. So, John, I know you served it up and probably you would think I was going to give Steve a Robert special in terms of a question, but to be honest with you, he’s doing stuff that I would say, Anyway, I’m going to revert to a Warren Buffet quote. Be greedy when other people are running or retreating, and be conservative and cautious when other people are being greedy. And this is one of those moments for real estate. I’ve been saying it a long time in certain ways on the show, desperately, anxiously awaiting the real estate slowdown that has been headed our direction for years now because, one, the real estate market needs an adjustment. Two, the real estate sales force needs to be trimmed, not because I have anything against realtors, but because there are people that are not treating it with the level of sincerity and dedication that they should be that have real estate licenses, and they will get shaken out of the business. Three, the opportunity will be greater for true professionals who take everything with a high degree of pride, like trust. That’s what I heard What does Steve say. Did I get you wrong?
Trust is a big thing, right?
Again, my coaching has evolved over 32 years. When I started out, again, I was new to real estate. I had moved from the East Coast to the West Coast. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t know anything. I was the classic person starting literally at ground zero. What What I benefited from in the beginning was one, getting coaching in terms of the seminars I was going to. And as a former athlete, I understood what it meant to be coachable. So when I got into this business, what I was told, simple things. You have four choices. You have four ways of making contact. Cold call, door knock, expired listings for sale by owners. That was it. You have to do one of those four things. Those were the four choices I was given. I wasn’t going to cold call and for sale by owners didn’t seem I just didn’t vibe with it at all. By default, it was knock on doors and expired listings. And I knocked on 200 doors a day and I called every expired listing every day in 14 different cities. So I was literally spending a minimum of 4 to 5 hours every day prospecting and following up.
Back in 1991, CRMs did not exist. Top producer wasn’t around. There was nothing. I had to hire a computer programmer paying them $10,000 to create a CRM like program. And that’s what we did. And every lead went in there and we created a system and followed up on every single lead. And again, from playing football, I knew what it meant to be coachable. You do what you’re supposed to do. And it’s not about liking it. You talked about realtors leaving the business. There’s another category where they quit and don’t leave. And that takes up another big segment of the market. They don’t leave physically, but they’ve given up. And And so another book that I wrote is called Real Estate is not Rocket Science. I call it that because guess what? It’s not rocket science. It’s not rocket science. The way I got into real estate, I heard an interview that Mike Ferry was doing with two agents in Long Beach, California, Kim and Darryl Rouse. And they were in their second year of business and they were doing 100 deals. So I was listening, what are they doing? And what I got out of that interview is real estate is a progression.
Contacts equal leads, leads, equal appointments, appointments, equal listings, listings equal sales. That made perfect sense to me. And so that’s why I went out. And the thing I was told, again, back then, I was fortunate because Mike Ferry had this thing, if you didn’t do 50 deals a year, you were worthless. You were worthless. In my head, I had to do 50 deals a year. In order to do 50 deals a year, you had to talk to 50 people a day. It was all very straightforward. So that’s why 200 doors a day. That’s why I was calling expired listings. The goal was to make 50 contacts a day. And again, this is completely by coincidence. I ended up closing 53 deals in that first year in a market that was so horrible. If you could get something sold in 90 days, that was a miracle. Here I am, a rookie. Imagine this first year in real estate, 40 listings, no escrows. That’s how different the market is, especially from today. Anyway, the story here, in the beginning, it was all about prospecting. It was all about lead generation, lead conversion. Where my coaching has evolved to today, it’s all about building a repeat and referral business.
So in the beginning, most people have to lead generate. You have to do it. You have to figure out how you’re going to make contact. And again, there aren’t that many ways. You can cold call, you can door knock, expired for sale by owners, open house, network, marketing. There are only so many different ways to generate leads. You’ve got to figure out what you’re going to do, and that’s up to you. There’s no one size fits all. However, now where the coaching is evolved to is making sure that all everything goes in your CRM and CRM is very simple. There’s three parts to CRM, get the right people in, organized, grouped and tagged in the right way. There’s It’s four main groups, active clients, leads, past clients, sphere of influence. And there’s definitions for each group. You get the right people in, get them set up on the right cadence. And then you got to make your calls every day. Again, this is not rocket science. And in order to do that, you have to time block out your CRM time every day, minimum one hour. And so that’s what we coach people on building a repeat and referral business, staying in touch every 90 days, reaching out by phone or in person.
You can follow up with text. You can follow up with email. It’s still a people business. You still have to talk to people. And going back to what you brought up, what you’re working to do every day is to position yourself as a trusted advisor. And what that means means is you put your client’s interest first. When I teamed up with Chris Voss, the methodology that they had come up with in the hostage negotiation world was called tactical empathy. And tactical empathy is the skill of influencing others by articulating what they’re thinking and feeling. What that means is making people feel understood. And this is the missing piece in all of sales. You get a lot of training about how to understand someone, how to ask questions, how to find out what’s going on. However, there’s a missing piece. Once you understand what’s going on, then you have to make them feel understood. And the way you make them feel understood is by labeling back to them what they’re thinking and feeling. It sounds It’s like, it seems like, it feels like, you’re probably thinking, you’re probably feeling. So there’s a way of labeling back so they get that you get what they’re thinking and feeling.
And so we call that mirroring. But I understand what you’re saying.
And mirroring is one of the tools that we use in tactical empathy. Now, again, we’re not trying to manipulate people to our advantage. That’s not what this is all about. Tactical empathy is about making people feel understood. What we’re trying to do is uncover the truth. Am I the favorite or am I the fool in the game? And the way we do that, we have a little framework that we go by. One, is there a deal here? That’s the first thing we’re trying to figure out. Is there a deal here? Secondly, is Is there a deal here with me? And third, do I want this deal? And within this framework, there’s a progression of questions, labels, different tools in the tactical empathy toolbox that we’re going to ask to uncover what’s true. Again, we’re not trying to convince anybody of anything. I’m not trying to get someone to do business with me. I’m finding out who Who wants to do business with me? And again. You can do this on by phone or on a Zoom call in roughly 15 minutes or less. Nothing magical about the 15 minute mark. However, the agents we coach, they do not go on listing appointments.
Right now, when you get a call, the call I mentioned earlier, you’re thinking of selling our home, we’d like you to talk to us. You say, great, you set an appointment Then you’re going to spend 2 hours minimum preparing for that appointment. You’re going to drive out to the house. You’re going to take a tour of the home. Then you’re going to sit down there in the living room. You’re going to take out your presentation and you’re going to spend an hour to 2 hours going through your presentation, either formally or informally. After that two hour meeting, they’re going to say to you, wow, you’ve given us so much to think about. Let us get back On the way back, you don’t know, did I get it? Did I not get it? You’re replaying the whole meeting. I should have said this. I should have said that. You’re on pins and needles for 24, 48, 72 hours. Then your phone rings. You see it’s them. Your heart starts beating. Oh, my goodness. They get you on the phone. They say, Steve, you did a really tremendous job. You gave us so much to think about.
However, we’re going to go in a different direction. And your heart stops and you feel defeated. You can barely say thank you and hang up the phone. We could have saved all of that and gotten to that same conclusion in 15 minutes or the opposite conclusion. You got the listing.
So I agree I’m with you, but Steve, I’m going to have you put a pin in it really quick because we break this show into segments. We’ve done 30 minutes. We’re going to do 10 bonus minutes. If you’d like to continue on to the subject, we can definitely do that in the bonus section, assuming that you sign up with us for the extra 10 minutes because we’re going to post it to our YouTube channel. Yeah, you’re good? All right. John, I’m going to ask for a small favor, Steve. You’ve been going down this path with the response for for a listing point, which I think is great. I think it’s a great piece of information. But I would like to give John… John does all the donkey work for the show. He does a lot of research. He probably watched a couple of hours of your video, so he’s probably got a few things prepared that he may want to ask before the show ends. So if you don’t mind, I would just like to give him that opportunity to ask any remaining questions and give you a chance to respond. Is that okay?
You got it.
All right, John.
You answered one of the questions, which is finding out if you’re the favorite or the fool. What’s your opinion of how all clients are different? But in general, based on your experience, what are the key factors that in the client’s mind makes the agent the favorite?
Great question. Based on the work that Chris Voss did, we break people down into three types: the assertive, the accommodator, and the analyst. And most real estate agents are accommodators. They’re people-pleasers. An accommodator is someone who puts relationship first. The assertive is the bottom line guy. And the analyst, it’s all about data. And so it’s important that you understand who you are and what your style of communication is, because if you really want to be effective with a client, you need to be able to adapt what you’re saying to how they hear things. So you can read based on responses, is someone an accommodator? Are they an analyst? Are they an assertive? And adapt how you communicate to them. Because, again, what’s important is making them feel understood. And what’s going to make them feel more understood is speaking their language. The accommodator speaks the language of hope. The assertive, it’s all about respect. And the analyst, it’s all about the numbers. So knowing who you’re speaking with gives you an idea of how to tailor your communication communication to that person.
Yeah, I think they’re great points, but I might be being a little bit slow here, but are you saying that the agent, they communicate in one of those styles and through their website, through their social media, through all the marketing mediums, when they’re meeting people at events, they’ve got one of those communication styles, and that’s what they attract similar possible clients because of their communication style. Is that what you’re saying?
What I’m saying is you want to be able to do business with everyone. And you need to understand your personality type, because if we just say there’s three basic types, that means two thirds of the world is not the same type you are. They’re going to hear information in a different way. And the beautiful thing about tactical empathy, it’s not a business thing. It’s a life thing. It’s a way of communicating. Making people feel understood is something you can practice all the time in every conversation with the kids at home, with your spouse, your partner, whomever, work associate, work associate in business. It’s a way of communicating that focuses on making it always about the other person, always making it about them. In fact, what you want to do to be the most effective communicator is you want to take yourself out of the equation altogether. It’s not about what you want and need. It’s always about what they want and need. And when you’re able to do that, when you’re able to detach your needs, your wants from any interaction with anyone, that’s going to build that trust that we talked we talked about earlier.
And ultimately, that’s what’s going to end up resulting in more business.
But I have it here, Rob.
So we’re going to head towards a windup. And when we do, Steve, we’re going to ask you for some contact information. I’m just going to give a very brief synopsis of what I heard you say, but I am going to move it slightly out of the territory that you’ve been talking about it in. Our show and our focus is oftentimes on discussions surrounding digital, and you are very much a traditionalist, which so that you know, my personal history is 100 % everything that you said. I’ve knocked on tens of thousands of doors. I did so for ADT among many, many contracts. I’ve done massive amounts of cold calling. And in the last part of my career here, I’ve moved into inbound marketing, mostly because I did so much cold calling and so much door knocking. I just got a little bit tired of it. So I moved. I shifted as technology caught up to my my philosophy, which is a Zigler thing. If you help enough people get what they want, you’ll always get what you want. I moved that skill set into digital. I moved it into answering really important questions for people. And you’ve been talking a lot about tone, and personality types and things like that.
So, for those of you listening to the show who are long-time listeners, I will say this: when you decide on a persona online, which I decided long ago, I’m just going to be myself, Steve. I’m not anybody else. I’m just me. And so I’m a fast talker. I’m much younger than I look. And so I gravitate. The people that call me tend to be younger, tech-savvy people.
But interestingly, my experience is more towards Mike Ferry. I am much more inclined to talk to a Mike Ferry guy than I am to most other people because when somebody tells me I’m on the phone four hours a day, God, do I ever get that? So, for those listening, decide on a persona and then speak to that persona on your social media. My advice is not to try to be all things in one to everybody. Be one thing and decide, and you’ll appeal to that market segment. But digital is vast, unlike picking up a list and calling 50, 60, 70, 80, or 100 names. It’s vast. It’s 10,000 people, 100,000 people, 1 million people.
A single video can speak to God knows how many people. But the only people who will call you are those who automatically gravitate to your particular tone and personality type. That’s been my experience, at least. So thank you so much for coming on to the show, Steve. Undoubtedly, we still need to gain the voice of experience on the show, especially regarding great traditional sales wisdom. There’s nothing that will ever stop a determined sales salesperson from making money. All you got to do is Tom Hopkins used to call it get belly to belly. You’re calling it something different. Everybody had some way of saying it. But, if you have the drive to get in front of people, you can sell it, full stop. If you want to knock on doors, it’ll work today, just like 20 years ago. The numbers might be slightly higher because of the way that people answer doors and rings and stuff like that. But it doesn’t matter. If you’re determined to go out and knock on doors, you will make some money.
How would you like people- The thing I would… Sorry to butt in a little bit. You can take everything I say and adapt it to digital, meaning not making it about you, making it about them, seeing the world through their eyes, inviting them to get to know you, to make space in whatever you do for them to want to know more about you, know who you are. The great thing about digital is that it’s a huge amplifier for this foundation of building relationships. It gives you the ability every day to set the foundation with personal contact; now, you can amplify that foundation in an unlimited way.
I love that. All right, we’re at the end of our time today. Again, I want to thank you very much, Steve. I have yet to hear your name directly, but your work history industry suggests that you are a legend in the industry. I’m so thrilled that we got you on the show. Thank you, John, for having arranged that. I appreciate it. Steve, if you wanted people to reach out to you, talk to you, or do whatever it is going to be, how would you like them to do that?
You can go to the website, www. Performancecoaching. Com. If you would like to ask a question, please email support@performancecoaching. Com. And we’ve got books on Amazon, the full-fee agent, real estate is Not Rocket Science, and the real estate team playbook. So go on to Amazon. We’ve got three books for you.
Beautiful. And John, if you wanted people to do the same with you, how would you have people reach out to you and get in touch with you, research you, or do whatever you think they should do?
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Rob. Just go either to the mail-right. Have a look at the Com website. You can book a free chat with me or go to the Mail-Right YouTube channel. We have many videos and cover many of the concepts discussed in the podcast. Back over to you, Rob.
Beautiful. For those of you who liked my way of podcast-helping you through this episode, you can always do more research about me at Inboundrm. Com. I walk my talk. Every lesson I’ve learned, everything you need to know about SEO, is all there for you to read and engage with for free. If you want to talk to me directly, email me at robert@inboundarium. Com. All right, guys, it’s been a great show. I appreciate it. John will take us offline, and we’ll spend 20 seconds talking to you, Steve, about some wrap-up stuff after the show.
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Make the phone ring with powerful digital campaigns! Unlock proven techniques for engaging audiences and driving conversions now.
Unlock the secrets to crafting digital campaigns that generate leads and make your phone ring off the hook! In this video, we’ll guide you through proven strategies for targeting your ideal audience, creating compelling content, and leveraging data analytics to optimize your outreach. Whether a small business owner or a seasoned marketer, these insights will elevate your campaign game.
#1 – Standing Out in a Crowded Market
Priming
Scarcity
Surprising Statistics
Curiosity
#2 – How Do You Build Real Trust With Your Customer?
#3 – Attracting Quality Prospects Without Chasing
#4 – Maximizing Your ROI
Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. It’s episode number 454. We will talk about some general rules that will work on creating digital campaigns that will make your phone ring. As usual, my co-host, Jonathan Dinwood, has done the research for the show. He’s chosen the subject for the show. He’s given the show notes for the show. He’s going to put them up on the MailRight channel. This is his second or third podcast. I always need to remember how many he does. It is a labor of love. I hope some of you will thank John because he is the engine that runs this thing. Before I go any further into anything about you, man, why don’t you explain to people who you are?
Oh, thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of mail-right. Com. We’re a marketing platform. We provide great websites, CRM, email, and SMS messaging campaigns. We combine that with Facebook. It’s a great platform. Back over to you, Rob.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve never done this on this show before. John has asked me to do it for years. I’m a bizarre guy. I look at the market as a whole. This platform that John built is extraordinarily well-positioned right now. It’s a minimal investment. It has a lot of functionality. It is on the lower side, with a higher engagement from the founder. It may or may not work as smoothly as some of these other platforms. However, it is less expensive. It’s built on WordPress. And if you are thinking about learning the skills that will lead you to substantial digital success, this would be the tool that might do well for you. I am not making any guarantees. It’s possible. If you were going to think about ever, if you’re a new realtor, first year or two, and you’re tired of getting quoted $500 to $1,000 a month for any marketing system you look at, this is a no-brainer. It is. You’ve got an engaged founder who will probably, again, I don’t know for sure, I haven’t worked with him in this capacity, that will probably hold your hand walking you through the platform, make sure you know how to use it, which is also incredibly hard to find out there.
Any of you guys who have bought new systems or are new realtors already know what I’m talking about because sometimes it’s not a matter of having a good tool. It’s learning how to use it and having somebody properly give you the structure to use it. Having said all that, my name is Robert Newman. For those who don’t know me, I’m one of the industry’s most prolonged-standing and experienced voices regarding SEO and search engine optimization. I talk about CRMs and other things on my website, inboundrem. Com. It makes me qualified to talk about campaigns that will make the phone ring and stuff like that. I’ve been doing it for 16 years, making me one of the longest-standing founders still doing content like this. While we will get going on the subject, I apologize to those who bore through that enormously long and very advertising-like intro to the show. It’s just the industry is just this is the perfect time. Make the phone ring with a robust digital campaign to unlock proven techniques for engaging the audience and driving conversions now.
And, John, you usually look at something behind the scenes. You didn’t link me to the thing behind the scenes that you looked at this particular time. Before you jump into, because I’m going to have you do, number one, standing out in a crowded market, I will have you take that and run with it. But usually, you have inspiration. Usually, you look around and go to this person, person, or site.
That’s a polite way, folks, to say I’ve nicked some ideas of somebody else, which is true. I look at the content out there and whatever I think the audience would be interested in, and I try to manipulate it so we add some additional value to it.
Is there somebody who inspired this?
Yeah, it was an interview. I’m surprised I didn’t send you the link. It was an interview, and I forgot their names, but I’ll include them in the show notes. Jimmy, he’s Jimmy. He’s been on the podcast quite a while ago. Burgess.
Jimmy is brilliant.
And he was having an interview with one of the founders of Curator, and they were going through some of these basic concepts of branding and marketing that work. And it’s a bit further along than our last podcast, which was very 101. This moves the discussion to a more sophisticated level.
For those of you who don’t know them, and I’m sure most of you do, because he’s bigger than John and I combined. Jimmy Burgess is an actual real estate broker who is creating and building a platform because I think ultimately he’s trying to let agencies It’s number one, I think he wants to do good by agents, and number two, I think he wants to let everybody know that there’s an option to move to him in his brokerage and get the help and training that a lot of agents need. I will say that Jimmy Jimmy is one of the very few voices I listen to. I read his content; I listen to his content. He’s got some creative, brilliant ideas. John and I accidentally nicked one of his ideas without knowing it was one of Jimmy’s. We did that three years ago when we discussed a generating method, which was 9 million or 90 million. An extraordinarily high number of people, using this prospecting method, used Google Earth. Jimmy came up with a thought about prospecting that was just brilliant. It’s just brilliant. We both thought it was clever, and we did a show about its brilliance.
So today, we’re going to do something else. We’re going to talk about standing out in a crowded market. Here’s the one thing I want to say: John and I probably have more experience directly in the digital space than Jimmy might. And that’s perhaps the spin on our show that we’re going to take on this subject, which is the digital elements of this.
Oh, so I also think he’s one of the more credible voices in the training influencer market. It’s like three or four that I think have some credibility, and I think he’s got some real credibility, and he’s a decent guy, isn’t he?
He really is. He’s a great human. Well, I don’t know how good of a human he is, but I know he’s a good guy, and he’s done our show, and he seems to really have some… He is the sales manager and sales leader that you’d want to work for if you were a good salesperson, because he’s going to give you ideas that you don’t already have yourself, and then he’s going to also inspire you to go out and utilize those ideas. That’s just real hard to find, and I think that Jimmy does bring that to the table. What’s more, he is a generalist, which there are very few of those out there. He is good at talking to you about all the elements of being a real estate salesperson, psychology and digital and how to actually go out and do the deal, how to knock on a door. He’s a generalist. He has a lot to say on a lot of subjects, and he generally tends to know what he’s talking about. I think that’s very rare, actually, John. I think he’s one of a kind when you take into account that he’s a really high-performing real estate broker.
Him and Kyle Handy, maybe, I think, are the two that And I think he strikes me as being a little more experienced than Kyle. He seems to have more to say on more subjects. So having said all that, why don’t you lead us into scanning out in a crowded market?
Yeah, I think some of the basic marketing psychology principles, and I’ve just put down four, and one is priming. Priming is the language, the photographs, the subliminal messaging that you’re transmitting to your target audience. I think a lot… I don’t know what Rob is going to think of this, but I think priming, I think when it comes to real estate agents, The most direct example that a lot of agents gets is around marketing to luxury market. But this applies to other sectors, but they get it a bit easier when you talk to the difference between the luxury market and the normal market, where you’re going to need better photography. There’s a higher expectation of the website. I think you can apply this, and you should apply it to non-luxury market. But I think this is just my observation, Robert, and you might have a different view on it. But I just think agents accept it when it comes to luxury a bit easier, the concept of priming. That’s why I’ve brought that example. And then we got scarcity. Well, you find that with a lot of marketing, online marketing is people, they tend to feel that there’s less of a risk in doing nothing, where the The reality is there’s a big risk in doing nothing, missing opportunity, time goes quickly.
But as human beings, I think instinctively, the easy option is to do nothing, where scarcity, you utilize the principle scarcity to just move the person to actually take action. Because as human beings, I believe that in built into our psychology is there’s a benefit of not acting on anything. It’s the more secure position that most of us take subconsciously, all right? And then using surprising statistics. Well, we have a view of the world. We all have this internal view of how the world works. And surprising statistics can challenge, be disruptors. They can challenge how we see something. I think. It’s like with animal behavior. If you’ve got a dog that barks a quick snap of the fingers or quick movement, can shake an animal out of a mindset. Well, When it comes to human beings, surprising statistics can shake us out of the norm we see a situation. That’s how I view it. Then you got curiosity. Well, I think we are curiosity machines. I think that’s one of humanity’s strengths. We are always curious. Well, most of us are. There’s a few people I’ve met done as they come, and they’re not very curious, but most of us are curious.
So if you can induce that in your marketing, I think that would be beneficial. And so that’s my basic outline of these four basic principles, Robert.
So all of these things are correct, but I think that oftentimes… Here’s a surprising trend in my own videos, John. I’ve been discovering that the videos that I do, just me in a desk and a talking head, and showing people specifically how I do something I have been getting a lot more traction lately than my whiteboard videos and my general knowledge videos. I think that the reason for that is simple. I just really quickly googled Jimmy Burgess, and I found hundreds of posts that he’s done. I use the word Jimmy Burgess in Prime trying to look up something for this podcast that we’re doing. I can’t find it easily. And nor did AI help me, did not get me to the place I wanted to go. And that’s because he’s I’ve done a lot of content. I think everybody’s done it. So I’m going to do something I don’t generally do. When you’re talking about priming, you’re really saying you want a good introduction or a attention-grabbing photo to start your campaign off, or an attention-grabbing headline is what we use to focus on in AdWords. And with SEO, we talk about attention-grabbing metadata, which is the sentence below the subject header When you get a search result, you get the search result and then you get the sentence, the metadata is written by the SEO team.
So we do have the chance to basically advertise even in organic results. It’s called priming or attention-grabbing. Jimmy, God bless his heart, is using his own language to do the subject, to do the content. I would probably call it something different. But one way or the other, it is grabbing somebody’s attention. John is not You could do that through a photo. You could use AI for these photos. You could use whatever for the photo. But what we cannot teach you is creativity. Humor grabs attention. Truth grabs attention when presented in an interesting way. Last but not least, for those of you that were really following along with what John just said, a amazing photography partner will grab attention every single There’s a photographer whose name I forget in Colorado who is the most in demand photographer in the entire real estate world because he takes these extraordinary pictures of Colorado homes in the mountains He has this way of lighting the homes. He hides all these colored lights, John. It’s crazy. What he does is he enhances the natural colors on the outside of the house, and he somehow puts lights in the environment surrounding the so that the trees are lit.
When you see these photos, they look fake. They’re so good, but they’re not fake. They are a guy who just really understands lighting. Every time somebody lists one of the homes where they’ve used this guy as a photographer, they get thousands upon thousands of clicks. Why? The guy is taking pictures that are extraordinary, and that is priming because you want to see what’s inside the house based on the amazing photographer photography on the outside of the house. Here’s the crazy part, John, it’s not even necessarily luxury. A vertical, a very specific type of property, yes, but not necessarily luxury. So priming.
The reason why I use the luxury example, because I agree with you, there’s a lot… I just used it, Rob, is that our audience, I think they tend to bundle all other… I might be wrong here, Rob, but I just feel they bundle all into one category, and they accept luxury as a separate, and they understand the materials, the priming that they’re going to have to provide on the website and other materials is going to be different to every other property that they tend to bundle in one big category.
I agree. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to drop a name I’ve never dropped stopped on this show before. She was put on my radar recently. She’s been put on my radar many times. She’s been doing some stuff lately that I really love. She’s doing some brand ambassador stuff. She’s got 5,000 subscribers in the hardest market to crack into in terms of digital, that would be San Francisco. Her name is Ruth Krishnan, K-R-I-S-H-N-A-N. Ladies and gentlemen, check Ruth’s site out. Check her photos out. Don’t copy her crying out loud. Understand that there is a creative process. Ruth’s creative process is simple and direct. It matches my philosophy with her with a much higher level of branding acumen. In order to make a simple brand really pop, you actually need to be an incredible brand person. Ruth is either that herself or works with other people that are. If you want to see a simple video, a simple editing, but really moves the needle, you’ll look at her. But priming. Second, scarcity. A scarcity is easy right now. Scarcity is so simple because most of you, over 80% of the people listening to the show right now, Jonathan, should be dealing with inventory crises like they’ve never dealt with before in their entire career.
So scarcity, which is what Jimmy is saying, like a pocket listing, or it won’t be available for long, or we have a rare listing in neighborhood name. And what I love about scarcity in today’s market is I live in Vanhijs. You don’t get more Metro or more unsexy or unexciting than the city I live in. And I promise everybody listening to the show right now Now, if I was listing a listing in Vanhijs, I would absolutely use the scarcity tactic. Why? Nobody’s selling in Vanhijs. Nobody’s selling anywhere. So when something came onto the market, I would say it’s not going to be on the market long. You should look Look at this now. Look at it fast before they change their mind. Scarcity. You know what the best part is? It’s truthful. Who knows? Scarcity. Surprising statistics. I loved what John had to say about this. I’m going to add my own little element to it. Surprising statistics are… One of the things I like about another name I’m going to drop, the guy that talks about statistics that I follow the most is usually Christoff, too, who does market updates every month. It’s central to his marketing strategy.
He adds it to his website. And by the way, his pages rank for terms like Bellar real estate. All right? So it’s working really well. Him just taking a look at statistics. But what he does do is he adds context after being in the business for 20 years, reads the statistics off a screen, but then says this might be like right now, prices are plummeting in Beverly Hills. I’ll bet everybody would not guess why. Well, there’s a mansion tax in LA that just came into effect. It’s 4 or 5%. And guys like stars that just weren’t paying enough attention are trying to list their home. And usually famous people can list their home for a premium. Jim Carrey has had to lower his house price three different times already, and it’s down like he’s already down about 12 million off the ask, the original asking. That is not a small number, everybody. It is down by 35 to 40 %. So when Christoff did his numbers recently, I was surprised. It was like a 20 % drop in a market that doesn’t generally see 3 % drops, 20 % in Beverly Hills. Sometimes the market does your job for you.
Sometimes. When it does, you should really call that out. Curiosity. Curiosity is like… All of you listening to the show right now might get curious. You might Google Christoff. Curiosity is a major driver for some of us because some of you might want to check my info, go, That can’t possibly be right. Once you surprised somebody, you might not go… That can’t possibly I need to be correct. I got to be honest with all of you. I did a double take, and then I verified Christoff’s information. It seemed wrong to me. It was so surprising. It turns out that it wasn’t. That’s how I got onto a rabbit hole that made me find out that Jim People like Jim Carrey, that’s how I got down the whole rabbit hole. It was the only curiosity, I can’t buy those homes. If the price keep dropping, maybe I can, but I certainly can’t right now. What’s happening is the tax This is 4-5% straight off the top. That’s what the tax is. It’s anything over $5 million in certain cities. These guys are just like, they at least have to drop their price by 5%, at at least because nobody wants to pay that tax just to buy the home.
So curiosity will take you a long way in your marketing. The thing is, you have to have an understanding of what might make somebody curious If you had a surprising number, a great photo, or any of the things that were on our list, they will already be curious. So it’s all taken care of if you get anything one through three on the campaign, right? The curiosity will be there. Now you can say, Click here to learn more, and curiosity drives the click, drives the propellant into the campaign. Another thing about curiosity, and it’s not as good of a strategy as it it used to be, but it is still viable, is curious about somebody who seems to be really good at what they do, like hundreds of five-star reviews, so on and so forth. You really want That drives curiosity, especially if you happen to be in a market where a lot of people aren’t really maintaining that reputation. Sometimes curiosity is just driven by results, like really good results. John, why don’t you take us into the neck? Well, hold on. Let me look at the time here. You know what? We’re going to go to break.
Sorry, we really over extended. We’re going to take a little quick break so that you can hear from our sponsors. No, I’m just kidding. John and I sponsor the show. We’re going to take a quick break. We will be right back. And when we come back, we will have some other great subjects for you from talking another 10 or 15 minutes about how to make your phone ring. All right, thank you so much. We’ll be right back. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 454. We’re talking about how to create digital campaigns that make the phone ring. We just did a really long number one with a lot of sub-subjects. Number two is simpler. How do you build your trust with your consumers? Jon, how do you do it?
Well, I think there’s two ways. One way, I’m not the on, because I think if you got good testimonials, and they’re real testimonials, and you put effort, the Melright system, part of it is getting testimonials out of people, doing surveys and identifying those that will give you a good testimonial. But I think having good testimonials, but the more not so obvious is, I think, something that you’ve touched on in other episodes about the importance of the About Us page, about story, about telling people about your background, about why you got into a particular industry, why you started your company. I think you’ve promoted that quite a bit in a couple of our episodes. And I see that as building trust as well. So there’s the more obvious testimonials, and then the less obvious but equally powerful, which is around storyline and telling people about yourself in a not in a boastful way, but in a way that if you wanted to know more about Robert, the way you would give that information over to people.
I think it’s It’s interesting that you touch on this because I need to be really honest with you, and I need to be really honest with the audience. Trust building the way that I do it, John, has always gotten mixed results. I’ve actually had leaders of companies fire me or demote me because of the way that I like to build trust. It’s too much honesty. I’ve always gotten busted for it because a lot of business owners and a lot of people in general think that too much detail is bad, too much information is bad. And I understand that sentiment. You get too personal, which I’ve definitely done on my website, because it’s my company now and I can do whatever the hell I want. But I always understood the argument. I did. I really did. I didn’t always have the highest sales numbers. I was usually one through three everywhere I’ve ever worked. But here’s what I did have that is a little more hard to articulate. I always had one of the highest profit mixes and client retention levels at every single organization that I ever worked at. Full stop, always, way up there.
Because when… And John, you own a business, you You know how this goes? We all would wish, we cross our fingers and we say, We want every customer relationship to run perfect. John wants that. I want that. Everybody wants that. We walk into the relationship with good intentions. It doesn’t always work out that way. Because of that, if you built a lot of trust in the beginning and you have a strong, integrity filled relationship dynamic with the person that you’re dealing with, I’m not saying those situations are great. I’m just saying they become more manageable. They become more navigatable for both parties because at least there is some trust. There’s the basic understanding that I’m not trying to rip you off. You may not be getting what you want, but I am not actively trying to screw you. If you come from that place, I’ve always found that business relationships really become more fruitful. Every now and again, you really accomplish something magnificent where you have something that’s really bad and everybody does poorly or shits the bed, or it’s all just one of a extraordinary situations for one poor client, and they don’t believe you because they’re the client.
Then somehow you turn it around because they stick with you. Then you have this amazing story to go along with that because you manage to pull through eventually. All of this is to say, how do I build trust with my clients? I got to say, I’m doing it right now. I always do it, John. I try to be as honest with every single person as it is within my capability. And I don’t mean just honest about giving a straight answer to a question. I mean giving all the hidden data that normally nobody would say, all the pros and cons, all the actual upsides and actual downsides. That way, nobody It’s got nothing on me at all, ever. If I could think it, if I could see the scenario going wrong in some way, I say, This is what that way might be. Now, obviously, we’re going to do everything in our power, and this is thing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 that we’ve done to try to make sure that doesn’t happen, but it’s theoretically possible it could happen. I actually have my client sign a contract that says they can make no money now because they don’t follow my recommendations.
That’s part of my contract language because that’s the number one reason why my clients don’t make money, is they don’t follow my recommendations. I protect my reputation. It’s like, have I told you that? And then have I given you recommendations? And the answer is, I made you sign a contract that says I have. And then I recorded a call that says I did. So there’s no… How do you build trust? I think it’s rigorous honesty, John. That’s all I think. And yes, reviews help and things help, but the trust comes first, the reviews come second, in my experience. You build the trust, and then when you want the review, it just happens. You say, I need a review. I want to review, we’re willing to review I mean, I’ve never had anybody say no. But that’s because I’m usually spending all that time building the trust. So that’s my… And I’m doing that with honesty, generally speaking. So number three, attracting high quality prospects. And ladies and gentlemen, we’re in 10 minutes of bonus time. So I’m going to do my best because it’s been me holding up this pony show right now. So I’m going to do my best to keep the last couple of subjects short.
But the subjects are attracting quality prospects and getting them to come to you and maximizing your ROI, two of my favorite subjects. So I’m going to try to keep it brief. John, how would you attract a high quality prospect?
Well, I think that’s one of the main pillars of this podcast is for digital marketing, utilizing video, producing good content, hiring your agency if you’re into SEO, evergreen content, If you’re into paid Facebook, paid advertising, have a look at the Melright system. But it’s producing really good content, but also the volume. I also think it’s putting yourself in the mindset of the people that you’re trying to attract if you’re an agent. It’s really having that ability to really relate to your niche audience and really be able to put yourself in their shoes and then produce the content. And I think a lot of people struggle with that.
I absolutely agree. So, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to say that attracting high quality prospects is one way or the other. Having a high quality funnel or a high quality partner, John, who’s got somebody who’s dedicated to Facebook, who talks to you on the creative and ad placing side. And Ylopo, who’s got realtors working for them that do the same. And everybody’s talking like how you draw people into the funnel in the first place has a lot to do with what you get out of the funnel on the back when you’re using that paid advertising system. And honestly, realtors can’t afford what would be the best way, which is probably really long form commercial-like content. So if you want to do that, you got to learn it on your own. But guess what? If you manage to do a really informative video and then get people to stay engaged with you and really connect with you, there’s absolutely no doubt that’s one of the most sweetest types of inbound marketing that there is because people already feel like they know you. They just do. And when they call you, it’s a conversation with a friend, and you oftentimes have an enormous closing ratio because most Most of the time, people have gone down deep rabbit hole with you.
You’ve already got content in other places that they’ve watched or read or whatever, and they know roughly what you’re offering or what service package you offer as a real estate agent, what value you bring into a relationship with your clients. All those questions are already answered. All you got to do now is simply find or list the home and get the top value for the client, which is what every single real estate agent I’ve ever spoken to once. They want a lead that’s ready to go, and all they’ve got to do is go out and do the mechanics of the real estate transaction, like the negotiation, the listing of the home, the getting of the best price, so on and so forth. But guess what, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to go back to number three. You know what the funny part is, John, is that in my experience, especially over the last five years, a huge percentage of what just doesn’t get talked about a lot is the establishing of trust along the way. Using funnels and things like that, if you call John, you call whoever, please make sure that you in your head think to yourself that somewhere along the way, you’re going to have to, a minimum, do a 30 to 60 second bit a video to give to your partner to let them establish a connection between the person entering the funnel and you.
That is my only complaint about paid advertising people in general, is that they oftentimes do not leverage, they don’t push the customer to make sure that there is a physical video presentation somewhere in the ad funnel.
You’re totally right, but it’s really linked to what you said about having it in your contract, that you can only encourage enough, you can only advise enough. But people, in your contract you have in it, we can’t be responsible if you don’t follow our advice. You can’t blame us if you don’t get the results that you’re looking for. And it’s a bit people… We always encourage people to do video, but it’s extremely difficult. Some people just don’t want to do it, Rob.
Yeah, and that is 100% true because we say it continuously. We have somebody sign an agreement, yet there’s a certain percentage of my clients just don’t do anything. So I feel you. Last Next is maximizing your ROI. John, I’m going to continue on with this one. So maximizing your ROI. I got to tell you, everybody listening to this show, the first step for all of you is to make sure that maximizing ROI, make sure that here’s the thing. You got to understand where your money is coming from. You know how you do that when we start talking about lead generation? Is you make sure that you talk to your customer and you make an educated guess to find out where the lead was initiated from. In my clients, I say anything that they found. If they say they found you online and you’re not doing paid advertising anywhere, it’s simple. I was responsible. Google. They found you on a Google search somewhere. They may not remember where. That’s fine. They may have followed you for years. That’s fine. If they were referred to you, you write down that they were referred to you. Then you say, Did you go to my website and use my tools?
Maximizing ROI is understanding where your consumers are receiving value from you. That’s a huge percentage of it. Who and where are they looking along the way to hiring you? That way, part of maximizing ROI is making sure that you are not wasting your money in areas that do not carry a maximum result for you. Another way to maximize ROI is make sure that you’re tracking… Like many, many realtors have 15 lead sources. And when I talk to a realtor, John, they’re usually hard-pressed to say they have one. And that’s because they’re not taking into account places like HomeLight and their Zillow profile and other places where they completely and totally list themselves with the expectation that somebody might call them. A realtor has 15 or 20 of those. Every realtor has them. And so you go, what of those sources have you ever gotten a phone call off of? And only one realtor in 100 is able to answer that question. It It’s staggering how bad the tracking is for real estate agents. And if I was a professional salesperson trying to get my phone to ring, the first question I’d want to know is, how did my phone get to ring in the first place?
I asked that question first, every single person ever calls in about an RM, how did you find me? So maximizing your ROI comes to understanding where your ROI is coming from, first and foremost. And then once you know that, once you understand where all your ROI is coming from, you You should be moving around your expenses into the higher profitability buckets. In other words, if you spent $10,000 in one marketing, got you one deal, and you spent $5,000 in marketing, and it got you another deal, the question is, can you spend $5,000 more in the place that got you the one deal? You need to look at where and how your revenue was created, and then you need to invest in the place that revenue was created more, and you need to look for the lowest cost of acquisition over time. That’s another important conversation because my clients see the best result, like year two. And so I need to tell them this strategy, but then I need to say, you need to wait. Some of my clients who are doing hyper local, they get five times ROI in the first year. But that’s not common.
And the good part about local is that while it’s not going to funnel all of your lead flow, it’s not going to probably keep a busy agent completely busy. It is incredibly high ROI, making this a very relevant conversation because the calls are cheaper when you do LSA ads. The actual acquisition of organic consumer calls is cheaper. If you do two deals and you’re spending $5,000 a year on me, but those two deals net you $30,000 in commission, guess what? That’s a 6-1 ROI. It may not be the most impressive form of lead generation that you’ve got, but it’s probably higher ROI. That’s my point on all of this, John. Take it away if you’d like to add something.
The worst return on investment is using, but it has its place. Don’t get me wrong, folks; it is paid advertisement and paid lead generation from Zillow or similar platforms. The next one is paid advertising on Facebook or Google. But combining it with organic video, content on a decent website, social media, and organic outreach is the best. I believe that there are different levels of getting the best return on the investment and the worst, but it’s still understandable why people use it on paid platforms like Zillow and then you. It’s worked down, but they tend to take… There’s a more extended return, but the return is of higher quality and is delivered repeatedly. That’s how I look at it. Well, if you’re leading flow and maximizing…
Just one last thing. So as you know, diversification amongst leads is essential. You could do three to five deals yearly if you do well with a hyper-local campaign. But that’s not enough, John. That’s not enough to make a living. It’s just a very high ROI form of marketing that gets the phone to ring occasionally. You may still need to look at Zillow or anybody else to get the phone ringing more regularly. If you’re a broker, holy cow, You have to be in paid advertising. You got to make the phone ring a lot. You damn well should know, Yeah, I understand, Robert, that it’s low-quality leads. I get it. My people need to be calling something. I have 50 of them. They have to have me make them get out there and go through the sales activity process because they will stumble in some business as long as I can get them in motion. And so that is a different subject. And maximizing ROI inside that process is really about funnel optimization, scripts, and everything that 99% of all sales trainers talk about.
And there’s no There’s no problem with that. It would help if you also were blending it with higher ROI types of marketing, such as SEO, which will deliver 5:1, 10:1, 20:1, and 30:1 on average. But It isn’t the driver of a full-time outbound Salesforce. It’s not because you’d have to build your business from the bottom to make that happen. In other words, create a well-performing organic site and a Salesforce around it over time. And that does seem to work for me. I’m doing it with InboundREM, but it takes years. So, anybody interested in growth would do it differently. They paid advertising. Anyway, maximize your growth. I’m an excellent call for everybody watching the show if you’d like to talk about your ROI if you’re deep in that conversation with yourself. It would help if you were talking to me. Could you call me at… Could you just go to inboundrem? Com, schedule a call with me. Could you not call me directly? Schedule a call with me on my calendar, and you can do that on my services page or my About page. Both have links to my calendar galore.
Or you can email me at robert@inboundrem. Com if you want to ask questions before booking an appointment. Jon, if anybody would like to reach out to you based on any of the subjects we covered today, how would they do that?
Oh, thanks, Rob. Yeah, the best thing to do is go to the mail-right.com website, and you can chat with me on Zoom. We’re one of the platforms that offers two choices. Our system is maximized in utilizing Facebook, but we offer the tools you can use to run your Facebook campaigns yourself and utilize our tools for that, or we can do the campaigns for you, so you have two options. We believe in giving options. Back over to you, Rob.
Beautiful. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that’s been today’s episode of the MailRight Show. John and I are so thrilled that you are joining us. We have a lot of conversations, which is just the two of us. It’s easier for us to get excited about guests if they’re super duper rock stars. So we have yet to do as many guests as we have lately. Having said that, if you feel like you’re a super duper rock star and you’d like to come on to the show, you can go ahead and email John at… Please do me a favor and drop the correct email address for these guys.
Yeah, it’s Jonathan, [email protected].
Beautiful. John is the one who handles the booking, the questions, and things like that, but he’ll go ahead and sign you up for the show. We always appreciate all of your patronage. We appreciate you listening to the show. We hope that you continue to get some value from us. That’s all I got, John.
We’ll see you later, folks. Bye. Bye.
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Provide real value as a realtor in 2025! Learn innovative strategies to enhance client relationships and stand out in a competitive market.
This insightful podcast explores the essential strategies for realtors to provide digital value in 2025. Discover innovative ways to engage clients, leverage technology, and build lasting relationships beyond mere transactions. We’ll discuss branding, personal touches, and market trends that will set you apart in a competitive landscape. Don’t miss out on these valuable insights.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 453 of the Mail Right show. Hold on to your seats, and grab your coffee cups. Today, we will talk about how to provide real digital value as a realtor in 2025. So before we dive into this incredibly meaty, unique topic, let’s ensure that all of you know who you are on this ride with John; why don’t you introduce yourself?
Thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Melrite.com, a real estate lead generative platform. We provide a great-looking website, landing page, text, email, and a ton of other functionality to be your digital platform for 2025. Back over to you, Rob.
All right. And ladies and gentlemen, as I get ready to introduce myself, let me just say to everybody, including John, that while it’s been a tough work day, it is my favorite day of the year. It is October 31st, Halloween. I’ve always loved this day. It has always been a personally good day. Work aside, I love giving candies to kids and getting dressed up in costumes. My name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound REM. You can look us [email protected], and if you want to learn anything about the digital market, you’re going to market, and you’re probably going to do precisely that. All right, let’s. John is just fucking losing his goddamn.
So your cats like today as well.
It’s just he has a hard time being English on this show. I’m letting you all know that if you watch Slow Horses, that’s John’s sense of humor. So, all right, what is real digital value? I don’t know. John, you wrote this down on the sheet.
I have written some show notes; I’ve given you some topics.
You and number one were asked what real digital value is.
What isn’t real?
Oh, what isn’t real? Oh, it isn’t. Okay, I was reading that wrong. So, ladies and gentlemen, what isn’t real digital value? Well, that’s a little bit subjective. But I will tell you what a pet peeve of mine, John, is, and then I’ll hand it over to you. I do get a little bit annoyed because I do a lot of coaching, and some people, you know, hire me, and some people don’t. But regardless, I’m on the phone a lot with realtors, and I’m telling them, you know, do this and do that, and then now and again, somebody Calls me back four months later, and what they’ve done is they’ve like copied almost identically something that they saw as a competitor do. There are ten things I hate about the city. They went down and did their version, but it wasn’t noticeably better. It was pretty much just the same thing that they saw somebody else do. And it’s a bit of a pet peeve because is there real value when copying identically? I don’t know. You and I both know that commentary video sometimes comes down to the commentary, the person commenting because some people only trust you.
So if you say the same thing that somebody else said, it can have value to a small audience. But I would still say that in my brain. I’m going, and I wish that they had said something unique. Yeah, that’s what I got. What do you want to say about this?
I see where you’re coming from. It’s the best. But I, I, I always try and look at the competition, try and work out what their business model is, what their edge might be. And if I’m gonna go down the same route, I try and find the top three and I try and rationalize what I got to do to try and get to some similar level. And I just aim at that to start off with and then I try and review it and then try and be better if I can. I’m a plodder at heart. I just plod along. Didn’t always want to admit that, and it’s been some ways difficult for me. But I am a plotter by nature. But I don’t give up very easily either, which is a two edge sold. So, yeah, I see where you’re coming from. Being original and doing something and not totally copy. I think totally copying something is something to be avoided. I think if you can do a mishmash and add a little bit of something to it, it’s much better than just lifting it. Totally. But the thing, I think there’s a lot of messaging in the real estate digital area that if you do A and B and C, D will happen.
There’s a lot of recipe marketing, as I call it, and I have my concerns about that because recipe marketing is okay to a certain level if your budget can only afford that in time or money or both. But it’s not going to compare to full Avocar marketing where the message is unique. And you’ve worked out your proposition and done all the things that we’ve discussed in these videos over the last Year. That makes sense.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, there’s a couple of no nos from us. Generic, generic digital value. What is it you kick us off on this one? John?
Well, it’s the kind of thing that a lot of people do and it has some value, but it isn’t as good as the next one we’re going to discuss. But it’s a, it’s, it’s a lot of what agents do when it comes to providing digital value on their website and social media. And it’s like general local market news that’s real estate focused. You know, where the market is, where your town or city is in the last quarter, what’s coming up in the next quarter. It’s community news. You know, what’s going on in your community, in your town, your city. The concept around that we’ve discussed a few times have been the digital mayor of your community sharing other people’s content and hopefully they will be more receptible to share your content. You know, virtual. You know, one of the great benefits of being in real estate is people are not bored unless you’re talking about yourself constantly. But if you’re talking about the end product, which are homes, people can’t get enough of it. So if you do kind of virtual tours, walk throughs using your phone around video, we’ve discussed that endlessly over the year, haven’t we?
And then market finance, you know, where the market is, where the mortgage rates are, this is all good stuff. But it’s all generic kind of content, isn’t it?
Rob? It is, it is. And it’s very, very tough in a crowded market to be generic. It is very tough to be a pine tree in a forest full of pines and have somebody pay attention to your particular needles. So it’s oftentimes a better idea to be the lone elm tree. I’ve always talked a lot about specificity and this is, this is goddamn, this is a marketing message that I lose consistently. John and it doesn’t matter what I, I’m an amazing salesperson, I’m an amazing storyteller. Three of the wealthiest people I’ve ever met in real estate were specificity people like they worked single neighborhoods or a single type of property. It doesn’t, it doesn’t hit right. So many people have built their careers through sphere of influence, talking to friends and family, going wherever to do a real estate deal. The idea of focusing on a niche is just so far outside their experience, they don’t even know where to start. I was on the phone the other day with a cop and who’s now a real estate agent. And he was, you know, we were going through a consultation and I don’t know that it ever occurred to him to leverage security inside.
His conversations about real estate was such a natural segue. And we’re, we’re entering a very uncertain time. I can, it’s so easy for me to imagine, like if I’m a super security conscious person and he, he’s working in Orange county, which is a fairly like conservative security conscious area in, in our part of the country. I was like, God, it would be so much more interesting for you to talk about security because it’s so your background and you could just leverage the heck out of that background. And so that would be what I mean by being in Elm Street. Does every single person buying a home care about security? Of course not. But if you’re the only guy that’s a copy, that’s, that’s a former law enforcement officer is. And you’re the only person saying it. I kind of feel like, well, the 10 people out of a hundred where it’s a really top priority. I think you’re going to be the only tree in the forest they want to look at. What do you think, John?
Yeah, I think that’s a really great example there, isn’t it, that you, you know, if people are concerned about security and you have a background from security, talking about different neighborhoods, different types of housing, how you can make them more secure, you have the credibility because you’re ex police officer. And then it is a subject that a certain percentage of the audience will be interested in, won’t they?
Right. And then there’s not everybody in the world talking about that specific subject. And if you decide to focus on it, I could just see so many different ways. Orange county does have a couple of military bases, has a huge police force. You start going on and on and on with all the people. There’s an FBI office out there, there’s an IRS office out there. When you start talking about all the people that have somewhat of a touch with law enforcement in Orange county, all of a sudden you start to realize, well, maybe the audience is really there. Like, maybe. So anyway, we’re, I’m gonna continue the roll here, but after we go to an early break, we’re gonna go to a break because I don’t want to start a whole brand new subject without going to break. So, ladies and gentlemen, I’m gonna go to break a little early. Stay tuned to the show. Always offer us your thoughts, your notes A thumbs up on the videos wherever you see them, whether it’s my site, John’s site, his YouTube channel, my YouTube channel doesn’t matter. Give us a little bit of commentary. We live for it.
We live for it. All right, we’ll be right back. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. Today is Halloween and we’re doing episode number 453. It is a small miracle that I am not neck deep in a bowl of candy instead of on a podcast.
So we’re. Where are you taking your cats out tonight then?
Tonight is a club called Charlotte Never Sleeps. And it would be the fourth Halloween event themed event I’ve gone to, the only one on actual Halloween, and I’m meeting some entertainment friends of mine there who should be dressed to the nines. So I’m super excited about it.
So are the cats looking forward to it?
Oh, the cats are looking forward to me opening the office store right now because they have gotten so annoying. I can’t allow them in the podcast anymore. That’s what. That’s their Christmas tree. But I will be giving them some to extra tuna tonight for sure. All right, there’s specific type of clients. Number three. Okay, Relocation. We kind of touched on this first time. Home buyers, military, family, kids, investors, and seniors. These are all subjects that we’ve, that we’ve talked about. A specific type of person that you’re trying to appeal to now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, if you weren’t realtor and if you had ever picked up a marketing book, you had a marketing degree, something like that, you would discover that one of the very, very, very, very, very, very first things that they talk about in Marketing 101 in any college course is understanding your vertical, like who is the market. Identifying the market. That’s what it’s called. And then you have something called market segmentation, which is another thing you’d learn shortly thereafter in that class. And market segmentation is where we identify pieces of our market. But here’s the thing.
In digital, because that’s what we’re talking about today. Digital is really not when it. When it started to become popular 20 years ago. Sure, you could be a massive generalist, but everybody’s been a massive generalist for 10, 15 years now. That’s not interesting to anybody. Hopefully the only reason you’re listening to the podcast with me and John is because we’re real estate specific commentators that we’re living by this rule. We’re talking to a very defined audience segment and we’re doing our best to educate Ourselves and then you, so that you don’t have to go out and do it yourself. We’re suggesting to you that you do the same thing that you find teachers or relocation people. If you’re in a college town, for crying out loud, make some content for some teachers, for some university people. Talk about why you’re fascinated with tenure, why you may go back to school and study whatever, take anything, go to a, an open. Every now and again professors do like open cattle call kind of like lectures. Go to one of those, you know, I know because I’ve been to one. Go to. Go to go to a lecture like sit down, immerse yourself in the environment for one day and make content about it.
Because if you’re in a town full of teachers and students, what would I be talking about? Something that’s relevant to them, teachers and students. And the only way that I’m going to know what’s relevant to them is either by talking to a lot of teachers or students, seeing what they’re seeing online like in their YouTube channels or Instagrams or Facebooks or option three, the one I just gave you, going and joining in person. Like I love this specific type of client thing here. Like it is probably one of the most relevant things a Realtor could do. And by the way, you missed a few. A specific kind of client is people looking for brand new home development in a certain price range are almost always going to be first time homebuyers. That is a specific type of client. The person who’s building their future, who’s bought into the American dream, who’s going to look for that specific house, has the wife and the kids. Granted they’re only about 60% of the population these days in most parts of the country, but they’re still huge. They’re still big. They’re going to fall into a certain age range usually and a certain economic status.
It’s the same kind of client that you’re looking for over and over again. So what would you do to provide value for that client? You would go and talk about things that concern those clients. That’s it. John?
Yeah, I thought your example of the show that we do was fantastic because that’s why the people are hopefully getting value from this show. Because we’re talking about general marketing and digital marketing principles and fins in the episodes. But the reason why people are listening to us is that we have a, a focus. Well and I think I get the feedback that I do get. People tend to say that we, they push back a little bit and Say that they’re in the area or where they can’t focus or they feel unhappy about choosing a pacific niche. And the truth of the matter, folks, is if you choose a pacific niche, you. You’re not going to turn around the general clientele anyway. Actually, in a very strange way, you’re going to attract more general clientele. I know that sounds counterintuitive and I think Robert is nodding because that’s how it works, doesn’t it? I’ve found it the more unless you get very, very, very niche focused, you know. But in general, finding a niche, you. You do better in the kind of general clientele anyway, don’t you?
Consumer psychology is something that most people don’t understand. Number one, you make something scarce, people want it more. Basic Psychology 101. Okay? So if you tell everybody in the world that you do X, but then you have 50 five star reviews, they’re like, yeah, but why won’t you do Y? Because you’re in demand. That’s marketing. It’s marketing one on one. You always make yourself in demand. And one of the ways that you can do that is by saying, I specialize in these things. John is right. Being specific and making sure that you’re very vocal about what you’ve done well in those categories is going to always get you more calls from other categories as well. I’ve got a guy that only rehabs homes that he can walk to in South Pasadena and he’s turning away deals every day, all day. Well, maybe that’s an over embellishment, but he is turning deals away. And, and the funny thing is, is I think he’s just. Because he’s so vocal and so demonstrative about the fact he only does a certain type of real estate transaction, it is p in people’s nature to ask you to do something different.
Now he does this in a specific area and that’s why people want to work with them, is because they go, well, you’re the guy in this area, South Pasadena. And he’s like, yeah, but you don’t. You’re not doing a kind of transaction that I’m really super familiar with. And so that surprises everybody, including the people that are talking to him. And you get that on his reviews, like on his actual commentary from the world at large, because everybody is so surprised. This idea that we as salespeople are supposed to sell everything is false. Okay? I can’t say it any louder or more in your face. It’s false. Be choosy about your clients. Be definitive about What? What you want to service? You cannot go to Los Angeles county and sell. I sell in la. What? Like, huh? No. Do you sell in Hancock Park? Do you sell in Mountain Washington? You can do deals for friends. That’s what Christoph Chu does. You can make exceptions, but you specialize. Everybody in real estate makes exceptions for friends and family or people that are referred to them. Why? Which is, by the way, for most of you listening to this show, that’s going to be about 50% of your business is you’re already working with your sphere and you’re trying to learn from John and I how to do digital.
That’s probably why you’re listening to this show. So let me clue you in. Your sphere of influence isn’t coming to your website or really checking your digital channels out in the same way that other people is checking it out Anyhow. It doesn’t matter what you say on those sites, but it does matter to the stranger that does not know you. Making specialization on a website in digital format an unbelievably important thing to do. It is completely and totally irrelevant to your existing business. And if anybody stopped for a second and thought about it, John, they’d realize it. It doesn’t make a difference. Like, because when we say specialize, like first time homebuyers, military, family with kids, investors, man. And I don’t say this like it’s going to sound like I’m poking fun at somebody. I’m really not. Let’s just say you’re Mormon and you’re part of your spiritual religious belief is to have many kids. Okay? That’s part of what you are doing. Church of Latter Day Saints. You’re helping populate the world for the Latter Day Saints. So great, then you should absolutely pay attention to what John said on number five here and go.
Family with kids. And I would add a defining factor to that. Do they happen to be Mormons? Like, because if you’re really living that lifestyle and you’re doing like your world is about family and raising many children. Wow. Are you a specialist? It’s not that common anymore to have four or five kids. It is an unusual thing, which means that you know unusual things. Even if what you feel like you do is mostly raise your kids, like, even if that’s the case, you have a lot to talk about. You’re just going to appeal to the small handful of other people that are building very big families all simultaneously. The house has to have specialized needs. God forbid should any of your children have specialized needs. All those things are so Deeply important that you talk about them as a realtor. Because what if somebody has a handicapped child? Do you have an unlimited amount of handicap inventory? Probably not. So should you perhaps check that out and make that part of your specialist? Because now all of a sudden you’re not. You do three cities and you say handicapped or probate or any of those things and you really start to say, there’s about 300 houses I’m repping and these are those houses.
I’m going to tell everybody, I’m going to say, share one more thing. And we’re going to move on to this because it’s a perfect intro to this. So I apologize, John, but one of the guys that I always refer to to Luxury because he, he’s a classy dude. I like him. Christophe Chu and Christoph Chu is, has, has done something for years that I’ve said on the show before. It always blows my mind. He has six or seven areas. He, he will sell a home in Wilshire corridor, Bel Air. But he’s always said, John, that he’s a Beverly Hills specialist. He’s a specialist. That’s what he always says. He thinks that he has been in 80% of all the inventory in Beverly Hills. Every single time a listing comes up for sale, every time. And he is allowed to go look at it, he goes and does a personal tour. It is part of his routine and his schedule. Every single house. Think about that. He’s been doing it for 20 years. When people ask him about his inventory, he actually knows what the inventory is. Not just because he looked at some pictures or he looked at a video, but because he walked into the property.
He knows what the drive is. He knows if the sun hits the hills. He talks about this a lot. He says that some of the times that he does sales, it is because he is able to not only talk about the inventory, he’s able to talk about the drive, the weather. Do you get sun all day long in this particular property? Because he knows. Because he put boots on the ground there. I always find that to be so impressive, John. Like, so impressive. That’s a whole nother level of specialization. Like, tell me that I’m going to walk into every home Van eyes. I’m like, I don’t think so. So that’s a good segue into number four on your list. And you should pick it up because I’ve been talking for a while. Luxury.
Yeah, I was thinking about it, comparing it to my other business, my other digital business. We’re involved in enterprise level sales software as A service. And in some ways, I see luxury in real estate to the equivalent of enterprise level in sas. The timelines tend to be much longer. The amount of discussions, the amount of zooms, the amount of back and forth, the timeline from being hired to actually the. The cell tend to be three to four times longer than the average cell. The upfront costs in time and just the upfront costs tend to be considerably higher. I think all what I’ve just said you can apply to luxury cells. You know, the upfront costs are going to be higher. The timeline’s gonna. Not always, but normally it’s going to be longer. And just the back and forth, the year is going to be at a much higher level than the average transaction. So a lot of people look at the pluses for understandable reasons. And it’s the same in enterprise level sales. Obviously, the profit, the financial possibilities are very attractive, but the amount of effort and work involved, don’t underestimate it. And that applies to the amount of digital value you’re going to have to show and give to attract those type of people.
I agree. It took Christophe a long time to get his luxury lead generation going. And that’s one of the reasons I. You said at the very beginning of the show, and this word implies that it’s bad, you said, I’m a plotter, Robert. I’m a plotter too, John. I am. I don’t do everything I should do. I don’t do every marketing trick or tactic that I’m aware of. I don’t work 12 hours a day. I don’t fit the normal mold. This is my seventh business. I know I don’t want. I knew when I started it, I didn’t want to work too many weekends and such. Well, one thing that I do do, though, that I agree with you 100%, is I am a plotter. Like, I do something, I just keep plugging away at it. I keep taking calls, I keep sending emails. I keep my team on staff. I keep. I keep. I keep keeping on with the stuff that I’ve got going. I just keep going and I figure out ways to make it sustainable. And here’s the important part about that story, is that Christophe was the same way. It took him 18 months to get his first lead.
Now his first lead in luxury turned into $26 million in sales. Okay, I really need to make sure that you all hear me on this. Most of you don’t rep homes that are 10, 20, 30, $40 million. Most of you are thinking of luxury is 2 or 3 million, if that, maybe a million. Who knows? Just depends on where you’re at when you’re listening to show. But I gotta tell you another story that that was on this show, I think, and if it wasn’t, then it was on my own personal channel. Was Gary Gold okay? Gary Gold took 10 years to close the Playboy Mansion and he didn’t use any digital marketing. So you might wonder why I was. I am referencing it because honestly, Gary transferred his career into Beverly Hills thinking that because he’s a world class salesperson that he was going to be able to set the world on fire. The market’s highly saturated. Every single realtor that is skilled. Some of those realtors, like Jade Mills, have an actual budget that they apply towards marketing. And they’re everywhere. They’re on radio, they’re on tv, they’re in newspapers, they’re collaborators with news channels.
And you’re competing against them to get deals in Beverly Hills. It’s complicated. And most of the time sales really comes down to what Jonathan and I have just said twice. It comes down to the plotters. You have yourself a marketing structure. You stick with it, you plod along, you keep doing the doing of the thing. Luxury is the same, except longer. It’s just longer. It’s a longer timeline. People who have money are a little bit more complicated to get in front of and a lot more people are trying to do it. It’s that simple. Really smart realtors are going to figure out ways to get in front of those people in any way, shape or form. Jade, one of her many strategies is she puts her advertisement in the back of the LA Opera magazine. Now, I’ve been to the LA Opera, John, and I know you haven’t and I don’t think you would ever want to. It’s full of geriatrics, okay, who are all enjoying classical music. It’s a dying art form based on the audience.
Actually, I was a member of the Covent Garden Opera Association. I used to go once a month to the office. I did.
Good on you. It’s a beautiful art form, which I was, I’ve been gotten into by my, my family, which is inner. They’re entertainment focused and they’re not famous. So everybody knows they’re more like entertainment. Like they’re the behind the scenes people. Like we’ve staged ballet, but it’s the.
Ballet opera house with confident. But I always, I’ve always loved Puccini and opera. Such a. Yeah, there we go.
I say that because Jade puts her advertisement there. And who is she? Appealing to, like, not me and my dad, but she is appealing to probably one person out of this audience is a billionaire, and we don’t know it. You cannot tell. I promise you. Like, it’s so difficult. Nobody’s there wearing a million-dollar outfit with the other geriatrics anymore. Opera has changed. It’s like. But yet Jade is there in that magazine advertising to those people. And I have to believe that after 20, 30 years, and $3.5 billion in sales, the woman probably knows a little about where her market is. And so, you know, it’s. I say this to all of you because when you decide to target luxury, and I get this conversation almost weekly, John, it makes logical sense to say you will go for the most expensive inventory in your marketplace. But the next question you must ask yourself is, who is already there? I will give one last story, and then we’ll call it a day. This is your bonus, everybody. I’ve got a story about a luxury agent that focuses on Aspen.
And this guy drives me a little bit nuts. He was selling luxury real estate in Aspen for a long time. Then his wife had an accident, and they had to go to, not Aspen, but some like Durango or something like that. Another, but much, much, much smaller Colorado ski town. And this guy was super funny because he was a record-holding salesperson, and he didn’t do fucking squat. No marketing. You know what he did? He skied, fished, and hung out in the cafe. But the thing was, he was part of the original Aspen community. He was an epically good skier. He often ended up teaching other people how to ski. And, of course, he’s a gregarious guy. So, as they’re sitting here talking about skiing, he’s also mentioning I’m a realtor. And, of course, he sold. I don’t even know what the number is. He never specifically told me. I did get the impression, John. It was no joke; it was hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate. I’m telling you why he had an accurate natural entry into the primary entertainment avenue that all these people were leveraging.
And he was a fucking normal. Like he was a rock star of the slopes. So everybody’s sent to this guy, and he’s a realtor. So your kids are skiing with this guy. You’re skiing with this guy. He’s very charismatic. Of course, he sold a lot of real estate. You got to know who your competition is. They are probably not generating their business the way you think they are. You want to make sure that you have a solid way to introduce yourself to everybody, which John and I are talking about in this whole episode is the digital introduction. So, when you think about your digital handshake, try to go back to your skills and history, and if you don’t know this stuff off the top of your head, watch some of my storytelling content. Read a book on storytelling. Read a book on knowing yourself. Read a psychology book. If real estate is slow, take the time to know yourself. Because when I tell the average person, you should tell a story about yourself and, and make that part of your, you know, your digital presence to a man and woman.
They’re like, I don’t know what to say.
Well, I think the good news, I guess the good news to wrap it up, Rob, is if you’re listening to this podcast and we’ve made you feel a bit, you’re. You will be in the top 20 to 10% anyway because the great majority are not being disparaged. They wouldn’t even listen to something like this. They wouldn’t. It wouldn’t trigger the kind of faults, the way they need to look at their digital marketing and how we’re trying to influence them. They just wouldn’t even think about it, would they?
No, they would not. All right, John. John called it. We’re going to sign off. I’ve been Robert Newman from Inboundrem. You can look me [email protected]. You can email me. That way, you can go to inboundrem.com. I have 140 videos, most educational, talking about digital marketing. I’ve got some reviews about all the major lead providers. I’ve got some case studies about people who use us for our services. They’re all on our website. Good, go there. John, how would you like people to reach out to you?
Oh, thanks, Rob. Just go over to the mail hyphen wright.com website. We’ve got great information about the platform, plus some fantastic videos, articles,, and all sorts of content. It’s been building up, and I’ve been working daily to give you the stuff to help you succeed as a real estate agent. Back over to you, Rob.
All right, well, we cannot tell you how much we appreciate your earballs. Thank you so much for tuning into the show today. It makes John and I so happy when we hear from you. So please just. I don’t care what the comment is; just leave us one somewhere. We would appreciate it, and we wish you all the best today. October 31, 2020.
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Are you ready to boost your real estate business in the digital world? Social media marketing is now vital for real estate pros to get more leads and grow. But how do you use social media to stand out?
Let’s explore how to get leads through social media. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook are great for showing off properties and connecting with clients. You can make your real estate business shine and leave others behind by getting good at social media.
Social media has changed real estate marketing a lot. It’s now a key way for agents to connect with buyers and sellers. Using social media well is crucial for success today.
Social media helps real estate agents reach more people and engage with them. They can show off properties, share market news, and build client relationships. An excellent social media presence can make you more visible and trusted in the market.
A solid online presence can help get more leads. Agents can draw in potential clients and grow their leads by posting engaging content. Keeping followers updated on properties and market trends keeps them interested.
Each platform has its role in real estate marketing:
Each platform offers unique ways to connect with clients and show off your services. Agents can build a solid online presence and grow their business by using these platforms well.
Making great real estate content is vital for a strong social media plan. Focus on visuals, stories, and user experiences. This way, you can attract leads and grow your online presence.
Eye-catching visuals are key in real estate social media. Use top-notch photos, virtual tours, and short videos to show off properties. Also, create infographics to share market trends with potential buyers and sellers.
Make stories about properties to connect with your audience. Share a neighborhood’s history, highlight local businesses, or describe life at a featured home. These stories help people imagine themselves in the property.
Use happy clients’ stories to build trust and attract leads. Ask homeowners to share photos of their new homes or write about their buying experience. This authentic content speaks to potential clients and strengthens your social media strategy.
| Content-Type | Benefits | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Visual Content | Increases engagement, showcases properties effectively | 360-degree virtual tours |
| Storytelling Posts | Builds emotional connections, highlights unique features | Before-and-after renovation stories |
| User-Generated Content | Boosts credibility, provides social proof | Client testimonial videos |
By using these strategies, you’ll create a mix of engaging real estate content. This content will attract your target audience and help generate leads on social media.
Social media ads have changed how we get leads in real estate. In 2024, intelligent agents use these platforms to meet potential buyers and sellers. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn let you target your audience by location, interests, and actions.
To make great social media ads, use eye-catching images and clear messages. Show off beautiful property photos, virtual tours, or neighborhood spots. Ensure your ads have clear calls to action, like “Learn More” or “Schedule a Viewing.”
Using social media ads with other digital marketing boosts your success. Mix paid ads with organic posts, email marketing, and content marketing. This way, you keep in touch with potential clients at every step of their home journey.
| Platform | Ad Format | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Carousel Ads | Showcasing multiple properties | |
| Story Ads | Virtual property tours | |
| Sponsored Content | Targeting high-end or commercial clients |
Keep an eye on how your ads are doing and tweak them as needed. Look at metrics like click-through rates, lead quality, and cost per lead. By always improving your tactics, you’ll create winning strategies for 2024 that grow your real estate business.
Creating a solid social media community is crucial for local real estate success. It’s not just about posting listings. It’s about connecting with people. Let’s explore how to build relationships that turn followers into clients.
To get authentic traction on your marketing platform, mix up your content. Share market updates, home improvement tips, and community highlights. Ask questions to spark conversations. This variety keeps your feed interesting and boosts engagement.
Quick, personal replies show you care. Address people by name and answer their questions fully. This personal touch can set you apart in the many real estate posts flooding social feeds.
Start discussions about local events or housing trends. Offer free advice on home buying or selling. This approach positions you as a helpful expert in social media marketing for real estate. By focusing on value, you’ll naturally attract potential clients eager to work with you.
Social media boosts your visibility and showcases properties. It helps you engage with potential clients and target specific groups. By posting valuable content, running ads, and interacting with your audience, you can attract and nurture leads for your real estate business.
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube are top choices for real estate marketing. Facebook and Instagram are great for visuals and targeting. LinkedIn is best for B2B connections and luxury real estate. YouTube is perfect for property tours and educational content.
Post at least 3-5 times a week on Facebook and Instagram and 1-2 times weekly on LinkedIn. Quality is more important than quantity. It’s better to post less often with high-quality content than to flood your followers.
High-quality property photos, videos, virtual tours, and local market updates are compelling. Also, client testimonials and educational content about buying or selling are valuable. Mix your content to keep your audience engaged and provide value beyond listings.
Social media ads can be very effective for lead generation. Use Facebook and Instagram to create targeted ads based on demographics and interests. Promote listings open houses or offer free resources like home buyer’s guides. Always use compelling visuals and clear calls to action in your ads.
Track engagement rates, follower growth, website traffic, lead generation numbers, and conversion rates. Most social media platforms offer analytics tools. You can also use Google Analytics to track website actions and leads from social media.
User-generated content builds trust and authenticity. Encourage satisfied clients to share their experiences and photos. Repost photos of happy homeowners with permission. Create hashtags for your listings or neighborhoods and showcase posts from locals or visitors. This provides fresh content and builds community engagement.
Share local market updates, neighborhood guides, and information about local events or businesses. Create content that highlights the lifestyle of living in your area. Use location-based hashtags and engage with local community pages. This positions you as a local expert and attracts potential buyers.
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Practical SEO Guide for Real Estate Agents in 2025! Unlock strategies to boost your listings, attract clients, and dominate search results.
Are you a real estate agent looking to boost your online presence? Our Effective SEO Guide for Real Estate Agents for 2025 is here to help! This informative podcast/video delves into cutting-edge SEO techniques explicitly tailored for the real estate industry, including keyword research, on-page optimization, and link-building strategies. Transform your approach and attract more clients—tune in now and enhance your digital footprint.
#1 – Keyword Strategies
#2 – Content Strategies
#3 – Leveraging Local SEO
#4 – Technical SEO
#5 – User Experience
#6 – YouTube SEO
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We will do episode 452 today, and we are deep, profound, deep, deep, deep in my comfort zone. We will talk about how to rank in 2025 for real estate SEO. This is literally what I do for a living. I eat, breathe, breathe it. I have hundreds of clients inside this space, and I’ve worked there for 16 years. Usually, we would call in an expert, but I probably am one of the better people to call if you are ever interested in this subject. So here we are doing an episode inside My Comfort Zone. Now, before we get started, though, my co-host is the person who’s been so generous in setting this up. He chose it. I had nothing to do with it. You can ask him. You know what? Now that I said that, John, please tell the audience, did I have anything to do with this subject?
I thought it was time that we touched it. We skim around it quite a bit, don’t we? I thought it was time we had a bit of a hardcore. But this will be an intro because we could do a series. We could do a whole season on this subject, can’t we?
Yeah, absolutely. So, for those who may not be familiar with you entirely or may only catch one or two of our shows, why don’t you give a little wind to who you are and why we’re doing a Mel Wright podcast in the first place?
Yeah, thanks for that, Rob. Well, I’m the joint founder of mel-right. Com. We’re a very light platform, real geeks, but better, better value; you get better service from us. And we also can give you a fantastic website that you own based on WordPress. So if that sounds interesting, it should go to the MailRight website. I go over to you, Rob.
All right. And my name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of Inbound-R-E-M. I got my start in the real estate marketing industry working for Edge and Image. I had been running substantial call centers, and they hired me to lead a new sales division. They gave me my run of the place once we did a little trial, and I decided I wanted to do an online marketing division, and we built one out for Agent Image. So, since the first minute I set foot in real estate, I’ve been doing online marketing, specifically to real estate agents. And most of the online marketing I’ve been selling has been SEO or organic. There have been all sorts of offsets, social like you, John, and all sorts of other things I’ve done over the years, such as video and video editing and stuff like that. But it all comes down to the actual marketing part—real estate SEO, how to rank in 2025. Practical, and I’m reading from what John wrote here, Practical SEO Guide for Real Estate Agents in 2025. Unlock strategies to boost your listings, attract clients, and dominate search results.
It’s funny because we have this exciting intro, yet the actual things we do don’t change much. The subjects and matters John wrote about are still the same; honestly, they will remain the same. It’s not going to be much different. Number one on the list is keyword strategy. Why don’t you talk to us a little bit about… John, you know I can just go. I could do all 30 minutes and barely breathe. I’m giving you a spot to jump in here.
I’m going to attempt to rein in your fascism because this could get techy. We lose most of the audience quickly. So, I’m going to try to control your enthusiasm. So, keyword strategy. Producing content where there’s no search intent, i. E. People are not searching for the content you’re making, which is, to some extent, going to be a waste of time, or you’re not going to get the results you’re looking for. So, you need to research what people are looking for. In a local region, that’s going to be a little bit hard because a lot of the tools, you just won’t have to search for you to make a choice. But on the other hand, you don’t have to be too sophisticated. You can look at the national trends, and I’m sure Robert will give you some tips about finding the correct keyword search terms and strategies. And because most of the people you’re up against, if they’re not hired somebody like Robert and his agency, they’re probably not going to… You’re going to be in the top 20 % anyway because you have listened to this podcast, and hopefully, you’ve listened to some others, and you’ve gone to Robert’s website.
Just knowing about this puts you in the top 20%, I think you would agree with that, would you? Yeah.
I would agree with that. Let’s talk about some of the ways that the search is changing. I just did the search, best places to find a home in Los Angeles, and I got an AI overview at the very top of the page. I got a few links, attributes, attributions where all of the snippets are being taken from the AI. That’s the place that AI is improving is that there’s attribution for the content, at least in Google’s version, which is my favorite version because they’re actually honoring the people creating the content. But guess what? John said I was going to give you a hack for keywords, and I am. Because when you get past the AI snippet and you get past the areas to live in, which is the next thing that’s served up, you do get people also ask, which is something that’s featured in almost every single Google search that there is. Search has gotten so much simpler that because everybody was already trained on a more antiquated way of doing search, when I explain the new way, John, everybody gets confused. Search is now 100% semantic. That just means that Google has broad subjects that it throws most search into regardless of the keywords that you target.
I can’t put it any simpler than that. We can say best places to find a home in Los Angeles, but also finding a home in Los Angeles will yield the same pages, basically. Google just decides what page is best for many subjects and sends everybody there. It’s been pushing for a long time for people to write longer, deeper content and the web complied. Actually, usually one blog post is a good answer for the top 10 places to live in Los Angeles. So people also ask is, where is the best home in Los Angeles? What is the best place to live in Los Angeles? How to get a house in Los Angeles? And where is the cheapest and safest place to live? The people that search best place to find a home in Los Angeles, those are the other keywords that they use. There is no reason for you to do additional research if you were a novice Content creator. There’s just not. You would just find broadly the topic that you’re interested. You type it in and you look at the subsection of subjects and make sure that you write or say or film something that falls into those categories.
I can’t make keyword research any easier for those people listening to the show. Now, when you are a medium to advanced user of the search engine and you have some experience understanding how Google is going to send traffic into content, that is when tools that we could talk about become really useful. There’s many, many keyword research tools that fall into the useful category when it comes to doing research. Some of which will help train you the same way that I’ve done on the podcast. The problem with tools, John, and the problem with the information age in general, because I have 15 things on my list to study right now, and I have I studied none of them because I just want to hit my head against the desk about how much stuff I have to learn as a founder, and it is jaunting. So I haven’t done it. I I know many people are just like me. I’m not alone. So everybody’s like, head desk, when you say SEO, keyword research, whatever, whatever. So my advice is keep it to the simple strategy that I just told you, and that It will take you five minutes to apply it.
You cannot, even I would say, Okay, if I could really do it in five minutes, I’m in. All right? Which leads us very seamlessly into number two, content strategies. I’m going to pick this up and let you go, John, because I’ve got something I’m hot to share right now. Content strategies. Listen, John is probably going to give you the technical version of content strategies. I’m going to I can shock everybody and not give you the technical version. Content strategies to me are like so much of SEO. Google has gotten so much better at rewarding people that make good content with good traffic.
Oh, actually, I was going to say something very simplistic, actually. I’m just throwing them, I apologize. I haven’t done that very often. Give me some slack, Rob. I haven’t got it. I didn’t need to do it. Just through it.
So listen, we’re going to… Content strategy is about… So user engagement is where SEO is at. It is. That’s it. And Google has gotten so much better at rewarding people who are making good content with good traffic, which is what I was trying to say before John interrupted me. All right?
So- For the light comment.
Okay, light comment. And here’s the thing about talking about stuff. You have to be passionate. And if you’re passionate about the subject that you’re talking about, it’s very likely that you’ll make a reasonably good piece of content. And if you like something that people can engage with that they want to hear or see, Krista Maysior and all these people have made a very good living off explaining how to be a funny person and then do funny videos and create interest that way. I never tell my clients to do that. What instead I focus on is what you’re passionate about, whether that’s walking your dog, the neighborhood that you live in, swimming, fishing, flying, boating. It does not matter because so much of real estate is lifestyle-based these days. That’s what people really lean into the realtor’s for. Really, what you’re looking at is, do I have any interests that I can talk about online in the area that I live in? If you have none, I would ask the question, why did you choose real estate? As your profession? Because you should have some interest in the local… And if you didn’t have them when you became a realtor, you should develop them as a realtor so that you then have something to, one, service your clients with better, and two, something to talk about online.
There is so much every single one of you, even like little, teeny, tiny cities like Toubach, which is the smallest city that I serve. I have a client in a city of 5,000 people, and we have so much to talk about. It’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s desert town. You understand what I mean when I say that it’s close to you up there in Reno. There’s not that much to do unless you are a desert lifestyle person, like riding horses, taking pictures of snakes and cactuses, and I can go on and on.
No, I’m not kidding. I take pictures of our snakes all the time. Don’t ever go at me, So that’s my advice for content strategy, is find something that you’re really deeply into.
And it does relate to SEO, because if you can talk about it with some passion like I can for SEO, you will have a very good chance of engaging your audience. All right, Tom, take it away. You’ve been bubbling up at this service. Let’s hear your very simple thing that you wanted to say.
Yeah, it’s called empathy, folks. It’s putting yourself in other people’s shoes. It’s not writing about your achievements. It’s about putting your mind in the mind of your clients and writing down half a dozen things that they would want to know about, and then putting those in search, and then looking at the competition, and then writing something that gives a bit more value than the competition. End of story. It’s a lot more to it, but fundamentally… Well, a lot more, but the fundamental piece is that, and a lot of people overthink it. But you got to put yourself into the mind of your clients. What are the things that they want to know?
If you don’t know that, ladies and gentlemen, and there’s nothing wrong if you don’t, then my first exercise as a realtor would be getting into the mind of people that are buying and selling real estate. I would do that any way possible. I would go to open houses and not with the intent of generating leads. I go there with the intent of meeting people who are buying selling houses and developing a series of questions. For those of you that are younger in real estate, I envy you because you could get away with the, Hey, I’m a student and I’m doing a study. I’m just researching what home buyers are concerned with today. Can I just ask you a couple of questions as long as we’re here? Maybe you’ve got to get the permission of the realtor. I don’t know. But one way or the other, go to model homes, go to developers, go to places where people would be interested in even having a very young, inexperienced real estate salesperson there. Figure it out. Go, hang out on the floor of of your realtor brokerage and stay there and do your homework until somebody walks to the door and then you ask them the questions.
Make sure that you have the opportunity to talk to people. If all of that fails, go to people that were recently bought or sold a home, which you can find. Instead of even trying to sell them a home, you just call them up and you say, Hey, I’m doing a survey. Can you tell me what your recent concerns were as you bought this home? There’s a thousand ways to break the nut of how do I get in touch with people who have bought or sold a home recently and figure out what their concerns are? Because once you know those, you have everything that you need. You can’t assume. You should just ask. If you ask and you figure it out, You’ll be way ahead of where most realtors are. We’re going to go to break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about one of the most important types of marketing for a real estate agent, full stop of any kind in any vertical, paid or otherwise. So stay tuned. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. It’s episode number 452, and I’m going to instantly deliver on my promise for the next form of SEO, which is local SEO.
All right? Right below that, categorically, because John missed it here. No, never mind. He didn’t miss it. Never mind. I’m going to hold on to it.
You got me worried there. He’s getting his own back for me interrupting him in the first half. He doesn’t like it, folks. He doesn’t like it.
I can’t keep my thought straight when you interrupt me. That’s why I’m not an entertainer. People would joke with me and I’d be like, And I don’t remember what I was going to say anymore. I can only adlib, but my adlib is nontangential. Actually, maybe I could do entertaining, but I certainly can’t try to do education. All right, so, John, we’re going to We’re going to talk about leveraging local SEO. We started talking about this before the show, ladies and gentlemen, and John was talking about how he has been doing some paid SEO and how it differs.
My partner has. I want to quantify that. But we’ve talked a lot, we’ve done quite a few episodes over the last year, haven’t we, about this subject, haven’t we? It’s linked to the other categories discussed in the first half, but it’s its own beast in its own right. We could do a whole series on SEO, and then we could do another whole series of four or five podcasts just on local SEO because it is a totally different beast. Google got a whole different department that deals with local search, and then a sub-department that just deals with real estate. It’s linked to your phone, them tracking your IP address, linking content more locally to your phone. It’s a whole world, isn’t it, Rob?
It really is. It’s a whole world. It’s a whole new source of revenue. It’s a whole new source of development. They’ve been working on local for a long time, all with the intent of eventually getting to what’s called LSA, Local Service Ads. They wanted another vertical to sell, search into, and they wanted one more specific to local business owners because that particular type of business owner was advertising the least in AdWords because it wasn’t as effective to market your garment shop as a big brand or somebody who would put out something on AdWords. It made all the sense in the world, if you’re Sony or whatever, to do ads on Google. Not Not so much if John was still running his dry cleaning business, or I was still running my house cleaning business, which was for both of us 20, 30 years ago, everybody, so it was a long time ago. But still, those businesses Anyway, local service has fixed all that. And local SEO is such a big topic. It deserves its own space. I am not going to try to educate any of you right now on on local SEO. All I’m going to say is this, because it’s so important that you hear it.
I don’t know of any type of search engine optimization, an organic traffic stream delivered to a tool that is as trackable, that is as monitorable, that is as monetizable as local service ads. And you can do what John and his partner do where they really sponsor ads. And we do that, too. We just don’t focus on it as much. It’s like we’ll get you into the ads, but we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. We’re just getting you submitted, and then you’ve got to do the bidding process yourself and all that stuff. We’ll give you some advice. But honestly, you’re usually up there against 100 or 200 agents if you’re in a reasonably busy Metro market. You’ve got this long cycle of people that you’re sorting through. However, having said that, it’s one of the lowest costs of acquisitions for a deal that you’ll ever get, and each agent will probably get one or two per year. You really, just because I’m going, Oh, you’re up again, you still want to be there. That’s the problem. You want to be in the local service ads. You can either do it yourself, you can hire an agency to help you, it doesn’t matter.
But local SEO, the organic ranking, wow, have I seen some agents make so much money? 10, 20 to 1 returns even after they’ve hired us at $500 a month with a set up fee. Massive returns because most people don’t know how hyper local is working. If you were going to focus on one type of SEO and you only had a very limited mindset and budget and all the different things, I am always going to say either local or YouTube. And local is easier because honestly, it’s easier to just hire somebody to do that for you. And it’s a much smaller kernel of SEO, your total knowledge that you need to have is probably two hours a month worth of effort, and you can dominate local. That’s what I got for local, John. Do you have anything you want to add?
No, I think you’re spot on there because I would say almost 90% of your agent competition will not be doing what you’re doing, what Robert’s just outlined. So the return you can get if you listen to this episode and then listen to some of our old episodes, It’s probably the biggest return you can get and the quickest return you can get for doing stuff yourself, isn’t it?
Yes, it really is. Now, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to talk about something that I have made a lot of money off of due to its complexity, which is technical SEO. And shoot, do I hate talking about it? Most SEO guys love talking about it because it gives us a to show you how complicated SEO is. There’s 200 things that Google looks at when it looks at a web page, 200 to this very day. Ai and other tools are definitely shortening that stream. There are things making that so that it’s easier. However, do those things still get looked at? Yeah, they do. They just get measured differently. Google has never stopped looking at the same things on a web page, ever. What’s happened is the way that they rank those 200 things has changed. I tend to stick to the basics. What is important right now? It used to be something called link building was very important, and it still is to us. It Its importance has decreased by about 80 %. It’s not that it’s not important, it still is. It’s just not nearly as important as it has been. User behavior is now the number one signal on web pages.
That’s it. So make making it very easy to say, Hey, let’s do clickable content, and now, bang, bang, bang, bang, we’ll see our SEO skyrocket. We only need a minimal amount of link building, which is a technical signal. On page, internal linking, I can go on and on. There’s lots of stuff that Google looks at on a page, and they still look at it because the page has to be readable. When you look at technical SEO, 90% of it comes down to how readable are the signals. That That’s it. How readable are the signals? Even page structure and link structure and all the technical SEO stuff is really usually so that Google can get two ancillary pages on the website without losing track with the Crawler. So that That’s the link strategy right there. Technical SEO is a bother for you guys, for me, for everybody. My recommendation for those of you interested in technical SEO is to go to Maas or or to Neil Patel. Actually Neil Patel and Maas are beginner level. When you’re done with them, go to Brian Dean. When you’re done with them, go to Nathan Gotch and Adam White.
Okay, that’s it. But that’s my learning Curve. That was my learning curve for the last 10 years. The people that I refer to are geniuses that work with major brands. You want to know how I got to where I’m at. I took what I learned, the little crumbs. I applied it to real And that’s why I keep saying I’m a real estate SEO expert. And one of the best is that I’ve worked on more projects of this kind than anybody that I’ve talked to in a long time. John, take it away. What do you think about technical SEO? You put it on the list. I’m almost a little angry at you because of that.
Oh, you normally are. One really big tip, folks, whatever site you are building, I think you should build it on WordPress because it’s inherently, if done in the right way, one of the best platforms for a real estate website to be SEO friendly. But a big tip is a free Google product that provides… It’s called Google Search Console. And you really, as soon as the website is built or you’ve built it yourself or you got something, you should link, you should set up a Google Search Console account. You will need a Gmail account, I think, to do it. And it’s free, and you set it up. And then you’ve got to put the UOR of your website in so Google can index the website. And then it will send, if If there’s any really major problems with the indexing of the website, they will send an email that’s linked to the Gmail account. And if you get one of those emails, you really want to look at and try and get it sorted out. But it’s totally free, and you really, really do need that, because if you’ve got a ton of problems showing up, and they’re really the red type that Google’s really shouting about, it’s really important that you sort them out, in my opinion.
I don’t know what you think, Robert.
I I agree with that for the most part. Google has constantly moved the needle, and what they’ve done is they’ve educated people to the point that now they’re starting to talk about contentful paint and it’s either LFP or LCP stuff. And I’m not even 100% sure what that is.
I’m not even sure, right?
They keep moving. So I don’t disagree with you. You use simple tools, and everybody’s got to understand I’m an SEO guy. These days, I do… It’s like, Listen, man, let’s try to get as much as the simple stuff right as we can. Let’s use a font that’s easy to read. Let’s link correctly on the pages. But when we start talking about images that are slightly the wrong side and giving us LCP, which, by the way, are yellow and red problematic areas, which is what you just said, here’s the thing. You got to figure You got to be a goddamn genius to go through and figure out exactly what Google is wanting.
I wasn’t really. I was talking about some of the basics because of the nature of this show, I saw it as a 101 introduction to the subject.
All right. Well, then, yeah, I guess I’ll… Obviously, I’ll agree with quantifiers. So number five, because we’ve got two more subjects in the bonus subject for this show, I think is going to be YouTube, which a lot of people don’t put into the SEO category. But guess what? As you can tell with the drum roll that we’re doing here, we’re putting it into that category. It should be in that category. It’s always been in that category. And we’ll explain why. But before we get to that, we’re going to talk about user experience a bit. What does user experience mean to you, John? I mean, obviously, I go on and on and on about it, but what does it mean to you?
Well, you got to get people to the website, and then you got to provide them content. And it’s how easy is the website to navigate. If it’s really hard to navigate, they’re not going to go and look at other stuff on the website. And Google’s watching all of this. And if they found you in search, what Google wants to see is that they go to the Pacific bit of content that has drawn them to the website, and then And they go and have a look at the rest of the website. That’s what Google… And the longer they’re on your website, the more Google will give you credos, and the more Google will think that your website is a really great resource for those type of people. And so the other content goes up in search. So they’re watching all of this? How long somebody stays on the website? Do they go to other bits of the website? And they’re measuring it all. And so user experience, that’s how I judge user experience in the context of this 101 introduction to real estate SEO.
And I I like that. And listen, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to use an analogy, and then we’re going to move on. And this shocked me. I’m not going to lie to anybody. This surprised me when it happened. We took on an older client, an English lady that I had been talking to for a few years, and had always skipped doing any SEO work because it was too complicated and all the things that we talked about on the show.
Does she drive you as mad as I drive you?
Yes. That’s good. Yes. But she’s also brilliant, just like you are.
All right. There you go. Okay.
So yeah, but be honest, sometimes it’s maddening because she’s so particular in an odd way. She We took her on and she was really expressing a lot of doubt, but she’d reached her place in a career where every form of advertising that she had tried had failed. And she knew that she had to burn the ships behind her and just do what we told her to do. We discovered that while some of her content, like top 10 reasons to move to the city that she lives in Westfield, and she’s made a public case study for us now, so I know I can use this as an example. That content was received okay, but we discovered that she almost practically went viral when we started talking about 10 mistakes that home buyers do. It just the English accent and what you always comment on, John, like the persnickety behavior. People loved it. They loved it.
My dog, Kuba, she shares it, does she?
Oh, God. And what’s more, it’s not just that they loved it. She actually got business almost immediately in the first few months because we’re posting these edited videos to her hyper local Google business profile. And this is where the user experience thing comes in. We posted the one video about five mistakes that buyers make in the city that she’s in, and all of a sudden, her profile just screamed up the ranking, just all the way to the top. That bang, just like that. She got calls, and one of those calls turned into a deal. It’s the calls that everybody wants who’s a realtor right now, John, which is listing calls. She got a listing call from another older lady who, just like her, who commented on, God, I’ve been waiting for somebody to basically be speaking my logic, things that people are going to hate to see in the house, because she got really persnickety about it. Clean the grout in your tile, no funky smells.
Yeah, it is a difficult balance because obviously, most people, if I understand the reasons, most marketing website content is very bland, very unopinioned, because it’s really easy. It’s finding that balance of being opinionated, but not so opinionated that you really rub up the majority of people the wrong way. But on the other hand, just so much content on not only real estate websites, but almost every website is a total-Washed it down. It’s total bull fest, isn’t it?
Yeah, and that’s part of the problem with the internet, is that real opinionated content like the podcast do that causes all these problems. Listen, there’s a massive audience for legitimate and honest, but in order to be legitimate and honest, you oftentimes have to over-embellish parts of your personality to become something that people want to engage with. And I think that Jackie did a very good job, in case she’s listening to the show, of balancing her… She was saying it all with a smile, but she did have a lot of really like, and you do this and this and this and this. I was like, I could see very easily why the video was so popular. Okay, so moving on to the very last little piece of bonus content, and the show has gone long, no surprise. We’ve got about five minutes to make it 40 minutes long. Is It’s YouTube SEO. John, it is stunning to me how many people do not realize that this is an SEO thing. It is a property. It is a Google company. It is a marketing service like any other. It’s the second top search engine in the world.
Eighty % of the content that was consumed last year was video. The only video platform in the world that competes with Netflix at this point is YouTube. So it is a massive platform where the vast majority of the world spends its time. I search for my music there. I search for my movies there. I search for commercials there. I search for knowledge there. I find every expert for every single subject that I look for on YouTube at this point. John, how about you?
Yeah, I don’t. I actually have a television, but it’s not plugged in. I haven’t watched American television for almost eight years, but I do watch stuff, and it’s YouTube. If I’m not working or socializing or outside, I’m normally looking something on YouTube or Twitter or some social media. But it’s just massive. It’s just the numbers are… I have a couple people I know that have got audience of about 200-250,000 subscribers, and I’ve got a tiny audience. I’ve got nothing like that. I’m envious of that. That’s in the WordPress space. I’ve got somebody I know that’s got audience of 250,000. But that’s still nothing. If you’re not in the Minion plus, you don’t even register in the world of YouTube. You got to be over three million subscribers to get into the top 200 list, I think. It’s just mind-blowing.
It is indeed, because so many people are there and there’s so much money to be made on the platform, but all I will say is this, there are 13 to 14 critical things that you can do to a video in terms of allowing Google to categorize it better. The allowing it to categorize it better sets you up with a significant significant advantage over people who do nothing. That is why there is YouTube SEO. It exists, it’s real, and it is actually more complicated. Well, it’s not more complicated. It’s a harder set of work to optimize a video than it is to optimize a blog post. There’s more that goes into it, but there’s more probability of success. Because it is so time consuming to optimize a video, some of the The best YouTubers I know do not optimize, fully optimize video. They understand what they should do. They don’t do it because they understand how much time it takes, like manually closed captioning versus using a service like Rev to do it for you. Everybody uses Rev, but Google doesn’t give you any extra credit for using an automated tool. They give you credit for manually typing out what’s on your video, which, by the way, we at InboundR EM still do, which is why I I always say to everybody, Listen, man, if you want your video to rank, then we are the only game in town when it comes to real estate SEO, specifically, because we are the only ones that I know of that are not using any automation inside the entire process.
It is a very long process. It takes you 30 minutes to shoot the video, and maybe you give us a 5 or 10 minute video. With Jackie, it took us 13 hours per video, John, to work on it. She does not spend 13 hours. It takes us far longer to do the support work than it does to post the video. Youtube SEO is a thing. Whether or not it’s for you is really a question of just how committed are you to the strategy, so on and so forth. For established YouTubers who have already gotten a lead or two off YouTube channel and you’re wondering if there’s some way to improve, YouTube, that’s when a YouTube optimo, like SEO is like, Oh, yeah, you’ll just make 10 times more money. Simple.
Anyway, John, do you have anything to add? What was the other two things apart from the caption? You said there was a couple of other things? What were they?
Oh, there are 13 things. You want me to go? Okay, so it’s- You said about three.
There were three significant things.
Three major. So, video captioning is one, and location tagging is the second. And I don’t mean location tagging because you can do a city or a latitude. Latter longitude is the bonus. Okay, so the city is relevant but not nearly as relevant to Google as the actual latitude and longitude, which connects directly to the Google Maps algorithm. Now, all they know is that they can connect it to the metadata on the video. If the two match, they know that you’ve been honest. That is a big deal. They’re trying to verify the credibility of the video. They throw these little, tricky, hacky things in there. They’re like, Hey, are you real? And are you trying to trick us?
Do you think I’m honest, Rob?
No.
No, I don’t. What’s the third and final thing then?
The third and final thing that would be hacky on videos is probably everybody’s already heard. But I’m going to say anyway, it’s video content like the text in the description. So, 80% of the people who watch your video do not read your description. You should know that everybody knows that. But once they do read the description, the hack that we have found, of course, for content that is current is if you have an Apple phone, specifically an Apple phone, and sometimes Samsung, but you have to install these apps. But installing emojis and making the video index engaging and readable is a massive ranking factor. Massive. So, if you’re doing some extra work inside the description, not just the standard cut and paste, these are all my other social channels, which is what every video producer I’ve ever seen does. Not just that. You handwrite a video description and use emojis and other exciting visuals so that when someone is glancing at it, they immediately notice it’s different.
So I need to become an emoji king, then, Robert.
If you wanted to know How your videos rank on the Mailright channel, yeah.
Yes. That’s my fault for Grace, isn’t it? I haven’t become an emoji. I’m being sarcastic. That’s some of the dark English humor. Oh, for fuck’s sake.
I just cursed. I just added 10 minutes to John’s editing work.
He said 40 minutes of this. It’s going to take him a whole week. It’s going to take him a whole week to recover, folks. That’s what it’s going to take.
All right. Without any further ado, do you have anything else? Those are the three. Yeah. Okay, we’re going to wrap it up, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for tuning in to us today. We appreciate it. John and I are eternally grateful for your ears and your eyes. We hope, more than anything else, that we have been helpful to some degree. It makes a big difference if we have likes, up, and thumbs up our content. Even if it doesn’t make a difference to our business in general, one, it helps us rank better, and two, it gives us a dopamine hit, which John and I both need because all content producers are super needy. All right, that’s it. Have a great day.
That’s bloody. Genuine words were never said.
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