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Okay, so today is Day 14 in our drive to $60,000 in 60 days.  It’s time to reflect a little on what we have accomplished over these two weeks…

As we mentioned in our Day 3 blog post, real estate investing is a marketing business.  We have focused a lot of our efforts on getting these marketing campaigns in place to generate leads.  We have several marketing streams in place that will continue to find us buyers and sellers.  To date, we have learned a few things that will help improve our marketing campaigns in the future.

1. In Day 1, we talked about the yellow letter campaign we are running, and we have learned a few things already.  Letters from Kelly work better than letters from Todd.  The response rate from Kelly’s “Yellow Letters” have been about 5 times higher than the letters written from Todd.  We thought this might be the case, because of some of the conversations we have had in the training seminars we have attended.  I guess it just seems that homeowners are more comfortable dealing with a female rather than a male.  From my perspective, I think it may just be that a letter coming from a male is maybe a little more intimidating than when it comes from a female.  Also, shorter letters that are direct and to the point are working better.  For the future we will keep all of our letters short and to the point leaving the homeowner intrigued.

3. Posting to, and searching online classifeds works.  In our Day 4 blog post, we showed how we are using online classified ads to find buyers and sellers.  We have gotten our best buyer lead by posting on Craigslist, and we have gotten several buyer leads for the property in Highland from posting on Craigslist.  The deal we have under contact and the deal we are close to getting under contract both came from emailing/calling sellers on Craigslist.  It is very efficient once a week for us to search for the following key words in Craigslist and send an email to these sellers.  These keywords are ones we think can indicate the seller is motivated.

• Handyman
• Investor
• Estate
• Must Sell
• Relocation (as in job relocation)
• Job (as in job relocation)
• Town (as in moving out of town)

4. Automating through Google Adwords is working great.  In our Day 5 blog post, we showed how we setup this campaign, and over the past two weeks we have gotten 15 buyer leads!  This took about 4-5 hours to setup, but we have generated 15 buyer leads in 2 weeks!!!!  This has been an awesome way to grow our buyer list.

5. We cannot count on one method to provide all the leads.  In our Day 3 blog post we talked about all the different marketing methods we are utilizing.  We have found some methods to work better than others, but there is no silver bullet.  As with most marketing, you need to get your message out in as many different places as possible, and this will generate the highest number of leads.

6. Bandit signs provide leads, but they need to be placed right.  In our Day 9 post, we talked about how we are using bandit signs to find seller leads.  The biggest problem we have found so far is that the signs are not staying up as long as we would like.  We’re not sure how they are getting removed, but they are.  On average, we have seen that the signs stay up for about 4-5 days, although we do have one sign that is still up after about two weeks.  We are going to need to work on this a little better to make the signs more effective.

7. Our marketing plan for moving properties fast is working.  In our Day 10 post we talked about our plan to market the properties we get under contract.  We are pleasantly surprised that we have gotten buyer leads from every different campaign that we have setup.  So far we have received 8 calls/emails on the property and we have 2 showings setup.  The great thing is that we haven’t gotten all the leads from one marketing campaign…everything is providing leads, so we will continue to use all these methods for marketing our properties in the future.

8. Okay, so now for one shameless plug.  Don’t forget, we are looking for YOUR help.  If you know of anyone that needs to sell their home fast, we can help them out.  Please remember the website we setup where YOU can make $500 if you refer us to a property that we end up buying.  You can check out  www.MichiganBirdDogs.com for all the details.  We’re sorry to report that, to date, this website has not provided us a single lead.  

To get everyone motivated, we’re going to up the anti.  In fact we’re going to double it.  If you’re the first person to send us a referral that we end up buying, we will pay you $1000!!!  Just mention this blog post in your submission, and you we will honor the $1000 referral fee, but you must mention this blog post.  

So now after two weeks of hard work we have accomplished the following

• One property is under contract and we have several potential buyers that we are talking to
• We are close to putting our second property under contract
• We are talking with multiple sellers to develop even more deals
• We have setup and we are evaluating the systems we are using
• We continue to dedicate ourselves to education learning EVERY DAY

We think things are going pretty good so far, but we can’t wait to complete that first deal towards our $60,000 goal…

More to come!!!