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With Special Guest Eric Preston From AgentLaunch.
At Agent Launch, our mission is to accelerate the growth of the new home market. We believe new home sales drive housing affordability and the growing supply problem, and we want to be a part of that.
#1 – Eric, can you give the audience some background information about you and AgentLaunch?
#2 – What primary needs do you feel AgentLaunch helps agents with?
#3 – What are some of the most significant differences agents need to understand regarding new construction online marketing?
#4 – What are some of the biggest and regular mistakes you see agents make regarding online marketing and lead generation?
#5 – How will AI change real estate online lead generation in the next 18 months?
#6 – If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of your career and business journey, what essential piece of advice would you give yourself?
Welcome back to the middle right podcast. Today, we’re super excited to have our first guest in many, many episodes. But before I get into that, it’s episode number 435. The special guest today is Eric Preston, who has a very oddly similar history inside the real estate industry, as I do. But we’re going to let him get into that, dive into that, and cover that himself. John, since Eric is new to us, I’m going to ask him to go first because we do this every week. So, Eric, why don’t you go ahead and do us the courtesy of introducing yourself to our audience?
Sure. My name is Eric Preston. I’m the founder and CEO of Agent Launch, a real estate marketing agency that focuses on the new construction side of things. You can find me on YouTube. I post a lot of helpful tutorials, and I think we’ll probably get into a little bit more about me throughout the episode.
Perfect. John, why don’t you introduce yourself to anybody who may not be familiar with you?
Oh, thanks, Rob. I am the joint founder of Mailwright. We build beautiful websites on WordPress and provide a CRM landing page, email, text, and a lot more in one great package. I’m back over to you, Rob.
And I’m another founder that focuses on SEO. I’ve been doing it a very long time, so if anybody’s interested, just go to inboundrem.com and you’ll learn all about me. Let’s dive into it. Unfortunately for all of you listening to the show today, I am the captain of this particular episode. So buckle up, buttercup, we’re going to have a lot of fun. Eric, the reason that I usually do a two-second dive, John knows this, and I usually tune out just complete honesty, because oftentimes I’m not finding anything that I relate to. There you go. But with you, it was interesting because we have a similar history. We were both doing other things. I was running massively big call centers for very, very big brands. That’s what I was doing. And then you seem to be like a nightlife person, but entrepreneurial in nature. I actually looked up the restaurant that you opened. It still seems to be in business and doing extraordinarily well. So I was just automatically ears perked up because it’s a hell of a thing to transition your career into that, into marketing. So, if you don’t mind, John has a series of questions, and we’re going to stick to his side of it.
But I’m just going to ask because it’s my burning question, what inspired you to make the change to go from that kind of pedigree and the amount of work it takes to open up a restaurant into digital marketing?
You know, it’s funny you ask, because you’re the third person this week that’s asked me about my origin story a little bit. So, um, but you’re going back to the restaurants, which is, which I haven’t had yet. So, yeah, I think, I think when my early twenties, I started bartending, and that felt right at the time for me. I was in a phase of backpacking the world, traveling, bartending, and just having fun. I felt like I needed that experience to kind of come out of my shell a little bit socially. And so that was great. And then that hit a point where, you know, I, I had helped open, I think, four different bars and restaurants, and it started to lose its allure for me, and I just didn’t feel like I was in the right place in the world anymore doing that. And so I wanted to do something with a bigger potential. And all I really knew at the time, to be honest, is I wanted to do something digital. I wanted to be in, like, tech. That’s what I said. I wanted to be in tech. So I was, you know, I went through this six or seven stage interview process with this actual, actual sales prospecting company where they teach businesses this, like, specific outbound method.
And I was really excited to join this company. And then Avenue reached out to me on LinkedIn the day before I accepted the, I think it was the day before or two days before I accepted the job. Got me on an interview the next day. I went and interviewed them, as the best interview of my life. I felt super aligned with them. It just came out of nowhere, too. I don’t know what, I don’t even know why she reached out to me. Couldn’t tell you. I didn’t have a specific profile. They were like, yeah, we’re looking for salespeople. You seem perfect. I’m like, I don’t even have that much experience unless you go back to my, you know, apple days or whatever. But, um, yeah, she reached out to me and had an interview. They offered me the job the next day. I took it the other, the other company was pretty upset. But, um, so that’s how I transitioned from that world to this world, was I knew I wanted to be in tech. I liked marketing. I knew I wanted to be somewhere in that world. It just happened to be a real estate company.
So I kind of happened upon it in that way. And then. Sorry, go ahead.
I just wanted to say what you described. The reason I asked you the question is because I actually have already seen some of those interviews that you’ve done and saw a lot of the information about Avenue. What is just blowing my mind right now is you and I had an identical experience. Like, I wanted to get out of the call center stuff. I wanted to get into tech. I kind of, like, vaguely knew that I wanted maybe to be an SEO, but, really, in my mind, it was like digital marketing. I was done with, like, traditional reaching out, chasing you down marketing. I knew I was tired of it. So maybe a little bit towards inbound, but. But it was all unformed. And the first company in 300 bloody resumes I sent out. You are obviously much more packageable and sellable than I am. And I had to try so hard, which was staggering because I was running an operation at the very top with, like, a $7 million budget, and yet I could not get somebody to give me a starting position in tech. So, the first person who did a real estate company, and here we are.
There you go.
Agent image. All right, before I just monopolize, I was just so, I get curious every now and again, and I was just so deeply curious, I was wondering, I wonder if his reason will be similar. And it was exactly the same. It wasn’t. I didn’t choose real estate. It chose me.
Yeah.
All right, John, you have this beautiful list, as usual, that you’ve produced. Why don’t you go ahead and, like, honor our commitment to Eric and stick to the list?
I could respond to that so much.
Robert.
I’m not going to Robert. I’m not going to Robert. So, you know, agent launch, you know, you’ve got a lot of experience in the real estate. What is agent launch and why? What does it do in your own mind for its target sector? Eric.
Yeah, sure. So agent launch has evolved over the years. I mean, talking about in the early days, after after avenue, I mean, we got into, you know, info products, selling courses on Google Ads, and I kind of became known for that. So that’s how agent launch started, was generally running Google Ads for agents that evolved over time from a variety of different things, solving more problems around that. So helping people with their CRM system, their sales system. We did YouTube coaching and video editing for some time. And it was about a year and a half to two years ago, we started building landing pages for new construction, and we had some clients who really wanted to focus on that. And actually, I just did my first podcast episode of ours earlier today with that exact person that we started this with. And so.
Oh, you don’t want to do podcasting. It’s just depressing.
So we got into doing this, and we didn’t really know at the time how it was going to go, but it started going really well. And so over the last year and a half, we’ve been doing more and more and more of it, and it’s worked better than anything else we’ve ever done. And, you know, last year was a tough year for everybody who’s pretty down here in real estate. And we got creative and we launched a new offer, helping people run webinars. And we did all this really cool stuff. But the fact of the matter is that this one single thing was working the best. And that was a specific funnel we have that targets people who are looking for new homes. And I just found out today, because my guest earlier shared this with me, that there’s a record high number of new construction homes for sale in the United States right now. Actually, one third of homes for sale are new construction, which blew my mind. And so I didn’t even know that. But anyways, we were just on our management retreat back in Canada, and we decided that we wanted to go all in on this because we didn’t need to rely on an IDX.
The lead quality we’re getting was much better. And the build of the funnel is, it’s a lot more streamlined for us in certain ways. And we were just like looking at the writing on the wall. We’re like, guys, I feel like this is where we need to be, and all of our best clients are coming through this. And the funny thing is, so, getting back to your question about what we do, we help agents build lead generation and conversion systems around new construction. We also work with some builders, and we’re actually trying to grow that side of our business as well. We do have coaching within our program where we coach agents on the sales process. We have some of our top, top clients do that with us who are doing hundreds of sales a year. So they come in and help work through the sales process. Bottlenecks what to say, how to say it. We help build our clients CRM systems. We build their lead generation, their funnels, and the goal is to just deliver them a steady stream of leads and make sure they’re equipped to take care of them and convert them.
So that’s in a nutshell, what it is that we do. And it was a recent change where we started focusing more on what was just working best for us and our clients. And that’s just really dialing in the new construction world.
That’s fantastic. Over to you, Rob.
Why? I kind of, I have a curiosity question. How did you find the Mailrite podcast?
My team did.
Got you. Okay.
So I don’t know.
So the truth is you. Okay, fair enough.
That’s my honest answer for you.
No, no, no. It’s. That’s, that’s brilliant. So just for the sake of. There’s another similarity between the two of us in that after 16 years, and I’ve been in sales since I’ve been 17, and I’ve been 16 years in real estate, always on the phone teaching and training other people how to be on the phone, I have focused my whole entire career on things like tonality and listening to uptones downtones, mirroring. And I can go on and on, like, big, big call center strategies and techniques and then using those, like, but like, in an elevated consultative way, and then Zoom has kind of changed the game where people can see you and I’m wearing my hat, but, like, I have multicolored hair, and that, that doesn’t really, like, didn’t really work for. Anyway, here’s my point. You and I have both do, like, I keep trying to offload sales. I’ve been trying for a long time. And the challenge that I have is that I like, even when I have fine people that can sell successfully, they don’t sell the way that I do. So the clients that enter our funnel, like our production process, they don’t end up being the right kind of educated or right kind of qualified to, like, use the system, because they didn’t.
They weren’t sold the right way. So I have to go back to sales over and over again. I saw something where you said the same thing where you said that you were trying to escape sales. So let me ask you a question. From the perspective of being the guy that is selling your system to your prospects, from your perspective, what is the number one concern that agents bring to you when you’re actually in the sales role, not the founder role, not any of your other roles, when you’re on the phone with an agent or broker, what do you think their top few concerns are when discussing a lead generation system with you.
Well, it’s interesting you say that, because you obviously have heard me talk about this, but it’s been the single biggest professional challenge I’ve ever faced is removing myself from sales and my own business. So currently I am very involved in sales. Our sales team is me and Lucas and so on, my team, and we work well together. And so, yeah, I’m very much on the front lines in that sense. And I think that gives me a lot of really good information as a founder to work with. And so even though it makes me busier, I don’t mind. I’ve accepted that I’m always going to be there in some fashion, and that’s okay. So, to your question, the things that I think that the number one thing I face is mistrust. I think that we’ve done a good job over the years of posting a lot of social proof online, building a lot of helpful videos, and a lot of people come to us and they do trust us, but there’s always that thought in their head of like, and I think we do very, very good work, and I stand by that. And I think we have a phenomenal team.
And I think that there’s still this just looming, like, oh, I’ve been burned before. And the unfortunate part is most marketing agencies in real estate, I mean, probably everywhere, but in real estate especially, you know, they, they all go through these similar programs. You probably know the ones I’m talking about. They learn to build these big offers with big guarantees that they need because they don’t have any social proof, they don’t have a track record. So they need to throw together these offers, and they don’t actually know the fundamental first principles of the business. And so these, a lot of agents get confused. And fair enough. I mean, there’s so many people out there that are not legitimate that they should be kind of, you know, a little bit concerned. And so there’s that I think that we have to overcome naturally.
Sure.
Like, we’re not a cheap program. We don’t aim to be. I think cheap programs get cheap results, and there’s plenty of them to choose from if that’s your motive. We’re looking for the higher ticket people who are really looking to grow and invest in their business, and so is every other agency. To be fair, nobody wants to work with new real estate agents. I’ll just tell everyone watching that the truth is that every agency, just like every agent, has been burned by a lot of broke agents who will default. They won’t commit, they will be very flaky. So it’s frustrating for agencies too, but it’s also frustrating for agents because a lot of good agents do get burned, right? So I think that’s the big one. The second one for me that’s super frustrating is the IDX. So for us to do our job, we need our clients to have like a specific website provider. And like, nobody comes to us roaring to change their website. It’s like, like they’re like, why do I need this? And I’m like, I’m trying to explain to them, well, it’s optimized for Google Ads and it’s not an easy thing to explain.
The site speed, how you present the information, the form field.
Do you mind me asking, which one do you work with?
So part of our pivot in going into new construction is we don’t need them anymore. So that was an internal reason that we wanted to do this as well. I still think people need IDXs as far as the nurture process of a lead goes, because you still want to be setting, even if they come out through a new construction funnel. And I’ll get to your question in a second. If you generate leads who are looking for new builds, that’s just one thing they might be interested in at that time. And most of them are actually going to buy resale, like a lot of them will and a lot of them have something to sell. I shared this message on LinkedIn of a person who said, yeah, I’ve been doubling down on the new construction stuff, but it’s actually generated a ton of resell on a ton of sellers. And I thought that was really interesting. So doing this this way, we don’t need to rely on lofty real geeks, Sierra interactive to fulfill our clients. And I’ll give you a bunch of stories. Like, there was three that stood out in the last month before we made this change a hard line just a couple of weeks ago.
And essentially a client was like, oh, I just want to get lofty set up before I just sign on the dotted line and pay you guys. And we’re like, done deal. This guy’s perfect fit. He’s excited, we’re excited to work with him. It’s like three, four weeks later and he says, still having problems with lofty, right. So now that’s out of our control. And it’s like there’s all these third party software providers that we rely on and some are better than other, like real geeks has always been good to us. Sierra takes months to set up. We found lofty support is, you know, abysmal at best, and so for us to build our business around that is challenging. We’ve done it for so long. But if I were to be honest with you, like, the amount of money I’ve probably lost and the amount of people I haven’t been able to help, because whatever we talked about and whatever excitement there was on that call three weeks later, that’s gone. And so it’s sad. And we just wanted to remove that bottleneck from our business and so far, that feels like the right decision.
Wait, just gonna. We’re gonna go. We need 2 seconds to go to a break, Eric, and when we come back, you can wrap up that, the end of that question, and then, John, you’re gonna. John’s gonna kick off by sticking to the format. Eric, I’m the one who’s going to be throwing you the curveball. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be right back. Thank you so much for tuning into the mailwright show. We’re here with Eric Preston. He is the founder of agent launch and we’re deep into talking about hopefully what is resonating with all of you as concerns. And honestly, both John and I, though we’re probably not showing it to you, Eric. We’ve had similar experiences with similar providers and boy, oh, boy, could we go on one. But it’s good to hear. It’s good to hear another founder say the same thing. All right, ladies and gentlemen, we really, we really appreciate you tuning in today. We’ll be right back. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. We’re here with the amazing, the outstanding Eric Preston, the founder of agent launch. We’re also here with the amazing Jonathan Dinwood. For those of you that don’t know, Jonathan is a multi founder.
He has more than one company, and if you want to know more about him, you should definitely look him up. He is a WordPress wizard and has another podcast that’s one of the biggest in his segment called WP Tonic. So go check that out if you’re exploring WordPress. Without any further ado, we’re back with Eric Preston. Eric, I was incredibly rude. I interrupted you while you were trying to answer the last bit of a question, which was, John, help me out. What was it? Who do you use to build your sites? And you were kind of in the process of saying the way that I interpreted your answer was, we would work with Sierra Interactive, real geeks and lofty, formerly known as chime, and you were explaining some challenges that you had, and then I interrupted you.
Yeah, that’s all good, man. I think the, you know, we also work with, like, agent locator works. Most. Most of the people use that are in Canada. But I think it’s kind of frustrating because now agents have to deal with two companies, right, and they’re, you know, it’s just not very streamlined. And so we’ve kind of brought that in house by building landing pages and doing it all in house. And our time to get a client live is a lot less, like, there’s just a lot less friction. And so that’s, that’s one thing. And I think there’s, like, a bit of frustration, obviously, like I was saying, on agents side with agencies and agencies with agents. So there’s, like, this middle ground we have to find to meet at. But I think the advice I’d give to agents when working with any agency is, like, don’t buy into big guarantees so much. People say, well, do you have a guarantee? I’m like, no. Like, I don’t like, go. Go read our social proof. Read our reviews. Read it. If that’s not enough for you, it’s not a good fit, and that’s cool. If you want a big guarantee, you should read the fine print and know that it’s not as big as it sounds.
And so that’s my feedback on that.
Got you, John. What? Let’s get you into the mix, man. What’s. What do you want to ask Eric next? I have your list, of course, but I don’t want to spoil it for you.
So what do you think? What are some of the biggest mistakes you see agents make regarding marketing and online lead generation? I think, and we’ve discussed this on the podcast, me and Robert numinous times, is that I don’t think a lot of agents who are successful, but maybe not know that much about online marketing is they have a total misunderstanding of what the average online lead is. They, there’s a, what they think is an online lead, and what you or Rob and myself might consider online lead, not always been a lot of times, there’s a lot of education needed. So, first of all, how would you respond to that? And then secondly, what are some of the things that you regularly see?
Yeah, that’s a good question. So there’s a few themes I want to touch on. The first being, I think that most agents are a mile wide and an inch deep. And I think that I talk about this a lot because you got to keep in mind as an agent, that and every agent knows this, there’s a million people trying to sell you something. And so just be careful because being everywhere isn’t a good thing. And I always say people are going to compare someone else’s fourth quarter to your first quarter. And if you see people like me or you see people that are like a little bit ahead on the content game. I have 30 some thousand YouTube subscribers. And so it was only when we got to close to where we are now, where we started doing a little bit of other platforms. And so most people become known for one platform. So you have to pick a social platform that you use and you like and you understand and just like become good at it. And when I say this, I’m also talking about lead generation. You don’t need to generate leads from ten different places.
Like, it’s good to have a little bit of diversity, but it’s more powerful, I think, to focus on one or two channels. So, like, if I were to fly home as a brand new agent, what would I do? I run ads on Google and probably new construction, and I would build a YouTube channel and I just put all my energy into that and make sure my online presence is tidied up. Because like, your point? I think there’s some really core principles with online leads that people miss. One is that these leads are early in their process or you wouldn’t be talking to them. People are like, I want sellers who are ready to sell tomorrow. It’s like, that’s not how this works. You. 67% of leads on leads online work with the first agent they talk to. As long as you don’t draw up the ball. This is about giving you that at bat. But also you need to understand with online lead gen that people are getting prospected by multiple agents. They’re usually on multiple websites. You have to win them over. That’s what this business is most of the time. People who are searching for properties, doing stuff online related to real estate, they’re getting captured as a lead in many places and they’re probably getting prospected.
And you need to deliver more value than anyone else. And you need to make sure your online presence is clean. And what I mean by that is not. You need a $50,000 website that took you two years to make. You need like a good looking online profile in general and a clean Google my business. And you need to have some activity. But just being on Instagram doesn’t help you. If someone goes to Instagram and they see that you’re not posting regularly, I hate that term. Posting regularly but they see that you’re not interesting or you’re lazy. It’s not helping. You just be really good at one thing. And if they go to your one platform and you’re super active and engaged, that’s enough. Like, people aren’t trying to work with the most social media driven agent. And so I think with online lead gen, you just have to understand that these people are the same leads that are going to zillow, that they’re selling back to you. They’re the same leads that are going to realtor.com. and we’re just getting in front of those people with advertising that’s driving them to your website so that you can capture their information, so that you have the opportunity to prospect them.
But it takes work. You have to put in the work. It’s not. Nothing in real estate is that easy until you’ve been doing it for so many years that you have a brand, you have a database, you have repeat and referral business, you have, like, you’ve grinded your teeth in this business for a long time, and you’ve got the reward of getting the easy business. And I know agents who are like, man, I’ve been doing this 20 years. I just take what comes to me and I’m happy, and that’s great. But most people aren’t there, you know? And so I think that online lead gen, the mistakes people make is going a mile wide, an inch deep. Because when you’re trying to convert ten different lead sources, you need a different process for all of them. If you just spend all your money in one that you believe in, you can recycle the same process and get really good at it, you know, same with building a YouTube channel or building Instagram or TikTok or whatever. By repetition, you will get good at that thing over a long enough time horizon, and you will not get good at ten things at once, likely.
So that’s my take on online leads, is figure out the place you want to be, find a good provider that you trust, and go all in on that and follow the process. I think a lot of agents don’t follow the process. They sign up for something, they think they know better, they think they’re good at sales, and they have an ego. Instead of just listening to the people that talk to hundreds of agents who do this all the time, we’ve done this for years, who’ve put together something and put a lot of work into something to make it easy for you. Because we know agents, the average agent isn’t that smart. Let’s be honest. And good agents know this. Every agent I talk to is good is like, yeah, there’s a lot of, you know, those types in the industry. So like, let’s just accept that and move on and be like, hey, the smartest agents I know are the ones that are the most willing to follow the process. Actually, it’s the ones that come in with an ego who think they’re better than they are and they don’t follow the process and take the advice and they don’t, they aren’t the ones on the website as a case study.
You know, they’re not the ones that make it there. So that was probably a very long.
Answer, but no, I agreed with every word you said there. Over to you, Robert.
No, so far, Eric, you’ve been a ten of ten guest and I’ve, I’ve been loving every second of it. There’s, there’s a lot to be said about focusing. John and I each have different verticals. With agent launch, you’ve done something that I find to be personally fascinating. I, I had run across few years ago as a guy producing like some type of purchasable content. I wasn’t able to find it again before this podcast, but I could swear that I remember that being a thing with you.
Yeah, it was okay.
I usually buy other content producers content. Like, I like to know what people are selling. Like, I pay attention to it. I don’t know yours, but what I absolutely agree with 100% and that I spend most of my time explaining to agents in this really incredibly long sales process that I have, is that I go, it is so much better to be an expert in a small neighborhood than one of 20 that isn’t really more qualified than anybody else in a big neighborhood. Like, for instance. And so since I’m an inbound marketer, it’s about providing value in ways that people didn’t expect, like being able to really analyze an area or a lifestyle and dive deep into that so that you capture somebody’s attention and then they want to talk to you. That’s the whole form and function of inbound marketing. But what I don’t hear enough people talking about is the idea of specialty information, the idea of saying no. Like, I live in Los Angeles county. You don’t want to focus on Los Angeles county. As a matter of fact, if you’re going to focus, I live in Van Nuys, which is a teeny, tiny little, very urban pocket.
Not a lot of great houses in Van Nuys. My neighboring cities all have higher priced real estate. What Van Nuys does have is a ton of apartment buildings. I’ve thought about this many times, and I think if I was ever to actually hang a license and sell real estate, I would just focus on apartment buildings in Van Nuys. Like, that’s it. Probably would only do a sale of two year, but they’re millions of dollars. And then I just focus on that one particular client, like, what questions are they asking? And then I would go out there and get those answers and then start publishing just like you have on YouTube and things like that. And the reason I’m going into all of this is that what you’ve done with new construction and a lead generation system that’s focused very specifically on a niche and how you just talked about a lot about process and sticking to the process. Every single angle of my career, everything I’ve ever done, me being a founder for the 7th time, I got to tell you, most of what you do is you create a process, and then you get all your people to try to follow along with it.
And I feel like I’m a dude with a hammer, and, like. And everybody else is kind of like, the nails, and, like, all I’m doing is like, okay, I hammered that over there, and now it’s coming out a little loose, and I got to go back and hammer it. But I’m not doing anything different. I’m just saying, just stick to this, to the thing that we created, because I’ve already tested it. I already spent two years, like, doing the whole thing. Like, please don’t muck around with it or change it or forget a step in the process. So, anyway, I guess this is just my really long way window way of saying, I love the idea that you presented about process. Besides the new construction bit, do you have, like, an aha moment for a process or something inside your. Your own business or maybe with a client specifically, like. Like, some really kind of lit you up?
Yeah. So, before we go to that, I do have a good one, and I just wanted to validate what you said about niche marketing. I think people really underestimate it, and it’s this idea of, like, being a big fish in a small pond. And when you become the best at a very, as naval says, specific. If you have specific knowledge, you have very specific knowledge about a narrow topic, but you’re the best at it. That’s when you get invites from people to come on podcasts, to be a guest, to talk to, speak to, whatever, because you’re the best at that narrow thing, right? A good example is Levi down in Dallas who crushed it with YouTube. Now he has a YouTube program. It’s like people see him as like the best at that, right? And like people saw me as the best at Google Ads right in the beginning. And that’s how I started. I founded this business based on that and I’m not going to get into my niche in real estate, but it was a wild one, but it was a very narrow, crazy niche, but it worked extremely well. And so now I’ve taken that same philosophy.
And the AHA moment that I had was, it’s funny, we made this decision before I found one third of properties were actually new construction right now. But that was super validating to hear nonetheless. But the big aha moment I had with this new construction was it wasn’t even the results that our clients were getting. It was the initial conversation that you have with a lead is just inherently different. So when you sign up with on an IDX site, you put in your information and you get access to properties. You get access to the exact same properties that you can get on any other agents website, Zillow, realtor, whatever, they have what they want, because people don’t care about agents, they care about real estate. Agents are just there to facilitate the transaction. Now when you sign up on these sites, then you start getting a phone call from an agent and you have to overcome these smoke screens and barriers to say, hey, I’m just here to help. I want to help you get set up on a safe search. And you try to move that conversation along. And this is challenging. And so this is what, because people throw you smokescreens, they’ll say, oh, I’m just browsing and not ready yet.
But buyers are liars. They say they’re twelve months out later, you get deeper, you find out they’re ready to go in a month or two. And that’s the difference between like a skilled agent who works on their scripts and works on overcoming these objections and smokescreens, and the agent that doesn’t follow the process and never gets past that first step.
Sure.
And so that’s why we’ve built a coaching element to our business, is to help people get over that. Now, new construction, you sign up for early access or first access to units that they don’t have access to. So it’s like, hey, opt in for all of the latest new construction developments in, say, Babcock Ranch is the one I was just talking about with my client. And if you listen to that episode of the podcast, which will be out soon, he’ll tell you that builders will call him first with inventory because he has relationships with them. So he literally has access to properties that nobody else does, including the public. So your initial value with the lead, when you call them and say, hey, I noticed you sign up on, you know, Babcock Ranch, new construction.com, or whatever it is. Just wanted to see what you were interested in finding so I could help you. We have a bunch of units coming to market soon. I’m happy to tell you about them. The commerce, the value you have to that prospect immediately is way higher because they do not get exactly what they want right away.
They actually need you to show it to them. And that’s how you can take that conversation for me. So that, that was the AHA moment for why we do new construction. It’s not like the lead cost is lower. It’s not the anything like that or what I talked about even before about the software. It was, the initial conversation is much smoother and therefore the conversion rate is much higher.
Eric, you are just over delivering in every single category. I asked the question. That is an incredibly cool answer. And I am, as a call center.
Guy, you want to take that high prize, Eric, because Robert doesn’t know that.
Well, you got my wheels turning, and I usually make other people’s wheels turn, and now you’ve got mine turning.
I can feel that. As I was saying it, I can feel that one.
I want to say that when Eric’s team approached me to come on the podcast, I’ve been watching Eric’s YouTube videos for quite a while.
Okay.
And I knew Eric, and I knew he would bring a lot of value to the company. And you’re very down turf, Eric. Something that’s greatly missing in the real estate market.
Not mentioning names.
To say the least. I’d like to go on with another question. So, AI, how do you see this affecting real estate and the Pacific real estate marketing? I’ve invested a lot of money and I use it daily, but I also see it being really abused by certain companies in the real estate marketing area. Really brutally, I mean, really brutally outrageous statements and all sorts of stuff. But I buy, use it daily and I’m committed to it. So I don’t know where it’s going to go in the real estate industry. Got any faults about Eric?
Well, I think in your space, like SEO and stuff, copywriting, like, obviously there’s quite a use for it. And I think for agents, too. I feel like you always got to dance around this one because you never know how people feel about it, but I think it’s a, right now at least, it’s a big negative for a lot of agents. And the reason is what you said about it being abused, is that it’s very sellable right now. So AI is all the rage, right? Everyone’s like, yeah, I got to AI. Everything got an AI. My bed and my house and my. It’s just like, everything needs, like, a splash of AI. It feels like online. But what I think happened was people got obsessed with AI. People started buying into AI, and of course they want to use it for the things that they’re either not good at or don’t have time for. So one of those things is the conversion process. So how do I use AI to prospect? For me is the question that a lot of people want answered. And, like, Robert, you’ll know this. There was a time in our business where we helped hire and train isas.
Yeah.
And what we realized in doing that is most agents are not ready to be a manager of a. Another human. And we would hire is as on teams. We give them all this infrastructure, we train them, and then we talk to the agent, and we give them sops. And it was like, they’re like, yeah, like, I don’t know. I just haven’t talked to my idea in a couple of weeks. And I’m like, what? You should be talking to them every day, every morning, like sales huddles. Let’s go. We teach this, we coach this, like, and it was kind of funny, but not at the same time, because there were, like, these, these beautiful people we were hiring and training, and they just weren’t led very well. And honestly, we’ve hired lots of isas that are still with their agents and doing great work, too. But the point is, an agent will do anything possible to not have to make the phone calls, and AI is just another reason for them to not have to make the phone calls. And so what happens is you get these kind of somewhat robotic voices, texting and emailing or whatever they’re doing leads.
And can it work? Sure, of course. Will it get better over time? Of course, it will. But what happens is something I call the authenticity gap, which is someone decides to not work with you because they felt somewhere in the sales process that you were not authentic and you are not aware of it because they didn’t talk to you, they didn’t reach out to you, they wrote you off. They might have unsubscribed or whatever, but you never know how many people you’re losing from sending an impersonal message. So we kind of went the other way and we got into more personalized video because I think in the age of AI, what people really want is personalization of the sales process. They want to be working with a human being. There are all these memes online of people dealing with AI, like phone people and phone bots, and they’re getting very good, don’t get me wrong. And I think there’s probably some utility. It’s not what we’re going to really niche into and sell. I think it’s people just need to be very aware that it’s very sellable right now. But the way you convert a real estate lead is through creating a human connection.
And I don’t think AI is a good way to create a human connection. I think it’s potentially a good way to qualify a lead a little. It’s potentially a way to nudge someone a little. But you’re never going to sell someone over text. You’re never going to sell someone with AI. Think so? I think it’s hurting people that are buying into it too much. And what’s going to happen is they’re going to be like, oh, I signed up for this AI program, and over the next four months, they’re going to stop prospecting. They’re going to take their foot off the gas and realize their conversion rate went way down and they’re actually missing a lot of business. So that’s my take on it. I think for other things, like helping with copy and helping with property descriptions, there are some pretty obvious use cases for it, but I just don’t know if sales is the right one. I think the right agent with the right tool could probably do some damage with it, but I think for most people it’s not quite there.
Wow, another beautiful answer. That’s probably going to do it for our show, John, unless you want to add maybe one more minute of stuff.
I think it’s a great place. And I just want to say, folks, I really highly recommend Eric’s YouTube channel, and I’ve learned a lot from it. Like I admitted to Eric, and he grinned. I’ve stolen so many of his ideas over the last couple of years. But you seem cool about it, Eric. There can only be one Eric, can they?
I don’t have a scarcity mindset about it. Use it. That’s why it’s there.
And from my end, I had run across your content a little bit here and there. And like what I’m struck with here and I’m struck with within. Your offer is, I will say, I think that debt, like, there are two very rare combinations inside the real estate founder section of real estate marketing, and that is a data-led company and radical honesty in combination with each other. That is what really impressed me about you. It’s, I don’t really have necessarily a tried and true silver bullet. What I have is I have data that I look at with like, like Google Analytics accounts. It’s part of my love. I’m fascinated by big data. And I go in and I literally look at my hundred plus, you know, whatever it is, accounts at least daily, sometimes every other day. But I’m always looking. I’m looking at how user behavior is changing on websites. The answer to conversion is usually where the audience’s attention goes. That’s where kind of like you want to present data, right? So, I have a data-driven approach and do not like a hard system. I build things around where people are going and what their interests are.
And the truth is that changes. Sometimes markets change. We’ve had a pandemic and we’ve had a once-in-a-lifetime real estate market directly after that. So I’ve been dealing with a lot of change, which means that the silver bullet has been changing because the industry has been changing. And that’s something I’m hearing you say with this new construction system and going from selling coaching or, you know, courses and then moving into like, you’re following along with the data, you’re stumbling across it, you’re looking at the results and saying, this is really productive. And I’m going to build up like a system and a process and a business around it and then you’re selling that. And as far as I can tell from everything I’ve seen, everything you’ve shown us today, you’re just really transparent about it, which I really like. It’s really incredibly rare. Like most people want to sell bait without the data, they just want to sell you on something. Especially real estate marketing company was covered early in the show. And ladies and gentlemen, I’m just going to, I’m going to close my end out. You can find [email protected] and see a lot of this stuff online.
I’ve got hundreds of videos and hundreds of pages on my website. And I’m just going to say this, beware what you buy. It is almost always stuff that serves the person selling it to you far better than it serves you. And we can go through the entire list. Very few real estate marketing companies are taking the time, like, Eric has to present enough data online to give you enough perspective where you can buy a system or buy a service and be properly educated before you do. It’s not that one is better than another. It’s which is best for you. Who’s put the data out there to say, give you enough research to say, this is going to work with my personality type. Like, you covered it earlier, like, will you make phone calls or just, will you never, ever, ever pick up a phone? Well, that’s probably, you know, if that’s going to be the case, you don’t want to go with a system that relies heavily on you or somebody else picking up a phone. Are you going to manage your ISA team? It’s crazy what you said, but of course you’re right. Like, you’re absolutely 100% correct.
Like, my biggest frustration is finding a world-class, like Argentinian or Filipino. And I’ve been to these countries, and I like to meet my teams. They’re just people to me. They’re just in a different place. And so I go, and I meet them, and I train them up and, like, and do all this. And some of them are the most beautiful humans you’ve ever met in your life. And then they can’t get their client to talk to them. And I’m just like, I just want to throw myself out of fucking window. All right, so I’ve said my bit. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Eric, how would you like people to find you? What would you like to, like, kind of point at? At the end of our time together today?
Yeah, I think if you’re interested in working with us using our service, you can go to agentlaunch.com and fill out our form. You can definitely follow me there. Preston, on YouTube. That’s where we’re going to be dropping a lot of value and putting our new podcast, which is called Build and Sell, which is all focused on the new home market, so make sure to follow along. And on agent launch, we’re going to be making a lot of really fun content coming up, so stay tuned for that.
Super cool. John, how would you like people to? What would you like to point out as we wrap the show-up?
Yeah, sure, Rob. Just go to the Mail-Right.com website, where we combine WordPress with Facebook—a winning combination. Over to you, Robert.
And I said it once, I’m going to steal the microphone for a second. Just say, go to inboundrem.com, look at my about or services pages. If you want to learn more about me and if you want to learn more about just real estate marketing, SEO specifically, I do exactly what Eric said. I’ve done it for a long time. I focus on only search engine optimization for real estate and residential real estate agents. It’s what I’ve been focused on for 16 straight years. You can learn a lot if that’s in the interest of yours on my website. Thank you, everybody, for joining the show. Thank you, Eric, for allowing your team to book the appointment with us and deciding to show up for the podcast. John, thank you, as always, for setting this all up and doing the production on the show. Everything, the acquiring of the guests, the being on time, all of that is John, so deeply appreciate you, my man. That’s it. Take us offline.
Thanks so much, guys. Appreciate it.
Sorry, I just kind of like random.
————————————–
The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
Jonathan Denwood
https://www.youtube.com/@MailRight/videos
https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
————————————–
Robert Newman
InboundREM
We discuss with our special guest Greg McDaniels the importance of quality photography connected to being a successful real estate Read more
Agents need to do more than blogging to get results in 2016. We discuss this during this show with our two Read more
Greg McDaniel literally began his career at his father’s knee. It would not be an exaggeration to say he has Read more
Personal agent photography is really important but usually semi-forgotten. We have a great guest "Preston Zeller" on the show who recently Read more
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Expert Advice on Crafting Real Estate Landing Pages for Maximum Conversion Rates!
Looking to supercharge your real estate marketing efforts? Look no further than our latest video, which offers essential advice on building successful landing pages that convert like never before! Explore innovative tactics for capturing attention, nurturing leads, and easily driving conversions. Take action now and watch the video to revolutionize how you attract clients and grow your business exponentially.
#1 – A compelling “above the fold” section
#2 – A strong, catchy headline
#3 – Creative copy with clear language and benefits
#4 – A transparent and compelling offer
#5 – A single call to action
#6 – High-impact visuals or videos
#7 – Genuine social proof
#8 – Final Thoughts
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode 434 of the Mailright Show. There is so much going on today, but if you join us now or later, we’re incredibly grateful. Today’s episode is number 434, which I already said. The subject that we’re going to give is some advice on how to create real estate landing pages that will convert and get people to provide you with their information. So without any further ado, John, please, you are the maestro; you are the producer. You’re the producer of the show; you’ve done so many things. You’ve got two podcasts, you’ve been in the WordPress world forever, and you know almost all the movers and shakers in the WordPress environment. Could you please introduce yourself to the audience in your own words?
Oh, thanks, Rob. And thanks for that introduction. I’m the co-founder of mail-right. Com. We build fantastic-looking websites on WordPress that you own. Plus, we got a CRM landing page generator and a lot of other cool stuff. Also, if you want to have any questions, you can join us live and put your questions to us during the show at 2:00 PM Pacific Standard Time on Thursday. To get there, all you have to do is go to the Mel Wright Facebook page or the Mel Wright YouTube channel. Back over to you, Rob.
Beautiful. Well, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Robert Newman. I am a guy who focuses on SEO inside the real estate space, and I’ve been doing that for 16 years now. It’s rare that anything interesting happens in my space, but it is new and genuinely Earth-shaking. But right now, the whole SEO world is staggered by the fact that Google had its first significant data breach in the search space. We basically get to see how the Wizard works behind the curtain. Anyway, if you want to find out what I’m going to update you on, please go to my website, inboundrem. Com. I shared the show on my Facebook page, which I’m going to do since John has been really good about saying, Join us Live. Anyway, let’s dive right into it today because we’re on a clock. Unfortunately, I have to be in and out on time today, which means no bonus content, but you are going to get 30 minutes of compelling data on how to convert landing pages. So when you look at the show notes, guys, there’s this one through eight lists, and number one on the list that John put, there is compelling above-the-fold section.
99% of the people who listen to the show do not know what you mean when you say above the fold. So why don’t we start there and say, what is that?
Well, it depends. It has altered quite a bit because you’ve got so many different devices. That’s why you need a good, responsive website. And what does that mean? A responsive website is that it can change how it looks depending on the device that is viewing a particular page or website. And that is achievable. You usually do have to alter a website slightly depending on the platform; what can work on a very large monitor is typically different from what will work on a mobile phone, but it can adjust. So what above the fold means is that first area that shows when you hit a particular page, what will show first? That usually is, like I say, in an era of all different types of devices, what is meant as before the fold. It comes from the old world of the newspaper world, where people bought their newspapers from the newsstand. It was the headline. It was the first… The paper was folded, and it was the first page of the paper. It’s what the lead story would be with the paper being folded. That’s where that term comes from, Robert.
And that term has remained the same, and in essence, design as it relates to advertising display design has had alterations but hasn’t changed that much. As an example, here is Facebook’s above the full landing page. Sorry, taking me a minute to figure out how to do this. Okay, so you’ve got content on the bottom and images on the top. That design standard has been in place for 50 years. Advertising geniuses in Madison Avenue invented it a long time ago, case-studied it, and multivariate tested it ad nauseam, and it’s what people respond to. Images first, content later. That’s literally what every single newspaper does. When we say a compelling above-the-fold section, the section that the eye is drawn to first is the easiest way to phrase it. You look, what do you see first? Capture their attention with a good image and a compelling way of writing the words. You could do fire sail with big, bold, animated words and little flames coming out. Anything that captures their attention is what you want when somebody’s eyes hit your advertisement for the first time. Now, here’s my favorite thing. Some people have made millions, if not billions, of dollars off. It’s crazy, it’s crazy.
But a strong, catchy headline. Jon, I have so much to say on this. Go ahead, but you start.
Yeah, sure, Rob. Well, it’s something I’ve learned with doing a fair bit of Facebook advertising with my partner, is that people tend to run Facebook campaigns, and if they don’t get an initial response, they can it. But changing the headline, a lot of people think it’s just they’re going to do a dramatic change, where changing the image, and especially changing the headline, you can get a totally different response to a Facebook campaign. And I think that applies to landing pages or Google Adverts or whatever. People think it has to be a dramatic change that will will result in it either being a success or failure, but it’s actually the word in the image. Small changes can make a big difference.
Wow, couldn’t I agree with you more? Ladies and gentlemen, this is interesting. If everybody here googles tag lines for real estate, I’ve had a number one or number two article for that for four straight years, which is difficult with the way that the SEO algorithm works. It means that people are gravitating to my content over and over for longer periods of time, regardless of what else hits the top of the page. Why would you ask? Well, number one for the search result is luxury presence, 35, attention grabbing real estate slogans as taglines. Number two, us, five Five hundred. Big difference. We’ve done a lot of this, a lot of working in my-You’re a bit loud this afternoon, don’t you? Enormously loud, super-pumped.
I know.
I’ll give you a few examples. Dreams Within Reach, Home Sweet Home, Invest in You, Lux Moving Life, Elevate Your Lifestyle, Live, Love, Home, keys to Happiness. There’s 500 of these. We’ve studied them ad nauseam. We add to this list every year. It’s one of our favorite pieces of content because there’s so much power in haikus, poetry, or put another way, tagalins. That’s what you are trying to do, three words that impact everybody deeply. Okay? So go check out our post, and let’s move on to the next subject inside this amazing subject that John has chosen for us today. Creative copy number three on the list for creating a landing page that converts is creative copy with clear language and benefits. So why don’t you open us up on that What do you do?
Well, a lot of content that a lot of brokerages agents produce is as boring as watching paint dry. It just is. And also they tend to use very flowery language, where we’ve touched upon this before. If you do any study, a lot of the gurus or the most influential people in copywriting, it’s very clear that you should really aim for a seventh to eighth grade level. And people tend… Obviously, that can vary. But in marketing, in advertising in this particular medium, it’s got to be interesting, but don’t use too flowery language. Aim at a seventh to eighth grade. That’s the general advice.
Got you. I agree with that advice. Writing at a sixth grade level is best recommended.
Seventh to eighth, they recommend?
I I don’t stick to that, personally. But then again, you have to decide who you’re appealing to. You want to appeal to everybody and go broad.
Obviously, if you’re writing for Old English geesers, you got to write much lower level for me to understand. That’s what John interrupted me to say, everybody.
That was so important that he had to interrupt me to say that.
So It was urgent, Rob.
Creative copy with clear language and benefits. If you really want to keep your whole advertising life simple, then keep your copy simple. If you want to get complicated, my advice is understand your audience to the greatest degree. There is no amount of money and effort that you can spend that would not justify understanding who your audience is, because once you do understand that, you have so many more tools in the tool belt of trying to create something that the people that you’re advertising to are going to resonate with. The more you know your audience, the better you can do, and maybe you keep it clear. Maybe you use some not so clear languages like legal jargon that might relate to real estate. Maybe there’s something happening in your marketplace that is somewhat like legal element of the real estate business, and you should advertise to that. It just depends. All right, number four, a A single call to action. I don’t know that I agree with this, but hit me, John.
I think you missed one, wasn’t it? A transparent and compelling offer.
Oh, yeah, sorry. You’re absolutely right. Number 4, transparent and compelling offer.
See, I am awake, Robert.
I am not. My brain, unfortunately, for all of us, is just connected to something else.
He’s buzzing. He’s been reading up on his Google SEO. He’s buzzed up. He’s pumped up, folks. He’s elevated.
He’s In a way I can’t even explain.
Yeah, there you go.
Fifteen years of a career validated, John. Fifteen years.
Yeah, keep it simple, folks. Compelling offer, transparent and compelling, and keep it simple. People have a tendency to want to build very complicated optimizations and complicated offers and all sorts. The geniuses in this industry have learned that the simple and well-trodden offers and tend to work the most. What do you reckon, Rob?
I reckon… Okay, hold on, sorry.
Is that Google?
No, it’s my dad. Sorry. Okay. I reckon that transparent and compelling is extremely viable. And I also, I’m going to say a whole bunch of stuff, and I hope you all hear me. A transparent, compelling offer does not have to be a sale, does not have to mean you have to slash and burn prices at your current shop. I have always deeply looked for service or informational add-ons that I can throw into my service that make it extremely compelling, but are also not me discounting my service or diminishing my brand or anything like that. I will do extra work like I am doing right now, reading 2,500 pages, so that I can come up with 10 things that are simple and straightforward so that you don’t have to read 20 hours worth of documentation and summarizes what is of interest to you. That’s what you’re getting. That’s the compelling offer is that. It’s like, Oh, there was a lot of work. I didn’t have to do it. Somebody did it for me, and I get to just see these 10 things. That’s compelling, in my opinion. And so a transparent offer is also something that is a hot button that John put down here because one of my least favorite things, one of like as a middle-aged dude, listen, if you say one thing and I hit a landing page and it is Clearly saying another, even slightly, I bounce off so fast, I don’t care how good the offer is.
I don’t anymore. Transparent to me means honest. That’s how I interpret that phrase that John put here. So if you say you’re going to do one thing in your little advertisement, make sure that your landing page says, basically, reinforces it in the first sentence. Transparency is, in my opinion, equivalent to honesty in advertising. And I don’t There is never a time that it is right to say, Fire sale, and then you hit a landing page and it’s like, Just kidding. We’re not selling. Our products are already awesome. There is no sale. I hate that so much. So don’t create a lot of hate in your audience by doing anything other than being clear, honest, and compelling is understanding your audience and creating something that you think that they’re really going appreciate. I’ve got a client right now who has nine times the certifications as any other real estate agent and does a one % flat rate for his customers in San Francisco, which is not a discount market. And he does very, very well because he’s twice as qualified and charges half as much. I’m not a price cutter personally, but I have to admit for a certain audience, that’s going to be a compelling offer.
And he’s an English bloke, just like you, Jonathan.
What could you ask for? You got two to deal with in one week. Shall we go for our break, Rob?
Stay tuned, ladies and gentlemen. We absolutely shall, my good, good man. We are going to go to a break and we’re When we come back, we have four more compelling things to talk about calls to action, impacting visuals, social proof, and some final closing thoughts. So stay tuned. We’ll be right back. Thank you for giving us your time today. We really appreciate it. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 434 of the MailRight Show. We’re doing the show today on a historic day. There’s so much happening in the world. There’s a big Google leak, there’s a jury verdict coming out. There’s so many things happening today, but John and I are here with you talking about real estate landing pages and how that you can create a compelling landing page that converts. Next up on our list, if you didn’t catch the first half of the show, please find it and go back and watch it. It’s excellent. Our second part of the show, we’re going to start off with a single call to action. I don’t know that I agree with this, John, which is what I said a second ago.
Why don’t you dive into this and make sure that I’m on the same page as you?
Yeah, I think I do agree with it, but I’ll be interested to hear your view. I think having multiple different offers and different calls on one page is not a great idea. I think it’s linked to the copy, transparent, compelling, and keeping it simple. Keep it simple, basically. One offer, compelling, transparent. Don’t have three offers on one page, on a landing page. I’ve been guilty of that a lot, having multiple offers on a landing page. And When I’ve cleaned it up and just had it as simple as possible and just had one offer, it’s always worked better.
One offer, yes. A call to action is responding to the offer. I found that through multivariate testing, that oftentimes there are compelling ways to set up multiple calls to action, not for different offers, for the same offer. Click here, click there. Not different offers. One offer, I agree with that. One offer. Absolutely no doubt about it, John. But multiple ways of asking somebody to engage with that one offer, which is how I’m seeing a call to action, a CTA, that I have just seen lots of proof that says that there are very effective ways to put multiple calls to action on the same page and get increased engagement. A call to action, ladies and gentlemen, is an action button. Get offer, sign up now, schedule with Robert. Those are all call to actions. They are the final thing that you do before you start getting into paperwork and such. Calls to action are usually short, sweet, to the purpose, and usually the content that you’ve been writing, that’s the transparent, compelling offer bit, is setting up the call. If you did a really good job, you might do the call. But here’s what you could do.
You could do a great job. You could do a simple call to action. Are you ready? Schedule this call now. But now you get something interesting. The rest of the building blocks that John is doing, the most effective landing pages that are existing in the world are funnel-like. That’s what you all have heard about. Funnel-like is you build, build, build, and you take somebody’s temperature with a call to action, such as, Sign up now. You’re midway through, but you think you’re done because you’re sliding down a long landing page and you think you’re finished. Then you hit this CTA. Then you don’t want to click the button as the person reading the page. You keep scrolling down and you discover the landing page is not done. What could be next is a paragraph of text, and then as John has put down in number 6 here, a high impact visual or video. I’m going to continue on with my thought here, but John, why don’t you explain what you mean here so, again, we can be on the same page?
Well, number 6, How did that impact your impression? Well, basically, I did my MA in graphical design and visual design. Basically, we are visual animals, Basically, we can input visual messages into our mind at a much higher rate than through reading words. So you can transmit a message through your image at a much higher rate, and you haven’t got much time with a landing page to get the person to do something. So having some thought in the images. And the same thing with the first frame of a video and the first 20 seconds of a video, you’ve got a limited amount of time, but you can transmit more information at a higher rate than you can through the written word.
I agree with everything. There’s no disagreement agreement to be had. I would just add that when you’re hitting… The way that landing pages really build momentum is you do a lot of compelling copy, transparent offer, so on and so forth. Then you take somebody’s temperature with, Hey, would you like to talk to me about this now? Or, Talk to me? Meet me? Whatever button, right? But let’s just say it’s like, Hey, I understand if this isn’t quite compelling enough for you yet, Just because I know you probably have some more questions, I went ahead and put a video together, and that would be slightly down the fold. Now you’ve got a compelling video that is slightly further down the page. As the video ends, what you’re going to say is, Hey, I’ve left some really great information. Like, right below this video. You keep getting people to basically digest information down the landing page. That’s how most… Like Motley Fool is doing landing pages like that. Everybody is doing landing pages like that. There’s a guy out there who’s named I forget, but he’s got a company named ClickFunnels. He’s built a whole company around this one principle, and so it works.
But you’re going to do multiple calls to action on the same page, six or seven, to get it to work right for you. You can change up what you’re calling the buttons, even though that does increase the difficulty in the page design elements. But here’s what usually happens on these landing pages. You’ve got you. You write your video, you had your call to action below the first compelling offer, the video usually explains, then you do another call to action, and now a lot of people still need to be ready. So you add more logs to the fire in the form of, number seven on our list, genuine social proof. John, talk to us about that for a second.
Well, if you can get a video, that’s fantastic. But if you can’t, image a person and then link to their website or link to their social media account, so you can prove that it’s actually a natural person, it actually exists. The more you can prove that through testimonials or… We live in the age of cynicism. A lot of that cynicism is justified, but it’s all prevailing now. Social media has put it on steroids. So, the more social proof you can provide, but you have to prove that it’s real.
Agreed. Social proof is where all the people who have already used the service bought the service, and so on and so forth schedule a call with you. I strongly believe that the service process is broken down into many elements of service and that if you can get people to review all those elements, such as what happens when you have a problem, it is social proof, right? Then you get somebody commenting about that. What happens when you sign up? Social proof. You get somebody commenting about that. What happens when somebody has been using this thing you sold for a while? You get a review about that. All these different elements because a long-term service-based relationship is like saying you used a plumber for ten years, and they fixed four different problems in the house. They could have gotten it right three times and messed up the fourth, and the fourth was the most significant job and cost you $20, $50, $100,000. Thus, that last review might actually be more impactful than the previous three. Social proof is how most people measure the viability of a vendor. That’s very important. On the landing page, you’d go to the call to action.
People need more time to be ready. Social proof is the last and final weapon in the gun. It’s the biggest deal of them all. It is what’s probably going to kick somebody over the edge. You make sure that you list significant amounts of social proof. Maybe you have a video of somebody talking about the service, and then you do what you’ve been doing the whole time, and you ask, again, for a commitment, a call to action. Sign up now, call me now, and schedule a call with me, I’m still not convinced. I’ll show you some case studies, stuff like that. There is a way to give yourself a little bit of space. You can set up the final call by saying, Hey, a lot of purchasing calls to action are like, this is at the very end, after all that baloney, 10 minutes worth of a landing page, at the very bottom of the page, they go, Oh, by the way, there’s no risk to your commitment. You have a two-day money-back guarantee. There’s no risk in the purchase. The same thing could be said of a service-based offer where a call to me is free. My consultation, my wisdom, the value of my information, that I’m giving that all to you.
What do you have to lose? Call me. So, John, we’re down; we’re between number 7 and number eight. We’re there. We’re doing final thoughts. So, do you have anything to add to what I just said? Do you have some thoughts that you want to share before we close the show out?
Well, I underestimated it, but what you’re fighting is in action. It’s safer for the person not to get the offer. It’s safer not to fill in the form. It’s safer. You’re fighting in action. That’s what you’re fighting against. It’s safer to stay in your existing home. It’s safer not to do anything. There’s a price that must be paid for in action, which can be very painful and insidious. But you’re fighting apathy and inaction. And that’s why the things that we’ve discussed in this show have been proven because it Is there, based on the experience of hardened marketers who have had to fight back in action. Back over to you, Robert.
And all of that, so a few things. One, remember what we said on the landing pages: succeed or die on the power of the initial tagline. That’s it. You are compelling somebody to get in there and read because oftentimes, these days, converting landing pages is very long. I don’t know if you all realized it, but I just basically said there’s text-based content, followed by a video or an infographic you spent some time on, followed by social proof, and there’s content in between each of these things. Then, there’s a form at the bottom, which oftentimes guarantees language. This is a big project to create a converting landing page. It’s worth it, of course. You can change your entire career trajectory off the strength of a single landing page. So it’s very worth it. It’s just not what most people think when a vendor hands you something and says, your landing page is your contact form. I hope you will all join me with this. A hearty guffaw because that is ridiculous. It is ridiculous. That is not a landing page. That is your contact form. You can use it as a landing page because people land there.
Technically, they’re right. But if you think that people will just come to that landing page and fill it out just because my goodness gracious, that didn’t work ten years ago, why would it work today? I have no idea. All right, ladies and gentlemen, it has been John, and it’s a great honor to entertain and hopefully educate you a little bit on what is one of the simplest yet most important things that you can talk about, which is these converting landing pages. John, thank you so much for putting together the show notes. If you would like our audience to reach out to you and talk about what you do to create converting landing pages for them and make your websites work from a lead generation perspective, how would you like people to go about doing that?
Oh, thanks, Rob. I want to point out the MailRight system. It’s one of our strengths. We’ve got a pattern and library of different sections that enable people to build landing pages on our platform quickly. And it’s all based on Gutenberg. And I’m pretty proud of what we’ve built there. And the other thing, Rob, is we got some guests in the next couple of weeks. I’ve rustled up some guests, Rob. So we got some people to talk to. You don’t have to part with me, Robert. I know that’s great.
Did you? Has anything happened with that young lady who sought me out and wanted to get out?
I think she’s one of the guests. Yeah, I think she could be.
Right on. All right. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I just saw some exciting news. Poor Donald Trump has been found guilty on all 34 counts. It’s hard to keep my feed not full of that stuff. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, if you’d like to reach out to me, Robert Newman, and talk to me about tagline story storytelling or anything like that, please go to inboundrim. Com. You can look at my About page and my Service page. I always encourage you to measure whether or not you should reach out to me based on the quality of the work you see yourself. You look at my website, decide for My website, decide for yourself, does this guy know how to create compelling content? I think that I do. If you don’t agree, don’t reach out to me. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. We so sincerely appreciate you, John. I appreciate you. Obviously, I’ve had too much caffeine, and I am having a life-changing day today. Until next time, sign us off.
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Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode 433. 33 is a lucky number if you’re in the numerology. So once again, 33 is prosperity. So, today’s show will help all of you out there have a bit more prosperity. So that’s the dream, that’s the goal, that’s the desire. So we’re going to talk about writing tools that use large language models, other words known or currently collectively being referred to as AI. Most of them are probably using some open chat 2BT back-in because not Everybody has the ability to develop a large language model. Most likely all of these services are using a similar back-end to create performance. John has used all these tools in complete transparency. I’ve only used one or two when I glanced at the list. He’s probably going to be leading our discussion. Since he is going to be our fearless leader for this show, John, I was hoping that you would just introduce yourself.
Oh, thanks, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mel-right. Com. We build beautiful websites for real estate agents and offer CRM, email, text messaging, landing pages, and a lot more, all combined in a great platform. Welcome, Rob. I’m back over to you.
Cool. All right. My name is Robert Newman. I’m the founder of InboundREM. It’s an SEO company, but really, for most of you, you should just go to the website. I will teach you how to do most things related to search engine optimization, such as hyperlocal, all for free. Just go to inboundrem.com and see what I have got going on there. I’ve been a thought leader for, God, 16 years in the space, so hopefully I’ve got something that would be interesting and worth your time. John, let’s talk about number one on your list, which is probably one of the most popular writing applications. I’ve never used it, but I’ve certainly heard of it 5,000 times. Jasper. Let’s talk about Jasper.
Jasper is one of the leading platforms if you want to write pretty quality content by utilizing AI. It’s owned by the same people as Href. I think they’ve put money into this, and it’s a pretty, pretty slick platform. It does long-form articles. I have utilized it. The only thing about it is It’s reasonably expensive. It’s not ridiculous, though. It starts at $49, which is called Creator, and the next version is Pro ’69. Basically, it’s aimed at teams where you can have different people, but they would have a consistent brand voice. It’s just a UX design. The interface design is pretty slick, one of the slickest of all these types of tools. The content quality optimizes content to be SEO-friendly. I’m not going to delve into all that because we could I’ll talk about that, and you probably know more about that than me, but it basically goes out there and you can give it a list of keywords, and it will make sure the keywords are in the article. And the quality that it produces is pretty impressive.
I will make a comment here because you’ve mentioned some keywords here. So Arefs, for those of you who don’t know, is probably one of the best-regarded SEO analytics tools that’s currently available on the market. And it does things like measure how many backlinks that you’ve got. It does really cool things like properly segmenting your keywords into what is called semantic keyword groups. It has a very interesting way of measuring domain authority and allowing you to understand or make a guess, a very good guess, at how authoritative a domain will be. Then about four years ago, they started their own content campaign, which has been extremely good, where they’re making content that is, almost bar none, some of the best SEO-related content that you can get. All you need to do is subscribe. It’s free content that you get. Obviously, a lot of it leverages their tool. Their job is they constantly do educational content that leverages AREFs, the tool. Now, I’m mentioning that deep backstory because when they say they’re invested, if that’s true, that they’re invested in Jasper, that would seem to imply a vote of confidence in both AI and Jasper in general.
Now, my personal experience is that since Google already has the tech for large language models in the form of Bard, they are figuring out ways to penalize significant language model content. It’s not necessarily spoken, but if you’re following along with their updates over the last year, the first way that they addressed these updates was to say, We want to see something on the page that comes directly from the website owner, such as video, because video is not yet to the point that most people can produce an utterly AI-generated video that looks authentic. I say all this because John said SEO. Well, we use Jasper for SEO, and you were asking for a lot of potential issues unless you need to do the following. You need to change, add, or subtract 30% of the text. Everybody, listen to me, 30% of the text. It would be helpful if you added a video that you personally did to the page that you had with Jasper write. It would also be helpful if you added some custom-designed, not AI-generated, custom-designed infographics or interactive elements on the page. Now, as real estate agents, you’ve got lots of options, mortgage calculators, search bars, all sorts of shit.
All of that needs to get done in order for your page to be long term, not today. Today, this recommendation is fine. You could probably use Jasper and do reasonably well. But a year from now, I would lay a heavy amount of money on no. So you’d be making a very temporary solution, and then, likely, you’d have to go back and fix your entire website. I’ve been there. I’ve done that. Trust me, it’s not worth it. I have yet to use Jasper to see what content it writes. I’m sure based on the test that I have done on ChatGPT 4 in general, which I have a video up on, I’m certain that it’s probably really good content, John. They can go out throughout the entire internet and take the very best of everything, which is precisely what it does, and then combine it into a new piece of content. Of course, it’s going to be good. They can take the best of the best and apply Now, hopefully, Jasper has an updatable feature because when I’ve been noticing that with the LLR models that are currently existing, they grab that information from 2016 and 2017. That’s when those designers and developers decided to make the best of five years ago, which could be more useful when you’re trying to write cutting-edge content.
I’m going to say, be very careful. However, I’m going to give one recommendation I had to give that whole diatribe because I do know what likely AREFs had in mind when they looked at Jasper.
Well, I think they had to go into something like this. I think they were driven by business logic to go in. I think they’ve made a lot of money from it.
Let’s just say that… Here’s the last little thing. Here’s what doesn’t happen in SEO, and it’s reasonable. Everybody usually aims. If you say a semantic keyword for you and me, John, real estate marketing companies, that’s a huge keyword that has 300 little keywords under it that basically mean the same thing. It’s a big semantic keyword. All of us, you, me, everybody else, we’re like, top 10 real estate websites, top 10 this, top… We’re all aiming at the real estate marketing semantic keyword. But somewhere well down that list, if you’re tearing out those semantic keywords, somewhere down there, there’s the best real estate marketing company for Real estate agents that make less than $100,000 a year, as an example. But this is the first time I’ve written an article like that. I doubt you, and if I’ve never done it, no offense, but I don’t think you’ve ever done it. I don’t know if anybody else has ever done it. It’s not just you and me. I don’t know anybody else in the industry who’s done it because who would target a piece of content at some… Yet, it would be very helpful if we did. If we did write that piece of content, it would be extremely helpful to the people at large.
Jasper would help a lot with that.
Piecing together-Yeah, I think we’ve lost most of our… Well, quite a bit of our listeners, but I knew that was going to happen. I do agree with you, folks. It’s really a great piece of technology, but if you’re going to… I think it’s worth looking at, folks, but it’s not for the casual use. I do agree that I wouldn’t go crazy with this. I think having some restraint and listening to some of Rob’s advice would probably be advised. So have a look at it, but I wouldn’t go beserk with it, put it that way.
Thank God you listened Grammarly as number two. Okay, Grammarly we use, and I’ve been using for close to 10 years. I have so much experience with this tool.
Yeah, I use it all the time. I use the Pro version. Folks, basically, I rely on it. I got the Premier. The Premier is $12 a month, or If you pay yearly, I think it’s 30 monthly, so definitely get your yearly one. It’s one of half a dozen online subscription extensions, I just pay it without wincing. They provide a Chrome, a Firefox, I think a couple of other extensions for other popular browsers, but the two Firefox and Chrome and Edge, I think Edge as well. It works on all the leading browsers. They do provide an app that works on PC and Mac, and it really works well. What would you say, Rob?
I would say 100% true. So ladies and gentlemen, Grammarly is something I’ve used, and I use the $12 license, and I love it. It helped me out. I type too fast, I think too little, and Grammarly smooths out the edges. It’s also great for a professional writer because you get a lot of corrections in real-time as if you had an editor sitting at your desk. It doesn’t change everything. It’s not perfect, but it’s about 80% perfect. I have a huge amount of overseas writers that I’ve now paid for a team account, John, which is one of my larger SAIS bills at this point, and it’s $150 a month. I have 15 people a month using it, I think, is what the number I don’t know. I’m not sure. But we do a lot of writing, obviously. We are not using AI, but we are using Grammarly. We do a lot on Grammarly. Grammarly is a form of autocorrection that is the perfect mix, in my opinion, between AI and yet a real-life human being writing something because it will fix it in a standardized way. But at the same time, it does a lot of really compelling things like what What style do you want to write in?
Engaging, technical, all these great things. I can’t recommend it enough. If you’re looking for a writing tool and you’re trying to scale the line between AI and something that’s highly Grammarly, two thumbs up. Let’s move on because I took too much time with Jasper. But man, yes, Grammarly, yes. Crollbot. I’ve never used this. Never even heard of it until you listed it here, so you’re going to have to help me out.
Yeah, I use it all the I’ve got the Pro version, it’s $99. Basically, you can put other people’s copy and it will rewrite it so they can’t see that you’ve just lifted their content. It does a reasonable job. It also checks for plagiarism. If somebody’s writing for you, you can take sections of their copy and make sure they just haven’t lifted it off somewhere else. It also has a reasonably effective AI detection. I. E, you can put copy in. That’s been done with Jasper and some of the other tools out there. It will tell you if it can detect that it was written by AI. But my experience, I’ve used them all, basically, all the AI detection tools. They’re all a bit iffy But this is a rectable, and I use it all the time. I can say I pay for the Pro version for $99, Rob.
Okay. It sounds like an interesting tool. I have mixed feelings about taking somebody’s content and mixing it up to the point that it appears to be original. I only have one idea surrounding everything that I do. It’s been my idea for a long time because It was in the original script close to 15, 20 years ago when the two guys that founded Google put it out there. It was really fascinating because their driving idea behind Google originally was, We just want to be useful. We want to help sort everybody’s information and be useful to the end user. They stuck with that for a long time, and I gravitated towards that mission statement, just be useful. Taking something of somebody else’s and regurgitating it is just you saying, I’m going to be useful like this other person was. You’re not really being useful in your own right. You’re copying somebody else’s usefulness that you like. I have mixed feelings about that. But what I don’t have mixed feelings about is if you think you have something interesting to say on a subject and somebody else has written it out in a way that you find compelling, but you know that your opinion is like a contrarian opinion or that you have additional elements to add to it, here’s what I would do.
I would do a video on top of that edited Qobot thing, and I would feel pretty okay about it. If I had a lot of unique interesting things to say as it related to the content that had not been said yet, that I felt it would be useful, then by all means, Qobot sounds amazing.
Yeah, I want to point out I don’t use it on whole posts. I use it if I’m on maybe one paragraph and I want to quickly use it out of courtesy. I just don’t want to lift it. And also I just don’t want some snobby little prick emailing me saying they’re going to sue me because I dare to copy two sentences. So I just put it through there and then have a quick check, and it saves me a little bit of time. But I wouldn’t lift up because it’s not good enough, basically. I also use it because of my dyslexia, because I actually like writing, but one of the tendencies of my own form with dyslexia, and I think people that don’t have it also suffer from this, is there are keywords that you like to use all the time in your vocabulary and in your written vocabulary, unless you’re a very polished writer of a high standard, you can keep on utilizing the same words. Well, it highlights that and it will swap the word out. So the frequency, because it’s a sign of poor writing quality, that your vocabulary, you keep utilizing the same keywords.
So I use it for that as well. I think it’s time for our break, Rob.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to be right back. John and I are going to talk to you about more AI tools. Hopefully, there are people that are sticking it out with us. We know we’re doing some deep dives. I feel like there’s a lot of conditions that go along with them. We’re going to come back with another set of tools and probably conditions, knowing the two of us. But listen, we’re excited to have you here. We really appreciate it. Stay tuned. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 433 of the MailRight podcast. We’re really excited to have you here. We’re We’re talking about AI writing tools, and we just ended with Quilbot, and we’re on the number 4 on John’s meticulously prepared list. It is Hemingway.
Yeah. Hemingway is a really interesting tool. The free version, you can get away with just utilizing the free version, folks, but I actually paid for the paid version. I want to point out I use all these on a daily or weekly basis every so. Hemingway really It helps on the opposite of what I said before the break when it came to Quilbelt. Hemingway stops you from being too flowy, as I would say, too wordy with your writing. A lot of people write too sophisticated. They reckon for your written materials to be really readable in North America, that you should be aiming at a seventh grade level. And Hemingway helps you with that. It will flag up two-wordy paragraphs and sentence structures. I think on the paid version, it does a better job of actually giving you alternatives. So it basically will help you write more readable content.
Got you. I don’t have anything to add, so we’re going to go on to the next one on the list because I’ve never used Hemingway, never heard of Hemingway before the call started, so I’ve got very little to add. Now, this next one also I may want to spend a little extra time with, so we’re just going to jump into it. Seawriter. Ai.
This is going to be the most controversial of this list, I feel. I have used it, The free product and what is their prices? Yeah, free for five articles. Monthly starter, 50 articles a month, $19. It doesn’t do a bad job, actually. It is nowhere near up to the quality of Jasper, but unless you’re in the top enterprise-level plan with Jasper, you’re not going to write. This is a semi-professional tool. It’s not a tool that I utilize for its target audience. It’s aimed at a certain SEO expert that has thrown their hat in completely. There’s a certain group of SEO gurus on YouTube that have promoted this tool quite a lot. It also will produce images for the articles. It does a pretty good job, actually. You do have to check them, though, but it does a pretty good job. And the writing standard, like I say, isn’t comparable to the top tools out there. So have a look. I would warn you Have a look at it, but don’t listen to Uncle Rob here. Don’t go bonkers because this could get you into some real hot waters. You got to study what you’re doing if you’re going to go in to utilize something like this.
Listen to Uncle Rob. Uncle Rob, what have you got to say about this?
Just 10 seconds of looking at this, and It’s obviously generated a lot towards what are called affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketers are people that take a product that they want to sell that belongs to somebody else or a service, and they’re going to get a percentage, but they’re proficient at online marketing, whereas the core service is oftentimes not. Or a dirty little secret of the core services is oftentimes bigger brands want the results that Black Hat marketing can deliver them, but they can’t seek it directly. But what they can do is offer an affiliate commission, and they damn well know that affiliates will go out and do strategies like this where they just they create a website in a matter of days and proliferate it with lower quality content. Just looking for the opportunity for maybe Google to rank it, they’ll do the same with link building For a couple grand, you can put up an affiliate site, which is still a reasonable amount of money. But when I say put up an affiliate site, you can actually put up a thousand pages with a decent domain authority. All of it’s scammy. All I need all of you to hear me.
I know where to go to get like scammy links. They work for like 60 days, and then they start to fall off, and then it gets bad. Some websites will be blacklisted If you’re an affiliate marketer, you don’t care. It’s a risk worth taking because you can put up 10 of these because a successful affiliate marketer will be making millions. Putting up 10 of these sites for the right I offer using a tool like this, no problem. It’s a great tool for them. If it just generates medium value content, for the average person, I’m sorry, John, I would say, Stay away from this.
Yeah, I was Maybe I shouldn’t put it on the list because I’m just tempting people. I just use it and then I use other tools to rewrite what it’s rewritten, and then I give it a good read myself and I manipulate But there’s other people that do know what they’re talking about. There’s a whole group of SEO experts that I religiously follow on YouTube, and some of them have got themselves into some hot water with Google going down this route. But it’s out there. It can’t be denied. So I thought it’s best that we discuss it. I’ve got your input I’m all about.
I don’t agree with what Google says about link building. I think that certain PBNs are probably pretty good. I could go on and on. I don’t disagree with Google, though, because we’re racing to the bottom using AI tools. My frame of mind is simple. I understand large language models. They operate off what has been done in the past. That’s it. That’s That’s great. But if you are a person who has thoughts that do not rely upon everybody who came before you, this is terrible. Everybody’s going to be stealing from you continuously, nonstop, because you’re the thought Yeah, I see what you’re coming.
I won’t deny it. I’ve got to be frank about it, but that’s the internet, Rob. In the WordPress space, there’s a leading company that has purchased over 30 of the leading WordPress plugins out there. The owner is somebody I don’t particularly like, and he’s built a whole gray network of linked websites. Google still gives the articles on all his websites, which are very low-quality content, and they all recommend the plugins that he has bought. Google, on almost any search on any WordPress topic, his network of linked websites will be in the top one, two, and three of what comes up.
There’s another company out there in the real estate space started by two Google engineers in the search category, no less, and it’s called Condomania. Not condom, condo. You guys can look it up there in Arizona, Scottsdale. They’ve done the same thing, John. They’ve done it effectively for a long time. What that tells me, since they used to work for Google, is that there’s just no way for Google to catch certain things, which is a PBN, which is what you just described, a private blog network. You own all the websites in a very large chain. There are some efforts that you have to make to make them undistinguishable from Google, and I’m not going to put those online in a public format since I am an SEO, and I don’t want Google to blacklist all my stuff. But I’m just simply going to say there are ways to do it, and you guys can all research that yourself if you have any interest. I don’t disagree with the idea. In general, it’s the abuse of a good idea. If I own 15 websites because I own 15 companies and I decide I want to link my companies together, I see everything right.
No, he’s not doing any… Some people in the WordPress community have called it Black Hat. I don’t like the individual, but he’s not doing anything Black Hat. It’s gray, and he’s not doing anything illegal. If he was doing things Black Hat, it’s not illegal. It might get you into trouble with Google, but it’s not… We still need to be in the situation where Google is the state. But there we go. On to the next thing.
Yeah, so we’re into bonus time here, folks. I’m going to give you some final thoughts on this, if I remember, if we have the time. But we have two more items on our list that John painstakingly researched and placed here. Runway and Doll E3, are the two that are remaining. So we’re going to talk about those. John is going to lead those conversations because I’ve yet to use either one of them. John, go ahead and start us off with Runway.
Yeah, Runway is amazing. It helps you break up videos like this video. I could use Runway, and it would suggest natural breaks. It would break the video into 10, 20 videos. It would put captions on the video, and I could use it for TikTok and Instagram. It has tools that you can put in a small script, and it will make a video. Actually, it will produce a video, the prompt that you put in, and it will produce And it does a lot more. And for $15 for the standard and $35 for the pro, and they do are unlimited for ’95, if you’re really If you’re into video and you should be as a real estate agent, I think this is the bargain, one of the margins that you should definitely buy, because it will help you produce a lot more video that you can utilize on a lot of different platforms, Rob.
Okay. All right. Give me one second.
What?
Jesus Christ, I cannot escape it. Forgive me. I cannot escape the fire.
He’s been pursued by clients today, folks. So let’s end the last one so Rob could He’s got to go get a gun and shoot himself. Del E3. Del E3. Well, it’s not got the most intuitive interface. A lot of these image generators news in AI technology. There’s a couple of others. They’ve got God awful interfaces. I wouldn’t say it’s intuitive, but it’s usable. You have to put in prompts, and You probably will have to adapt the prompt. But for what it does for the price, which is $20 a month, it does a pretty good job, actually. But I wouldn’t say any of these AI image generation operators are the most intuitive when it comes to interface design, but this is one of the better ones.
Awesome. Here’s my closing thoughts on just some stuff that we’re talking about earlier as it relates to Google. I just want to be clear with everybody. Listen, I live in this world, breathe in this world. I own Google stock. I work in the Google space. But I got to tell you, any big corporation, when it gets large enough, there’s all sorts of rules that are in these algorithms that actually impact Google favorably. They design certain elements to successfully promote other Google service and tools. Some of it’s logical, some of it’s a little scurrilous. Google is a big corporation, and I understand the way their tech works better than most people. Here’s the thing. Some of the time, they need to make big, broad rules that affect very specific bad actors, people that have access to thousands of people, and they’re going to proliferate the internet with PBNs that are just horrendous and ruin all of our experiences when it comes to search. I understand that. But when you’re talking about a small handful of high-quality websites that try to provide some small amount of value, each one, if you can make it happen, my opinion is you should.
Google certainly makes every single thing happen for themselves that they possibly can. There’s nothing to say that we, as entrepreneurs, can’t. Where you need to be very careful is the things that they’re looking at heavily that are going to get your website blacklisted. Once that happens, it is next to impossible to reverse that process. If you’re investing tens of thousands of dollars or years’ worth of your time into something, you do not want to run the risk. That’s my opinion. I’ll stick with it every single day and twice on Sunday. It’s not worth it. Look at some of these tools through that lens. If you’ve got a huge investment, I wouldn’t mess around with almost anything on the list except Grammarly, because why risk it? There’s a very small chance sometime in the future that an LLR scan will happen. But it’s not impossible, guys. We don’t know if OpenAI will open source their code. Developers are insane people. You just don’t know what they’re going to do. You don’t know what Sam Altman is going to do. He’s not your typical entrepreneur. Pay attention to who these people are that run these shops. It’s really important because if you’re making a big investment on the back of their tech, what can happen is that you’re going to get boned, very similar to the way a lot of people are getting boned with Elon Musk because he is one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time.
He’s got a lot of mental and emotional issues going on that impact his decision-making. For a very long time, the impact of his business is in a positive way. Now they’re not at all. The same thing can happen with this AI stuff. You just have to be, in my opinion, cautious about it because you could go down with the ship if you make a big enough investment in this area. That’s all I want to say, John.
I wouldn’t disagree with the fundamentals. I think you can utilize these products, folks, and it will be beneficial. But on the other hand, I do agree with Rob. There are certain voices in the real estate industry that will say everything can be done with these. I don’t use it that way, and I’m more gun-hole about all this than Rob is. But I do agree with Rob. Caution would be the better road and valor here because I’m reasonably cautious about it, Rob. I mix it up with a lot of unique content, and I’ve been quite cautious about it. For me, cautious. But so I agree. It’s time to end the show, Rob.
Ladies and gentlemen, one way or the other, this is a subject that, in those cases, John and I are pretty close, and we’re not on opposite ends on this subject, but we’re a little farther than we usually are. I do use AI. AI is the wave of the future. Don’t disagree with any of that. I think that we’re in the frontier days of this stuff. I think that making massive, huge, gigantic decisions when you’re in the Wild West of a burgeoning technology is always risky. Same thing with crypto, same thing with this. When it becomes established and less risky, you should learn about it; you should understand how it works. I endorse all those things. You should test these tools. I suggest that you don’t lean on them 100%. You should do what John has done, especially if you’re in John’s situation. And then I specifically changed my recommendation to a, Absolutely, these are life-changing. If you have a learning disability, a speaking disability, a reading disability, I can go on and on. A visual disability. If you stutter and you’re trying to get stuff done on video, then he made a great recommendation for Runway.
I don’t know if that works, but if you have an impediment to communication, then I’m like, go all in.
I’ve got a double impediment in English and dyslexic. I’m doubled bug, isn’t I, Rob?
John, why don’t you go ahead and tell people how to reach you? You’ve been a great leader in this show. You handled me with kid gloves as usual.
Well, it’s not that. Fundamentally, I do caution. If you invested a ton of money, you’ve hired people like Robert and his team, and you’ve invested a load of money, time, and energy, I would strongly advise you not to bother with some of these tools. I use it, but I have done a lot of studies and put a lot of effort into utilizing all these tools, but even I back off because I’m going to put only some of my eggs in one basket, so just be aware. But there are, as I say, there are other people in this industry who will tell you that it will solve all your problems, utilize everything on everything you do, and they’re just turning you a load of crack, folks. The best way to content me is just to go to the mail-right. Com website. Have a look, have a read. They have plenty of content on their videos, blah, blah, blah. You can also book a chat with me. Back over to you, Rob.
Okay. All right. If you’d like to follow me or learn what my thoughts are, there are lots of ways to thread the needle and lots of applications for AI. I’m not saying there are no applications. I’m just saying caution. If you want to follow along with me and see what I’ve got to say on the subject as I do more research, go to inboundrem. Com, you can find my YouTube channel. Subscribe to me there, subscribe to our newsletter. I think that we do a lot of exciting things in terms of what we’re talking about. I’ve already talked about ChatGPT. I’ve talked about AI. I’ve talked about the NARS settlement. I’ve talked about all sorts of stuff. I’m committed to talking about something new every Thursday after we do the show. I’ve got some thoughts. I’m going to get off this thing, and then I’m going to record those thoughts, and then next week you’ll see them. John has been propelling us towards conversations around AI, and I sincerely appreciate him as a person and a co-host because it’s the dominant conversation that you all are hearing. I have a very unusual view on it is that everything that’s dominant usually goes like, excitement phase, excitement phase, excitement phase, complete and utter crash.
The government hasn’t gotten involved in this yet, and Google hasn’t really formulated its staunch response to AI yet. It’s all happened so fast, becoming such a common part of the daily vernacular that everybody forgets it’s less than a year old. Let’s display a little bit of wisdom and caution based on the past. That’s it. All right. Bye.
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Tell Me a Story – Prof Scott Galloway
Looking to dominate the real estate market in 2024? Learn the one skill that will set you apart as a top-performing realtor.
Elevate your real estate career by learning about The One Skill You Need to Be A Successful Realtor in 2024. This insightful show delves into the essential skills that will position you for success in a competitive market. You can take charge of your professional development and watch this video to gain a strategic advantage over your peers.
Some More Additional Skills You Need to Develop For 2024
#1 – Become Knowledgeable
#2 – Narrow Down Your Niche
$3 – Focus on Accountability
#4 – Learn to Delegate
#5 – Automate All You Can
#6 – Keep a To-Do List
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. It’s episode number 432. And we’re going to get a bit Grims on you today because our subject is storytelling. It’s one of my favorite subjects. It’s such an interesting topic. But before we get into any of those exciting topics, John, I’d like to know if you’d do me the courtesy of introducing yourself to the audience.
Yeah. But before that, Rob asked the obvious question. Grim or fairy tales? What character would I be then, Rob?
Oh, my goodness. Of the many lost kings, perhaps?
Oh, well, I’ll take that. I’ll take that. So I’m the. You’re the dragon. So I like that. If you’re just listening to this, folks, you like that. So I’m the joint founder of Melrite.com, where we build beautiful websites. Plus, we provide CM landing pages, email, and text message sequences, and a lot more. Back over to you.
And of course, as an inbound marketer that focuses on SEO, I actually identify with, and my company identifies with being storytellers. It’s in all of our literature. It’s on the homepage of our website. But really, it’s like storytelling with technical expertise because you have to know how Google wants to see the story, and you have to adjust your story to address specific questions that people have through Google. So it’s not directly storytelling. It’s not just making up a yarn and going for it. But anyway, it’s central. Telling a good story is central to the success of being online and being an inbound marketer. It’s central to all of it. Your ability to riff and make a boring subject interesting, which is usually done through storytelling or things like that. Like, it’s all coming back to storytelling. So anyway, if you’d like to hear more about what I have to say about storytelling, go to inboundrem.com dot. I have lots of posts that talk about, in various ways, the idea behind writing a story, telling a story, telling a story with keywords, telling a story about real estate, and telling a story about many different things. Anyway, without any further ado, let’s just leap right into it.
John, why don’t you go ahead and share, I don’t know, maybe a favorite idea of how a story played into either your company or another company you do business with, or a story that you’ve seen online that just was memorable to you, something that somebody created. What do you do? How do you view your receptivity to storytelling online?
Yeah, it’s been influenced by two individuals. One of them I gave a link in the show notes for Rob, and that’s Professor Scott Galloway. He’s well-known as a brand expert. He does a fantastic podcast called Prophecy. Prophecy. And he does a really good newsletter. And in his, on Fridays he does a monolog, which is actually read out by a professional actor. In one of these monologs, he tells me the story. And it really clarifies what his own faults, because he’s been very successful, he said his ups and downs, but he’s been very successful in his business career. But he says one of his superpowers is storytelling. And another person that really influenced me is Rob from startups. For the rest of us, another great podcast. And Rob’s a personal friend of mine, and he’s a multi-millionaire. He built up an email drip marketing company called Drip and sold it a few years ago for a huge amount of money. And he does a great podcast. And one of his great skills, I feel, is storytelling, and how important storytelling is in startups, bootstrap startups, and how it’s important in. I think storytelling and custom market fit are the two biggest things that every startup does, and getting this product fit with the customers can be utilized.
And I think that applies to real estate agents because I think if, if you’ve got a message that really resonates with an audience that’s really there and you get the message correct, there’s something magical about that and something that anything else can’t match. But so many real estate agents and so many bootstrap startups don’t have this linkage between message and target if you know what I mean. Robert.
Those are some interesting podcasts. I’m going to have to check one or two of them out. I think you consume more podcast stuff than I do. I actually listen to very few podcasts currently. I just bought, for the very first time in a long time, somebody else’s course, a guy by the name of Ryan Stewart, who is an SEO guy. And so far, I’ve got to say he’s got, he used storytelling to reel me in to buy his courses in the first place. His storytelling was small and straightforward, but storytelling falls into categories. And if all of you who are listening to the show still need to do this, I strongly recommend that everybody read Jung and look deeply into his messaging as it relates to archetype, because Jung was the very first person to ever say the following. Most stories are based around the hero’s journey. And he was correct because the hero’s journey is an idea that has been around since, as far as we can tell, since there was language like it painted on cave walls. The idea is the protagonist is under duress, has a hard life and a hard time, and barely survives.
And this protagonist runs through any number of different challenges, such as the Odyssey is a great hero’s journey, and then at the end, achieves something notable or great. And the thing that’s interesting about this is that when Jung was doing the study, we all resonated with that story. It’s almost hardwired into our brains. Your job is to tell that story in a compelling way. But the idea of the story, the general outline of the story, is actually already done for you. If you read you, you can also really flesh out a lot of characters in the story, if you understand archetypes. We all have an archetype, and it’s automatic. Everybody is placing everybody else into categories. Smart guy, dumb guy, strong guy, teacher, maiden. And there are many archetypes. But the archetypes are universal. They’re not related to a culture or a particular thing. They’re universal. Which is what makes social media so interesting, is that we are automatically characterizing people, and people are automatically putting themselves into the archetype. Maiden is very popular on social media in terms of archetypes, because it’s young, attractive, young women with a message, but they’re fitting into an archetype that is inside of all of our brains.
There’s another archetype princess, and there’s another archetype queen, and there’s another archetype. Do you see what I’m saying? Where I’m going with this? There’s all these different archetypes, and if you decide to fit yourself into one of them or king, hero, teacher, professor, one of those archetypes generally helps you tell a story. So you’ve got the storyteller who’s sitting in an archetype role, and then you’ve got the story that you’re telling, which is full of archetypes, and you make sure that they’re understandable, straightforward, and relatable to other people. And then you take everybody through a hero’s journey, which is when I started off. I started off at my desk with just a virtual assistant. These are the various challenges that we had to overcome. Challenge one, challenge two, challenge three, challenge four. And that’s basically storytelling 101. One of the fascinating things about selling things, guys, everybody that’s listening to show real estate, anything we can sell anything if we can make the idea digestible and relatable, anything. You go and you look at a house, and you need to tell a story about it. Understanding the fundamentals of storytelling, which is really done very well through the eyes of a psychotherapist, is fundamental to whether or not you find it easy or hard to get up in front of a camera and in five minutes or less, say something interesting about the house.
Because the first thing you need to understand is your message needs to be relatable to the average man. And if you don’t know how the average man thinks or the average woman, you’re probably in trouble in terms of your storytelling. So telling a story as it relates to a piece of property is, I don’t know, is incredibly relevant. And telling the story the way that I tell stories, John, or anybody else who’s listening to show, is I usually do a bit of research to make sure that I like, if I was doing homes, houses, I don’t care if, like, my bungalow, okay? It was owned by an italian entrepreneur before me. Okay? And it was. He raised three kids here, and I actually know their names. And so. And those children, one went to jail and unfortunately, died inside, and the other two children are still living with their parents. And it’s a nuclear version of an italian family, and they all speak italian, even though the kids were raised here. It’s kind of fascinating in a way. The husband, the guy who owned the house, is a machinist, and he was a machinist for a very long time, eking out what would be called a shop steward role, which is a very low income role where you machine little parts.
And then, because he was affable and friendly, he met somebody in the movie business who said that there was a very hard piece to make for mobile gimbals. And Frank, the guy that lived here, said, oh, I can make those. And so he started making these mobile gimbals and turned it into a business, which has allowed him to buy quite a few properties, not just this one. He’s made a lot of money making little machine gimbals, and he owned this house prior to me. Now, that is how you tell a story. You break it down to the ridiculous. You find the interesting points, but how do you know that they’re interesting? Well, I just told you a micro version of a hero’s journey. He was a shop steward, didn’t make very much money. An immigrant that didn’t speak a lot of English, still doesn’t speak a lot of English, to be honest. With you. And yet he managed to make himself a big success. It’s a very encapsulated version of a hero’s journey. That’s my thoughts. And storytelling, John. I mean, there. There is so much more that can be said about the subject in general.
But when you understand what storytelling does, when you understand that it can move people emotionally, like the whole of all of our religions is based on storytelling, and it doesn’t matter which one you talk about, it doesn’t matter if you’re listening to show what part of your spiritual, religious journey, at some point somebody told you a story, maybe it was in church, maybe it was early in your life, maybe it was later in your life. Something about that story resonated with you and. And created in you a wellspring of faith. But it started with storytelling. It’s nurtured with storytelling. Storytelling, in my opinion, is probably the most important skill that an entrepreneur. Well, it’s up there. Maybe not the most important. It’s certainly top three out without a question. Top three skills for a salesperson, top three skills for an entrepreneur. Top three skills. If you decide, hey, storytelling and parenthood is strong, imagine the impact that you’re having on your children. Because another thing that storytelling does is allows us to absorb knowledge. Do you know why that is, John?
No, but you’re going to tell me.
Well, it’s a fascinating thing. I’m neurodivergent. A lot of people are. About 30% of population is neurodivergent. And guess what? We can’t listen to information. We can’t absorb it, we can’t focus on it unless somebody is actually doing a job on engaging our conscious intellect, and it has to be very engaging. So if you don’t tell us a piece, like, if you just say, here’s a textbook, here’s the history of Edinburgh, and it’s written in 1942. Edinburgh was founded in 1955. Edinburgh was attacked in 1965. Edinburgh incorporated itself. ADHD people can’t fucking do diddly squat with that, but what they can do is if somebody tells them a compelling story about Edinburgh, we’ll probably never forget it. I visited Edinburgh on such and such. The Blackwatch was there. They were dressed in these amazing outfits. And it was really funny because I walked up to the. Do you see what I’m saying? You couch it in a parable or a story, and ADHD people can absorb the knowledge probably better and faster than traditional neurotypical people. Anyway, storytelling, in my opinion, is one of the most important things. Now we’re going to go to a break here, folks.
And when we come back, John is going to kick us off into the actual mechanics of starting to become a good storyteller. I gave some thoughts. I gave some opinions, but we’re going to move into some scientifically proven methods that you, the average person, can use to become a better storyteller. All right, we’ll be right back. Stay tuned. All right. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to episode number 432. We have been talking about storytelling as a mechanism of propelling your digital marketing for your real estate business. John is going to start us off. He has created an incredibly good list of some tips, tick tricks and tactics on becoming a better storyteller. So, John, why don’t you lead us off?
Yeah. Storytelling, and also skills that will complement your storytelling ability. And I agree with what you outlined at the end of the first half. I think. I think storyteering, if you’re going to be an effective agent and still have a career, is going to be one of the top skills that you’re going to need in the next couple years. And it’s a skill that I see a lot of agents failing on. And the good news is, I think with some being aware of it and practicing and getting in front of the camera and just talking to people and honing this, you can improve it dramatically. You don’t have to be a born star to become pretty effective at it. It just needs conscious effort and practice. So number one, becoming knowledgeable, and I think that does really help with your storytelling, is a skill, because I think you’ve talked about this being knowledgeable about the area that you’re selling property in, knowing about the different type of properties, I think it’s something that over the episodes, you’ve mentioned multiple times, Robert, and I think it’s definitely a skill that the more professional and those that really want a long term career in real estate, they really foster, don’t they?
I do. I do think that, and my comment about being knowledgeable is being knowledgeable is literally no joke. John. Beyond the idea of basic sales skills like learning from masters like Tom Hopkins and Zig Ziglar and learning what a close is and learning how that works, and psychology of selling by Brian Tracy and I could go on and on. There are some basic books that I read over and over again. But once I understood sales, there was one thing that you do differently. No matter what sales job you go into, no matter what, it’s always, do you really understand the product? Do you really understand the subject? When somebody comes to you. The reason that we all get frustrated with salespeople is that the amount of times I’ve walked on to someplace that’s selling a product, and then I have done maybe a very cursory amount of research, let’s call it a day or two’s worth, and I walk on to a car lot, let’s say, and then I ask a question about a car to the guy that’s circling the lot, and he can’t answer it. That’s it. I’m done. Like, I’m not going to buy anything from that car dealership.
I’m not going to buy anything from that salesperson. I’m done. If I know more than you with two days of research and you can’t answer a question or come up with an answer for me super fast, yeah, I’m done. So, and it’s pretty dramatic with me. Like, I walk off a lot. Like, thank you, bye. Like, it’s so ridiculous to me. It’s like, how can you, how can you have a career or profession that you are claiming to be? The word professional is indicating indicative of some kind of enhanced knowledge or skills or ability? That is certainly what people expect with real estate agents. Take away the car lot analogy. I’ve talked to lots of people and hundreds, if not thousands, directly one to one. And when I talk to my friends, John, and I say, what do you expect out of a real estate agent? My friend’s answer is somewhat universal. And it’s just like, oh, my God, they’re making so much money these days. They better know every single detail of all 500 pages of the contracts, or else why am I hiring them? Like, what? What’s the point? Like, so if you’re an agent, you don’t know what is on the 500 pages of the average real estate trans like transaction.
I’m gonna ask you, what are you doing? Like, you gotta, you got to. And the knowledge is, you take that 500 pages that you read, painfully, because it would be hard and painful for me. And then you go, and now that I’ve read it and I do understand the details, I get to take all that away, break it down to the ridiculous. Another strategy, a storytelling strategy. And then I get to, which is just make it very simple. Very, very simple. And then you take a very complicated document and say, these are the top five things that are getting done in this document, and I need you to sign here, here, and here. Which makes people feel comfortable and confident in probably signing the paperwork for one of the most important transactions of their entire lifetime. Certainly in California and the coastal states where we’re moving less, it’s once every twelve years now instead of once every five home, like most people are locked out of the home price, the home market, most first time buyers can’t buy. So, yeah, John, that’s probably kind of a long riff on being knowledgeable, but, yes, it is.
It. When I train people for sales teams, and I’ve trained many, many thousands of them, what I am always focused on first, and number one is how well do you know the product or service? And if they don’t know it, I start to teach it and train it and I hammer away at it. I want every salesperson that works with me to understand every detail of what the service is, what it’s supposed to do. Can’t guarantee it’s going to do it that way. But you can guarantee that you understand how it’s supposed to work.
Yeah. Number two, no. Narrow down your niche. Well, we’ve consistently talked about that in previous episodes, and it helps you be with your storytelling because you know more. You know, obviously when you’re starting your career, you have to be a journalist. But hopefully, as you get on your feet and you progress, the more you can find a particular area, geography, type of clientele, doesn’t really matter. It had. But finding a niche that you, you kind of attracted to, the easier the storytelling and the selling process and being effective becomes, doesn’t it?
Yeah, absolutely. 100%.
Right. So focus on accountability. Not totally, but I think. I think it’s one of the factors that will make the storytelling, true storytelling that’s effective rather than just flannel, because there’s a lot of people that are quite good at flannel, but it’s been an effective storytelling. And being effective, it’s the accountability part that kind of fits into that.
Accountability as you. As you intended it for this subject. Accountability. Do you mean make sure that everything that you’re saying is accurate? Is that.
Yeah. And you do the things you say you’re gonna do.
Gotcha. I do think accountability in terms of storytelling, I think that accountability, like I personally am not like I don’t like 100% accountability in my storytelling because I tend to exaggerate for the sake of the story, everyone swamp. And that’s tricky because people might think that you’re lying. So I try not to exaggerate about hard facts like numbers, statistics, but. And when I do exaggerate, I, or, or I can feel myself getting excited. And I’ve done it here many, many times on the show, I tend to go. This is just my opinion, but there’s.
No chance of that because I’m english for me, is there? It’s been no excitement for me, is it?
No, you’re. You’re more about sarcasm. No, I’m just kidding. I’m joking, everybody. Just joking. All right. But when I’m doing the. In my opinion, that kind of takes the weight off. I know this for a fact. You’re not saying that, really, or take this with a grain of salt is something I use a lot of times, which is when I know I’m just kind of riffing on numbers. Now, I may have a general knowledge. I usually do. Like, I have a lot of background knowledge. I read a lot, just like you do, John. I don’t listen to as many podcasts as you do, but I read it a crap tonight, and you like, so I have a. I don’t remember where all my knowledge comes from, though. That’s the problem. I don’t remember where I got the idea or the fact. So when those things happen, I go, well, I’ll take it for a grain of salt, but I’m not sure where this came from. So accountability, in terms of just being accurate in your communication, is something that. That’s how I would interpret accountability and apply accountability to storytelling. Just make sure that if you don’t know a thing for sure that you say that.
Like, just say it normally, there isn’t a big problem about it. The big problem is not saying that isn’t it? But a lot of people are frightened to actually do that. On to the next one. Learn to delegate. It’s more of the skills that added on to storytelling, because I think when you get to a certain level business, the quicker you can delegate and do it in an effective way, because there’s a lot of people that, when it comes to intelligence, they’re quite capable of managing a team, but they are micro managers to the extreme, and they’re incapable of doing it because they micromanage to death. It’s finding a happy medium, isn’t it?
Yes. Delegating is probably, fascinatingly enough, in terms of telling a good story. It is literally one of the things on this list that I actually looked at with the most importance. Okay. For everybody listening and watching the show, I delegate to a ridiculous degree. I delegate my storytelling. I delegate everything. About the only thing I still do personally is record videos like this. And I record a couple private ones from my team, and I record public ones for the. For the world at large. And then I let my team riff off it. We create, they create blog posts like, I’ve got a world class content writer that took me many years to acquire. And when I did get him, it’s still one of the greatest pieces of my business. He is incredibly good at taking the heart of my message and converting it into content that matches on the website. Now, we’ve worked together now for years and we talk together frequently so it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. But at the same time, being able to delegate and understand that my message, the way that I like to communicate it, which, believe it or not, is like, I’m not worried about efficiency in terms of like, creating leads.
That’s not my objective. My objective is efficiency of storytelling, impact emotionally, making sure that my message is heard. I let the sales bit do its job, do its job on its own. These days, I just don’t really focus on it at all. I just let my guy get the message right. What are we trying to do? We’re trying to teach real estate agents how important it is to have at least one marketing strategy that’s not dependent upon some big company or, you know, some, some huge conglomerate, a boomtown, a sink, something like that. Have something, somewhere that’s more independent, stuff like that. And why, you know, that that message is delivered from me, at least from, you know, the fact that I’m an alcoholic in recovery, the fact that this is my 7th gosh darn business. Like, there is so many things that go into that message and delegating allows you, like I have, I think, like four writers that touch my corporate blog. I have an image guy. I have the WordPress mechanics guy. I have. So who installs the clever little bits into the blog, because neither me nor my main writer do it.
And what that means, John, is that I get to employ a really insanely overqualified writer for Inbound Rem because I let him write the way he likes to write. In other words, he doesn’t have to do a lot. He writes the piece and then all these other people do the little tasks he finds annoying for him. So it’s a massive, prolific effort of delegation that everybody kind of enjoys in order to get this piece of content done at a really high level. And so delegation is critical, in my opinion, to multimedia storytelling. I love the fact that you put it on the list. Delegation is, is so important. You’re going to have people optimize your videos as an example. You’re going to have people rewrite or edit your content, as an example. Add images as an example. Delegation, would you agree with that, John, because I think, if I remember correctly, you delegate a lot inside your writing process. Or am I, am I misremembering?
I do a fair bit, but I also produce a lot of it now myself. But I do, I do a lot of video and a lot of podcasting, as you know. So I’m kind of hammering away at it in all levels. On to the next one. Autumn ultimate all you can. Um, so two o in my opinion, I’d be interested to see what rob thinks. It’s a bit of a two edged sold, because it automating stuff that can be, is a great idea, but you can also overdo it. And in the real estate industry, there’s a lot of vendors and a lot of so called gurus that really push automate an automation to such a level that is ridiculous. And, but then there’s other people that poo poo it totally and say it’s a one to one business and you need to just get on the phone and do those calls. They don’t point out, like, I’m sure Rob’s the same as me. I’ve, I’ve only got a mobile, and if somebody rings up and they’re not on my list and they don’t leave a voice message, they’re not getting a call back. Never. And I would say a higher and higher percentage of population is like that.
Obviously, you could say at a lower, higher age level that that morphology could still be effective. I I don’t know. I imagine there might be some credence in that particular argument. Um, so, I believe in automation. I use a fair bit myself, but I think you got to be aware that the, there’s definitely a level where it isn’t beneficial. Over to you, Rob.
So I just did a part, like a little video not so long ago where I finally broke down and discussed AI. I did a review of chat GPT four for realtors, and, like, I’ve got a lot of team members, and we fall all over the spectrum with AI for particular pages. We really use a lot of it. Automating it, automate the process, like neighborhood pages and things like that. And the places that we dive deep on those pages to make sure that, number one, they’re useful to the audience, and number two, that we don’t get dinged by Google, is we have these five real estate facts. The five facts. I absolutely do not allow anybody on my team ever to use AI. Like, they have to always manually research those five facts and we can automate about 50% of the writing process. What I do love is chat. GPT four is, and I think you’re the one who pointed this out to me, if I remember correctly, I can copy and paste like a big blog, or I can take couple of headers and put it in there and say, write a blog around this.
And it does. It extrapolates other headers, titles, and headers. As an ADHD person, I actually don’t want to use usually what I see written, I never want to use it. So it’s for me, it’s not a cheat code. But the way that my brain works is I look at what somebody else gave me and I go, oh, I can do better than that. And instantaneously the answer of what is better to me comes to me. I can rewrite the whole damn thing really fast when somebody has given me the breadcrumbs. And that is something like that type of automation now, automation in many other parts of the business. Dude, I don’t know, it’s so complicated. I have one automated sequence in my entire business and I used to have four. And why did I stop him, John? I got so many fucking complaints. Oops, sorry, everybody. I got so many complaints.
I can tell you, you have no problem. I did a podcast this morning, and for some reason, I had one of the most potty mouths I’ve had in a long while. I might not. I’m actually gonna have to put on iTunes that it’s for adults, adult adults only because it’s definitely not child-friendly. I don’t know what was in me. Too much coffee in the morning, Rob. But it was a bit, it was a bit potty mouth. And I’m not normally like that, am I?
No, you’re very rare. It’s. I am the one that takes that prize home on this show, that’s for sure. I mean, 90%. It was blue twice in like four years. Three or four years.
It was blue. It was blue this morning. We had a reasonably large live audience. And that’s the other factor, folks. You’re not joining us on Thursdays at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. Please join us by going to the Mel Riott YouTube channel, the Mail Riot Facebook page, or Robert’s inbound Facebook page. I’m sure you push that live.
I’ll push it live since you’re, you’re.
Push it and join us with your questions. Me and Robert, we’d love to ask, ask any questions during the show that you might have last thing before we call this a day. Keep it. Keep a do list. Well, I live by my lists. I am because of my dyslexia mind and it’s the way I keep it under control is that my whole life is driven by lists. Do lists. Funny enough, I don’t do it for my shopping. There are parts that I refuse because. But in general, when it comes to business and the things I’m going to do, I draw out lists and I find it really useful. What about you, Rob?
Not so much. But I do have lists. I have a task list. I have, through various times in my life I’ve kept to-do lists. And I have found that the higher level, more creative things like I. So I have a very disciplined schedule as it relates to certain things. And those things are just things I do. I identify the healthiest, most productive part of my tasks, and I tackle them. I took that idea. There are a lot of ideas that I’ve taken from many different people. One of the latest and most recent is Tim Ferriss. Because I operate more on the four day work week.
I can’t stand him. I really honestly can’t stand Tim. It’s never done me any harm, but I’m not gonna lie, I just can’t stand the guy. And this whole he’s the reverse poster child of very jet, Gary Jaotenick, wherever you pronounce his name, the geezer that, yeah, you reckon you should work 70 hours until you collapse. But this whole idea that you can build anything in just 4 hours is also a load of nonsense. But it’s, it’s the storytelling, folks. It’s having the right message that energizes the larger subconscious subconsciousness of your listeners. It’s this linking the two fins and when it happens, something amazing happens. And that’s the perfect example. You wrote that book out at the right moment with the right message and magic happened.
Yeah. And at the end of the day, Ferris is some kind of, you know, savant and most people aren’t. But you know, he wants to pitch the story that you can be, and, in some cases, you can be. What I liked about his message is this. You spend your time where the love and joy are. If I agree with you, at some point, you have to make a deep investment. But once that deep investment, like if you become truly an expert at something, you can usually scale back your hours. So, anyway, to-do lists, I agree that most people need them. I have a priority list. It’s not the same thing, but I understand where you’re coming from. With no further ado, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to wrap up the show. We really appreciate your attendance today. I agree with John. I have yet to push out the show to my Facebook page. I put it in my Facebook group.
We would love for you to join us with your questions and participate in the conversation. We don’t buy it, do we, Rob?
No, we only have a potty mouse, so we’ll try to keep that to a limit. All right, John and I will. So, John, if you would like people to do some little research on you, where would they start?
I’ll just go to the mailright.com website and have a look at our latest posts. We’ve got a load of content and all the podcasts. There’s a load of stuff on the Millwright website. And then, if you want to chat with me, you can just book a Zoom meeting with me. I can show you some of the great functionality of the Millwright system. Back over to you, Rob.
And as a reminder for all those people who listen to the show who may not have heard me, John has spoken before. John is a WordPress maestro, and if you have an interest in using WordPress for your business, interest in, you do allow ownership of the site, is that right? Right.
Yep. They’re all done in WordPress, and we will migrate them somewhere else if you decide to leave us. We’ll be so sorry if you do decide to leave.
All right, there you go. But. But the bottom line is that John does offer control. Ownership is a little bit weird on the language side, but basically it is ownership because you have complete control, so including taking it somewhere else. And that’s something that is very important. So you should check John out because he creates amazing tools. He knows what he’s doing. He’s done it before. This is his second time. Check him out. For me, I’m very, very, very good at SEO search engine optimization, and that is what I’ve done for 16 years now, and I’ve always done it for residential real estate. So if you’re interested in learning more about that or you’re interested in learning more about me, you can go to inboundrem.com. That’s inbound I n b o u n dash e m.com. And you will also, just like John, find a lot of great content, a lot of how-to’s, a lot of reviews, and a lot of information about me and our services. All right, take us offline, sir.
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#1 Understanding how the successful lead funnel works in 2024
-a – Cold Lead – you are going to need ten or more valuable touches and 12 to 18 months out from buying or selling
-b- Warming
-c- Hot Lead
#2 – Storytelling works connected to turning cold into warming leads
Hero’s journey | The seller or buyer journey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey
Joseph Campbell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell
Video and Newsletter
-a- Deal of the Week
-b- New in the real estate market
-c- Local things to do
-d- retargeting
#3 – Hot leads – you need to do personalized outreach
-a – text messages
– b – Bomb, Bomb video
– c– Phone call
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mail-Right Show. Today, we’re going to talk about Lead Journey. The actual title of the show is Authentic Information About Hot Real Estate Leads and Lead Generation in 2024. In other words, what you need to know about generating an actual warm lead. Forgive me for all the motion here. My cat has decided to do some acrobatics in front of me, and I’m having to calm him down. Anyway, so with no further to do before we get deep into the subject, and we stop talking about my cat.
Well, at least you’re not going to shoot your cat.
I love my animals.
It’s dogs and goats that you don’t like.
No, I like animals in general. As long as they don’t interfere with the things I’m trying to do, which, of course, that’s what they want to do most at all times. But having said that, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself to all the people who might be listening to the show today?
That’s fantastic, Rob. I’m the joint founder of Mel-right. Com. We build beautiful websites on WordPress, plus we provide CRM landing pages, email, text outreach, and a lot more, all in one A great value package. Back over to you, Robert.
Awesome stuff. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m the founder of InboundREM. It’s a content marketing, story-telling-based platform. I’ve got what I’m well known for is being a real estate SEO Authority. Without any further ado, and if you’d like to figure out anything about me, for those of you who are watching the show, you already know how because I wear my swag on the show every day.
I’m very impressed, Rob.
So without any further to do, we’re going to jump into this subject, which is an interesting and good one. And yet, once again, a second time in less than 60 days John has come up with a unique topic, one that we’ve never discussed before. So buckle up. Number one, understanding how a lead funnel would work in 2024. So one of the things I want to ask you is if you feel like things are changing or you’ve been putting in the date a lot, and I agree with you if that’s the direction that you were headed. So do you feel like this is information that might be different than information that you would have handed out to people in 2022? Let’s start there.
Well, I think to get leads that pan out, a lot of agents don’t understand this concept. It’s what I call the buyer-seller journey. This isn’t original. I’ve copied this off from other people. Nothing I supply listeners and viewers is original. I can assure you that, but I do think about it. I think a lot of agents, that’s why they get very frustrated. A lot of people can get frustrated about expectations and about what they thought they were engaging in and what they’re getting from a system like Melright, from engaging you, Robert, from anybody that is in the mechanics of helping real estate agents and brokerages around their digital marketing. But those agents that do understand this concept of the buyer-seller journey and about the different stages and different outreach that you should be attempting at this journey that you are with the potential lead that becomes hot is crucial in 2024, in my opinion, Robert.
Okay. So essentially what John has researched and proposed, and I agree with, is that today, in today’s world, the quality of a lead is going to be multi-stage. In other words, it’s no longer just as simple as getting a name and a telephone number, and it hasn’t been that simple in quite a few years in my experience. And you’ve got a lot of different ways of building value into the lead. If you have a very successful way of convincing people to leave you their information, but you haven’t told them that much, maybe you hooked them into a free e-book or something else where the value has not yet been established, then you might use a multi-step process to build value into the lead. Once they’re already technically a lead. We’ve separated these into the categories of cold lead, warming, and hot lead. That’s how you’re describing them. You’re saying that you’re going to need 10 or more valuable touches in 12 to 18 months out from buying or selling. I, once again, agree with you. Catching somebody high upstream in terms of the intent funnel might be like an example of the best home buyer’s guide, a manual to buying a home in 2024.
There’s an example. You’re catching somebody way upstream, housewife, somebody like that. Not that that exists all that much anymore, but somebody who is doing the shopping and is interested to learn how they would navigate the best rates and so on. In that process, you’d move on to number two on this list, which is storytelling, working, and connected to turning cold into warming leads. John, why don’t you go ahead and explain what you learned while you were researching for the subject? Joseph Candeble, video newsletters, and so on.
Well, I’ve always been influenced by union psychology myself. People were going to wonder, what the hell is he going on about? But I have. Union psychology has influenced me, and I think it influenced a great writer called Joseph Campbell, and he wrote this I actually, I haven’t read it. I’ve listened to it on audiobook. It is a bit long-winded. I wouldn’t say he’s, in my opinion, the greatest writer, but he had this concept which is union-based, in my opinion, based on archetypes that every story, every film, mini-series, novel, basically has about five different fundamental storylines to it. A lot of Western culture and Western written material, and then in the 20th century, film and television is based on the hero’s journey, where the hero goes through different stages of this journey. I think you can apply it to the buy or seller journey. What a lot of agents I don’t understand with digital leads is their perception is that all the leads that digital… And it does depend on where the lead comes from, digitally. If it’s coming from Google search, the intent is probably going to be higher than if it came from Facebook or they came from some other digital way of getting them into your CRM, your list.
But even then, a lot of the people that you initially contact, they’re going to be on a journey. They are not going to be in the stage to engage with you and lead directly to a check. But this inability of a lot of agents, in some ways understandable if you’re desperate and you need a commission check ASP, you’re not going to understand it because you’re not in the position to be able to understand this. But the agents that are not under such pressure, that have got a bit of leeway, They might not be able to verbalize this so clearly, but I think instinctively they do understand that they’re on a journey and their leads are at different stages of this journey.
Copy you. All right, let’s see if I can interpret that. You went We’re going to go down a lot of rabbit holes, and I think that if we’re going to go down some of these rabbit holes, we should probably talk about storytelling in a separate podcast. But I’m going to say that the way that I understood what you’re saying- Next week.is you got to put the consumer in the position of the hero on the journey. In order for this to make sense, though, unfortunately, John, I think that everybody has to understand the way that these… Jung created the idea that human beings associate with one another in archetypes. After studying many different cultures and things like that, he actually looked and said, there are similar archetypes no matter who you are, where you are, what part of the world you live in. Indeed, he has proven to be right. As knowledge has increased despite the proliferation of the internet, Jung apparently got it right. It doesn’t really matter what culture you’re talking about. Asian cultures, American cultures, Irish, the Nordic cultures, everybody has archetypes that they refer to, which means that storytelling is universal, which is why religions have spread so prolifically.
They’re generally based on the hero’s archetype. Some additional work was done by some people, including Joseph Campbell, that talked about the archetypes in these people and then created the mythos around the hero’s journey. That would be a journey like Christ. You start oppressed in huge challenges and so on and so forth, and everybody’s against you. And then through diligent work and a little bit of luck, you achieve this great thing, the hero’s journey. I would say applying that bit of storytelling into turning somebody from a cold into warming leads, you’d have to equate that, in my opinion, let’s see if you agree, in this storytelling method, I think you’d have to equate that with you’re on a journey, things are really hard right now, and we’re going to give you the tools to accomplish this very hard task, which in 2024, unfortunately for all of us, buying a home is a very hard task. And I perceive your hero’s journey being you give them the tools to be the hero. Is that what you meant?
Yeah, and you’re with them on this journey. So you initially offer something to induce their name and email, and you do some outreach to see just they might be further on the journey than normal. So it’s always best to do some initial outreach, but don’t overdo it. But then they’re on an email list, so you put them on a newsletter, but you actually put effort into that newsletter and you provide value. And periodically, you send them a special email with a additional real high value and content, maybe every quarter, but they’re in your cold list system in your CRM. But then if they come to your website and they have to log in after they’ve done some more searches, that means they’re a warmer probable prospect. So then you need to maybe send them more focused content based on the searches they’re doing, or you send them something where you say, I like to help you some more. Can you give me some more information? Then you can send them more customized outreach. But then they indicate that they’re further on on the journey. And And like on those warming ones, you might send a more periodically more individual content through Bombomb, or they might be on a list that people that you actually ring.
That’s what I mean. It’s a… There’s the initial part of the journey, there’s the medium part of the journey, and then there’s the part where they indicate to you that they’re active in the market and they really want your help. Well, that’s the hope, isn’t it?
Yeah. I’m going to take everybody, you included on the little journey here. I’ve been a student of sales mechanisms and sales in general since the ’80s, early ’80s. And back in the day, the sales journey, the hero’s journey was always done in face-to-face because door knocking and in-person appointments were common. And so you would knock on a door, a person would answer the door. And then the common sales vernacular at the time was you needed to be able to overcome at least five objections. Objection, answer, response, answer, response, answer, response. As time has gone on, people started to change. They just simply wouldn’t sit around in a conversation with you, no matter how good, charismatic or eloquent you were, and just let you rebut them, rebut them, rebut them, rebut them. Brian Tracy was the first trainer who started talking about ancillary or additional touches, and he did a lot of studies with big corporations that he was consulting with that said, You’re going to get five touches from us, newsletter and email, so on and so forth. So theoretically, when we get on a call with you, some of those objections have been handled by the touches.
That’s that he had to explain modern marketing in a way that all the people who are used to the old vernacular of door knocking and overcoming five objections would understand and not fight against because it was so thoroughly trained into all of us that you’re supposed to stay on that conversation or a butt over and over and over and over and over again until somebody said yes or gave you a final no. Well, I think that if we were to do a study today, We discover that people are very similar to thermometers or bank accounts and those touches that John is suggesting. Probably you need more like 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I doubt that five is the number anymore. A touch can be a video that they watch. And video is the best because video can account for many touches all at once. You get somebody watching you for 30 or 45 minutes, you can overcome 5 or 10 objections in a single video without ever speaking to somebody directly. Modern marketing has changed. We are now, all of us, capable of doing TV commercials and doing infomercials, and we have to cleverly impart that information so that somebody doesn’t turn us off.
And if we do that successfully, very similar to infomercials, we oftentimes can do 5 or 10 objections. However, the old marketing analogy that Coca-Cola and all the big corporations have done, the reason that they do commercials and billboards and cans and things like that, I don’t know that most people understand this. There’s something called name familiarity or psychological familiarity, which is where we observe things in the background of our mind without ever responding to them. It’s no longer direct response marketing. It’s simply name brand or brand recognition marketing. Most people don’t realize that that marketing takes 10 or 20 times. I get calls and emails from all the time from people saying that they’ve already spoken to me, and they haven’t. What they have done is probably seeing my website When you see a website that has 780,000 impressions, but maybe 22,000 clicks, which I get all the time, you think to yourself, the 780,000 impressions is a waste of time. You’re wrong. You’re getting people, you’re warming people up as they see your URL in search results, and you might have to warm them up 10, 20, 30 times. The way I perceive your comments is very similar.
The more important or directly aimed the piece of media is, such as an email sent directly to a person or video, the faster that that person warms up, going from cold to warm to hot, hot being, are they willing to talk to you and have a long conversation with you about whatever it is that you’re I think that you are correct. You listed a few things which we’re going to get into. We’re going to go to a break and we’re going to come back. And when we come back, we’re going to talk about some of the touches because John did get specific in many different touches that he listed, and I might add a few, too, John, about how you can touch people, give people that impression, warm them up, why that’s important, what size should you be as you consider these different methods of warming somebody up because some of these methods require expense and time. If you’re brand new directly into real estate, probably not for you. Some of these touches require nothing at all and might be interesting to some of you. We’ll be right back. We’re going to go to a break.
I want to thank InboundREM and MailRight for sponsoring today’s show. They’ve been very generous to us. If you’d like to check them out, you can go to mail-right. Com or inboundREM. Com. If you do us all a favor and tell our sponsors how much you appreciate the content of the show today, we’d love you for it. All right, we’re coming right back at you. Three, two, one. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to the Mailright Show. Today’s subject is talking about how to turn cold leads hot, effectively. That’s what we’re talking about, taking a cold lead and make it hot. We’re going to I believe you, prior to the break, I was talking about, and John was talking about, things to warm leads up. And I was talking about, John did a pretty deep dive into psychology, which is interesting because that’s not usually a journey that you’ve taken us on too often.
So we’re-Oh, there’s many facets of me that I haven’t shown you, Robert.
I have no doubt. So we’re going to talk about hot leads, how to personalize outreach. So why don’t you jump into that? Because all the research and background. So what were you thinking when you put down… I’m going to let you get into it.
Yeah, before that, I think there’s two things that I think… There’s two words I I call it pulsation and oscillation. I found, and I think you’ve hinted on this, that I have people that book a consultation with me, and we have a good chat, and then I don’t hear from them for months. Then they come back for a second consultation, and then they go away. I had one this on Monday. She must have spoken to me on three occasions over a year, and she gets very enthusiastic. Then she doesn’t follow through, and I think I’ve lost her, and she comes back again. If you’re really desperate for a sell, you really worry about this because you think, Well, I’ve got to convert. If you push that, I don’t know if you agree. I’d be interested in to see if you agree with this. But if you really push it, you’re going to lose them. I find it’s best to leave it and let them stew and just keep on producing value content. And some of them don’t come back, but a lot of them do. And there’s a certain… I didn’t realize they’re on this journey.
That’s the key of it. I used to try and force it, Rob. I didn’t accept they’re on the journey. And if you force But if they’re in the wrong point of the journey and you try and force it, I don’t think it works out that well.
I agree. I I think that forcing people generally creates resistance. Resistance is not what you want. Most of my sales presentations that I design are designed with a simple concept but require a high degree of expertise. The concept is take all the objections that you know you’re going to get, which means you have to know what objections you’re going to get, and you answer them in your presentation. So theoretically, that by the time you’re done, nobody has any objections left. It comes down to the mechanics of, one, did you see the value? Two, if you did see the value, did you want to move forward? And three, if you don’t want to move forward, I don’t really personally take all that many objections anymore. I don’t respond to them. If somebody says they don’t want to move forward, I go, Great, here’s my information, and you can go your way and I’ll go mine. I find that that lack of interest, that seeming like lack of pursuit, is a reverse psychology mechanism that is as effective as any sales closing strategy I’ve ever gotten. My lack of interest and my lack of pursuit in leads oftentimes creates a sense of we don’t need the business, which means people want to give it to me more.
Why doesn’t this guy need the business? Why does he need chasing me? The answer is pretty simple. Number one, I generally don’t need the business. Number two, the reason I don’t need the business is I’ve been so successful with the sales strategies that I have that I usually have enough people in the queue. I also do forced scarcity as part of my sales strategy and marketing strategy, and I understand it very well. I keep a team big enough on staff to scale up, but only slightly. So if we have a slightly bigger sales month than we were expecting, one or two additional clients, we run out of room to do projects. There’s no joke. That’s not me bullshitting. So unless I want to scale up, take on more people, train more people, we’re done. And I just say, Hey, we’re at capacity.
And that at capacity- And there’s the other factor, and I think agents, you got to face it, is, and it might become more prevalent, is I think Mailright and my other business offers great value, and we offer a lot of options. But there are a lot of people who get fixated. They’re looking for a certain level of outcome, a certain level of website, or a certain level of service, and their budget doesn’t meet their fixation about a certain level they’re looking for. And there’s no… Their expectation is linked to the budget which they’ve got. It’s so different to What? There’s no possibility of negotiation because what they’re seeking for what they’re prepared to pay for it is so out of kilter to what I could provide that there’s no meeting place to it. They just have to go to other providers or try other things and not get a lot of success. Then they come back, hopefully. Or they might be lucky and they might get successful, aren’t they?
That is one of the things I love about inbound marketing. My job, my funnel to warm my leads up is to take the uneducated purchaser of services like mine and educate them. If they follow along with my content, eventually they arrive at my doorstep, educated in what is a reasonable expectation. Takes a lot of work and effort to produce content like that because you generally have to show people a lot of proof in today’s world. You can’t just say, You can just randomly expect this from BoomCat. They don’t believe you. They won’t believe you because you’re a competitor. You got to show them, have a login, look at the leads, talk to customers, do all that stuff. But once you do that, your client gets educated by you, which builds up trust. You answer the question. By the time they walk through the door, they have a reasonable expectation. But I do find that the sales call that I find hard for me to take, John, respond coldly to an email. They don’t do any research. They don’t watch any of my videos. They simply get an email from me that they barely I don’t even remember how they got on my email list.
Then they call me because I happen to have the perfect subject line for them. Now I’m on the phone with somebody who doesn’t know me, doesn’t know what we do, doesn’t know what the pricing is. Just like, I want leads. Some of the time, they do want you to wave a magic wand and put warm leads into their inbox. If they could get it, they would go, I’ll give you $100. Give me five highly qualified leads. Thank you. And you’re like, Are you kidding me? I get you.
No. But get on to the specifics, but I thought that I should point that out. But I’m talking about the warm. They’ve got into your funnel by advertising, by content marketing, They’ve seen you on Instagram. They’ve come across one of your videos. The way you keep them from making warm is through your newsletter, through the videos you the stuff you put on Instagram and all the ways that you might touch them these 5-10 times on their seller or buyer journey. It could be In your newsletter, there will be a deal of a week, a property that you think would be interesting to your list, and then you can make a video of it, which then you share on your Facebook and Instagram, the news of the real estate market, a monthly synopsis of where the local market is because real estate is local. So that has value, and it also increases that you’re seen as the professional that has an interest in the market. You’re not just one of those who just want the commission check. You provide some value. Local things to do, that’s more abstract, but it’s content. And you can also build relationships with other local business owners by doing that.
And retargeting is one of the most cost-effective ways. If you’re going through Facebook, or mostly Facebook and Instagram, to some degree, also Google, these are all ways of turning your cold leads into more warm leads. And so they are still engaged with you where they do that outreach, where they give you signs by coming to your website and signing in to do searches and that, and then they’re warm and you do more… You phone them up, you send email, bonbon emails. A lot of agents just don’t understand this journey It’s good, isn’t it, Robert?
I agree, and I think that the sooner… Listen, talking about taking warm lead to cold, inbound marketing is all about presenting value, value, value, value, and your main objective as an inbound marketer is just getting people to tune into your content. You’re not encouraging them to call you at any particular time. You’re not inundating them with anything like a request. You’re just saying, Here’s good helpful information. Here’s good helpful information. Here’s good helpful information. If you’re looking for real estate or lifestyle or the best restaurant in the area you’re thinking about moving to, or maybe you’re coming out to this area to explore it slightly. Well, here are some cool schools to check out, some cool parks to go to, and things that I think that you enjoy that is part of the lifestyle. Then, oh, by the way, if you want to talk about houses, I happen to be an expert in colonial or modern, whatever. You talk about, you focus on the useful. That, if people tune into you if they engage, however you get the information to them, whether they subscribe to your YouTube channel, your Facebook, or your email list, or your however, Twitter, whatever it is, as long as they’re tuning in to you and you’re giving them value information, What I hear you describing is the psychological stepping stairs of, I am getting to know you, getting to know you, getting to know you, getting to like you, getting to like you, getting to like you, and now I am perceiving you as a person I’m going to talk to for sure when I get ready to do X.
That’s inbound. That’s warming somebody up to the point that by the time they call you, they’re usually better than a referral. Terms of lead quality, ROI, and conversion, they’re better than a referral. It’s an interesting… I love the digital age because it makes inbound marketing infinitely possible, which is a lot of what you’re talking about. But you also can do lead nurturing through low-quality lead acquisition, which is another subject. We’re just considering that introduction differently. And you grab that information, let’s say, off an ad, and then you build the value into the person once you have their information.
Yeah, I call it becoming the trusted advisor, the trusted individual. There are other morphologies in real estate where they link it, and I find it, maybe because I’m English and the culture that I come from, They move it on to a step where the boundary between becoming a trusted adviser and a personised friend. I find that a bit cringy, I don’t particularly, but I do think it’s really important through this process, this journey, the buyer-seller journey, the hero’s journey, to be seen as the trusted adviser, to be seen as the source of your specialty. I think the agents that can do that in 2024 and beyond are the ones that will in the end be the successes and the ones that aren’t.
I agree with you. All right, it’s been an interesting show. Ladies and gentlemen, we hope you enjoyed it. We’re going to wrap up. John, if you were going to have somebody come and try to talk to you about the Hero’s Journey storytelling or how you accomplish these things with Mailright and the various tools that you’ve built, how would they do that?
But before that, I think we’ve got to do a shout-out. We love people to join us live on the Mai-lRight Facebook page. I think you share it on your Facebook page as well. Join us live with any questions, or you can go to the Mailright YouTube channel, and you can answer questions. We do this at 2:00 PM Pacific Standard Time every Thursday. And if you got any questions, we will attempt to answer them during the show. And so that should be fun. I get a lot of people on my other podcast now asking live questions, and we love you to join us on the show as well. About Melright, just go to Mail-Right.com. Have a look at some of the websites we’ve done. It’s a great, valued platform. And you also, the website that we build for you, you own it. So that’s great news. Back over to you, Rob.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Hey, listen, if you would like to talk to us and me, specifically, or learn anything about SEO, learn anything about hyper local, learn anything about YouTube, learn anything in general about storytelling or inbound marketing as it relates to real estate, specifically, go to inboundram.com. I have copious amounts of free books, free information, no forms, no lockout, no anything that you have to sign up for. You just go and you should learn everything that you need to know about inbound marketing in 2024. All right, that’s it. Thank you so much, everybody, for tuning in. I appreciate it, and I think John does, too.
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The Hosts of The Mail-Right Show
Jonathan Denwood
https://www.facebook.com/mailrightusa
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Robert Newman
InboundREM
https://inboundrem.com
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