Author: Brady Winder

  • EP 467: Breaking Through Business Plateaus

    EP 467: Breaking Through Business Plateaus


    If you have a vision — a passion or a new strategy for your business, but you just feel too STUCK to bust through a plateau, this episode is for you. Most entrepreneurs that plateau either get burnt out or bored, causing you to sell or sabotage. The good news is I have a few specific things you can do to crack through and make your biggest impact. Let’s dive in.

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Carrot.com/EPIC


  • EP 466: The State of SEO & A.I. w/ Bryan Sekine

    EP 466: The State of SEO & A.I. w/ Bryan Sekine


    How can I use A.I. to speed cut down time spent on my SEO efforts? What does it take to rank in an increasingly competitive SEO space? Are Google Search Labs and other algorithm updates good or bad for investors? Today we’re covering all of that and more. Stay tuned for the end, where we talk about ChatGPT prompts you can use to make SEO even easier!


  • EP 464: Why 4,000 Deals, Working 1 Hour per Week, and a Yacht Wasn’t Fulfilling w/ Brad Chandler of Express Homebuyers

    EP 464: Why 4,000 Deals, Working 1 Hour per Week, and a Yacht Wasn’t Fulfilling w/ Brad Chandler of Express Homebuyers


    One of America’s largest Homebuyers, 20-year investor & 3x CarrotCast podcast guest Brad Chandler of Express Homebuyers opens up about his complicated yet inspiring journey about how like many investors, he was chasing the wrong goals for years without even realizing it. We dive into the changes he’s made in his life that allow him to run a wildly profitable real estate business still while doing more of what he’s truly passionate about. Listen in.

    Mentioned in this episode:


  • EP 463: The Priority Waterfall: Connecting Personal + Business Vision For Massive Focus


    How do you break the pattern of reactive and determine your one true priority? Over the years as a leader, I’ve tried apps, planners, journals, spreadsheets, and calendars. Only one thing has stuck. I call it the CEO Priority Waterfall. If you find yourself rushing through the week from task to task, take a minute to pause with me. I’m going to walk you through how to set priorities at a personal level that connects to the priorities of your business, so you can get clarity in your week and make a bigger impact.

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Getting Things Done by David Allen

    Carrot.com/priority


  • EP 462: How to Structure & Grow your Team in a Real Estate Wholesaling Business w/ Ryan Dossey & Jason Lewis

    EP 462: How to Structure & Grow your Team in a Real Estate Wholesaling Business w/ Ryan Dossey & Jason Lewis


    What hires should you make as a wholesaler? Do you need an assistant in the office or a virtual assistant? Acquisitions or dispositions? It depends on your income, the business you want to build, and what gives YOU energy. These two investors and I will walk you through how they have scaled large, successful teams that are closing deals consistently, with only working a few hours per week. It wasn’t easy in the beginning, but there is a way to grow and scale an investing business that runs without you. Enjoy this session from the Carrot Summit, and check out the video version on CarrotCast.com.

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Connect with Jason at The Investor Machine

    Connect with Ryan Dossey


  • EP 460: Virtual Assistants: Creative Use Cases for Real Estate Investors + Dos & Don’ts with Greg Brooks of Rocket Station

    EP 460: Virtual Assistants: Creative Use Cases for Real Estate Investors + Dos & Don’ts with Greg Brooks of Rocket Station


    The landscape of VA’s or virtual assistants has dramatically changed. The problem is the way most investors go about outsourcing help hasn’t changed. The difference between hiring a generalized contractor on Upwork vs partnering with an industry-specific team like Rocket Station is night & day. Listen in to learn how they’re pushing the boundaries of how a VA can buy back your time & what not to do when growing your team.

    Mentioned in this episode:
    Check out RocketStation in the Carrot Marketplace
    Trevor Truck Talk: Inefficient and Ineffective Delegation Strategies and How to Fix It
    InvestorFuse CRM


    Episode Transcript (This is an automated transcript by robot carrots – please mind the typos 😉)

    00:00:00:02 – 00:00:22:07

    Greg Brooks

    Anything, strategy, anything. Final decision making. Don’t try to outsource that. Don’t try to outsource your problems. The biggest mistakes that we find people making when they’re hiring is they’re trying to outsource things that they haven’t themselves done. And that’s just really not where VA’s or we’re outsourcing. That’s kind of follow those steps of making sure you got the plan in place.

    00:00:22:07 – 00:00:41:08

    Greg Brooks

    You find the right person and then you work with them to hold them accountable to it. But really, for all business owners, you know, as we’ve led off with like real estate, it’s not an ATM machine, right? It’s tough. It’s hard. There’s a lot goes into.

    00:00:41:11 – 00:00:51:17

    Brady Winder

    Hey, friends. Welcome back to the Cure Cast podcast. I’m your host Brady Winder. And I’ve got my friend with me, Greg Brooks from Rockett Station on the podcast. How you doing, Greg?

    00:00:51:19 – 00:00:53:19

    Greg Brooks

    Hey, I’m very mad. Thanks so much for having us.

    00:00:53:20 – 00:01:23:12

    Brady Winder

    Yeah, absolutely. It’s good to have you on, man. Everybody, It’s a team building month. It carried July as team building month is our whole goal this month is to give you a vision for investors that are building teams well and that are really going after our vision of building a business of freedom and impact. So this month we’re going to be giving you tactical, practical examples of people who are doing that, people who have gone from a solopreneur to a team and then have managed to buy back some of their time and energy.

    00:01:23:14 – 00:01:47:20

    Brady Winder

    And one of the best ways to do that is virtual assistants, dot, dot, dot. You can do this wrong and you can do it right, which is why I’m really excited to talk to Greg. Greg, you are a partner of us with the rocket station. I’ll leave it at that. But I want to toss it over to you and tell us about Rocket Station, what you guys do and why Rocket Station and Carrot have been BFFs for the past few years.

    00:01:47:22 – 00:02:02:13

    Greg Brooks

    Yeah, we have, as I say, just like any good relationship with Carrot, it all starts at Carrie Camp, right? We were up there in 2019 and got to work with you and the staff and really kind of, you know, fall in love with everything that Carrot is so or so. So my name is Greg Brooks. I’m our chief growth officer.

    00:02:02:13 – 00:02:21:04

    Greg Brooks

    You’re a rocket station. So what Rocket station is and what we’ve grown into over the last five years is really one of the leading virtual staffing providers in the real estate specific space. So we have our business and really three core areas. There’s the real estate investor side. We work with over 600 investors all across the country and some in Canada.

    00:02:21:07 – 00:02:44:21

    Greg Brooks

    We’ve got our property management side. So anything from small scale property managers up to our largest client has 45,000 doors. We help service and and staff their back offices as well. And then we have a home service division. So really everything we do is real estate. And in our business we break it down. I mean, VA is now a lot of people have tried them or heard about them, you know, read about them and have had varying success.

    00:02:44:21 – 00:03:10:09

    Greg Brooks

    But what we are is, is an end to end solution provider. And what that means is we help you set your systems of processes and company up through documentation and SOP creation and formalized training guides so that we can then use what you need to get off your plate to find you the best talent that has gone through a comprehensive six week real estate focused training and evaluation course with Rock Station.

    00:03:10:12 – 00:03:31:14

    Greg Brooks

    So we help kind of blend the people with the process to create a great outcome for the client regardless of what position they need. And we’re very fortunate, you know, working with the scope and with great partners like yourself, we have a whole carrot offering to it. So, you know, to run all your SEO and website management, all that through a trained VA that we’ve partnered with.

    00:03:31:14 – 00:03:52:22

    Greg Brooks

    So it’s been a journey obviously in the last specifically two, three years. Real estate seems to change every single week. So it’s really made my role within the company is is working directly with our partners like yourselves, working with our clients to understand how is the business changing, you know, how can we help you scale and grow and run a company that doesn’t run you?

    00:03:52:24 – 00:04:14:10

    Greg Brooks

    And and how do we help, you know, plug in Vas to be able to give you you know, we really view it as like a secret key, right? If you can get some quality Vas on your team, regardless if you’re just starting out or if you’re a large scale operator doing ten, 20, $50 a month, really talented virtual talent can really help you unlock and level up and take that next steps.

    00:04:14:12 – 00:04:17:06

    Greg Brooks

    We try to help, you know, and and do that for our clients.

    00:04:17:09 – 00:04:41:06

    Brady Winder

    Absolutely. Well, thanks for the eight things for the intro and thanks for explaining that, man. It’s like how we’ve talked about VA’s the landscape of virtual assistants has really changed a lot over the years. And for anyone listening, I promise it’s not going to be a 30 minute sales pitch for Rocket Station. My goal for this episode is really to give you some understanding so you can make a decision like do I?

    00:04:41:07 – 00:04:58:24

    Brady Winder

    Do I even need a VA in my business? Do I need help in my business? And then really some context as to what that looks like, because I want to save you the time of going to Google and typing in like how to hire a VA and like, how do Vas work in this this rabbit hole of research that is not industry specific.

    00:04:58:24 – 00:05:28:06

    Brady Winder

    So I’m going to be picking Greg’s brain on what this looks like for an investor, what they’re doing that you know, a typical VA wouldn’t do or that you have to train and create process for them and find out why. Why go real estate specific in the time that this can save you. So you mentioned, you know, end to end virtual staffing provider you guys you’ve been VA’s is all you do Tell me about I want to talk a little bit about first what the landscape of VA is like.

    00:05:28:06 – 00:05:46:25

    Brady Winder

    I mentioned, you know, I feel like it used to be, Hey, I’ve got a VA doing this, but now I hear more people say, Yeah, I’ve got a team of seven people, you know, four of them are in the Philippines, three are in the US. And, you know, it’s just the way that we’re talking about has changed. So where is this?

    00:05:46:27 – 00:05:51:27

    Brady Winder

    Where has it been really? More importantly, like where do you see this heading? You know?

    00:05:51:29 – 00:06:09:01

    Greg Brooks

    Yeah, definitely. I mean, VA is especially in the real estate space. And when we say VA, obviously we’re talking virtual assistant. It kind of used to be like a like everyone’s kind of that dirty little secret, but like everyone had their VA made guy or they’ve got someone overseas that maybe does a little bit of data management for them or some cold call it.

    00:06:09:03 – 00:06:35:07

    Greg Brooks

    I mean, all we’re really talking about is a is a piece of a much bigger industry called the BPO industry. So like the likes of I mean name any major brand, American Express, Google, Oracle, you know, they have tens and hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas. I think where it’s it’s really become a powerful tool within real estate as this section of the business has matured is and really kind of like for companies like ours, what we’re trying to do is like that same level of talent.

    00:06:35:08 – 00:06:58:24

    Greg Brooks

    You know, we all found out during COVID, hey, we can do almost all almost almost all of our business is run on the computer room. So it doesn’t matter if I’m in Dallas, Manila, Portland, like I can buy properties. I can research, I can make calls from anywhere, which is great. It also, you know, for that, for those of us that kind of went down the road of discovering Vas and how can I now leverage that?

    00:06:58:26 – 00:07:21:17

    Greg Brooks

    It’s like you quickly realize there’s so many talented people all over the world. You know, you’re always you know, you always be foolish not to leverage someone who is half the cost of hiring locally to to help you grow and scale your business. So, I mean, really Vas, when we talk about that, we don’t run with that term only because like that, the term VA kind of you think of like an admin assistant, right?

    00:07:21:17 – 00:07:50:05

    Greg Brooks

    Someone who could like manage your calendar or maybe like, you know, check your email inbox, which don’t get me wrong, VA certainly can do that. But I mean, we truly are trying to help change the mindset in the real estate world to say like, Hey, these are, these are team members. Like, these are valuable, integral parts of your team that really help you unlock and scale faster because maybe, maybe you could afford to hire one person if you were hiring locally or what if you had four people that could do that?

    00:07:50:05 – 00:08:21:23

    Greg Brooks

    How does that multiply your business? How can you grow quicker and faster? And what we’ve seen, especially in the real estate space over the last, you know, two or three years, is more creative ways that our clients are looking to leverage base. So I kind of joke that on our on all of our consultation calls, you know, you rewind four years ago, number one question we got was, well, how can I communicate with someone halfway around the world and, you know, we’d have a 30 minute consultation where we want to jump into like, okay, what does the role look like?

    00:08:21:23 – 00:08:41:02

    Greg Brooks

    What is And we’re just talking about like, hey, we’re here because of voice over IP because of your CRM. Well, now, like everybody was a VA in some regards for three years. So they get it, you know what I mean? So now the the really fun part and what we’ll get into here is like some creative ways to leverage Vas.

    00:08:41:02 – 00:08:51:19

    Greg Brooks

    But really all we’re talking about is just talent that happens to live in another country, that when you set them up for success the right way, they can really do anything in a modern day real estate investing business.

    00:08:51:21 – 00:09:10:18

    Brady Winder

    I’m glad that you said it that way, because I think there’s this misconception that people put Vas in a box of like only administrative work and they have it. The brain hasn’t been open up to like, here’s all the different things I can have someone do because like you said, it’s it’s a team member, just like any other team member We actually have I don’t know how many I know at least one or two.

    00:09:10:18 – 00:09:37:09

    Brady Winder

    We have a partnership with you guys where we have people from Rocket Station working in site care that are just part of the team. So let’s talk about I want to talk about some of the creative use cases. Like you mentioned. I’m really excited to hear how other investors are leveraging you guys, your services. And another thing I want to talk about is how do you you know, how do you train for culture and how do you get them engaged in your team?

    00:09:37:09 – 00:09:52:24

    Brady Winder

    Really, how do you build trust? So let’s take us one step at a time. Let’s say if I’m a I’m a solo investor, let’s say I’m doing a few dollars a month, I’m wholesaling, I’m flipping, and I’m like working 80 hours a week and I’m like, Greg, I don’t want to work 80 hours a week. I need to offload some stuff.

    00:09:52:24 – 00:09:56:11

    Brady Winder

    I don’t know what what are the first things I need to do?

    00:09:56:13 – 00:10:18:10

    Greg Brooks

    Yeah, I mean, real estate, we all know it’s a transaction based business, right? Ah to kind of give a quick little story. So my partner Rob, we’ve met. He founded this business, he was an investor in Dallas and kind of him even dabbling in virtual assistants. And this was eight years ago, nine years ago. So kind of talking about like those you know, he read the four our right kind of main book everyone reads.

    00:10:18:15 – 00:10:37:27

    Greg Brooks

    They’re like, oh, this is the thing. This is interesting. The main reason he got into it is because he was stuck in the investor cycle, right? He would cue up his marketing, he’d hammers cold calls, he’d have his bandit signs, yet his CEO going, you know, leads were coming in, he qualified, leads working. He’d get out on appointments, get the contract sign, you know, go through the whole life cycle.

    00:10:37:27 – 00:10:52:27

    Greg Brooks

    And it would take six, eight, ten weeks. And then he’d be like, All right, I need a new, fresh batch of leads. Well, then no one had been working the front end of the house, right? He had he was off chasing down deals and negotiating and going and working with his disposition, his partner, who kind of specialized in dispositions.

    00:10:52:27 – 00:11:25:28

    Greg Brooks

    Well, he quickly realized, like the ups and downs, like that cycle of like marketing to qualifying to deal chasing, like it was going to work out like as amazing as real estate can be when you’re a solo operator and you’re stuck in go, Yeah, it’s tough, man. It’s a beating, right? It’s, it’s, you know, the, the ATM machine that a lot of, you know, coaches and gurus out there kind of paint real estate in you very quickly in their first three months realize like, oh no, this is work like to be successful or it’s work.

    00:11:26:01 – 00:11:51:12

    Greg Brooks

    So so what I would say is anybody listening to this podcast or listening to this episode, getting someone to help you on the front end with lead management, with outbound solicitation, that has to be your first because there’s really two wins that happen when you get someone who can, whether it’s as simple as like, Hey, I need someone to make cold calls or I need someone to qualify my leads when they submit my forms or come and be on my website.

    00:11:51:14 – 00:12:23:00

    Greg Brooks

    Yeah. The biggest thing, what’s going to help with is just the consistency of pipe, right? I tell people we’ve got incredible case studies of a lot of our clients. I mean, just to get someone to a qualified conversation and that’s anywhere from 7 to 9 touch points just to get them to this conversation was like, how many of us if you go download a list of 2000 or if you’re if you have 25 inquiries a week coming in on your website, how many people even have the time while operating the business and running dispositions and queuing up our next marketing campaign?

    00:12:23:03 – 00:12:56:06

    Greg Brooks

    How many people have the time to pick up the phone or send five, seven, ten emails? Right? So it’s like the the classic like 80, 20, the 20% of leads are just the marketing hit. They’re motivated, they’re going to close. Like you can get those and you can hustle your way to, to monetizing off of off that lead yet but the 80% right the stuff that’s that takes a little bit longer or is a longer nurture or that you’ve got to make the sixth seventh eighth ninth touch touchpoint that’s where you really start operating right That’s where the scalability gets unlocked.

    00:12:56:08 – 00:13:18:05

    Greg Brooks

    That’s where you know, your cost per lead, your cost per acquisition. That’s where all of that starts to become less and less because of the bandwidth to continue that chase and to bring on more business. So I always tell people we’ve kind of going to position we call it a virtual lead manager. It’s kind of that hybrid especially, and this is probably speaking more to like kind of the solopreneur.

    00:13:18:06 – 00:13:36:13

    Greg Brooks

    If you’ve only got a team of like two or three, this is your person who can run cold activity, right? Cool. Call techs campaigns, qualifying leads that come in from the website, you know, prospecting, Facebook groups, whatever your strategy is, it’s someone who can do that consistently in bulk without you, the without you, the business owner having to do it.

    00:13:36:13 – 00:13:42:09

    Greg Brooks

    Because let’s be honest, like most real estate investors, that’s the stuff that they pull their hair out over having to do the cold.

    00:13:42:11 – 00:14:03:01

    Brady Winder

    Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s like I feel like most investors are one of like a mix of one of the three things like either your visionary, you want to start a business and run with it, but you don’t want to manage the whole thing or you’re a marketer at heart, or maybe you’re just a deal closer. Maybe you’re the guy who likes doing acquisitions, dispositions like sit down, shaking hands.

    00:14:03:03 – 00:14:19:29

    Brady Winder

    But I don’t feel like many people I talk to are like, Yeah, I want to qualify leads all day. And so but that takes a lot of your time. And so if you could free up some of that time and really that mental energy, kind of relieve some anxiety for you to do more of your creative work, some of your best work would be powerful.

    00:14:20:01 – 00:14:35:19

    Greg Brooks

    And the strategy side of it, too, right? Because it’s it’s like if you’re stuck all day qualifying leads or working in your CRM or do you have time to go research a new market, Do you have time to listen to a podcast like this to learn something? Do you have time to go network with a mastermind like No, Right.

    00:14:35:19 – 00:15:00:24

    Greg Brooks

    That’s one that that I feel like it’s kind of almost used to cliche, but the like so many real estate investors get stuck working in the business rather than working on it. Like that’s what that actually looks like. It’s, it’s when you’ve you’re trying to get the next deal across the finish line and you get stuck doing the minutia of the very process driven, repetitive type work that isn’t allowing you to to be the deal closer that you are or to be the marketing strategist that you are.

    00:15:00:25 – 00:15:15:06

    Greg Brooks

    Like the reason you actually got into real estate. And what we you know, what’s so important is like developing systems and processes around that so you can leverage a VA so they can do the work the way you need it to be done. So there can be consistency in it, so the business can start to scale and grow.

    00:15:15:06 – 00:15:32:29

    Greg Brooks

    But more importantly, like you as the owner, as the president, as the investor whose name is on the door, you can start really being that business owner. And for some people that’s like, Hey, I’d love to consistently do one deal a month for other people. That’s I want to get to 25 deals. I’m like the economies of scale.

    00:15:32:29 – 00:15:37:12

    Greg Brooks

    There are different but apps to get there are the same, you know, I mean.

    00:15:37:15 – 00:15:50:02

    Brady Winder

    I love the way you put that the stuff together are the same is true. So let’s talk about you mentioned some of your some of your clients are coming up with some really creative ways. The K can we use guys for this? What’s going on there.

    00:15:50:04 – 00:16:06:00

    Greg Brooks

    Yeah, I mean you can even kind of bring it back to the partnership that we have with you guys, like especially on the SEO side. Yeah, I mean, I mean Vas, you know, running pages, you know, pixel pixel saying running all the audit reports around all the ad spend that they have managing budgets, kind of acting as like junior buyers.

    00:16:06:00 – 00:16:25:15

    Greg Brooks

    That’s been something that, you know, three or four years ago we had no use case. You know, we had a lot of people that were leveraging Vas for cold calls and text campaigns, CRM management, and now, you know, seeing our clients get really creative around whether it’s auditing ad copy and creating new ads and split testing.

    00:16:25:17 – 00:16:31:09

    Brady Winder

    Of its force, because you got regulation changing and, you know, text message blasting has gone away.

    00:16:31:12 – 00:16:51:08

    Greg Brooks

    Alchemy Exactly. And where they’ve seen like hey, this team members credible like where can I repurpose them somewhere and as well I think a lot of it has to do with with operators you know everyone not everyone. I’d say a lot of people there is a certain now remote or virtual, you know, if you like, the term iBuying is kind of gone away.

    00:16:51:08 – 00:17:09:12

    Greg Brooks

    But like that I buyer where we’re all kind of looking for a new market especially in this compressed economic situation we’ve got. So it’s kind of putting people in the position where like it let’s try this, let’s see if our team can do this. Let’s kind of build a plan and kind. I parcel what would the steps be to success and let our views go at it.

    00:17:09:12 – 00:17:28:12

    Greg Brooks

    So yeah, it’s it’s, it’s new. It’s very much evolved from like virtual assistant just the cold caller or just my personal admin assistant to I mean we’ve got got clients that are leveraged all across the board and many different businesses to where you know every week they’re coming to us. Hey do you think it’d be I could do this like, All right, let’s hop on a call.

    00:17:28:12 – 00:17:32:02

    Greg Brooks

    Let’s see. I think if we start out, they probably they probably cut it.

    00:17:32:02 – 00:17:47:20

    Brady Winder

    So I think when when you see when you say SEO, I can I can feel like a lot of our listeners ears perking up go away VA can do it. So give me some context for like the level of expertise and the training. Like what kind of work are the viewers doing for SEO for sure.

    00:17:47:21 – 00:18:06:27

    Greg Brooks

    So a lot of it is like, you know what, like what we call like the digital plumbing behind it, you know what I mean? So like, whether it’s setting up pixels, managing web pages, even like link checks, we, you know, we work with a large client who does a substantial ad spend, you know, six figures every single month in paid advertising.

    00:18:06:27 – 00:18:20:00

    Greg Brooks

    Well, like a big thing for him, if one link goes down, that’s a big issue. So we have like literally Vas like go on and audit all of his campaigns, all of his sequencing, making sure links are lie, making sure you ATM’s are passing through correctly.

    00:18:20:02 – 00:18:24:26

    Brady Winder

    It’s a QC basically to making sure you’re not wasting all your marketing budget.

    00:18:24:28 – 00:18:38:16

    Greg Brooks

    Exactly. Because it’s all well and good. I mean, I’m sure a lot of people, you know, they’ve got at least a monthly, hopefully a weekly call, checking them on like and performance. But it’s like there’s nothing worse than being a week or a month and do it being like, that’s so weird. This campaign was killing it for us.

    00:18:38:18 – 00:18:55:11

    Greg Brooks

    Now we’ve spent five grand and haven’t got anything for it. And just to find out all links wrong or a web pages down or something, it’s like all those little things that when you talk about like small operational stuff, it’s like even if you do have a team, you know, local or in your market, like who? Who’s going to have time to do that to go and like, click on every campaign?

    00:18:55:11 – 00:18:58:23

    Greg Brooks

    And how do you like that’s not a revenue generating, actually.

    00:18:58:23 – 00:18:59:05

    Brady Winder

    No.

    00:18:59:05 – 00:19:38:07

    Greg Brooks

    Interest in revenue, but like, you’re not going to be you shouldn’t be as the owner spending your time doing that. So like creating a lot of scalability there. And then and I’ll say it and we definitely don’t need to turn this into like an AI chat conversation and but the use of AI from an actual copywriting, you know, ad word type perspective has really helped us with our clients build scalability there to like whether it’s just like the organic strategy around, you know, creation of blogs and content for the website, whether it’s like website copy readers, we’ve been able to have Vas where yeah, they’re not just doing it on their own and publishing it,

    00:19:38:07 – 00:19:58:26

    Greg Brooks

    but 80, 90% of the work that comes with copywriting, that comes with content posting that we now leverage the Vas and they’re even faster at it now because of eye to where we can get, get it across the finish line, kind of everything from creation to QC to managing budgets and ad spends and testing like it’s everything across the board.

    00:19:59:01 – 00:20:14:10

    Brady Winder

    While we’re in this. You mentioned I like we’re in this kind of unique period in time where we’re realizing we’re learning, you know, I’m learning how long it takes to use AI and like, yeah, it is a huge timesaver or but you also got to, you got to know the problem, so you got to know how to work it.

    00:20:14:10 – 00:20:33:09

    Brady Winder

    You still have to be a subject matter expert on what you’re writing about, you know, to not come off as, you know, just generic content in this case, you guys have any views doing like internal linking free SEO or things like that, like linking blog posts to each other that can help build trust you a strategy that.

    00:20:33:09 – 00:20:53:27

    Greg Brooks

    No, definitely. And even like the back linking strategy, like whether it’s like reaching out for guest posting, like all of that stuff, that just takes time and coordination and I mean plug in too. And that’s all very process driven stuff. And I know we’ll get into kind of like how do I successfully hire This sounds great, but like where do I find that person, you know, kind of developing the process around how to do that?

    00:20:54:00 – 00:21:06:03

    Greg Brooks

    You’re to see an audience around it, you know, tracking those links and back linking and the partners and the guest posting how to create a really strong structure. So the VA has a manageable workload that can be tracked is super important as well.

    00:21:06:05 – 00:21:33:08

    Brady Winder

    Okay. So we talked about some of the technical like where the use cases, where do you fit a VA into your business? One of the concerns I would have and investors would have is, especially as we’re talking about something like content creation, where now they’re responsible for part of your brand’s voice and your tone, your image. How do you build trust, let’s say with a VA, but really with a team?

    00:21:33:08 – 00:21:46:09

    Brady Winder

    Because you get the same thing if you’re hiring somebody local. So how are you training them for culture, integrate them into your team? And for context, where are most of the views you guys work with from?

    00:21:46:11 – 00:21:55:00

    Greg Brooks

    Yeah, so all of our people were based in the Philippines, so we’ve got almost 2200 people in and around mostly Manila were fully remote. So all in the Philippines.

    00:21:55:04 – 00:21:59:01

    Brady Winder

    Okay. Yeah. So how, how are you building trust? What’s that look like?

    00:21:59:03 – 00:22:07:14

    Greg Brooks

    Oh, definitely. That culture word, right? Like everyone throws around culture and it becomes cliche and it’s like, Oh, we have a great culture. It’s like, what is that mean? It’s like, well, we send everyone a bag, a coffee.

    00:22:07:16 – 00:22:09:00

    Brady Winder

    They say donuts on Fridays.

    00:22:09:06 – 00:22:24:18

    Greg Brooks

    That that’s what it’s I saw a great LinkedIn was the other day It literally it it’s like people want us all to come back into the office because the culture is amazing and it’s like a picture of a slice like here’s our or not sliced and sliced bagels. Now here’s our culture. It’s like I’m.

    00:22:24:18 – 00:22:32:22

    Brady Winder

    Crying inside because of past jobs where it’s like the bagels showed up. And that was the the checkbox of like, we have culture.

    00:22:32:24 – 00:22:38:06

    Greg Brooks

    The boss walks in our the bagels everyone have a group yet see it’s like, awesome.

    00:22:38:09 – 00:22:41:18

    Brady Winder

    What’s yeah Oh man what.

    00:22:41:21 – 00:23:02:02

    Greg Brooks

    Were we kind of our stance on culture is I mean it kind of can go many different ways what we say in terms of successfully integrating a VA into the business. What we find and this really is true of local hires, it’s just true of people like we all run businesses, we all have probably hired and we all have.

    00:23:02:02 – 00:23:25:04

    Greg Brooks

    Probably the the hardest part is like, how do I align someone with my goals with their roles? How do I give them clarity in the scope of work that I need them to own and the KPIs around that? Right? I’ve I’ve never hired somebody or I’ve personally never taken a job that on day one I was like, I want to do get I don’t want to be here.

    00:23:25:04 – 00:23:41:27

    Greg Brooks

    I’m just going to see how long I can, you know, cash a check. Like, that’s not why people go through the interview process and get hired. What we find is that when people burn out or when they don’t integrate well or when they don’t hit the metrics that maybe their resumé or that we thought they would through the qualifying process.

    00:23:42:00 – 00:24:03:02

    Greg Brooks

    It usually comes down to two things management or clarity within the role. And what I mean by that is if you do run a big team, a lot of managers are accidental managers, right? Meaning they were top performers and top performers get elevated. And as you get elevated, you what if you’re paying them more? They got to do more.

    00:24:03:04 – 00:24:29:28

    Greg Brooks

    But we don’t really invest in their management training, right? When you go from performer to person in charge of other people’s performances, that’s like a career maturation that just a lot of companies don’t. Right. Or when you see a quoted owner, you know, of someone who has a team like that 60% of your time, 70% of your time, like that’s who you should be spending your time with, cultivating that leadership, being in touch with that.

    00:24:30:00 – 00:24:47:26

    Greg Brooks

    The other part of it is the structure and process around clearly defining the scope of work and what you want that hire to do. So often, you know, we hear we want to hire someone who’s super experienced. What does that really mean? Well, I don’t want to train them. I want them just to know and figure it out.

    00:24:47:29 – 00:24:49:10

    Greg Brooks

    Everyone’s business.

    00:24:49:13 – 00:24:49:28

    Brady Winder

    Yeah.

    00:24:50:01 – 00:25:06:08

    Greg Brooks

    Yeah, everyone’s culture is a little bit different. So the strategy that we deploy with our clients that I would tell anybody, whether you work with us or whether you’re just kind of looking out for Vas, you’re on your own, or if you have Vas and you’re like, They’re really great, they’re really in tune, but the results aren’t there.

    00:25:06:10 – 00:25:29:00

    Greg Brooks

    I would dive into your processes. Do you have for each scope of work, each task, each responsibility? Do you have a clearly defined document? Do you have a video recorded training? Do you have a step by step step that can give that person clarity in terms of you’re the business owner, it’s your name on the door. How do you scale yourself in, multiply how you would do it.

    00:25:29:00 – 00:25:47:11

    Greg Brooks

    And the way to do that is through process and system documentation. We find so many people just have their business fully stuck in their head. It becomes very hard because if you’re hiring, whether you’re a small shop or a big shop, you’re usually not hiring because you have an abundance of time on your hands, right? You’re using opportunity daily in you’re growing.

    00:25:47:11 – 00:26:05:24

    Greg Brooks

    You just paid 50 grand for a new marketing campaign to kick off like there’s a lot of stress. So by spending the time to really dive into like, okay, why are we hiring this role? Who do they report to? And then diving into the particulars as to the scope of work, like going back to that lead manager example, like, okay, or CRM, how would, how, how do we train them on that?

    00:26:05:24 – 00:26:24:05

    Greg Brooks

    You know, what’s software we’re using as a, you know, investor view that any of the ones out there, how do we make sure that they’re going to know the buttons, to press the links, to hit the notes, to take the, you know, the structure to follow so that we can expedite their learning curve rather than just saying, hey, come sit beside me and watch how I do it.

    00:26:24:06 – 00:26:41:27

    Greg Brooks

    Right. That’s kind of everyone’s all back for training. And I think we’ve all been in school and for a lot of people, the traditional listen to the teacher tell us how to do it and then go figure it out. Like we actually learn through the practical, through that doing the homework and doing the studying and getting the reps.

    00:26:42:00 – 00:26:56:10

    Greg Brooks

    So by having them in a process, it allows you to give the the future, hire the VA the opportunity to succeed because they got clarity, they know what and how, right, which is so important, especially through that first 30 days of getting into and with your team.

    00:26:56:12 – 00:27:22:23

    Brady Winder

    Yeah, so the first 30 days, I’m glad you mention that because what I wanted to ask is like you’ve, you’ve outlined like what it takes to build trust and have that VA be confident and successful. So that makes sense. Like clear expectations, good management, a good working relationship. It’s actually simpler. Simpler than I thought. Like if they know what they’re doing and what they signed up for it, that creates some of the trust.

    00:27:22:25 – 00:27:39:24

    Brady Winder

    But as far as communication between like the the investor or the leader in their team, what’s that look like for the first 30 days and what’s that look like for the next three years as far as like how many how many touch points in a week? Are they communicating with them?

    00:27:39:27 – 00:27:59:19

    Greg Brooks

    Yeah, no, definitely. I think the scope of the of the role they’re plugging into it definitely varies. Like we mentioned, when you have someone who’s running your marketing or your property up propping up a new marketing campaign or ad spend that you probably on daily check ins. But for that, for a general rule of thumb, if you’re hiring a VA, a go through the process of documenting and clearly defining what you want them to do at it.

    00:27:59:21 – 00:28:16:02

    Greg Brooks

    Once you now hire someone and get them in the seat, you don’t just want to put them in the corner and say, Here’s your playbook, have fun. Let me know how it goes. Like, we want to set very intentional, very deliberate check ins. So what we typically recommend is, is for the first 30 days, we do a check in every single morning.

    00:28:16:05 – 00:28:39:20

    Greg Brooks

    Okay, So it’s strictly just a dive in. Any questions from the day before? You know, here’s where I would like your priorities to be. Do you have any questions for me and just set that cadence of knowing that that they’re there for you or that you’re there for them? I mean, building that trust, building that culture? Well, we also encourage is doing an end of day check out right what came up what issues like don’t create any gray area.

    00:28:39:22 – 00:28:55:22

    Greg Brooks

    Right. The worst thing I mean one complaint that we hear from a lot of people, especially within Vas, was it’s like I thought they were good, but then I audited their work and it turned out they actually weren’t doing anything because there was this one issue and they didn’t want to come to me to ask about it. And we said, Well, why?

    00:28:55:22 – 00:29:11:15

    Greg Brooks

    Why didn’t you ask? You know what I mean? They just because you think about the time trait, you’re right. They hire that VA, They just saved you 4 hours a day. Well, I think you can find 15 minutes to go to them and say, Hey, is everything good? And it makes sense. The document makes sense.

    00:29:11:15 – 00:29:11:28

    Brady Winder

    Yeah.

    00:29:11:29 – 00:29:19:16

    Greg Brooks

    So where did your logging, you know, I mean, like, it’s a time trait. It’s not a lot of people that I always use the the staples and rhythm of that was easy button.

    00:29:19:18 – 00:29:20:16

    Brady Winder

    Yeah yeah.

    00:29:20:18 – 00:29:33:29

    Greg Brooks

    It’s it’s like I don’t know why but a lot of a lot of viewers out there are a lot of investors have this connotation that like these are just the easy button. You’re going to hire someone that just knows your business, knows what to do, and you can just set it and forget it. And like, that’s just not true.

    00:29:33:29 – 00:29:55:02

    Greg Brooks

    That’s not people, right? So changing it, changing your mindset as the as the owner to now be the accountability structure rather than the operator that has to do it. That’s where you got to be. So setting those daily check ins to have intentional conversations and maybe for the first couple of weeks, like it’s minimal feedback, like at the end of the day, like you’re still kind of dating at that, you know what I mean?

    00:29:55:02 – 00:30:18:12

    Greg Brooks

    Like for like, you know, a lot of us, like, say, I’m married with my wife, like there wasn’t a lot of sharing going on the first month, but it was like we had to keep going on dates and texting and all of a sudden there builds trust. It’s that same kind of kind of methodology where if you’re intentional with setting that time aside every single day, 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes at night, sometimes it turns into a 30 minute conversation, an hour long conversation.

    00:30:18:18 – 00:30:38:19

    Greg Brooks

    But that’s what builds the trust. And through those conversations, you know, you’ll really be able to flush out any inconsistencies or any, you know, any areas where expectations aren’t being met. Just because building the trust where the employee, the VA knows that you’re invested in their success. And a lot of people forget about that. They do a couple of calls at the beginning of like, Oh, they got it.

    00:30:38:24 – 00:30:51:12

    Greg Brooks

    They see like an initial, you know, they convert one lead on day number two and they’re like, Oh, they got it. I don’t need to waste any time over there, do it. And then a month later through two months later, the performance is bad and it’s like, well, I don’t know how that happened. They crushed it on the second day.

    00:30:51:14 – 00:31:14:10

    Greg Brooks

    So it’s that consistency through the first 30 days and then from there evaluating right at that time, if you’ve done it right, they should be a pretty autonomous team member. Yeah. So maybe it’s a weekly powwow, maybe it’s a monthly check in. Like at that point you can kind of evaluate based on like how much tracking do I have in my software, do I need to be meeting with them this frequent?

    00:31:14:10 – 00:31:27:11

    Greg Brooks

    Because there’s a lot of moving parts that are happening in and around their role. But I say for the first 30 days you need to be carving out at least 30 minutes a day, 50 minutes morning, 50 minutes afternoon to establish that communication and create that feedback.

    00:31:27:13 – 00:31:49:12

    Brady Winder

    So it sounds like from hearing you talk, it sounds like probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest mistake is having, excuse me, real estate investors not put the onus on themselves to like, have their KPIs in place, have clear expectations in place for that Vas and really knowing what they want to get out of that. And in having that touchpoint like how are things going?

    00:31:49:15 – 00:32:04:17

    Brady Winder

    Just expecting it to be an easy buy and when really it’s a it’s an easier button, you know, rock station industry specific, it’s is easier than trying to do it yourself, but you still have to they’re they’re an integral part of the team. You have to be walking alongside them.

    00:32:04:19 – 00:32:28:24

    Greg Brooks

    Yeah. And that’s I mean for me like that’s what I as a business owner, like we’re all managers at some perspective or we, we, we have a partner or a number two in the company that is like, hey, maybe we are the visionary and we just want to be idea board person. But we’ve got I mean I know I carrot you’ve got the number two that are the operators and for me you know if there’s one thing I can kind of pass a lot from like my learnings is I view managed management like true quality management is like two things.

    00:32:28:26 – 00:32:50:19

    Greg Brooks

    It’s the ability to get your team what they need to succeed and then hold them accountable to the results you put in place. Like that’s all management is. So if you’re not setting time aside to do that, whether it’s with, you know, your most expensive hire your office or whether it’s with your team, like you’re not setting anybody up for success and within the business, that’s where that like mistrust and how do I know what the Vas are doing?

    00:32:50:19 – 00:33:07:11

    Greg Brooks

    Are they overcharging me? Were they even here yesterday working? I got a bill for them, like that’s where that comes from. It comes from, you know, not being in tune and checking in and just setting frequencies and cadences with them to ensure that they’re doing what it is that you want them to do. And what’s getting, you know, what’s getting done.

    00:33:07:14 – 00:33:42:18

    Brady Winder

    Hmm. I like that we’re about at time. But one last thing I want to ask you, Greg, is you got to promise to give me a real answer on this. What are Vas not good for? What do you not recommend hiring a V.A for? I’m particularly curious if you guys are doing user offering any creative services like video editing, graphic design things where it’s it’s it’s it’s less of a you know follow this documentation for this process these steps in a little bit more of like emotional communication like brain communication that makes any sense at all.

    00:33:42:20 – 00:33:45:05

    Brady Winder

    But yeah what if he is not good for research?

    00:33:45:06 – 00:34:03:20

    Greg Brooks

    So I would say rocket station. We’re not good at graphic design. We don’t really touch the creative suite of stuff. This is I get this question a lot stuff because we just spent most of the podcast being like, Hey, they’re they’re termed as a VA, but they’re just talented individual that happens to live somewhere else in the world.

    00:34:03:22 – 00:34:25:08

    Greg Brooks

    So there really isn’t anything that they’re not good at. What I would say as a business owner, anything, strategy, anything, final decision making, don’t try to outsource that. Don’t try to outsource your problems. Don’t try to hire VA because you’ve run a cold call campaign and you haven’t converted any. Like there’s no magic list. There’s no magic VA that can just hear it convert.

    00:34:25:10 – 00:35:01:24

    Greg Brooks

    The biggest mistakes that we we find people making when they’re hiring is they’re trying to things that they haven’t themselves done. And that’s just really not where VA’s or we’re outsourcing vets. You know, I mean a lot of the day to day operational stuff, a lot of the process driven work is is perfect, right, from making the cold calls, following up the leads, scrubbing the list, cleaning the data in your CRM, contacting by like all of that process driven stuff is great and I don’t want to discount it to say we have clients that have had VA’s for four years who are now in strategic seats and managing team.

    00:35:01:24 – 00:35:20:11

    Greg Brooks

    So it’s a person it can happen for, for most investors that we see, probably most people listening here, I would not try to outsource or hire VA to do something that you yourself don’t have a general idea of what needs to be done in order for it to be successful. Don’t try to outsource your problems. Make sure you kind of follow those steps of making sure you got the plan in place.

    00:35:20:11 – 00:35:44:01

    Greg Brooks

    You find the right person and then you work with them to hold them accountable to it. But really, for all business owners, you know, as we’ve led off with like real estate, it’s not an ATM machine, right? It’s tough. It’s hard. There’s a lot goes into it. Don’t try to hire a VA if you’re having trouble marketing, if you’re down to your last $10,000 and you’ve got 60 days for this to head or you don’t know if you could be a business, don’t hire.

    00:35:44:06 – 00:35:59:07

    Greg Brooks

    It’s all those problems, you know, I mean, hire VA to execute against plans to execute against, you know, defined roles. Clear scopes at work don’t hire VA to fill in the gaps of things that you don’t know how to do or or that you yourself don’t have experience.

    00:35:59:09 – 00:36:30:20

    Brady Winder

    And I love that. That’s a great analogy. I’ll link up Trevor CEO and or host the podcast. He did a a Trevor track talk not too long ago about why he kind of regrets delegating strategy now. And so he was, you know as our team went from turned 20 to now over 50 to 60 people, it was like, okay, I’m going to start delegating strategy to people and then realize like, oh wait, some of this maybe be over delegated this was in my unique skillset.

    00:36:30:20 – 00:36:45:17

    Brady Winder

    I’m really good at these things. I just pass the baton without guiding them. You know, I need to teach the team how to do this. And so that’s that’s really good insight there. Not to just expect you can just be the solution to your problems by hiring someone else, but you need.

    00:36:45:22 – 00:37:08:00

    Greg Brooks

    Yeah. And it’s kind of like the buying your time back right? Tough stuff. The strategy like leverage of VA to get the low dollar an hour to the cold calls, the follow up training, your marketing content, the managing your website, use your VA and hire Vas to get that stuff off your plate so that your time can be fully invested in the strategy, in the decision making.

    00:37:08:00 – 00:37:30:19

    Greg Brooks

    Right. It’s that it’s that time tradeoff there. Don’t look it. This is a tough problem. I need a VA here none at all that the 80% that we all that I deal with that you deal with running a business, outsource that DRE processes and systems to get Vas plugged in there so that your time can be set spent more on the 20% that’s going to cause your business to double or triple in the next 12, eight, 24 months.

    00:37:30:21 – 00:37:48:19

    Brady Winder

    Absolutely. Well, sweet man. Well, I appreciate you sharing that. It’s been insightful for me. It’s it’s really cool to see how Vas have changed over the years from like, oh, you know, I have a VA and he knows what they’re doing to like, Hey, this is my team and, and just how the pandemic changed something at least one thing for the better.

    00:37:48:19 – 00:38:05:23

    Brady Winder

    And yeah, I love what you guys are doing I think it’s I don’t think I know it’s been a huge blessing to our team and to many other investors You’ve really just unlocked a lot of people’s bandwidth and time and energy, so keep doing what you guys do. For anyone listening, watching, you can find Rocket Station in the marketplace.

    00:38:05:23 – 00:38:28:04

    Brady Winder

    So just go to Care.com slash marketplace like Greg and I have talked about. We have a carrot specific relationship with VA where they’re doing helping out with SEO and with marketing. It’s not just, hey, you know, go to Rocket Station. Just because they’re in our industry, we really do work closely together. So I don’t say that lightly. Greg Is there anything?

    00:38:28:04 – 00:38:35:09

    Brady Winder

    Guest Have any goodies for the audience? Like if they want to learn more about Vas, any sort of guides or things that might be helpful?

    00:38:35:12 – 00:38:51:01

    Greg Brooks

    Yeah, definitely. So our website rocket station dot com. Obviously you can go to the marketplace to book all, you can book all there. We’ve got tons of great blog content, how to guides. I mean, even if you don’t, maybe you’re just getting into real estate and you’re still kind of just in the discovery mode trying to get the first deal.

    00:38:51:03 – 00:39:16:23

    Greg Brooks

    I would encourage you, even if it’s a part time person, even if you go do it yourself and just hire someone took to work three, 4 hours a week for you. You know, we don’t do that, but there’s lots of freelancers out there and we have tons of great resource guides on where to find the reputable sites. How to vet talent properly, you know, how to go through that process development piece we’ve got so rocket station dot com there’s tons of upgrade tutorials and if you want to do it yourself, we kind of open the curtains right.

    00:39:16:23 – 00:39:35:12

    Greg Brooks

    And we were very much aligned with Carrot in that way where it’s okay if you want to do this yourself, here’s the playbook, here’s how you do it. You know, if you want to save some time and work with a company that’s you know, that’s got eight years of experience, come talk to us. So rocket station dot com what’s got to meet any needs or this kind of tickled tickled your your VA hiring senses go check us out I.

    00:39:35:12 – 00:39:53:29

    Brady Winder

    Appreciate that and I almost forgot I asked this question I wasn’t intending to set myself up for this. I promise if any of you watching or listening went to the summit, depending on when this episode comes out, if you’re at the care summit and you purchase the special, then we have a special resource on like do’s and don’ts for viewers and how to train viewers.

    00:39:53:29 – 00:40:14:08

    Brady Winder

    That’s really I was expecting I wasn’t expecting what Greg and his team gave me, but like really in-depth guide on how to use views in your real estate business. So go check that out. Carrot Accomplish summit. Yeah, that’s it. Well, thank you, Greg. Thanks again for joining us. It’s been a good conversation and appreciate you sharing what you have with our audience.

    00:40:14:08 – 00:40:19:09

    Greg Brooks

    Man Yeah, thanks again. It’s been a long time. So good to connect and appreciate Appreciate your comments on.

    00:40:19:11 – 00:40:21:05

    Brady Winder

    Absolutely. We’ll see you all next week.

  • EP 456: Virtual Wholesaling 3-4 Deals Per month w/ Carrot SEO & TV w/ The Russos

    EP 456: Virtual Wholesaling 3-4 Deals Per month w/ Carrot SEO & TV w/ The Russos


    Virtual wholesaling in the market you live in? Yep, that’s Chris. After 30 years of investing, 11 of those living in Brazil, Chris & his wife are constantly innovating their marketing & how they close deals.

    He’s consistently closing highly-profitable deals in a competitive market with Carrot. So, we had a bit of a nerd-out to hear what’s working from their SEO, TV, and direct mail efforts. Enjoy!

    Mentioned in this episode:

    The Russo’s Carrot Site
    Jerryll Noorden’s SEO Service
    InvestorFuse.com
    Velocity BPO


    Episode Transcript (This is an automated transcript by robot carrots – please mind the typos 😉)

    00:00:00:00 – 00:00:18:05
    Chris Russo
    I do one thing when A comes in from Google, they’re ready to sell. You know, I’ve tried Facebook before and you’re like putting yourself in front of them and then maybe they’re interested in selling here and there. It takes a little longer, but Google. That’s why when they call the call or or they email me, I pick up right away. Right away.

    And then if if for something I pick up and they’re not there, I’ll leave a message, I’ll text them, I’ll email and I’ll do it like for three or four days straight, because I want them once I speak with them, and then I’m, you know, more or less that’s my goal, is to contact them right away.

    00:00:39:05 – 00:00:50:25
    Brady Winder
    Hey, friends, welcome back to the CarrotCast podcast. I’m your host, Brady Winder, and I have my friends, my new friends today with me, Chris and Rosangela Russo. How you guys doing?

    00:00:50:28 – 00:00:52:17
    Chris Russo
    Good, good. And yourself?

    00:00:52:19 – 00:01:12:01
    Brady Winder
    I’m doing good. I’m doing good. Thank you. This is going to be a really good conversation. It’s a little bit unique because we’re it’s success story month at Carrot. We’re going over the different ways people are using care to be successful. We’re talking to people that are consistently generating leads and closing deals with SEO and with Carrot and Chris and Rosangela are virtual wholesaling. But what’s interesting is that they are whole, their virtual wholesaling in the market that they live in. And so we’ll get into that and why and how they are doing that. But yeah, we’re going to go over that and we’re going to go over what’s working for them marketing wise with SEO, with direct mail, with TV, the different things that they’re doing and their team structure, how they’re using VAs, all of that.

    So tune in. It’s going to be good. And if you want to catch some of our other content are the success stories. Go to Carrot.com/success. And one more thing. Carrot Summit. Carrot Summit is coming up July 12th. So go to carrotsummit.com. Check it out. It’s going to be amazing. We just announced that we would love to see their totally free event.

    00:01:59:21 – 00:02:11:29
    Speaker 2
    So before we have done this podcast Chris, Rosangela, y’all were telling me about one of the deals, one of the first deals you closed with care. Would you mind sharing that little story with me? The 60/40 deal?

    00:02:12:01 – 00:02:36:29
    Chris Russo
    Sure, sure. She she found this on, on Google. And I always ask, well, how did you hear of us? And she said, Oh, Google. And I go, Why did you pick us? I always ask, what keywords that you put in. She gave me all that information. She called me and I asked her information about the property. And and then what happens is I said, okay, I’ll get back to you with an offer, and then I get back to with the offer.

    00:02:37:03 – 00:02:58:25
    Chris Russo
    And I called it like three or four or five times. I always like to call them back a few times because in this way, establish a relationship with them. I become their friends. And then she decided, You know what, Chris, based on your voice, you sound transparent and looks like I can deal with you. Set up great. And so what I did is I sent her a contract and it was through email and she sent it over.

    00:02:58:27 – 00:03:24:01
    Chris Russo
    She I think she had a brother and a sister and they all looked it over. They agreed. She sent it back and I start working on it and that’s how I started with her. And then when their end up making like I think a $64,000 and by the way, I do everything virtual. I didn’t see the seller, I didn’t see the buyer about a week afterwards, once I signed her up, she goes, Chris, by the way, we have another house we want to sell.

    00:03:24:01 – 00:03:41:14
    Chris Russo
    So sure, I’ll buy. I buy as many houses as possible. So she sent me to her, her other brother who was working on that house and that one we closed and we made like 40 something thousand. So between both of them, I think it was like $102,000. And then what happened? I didn’t see the seller, I didn’t see the buyer.

    00:03:41:16 – 00:04:03:03
    Chris Russo
    And I felt really good. And so what I did is I were lunch for the title company. I said, Listen, you know, I made 102,000 like you closed the same time a couple of days apart. But within a week, some 102,000 so I bought everybody lunch. He was happy. And that was the story with that one. And she just said no, I think she said we had a five star rating.
    And then she went into my website and she saw my face, my wife’s face, my family. And we have, you know, in our website, it’s, you know, it’s a lot of credibility involved. So and she felt comfortable with me. And then it goes, Do you need to see the property? No, basically, just tell me about the property. So you know how old this I always ask, how old is the roof, The AC?


    Those are the big ticket items and and the condition of the property. And so, yeah, that’s fine. I gave her my offer. It was accepted and that was it. So I do everything virtual and I, I used to like drive to the property, but between the traffic I can only do maybe see two properties in a, in a day.

    And with virtual I’m able to close more properties. So I’m really comfortable and I know a lot of people are very uncomfortable with virtual, but I’m very comfortable and it works for me. So and I’m able to do more deals and yeah, that’s the main thing. Yeah.

    00:04:57:13 – 00:05:04:16
    Brady Winder
    And how long after, like for context, how long after how long was this deal after you started doing SEO?

    00:05:04:18 – 00:05:28:17
    Rosangela Russo
    It was okay. We start with Carrot. It was September. We set up everything. It was in December. We start working really hard and from January on and then we have like the routine, how you do like every day we do something. Every day we post something and every day we work in the blogging and we have a routine in the office.

    Meet and make, and everyone is responsible for some areas. And then we use in the night to watching videos and learn more about what we doing a and that we this li the specific was in December we closed just before Christmas.

    00:05:46:28 – 00:06:08:11
    Brady Winder
    Which is wild. I asked that because I want people to hear like you need to have the context. SEO is a long term is a long term strategy. You know something you put in the work for or, you know, pay someone else to put in the work for. But I think it’s so cool to share that because it’s you’re usually expecting the results of like 3 to 6 months, you know, the fruit of all that work.

    You then putting in. But it’s you know, we also get people closing deals off the bat, like launching a carrot, say, out of the box. And so all of the stories.

    00:06:17:11 – 00:06:35:18
    Chris Russo
    I do one thing when lead comes in from Google, they’re ready to sell. You know, I’ve tried Facebook before and you’re like putting yourself in front of them. And then maybe they’re interested in selling here and there. It takes a little longer. But Google, that’s why when they call, they either call or or they email me, I pick up right away.
    Right away. And then if if for something I pick up and they’re not there, I’ll leave a message, I’ll text them, I’ll email and I’ll do it like for three or four days straight, because I want them once I speak with them, and then I’m, you know, more or less and that’s my goal, is to contact them right away because I know they’re calling two or three other people, but I know they’re ready to sell. They’re hot. That’s why I like Google leads.

    00:06:57:00 – 00:07:12:07
    Brady Winder
    Or you had mentioned that last time we talked before we recorded on the podcast that, you know, you guys are close in about 3 to 4 deals a month, but those are they’re bigger spreads than some of the other marketing methods you guys have been doing. Like they’re big deals.

    00:07:12:09 – 00:07:13:08
    Chris Russo
    Yes.

    00:07:13:10 – 00:07:29:22
    Rosangela Russo
    If you want to talk about the numbers, last month we close 87, 89,000 A actually, we we closed one yesterday for 53. And these month we have we we spec to receive one or three.

    00:07:29:24 – 00:07:32:06
    Brady Winder
    Sheesh. That’s a good month!

    00:07:32:08 – 00:07:52:01
    Chris Russo
    You know you know it’s funny the last week I’ll be closing for 7500 which is a lot of money. It’s great. I don’t mind doing like five of those a month but to me is like, oh that was a small one. After that it wasn’t 52, it’s 57 actually, it’s 57 550. Right. And then we’re closing one on I think the next couple of days for 27 and another one for ten.

    00:07:52:04 – 00:08:15:22
    Rosangela Russo
    So but I think one thing is okay because every time, okay, what we do, for example, our YouTube, I believe, you know I’m I’m not the marketing I am just a wife and you know mom and but I believe is that people need to see us and then that we have a hitting the office crews need to do some videos for week Every time we close we make a video.
    This one he’s make only 7500. He and the winter do a video for this one. I said, Why not?

    00:08:22:15 – 00:08:38:22
    Chris Russo
    Because she’s always on me or Chris. Another video, another video, Another video. And what do we do for videos? We just think of people calling in deals. We’re closing deals. We’re about to close new deals coming in. So I talk about that. So it’s easy to do videos. And there was like a minute, 2 minutes.

    00:08:38:22 – 00:09:16:11
    Rosangela Russo
    Yes. One thing is we do hear these. Okay, Everything happened. Heating the office. Actually, we work from home, but everything happened here between us is as juice for SEO means when somebody call us for the information, probably somebody else has the same problem. And, you know, the more we talking about what we do and we put these in as a SEO in videos or even we do in the blogging, now we see the videos and I know it’s not perfect because my English is not perfect, but I try to keep out of what we do because I believe the more we talk what we do, the more the people can find us.

    The more people can find us, the people. Because I say, Chris, 30 years buying, selling houses, and Chris knows a lot about probate, even we have investors where there cannot close because, you know, probate is really and Chris has words all his leads, all his deals, has hairs is doesn’t have any any lead is like so we actually we have one very good one was like really smooth but usually it’s really you know it’s very hard and this people usually their call was unfortunately they are is not like really sometimes they have problems, sometimes they need somebody to listen and you know is is usually they are selling a problem.

    And and Chris is really good with patient with this people and talk and always returning the call the same time and.

    00:10:06:27 – 00:10:14:01
    Chris Russo
    Yeah they call me a night weekends I’ll answer it and you’ll pick up right away on text I’ll text right back. So they feel confident.

    00:10:14:03 – 00:10:20:02
    Rosangela Russo
    Yeah. What think you know like when you start calling like 11:00 and that is maybe that’s not nice.

    00:10:20:04 – 00:10:38:06
    Brady Winder
    Well, I want to I want to talk about some of the specific things y’all are doing. Like you mentioned the videos and getting video reviews while being virtual. So I want to dig into some of that. But real quick, tell me tell me about your team structure, because you I mentioned you have VAs.

    I love to know what specifically you have Vas doing so that people can understand. We can paint a full picture for what the business looks like and then kind of what the past, what the wholesaling or sorry what the virtual wholesaling part look like and your your journey in Brazil.

    00:10:52:09 – 00:11:09:23
    Rosangela Russo
    Yes, yes. All right. We are like a long time ago we used to have ten people making calls. We have like that small office in Philippines and we have all of these people making calls for us. But then, you know, if all the things then we don’t do this anymore. We stop this like four or five years ago.

    And right now what I have I have three VAs, one VA specific I work with me SEO and he is the one like him. Our we have I have these crazy ideas and, you know, he’s keeping up with the routines and that’s what he does. And then I have one is like a shadow of Chris, where he’s always helping Chris with, you know, the follow ups and getting the price for the property.

    And I have another one. What she does, she does do follow up for between cold and warm leads, because even though we don’t cold call anymore, we we have like 300,000 people in our data where actually we just sign up for the Investor Fuse because it’s too many leads and it’s kind of hard to keep everything in the same place because we use a bunch of tools, you know more.

    I know we have a vastly we have a look when it was a constant contact put all this together demands is just too much and then we sign up for Investor Fuse. We had a meeting with Carlos and I used to use Investor Fuse many years ago but I understand the now is much different, is much more close and much easier to use and we just sign up to get a because Greece does a lot actually we work many hours per day.

    We go to the basketball game, we are in the phone, we will have a computer. We always working.

    00:12:34:12 – 00:12:51:00
    Chris Russo
    I believe 80, 80% of my business is in the follow up. So follow up is very important. Very every once in a while you someone to call, you get them right away. But majority of it is then the follow up and you need a good follow up system. And we had mojo, which is more of a dialer than a CRM.

    So that’s why you switched Investor Fuse because with all these leads coming in. So I need a text, some I need to email them, I need a mail, so I want to be in front of them. So on. Let’s say Chris, not bother me. I’ll take them off the list of not others. Keep doing it but nicely. So that helps a lot.

    00:13:08:05 – 00:13:29:11
    Rosangela Russo
    Yes. One thing is is very important when we decide to go back to Carrot with Chris because we had somebody else taking care of our SEO. He did like for two years. He was trying hard. I you know, I believe that, but was like one lead here, one lead over there and after while was costing money because no leads.

    And then let’s see, I mean, me and Chris, because we try to, you know, talking about everything and then okay, let’s go to try do ourselves. I said, okay, how are you going to do that? And then we start looking, Who can help us? We sign up we for Jerryll.

    00:13:46:02 – 00:14:01:19
    Chris Russo
    A Jerryll Noorden of SEO for Real Estate Investors. What happened is we had the person like I’m sure everybody knows someone that will do it for you. They’ll pay him a couple hundred dollars. But what happened if he does well, and then also he slacks off and then he does well, he slacks off. So then we went with Jerryll.

    And what he does, he actually gives you the blueprint and how to build your SEO, which is great. So you actually know what he’s doing when you hire someone paying them a couple hundred dollars a month, he’s doing everything for you. So if he leaves or something happens to him, or if he doesn’t do a good job, you’re back to square one.

    It’s like, I don’t know what to do. So with Jerryll, he gives you the blueprint how to do it, like building house from the ground floor up. And that’s why we like that.

    00:14:25:02 – 00:14:41:21
    Brady Winder
    Right? Which is important for y’all, because I can see y’all. Really? You guys are marketers. You want to understand the fundamentals of what you’re doing as opposed to, like, just throwing money, have someone else do it, which I think for a SEO is is really the sweet spot. You can go total DIY or you can go, you know, total paid.

    But if you can understand it and know how to manage it, know how to implement it, but then also, you know, pay for the training, but have a VA like yourself where you’re guiding the VA, you’re telling them what to do. I think that’s just like the best bang for your buck.

    00:14:57:00 – 00:15:21:13
    Rosangela Russo
    Exactly. And the other thing is, you know, me. I mean, always, always, even though sometimes is a little bit but I trying to be the media’s is important. I think I watch most of the Carrot videos. You know, I watch you all the time because sometimes, like, for example, we have we have a routine for be post every day in Facebook, Instagram and all the social media.

    But I got these from one of the videos I watched from you guys to see how important we be there all the time, because if you not be there today, somebody else is going to be in front of you. Yes. And yes, they are. They’re trying to learn a little bit about how working, blogging, landing page and, you know, I know my keywords and I know my website is not perfect.

    I know that because it’s a lot to improve. I never did college. I’m doing everything to watching videos and getting ideas. But it is very important to educate yourself because this is even though we not pay somebody else is money. You investing because you have the VA, you have all this system behind the scenes to make this work.

    00:16:06:17 – 00:16:23:12
    Brady Winder
    I appreciate it. It’s really cool to hear you know, somebody like actually doing all the things we teach because it’s like you can learn it all. But to implement it is another thing. Yeah. So I want to, you know, in a second we’ll dive into like the different marketing channels you guys are doing. So we talked about SEO.

    I want to dive into, you know, the TV and the probate mailers SEO mentioned. But one other thing real quick, I was going to ask you is, is there anything else specific you’re doing to like I was going to say, build credibility, you know, for virtual wholesaling, but you’re doing the videos.

    Is there like have any tricks to get these deals to close when they’re they’re all virtual and you’re doing ones in your own market where like you and the seller both know you’re there in the market, but you’re not going out to the properties, how do you get that trust?

    00:16:58:13 – 00:17:15:10
    Chris Russo
    How? Just being honest. Listen, listen and just speak with them and find out what their pain is. Basically, when they call in, you know, if they call in, I’ll I’ll ask them what the address of the property. And a lot of time you go on site, they don’t really have the true like how many bedrooms and bath.

    So I need to know that that’s important and then ask them. You know, it’s very simple. I don’t like I know those people. They have like 12 questions, 13, 14. I’m very simple. So what’s the address of the property? How many bedrooms and baths and the condition of the property. And and basically the big ticket items are like the roof and the central air.

    So how’s the roof? If I know it’s 15, 20 years old and there’s no way they’re going to list listed with a realtor, go retail. So they need to replace the roof right there. You know, they have to go with investor. So I said, Why are you going to go with the realtor? Pay seven for six or 7% commission and then end up selling it to an investor.

    So right there I can do that. And then and then asking about the questions, you know, about the property. And that’s a very simple I don’t even ask him about the mortgage or anything. Just, you know, you know what repairs needed and that’s it. And I don’t think go into the detail very quick and fast. And then basically then I do my comps, I get back to them, I give them an offer, and then if they like it, fine, or they might negotiate a little bit. Sure.

    You know, hey, listen, I’m not going to make as much on this one. That’s fine, ultimately. And that’s it. And then I send him the contract via email, a DocuSign, or if they’re an older person, that they don’t have email, everyone has email now. I’ll send it ups the next day. And so and they sign it, they send it back.

    And then my little trick, what I do is I set him to me favorite. He take pictures of the outside in the inside of the property for me so I can get a head start before I send my inspector out there. And I let the front, the two sides, the back and every room on the inside, the AC unit, inside the electrical panel and the water heater.

    Sure, I could do that. For some reason I don’t. I have this company called Velocity BPO. They’re nationwide, I think for what, $70 or 50? Sometimes they’ll take a video of pictures. That helps a lot because it’s cheap. All cash buyers ask for pictures and sometimes they’ll do a sight unseen. So, you know, we’re buying properties sight unseen, which is great also. So there’s all the little tricks I do.

    00:19:11:20 – 00:19:15:18
    Brady Winder
    I never thought to ask the seller to have the do the or to have the seller are.

    00:19:15:18 – 00:19:17:03
    Chris Russo
    More than happy to do it. More than happy.

    00:19:17:03 – 00:19:31:15
    Brady Winder
    I love your answer because it was I was asking, what are you doing? And you’re telling me, Well, here’s what I’m not doing. I’m not asking the the regimen like 13 questions that everybody goes through. I’m not staring at a sheet and it’s much more of a patience.

    00:19:31:15 – 00:19:33:17
    Chris Russo
    You know, when I get right to it, right to it.

    00:19:33:17 – 00:20:00:27
    Rosangela Russo
    What you think is very important. I think that’s what make Greece different than the other people that anybody call is most people they’re really passionate about high time. They really more sometimes there need somebody to listen. Sometimes you know, we have a lady she even did a testimonial for us. She when I heard how much you’re making this one with Mrs. Cooper.

    00:20:00:28 – 00:20:03:00
    Chris Russo
    COOPER Yeah, that that was.

    00:20:03:03 – 00:20:03:24
    Rosangela Russo
    He didn’t make any.

    00:20:03:26 – 00:20:19:28
    Chris Russo
    Yeah, that was like five months. It was just one headache after another. We finally closed it. And what I do this. Another thing I discovered, what I do is, like at the closing, I’m having the title company which have a good relationship with them. So number one, it’s always good to have a good title company.

    Yeah, we use Independent’s title out of Fort Lauderdale. They deal with investor. You have to be investor friendly. You have to work with investors. So I have them take I have them take a video. They use dirt because they’re not computer literate or whatever. So the title company Girl videotapes are for one minute and she talks about me and then they send it to me. And then that’s a it’s a great video. It works like a charm. It’s perfect.

    00:20:47:10 – 00:20:47:28
    Brady Winder
    I love that.

    00:20:48:03 – 00:20:52:18
    Chris Russo
    Girl’s actually videotaping her talking about me. And then after the closing.

    00:20:52:18 – 00:21:05:03
    Rosangela Russo
    Yeah, this lady, you know, she has so many issues and she has dogs and she has she’s a kind of old lady. Is nobody going to do What if it wasn’t even for money? Because we didn’t make, like, twice?

    00:21:05:06 – 00:21:20:23
    Chris Russo
    Yeah, it was. I know it’s 9000 and up having a dog at the end. The buyer want the dog out. I said, okay, here’s $200 for some guy to take the dog out. Then she needed a ride to the taro company. I paid her 50. Then she called me Chris. Aren’t you going to pay for a return trip back? Oh, whatever it is. Yeah. We’ll do whatever it takes just to get it.

    00:21:26:09 – 00:21:29:06
    Rosangela Russo
    And she was alone, you know, like, you know, she has done.

    00:21:29:06 – 00:21:30:05
    Chris Russo
    She’s very happy now.

    00:21:30:06 – 00:21:34:27
    Rosangela Russo
    Yes, She has grandkids, kids. And they actually used to call her. Yeah. See how she’s doing.

    00:21:34:28 – 00:21:46:20
    Chris Russo
    What we do is every holiday we said, you know, happy Memorial Day epic Labor Day, 4th of July, Christmas, just to be in contact with them. And we always ask, do you have any other properties or if you know of anyone looking to sell.

    00:21:46:23 – 00:22:08:23
    Rosangela Russo
    You know, this or converting this thing. Last year we sent was a Thanksgiving. We had this lead was canceled. The lady laughed because, you know, it was very hard to sell the house because the house was just a shell, like just the walls. And we like was very complicated because she had so many. So with the title, if they had to say the code violation, we couldn’t sell.


    And then she kind of okay, she didn’t like too much, you know, because of what’s happened. And then we said that Thanksgiving for her, she call us back and we closed it for her.

    00:22:18:22 – 00:22:31:17
    Brady Winder
    Oh, that’s awesome. I love what you’re doing. Even after the fact, after you close the deal, you’re still keeping in touch. And yeah, I mean, yeah, there is strategy to it, but it just shows that personal touch and probably helps a lot with word of mouth too. That’s really cool that you guys do.

    00:22:31:18 – 00:22:35:07
    Rosangela Russo
    Yes. We get a bunch of leads like these, the people. Yeah.

    00:22:35:07 – 00:22:40:28
    Chris Russo
    So and it’s it’s free leads. That’s free leads. The best kind of leads.

    00:22:41:01 – 00:23:05:06
    Brady Winder
    So we talked about it, talked about, you know, how you’re doing it virtually. We talked about how you’re building credibility. I love the simplistic, just like friendly attitude in nature you bring to that. We talked about SEO getting big, fat, juicy SEO deals and then what other marketing are y’all doing? You mentioned you’re doing TV, right? And then driving to the website.

    00:23:05:08 – 00:23:26:29
    Chris Russo
    Yes. We even have a QR code on our TV commercial. So we have our phone number, which is like a simple number like 954 209 3000. So I came up with that the to country for the three and the 3000 easy for them to remember and then has our site 123 web address 123.

    So capsicum and add a QR code so there’s yeah they’re going to have to call us between all the three different options.

    00:23:34:13 – 00:23:50:16
    Brady Winder
    Yeah. And so this a just a big fat QR code on the screen and it’s working. I mean I was looking before I went on the podcast is looking at the nails curious site in the back and you’re getting, you know consistent leads from the from the commercials. How long have you been doing that for TV?

    00:23:50:16 – 00:23:51:11
    Rosangela Russo
    More than a year.

    00:23:51:17 – 00:23:53:01
    Chris Russo
    Yet the year and a half.

    00:23:53:03 – 00:23:57:15
    Brady Winder
    A year. And did you guys go DIY or you find a TV agency to do it?

    00:23:57:18 – 00:23:58:29
    Rosangela Russo
    We do everything ourselves.

    00:23:59:02 – 00:24:06:08
    Chris Russo
    Well, yeah, we thought we thought of that and then we said, you know, let’s go to the TV station. And we went direct and it’s been working for us.

    00:24:06:15 – 00:24:13:29
    Rosangela Russo
    We have some assistant behind us to help us. We pay outside to drive us, but we do everything ourselves.

    00:24:14:02 – 00:24:15:22
    Brady Winder
    Yes, that’s awesome. That’s really.

    00:24:15:22 – 00:24:18:29
    Rosangela Russo
    Cool. So as you can see, we do everything right. The SEO, the TV.

    00:24:20:23 – 00:24:23:01
    Chris Russo
    Yeah. We don’t act like a third person, right?

    00:24:23:03 – 00:24:28:20
    Brady Winder
    Well, you’ve been at it for a while. I don’t think we mention this in the beginning. But you’ve been investing for, what, 30 years? You said.

    00:24:28:23 – 00:24:45:15
    Chris Russo
    Correct? Correct. Back in the day I started. I was a mortgage broker. I did the BC loans, and then I bought and sold here and there. And I was a real estate broker, but I always been sold in wholesale, but I strictly I wholesale 100%. I don’t remember. I don’t do anything. I wholesale everything.

    00:24:45:18 – 00:24:47:11
    Brady Winder
    Yeah. Okay. Nice, nice.

    00:24:47:18 – 00:24:58:00
    Rosangela Russo
    One of these time we are living 11 years in Brazil and because we have our kids and we raise our kids over there, I’m a Brazilian. Brazil can speak Portuguese.

    00:24:58:03 – 00:25:18:21
    Chris Russo
    Right? And what happened in 2008, we had the economic crisis. And so what are we going to do? So I have two babies. I want my wife because what are we doing? What to do? Anything else? Well, we’re going to stay here or go to Brazil. So we went to Brazil. And so I was there 11 years and we started like a sunglass business importing sunglasses. And that was okay. But it’s very hard to open a business in another country. So then I went back to virtual wholesaling and I did everything virtually from Brazil.

    00:25:27:24 – 00:25:33:14
    Brady Winder
    MM Okay. And any complications with that or something? You just. Oh yeah.

    00:25:33:15 – 00:25:36:09
    Chris Russo
    Yeah. Well they would say, When are you going to come see the property? I said.
    Well.
    You know, I was using Magic Jack that had like a 954 305 area code.

    00:25:43:15 – 00:25:48:00
    Brady Winder
    I remember the infomercial for the, as you know on TV I can picture in the the fast lane at WalMart. Yeah the magic Jack.

    00:25:51:01 – 00:26:13:07
    Chris Russo
    Yes the Magic Jack I still have it I don’t want to leave it but you know yeah I use magic champagne They would call me and it’s oh, I don’t need to see the property. I could see it online. Just tell me information about your property, the condition, and that’s fine. And sign the contract again. Email, UPS or doc, you sign and then they would sign it, send it back, and then I would last it out to my cash buyers.
    They would go take a look at it and then I would send a contract to them. So everything done by email.

    00:26:18:19 – 00:26:38:27
    Rosangela Russo
    When you are in Brazil, we had a very funny deal where Greece bought this house. The guy used to live in the Bahamas and he has this house for many year, was a probate. He got, I think for his grandparents. We signed up the contract and then we started sending buyers over there. But then the buyer said, Chris there is no house here.
    They have a house? Yeah, the house was on fire two years ago and we couldn’t check because.

    00:26:44:29 – 00:26:48:02
    Chris Russo
    This is a deal in virtual. But majority of time it works perfect.

    00:26:48:08 – 00:27:12:28
    Rosangela Russo
    Because what we do when this time we used to have the ten, the ten villas in the Philippines and usually they are go Google Street and see any house was abandoned or any house like you know, with the grass or something. We skip these people this time. Well, but it was more than five years ago. Seven years ago we used to do these.

    Also. We look in the area, some of the houses was, you know, like nobody’s taking care. But usually now Google is much faster. But before I take one or two years to get Google Pass again and take a new pictures, that was the problem.

    00:27:29:00 – 00:27:41:05
    Brady Winder
    Yeah, I’m still I just built the house and I’m still trying to get Google to show that it’s not just a hill with dirt on it in my house doesn’t show up. It must not be driving around Roseburg, Oregon, very much.

    00:27:41:07 – 00:27:43:21
    Rosangela Russo
    Is going to think that. But now Google is much faster.

    00:27:43:21 – 00:27:44:05
    Brady Winder
    Oh, yeah.

    00:27:44:12 – 00:28:08:09
    Rosangela Russo
    There’s another deal where we got to this house. But, you know, one side is even number. In the other side is old number. And we got to this deal. But I don’t know what’s happened in this address us opposite interesting And then we putting the flier the wrong house Yeah we had this house we said to find a buyer device and then somebody knocking the door said, no, it’s not my house.

    It was the housing, the front. And then you get a fix. The flier. We found your picture because of what?

    00:28:13:01 – 00:28:14:11
    Chris Russo
    The majority of time it works.

    00:28:14:11 – 00:28:15:01
    Speaker 3
    Yes.

    00:28:15:03 – 00:28:38:09
    Brady Winder
    Are you are still driving for dollars virtual or. I don’t know, clicking for dollars virtual driving for dollars now? Not anymore. Yeah. No, it’s all inbound right now. Yes. I want to talk about two to specific things. They were pretty much covered. You know, most of what I wanted to ask you all about, a couple of things on the experimentation side.

    So y’all are in Orlando, Florida, and, you know, you’re working you’re doing deals in southern Florida. You had mentioned some specific scenarios. You’re cooking up some ideas on ways to reach people. More specifically, instead of just, hey, we buy houses or anything you guys are trying out as far as like, you know, you mentioned like floods or immigration.

    00:29:01:17 – 00:29:28:07
    Rosangela Russo
    Yes, it’s true, because what we do is we have some campaigns in what we do, Google. We look in what’s happened in the area with that, because, you know, for example, we have a float floating in Broward and happened a month ago from this time when just happened. As I told you, we have a control board. That’s something we get a need to really get better is when we something happen.

    For example, happened today, we trying to make something for tomorrow because asked when I have control of the the how the say the advertising I can really target these people. Yeah because I know for us that people have a flow probably you’re going to look for I don’t know a fan or something to help to to clean the or even move in this area because you know.

    00:29:52:04 – 00:30:11:24
    Chris RussoSo she has a way of like so there was a flooding a month ago in Broward and in fact we got a lead that I got to keep following up that she had flooding They want to sell the property to inside a let’s hit that area where people had flooding. So now we’re trying to be creative to figure out how we can we hit them to say, hey, we buy houses besides the normal way of direct mail.
    So you kind of like thought of something I it individually.

    00:30:15:00 – 00:30:25:00
    Rosangela Russo
    Yes. Because for example, we’ve now we have these you know, the immigration is getting the people move out. And that’s something we trying to work in to see if they.

    00:30:25:00 – 00:30:25:17
    Chris Russo
    Want to sell their house.

    00:30:25:17 – 00:30:31:14
    Rosangela Russo
    Yes. Because a lot of these people, they are need to move out fast and they need the money to move.

    00:30:31:16 – 00:30:37:05
    Brady Winder
    You mentioned reach to them visually. What did you mean by that? Like a TV commercial, A certain mailer?

    00:30:37:07 – 00:30:53:29
    Rosangela Russo
    We do. We do mailing also. But what we do, we we do a YouTube in that we put Chris in front of these people. With these I’m going to say this message is asking for these kind of messages that what we trying to do right now.

    00:30:54:00 – 00:30:59:03
    Chris Russo
    Will be YouTube videos in the Broward area, in that area where the flooding happened. Okay.

    00:30:59:08 – 00:31:03:05
    Rosangela Russo
    I just have a here. Yeah, just happened to have a heated I haven’t been script.

    00:31:03:05 – 00:31:06:16
    Rosangela Russo
    You got the script. I love that. I love it And so because.
    You know like yeah because usually this people they speak another language but they’re going to move out You know we have in Spanish and Chris can speak a little bit and you know is something that we trying to do because experiment.

    00:31:17:25 – 00:31:36:06
    Brady Winder
    Yes so I love that you guys are doing targeted timely YouTube ads. So you’re you you’re like you’re paying attention to what’s going on in your markets and you’re saying these are the events. How can we deliver like a tailored and timely message, record the video and then get it into YouTube ads and serve that up to those markets.

    So I want to follow up on that later on in the in the future, let me know how that’s working out for you guys and you know how that goes. But I think it’s cool. Your experience experimenting with new marketing. Yeah. So I mean, we’ve covered a whole ton here. I mean, I could I could talk to you guys all day.

    I love talk in marketing. I think it’s been super valuable here and, you know, all the things you guys are doing. Props to you guys for putting in the work and just, you know, putting your head down and doing the SEO and learning what we teach. I think it’s amazing. So good job and we guys are doing Keep it up.

    00:32:10:05 – 00:32:10:25
    Chris Russo
    Thank you. Thank you.

    00:32:10:25 – 00:32:35:07
    Rosangela Russo
    Thank you very much. Was really when we came back to we take from the people was doing for us and our intention was okay how how do we start with if you don’t start getting crazy and you know like putting together and learn how we put this together, I think most of the investors somehow see how you do it.

    I said, first, you know, go the Internet and listen carrot and listen. SEO with Jarrod. And then, you know, like having educate yourself because the more you learn. And the other thing I want is very important when you do doing your doing your website, doing your your history, your company, talking about what exactly you do. Because when the people call crazy is is for sure exactly what the people see the website, that’s exactly what we are.
    And that’s make the people and we.

    00:33:08:25 – 00:33:22:16
    Chris Russo
    Give value to them. And that’s what Jerryll teaches us. You know, he’s getting value by the information in his website. That’s why when people go there, they all this is interesting. So that’s why anything is given value to you, to the sellers and to, you know, that’s.

    00:33:22:18 – 00:33:31:00
    Rosangela Russo
    Explain exactly what you are and what you do. And all these people, when they’re called, they are know, okay, I want to sell for a huge company, right.

    00:33:31:00 – 00:33:43:04
    Chris Russo
    Like an open door. And these big companies, you know, who knows who you’re going to get. You’re getting me. And when they when they get me and say, oh, by the way, I’m the I’m the guy on TV or whatever. Oh, really? Okay. So instant credibility.

    00:33:43:06 – 00:33:55:25
    Brady Winder
    I love that you mention that you’re providing value. It’s Evergreen Marketing 101. And sometimes marketers forget that. It’s like you’re there to provide value, not just explain what you do, like, you know, help out the sellers.

    Where can people where can people find you if they’re wanting to connect with you, hit you up for advice, anything like that.

    00:34:03:21 – 00:34:21:00
    Chris Russo
    The easiest way is our website. It’s very simple 123soldcash.com. And you know, if anybody wants to contact me, I’ll be able to help them if they have a deal. It’s hard to close a probate, whatever it is. Give me a call and maybe I can help them. Yeah, if you want. Maybe I’ll partner up with you.

    Whatever you want to do, You know, I’m willing to help people because I know if you help people, you know, good things come back to you. So I’m a given person. So you want to contact me. The easiest way is one, two, three. So cash scam and contact me. I’ll be able to help you out whatever situation you have.

    And my wife also, she handles more of the SEO and I handle more of the acquisitions.

    00:34:42:18 – 00:34:51:11
    Brady Winder
    Okay, I love that. Well, thanks for sharing that. I appreciate y’all’s hearts and just willing to share all these things you’re doing and and help people out in your market. I love that.

    00:34:51:14 – 00:34:57:00
    Rosangela Russo
    We got to work together. That’s the thing. The more you work together, demand you learn, the more you can share.

    00:34:57:02 – 00:34:58:00
    Chris Russo
    It’s exciting.

    00:34:58:02 – 00:34:59:19
    Rosangela Russo
    Yes, very excited.

    00:34:59:21 – 00:35:19:16
    Chris Russo
    And I’m working on new ideas with TV. Also the digital like, you know, you have direct mail you sent to a list where I think I’m able to maybe instead of sending a direct mail or maybe do a digitally, you know, where like, for example, I can hit a zip code and then my TV commercials will show up in that zip code or a mailing list of probate or code violations.

    And so my, my commercials will show up on their streaming devices. So I’m working on that also. That’s something that I’m working on.

    00:35:26:00 – 00:35:52:19
    Rosangela Russo
    And the other thing is like Greece does a lot these a lot of these, even the new people, they’re get this leads from probate because Greece is really good in probate and they get this lead and all because the seller yeah with me or somebody you know because I’ve yet to understand all these people they’re really stressed their county for this money most the people and you know Chris with okay let’s go straight let’s talk really how how you can resolve that and you know.

    00:35:52:24 – 00:36:06:13
    Chris Russo
    Give it probate. I have a good probate attorney that I work with. You can close fast, so I can call him any time. I can email him. In fact, he works seven days a week and I’ll give me the answer if I don’t have it all the of the cell, I don’t have the answer, but I’ll get back to you.

    00:36:06:16 – 00:36:09:26
    Rosangela Russo
    Yes. And we work. We really like that. Our title companies the best.

    00:36:09:29 – 00:36:27:24
    Chris Russo
    You know the title of independence title they’re great they work with. That’s important. If you’re an invest in business, you need a title company that works with investors. We do assignments, double closing, no basis, whatever it is. So they’re very experienced and they deal with me now they call it, you know, I don’t know. They close 50, 70, I think 100 deals a month.

    And they they seen the situation. So I’m very confident they deal with my sellers and there’s.

    00:36:32:29 – 00:36:33:16
    Rosangela Russo
    Even call.

    00:36:33:20 – 00:36:41:17
    Chris Russo
    There’s an issues they’ll tell me Chris what do you know so you got to work with a great title company, a great probate attorney That’s brave.

    00:36:41:21 – 00:36:49:27
    Rosangela Russo
    SEO company, great insight. Yes. Because I always see the website over there asking how I do these, how I do that. Yeah.

    00:36:50:00 – 00:37:05:17
    Chris Russo
    Right. And one thing, don’t worry, the team don’t reinvented and that the rights is I have like a philosophy copy someone else if they’ve been doing it a couple of years and it’s working for them copy them why are you going to spend money and time? So every time I go on the internet, I see parrot all over the place.

    So you guys must be do something right. Everyone knows yourself if that’s the case, then go with carrot, because I look, I got a scroll down to the bottom and every sponsored or or by carrot. So that’s how we came across you guys also. So that’s what I do is if someone’s work and they’re been doing it for a couple of years, obviously it’s working for them.

    00:37:23:27 – 00:37:26:12
    Chris Russo
    Do the same thing. It’s very simple.

    00:37:26:14 – 00:37:33:19
    Brady Winder
    Yeah, well, I appreciate you saying that for everybody listening, watching. And we didn’t pay them to say that. A promise. You know.

    00:37:33:21 – 00:37:42:17
    Rosangela Russo
    We use carrots much like five years ago. But I’m going to say when we came back, it’s completely different. Before I was like really caring, user.

    00:37:42:17 – 00:37:44:18
    Chris Russo
    Friendly, very easy, scrappy.

    00:37:44:19 – 00:38:02:18
    Rosangela Russo
    Yeah. Even like you guys when I cannot do something. And I saw that you guys call this now, did you see that You fix that. You know, it’s really is like a going to see like a family working together is it’s not easy business this is because all these people with problems coming to us we try to resolve this problem.

    00:38:02:20 – 00:38:11:06
    Chris Russo
    Yeah they’re coming to us. So we got to, like, relax, you know? Yes, they bring their problems on to us, but that’s okay. That’s the nature that make us stronger.

    00:38:11:09 – 00:38:33:04
    Brady Winder
    Yes, I love that. I love it. So my biggest takeaway from this conversation, everybody listening. Take take their advice and go listen to every episode, every YouTube video we have ever put out. Go listen to the entire back catalog of the characters, all 400 some, and just get one. Soak it all in now. Thank you guys again for your time.

    I appreciate you hopping on and everybody watching, listening – If you got value out of this share it with a friend. Give us a positive review on Apple Podcasts if we deserved it. Go ahead. Give us a rating. I would appreciate it very much. Helps us grow the podcast. So until next time, we will see you all later.

  • EP 438: Google Ads/PPC for Real Estate Investors – What You Need to Know w/ Brendan Holmes

    EP 438: Google Ads/PPC for Real Estate Investors – What You Need to Know w/ Brendan Holmes


    Want to generate highly motivated seller leads without breaking the bank? When done right, Google Ads (pay-per-click) can be the perfect supplement to a solid marketing strategy, helping you generate leads fast while building long-term lead gen efforts like SEO.

    Brendan, our in-house Google Ads expert, is here to share:

    • The most common mistakes investors make with PPC
    • ROI, budget & lead expectations
    • How to keep your ads relevant & effective

    and more! Enjoy!

    Let us know what you think of the episode – brady@carrot.com

    Get more content about paid ads at Carrot.com/ads


    Episode Transcript (This is an automated transcript by robot carrots – please mind the typos 😉)

    00:00:00:00 – 00:00:23:06

    Brendan Holmes

    Google ads is how I always related it to two baseball playing baseball through my youth. And our coach always said it’s it’s the little things that can win the game. Yeah. And in Google ads, it’s kind of the same thing. You make these little adjustments and then you can get leads from and those little adjustments for someone just self-managing their campaigns, that that can go a long ways.

    00:00:23:06 – 00:00:33:04

    Brendan Holmes

    It’s not necessarily the home runs and Google ads rarely. It’s something major that you did to a campaign that’s going to drive more leads.

    00:00:37:27 – 00:00:55:13

    Brady Winder

    Hey, friends, you’re listening to the CarrotCast podcast, where we help investors and agents build businesses of freedom and impact by dialing in your marketing, your online marketing. I’m your host, Brady Winder. And today I have with me my friend, my coworker, PC expert, Mr. Brendan. Holmes What’s up? Brendan? How you doing, man?

    00:00:55:13 – 00:00:57:05

    Brendan Holmes

    Hey. Hey. Guess how you doing?

    00:00:57:16 – 00:01:16:15

    Brady Winder

    Brendan has year. Let me. Brendan has been accurate since the beginning, you know, with Trevor when this thing started and he he knows carrot customers. He knows carrot members in and out. He knows real estate marketing in and out. And he’s been running PPC campaigns for. And how many members do you think over the years? Ran campaigns for?

    00:01:17:29 – 00:01:36:29

    Brendan Holmes

    Hundreds. Yeah, hundreds. It’s kind of funny that I mean, before I recall, you mentioned Kylie as on a call with Kylie talking about Cam paid marketing last week and I got out my binder and this is, this is how I learned that that’s that that was Google ads in 2013.

    00:01:37:21 – 00:01:38:11

    Brady Winder

    Yes.

    00:01:38:11 – 00:01:49:19

    Brendan Holmes

    And I read almost every every one of those pages to learn about. And now now probably 90% of the ads probably obsolete. And then the other 10% we we kind of still use.

    00:01:50:08 – 00:02:01:08

    Brady Winder

    Yeah, that’s awesome. So yeah, you’ve been running PPC, Google, PPC, Google Ads for members for years, since before it was called Google Ads when it was just pay per click goods.

    00:02:01:13 – 00:02:04:07

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah. Yeah. Is that was that’s average. Yeah.

    00:02:05:00 – 00:02:26:22

    Brady Winder

    Yeah. Google AdWords it wasn’t even that long ago. So everybody listening and watching, it’s paid ads month at carat. So before you do anything else or I guess after the podcast, go to Care.com slash ads ads and we’ve got a bunch of resources on Facebook ads, on Google ads, YouTube ads, any sort of paid marketing that you want to run to supplement.

    00:02:26:22 – 00:02:48:06

    Brady Winder

    You’re also, you know, if you’ve listened this podcast for any length of time, you know, the SEO, we practice what we preach. It’s the best way to generate leads consistently, predictably, and, and the most motivated seller leads. And so we always teach people, you know, build up your SEO over the long term. If you’re just getting started, it can take 3 to 6 months to start to see some SEO efforts pay off.

    00:02:48:15 – 00:03:13:01

    Brady Winder

    And so pay per click is a paper click. Facebook ads are a great way to, you know, work into your overall marketing strategy. We’ll talk about where that fits in. But this episode is going to be all about like you know, best tips for PPC, getting started, some of the most common mistakes people make, what it looks like to run campaigns yourself versus, you know, hiring out to someone, which will give you options for that as well.

    00:03:14:02 – 00:03:29:20

    Brady Winder

    Budget expectations like what to expect is it varies so much by market and people have no idea, you know, times if they’re getting ripped off or if they’re getting, you know, leads at a good price. And so we’re going to do our best to cover all those things and not, you know, give you too much of a firehose.

    00:03:29:20 – 00:03:49:16

    Brady Winder

    But yeah, we’re going to dive into Google ads and anything else you always want to learn on, on paid marketing character, on slash ads, and also to get our free PPC resource we’ll talk about later in the call that’s going to be on that page as well. So yeah. Brendan Let’s kick it off, man. You’ve been doing PPC campaigns for years.

    00:03:49:16 – 00:04:04:13

    Brady Winder

    Let’s first talk about like, you know, if someone wants to a real estate investor wants to get started in PPC, what’s the best time? Do they need to be in business for a few years? What are the things that they need before they even consider doing this?

    00:04:04:29 – 00:04:40:18

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah, consideration number one is a website, so not necessarily do they have to be in business for years. They need to optimize their websites for for conversion. So the optimization side of that is a little bit different than optimization can be a word or term that’s used for more of the SEO side. But for a conversion ad that needs to be dialed in before you’re thinking about any paid traffic, you know, you want to send it to a site that has some credibility now, making sure that looks good on mobile, that’s optimized for the mobile side.

    00:04:41:03 – 00:05:08:21

    Brendan Holmes

    Probably 75% of your leads could come from mobile. So that is one one piece that I think is people get ahead of themselves is that I want to start paid traffic. But when I either audit accounts through our carrot support or, you know, someone’s reaching out to me, potentially looking at Google ads, newer investor, older investor, it doesn’t that piece doesn’t really matter.

    00:05:08:21 – 00:05:31:12

    Brendan Holmes

    It’s they they get ahead themselves and they don’t think about the website first and how it converts and how that and yeah besides the on page making sure their their lead notifications are integrated. So kind of taking a step back and making sure all that is in place before now starting that a Google ads campaign or Facebook or paying or whatever, any kind of paid source.

    00:05:31:12 – 00:05:31:21

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah.

    00:05:32:03 – 00:05:41:20

    Brady Winder

    And just to just to be clear and reiterate, this is a must have right now. I should have like you’re not going to like you’re just going to be wasting money if your website’s not converting.

    00:05:42:09 – 00:06:10:23

    Brendan Holmes

    Yes, it’s a must have I if I’m going to manage a member or if there’s like we audit through the year, we’ll probably audit 20 accounts through our carrier support. So my just reaching out and looking to for me to review, I’ll see a lot of websites they just purchased, Maybe they’ve been a care member for a month or two months and they, they still have the canned website.

    00:06:10:27 – 00:06:37:24

    Brendan Holmes

    Everything is still the same. They have an ad, A and testimonials. They’re about pages came the can content. They still have the stucco house with you in the background. So there’s no personality to it. There’s no nothing to connect, there’s no testimonials. And you know, over the years that testimonials spot is sometimes a little tricky because there is a new investor that maybe they don’t have testimonials to add to their website yet.

    00:06:38:05 – 00:06:52:06

    Brendan Holmes

    So it’s it could be looking outside their industry. If they are just starting out, they probably are in a different industry, have a different career. Maybe they can bring some of that personality onto their website if they don’t have that true, you know, seller testimonial.

    00:06:52:27 – 00:07:16:11

    Brady Winder

    Hmm. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And if if, if anyone listening, watching this doesn’t have any testimonials, go to care.com slash convert. We just did a whole episode all about how to get testimonials. You know what they should look like, what you should say, or go to YouTube type and carrot testimonials. One question I had, I might be jumping the gun here, but I feel like it’s relevant for what you’re talking about.

    00:07:16:11 – 00:07:33:06

    Brady Winder

    Like making sure your website is set up. You have to have these things in place before you even start running Google ads and putting money into it. But I want to ask how many, depending on the market or the search phrase, about how many other pay per click ads are you competing with? I feel like it’s more and more now.

    00:07:33:06 – 00:07:48:01

    Brady Winder

    I used to be like, Oh, there’s an ad on Google years ago now. It’s like, Holy crap, is it? Five ads are going to scroll past, meaning like, are there five other investors you’re competing with? And if they all have their site dialed in and you don’t And yes, clicking down everyone.

    00:07:49:00 – 00:08:33:00

    Brendan Holmes

    Depends on market. But I think in a smaller market you might only be competing against one or two other investors for the top four ad spots in a metro market, if you’re statewide or national, you’re you’re competing. Yeah, probably all four of those are other investors. And that could be yeah, somebody who is. Yeah, just an investor I can remember or it can be the national investor that I buy or it they, they drive traffic they’ve kind of pulled out a little bit now like offer pad opendoor those types they were running paid traffic to kind of pull back some over.

    00:08:33:00 – 00:08:35:00

    Brady Winder

    They probably drove up costs temporarily.

    00:08:36:03 – 00:08:36:20

    Brayden Reber

    Yeah.

    00:08:37:19 – 00:09:11:17

    Brendan Holmes

    And it could for sure. It definitely could. I’ve seen if you’re in a specific market and it’s a metro type of market, that could impact that for sure. There’s there’s many other reasons costs could fluctuate. But yeah, I saw definitely in some metro markets that had national buyers definitely turning control in the cost in that back cost could have been more like the top number one and number two ad position where that they were really worried about number three and fourth, they wanted to be at the top.

    00:09:11:17 – 00:09:14:04

    Brendan Holmes

    So they were they were willing to pay for those spots.

    00:09:14:23 – 00:09:36:14

    Brady Winder

    Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about expectations. ROI, how much are you going to be paying per lead when you’re going into a market? What’s this look like? Let’s say let’s compare. Roseburg is pretty small. Roseburg is like 30,000 people. How big is Klamath Falls? Smaller than Roseburg.

    00:09:36:14 – 00:09:38:23

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah, it’s. It’s right about the same size.

    00:09:38:29 – 00:09:52:27

    Brady Winder

    Not the same size. I don’t know. Okay, let’s compare, like, Eugene, Oregon. I don’t know, 500,000 people. I don’t even know. Smaller market to say like Dallas. You know what our expectations as people go to.

    00:09:54:09 – 00:10:23:03

    Brendan Holmes

    Number one is like that smaller market the expectation of let me back up real quick is you talked about the expectations are away and what what the most important metric is, is that your your cost per deal metric and that’s then aligning with you have to know where your leads are coming from. If you don’t have conversion tracking or you don’t have good CRM that really had better could harm a member.

    00:10:23:14 – 00:10:50:07

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah, I’ve had members in the past had no idea where their leads were coming from and then I would have to look into their care dashboard and say, okay, this one was a Google ads, this one was organic, this one came direct. And so knowing number one, knowing where your leads are coming from and then to being able to track those that specific lead to, if that turned out to a deal, the the motivated seller terms have pretty much stayed consistent.

    00:10:50:07 – 00:11:14:20

    Brendan Holmes

    It’s the searcher that has changed so that retail searches are are shifting into more of the the motivated seller type of search, somebody that is not necessarily in a hurry, but maybe their house has been listed for two years. And like I use Klamath Falls as an example, we have a very nice golf course with, you know, some million dollar homes out there.

    00:11:15:07 – 00:11:36:27

    Brendan Holmes

    Californians, that they’re they’re not necessarily in a hurry to sell their house. They’re not you know, that they have plenty of means to keep kids in their pay or they’re no hurry, but they’re starting a certain search for that term to sell their house fast. They’re there. They just want to know how to sell their house fast. But that’s not the true motivated seller.

    00:11:36:27 – 00:12:07:24

    Brendan Holmes

    So those are easy to weed out in your leads. It’s more paying attention and focused on those one leads that you know, if it’s a batch of five leads that come in in the past month, pay attention to those and track those through the deal. And yeah, that deal could take three or four months. But keeping track of that specific Yeah lead that is a whatever source page traffic lead and making sure that your ROI over six months a year not in paid whatever paid source you’re using but in Google ads in this case.

    00:12:07:24 – 00:12:46:19

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah. Making sure that your ROI is is you know outpacing how much you’re spending on it. So that’s number one. And number two, kind of using the example of these these types of markets like Eugene compared to Dallas, the expectation, how many leads are possible in those areas? And so I’ve had members in the past who have come into like a Eugene market and they they’ve heard from the grapevine that 20 leads is possible in my area and sometimes I wonder, or I’ve known that competitors have kind of said that like they they think that yeah my competitors getting 20 leads.

    00:12:46:19 – 00:12:56:24

    Brendan Holmes

    Well yeah they might be telling you they’re getting 20 leads. So then you kind of feel like me and maybe you don’t even need to go into it. Or maybe your expectations are a little bit too high.

    00:12:56:24 – 00:13:14:16

    Brady Winder

    And do they know? Because based on what you’re tired about and you know, a lot of members we’ve talked with over the years, not everybody has, I would almost argue, enjoyed a lot of people don’t really know their lead sources and have their KPIs dialed. And to be able to say, I’m getting exactly this money from PPC, this money from Facebook, they just know they’re getting leads in their closing deals.

    00:13:14:25 – 00:13:15:07

    Brady Winder

    You know.

    00:13:15:09 – 00:13:25:18

    Brendan Holmes

    We’re not exactly yeah, in that competitor might be the same case. Like they just we’re getting 20 leads. We don’t know where they’re coming from, but we’re getting 20 leads. And so.

    00:13:25:24 – 00:13:26:10

    Brayden Reber

    In those.

    00:13:26:11 – 00:13:52:27

    Brendan Holmes

    The smaller markets that are probably under like a in Google calls it reach, So it’s not necessarily population. It’s based off of how many devices they can actually, you know, potentially show ads to. So usually that reach is much higher than your population and but a reach under 500,000, I’d say you’re potentially going to either really need great leads because you’re only going to be able to drive this many leads per month.

    00:13:53:00 – 00:14:19:27

    Brendan Holmes

    And hopefully those are quality and you could do something with them. And then I always kind of try to build in. Well, the Google ads gave me a great source for you, but you might need other channels, you might need other paid channels, you might need offline channel, so you might need something else to build, build in. And I think that’s sometimes where they in a market like that, they, they fail because their expectations aren’t set correctly.

    00:14:20:05 – 00:14:43:05

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah. Yeah. Or they, they don’t, they don’t have the marketing budget to be in Google ads and maybe some direct mail and maybe some cold calling or whatever. They’re, they’re putting all of their chips into one thing in that specific lower traffic, you know, area and it doesn’t call them. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

    00:14:43:14 – 00:15:09:23

    Brady Winder

    So we know. Okay so we know we’ve established at this point, you know, if you’re let’s say if you get your website up and running, it’s converting, it’s dialed in and you started working on your SEO, you know, PPC, Google ads is the first thing you want to do to supplement those to get leads. Now, while you work on the long term, one question I have is, you know that we we see all the time people do their marketing.

    00:15:09:23 – 00:15:27:16

    Brady Winder

    You know, Trevor coined the phrase mouth over emotion in your marketing. And so people get emotional and they start you. You’re probably in this day in and day out with, you know, your clients is people see the dollar signs and they see the money going out the door and they’re like, Oh crap, not getting leads. And they get scared and then they pull back.

    00:15:27:16 – 00:15:41:14

    Brady Winder

    And so my question is, how long does somebody need to commit commit? This is a keyword to doing Google ads before you know that they hit pause or reevaluate. Is this three months, six months, a year? You know?

    00:15:42:18 – 00:15:42:29

    Brayden Reber

    Yeah.

    00:15:42:29 – 00:16:18:24

    Brendan Holmes

    I think I if if someone’s asking me to manage their account, I usually say at least three months and that in if not more like if you are getting leads within that three months which you should be anyways, then it’s evaluating those types of leads and it could market and season will also factor into that. So if I start a campaign at the end of November, that’s not the same as starting a campaign at the beginning of May, the market could be totally different.

    00:16:19:14 – 00:16:40:01

    Brendan Holmes

    So that seasonality side of it, yeah, it will factor in. So that’s why I usually say three months. Yeah. And give them the had it, you might need longer if you’re getting leads and we know some of these leads have quality or have been quality but you just haven’t been able to close one. We need to reevaluate after three months for sure.

    00:16:40:10 – 00:16:58:23

    Brendan Holmes

    But then you know cash there is promise here in some markets. So after three months, you just know either that budget isn’t matching, maybe they don’t have enough budget to potentially be in that area and then it could be looking at their locations and what we could potentially do with that. But that, yeah, there’s some other factors in there for sure.

    00:16:58:23 – 00:17:30:27

    Brendan Holmes

    But overall, three months, six months depending kind of what markets they are in Now, timing. Timing is big. It’s I think that’s another expectation that isn’t on a lot of their minds when they’re starting is when am I starting this and what’s my market looking like right now? And it’s hard to I know it’s hard. That’s that’s terribly hard night for investor who is spending thousands of dollars a month on unpaid traffic.

    00:17:30:27 – 00:17:53:08

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah that’s it’s hard right But like you said it’s their emotion side that you try to hire and eliminate as much as possible and have that clear picture. But again there are times that it is just cut and dry after three months if we don’t make these changes to the account yet, honestly, go, go. Try something else. Go, go.

    00:17:53:08 – 00:17:55:02

    Brendan Holmes

    Put your money in a different channel.

    00:17:55:24 – 00:18:09:12

    Brady Winder

    Interesting. Oh, well, I’m glad you brought up seasonality. Does it do you see the same seasonality as or leads overall like as organic leads, awards, you know, slump in the winter and that comes back up the springtime?

    00:18:09:12 – 00:18:35:13

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah, I, I do. And but it’s really it’s kind of it’s not across the board it’s very dependent on market too. I have it I mean typically it’s it starts in November kind of like Thanksgiving time this last year in 2020 to kind of a slow down in the paid traffic. We’d started around more around Halloween and then it had kind continued.

    00:18:35:13 – 00:18:46:20

    Brendan Holmes

    But then there were some markets that in December that were like Midwest, snowy, very cold markets that thrived in December. They they crushed their lead volumes.

    00:18:46:20 – 00:18:48:06

    Brady Winder

    They’re not phase two. I went there.

    00:18:48:15 – 00:18:50:08

    Brayden Reber

    Yeah yes yeah where.

    00:18:50:17 – 00:19:10:07

    Brendan Holmes

    The I it and I would anticipate a slowdown is that’s pretty much what always happens and those every year I’ve you know since I’ve been managing campaigns that I’ll get questions what happened what happened to our Google ads campaign. What what do we do wrong. What’s going on? And if we can go back and see the Google ads campaigns.

    00:19:10:15 – 00:19:38:13

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah. Besides the moves that we always make that like the daily, the weekly, the monthly, if if there were no major shifts in the Google ads campaign, what what other kind of factors or there could be a market, it could be competitors, maybe it could be if you made a website changes. I found that too that members didn’t communicate that they had changed the website and I, I, I checked the websites, but I’m not in there.

    00:19:38:27 – 00:20:00:02

    Brendan Holmes

    They had, you know, every other week looking at their websites and especially if they’ve made changes on their within their previous section that now we have the lead gen banner which I think is amazing, especially in Mobile. Oh yeah. But before that we’d have members putting videos in their their hero section and without checking it on their phone.

    00:20:00:15 – 00:20:18:06

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah, the video would be pushing their form down and potentially they’re losing out on leads on mobile. So those are those kind of outside the Google ads realm. We can tell Google ads is we didn’t make any changes to really mess up the account. Right. What else could be happening?

    00:20:18:24 – 00:20:39:02

    Brady Winder

    Yeah, it matters a whole lot. We were talking about that a second about that with Brian Driscoll and Chad Keller. And on one of the previous podcasts about conversion and and just the importance of that form placement like having it, we call it above the fold, but near the top of your website so that you know especially if someone’s clicking on a Google ad, they’re usually not going to make it even halfway down the page.

    00:20:39:02 – 00:20:52:10

    Brady Winder

    They’re going to see whatever is at the top, fill out the form, read the information and bounce, and maybe even go to the next ad like they’re finding, you know, they’re looking for exactly what they need. They’re not going to spend the time to usually to browse the whole page. Am I often saying that there’s that.

    00:20:52:17 – 00:21:03:27

    Brendan Holmes

    That’s absolutely right. Yep. Yep. Maybe. Maybe not so much on desktop. Desktop is still important. I still love that. The image and banner on desktop. On mobile. Yeah. So very important.

    00:21:04:16 – 00:21:24:25

    Brady Winder

    Yeah. And it’s funny because we you know it’s it’s crazy because everybody like you mean normal people would look well we visit everything or most sites on mobile everybody’s on their phones but then you build websites on the computer people are you build websites on a desktop and we forget like the main thing. Oh my gosh, Mobile. It has to look good.

    00:21:24:25 – 00:21:45:22

    Brady Winder

    Yeah. Which that’s one of the things it makes easy is making it look good and perform on mobile. So you don’t have to worry about that as much. But let’s talk about I want to talk about the difference between managing ads. If I were to start a PPC campaign, Google ads campaign, and manage it myself versus outsourcing to someone like yourself, what what’s the biggest difference?

    00:21:45:22 – 00:22:07:10

    Brady Winder

    And I guess what I’m asking is like, what is what is the thing you see people mess up or do wrong? Or like, Oh, I should just pass it off to someone else soon or should outsource sooner. And I’m not like, we don’t care. It doesn’t people listening, we’re not greatly benefiting from like we’re not making our bread and butter from getting a few more PPC clients or to have people work with our vendors.

    00:22:07:10 – 00:22:23:11

    Brady Winder

    That’s not our agenda. Our agenda is to help you save your time and money so you can close more deals and have more freedom. I mean that like in full sincerity. And so I have no genuine access. But like when people come to you and they’re like, Oh my gosh, Brendan I did the PPC campaign waste of money, like, Help me, What are they?

    00:22:23:12 – 00:22:25:12

    Brady Winder

    What are they doing wrong now?

    00:22:25:23 – 00:22:50:08

    Brendan Holmes

    And it’s kind of to add to that real quick is that, you know, Google ads isn’t it’s kind of excite, but it’s not what I love. I don’t really love Google ads. I love when people are successful with it. And I trust in in educating the members who who are either managing themselves or using myself or anyone else when they’re successful, that that piece is still, you know, the way I do this.

    00:22:50:08 – 00:23:17:15

    Brendan Holmes

    And yeah, so I love auditing the accounts that come through our carrier support. And most of those accounts are they they’ve had Google. So number one mistake is having Google create your your motivated seller campaign. So I’ll speak to motivated seller campaign specifically. So you when you start up a Google ads campaign, Google pretty much forces you now to create what they call a smart campaign.

    00:23:17:25 – 00:23:45:12

    Brendan Holmes

    And the smart campaign is it’s industry based. So it’s real estate industry based, not real estate investor, not looking for motivated sellers. Now, some of the keywords that are within there are motivated seller keywords, but the other batch of them are just real estate keywords. Yeah. So that’s number one. Number two, you lose control of some of the management within those smart campaigns.

    00:23:46:15 – 00:24:13:01

    Brendan Holmes

    So it’s it’s trusting that when you signed up with Google and they might have had a call with one of the Google ad strategists before and they’re walking them through the stages, they’re building trust with Google then or Goofy and the sales Google salesman, he’s building trust with the member. So they kind of have this misconception in their mind that this is how I should be creating a campaign.

    00:24:13:18 – 00:24:19:02

    Brendan Holmes

    And so that’s number one. Not don’t don’t put that trust in Google to build your campaign for you.

    00:24:19:15 – 00:24:20:13

    Brady Winder

    It’s interesting.

    00:24:20:21 – 00:24:21:07

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah.

    00:24:21:07 – 00:24:41:24

    Brady Winder

    And I think but I want to interrupt you just real quick. The thing that pops out to me about that is that, you know, whether it’s Google or not, trusting somebody that’s not industry specific, that doesn’t have industry experience is seems like the key. Google doesn’t know real estate investors, wholesalers in and out.

    00:24:42:21 – 00:25:27:08

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there are you know I’ve come across over the years some good PPC management companies that aren’t real estate investor specific and yeah, there’s that learning curve though and yeah we’ve anyone that has managed our industry specific ads, we all went through that learning curve and it took that learning curve for Trevor and I was probably 2014 when we had a member in Orlando willing to pay for his ads and we tossed thousands of keywords at Google and this is pretty much what we still use today for our or Quickstart or in the Evergreen webinar we give our Google Ads campaign.

    00:25:27:22 – 00:25:57:24

    Brendan Holmes

    That’s those that’s still pretty much that campaign that we learned from. Yeah, there’s been iterations from it, but that’s kind of where it came from. So no. Yeah. Number one, don’t trust so much in Google. Number two probably would be that again, going back to that expectation of what’s possible and not not learning what or how to self-manage that campaign.

    00:25:57:24 – 00:26:19:14

    Brendan Holmes

    So if you’re managing your campaign, there’s Google ads, there’s you know, night through cares support. If you add that type of means to reach out to somebody who has been managing ads and give you some tips or look over, you know, audit campaigns. So not educating yourself on what the keyword structures are, what that really means, what do broad match keywords mean?

    00:26:19:21 – 00:26:50:21

    Brendan Holmes

    What does that mean? But what kind of traffic am I going to be sending or phrase are exact or targeting options? Yeah, there’s limitations on our industry, on the housing industry that Google kind of sets, kind of limits. Our are what we what we can target. We can we can no longer target zip codes. And a lot of members used to like to target by zip code that was about two years ago that they they removed that.

    00:26:50:21 – 00:27:06:05

    Brendan Holmes

    So that’s probably number two is this educating yourself and if you’re using a specific campaign and maybe number three would be starting to with too too much too much going on two, too big of a campaign.

    00:27:06:18 – 00:27:09:07

    Brady Winder

    So meaning like how many keywords.

    00:27:09:19 – 00:27:33:29

    Brendan Holmes

    Gourmet keywords. Yes, that’s probably a bigger factor to many keywords, maybe using the wrong targeting. You know, there’s a couple different ways you could target your locations. Maybe have a too wide and you’re getting leads from other states or other countries or clicks from those. But the keywords probably is the number one that you’re looking at, the match types and then how many.

    00:27:33:29 – 00:28:03:29

    Brendan Holmes

    So I usually say if you’re doing a manager on a campaign and you haven’t received one like ours. Viviana has been given a campaign start with like 2025 keywords and just get your can get your bearings on what, what that means. And then there’s reports to go look at and in the time to kind of spend, once you have a campaign running and then suspending a little time, maybe getting it going, you’re spending a little time every day and then maybe that goes into every other day.

    00:28:03:29 – 00:28:26:26

    Brendan Holmes

    But that’s it’s definitely being involved in the campaign. Yet. Bailey In the first few weeks, maybe a month and then when you get you see, okay, this is how I need to manage my my campaign. This is these are the key words that are working and aren’t working. And that’s probably number one, don’t use Google to build that number to educate yourself.

    00:28:26:26 – 00:28:31:01

    Brendan Holmes

    And then number three, don’t don’t start so broad. Don’t start with hundreds of keywords.

    00:28:32:05 – 00:28:32:18

    Brady Winder

    Yeah.

    00:28:33:05 – 00:28:54:28

    Brendan Holmes

    One that we’d had in the past that our members used to get a spreadsheet from Sean Terry. So this is good dating back to probably six years ago. And this campaign that you’d get was an amazing campaign for someone who knew how to manage Google ads, but the members who didn’t. So there were thousands of keywords in this in this campaign.

    00:28:54:28 – 00:29:11:20

    Brendan Holmes

    Gosh, yeah. And if you didn’t know what you’re doing, I remember auditing you. It’s through to support a campaign that I think they had wasted about $8,000 and just not knowing what they were doing and using this campaign structure. Yeah.

    00:29:11:28 – 00:29:13:00

    Brady Winder

    So it’s so much it’s a matter.

    00:29:13:00 – 00:29:13:09

    Brendan Holmes

    Of just.

    00:29:13:28 – 00:29:15:29

    Brayden Reber

    Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

    00:29:16:00 – 00:29:18:22

    Brendan Holmes

    If then that then it gets crazy. Yeah.

    00:29:18:22 – 00:29:38:12

    Brady Winder

    I remember trying Facebook ads myself for the first time and I think this was after working at Care for a couple of years as a go. I’ve got my head wrapped around it and you know, back then, little did I know it was like having your head wrapped around even the the copy and the hooks and the messaging and even the creative and the imagery is, in a lot of cases, not enough.

    00:29:38:12 – 00:29:52:20

    Brady Winder

    If you are going to, you know, target poorly and budget poorly and go after too many keywords or too many areas and it’s like it was not a it was not a fruitful experience. So I’ll just say that. So what you’re saying cannot be any more important.

    00:29:53:04 – 00:29:58:03

    Brendan Holmes

    And those are the ones I usually come in and just say, Google ads isn’t working for me.

    00:29:58:03 – 00:30:02:18

    Brady Winder

    Yeah. And it’s like, well, Google, it’s not. The Google ads is working and you need someone to manage it. Well.

    00:30:03:04 – 00:30:05:13

    Brayden Reber

    Yeah, and that’s anyone.

    00:30:05:24 – 00:30:32:02

    Brendan Holmes

    Managing a campaign that that’s what we do. And we know the ins and outs and some will have different strategies like I have a different strategy when I’m managing a campaign, then I would if, if someone used our our Quickstart campaign and our Quickstart campaign, just because I have many members that I can link into and use all their data if.

    00:30:32:12 – 00:30:57:16

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah. So I use a different strategy, not necessarily. That’s I guess to me it’s yes, it is better, but you can still have success just having your own campaign and managing it correctly. So that could be advantage of someone managing campaign or accounts that they just might have some different data sources. And but the drawback to is then you’re paying a management fee.

    00:30:57:23 – 00:31:19:29

    Brendan Holmes

    But what I think some look at is if if someone is managing a campaign and they can be saving you money by kind of doing it the right way or, or speeding up the process to do it the right way, then might make the member who lost $8,000 if he would have had somebody managing their campaign for however much, he would have saved money.

    00:31:20:08 – 00:31:46:21

    Brendan Holmes

    And so, yeah, there is a cost for the management too, but yeah, it’s I still love seeing members manage their own campaigns if they if they’re willing to to take the time to learn. And and it’s simply like we have a call tomorrow with a Google ads Quickstart just go over like I’m going to train him how to use his his you know, the dashboard.

    00:31:47:20 – 00:32:20:12

    Brendan Holmes

    I always tell them, just get that app on your phone. And for these guys managing their their campaigns, it’s just tick tick 20 minutes through your day and just look on your phone and you could make these simple changes and that’s all the quickstart or a member, you know, that’s all they really need to do. You know, it’s they’re not managing beyond, you know, into the kind of more advanced strategies they’re managing and a strategy that is still effective and can be simple.

    00:32:20:17 – 00:32:44:17

    Brendan Holmes

    And that’s kind of Google ads is how I always related to to to baseball, you know, playing baseball through my youth. And and our coach always said it’s it’s the little things that can win the game. Yeah. And in Google ads, it’s kind of the same thing. You you make these little adjustments and then you can get leads from and those little adjustments for someone just self-managing their campaigns, that that can go a long ways.

    00:32:44:17 – 00:32:55:01

    Brendan Holmes

    It’s not necessarily the home runs and Google ads that you know you rarely it’s something major that you did to a campaign that’s going to drive more leads.

    00:32:55:02 – 00:32:58:07

    Brady Winder

    Yeah, it’s not one keyword. It’s not one line of copy or something.

    00:32:58:09 – 00:33:22:19

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah, yeah, yeah. It could be adding in like the trend of the last year and a half or so or members instead of targeting, you’re targeting a specific area, maybe a metro area or just a Eugene area or something. They go statewide where they go multistate. Yeah. So that that could have a big impact. Obviously, you’re getting more leads and your password leads a lot different.

    00:33:22:19 – 00:33:43:27

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah. You’re not looking at 20 leads in a metro area now you’re looking at 100 leads statewide. So that that’s a game changer. But they also have to have the the infrastructure, the business infrastructure to manage those leads and understand the different markets. And so that’s presents its own challenges.

    00:33:43:27 – 00:34:03:01

    Brady Winder

    But okay, I’ve got a couple other things I want to cover here. One technical one real quick. What what KPIs are you looking at for a PPC campaign? I feel like this is important for member too, even if they’re not running them themselves so that they can ask the person they’re outsourcing to say, Hey, what are you looking at?

    00:34:03:01 – 00:34:06:02

    Brady Winder

    What does success look like so that they know they’re working with somebody legit?

    00:34:07:04 – 00:34:30:19

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah, within the Google ads dashboard and what we can see cost per lead, number one. And that’s the most important KPI because we can’t see cost per deal in the Google ads dashboard, but that’s the number one cost for lead. And then then it trickles down. And these are still very important metrics, but depending on what kind of bid strategies they’re using the ad, it doesn’t it doesn’t hold as much weight.

    00:34:31:04 – 00:35:06:28

    Brendan Holmes

    But let’s say if a member’s just starting out, I still recommend starting out with manual cost per click instead of using one of the. And that is also to prove out some keywords, get them familiar with what the keyword cost should be, and then maybe changing over to advanced bit bidding, but looking at our cost per click pin and then your click through rates and making sure your click through rate will determine then how you know, potentially ad position, potentially ad copy, those two are going to probably factor into your click through rates, your bids are going to factor in, you collect your rate.

    00:35:06:29 – 00:35:29:05

    Brendan Holmes

    So those after your cost per lead, look at your cost per click, look at your click through rate. And then yeah, just by those, you can have a pretty good idea. You could be looking at impression share and that’s getting pretty deep and you’re getting pretty advanced when you’re looking at your impression share and you’re potentially you’re you’re in pressure lost it.

    00:35:29:07 – 00:35:48:00

    Brendan Holmes

    You can lose impressions here about your budget but those those get more advanced So just keeping it high level, if I’m just managing my own campaign, I just started out I want to know customer lead, I don’t know, cost per click, I know my click through rate and then I am adjusting my bids from the the manual know manual bidding process.

    00:35:48:21 – 00:36:03:09

    Brady Winder

    Okay, that’s helpful. Simple enough. What are you what are you doing to stay relevant and keep the ads fresh or is there a need, I guess like how often do you end up, you know, hey, let’s go change up some of the ad copy? Yeah. What are you doing?

    00:36:03:18 – 00:36:26:17

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah, I’ll always a need because Google is what they’ve shifted into what they call responsive ads. So response of ads you have, you could put in 12 headlines if you want and Google is going to now change those headlines. Yeah, maybe not everywhere but they they’re going to frequently change those headlines. So then they look different. And then you have four descriptions so you can.

    00:36:26:17 – 00:36:35:14

    Brady Winder

    Similar to Facebook where it’s where it’s you know, you put in 12 and it’s going to decide the best one and stick with it or is it constantly continue testing.

    00:36:35:24 – 00:37:06:09

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah yeah. It will stick with winners. Yeah. And depending on sorry that’s the drawback to too is that like on our current Google ads we had a yeah, we’re using responsive ads. And what Google doesn’t show you is potentially what combinations were the winners. There isn’t a dashboard yet to show you what was working. So for our ads, for our current ads, we have now just to do ads and we’re always just testing against those two.

    00:37:06:23 – 00:37:26:01

    Brendan Holmes

    And we only had three headlines because you have to have three headlines. So our ad Mad one will have three headlines and two descriptions. AD two has three headlines and two descriptions and you can pin headlines. So we want that headline number one. We always want to show that first headline. Number two, we always want to show that second.

    00:37:26:02 – 00:37:47:00

    Brendan Holmes

    And then so you you have to kind of get a little bit innovative to look at the data a little bit better at or efficiently to make those changes. So response of ads that maybe you don’t have to change them as often as what you had to in the past because of the big limitations with the extended ad copy.

    00:37:47:28 – 00:38:06:16

    Brendan Holmes

    But still important to change your ads and continue to look at ads and the click through rate within ads. Conversions are always yeah, leads are always the most important metric, but you’re also looking at that click through rate and then potentially looking at how much at that cost that the ad cost is too, but yet always, always looking at your ads.

    00:38:06:28 – 00:38:20:27

    Brady Winder

    Making sure would it be like if your click rate drops and you know, like your ads are doing well for a few months and then your click rate sort of taper off, maybe it’s looking at what are other investors doing? Are we all seeing the same thing? And maybe that’s why it dropped off.

    00:38:21:08 – 00:38:51:16

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah, that could be absolutely other factors. Budget is a factor, competition factor. I mean, there’s other factors besides just what your ad copy says, but yes. Yeah, it could be. I took a screenshot years ago of another investor page traffic management company and they had well, maybe they didn’t, but there’s three ads. So it was when Google shifted to four ads at the top.

    00:38:51:25 – 00:39:14:21

    Brendan Holmes

    So number one and two and number four were all the same ad copy and I knew this this company. So I could have I could see who was running ads. But yeah, yeah. You don’t really want that, you know. But the other side of this is this response of ads is making sure your ads look and flow correctly.

    00:39:14:21 – 00:39:43:03

    Brendan Holmes

    If you have sell my house fast in a headline and then somewhere else down that line of headlines you have some house fast in Chicago. Well, Google could show those two headlines within the same ad so it starts kind of you can it kind of looks funky if you now off or. Yeah. So trying to make those headlines sound different look different than just having kind of the canned, you know, Copy that.

    00:39:43:03 – 00:39:45:24

    Brendan Holmes

    You just were accustomed to it before. Yeah.

    00:39:46:04 – 00:40:05:26

    Brady Winder

    Right. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it’s good. I’m glad you mentioned that. You know, sometimes it’s not the ad copy because, like, as marketers, we think like, oh, it’s not performing. Let’s, you know, it’s got to be the copy. It’s going to be the creative, you know, it could be budget, could be competition, could be market factors, could be other things, you know, besides just what’s in the ad itself.

    00:40:06:28 – 00:40:27:23

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah. AD and trying to make ads unique. I, I still struggle with members giving me unique ad copy, something that makes you stand out. Yeah. We used to be able to use how fast you could make it an offer that was kind of like the kind of battle of ads, how fast people can make an offer. I know.

    00:40:28:26 – 00:40:37:04

    Brendan Holmes

    Express homebuyers who say we can make an offer in 7 minutes. America members reaching out and saying, Can I put that in my ad cut? Yeah, Yeah, you can.

    00:40:37:04 – 00:40:39:23

    Brayden Reber

    And if that if you can really.

    00:40:39:23 – 00:40:40:13

    Brendan Holmes

    Legitimately.

    00:40:40:13 – 00:40:41:03

    Brady Winder

    Make a 60.

    00:40:41:12 – 00:40:41:24

    Brayden Reber

    Minutes.

    00:40:41:24 – 00:41:04:02

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah yeah that’s a good was like this play on how fast we can make an offer I remember some ad said 30 minutes we can make 30 minutes 7 minutes to an hour. 24 hours, 48 hours. Yeah, it was. But if that’s unique to you. Yeah. Okay, test it. Test it in your ad cup and see if it goes but something interesting rather than the canned content.

    00:41:04:26 – 00:41:12:16

    Brady Winder

    Yeah. 7 minutes. I’m almost skeptical on, like 7 minutes. I think that’s the 31 below it. I’m like, these guys sound little midget. Maybe they’re thinking.

    00:41:13:05 – 00:41:20:03

    Brendan Holmes

    They just might. Yeah, that 30 minute one actually worked. It did Well I click through rates went Yeah spiked. Yeah.

    00:41:21:07 – 00:41:44:21

    Brady Winder

    Interesting. Yeah. So that’s a good point You know for the ad copy, think about what you know, what makes your business unique and set apart maybe your hybrid, maybe an investor. And that’s something you can, you know market maybe you can close fast. What’s your unique selling proposition, as we call it? That’s a good point. Any other protests, anything to keep ads interesting?

    00:41:44:21 – 00:41:50:06

    Brady Winder

    Anything you want to mention as far as targeting do’s and don’ts that we feel like people should know what they’re doing.

    00:41:50:06 – 00:41:55:17

    Brendan Holmes

    PPC landing page testing has come up in conversation that fast that I’m.

    00:41:55:17 – 00:42:00:22

    Brady Winder

    Still glad you said that because I was going to ask and I forgot. So yes, let’s dive into it. Yeah.

    00:42:01:00 – 00:42:32:00

    Brendan Holmes

    So that’s more like that advanced move they can go calls and experiments, but you can a test and Google ads putting together ad hoc, abusing your home homepage and then you create another landing page at simplified and you can test that you have a 5050 split and see what performs better for myself I yeah I have yet I know there’s there’s chatter or conversations that you know landing pages or squeeze pages as we used to call them.

    00:42:32:29 – 00:43:03:18

    Brendan Holmes

    Where are more effective than driving traffic to a home page that has a nav bar and some copy to it. And I think the reasoning behind that might be that it’s distracting if you have too much information on your site. But I there are times that maybe I’ve found that to be true. But overall, like if I look at it, yeah, home pages, as long as they have credibility, they’re set for per conversion rate optimization.

    00:43:03:18 – 00:43:11:28

    Brendan Holmes

    I, I still, the home page has always been one of my favorites as long as it has the checks. Those boxes looks good on mobile.

    00:43:12:11 – 00:43:15:20

    Brady Winder

    The quality in ones are still converting. Yes.

    00:43:16:11 – 00:43:33:23

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I know that’s been a hot topic but that’s like it advanced piece is that creating a squeeze page and routing traffic against your home page and see which one now wins out. So that’s one. Anything to add, Did you want to add anything to that?

    00:43:33:23 – 00:43:53:26

    Brady Winder

    I don’t think so. You know, it’s it’s hard to make a generalization and say, you know, this one works better because there’s so many there are so many factors in general. You do want to give more focus when you already paid traffic because they’re there for a specific reason. But at the same time, you know, if it’s if it’s the right content on the page, then it’s not necessarily a distraction.

    00:43:54:06 – 00:44:15:09

    Brady Winder

    I think that that thought, that methodology, that concept comes from, you know, if you send them to a really cluttered page where you have like sidebar ads that are advertising a lot of the things, or if you have like a blog feed where it’s like, Hey, check out these seven articles. Yeah, that’s super distracting. And I think when people think of the website, they think of all all this stuff going on and check out these products.

    00:44:15:22 – 00:44:41:14

    Brady Winder

    But if we’re talking about a homepage to attract motivated seller leads, that’s different than your average website page. They’re not necessarily distractions. They’re things that are going to help a convert. And so that’s just my my thought as to why the Carrot home page is still converting over all these years. Well, for running page traffic to my only other thought is where, you know, you and I, we’re working on content right now.

    00:44:41:21 – 00:45:08:00

    Brady Winder

    We’re some tasks behind the scenes. So keep it really general because I’m not sure what the content will come out like, but we are working on some tests to look at really slimmed down landing pages versus home pages. And yeah, we’ll see what comes of that. And, you know, follow along guys, go to character on such ads and, you know, check out our blog to see maybe we’ll put up some examples of like what a a really well converting page looks like for sending PPC ads to versus one that’s not dialed in.

    00:45:08:00 – 00:45:29:29

    Brady Winder

    Whether that’s landing page versus home page or whether that’s, you know, good home page versus bad homepage, because like we’re talking all in theory now, you can have a really crappy landing page, squeeze page. It’s not going to convert. Same thing with a home page. And so, you know, there’s not a need to overcomplicate it and go go out and get another piece of software and start building landing pages.

    00:45:29:29 – 00:45:35:28

    Brady Winder

    You could do that with a carrot and have a converter. You know, we’re doing it right now. So that’s what I thought on that.

    00:45:36:28 – 00:46:12:27

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah, Yeah, exactly. I I’ve, we’ve tested hundreds of other landing pages over the years and still I, I default to home page as long as it looks good and there have been times that I’ve I’ve created another by another home page basically because they kind of had that messed with their copy or their format more specific and made it just kind of I, I know Trevor Trevor likes to say like ugly websites, but these are really like bad, ugly websites.

    00:46:12:27 – 00:46:15:12

    Brayden Reber

    They’re just they were.

    00:46:15:26 – 00:46:27:28

    Brendan Holmes

    They were good. So you had created a different like home page for them. But yeah, and then that’s just it’s not impacting SEO. They’re there no index, no followed and we just use them for Google ads but.

    00:46:28:27 – 00:46:29:05

    Brayden Reber

    Yeah.

    00:46:30:10 – 00:46:34:09

    Brendan Holmes

    Other Yeah I guess it not necessarily advanced it but.

    00:46:34:18 – 00:46:35:10

    Brayden Reber

    Google.

    00:46:35:25 – 00:47:08:14

    Brendan Holmes

    If you’re managing your own campaign, Google is going to give you recommendations daily though, and it’s also educating yourself on what those recommendations mean. You click yes or to accept them or reply them is some of them can really harm campaigns without understanding the danger. And on occasions one of them specifically pops up lately that I am and becoming a believer in more than I ever have been and are broad match keywords.

    00:47:08:14 – 00:47:42:00

    Brendan Holmes

    And I was always totally against broad match keywords. I had seen too many, you know, bad campaigns with broad match and because of Google’s API algorithm that the algorithm, the pieces that they’re learning from this has gotten him in more advanced or more efficient, more optimized for for motivated seller. And the the combination of these broad match plus good negative keywords can really get lower cost per click and then expand the keyword bubble.

    00:47:42:10 – 00:48:07:08

    Brendan Holmes

    You might be missing some keywords. They just know people are searching for. So using broad match. But Google lately though, you know, in the past probably six months in campaigns, they’ll say shift to all broad match. So you click a button and it will make all of your keywords, your same keyword base, but all keywords are turned into to broad match.

    00:48:07:27 – 00:48:36:13

    Brendan Holmes

    And that’s where you really have to be careful of, especially if you’re in a metro mercury or statewide campaign. Your campaign could go crazy. You’re just getting clicks that really don’t make sense and right. But yeah, testing your way into maybe some of those broad match keywords like take a pick five of them, add the man, see what kind of search terms are coming off of them if they’re good or bad, and then adjusting, not just making all 50 or 100 keywords, they have broad match just automatically.

    00:48:37:01 – 00:48:53:18

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah. So it’s those recommendations, understanding what they mean and how they could impact your, your, your account. And that’s, that’s not necessarily advanced. It’s just like kind of anyone managing their campaigns needs to understand that.

    00:48:54:11 – 00:49:01:12

    Brady Winder

    Yeah it goes back to what you were talking about earlier like don’t don’t always put the trust in Google just because they’re you know just because that’s the platform, you know.

    00:49:01:13 – 00:49:01:22

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah.

    00:49:01:28 – 00:49:03:14

    Brady Winder

    They don’t know what’s best.

    00:49:03:14 – 00:49:35:26

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah they are getting better though I think some of these recommendations are getting that they make more of a positive impact than a negative impact on their accounts. So yeah, but still understanding what they mean and especially like I said, I’ve seen it happen in metro markets where some of you just make all 100 keywords, broad match and all of a sudden they’re getting crazy search terms and in their budgets, you know, wiped out and they just they doubt they’re doing good might their means were good they they just didn’t.

    00:49:36:18 – 00:50:13:24

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah. Make the right choice Yeah yeah yeah. And then there I mean there’s there’s advanced bid strategies you can use, there’s advanced targeting, you know location targeting you could use there’s a lot of advanced to it. But yeah, for someone who is just starting out kind of just don’t, don’t get caught up in what are saying or promising and that is one really common issue that I hear is that I I’ve heard this competitor I just went to this mastermind and this guy’s getting 20 leads from Google ads.

    00:50:13:24 – 00:50:35:22

    Brendan Holmes

    How do I get that? And well, there’s there’s a lot that goes into that. It could be. How long has this campaign been on? Did he say I mean, like his campaign could have been on for a year or two and it’s really dialed in and he might have the best website that it converts where if you’re just starting out, yeah, maybe they strive for that.

    00:50:35:22 – 00:50:57:27

    Brendan Holmes

    But you had Google ads is still it’s still a it’s still a process and it’s still a you have to optimize it. You have to continuously optimize it to get to two points that and yeah, so I have that kind of, that idea of people that once I turn on my campaign, I should be getting leads, right?

    00:50:58:23 – 00:51:01:17

    Brayden Reber

    Yeah, you might. I mean there’s, there’s campaigns.

    00:51:01:17 – 00:51:20:21

    Brendan Holmes

    I definitely could get leads in the first few days and I had a member one down who who got a lead within 10 minutes that turned out to be a deal. But for the next three months, he did not get a deal. He had nothing. And he decided to pause. And that was years ago. But it was that that was one that stuck out.

    00:51:20:21 – 00:51:44:24

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah, you can turn it on. You can get leads right away or you might not. I mean, the likelihood that you’re your first months kind of that ramp up stage month to year, diving more into the data. And then month three, you have this great data set that you can work from. And if if you’re seeing good search terms and you know, caches, this these people look like they should be converting, then it’s okay, go look at your website.

    00:51:45:09 – 00:52:28:13

    Brendan Holmes

    Go see what other kind of changes you can make. Make a my change maker, make a form change, you know, test something within maybe it’s going from, you know, three form fields to two two. We’re adding in the lead gen banner. Yeah. So it’s once you have good data knowing then if that if that data is really looking promising in something that should be turning into deals, you know, then it’s that next stage of testing and landing you’re not by any pieces is, isn’t like squeeze pages, but other pages other or other other headlines within that the the websites I do have more testimonials to use I mean right.

    00:52:28:29 – 00:52:32:03

    Brady Winder

    Trying to get those leads to convert at a higher rate. Yeah.

    00:52:32:09 – 00:52:32:21

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah.

    00:52:33:10 – 00:52:54:06

    Brady Winder

    Well I like that man. I appreciate you sharing that. That’s a good wrap to it. In summary, So educate yourselves whether you’re doing PPC yourself or you’re outsourcing, educate yourself on it so you know what you’re looking at. And yeah, I think that’s one of the one of the best things we covered during the podcast. Man, it’s been fun having you on the podcast.

    00:52:54:06 – 00:53:14:19

    Brady Winder

    One thing I forgot to mention, the beginning is kind of funny. You were running this the podcast before. You know, I’ve, you know, I’ve only been here four or five years and you were running there and I had to, you know, how are we doing shown us how do we hurry this whole production thing? And yeah, you’ve been running this show since before I was even around.

    00:53:14:19 – 00:53:15:28

    Brendan Holmes

    Yeah. It’s been a.

    00:53:16:01 – 00:53:17:01

    Brady Winder

    And a team and.

    00:53:17:03 – 00:53:33:08

    Brendan Holmes

    How amazing it’s been one, especially since you taken over. I just, I, I did some show notes. Yeah, I put on the blog, but now you’ve taken over and really made it into a nice production. A great production? Yeah.

    00:53:33:08 – 00:53:36:20

    Brady Winder

    I’m grateful to be interviewed now. Yeah. Yeah, it’s legit.

    00:53:37:02 – 00:53:38:12

    Brayden Reber

    It’s legit. Yeah.

    00:53:38:24 – 00:53:59:19

    Brady Winder

    Or any of our longtime listeners, you’ll appreciate that. You know, Brendan, the OG producer, is coming on the show, so, yeah, it’s been fun, man. Anyone, if you have any questions on pay per click, if it went over your head, if you have any questions at all, email me, birdie at Care.com, We’ll get you over to Brendan or the right person to get your questions answered.

    00:53:59:19 – 00:54:13:01

    Brady Winder

    Go to character com slash ads, Get our resources. We do our best to give you all of the education you would possibly ever need even to the point of overwhelm so that you just are equipped and we’re here to help. So we want you to know that please reach out if you need help, because it can get overwhelming fast.

    00:54:14:04 – 00:54:48:13

    Brady Winder

    That’s it. If you like this episode, share with a friend. Please give us a review on Apple Podcasts. I don’t ask for them often, but good Apple Podcasts give us a five star review if we earned it and tell a friend about the podcast, help us share the work. But until then, we will see you next week.

  • EP 434: Facebook Ads for Real Estate w/ SilverStreet Marketing

    EP 434: Facebook Ads for Real Estate w/ SilverStreet Marketing


    Do Facebook ads give good ROI for quality, motivated seller leads?

    Yes — when managed well. Kiley & JT with SilverStreet Marketing have spent millions on Facebook ads over the last decade, gaining a massive amount of insight into what makes an ad flip or flop.

    We talk about what to look for when outsourcing, lead costs & ROI, how to get quality targeting & lower ad costs despite recent changes to Meta’s platform, how they’re using ChatGPT to make ad creation more effortless, and a cool new tool they have in Beta that serves the investor who wants to go the DIY route.

    Let us know what you think of the episode – brady@carrot.com

    Get more content about paid ads at Carrot.com/ads

    Work with Kiley & JT: Marketplace.carrot.com or go.silverstreetmarketing.com/beta.


    Episode Transcript (This is an automated transcript by robot carrots – please mind the typos 😉)

    00:00:00:00 – 00:01:11:25

    Kiley

    I don’t want to pay an agency. I think I can figure this out. And like J.T. said, you can totally can. But I think some people underestimate the consistency of effort that it’s going to take because, you know, creating an ad on Facebook is not super hard. You have to learn a little bit inside of ads. Manager But but creating a really good ad and then getting those things to consistently perform over time is really where the magic comes.

    00:01:11:29 – 00:02:40:28

    Kiley

    Thank you. Super stoked to be here. We love paid ads.

    00:02:45:06 – 00:02:46:04

    Kiley

    JT Go ahead, man.

    00:02:47:00 – 00:03:18:20

    JT

    Yeah. So when you’re looking at the the ROI that’s coming from it, typically what we’re seeing on Facebook is we’re seeing a cost per acquisition in between about a 3000 to 3500 on average is overall cost per acquisition. Depending on areas, you can kind of lower that down to about around a $2,000 mark. It just kind of depends on a couple moving parts that could be things like are you paying for management, How aggressive are you in your area?

    00:03:19:06 – 00:03:45:17

    JT

    Are you employing different types of tactics, not just lead generation like branding and and trying to become more of a powerhouse in your area? So there’s a couple of things that will affect that. And can kind of change that cost per acquisition price. But most investors that are coming on for management are sitting around that, you know, you could probably say about 2000 to $3000 cost per acquisition marker per deal.

    00:03:46:03 – 00:04:09:18

    Kiley

    Yeah. And to to, to break that down maybe just a little bit more basically to get that cost of acquisition, you’re looking at your cost per lead, right? And then the number of leads it takes to close a deal. So on Facebook, we see probably right around an average of 20 leads per deal. Would is that wouldn’t you agree?

    00:04:09:19 – 00:04:11:20

    JT

    JT Yeah, yeah.

    00:04:12:29 – 00:04:41:05

    Kiley

    Yeah. About 2020 leads per deal. So depending on what your cost per lead is and then depending on your on your close ratio. So one of the things we find that’s, that’s most important when doing Facebook ads is having a really strong follow up system. So if you think about lead generation in terms of each channel you’re using, you’re going to be finding potentially different people.

    00:04:41:05 – 00:05:03:09

    Kiley

    A lot of the same people. We can talk about that a little bit more, but you’re you’ll find people at different levels of readiness in their decision making process. And with a PPC ad, for example, you have someone that is actively searching for I need to sell my house fast so that person is in this mode of problem solving.

    00:05:03:14 – 00:05:43:00

    Kiley

    On Facebook, we one of the one of the powers of Facebook is that you can find people who are potentially not quite that far in the in their decision making process. Yet the benefit of that is you’re getting in touch with them before they start shopping investors. The challenge with that is you have to be ready and able to nurture that lead so that that follow up system really matters in the frequency of the follow up and the quality of the follow up because your lead time from lead capture to lead close maybe a little bit longer.

    00:05:43:00 – 00:06:21:02

    Kiley

    Now that varies. We have people who start running ads in within 2 to 3 weeks close the deal. So it’s kind of, you know, there’s that full spectrum, but you. Yeah. So I’m yes, I mean, yes, on the Facebook stuff, but I’m talking more specifically about your non Facebook follow up. So text messages, emails, phone calls, you know, you’ve got to be you’ve got to be contacting those leads right away.

    00:06:21:02 – 00:07:05:10

    Kiley

    You need to be following up with them frequently and often and and putting them in an in a nurture sequence to get them towards the the close. Well, I mean, Facebook ads have been effective for many, many years. There’s like a kajillion people on Facebook still even though even though it’s now kind of an older social media which is wild to think about the demographic of users on Facebook skews older.

    00:07:05:10 – 00:07:35:11

    Kiley

    So that fits well with the the typical, like high equity homeowner or someone that would would own a home and be potentially interested in selling. But specifically I think the opportunity right now. Brady you touched on this a little bit earlier. There have been a lot of changes on Facebook. So the iOS 14 change was huge. That dramatically impacted audience sizes and the ability to track conversions and things like that.

    00:07:36:02 – 00:08:01:19

    Kiley

    But then not too long ago there was another update with a a settlement with the HUD where they they changed targeting options a lot. I mean, and we did it we did a video on this as well with you that talking about how talking about how you can’t use lookalike audiences or special ad audiences in real estate anymore.

    00:08:01:20 – 00:08:41:21

    Kiley

    Now that was like that was one of the I’ve been I’ve been marketing on Facebook since 2007 and that was one of the biggest changes I’ve ever seen Facebook make. And the result of that is a lot of people have said, I don’t know how to do this anymore or I’m going to give up on Facebook and I’m talking like individual investors, but also some of the other like agencies that we we know of have really stepped back because they didn’t want to try to figure out how to how to work through it.

    00:08:41:21 – 00:09:18:03

    Kiley

    So the benefit there is the eyeballs are still on Facebook. So if there’s less people competing for those eyeballs, you have an opportunity as well.

    00:09:18:03 – 00:09:32:01

    JT

    And that’s that’s a lot of what we’ve seen. It’s just that that feedback there is that people are using Facebook is exactly that. You want to stay away from those demographics because that’s going to limit that’s going to help you get your targeting more and more direct. So you’re 100% right on.

    00:09:32:24 – 00:09:59:03

    Kiley

    Yeah. And the other thing the other thing to remember is that Facebook now called Meta, you know, they changed their name to Meta. They they own Instagram as well. And then they have their their own ad network, which is similar to like the Google ad network. So when you’re running ads through the Facebook or the meta ads manager, you’re you have a ability to run ads across many other places, too.

    00:09:59:03 – 00:10:29:00

    Kiley

    So your ads will show up on Instagram. Your ads can show up in mobile apps as people are using, you know, if someone’s scrolling and playing a game or whatever, like your app, your ad could show up in that as well. All through that Facebook ads manager Yeah, And also I just think some people kind of think about, you know, I’m going to run Facebook ads.

    00:10:29:00 – 00:11:00:09

    Kiley

    They’re thinking of just the one like in feed ad, which you know, that is a big part of it. But just I think it’s helpful to remember that you’re actually putting your ad in a lot of different places.

    00:11:00:09 – 00:11:00:18

    Brady

    Yeah.

    00:11:02:16 – 00:11:24:24

    Kiley

    I’m totally fine with that. We I don’t ever call it meta because I feel like most people don’t know or like you. Brady Like we haven’t, like, collectively accepted that that’s what it is. So if we you know, if we if we hop on the phone with someone and we’re like we’re experts at meta ads, they’re not going to know what we’re talking about.

    00:11:24:24 – 00:11:38:00

    Kiley

    So, yeah, we’ll call up we’ll call up Mark Zuckerberg. We’ll see what we can do.

    00:11:38:00 – 00:12:13:11

    Brady

    Yeah, you bet.

    00:12:13:11 – 00:12:34:00

    JT

    Yeah. You know, when someone’s, you know, running ads on their own or debating about running ads on their own, there’s a couple of things that we kind of, you know, you have to think about and consider. One is, you know, time. I mean, this is a conversation I have a lot and most investors I talk with, you know, when we have this, we’re talking about ads and learning how to do it.

    00:12:34:00 – 00:13:11:22

    JT

    I really say, you know, anyone can learn, but do you have the time or do you really have the desire to do it? Because if where your desires lag, you are like out in the field, you know, talking to the leads, like getting the contract signed and closing the deals, then that’s a job in itself. And to add on the marketing side of it, there’s there’s a lot that goes into that, you know, in terms of, you know, being on there weekly, watching all the data, thinking from a different type of mindset of a data data mind set of, okay, how is this affecting the algorithm versus how is this affecting my business?

    00:13:11:22 – 00:13:30:01

    JT

    And you kind of have to walk through those different steps at different times while you’re making these changes. So the first thing that we always kind of talk about, if someone is interested in doing it themselves, you are totally capable. You can you’re smart enough, you can figure it out with the right direction, but do you really want to long term?

    00:13:30:01 – 00:13:51:22

    JT

    Is that really going to be what’s best for your business? And everyone’s at different places, so for some people it will be for others. An agency might be a better spot to lead. And when it comes to agencies, there’s a couple of things we have to we have to think about. One is going to be your strategy. What type of strategy they’re using?

    00:13:51:22 – 00:14:14:15

    JT

    Are they focusing purely on your top of funnel? And, you know, that’s pretty typical for most like average Facebook agencies, especially in the last couple of years, a lot of people have geared towards spending 90% of your budget on a broad, no targeting because you’re in real estate and it’s really hard to target people. And then 10% of your budget on your retargeting.

    00:14:14:15 – 00:14:37:17

    JT

    And that’s kind of what they do. I would say that’s not a really thought out process because there are still ways that we could target. There’s still ways that we can filter out our top of funnel, middle of an Obama funnel. It just takes a lot more time and effort and management. So when you have the right strategy in place, that’s going to obviously affect your your leads.

    00:14:37:26 – 00:14:56:00

    JT

    And then second, when it comes to an agency, the next thing you want to consider is how well do they integrate with your team? Because one of the biggest things I hear people talk about when they had a bad experience is, you know, I kept getting bad leads. I wasn’t able to like, communicate with anyone to tell them that, and it just wasn’t working in my business.

    00:14:56:00 – 00:15:22:00

    JT

    And I’m sure if you went over to the agency and talked to them, they’re like, Well, all the leads we were driving were like $10 per lead. It was like a crazy. They were our best account, you know? And so you really need a good team work when you’re working with an agency, a really good team connection and one of the one of the best ways to do it, I tell everybody, even if you manage your own ads or you’re managing with an agency, one of the ways that you can fix this is use UTM parameters on all your ads.

    00:15:22:14 – 00:15:40:04

    JT

    And then that way you can see exactly what AD drove, what lead, and then you get the feedback from in our case, from our client. And and we say, okay, tell us the leads that were the best leads. Okay, There are these people, these names. All right, awesome. So these these names have these UTM parameters attached to them.

    00:15:40:04 – 00:16:03:11

    JT

    So whether you know that the iOS 14 came in place and we tracked it or we didn’t track it, we could manually track that and say, okay, this is where it came from. So now we know that these are our best ads in terms of motivation, and this is how we’re going to scale your results, even if it means we’re spending a little bit more per lead or we’re spending a little bit less, it’s more trackable and it’s going to give more tangible results.

    00:16:03:11 – 00:16:12:00

    JT

    So those are a couple of things. You know, we have a discussion with clients. We’re talking about agencies doing it yourself or, you know, browsing the market.

    00:16:12:20 – 00:16:40:25

    Kiley

    Yeah, that that feedback loop is critical. Whether you are working with an agency or you’re doing it yourself. Obviously the feedback loop with yourself, not really a loop, but but tracking that information and knowing that is important. And like JT said, that’s something a lot of people miss, which is paying attention to patterns in your leads and which which campaigns, which ads are generating the best leads.

    00:16:41:24 – 00:17:10:13

    Kiley

    And if you’re working with an agency, you want to be feeding that information to them. I have two analogies I think of when it comes to doing it yourself versus working with an agency. And one of those is like hiring a personal chef. So if you hire a personal chef to make your meals for you, the reason you’re doing that is because you don’t want to you don’t want to take the time to shop and cook and think about what you’re going to eat.

    00:17:11:21 – 00:17:29:10

    Kiley

    Maybe you don’t think that you can cook very good. Doesn’t taste very good, right? So you hire a professional chef. You’re you’re still going to be very engaged with that chef. If you if you hire a personal chef, like if he makes a meal that you don’t like, then you’re going to tell him or her about that. Right?

    00:17:29:10 – 00:17:51:15

    Kiley

    Or if they make when you love, you going to say, well, I do that one more often, or you may even have requests, you know, like I, I’m craving this or whatever. So that, that even though you’ve outsourced that work, you’re still involved in, in guiding that, you know. And then let me let me give you one other analogy as well.

    00:17:52:00 – 00:18:16:11

    Kiley

    The like fitness analogy. So because I think we see this a lot with people in who think who want to do DIY. So you go to a personal trainer and you say, Hey, I want to get ripped off. And the personal trainer starts with starts listing out all the things you’re going to need to do to get ripped.

    00:18:16:26 – 00:18:38:20

    Kiley

    And it’s like, you know, you’ve got to like follow a you got to count your macros, you’ve got to do these certain kind of workouts, you’ve got to work out this many days a week, etc., etc.. And you’re going, I, I just kind of wanted to get ripped like, yeah, can I just get ripped? And I think that happens with the DIY side.

    00:18:39:15 – 00:19:02:15

    Kiley

    The idea of like, Hey, I don’t want to pay an agency, I think I can figure this out. And like JT said, you can, you totally can. But I think some people underestimate the effort that it’s going to take, the consistency of effort that it’s going to take because, you know, creating an ad on Facebook is not super hard.

    00:19:02:17 – 00:20:03:08

    Kiley

    You have to learn a little bit inside of ads. Manager But but creating a really good ad and then getting those things to consistently perform over time is is really where the magic comes in.

    00:20:03:08 – 00:20:31:11

    JT

    And so what is diving into your seller interests? Obviously, you know using seller interests can help be kind of a bridge between your broad just going to anybody and then going to a more interest based audience that could be interested in things that you’re offering based off of what they’re looking at and browsing online. So that’s still capable of being used and that as well, the custom targeting of using custom lists.

    00:20:32:00 – 00:20:56:10

    JT

    So we can still use lists that we’ve uploaded for like retargeting purposes. And so using those to our advantage. And basically I mean we talked about this in last video, but the combination of what type of media we’re using to help filter out what type of motivation that we’re getting on these and then also the targeting in place.

    00:20:56:10 – 00:21:25:15

    JT

    And then lastly, you know what we just kind of touched on using manual like feedback, like UTM parameters to be able to give us really good feedback on what’s actually working. Those are kind of been our go to options to be able to continue to get consistent results for investors, even though the landscape of the ads are changing, you know, and and that’s just kind of the nature of any platform is over time.

    00:21:25:24 – 00:21:50:05

    JT

    It’s always the landscape is going to change a little bit. But as long as our type of seller that we want is located there, we’re going to be able to find a way to get in front of them. We just have to change up the strategy a little bit to do it. So that’s that’s some of the things have consisted of of changing that strategy.

    00:21:50:05 – 00:22:24:20

    JT

    Yes. So there are like equity interests, so people who are doing like reverse mortgages, people are interested in their their own equity types. There’s like Facebook interest. So like for sale by owner interests, they’re going in through like Zillow and doing for sale by owner stuff. There’s a couple of different things when it comes to like, like debt consolidation or real repairs on your house as well as like overall lending purposes.

    00:22:25:15 – 00:22:53:12

    Brady

    So you’re pickleball anymore.

    00:22:53:12 – 00:23:20:18

    JT

    Yeah. And a lot of that is due to, you know, with all this changing that’s been going on in the real estate industry, specifically, there’s a lot more of like how we have to think that these people are showing motivation inside those interest categories and then combining that with the type of media and the type of copy that we’re using to really be like a hard trigger to filter people who are not going to be interested and filter those, that will be because Facebook is still an algorithm.

    00:23:20:18 – 00:23:39:20

    JT

    I think a lot of people forget that. That’s really what we’re working with, is not, you know, we’re not in an auction like PPC where we can say these are the type of words we bought. This is how much we’re willing to pay for it. We’re with an algorithm. And that algorithm primarily focuses on one, how many impressions they’re able to get out of the audience that we’re running.

    00:23:40:15 – 00:24:00:27

    JT

    So impressions being the ability to have your ad loaded to a cue, that’s when Facebook charges you. So it charges you per impression. It’s not per view, it’s not per click. And then second is it’s going to prioritize engagement. So we understand that we have a really good buy hard filter ad that when somebody is going to be interested, they’ll click it.

    00:24:00:27 – 00:24:17:08

    JT

    They’re not at all going to be interested. They’d make sure that they go past it. Facebook recognizes that, and they’re going to start to understand who’s actually clicking. But the other thing they’re going to see is the more engagement we’re getting, they’re going to start to raise us up in the ranks on the feeds. So it’s costing us less money overall.

    00:24:17:17 – 00:24:42:03

    JT

    That’s why a lot of people who only run ads for like 60 days, they don’t make any changes to it. They just publish an ad, they launch it, they don’t see any results versus somebody who runs it for, you know, 3 to 6 months and they’re in there making biweekly changes are going to see consistent deal flow. So that’s one of the reasons, just because the way that the platform has been made, you know, what we’re working with is very different than other ad platforms that you may be buying.

    00:24:42:04 – 00:24:45:05

    JT

    Media.

    00:24:45:05 – 00:25:40:15

    Kiley

    So one other quick thought there. So over the years, Facebook has made updates to what advertisers and marketers, what information we’re able to use to in our targeting. You know, there have been like you could use to target around lots of different things like income and and yeah well there’s lots of examples in there but as yeah some of that some of that you can still do but the the as Facebook has grown they’ve made updates to some of that and you know some of that is a win for consumer privacy and and those types of things because unfortunately there are bad actors out there that use information for discriminatory practices or whatever.

    00:25:41:15 – 00:26:17:21

    Kiley

    But so part of what’s been so important, I, I started marketing specifically for real estate investors in 2016 and I had previous to that spent a lot of time marketing in other industries, spending several million dollars a year in Facebook ads. And what what I found is any time Facebook makes a change, we we just have to be willing and ready to go in and make a couple of adjustments and continue to test and optimize, kind of like JT was saying.

    00:26:17:21 – 00:26:40:11

    Kiley

    So if one of our targeting, one of our interest based targeting got cut, then we’d go in and like JT said, we’d, we’d have to get creative and say, okay, what else could we think about that might connect to that person? But in a, in a different way. And yeah, and so that’s what we, that’s what we can continue to do.

    00:26:40:20 – 00:27:27:01

    Kiley

    And I think that’s what is difficult for people who aren’t investing the time or energy to know that or if they if they just have a really simplistic strategy, if something in that changes, it’s difficult for them to adapt right? Yeah, it’s.

    00:27:33:14 – 00:27:52:17

    JT

    Yeah, yeah. We definitely talk a little bit about that. So when it comes to copy, typically, you know, what we’re doing here is we’re doing a lot of testing over and over again just because we really want to see what is getting the most valuable clicks. So there’s a couple different things that we do when we look at creating copy.

    00:27:52:17 – 00:28:22:29

    JT

    So one is we’re looking at short form copy and we’re looking at long form copy. So we’re seeing what are going to be the differences between having just a short, you know, 1 to 2 sentence copy piece versus having something that’s, you know, 5 to 6 sentences. And then we’re also testing different things like adding in bit.ly links inside that copy, adding in emojis inside that copy, and then kind of switching out some of our our main triggers, which would be, you know, like get a cash offer or sell without paying for any fees or repairs.

    00:28:24:02 – 00:28:52:04

    JT

    Right now, typically what we’re seeing and this kind of change is per market. So, you know, obviously you have to test and figure out what’s working for your audience. But a lot of what we’re seeing is kind of that that. Sure. And we’ve gone back to that shorter copy has been working really well with direct triggers, right, like hooks right at the beginning of sell your house without pay for a yell, fees, repairs on your home and things like that have been working really well.

    00:28:52:04 – 00:29:07:29

    JT

    I think part of that is because of market shifts. So you do have to understand, you know, because that market people are starting to now realize the traditional real estate market right there, they’re usually about six months behind. They think they could get one thing for their home and that was six months ago, is what they could have sold it for.

    00:29:07:29 – 00:29:28:00

    JT

    So they’re kind of in that point where they’re starting to realize it’s hard to sell a house. And so those things are starting to stand out a lot more and then add in some personal customized like situations or different things. So we always suggest to two people who are running their own ads or to our clients to give us stories that we can also include in those types of copy.

    00:29:28:08 – 00:29:52:11

    JT

    That could be it’s like, you know, so and so, yeah, we help so-and-so move out of their house when they were, you know, facing foreclosure or, you know, whatever that situation might be to kind of give some more context to the person. So we’re testing all these different things inside these accounts to try to figure out what works for every single client, because really, that’s that’s what we’ve seen.

    00:29:52:11 – 00:30:12:07

    JT

    The best way to do it is we look at those metrics and then we make decisions based off of that because it it’s going to change per person per area because everything’s based off of engagement. And in an area they could get different engagement than another using the same message. So and that would then hurt those ads in the area that’s not getting the engagement.

    00:30:12:07 – 00:30:13:12

    JT

    So a lot of.

    00:30:51:20 – 00:31:21:16

    Kiley

    Yeah, engagement matters. It’s part of the quality score that Facebook uses to determine an ads relevance. So Facebook keeps a pretty tight lid on exactly what that recipe looks like of how important eat. At one point I had I got access to this internal spreadsheet from Facebook that had like a weighting system of, you know, abuse complaints, comments, etc., But it’s old enough now.

    00:31:21:16 – 00:31:54:00

    Kiley

    I don’t I think it’s probably no longer relevant, but so the quick answer is engagement matters because if Facebook feels like the ad is engaging, they’re going to show it to more people. I you know, I think it’s important to take a step back and think about what is Facebook’s overall goal, their overall goal is to keep us users on the platform as long as possible so that they can show more ads to us, so that they can they can charge advertisers for showing those ads.

    00:31:54:00 – 00:32:16:19

    Kiley

    Right. So if Facebook thinks an ad is going to help with that, then they’re going to they’re going to continue to show that that that is in combination with Facebook’s algorithm looking at who’s most likely to take the action that you want. So we strongly, strongly recommend that anyone running Facebook ads is paying attention to the engagement on their ad.

    00:32:17:05 – 00:32:38:19

    Kiley

    And that’s important for a couple of reasons. One is if if someone comments and then you engage with them, it continues to feed that also just from a from a like social psychology perspective, if the ad has engagement on it and they can see you engaging, that’s going to encourage more engagement and it’s going to create some social proof as well.

    00:32:39:15 – 00:33:00:00

    Kiley

    And then the last you know, the other one would be there’s a good chance you’ll get someone that comments something on there that is like you could see it skews negative. So it’s something like, Oh, yeah, yeah, right, I’ll sell you my house and you’ll give me pennies on the dollar. Or I bet this is a scam or something like that.

    00:33:00:13 – 00:33:21:23

    Kiley

    And the opportunity there is twofold. One is to feed that engagement out that that that side of the algorithm on engagement by responding to that person. But the second part of that is you get an opportunity to answer that person’s question and explain and other people are going to see that. So we will get comments like that is an opportunity.

    00:33:21:23 – 00:33:48:28

    Kiley

    It’s an opportunity for you to jump in there and say, hey, you know, totally understand what you’re saying. What we offer is isn’t best for everyone, but for some people it’s a great. So whatever you’re going to say, you know, whatever your your pitch is there. And and the only time I’d ever hide a comment is if it was just like, totally spam or like really belligerent or something, you know, other than that, take that opportunity to engage, have that conversation.

    00:33:49:04 – 00:34:00:27

    Kiley

    Facebook has become much different than it was originally, but it’s still a social platform, right? It’s it’s intended to connect people again because they want us to stay on there as long as possible.

    00:34:01:16 – 00:35:28:25

    Brady

    At Yeah.

    00:35:28:25 – 00:35:47:18

    JT

    Yeah. There’s a you know, I think Gary came out with this. I want to say like six months ago he released this where he was like his entire ad strategy was changing to you. First start organic and see what gets the best. Like proof that it would work and then take that style of ad and run it as a paid out.

    00:35:48:24 – 00:36:13:15

    JT

    And you know, something that we can sell our clients with is is similar in the sense that we’re trying to get very transparent and honest content. So things like face to face videos, talking about situations in which they’re helping sellers, you don’t have to have the seller with you. You can I think that’s great what you do. But instead of just getting like a review from the seller that says, Yeah, it was great, you know, they bought my house for cash, that’s good.

    00:36:13:15 – 00:36:43:08

    JT

    But you can go even better and you could talk about situation and give give those details. They’re a little bit more intimate, transparent and honest. And oftentimes that’s going to attract an even more motivated person because they connect with those things. Yeah. When you talk about someone struggling through foreclosure and that you able to stop it, you know, two weeks before they lost their house had all this damage done to their credit, all of these, you know, negatives and you’re like, but they put cash in their pocket.

    00:36:43:08 – 00:37:09:19

    JT

    They’re able we were able to to arrange it so that they could leave on their timeline. And, you know, now they’re off in a better place all of a sudden, like that’s going to appeal way more to somebody. So I you know, that’s a big thing where video is really starting to come back is content. You had a switched couple of years, like probably about a year or two back switch to images again because they changed that some of the rules around how much headlines you can have on images.

    00:37:09:19 – 00:37:22:29

    JT

    So everyone went back to advertising images, but now we’re back to videos. And those type of stories are just mixing really well with videos. So that would definitely be something that we would suggest to all of our clients and anyone who’s doing their.

    00:37:22:29 – 00:38:11:02

    Brady

    Own Facebook ads.

    00:38:11:02 – 00:38:30:03

    JT

    Yeah. And it changing your the way that you run your ads to you. I mean, one thing that we do is we use dynamic, creative, and that helps a lot in how we’re actually running and operating these ads and figure out what’s working best because we’re not having to do so much split test, which can test great because it gives you a definitive answer.

    00:38:30:03 – 00:38:54:04

    JT

    But oftentimes you could spend more money in trying to find the answer than it is worth it, because then you have to test again and again and again. Whereas when you’re running dynamic creative tests that automatically that basically the your budget is shifting towards what’s actually getting the engagement. And so we can keep adding to that test over and over and over again, proving the results and getting the best options that can be in that ad.

    00:38:54:14 – 00:39:13:00

    JT

    So that’s another thing I think a lot of people kind of forget about is is using dynamic, creative.

    00:39:13:00 – 00:39:41:27

    Kiley

    I guess this whole everything I’ve said on this podcast was written by chatty people. I I’m just typing it in as you guys see it. And I’m like, okay, you know, it’s interesting than like a chat. GPT it I mean, air is powerful and it’s going to, it’s going to change things for sure. I, I don’t know to what level or how good it will get.

    00:39:41:27 – 00:40:11:18

    Kiley

    I mean, as of right now, I think the best way that someone listening to this podcast could leverage chat would be to grab some ad copy that you that you’ve seen that that you thought was good and go in and you have to work with chat, you have to prompt it a little bit but basically have it write some variations of that and, and then I would and I’ve used this to do that, right?

    00:40:11:20 – 00:40:30:23

    Kiley

    I for me, one of the best values of Chatty Betty right now is like my first draft of a lot of things because then I can take it and I can kind of iterate it and make sure that my personality is still in there or the personality of the brand and the customer that we’re working with. But if you’re just like, Man, I need I need some help coming up.

    00:40:30:23 – 00:40:54:26

    Kiley

    Like, I don’t even know where to start. Just you could go to chat GPT and say, write an ad for a real estate investor on Facebook that wants to buy a house that is in foreclosure. Whatever. Yeah. And just let chat, chat, start, start going to work for you. I think that’s probably the best way that someone could use it right now.

    00:40:54:26 – 00:42:10:07

    Kiley

    I think in the future we’ll see tools that are built that allow us to and some of this already exists a little bit, but where we can feed it content that we’ve written in the past so that it will get better at writing things in in our style, which, you know, that that then makes the output even more powerful.

    00:42:10:07 – 00:42:11:10

    JT

    Actually, a couple of them.

    00:42:11:26 – 00:42:13:09

    Kiley

    I’m not sure which one.

    00:42:14:12 – 00:42:15:04

    Brady

    I.

    00:42:15:04 – 00:42:15:29

    Kiley

    I, I don’t think I.

    00:42:15:29 – 00:42:16:27

    JT

    Have that one.

    00:42:17:13 – 00:43:03:21

    Brady

    Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    00:43:03:21 – 00:43:51:09

    Kiley

    It’s interesting and it’s important to remember that this, these things are language models. So what they’re designed to do is to mirror language that they’ve been taught to provide a response or an answer. So what that, what they’re not necessarily designed to do is to follow a logical decision making process to reach the conclusions that they reach. So if you’re going to use it to discover information or to write information, there’s there’s definitely a chance that some of that information is not accurate because its goal and it’s going to it’s going to take what what you’ve it with into consideration as well.

    00:43:51:09 – 00:44:33:00

    Kiley

    So this is a whole nother like a whole nother interesting conversation. But there’s there are people now called prompt Engineers and their their role is to learn how to ask the AI the right questions in the right way to get the right kind of response. Pretty fascinating. I yeah, it is right now it’s yeah, for sure. I think I just want to say one of the things so why is that?

    00:44:33:00 – 00:45:04:26

    Kiley

    I don’t know what the future looks like. I think I will get I think we will see all over in the marketing world. So there will be aspects of, of mining jobs that that get taken over by AI. But I think what will always remain is the need for the human empathy of understanding who you’re talking to, what their problem is, and how you can connect with them and and present your solution to them.

    00:45:04:26 – 00:45:33:23

    Kiley

    And and that is, I mean, at the core, the the specifics of marketing change dramatically. You know, I mean, I can imagine the way we feel about AI right now is probably how people felt when TV was invented or the radio is going like, whoa, this changes everything. And but the principles of good marketing remain, which is you got to understand who you’re talking to.

    00:45:33:23 – 00:46:30:28

    Kiley

    You got to you got to understand their need and you got to speak to it. And if you provide value to them, then they’ll be interested in engaging with you or talking to you.

    00:46:30:28 – 00:47:14:19

    Brady

    Yeah, yeah. Hmm. Yeah.

    00:47:16:05 – 00:48:02:03

    Kiley

    Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s yeah. I mean, that the reality is we crave connection as human beings where, you know, call us pack animals. We crave that connection. And, and so I certainly think as we get more and more digitized, I mean, there are studies now that show that even though we have tools that connect us better than ever before, like on average, we’re lonelier and feel more isolated than, you know, generations before us.

    00:48:02:03 – 00:48:20:27

    Kiley

    So I think I think there’s there’s got there’s some truth in there for sure that people crave that connection. And and and there’s there’s always that opportunity to be a real person that’s interested in really connecting with people and really solving problems.

    00:48:20:27 – 00:48:55:21

    Brady

    Yeah. Hmm.

    00:48:55:21 – 00:49:26:06

    Kiley

    Yeah. I mean, I got a couple and then I’m sure JT might too, but this might sound really, really basic, but it’s so critical and we see people miss it, which is just make sure that you are investing the time to set things up correctly. So if you don’t put your pixel on the website and set up your conversion event correctly, then your waste, your waste a lot of money on Facebook, you might still get some leads, but it won’t be feeding that.

    00:49:26:06 – 00:50:03:07

    Kiley

    It won’t be feeding your pixel data. You won’t necessarily know where they’re coming from. So you got to you got to make sure you have that that setup done well. And then the other thing I would say is, well, yes, but that’s only part of it. So when you set up a Facebook ad, you’re going to put your pixel on your website, but then you’re going to have something on your website.

    00:50:03:08 – 00:50:42:12

    Kiley

    Tell that Pixel that the conversion event that you’re looking for happened. So like on a carrot Web site, when someone clicks, submit on, you know, enter my property address or whatever, they click submit and then it takes them to that next page. Your pixel data should be telling Facebook that that person took action. And the reason that matters is the pixel is looking to see if your ad is getting the action that you want it to have one so they know whether it’s relevant to people and to so they know how to continually optimize that, to show that to the right people.

    00:50:42:12 – 00:51:17:09

    Kiley

    So if your pixel is not configured correctly, you’ll see like a little you’ll see little errors in Facebook. That’s like, Hey, the pixel is not getting any data for this conversion event and that that impacts that impacts the algorithms ability to like build and gain like flywheel momentum so that. Oh that’s right. That’s right. Yep, that’s right. And then and then like you said, yes, you can retarget that traffic which is, which is super awesome and you should be doing that.

    00:51:17:15 – 00:51:24:17

    Kiley

    But yeah, you’ve got to have that conversion piece set up correctly.

    00:51:24:17 – 00:51:48:26

    JT

    Well I was gonna say that to test I think, I think a lot of people, you know, we kind of mentioned you have to give it the time and part of that is just consistently testing. Don’t ever think that just because you know you find something that works that you can just stop because we’re talking about a platform that changes all the time and change it, you know, changes as your results are coming in.

    00:51:48:27 – 00:52:08:15

    JT

    So you start having something you never want to just like all a sudden enter into something slow because you haven’t been staying up all on your changes. So just consistently testing, keeping a beat, the alchemy, keeping a feel on the beat of the of the market as well, like not just in real estate but on the Facebook ads side of things.

    00:52:08:15 – 00:52:16:05

    JT

    Just understanding what you need to do to stay on top of it. What the algorithms feeding and now help you be more successful.

    00:52:17:08 – 00:52:26:13

    Brady

    Yeah, yeah.

    00:52:30:28 – 00:52:32:03

    JT

    Yeah. Just just I.

    00:52:32:03 – 00:53:14:16

    Kiley

    Mean, the answer is yes. Yeah. We test. I mean, from a visual, creative perspective, we test so many different variations. You know, we have text on the images. What color is the text, What size is it, where is it located? Does the text have a shadow on it? So you can. Yeah, the answer is yes. Test. And, and we kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, but I think the other piece I’d add, maybe just as a little bit of a repeat is really consider what you want to invest time and money wise and that will help you decide the best way to approach it.

    00:53:16:12 – 00:53:43:09

    Kiley

    If you are going to put the time in to learning how to do it yourself. That’s why JT said it’s totally doable. There’s lots of education out there. In fact, we we have a course that’s available in the current marketplace that basically teaches everything that we know and do on a Facebook account. It’s several hours long. So it takes it takes commitment to to want to do that.

    00:53:43:09 – 00:54:10:26

    Kiley

    And then part of what we’ve realized over time, you know, I’ve been doing I’ve been doing Facebook ads forever, but specifically for real estate investors since 2016 and what I realized is a lot of people who want to do DIY, they fit really well into the analogy I gave earlier, which is they want to be ripped, but they’re not quite ready to really do everything that they need to do to get ripped.

    00:54:10:26 – 00:54:50:20

    Kiley

    And so we see people jump into that and then they hit some hurdles, they hit some difficulties and they kind of bail and they go our Facebook ads don’t work. Or I you know, I’m going to I’m going to move on. And we’re actually really excited about about this. BRADY We because of that feedback, we we’ve been really thinking about how do we make something that people who are not ready for management either because their budget is a little bit smaller or maybe their personality is such that they’re like, I don’t want to hire someone, What?

    00:54:50:22 – 00:55:24:06

    Kiley

    How can we help them get into Facebook ads in a way that they can be more successful long term? So we’ve created a dashboard software tool where we’ve taken all of our best performing ads and prebuilt campaigns with all of our and everything that we would normally use. And basically people can run Facebook ads with three or four clicks and run everything through through this dashboard.

    00:55:24:18 – 00:55:54:11

    Kiley

    And it’s because part of what part of what’s hard about Facebook marketing is learning how to use ads manager. It’s Facebook ads, managers. I mean, you get in there, it’s a little bit overwhelming. It’s a little bit intimidating. Yeah. So we’ve we’ve we’ve got a tool now that that takes all of that and puts it into like a super simple dashboard where you’re just like, you’re, you’re cooking and you’re toggling things on and off and this is the way I think about it.

    00:55:54:11 – 00:56:26:11

    Kiley

    So to come back to my other analogy about about food hiring an agency is like hiring a personal chef. DIY is like doing it all yourself. So you’re coming up with the meal plan, you’re going to the grocery store, you’re buying all the groceries, you’re chopping it all up, you’re cooking it, you’re and this, this, this, this new tool is like hellofresh or Blue Apron, where someone who knows the the professionals are preparing everything for you there.

    00:56:26:11 – 00:56:51:22

    Kiley

    Do a minute to your doorstep and all you have to do is a couple of steps and then you’re eating. Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s it’s not a perfect analogy. I mean, because really it’s like. I mean, it would be like if all you had to do with the hellofresh was put it in the microwave, you know. Yeah.

    00:56:51:25 – 00:57:49:00

    Kiley

    That’s, that’s how easy it is. So as of, as of today when we’re recording this we are in beta and we have a handful of people in already and are accepting just a limited, a limited few more. If you’re interested in that, you can go to go dot Silver street marketing dot com slash beta. And by the time when this podcast airs, if we’ve come out of beta, we will redirect that link to get you where you need to go.

    00:57:49:00 – 00:57:49:18

    Kiley

    Thanks, Brady.

    00:57:50:03 – 00:58:16:19

    JT

    Thanks. Out of this.