Ted's Top Ten - The Most Important, Must Read Books for Marketing and Advertising

Dear Real Estate Ace:

I've been searching doggedly through my library of reading materials to share with you, what I believe are the best books available on marketing. I have to warn you though, some of these are a pain in the rear to get. Some have been reprinted, but in revised editions by guys who are total idiots. I'll try to let you know which are worth reading. Anyway, if you want to market for your real estate business, you should definitely take the time to check out these:


The Gary Halber Letters, Gary Halbert
Scientific Advertising, Claude Hopkins
Triggers, Joseph Sugarman
Tested Advertising Methods, John Caples (Fourth edition or earlier)
How-To Write A Good Advertisement, Victor Schwab
The Ultimate Sales Letter, Dan Kennedy
Mail-Order Secrets of A Marketing Maverick, Joseph Sugarman
The Collier Letter Book, Robert Collier
Anything else you can find by Gary Halbert
Influence, Cialdini

Tootles!

-Ted

CRUSH Your Competition (Part 2)

Dear Fellow Real Estate Junkies,

I started the last post ranting about asking questions of your leads, and looking at the competitions marketing to get an edge in this game of creative real estate investing we all play.

So what did I find from all of those ads, and postcards I took from seller that I met with?

90% of them sucked!
(and mine did too)

From there I (and you need to do this) asked myself how do I beat them. Well, okay like the opening to the movie Patton, I wanted rip my competition apart and stomp on their guts!

I looked for better headlines, better hooks, better formatting, less cutesie picture bull$hit.

And this leads me to a coming post, possibly a full-blown articles (and if I really want to cover it right 3 chapters in a course). When think about marketing there are three key criteria you absolutely must meet.

The 3 M's of Marketing/Advertising:

Message, Market, Media

Well that's all for now.

To your success,

Ted, The Master of Mail

CRUSH Your Competition (Part 1)

Dear Real Estate Super-Stars,

I was all ready to rant off about the 3Ms of marketing, but I realized I've been promising for a while how I'd write about my most favorite subject of all:

Stomping Your Competitors Into The Ground
With Better, Smarter Marketing

See gang, I'm a pure-and-simple capitalist, and I'm a competitive one at that. I think you should revel in making money. You should want to do your business better than everyone else - no time for losers. May the strongest business win! Can't handle it - get a job.

To that end I absolutely hate dumb marketers, and the world is full of them.

So here is the story, you need to figure out what works in your market and tune into why its working. I always ask peope WHY they call me, and if you're starting out you'd be surprised what people tell you.

Here's one such call:

ME: "How did you find out about us?"
Caller: "Oh yeah, you wuz with a bunch a signs on the road"
ME: "Did you call any others?"
Caller: "Nope."
ME: "Why'd you call me?"
Caller: "Yours was the only one I could read!"

Holy cow I thought! Could this be real? You bet! A little common sense and you can tweak your marketing. In any kind of signage readability is king - screw pretty pictures, extra words, it's all crap. Make the stuff readable!

But how do you figure this out?

TEST IT!!!! My friend and I tried all sorts of things... for signs we fiddled with text sizes, colors and other little details... we poured hours over everything. The difference is in the details.

I do the same thing for mailings. I'll write literally a hundred headlines anytime I want to mail something. (Yes a hundred headlines, anything less is sad excuse for an effort.)

Moving on, I want to share how I started to clue into other media... I started with the standard crap you see in Real Estate courses you know the stuff they give you just to get up and running with.

I wasn't sure how to make it better, so the next person I went to see I made a deal with. While on the phone I offered them a quarter for every piece of advertising they had that had anything to do with selling their house. You know what?

I spent nearly Fifty Bucks on junk mail!

It was a damn good investment. I had my competitions' stuff. I now had a clue what floats around out there... most of it is truely garbage. Some of it ain't.

What I found out, will come in the Part 2.

-Ted

A 39 Thousand Dollar Mistake in Creative Real Estate Investing

Dear Top-Gun investor,

First, It's been a month since my last post... Beggers can't be chosers right? (Just kidding, I do apologize)

Anyway this mornings post is from a caffienated conversation I had just a couples hours ago, as a fellow investors and I remember just

How We Lost 39 Grand in
Brain-Dead Obvious Deals

(I should mention though we were just starting out) So here's the story.

We'd spent about 10 nights out on the town during the wee hours of the night posting signs, and I dropped about a grand in to some post-cards, which took another day or two to pull off. We did all this over a period of two to three months, and had what to show for it - 200 motivated sellers.

From this we had a pretty solid short-sale worth $10-20k, a $15k retail deal where we had taken the deed, a $5k wholesale deal in an 80K neighborhood and another $14k wholesale deal to be had in a $150k neighborhood (aka nice for B'more).

So I bet you're thinking wow Ted you made $44k your first three months in Real Estate - Hah -no! Not even close...

We had an RE Agents scare a seller away from us, followed up with one seller an hour late (literally!) and I ticked off a bank rep. When the circus was over there was only one flip deal was had.

Point is: market for 4 deals to get one done! Don't market to try and get a deal, when you start out, you're bound to mess up a lot.

Peace out, cub scouts.

-Ted