My Old Roomate Jim...

Okay, so last post I said I was going to hit on some quick ways to start getting leads to flow, but first I need to share another story or two...

I once lived with a roomate who wanted to get into real estate... This guy Jim had a mentor, went to a club occasionally, and sort of took advice and rolled with it. Last I heard though, he took some...

Six-Figure Job In IRAQ!

Now it's bad enough that this guy gave up on his aspiration to become a real estate investor, maybe he thought it too much work. What's worse, he settled for a job that you and I pay for! I gotta tell ya, I tried to help him market, but his head was truelly in the wrong place... He bought a case of Band-It signs - 10 of them went on poles, 90 of them sat on the living room floor. He mailed out post cards - I read them - truelly bad pieces. Actually truth is, the postcards he mailed barely made sense, and he only mailed maybe a thousand or two.

He had in toto, attempted maybe three things, butI should really say he attempted the

BECAUSE:

10 Bandit signs isn't trying!

Mailing a postcards without putting two ounces of thought into them isn't trying

Mailing a postcard with a cute, seemingly relevent picture to 400 people isn't trying either...

Let me tell what is:

1. Tacking up 50 signs a night... (usually involves a tank of gas and two Red Bulls and couple of Dunkin' Donuts) Do this ten times and you may get some where

2. Mailing 5000 postcards/letters I used to mail 'bout a 1000 at a time - got about 5 calls each time. Once I started figuring out what to write, which lists to hit, etc., it went to about 30 calls/1000.

3. Running ads twice a week in Craiglist... (But only if you do other stuff too) Friend of mine claims he does the craigslist thing once-per-week. I've checked up on him though (truth is about once per month)

4. Dropping flyers on FIVE Thousand cars. Not a targeted audience... painful to do (I'd sooner put the nail through my hand while tacking a sign to a pole (seems less painful)

Here's the POINT: Most people do diddly-squat!

Jim didn't actually do anything! "I sent out a mailing, I put up some signs" he said... I knew the truth he put up ten signs and mailed maybe a thousand people... in his mind that was trying... personnally going to Iraq "because it pays well" seems like selling yourself short... I'd rather sit here and get rich, and I hope to help a few of you do the same.

Most people don't really put a lot of effort into this stuff (btw, an hour sitting at your computer is not an hour of work)... If you want your marketing to work, you gotta either get a bad message in front of a lot people (band-it sign "WE BUY HOUSES 555-1234" 6+ in 10,000-car-per hour intersectiona) or a good message to a targeted bunch.

Personally, I think it's a lot easier to start out with jamming a bad message in front of a ton of eye-balls, and then try and work your way up from there. When I started out, the message was terrible, my signs did poorly, my post-cards where bad, but I didn't throw my hands in the air and say "I tried". NO, I asked myself what got response. I asked myself why. I pondered what would work better and I tried each change I could think of dozens (probably hundreds) of iterations later I found stuff that works pretty darn well.

Next posts:

What a well-oiled marketing machine looks like (okay, what my machine looks like)

7 Sins of marketing - aka How-To flip your company upside down and get stuck back in a JOB

My favorite subject, How-To CRUSH the competition. There's a lot of it, don't be shy.

Good luck,

-Ted

P.S. Tell me your story what are you REALLY doing to get the ball rolling... In upcoming posts, I'd like to feature some case studies, but I need to hear from you.