David: Alright guys, welcome back Discount Property Investors! David Dodge with my co-host Mr Mike Slane.

Mike: David, how are we today?

David: I'm doing great, man. Feeling good.

Mike: Same. A little sunny out, it's getting a little warmer.

David: It's beautiful out there. Really nice.

Mike: Spring is springing, man. It's a good time to get out there and walk the dogs, ride a bike, all those Spring time activities. Market for sellers, you know, things like that.

David: All the good stuff.

Mike: So marketing for sellers, guys. I slipped that one in there. Not necessarily a Spring activity, that is an everyday activity if you are a wholesaler. Dave and I, it is one of our favorite things to talk about and to work on. I think we both just kind of like marketing, it's kind of fun.

David: Hell yeah.

Mike: The reason for that, we are wholesalers and rental investors, rehabbers, you know-- entrepreneurs. Dave has a couple of other little businesses that he is doing as well. It doesn't matter what business you're in, you're in the business of marketing. So today we are talking to the wholesaler audience, hopefully you guys are interested in learning how to wholesale. Real quick overview of what wholesaling is; buying a property at a great price and selling it at a good price, and making a profit in between. Now a lot of people say, oh you don't want to say you're selling the property, you only want to say you are selling the contract. That is very true when you are assigning it. If you double close it, it's a little bit different. But again, the basic principle is buying something very low, selling something a little bit higher. But it's still a great price for somebody else, and you make the spread. That's wholesaling real estate.

So how do you find properties at a great price? It's simple; you have to market consistently. So that's what we are going to be talking about today. Dave, do you want to kick us off? Do you want me to keep going?

David: Keep going, man. You're doing great.

Mike: Perfect, so the number one way I like to market-- and I kind of rank these in order of cost as well. It starts to get a little murky, but the least expensive way is probably going to take the most time. You will often find there is an inverse relationship between those two things. So the one I like the most and I am a big proponent of is networking. When you are just beginning in this, you have to network. You have to find out who is doing what in your local area, and-- that is just going to help huge. You are going to--. Yeah Dave is playing with the video here. Making a list.

David: Oh right, yeah, buddy.

Mike: Networking is number one, and again it is an inexpensive way to find leads and to find what is working in your local market. You are going to meet other wholesalers, rental buyers. You are going to meet random people if you are just going to different types of networking. You are going to find people hopefully you can joint venture with. The type of networking you're going to do, you're going to find another wholesaler and say, I got this under contract and can't find anyone to buy it. Guess what? If you can find somebody to buy it, you can help him. You can joint venture and put a deal together that way. That's networking. You will find some sellers through joint venturing. Heck, you might find you are able to wholesale a deal from someone who is also just a real estate investor. Some people don't necessarily know how to wholesale; that's okay. If they have a property, they are looking to sell it, they are willing to sell it for a good deal, hey they know they are an investor, great, all the better. Again, you can have another investor who has a property. If you can sell that property to someone else for a little higher than they are asking for it, that's great. You can find sellers at networking events. I've done it. I am not embarrassed to say it.

David: I love finding sellers at networking events. It happens all the time.

Mike: So again, you can find sellers there. You are also going to find a lot of your buyers there at networking events. It's really a two fold strategy. You are able to market your deals once you get them under contract. Another way to market, we said we would kind of do the inverse thing. The least expensive to the most expensive. I am going to say cold calling would be next on the list of ways to network.

David: I like that.

Mike: So cold calling, Dave, what do we do when we're cold calling?

David: Cold calling, you are getting someone's contact information after you skip trace them, and you call them up and say, hey I am looking to buy some properties in the area. I am buying houses in the neighborhood or on the street. We buy to fix them up and flip them. We also buy to hold them and rent them. Do you have any property you are looking to sell? That's it. You are just calling them up, making a friend. It's a cold lead, that's why it's called cold calling. It's not different than you doing other types of marketing. You are just doing the outreach yourself. You can hire someone to do it as well, but you are doing the outreach. You are essentially going to be trading time to get leads versus money in this scenario. Some money might be required to get a dialer, or even do skip tracing if you decide you want to go that route. Or, you can just write down addresses, go to the county records, find the owner, then go to free sites like TruePeopleSearch.com, and get that some information.

Mike: Awesome. I also kind of include these two together, Dave. Cold calling and now cold texting. It would be similar like Dave just described. You would get a list, then you would text those people, reaching out to them via text message. Now Dave, where would people find a list? Let's talk about that real quick.

David: Where would they find a list? PropStream would be the best place to find a list in my opinion. Just because you are going to be able to get a lot more bang for your buck. It's a monthly cost. However, you get I think it's 10'000 downloads from that list a month. You can easily upgrade for another twenty bucks to get that number up to 40 or 50'000 downloads, versus going to like ListSource and paying 15, 17, 20 cents a lead. I remember when I first started I was paying like 20 cents a lead. Now it's like if I pay more than a penny for a lead on a list, it's like crazy to me. Yeah PropStream would definitely be where I would go. We will put a link on our show notes for you guys to get a free trial.

Mike: Yeah I love it. Yeah, I think the link is DPIPodcast.com/Comps.

David: Yep.

Mike: Just go to comps and we will have that there for you. That's a really cool one. The next thing I would say in level of cost is direct mail. Again, you are going to spend a little bit more money on this one. It is going to take much less of your time. Again, we are kind of working that scale. Direct mail, pretty simple. When I started out, yellow letters were the hot thing. Everyone was pushing, send a hand written letter, it says, hello (owners name), my name is (your name), I would like to buy your house at (address), call me, (your phone number). Just as simple as that. A hand written letter, throw it in an envelope, send it out, and wait for them to call you. The least amount of your time required, but it is going to be a little bit more expensive. Now the next one that I have is-- online ads like using Facebook to advertise to motivated sellers, or using Google ad words to market for motivated sellers. They would click on maybe a landing page of your website, something like that, or an ad in Google. They are going to click on it, call you, or click on your landing page and fill it out. You are going to have the motivated sellers reaching out to you. This is probably the most expensive, but again it is probably going to be the least time consuming. Once you get it set up, or you have a manager for your campaigns, you are not spending a lot of time on this, relative to let's say networking, where you have to get dressed, go out, or cold calling and texting, where you are spending a lot of time doing those activities.

I left out one of the big ones which is bandit signs, shoot. Where would I put that on the list?

David: Bandit signs and driving for dollars. I am going to put those probably after networking.

Mike: Yeah.

David: Just somewhere in that range. Give me a second, let me save it and see it. Boom, there you go. So types of marketing, I would say driving for dollars is going to be-- it's more expensive and time consuming than networking, especially if you're using an app like we use. We use Deal Machine. Bandit signs are probably going to be a little bit more than that, because you are going to have to pay per sign.

Mike: In addition to driving them around and putting them up.

David: Cold calling and texting you're going to have to pay for those leads. Again, unless you are getting those leads from driving for dollars, or something along those lines. Typically still going to be buying those leads. Yeah I think we have got ourselves a pretty good list right here, Mike. There are lot's of other ways though, guys. There are a million other ways to find motivated sellers. Direct mail marketing is one of my favorites, online ads is another good one. We love driving for dollars. I am going to add another one on here, and that's going to be big media. Just going to go broad with it, which is going to be radio and TV. When you first get started, that might not be an option for you. But, we run radio ads and we spend about-- maybe two grand a month right now. We were spending double that at one point, but we have scaled back. So you don't have to have a crazy budget. You can essentially get on the radio, have several ads playing for a week for under a thousand bucks. So definitely do not discount these big media, or bigger media. You are talking billboards, radio, possibly TV. Bandit sign on wheels you can do with bandit signs on the back of people's cars. Or, you can higher the pros to do bandit signs on wheels and get the city buses, and get your message on those buses. I am not sure if I mentioned billboards or not, but that is also another great way to get your message out there, guys. Tons of ways, lot's of online ways like Mike had mentioned. Online advertising like PayPerClick, or even doing SEO to your own website. Of course social media is huge. I am going to add social media in there, and I am going to put that at the very top, because social media doesn't cost you anything, and it is really just you telling everybody that you are in the house buying business. I think Mike led with this when we first got started. Social media is huge and it's free. So tell everybody what business you are in. That business is the home buying business, alright? You always need to be marketing yourself and your business. Look at that, pretty cool little list there, right?

Mike: I love it. Yeah that's a pretty good episode, guys. You have to be marketing--. Oh, Dave! The best way to market is to follow up with your leads. I can't believe we didn't add that. So follow up, baby, follow up! Once you talk to someone, if you say, I'm not motivated. It doesn't matter. You know what you need to do? You need to follow up with them. Every one of these leads you have payed for in some way. In either your time or your money. So you have to follow up with your leads. When you are just starting out, I can completely understand using a note pad or an Excel spreadsheet, something simple, to help you remember the names of the people that called, the phone numbers, taking some notes on them. That is an awesome way to get started. You have to document these people so that you remember what you spoke about last time. Once you have progressed a little bit more, you are going to start to find it a little more challenging. It can be overwhelming once you're working with 100, 200, 500 leads to remember-- oh I have to follow up with this guy in a month, got to follow up with this guy in two weeks, have to follow up with this guy in-- there are a lot of different things you are going to have to follow up with. You can try and do that with your calendar. I suggest getting a CRM. We have one that we absolutely love. I think it's DPIPodcast.com/CRM, let me look it up. So you are going to go there, you are going to find the CRM that we use. This one is awesome, it allows you to build landing pages. It has call tracking, so you can have different numbers for different things. There is task management and follow up. So when you off the phone with that person, you can assign yourself a task to call them back in three weeks. Next time you log into your CRM it is going to remind you, you have to call this person back. Again, that to me is probably one of the most powerful marketing things is follow up. I know it sounds silly, doesn't even seem like a marketing thing. To me that is the most important thing in this business is to follow up with your leads.

David: I totally agree, Mike. I love that. I think a lot of people discount that, we almost missed it. We spend a ton of money to build these leads, and to get these leads, and to get people calling you. If you are not following up consistently. I think one of my favorite saying is 'consistent persistent action'. You have to be consistently following up with these leads, otherwise you are basically just lighting your money on fire. You definitely want to have a killer CRM to keep track of that leads that are coming in. Keep track of the conversations that you are having with these sellers. Last but not least, create a task. Basically give yourself an assignment for a later time, a later date. How else are you going to remember to call Jan, or Sue, or Tony back that you talked to today, but the follow up doesn't require you to talk to them for maybe six weeks? Are you really going to remember that? Times that by 300 people a month or a quarter that you are adding to your system. No way in hell, right? So you definitely have to have a CRM in place. The CRM that we use-- I will just drop the name, Mike, because the link we give them anyway has a thousand dollars off basically. The CRM we use right now is REIBlackBook. It is not the cheapest one out there, we are not going to tell you that this is going to be the cheapest one by any means. But, it is one of the most powerful. It allows us to automate some of that follow up, actually most of that follow up, so we can be focusing our time and energy on doing other things like more marketing, right? So this CRM will allow you to follow up on autopilot. You can do text sequences, call sequences. You can even do ringless voicemails. All kinds of cool bells and whistles to help automate that process. Again, that is REIBlackBook. That's who we use, that is my favorite CRM out there. If you guys go to DPIPodcast.com/CRM, Damon, the owner of that company, a great friend of mine, he has actually hooked us up with the ability for all of our listeners and students to waive the $997 fee to join. So you can join without having to pay that license fee. That's huge, that's a thousand dollars that's saved. There are other platforms out there that will easily get you by, that are maybe free or even cheaper. But, if you are looking for the real powerhouse, something that is going to give you the ability to not only do the front end of the business, which is the acquisitions, the websites, the landing pages, the phone numbers, the call systems. Also the disposition side of the business, and that's where most CRM's have nothing to offer, they do. They have the websites to sell these properties, they have the e-mail lists and the text blasting capabilities all in one place. Again, that is REIBlackBook. To get that at a killer deal, go to DPIPodcast.com/CRM. They will waive-- and we are so grateful to them for this, but they will waive that $997 fee, the license fee to join. So definitely go check that out, guys.

Mike: Alright, guys. Anything else you want to add Dave? Or let's wrap this one up.

David: Yeah I think that is a pretty good list, guys. Again, I think there is going to be a lot of people who may comment on this. I am going to through this up on YouTube on here, Mike. But there are going to be a lot of people who comment on this and say, there are all these other ways to market, and you're right. There is literally a million ways to market. So if you're watching this, comment down below, some of the ways you like to market.

Mike: I love that.

David: Here are just a couple of things we do, but again, there is an infinite amount of ways. Last but not least, if you are new, don't spend a ton of your time and energy trying to do ten of these things, or learn ten of these things. Only pick one and get good at it, or at least do it. Do it a couple of times. From there you can find a second or a third thing to do, or even better, find somebody else to help you do these things, so you can outsource it and have multiple going. But if you are new, that is one of the biggest mistakes people can make. I know I made that mistake when I first started, and that was basically trying to go out and do five or six different types of marketing, and half ass all of them, and do some of them wrong, right? So keep it simple, that's the message today, guys. Lots of different types. If there is something that we missed, drop it down below in the comments. If you're listening, the conversation continues at DPIPodcast.com. Every one of these shows we drop in there, there is a place where you can comment. Mike and I are in there as well. So the conversation continues over there as well. I think that's all I've got, Mike. Close us out.

Mike: Thanks for listening.

David: Signing off guys, we will see you next time.