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A Guide to Setup Your Social Media Hub – Your Blog

It’s been very interesting lately talking to other real estate investors, and almost without exception the topic of social media comes up. Quite a few of you are really interested in what we’ve been doing on the social media scene, and so we want to talk today a little more about social media. In our blog post, How to Get Started Using Social Media to Market Your Real Estate Investing Business we talked about an overall plan to set up your social media strategy. Today we are going to talk about what should be the hub of your social media strategy – your blog.

Blogging is an excellent platform for you to deliver your content to your followers. You need to have interesting content that is useful to the viewer to keep their attention, but if you can do this, your blog will take you places. We have had a great deal of success with this blog offering information about real estate investing, and just tracking our progress. In fact, we’ve had so much success we’ve decided to start another blog for our Michigan Turnkey business. So we’re going to walk you through the steps of how we setup this blog, and show you how quickly it can come together. I want to emphasize this point…it took all of about 3 hours and $19 to get the blog setup and the first post out. It really is that simple.

So here’s what we did…

Setup Your Blog (5 minutes)

Go to WordPress.com and sign up for an account. We already had an account, so it was just a matter of setting up a second blog. Now, you’re going to want to have an idea of what the name of your blog is going to be and the mission of the blog. For us, our mission is to inform people about our business at Michigan Turnkey and show them on a weekly basis the deals we’re doing, provide information about the Michigan real estate market and give them insight into different real estate investing strategies they can employ with Michigan Turnkey.

Get Your Domain Name (5 Minutes)

Next you’ll want to go to GoDaddy.com to buy your URL. We selected www.MichiganTurnkeyTV.com for our URL. Also, here’s a hint, use the discount code “YES3″ and you’ll receive a pretty good discount on the purchase of your URL. Our’s cost $7.97.

Link Your Domain to Your Blog (10 Minutes)

Once you have signed up for your blog and your URL you’re gonna want to go back to WordPress.com and go to your “Dashboard”. Your Dashboard is where you will be updating everything about your blog. Think of it as your home base. So the first thing you’re going to want to set up is your domain. Click the “Upgrades” tab and follow the instructions there to set up your domain. You may have to go back to GoDaddy to set up the Name Servers, but this is quickly done at the GoDaddy website. To change your domain WordPress charges you $12 for the year. This is really a small price to pay for having a unique URL. Also, this is the last time you will have to pay anything to blog…from here out it’s all free. (Total Cost $19.97)

Select Your Theme (60 Minutes)

After your domain is set up, the next thing to do is select the theme that you will use for your blog. WordPress has a number of different themes to select from, and with most of them you have the ability to make changes to customize them for your own preferences. There are also a number of widgets you can add to add things like RSS feed buttons, social media buttons, etc. Most of this stuff can be added and tweaked over time, but for now you should concentrate on getting the basic theme selected. One more thing I should mention on themes…you can have your own custom theme designed for you by a professional web developer, but initially we would recommend you just stick with the themes offered by WordPress.

Signup for Video Sharing Sites (5 Minutes)

We highly recommend you incorporate video into your blog. The advantage is that you get to truly connect with your followers with the videos you publish, and this is so much more powerful as compared to a blog that is just written. To get setup to add videos to your site you need to upload the videos to a video hosting site like YouTube, and then you just refer to the YouTube link in your posts. It’s really quite simple, but you must have a YouTube account to upload the videos to. So you just need to go to YouTube.com and create an account.

Create Your “About” Page (45 Minutes)

Your “About” page should really tell your readers what the blog is all about. We decided to add a video and a short blurb about the blog on our About Page. We may change it in the future, but for now it will suffice.

Create Your First Blog Post (45 Minutes)

With all of this setup, you’re pretty much ready to create your first blog post. We’re going to dedicate mainly as a video blog, so it was pretty simple to get the flip cam out and put together our first post. You can check it out here.

So this is how we have set up our new blog www.MichiganTurnkeyTV.com. The great thing about this is that it took us about 3 hours to set all of this up, and now we have a communication tool that will provide us a platform to really connect with our colleagues and clients. I cannot emphasize how powerful this is…so get out there and start blogging!

2010: 12/21
CATEGORY: Social Media Networking
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How to Get Started Using Social Media to Market Your Real Estate Investing Business

Last night we had a great time presenting to the Renegade Detroit Real Estate Investor Club. Our topic included a discussion on how we got started in real estate investing and how we started leveraging social media in our real estate investing business. We have been using this blog along with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TubeMogul, BiggerPockets, and many other social media platforms over the past 4 months in an effort to create relationships with many individuals.

The good news is our efforts are paying off tremendously. It’s almost amazing to us how many connections we have made with great individuals. This has helped our real estate investing business in so many ways, and I can honestly say that engulfing ourselves in the social media scene has been the single biggest reason why we have been successful over the last four months.

As promised in our discussion last night, we have put together 12 simple steps that you can take to get started promoting your business with social media. You don’t have to do all of these, but the more you do, the more you will get back…

So here goes…

Signup for Facebook & Twitter - This is the single biggest thing you can and should do. Everyone, and I do mean everyone is on Facebook and Twitter, and this represents an excellent opportunity for you to connect with all kinds of people. So go there now and signup…
Read Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk – This is the book that really showed us how to get involved with social media. Gary lays out exactly how to get started in the social media scene to promote your business. We followed his model and it has worked great!
Start a Blog - As Gary tells, your blog is the center of your social media universe. It is where you really brand yourself and/or your business and provide great content for your followers. Just go to WordPress.com and signup. It’s really easy, and literally within minutes of signing up you can have your first blog post published.
Choose a Domain Name – We chose DriveToFreedom.com as our domain name mainly because most of our video blogs would be shot on the road, and our ultimate goal was (and still is) financial freedom. Put some thought into your name and heck, you can even use your own name to create your personal brand. When you figure it out, go to GoDaddy.com and register your domain…it’ll cost you about $10…
Signup on Other Social Media Sites – Here’s our favorites
Create a Facebook Business Page - On Facebook you should really have two areas where you work – your personal profile and your business page. To create a business page click on the “Home” button at the top of the Facebook page, and then on the lefts side of the screen you can click the link labeled “Ads and Pages” (you may have to click the “more” link to see it). Once you click on this link you will then have to click on the “Pages” link on the left side of the screen. From here you can click the “Create Page” button and follow the instructions. One note, when you get 25 people to like your page you can go to www.facebook.com/username and create a vanity name. For instance, our business pages are www.facebook.com/MichiganTurnkey and www.facebook.com/KTProp.
Join Other Facebook Business Pages – Once you get your own page setup, start checking out other business pages relevant to your topic. This is a great way to make connections and start interacting with other businesses.
Link Your Blog to Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media Sites - Most social media sites give you the option to automatically share content on the other social media sites. For instance, you can set up your blog to automatically send all of your posts to Facebook and Twitter when you post. Or you can have your Facebook posts automatically post on twitter and your blog. There are many different ways you can set this up, but you should sit down and map things out before you do it. However I will caution that you should only go one way with the links. For instance you don’t want to have your Facebook posts automatically post to Twitter and also have your Twitter posts automatically post to Facebook…this can create a loop and your posts will show up multiple times on both sites.
Start Posting Blog Content – When you start posting content you need to keep a few things in mind.
- Be Consistent – keep your content on a schedule whether it’s daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly
- Before you start posting, brainstorm at least 15 topics that you can post about. If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas for posts start looking at other blogs to get ideas
- Keep in mind that what you put out there is a permanent record of your thoughts and ideas
Start Leaving Comments on Other Blogs – One of the best ways to make great connections is by following other blogs. When you leave a comment on a blog your reply along with your name and website are etched in stone. Therefore it is key to focus on providing insightful responses, because there is a good chance that if someone sees your response and they like it, they will check out your blog.
Get Involved in the Conversation – No matter what platform you are on you need to get involved in the conversation. You should always be sincere with your comments, and make the effort to really think about what you are saying. Remember you words will be etched in stone and you normally cannot take them back, so don’t goof.
JUST HAVE FUN!!! – Remember, these sights are SOCIAL media sites. Don’t be boring and don’t be afraid to have fun. People want to see your personality, so don’t be afraid to let yourself shine.

So that’s it, there are of course hundreds of other tips we could talk about, but this list should get you off and running. For any questions you have, go ahead and catch up with us on Facebook and we’ll be happy to discuss how you’re using social media to promote your business. Hopefully you can teach us a few tricks too!

2010: 11/03
CATEGORY: Marketing
Networkding
Power Team
Social Media Networking
2 comments

Our Favorite Social Media Sites

As many of you know, we will be speaking at the Renegade Detroit Real Estate Investor Club Meeting tonight. Our topic will include a discussion on how we got started in real estate and how we are using social media in our real estate investing business. To supplement our discussion, we have decided to put together this blog post showing our favorite social media sites and how we are using them. So, here goes…

WordPress.com

WordPress.com is the platform that hosts our blog. If you have never blogged before, I can tell you that it is very, very simple, and most of that is because of the interface that WordPress offers. You can literally have your first blog post up and out for the world to see within about an hour of creating your account on WordPress. Now, there are many features and add-ins that you can apply but most of those are things that can be done after you have your blog up and running. If you’re thinking about starting a blog, WordPress.com is definitely the place to start, and did I mention it’s completely free!

Facebook.com

When it comes to social media, Facebook is the 800lb gorilla. If you’re not on Facebook, please go there now and signup. Facebook is by far the biggest site we have leveraged in our social media networking and marketing. That is for good reason because it is the site where everyone (and I do mean everyone) is at. To get an idea on what we are doing on Facebook, check out our article Use Facebook to Promote Your Business.

Twitter.com

Twitter is another excellent website that allows us to connect with real estate investors. We can use twitter to send out short messages to our followers promoting properties, events, or let people know what we are doing on a day-to-day basis. Twitter is also a great source for up to date information as many people are posting links to articles and information.

YouTube.com

YouTube is the primary video sharing site on the web, and it offers an excellent way for you to share video content. We have used YouTube to host our blog videos, presentations, video tours of houses, and personal videos of our family. One thing we haven’t done as of yet is incorporate the “My Channel” feature. This is an excellent feature from YouTube, and really gives the opportunity for you to establish your personal brand. In addition to YouTube, there are many other video sharing sites like Viddler.com, Yahoo Video, Metacafe, and Dailymotion.

Flickr.com

What YouTube is for video, Flickr is for photos. We haven’t used Flickr as much, but it offers an excellent opportunity to host your photos much like YouTube does for videos. If you have a set of pictures of a home you’re rehabbing or trying to sell, Flickr is a great place to put those photos to host them.

Discussion Forums

There are many forums out there, but our favorites are the forums on BiggerPockets.com and Trulia.com. If you have a question you want answered or if you want to get perspective other than yours, discussion forums represent an excellent opportunity to have that discussion. I would argue that you can use Facebook and Twitter to accomplish the same thing but the discussion forums definitely serve a purpose.

Other Blogs

Blogs serve as an excellent resource on up-to-date events and information. They represent the current opinions on many topics and also offer great information on many relevant issues pertaining to their category. Some of my favorite real estate blogs are DriveToFreedom.com, UrbanDetroitOnline.com, 123Flip.com, & EmilyAHay.com.

The True Power of Connection

At first glance, all of these different websites can sound a little overwhelming. However, there is one key element to social media that really makes them powerful. They are all connected. For instance, when we create a blog post it gets posted to DriveToFreedom.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and BiggerPockets. This all happens just by submitting our blog post through WordPress. This saves an amazing amount of time from having to go to each of the sites individually to post your content, and this truly represents the power of social media. You can literally get your content posted in front of millions of people with one click of the mouse as long as you are setup correctly. Most of the social media sites have some way to automatically share content between the sites, so make sure you leverage this to your advantage.

2010: 11/02
CATEGORY: Networkding
Social Media Networking
Uncategorized
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Drive to Freedom at the Renegade Detroit Investor Club Meeting Tueseday November 2, 2010

When we started out blogging about the things we were doing to grow our real estate investing business, one of our main strategies was to build up networks with individuals and groups. Social media has allowed us to do this at a very high rate of speed, and in the past four months since we’ve started this blog we’ve seen our network grow dramatically. This one single strategy has been hugely beneficial to our real estate investing business.

As we have gone through our journey engaging with others on the various social media outlets, we began to see the same people popping up everywhere. It became immediately apparent who the “players” were in the Detroit market because we were hearing about what they were doing every day. As we looked to different groups to begin networking with, we found that many of the “players” all belonged to one specific real estate investment club – The Renegade Detroit Real Estate Investor Club. We began to attend their meetings, and in the short time we’ve been attending we’ve really figured out why this group is so popular. Unlike a lot of REIA’s they don’t bring in speakers that try to sell you on something each month. On the contrary they bring in people who are out there doing deals and doing the things necessary to make their real estate investing business move forward.

That’s why we were elated when asked to speak at the next club meeting. So, on Tuesday November 2nd we are going to speak at the Renegade Detroit Investor Club meeting. We’re going to share with everyone exactly how we got started, and the approach we’ve taken towards social media. We hope you can make it.

The meeting starts with a social hour at 6pm at the Peking House in Royal Oak and will include dinner. Dinner is $10 for first timers and $25 for returning investors.

We hope to see all of you come out.

2010: 10/28
CATEGORY: Networkding
Power Team
Social Media Networking
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Tools to Use In Your Real Estate Investing Business

Mark Ijlal is a real estate investor in Michigan that has been writing his blog Michigan Foreclosure Report by Mark Ijlal for quite some time. Personally, I have found his articles to be spot on and straight to the point. Mark has an excellent ability to relate real estate investing to many facets of life and really drives his points home with his unique writing style. In his latest blog post, Mark provided a great list of Tools He Cannot Live Without in his real estate investing business. As I expected this was an excellent article listing several useful tools Mark uses. I have used many of these tools myself, and I’m sure I will look at using some of the others in the very near future. It was really a great article, and I wanted to post a comment to Mark’s blog, but unfortunately Mark does not accept comments on his blog. So instead, to followup on Mark’s blog post I decided to offer additional tools that I cannot live without in my real estate investing business. Here’s my list…

GADGETS

Mark mentioned that he uses a Kodak Zi8 flip camera to shoot videos of houses to make video tours. I have this same exact model and it really is a great little camera. It takes video in high definition, takes still photos, and to download them it actually has a USB port that flips out and you just plug it into your computer. This feature is nice because you never have to worry about losing the cord. In fact it’s so easy to use, I found my 4-year-old daughter making her own videos one day. So go out and get yourself one of these cameras, it’s a great little tool.

In addition to a flip camera, I would recommend the following gadgets that I cannot live without:

Laptop Computer – I will never buy another desktop computer again. To me they are dinosaurs of the computer age. A laptop is so much more practical to use for the simple fact that you can take it anywhere. I use my laptop with every aspect of my business and would not be a real estate investor without it.
Smart Phone – Next to my laptop, my Blackberry is the gadget I use the most. I’m really not sure how I was able to manage things for so long without it. The ability to have access to your email, outlook calendar, phone, and internet all in one handheld device is great.
GPS Unit – We bought a Garmin earlier in the spring because we were driving down to Florida for vacation. It certainly came in handy during that trip, but I thought it would not be very useful after that. I was dead wrong. We use the GPS unit everytime we go and look at a house. You just get in the car and go…no looking up maps or directions on the internet…just get in the car and go. We’ve used it so much that we just purchased a 2nd GPS unit, a Garmin 295W. This one is a little more sophisticated as it has the ability to access the internet and also take pictures. The camera feature is particularly useful because it actually “Geotags” the photos with the location of where the picture was taken. This is extremetly useful when you combine this technology with Google Earth software.
MP3 Player – Most people use MP3 players to listen to music, but I use it for education. My drive to work each day takes about an hour, and I have listened to countless audiobooks using my MP3 player during my commute back and forth to work. This has proven to be a very effectient use of what would otherwise have been wasted time.

SOFTWARE

Mark mentioned that he cannto live without Quickbooks to keep track of his finances. I currently use Quicken, but as Mark said, your CPA uses Quickbooks and that is exactly who told me I need to switch over. I think I’m going to ride out the rest of the year with Quicken and then startup in the new year with QuickBooks at the beginning of the new year. In addition to QuickBooks, here are few pieces of software that have been invaluable to me.

Google Earth - This is a free application offered by Google, and quite frankly it’s one of the coolest pieces of software I think I’ve seen. If you want to check out mount everest, you just type it in, and the globe spins taking you to Mount Everest. So you can have fun with the software, but you can also use it in your real estate investing business. The nice thing about Google Earth is it allows you to plot locations on the map, create notes, etc. Kelly and I have used it extensively to map out the areas we are investing in, and it provides a great way to help understand the market.
PDFEdit995 – I’m sure everyone has opened a PDF file before. The nice thing about PDF files is that they cannot be changed, and when writing contracts or official documents they work out very nicely because you know that nothing can be changed on the doucment after you sign it. The person you send it to can only open it and print it. If they want to make changes to the contract, then they will have to write them in, and you will know exactly what was changed.
Microsoft Office - Excel, Word, & Powerpoint are a must to have, and I think this goes without saying. Being an engineer, I’m a little partial to Excel because I think you can pretty much do anything in Excel. We have used it to create a template property analyzer that contains all the sheets we need to fully analyze a property and write a contract. In fact, it automatically populates the contract for us once we fill in the owner’s name, address, etc. The sheet includes a market analysis form, a cashflow analysis form, a repair estimate form, a rehab analysis form, a loan amoritzation calculation form, and the purchase agreement. We systematically fill out each page, and they are all linked which creates a complete analysis for the property. When submitting an offer on any property I’m confident of the numbers because I know they were calculated correctly.

WEBSITES

Mark mentioned several websites in his post – some I’ve used and some I haven’t but probably will very shortly. Below are some additional websites that have proven to be extremely useful for us.

BatchGeo.com - This is a really cool website to use if you have multiple properties that you want to go and look at. You just create a list of the addresses in Excel of the properties you want to map, and then you just copy and paste this list into BatchGeo.com. Hit submit, and BatchGeo maps each of the properties. This makes it really easy to figure out which property you should see first, second, third, etc. In addition to this, BatchGeo has a feature that allows you to download a “.kml” file which you can read into Google Earth. This makes mapping multiple properties in Google Earth very easy. Check out our post Getting to Know the Pontiac Real Estate Market to see how we’ve used BatchGeo.com in conjunction with Google Earth.
WordPress.com – Of course this is the platform we use to host our blog. We actually started out on Tumblr.com but found that WordPress has many more useful features to it, so we moved over to WordPress. This blog has aided us in so many ways, and I would encourage everyone to try blogging in their real estate investing business.
TubeMogul.com – TubeMogul is a website that allows you to upload videso to multiple different websites simultaneously. When people think of web videos, most think of YouTube, but there are actually many more video hosting sites out there. Sending your videos to multiple sites increases the exposure level, and TubeMogul makes it very efficient to do this.
Facebook.com – Everyone knows about Facebook, and if you’re not using it in your real esate investing business, you really should. The possibilities are truly endless. Check out our post Use Facebook to Promote Your Real Estate Business to see how we are using Facebook.
RealInvestorWebsite.com – This website really caters to real estate investors, and it is the hub of all our website activities. They have many templates setup that are geared towards setting up websites for real estate investors. Their web interface is really easy to use, and if you don’t know how to do something they have a great video resource library showing you exactly how to do everything on the site. The nice thing is that they will host up to 10 different websites for you for one low fee of $27 per month. I know 10 sites sounds like a lot, but when you have a main site, several squeeze pages, and a couple sites dedicated to particular houses you’re trying to sell, you’ll find yourself wishing you had more sites available.

OTHER BUSINESS ESSENTIALS

Mark mentioned how to setup an LLC, and the forms you might want to have ready at a moment’s notice. In addition to these things, you should really think about the following things:

PO Box – A PO Box is very handy for keeping security in your business dealings. You don’t want everyone under the sun to know where you live, and a PO box is a very handy tool to help you accomplish this.
Separate Bank Account – As your CPA will tell you, you need to keep all of your financials separate in your business dealings. Therefore it is imperative to obtain a separate bank account. Follow Mark’s suggestions on setting up an LLC (or another entity) and obtain a Federal EIN number, and you’ll be all set to go to the bank to get a bank account.

2010: 10/04
CATEGORY: Deal Analysis
Getting Started in Real Estate Investing
Marketing
regular
Social Media Networking
Video
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Getting Started in Real Estate Investing – Step 5 – Build Your Power Team

Today we are going to continue our series on Getting Started in Real Estate Investing. In previous posts, we talked about:

Today in Step 5 we are going to talk about building your power team. If you’re just starting out in real estate investing, you should wrap your arms around the fact that you cannot do everything yourself. I know a lot of people, myself included, struggle with this. When starting out, you probably want to know every detail of what you’re doing and you’re eager to learn the business.

However, there aren’t enough hours in the day for you to learn about everything or do everything that you need to do. Rather than fight this fact, you need to embrace it. I know personally it took me a long time to figure this out. I was always the guy that spent time figuring things out and doing things myself. However, eventually I realized that I spent so much time learning and doing that I could only do so much. There are only so many hours in a day. So, I needed help, and you do to. The good thing is that there are many people out there that are looking to help you. They will be charging you money for their services, but look at it this way. If you can do one deal, and make $10,000 doing everything yourself, and it takes you 6 months to complete the deal that’s great. However, in that same timeframe, if you could do 10 deals but you only made $5,000 per deal because you paid for help, doesn’t it make more sense to pay for some help. You will net $50,000 in that same time, doing the same amount of work.

You see, the key to doing more deals is building a team of individuals or companies that you can go to at a moments notice and know that they are going to be able to answer questions, provide services, or just simply help you get out of a jam. Below are a list of individuals or companies you should have on your team:

Other Investors
Mentors
Title Agents
Mortgage Brokers
Bankers
Hard Money Lenders
Attorneys
Contractors
Real Estate Agents
Property Managers
Home Inspectors
Accountants
Bookkeepers

As the list indicates, it is normally a good idea to have more than one team member for each category. For example, if you have one contractor on your team, and you go to them to look at a rehab that you’re going to do and they’re tied up on another job, you’re going to be stuck without a contractor. Or, if you’re looking for money, many times one banker or hard-money-lender will be limited by the programs they have to offer. However, each lender has different programs available, and the more relationships you have, the more options you will have available to you. Like they say, it’s not who you are, it’s who you know.

So how do we build a power team? First off, please do not go to the yellow pages or Google and start searching for team members. This is probably the worst thing you can do because you have no idea whether the person or company you find is reputable. The best way for you to find team members is simply through networking. Every team member you find should come through a referral by someone you know. This is important for a few reasons. First of all, the person you got the referral from has likely done quite a bit of business with the person they are referring you to. This is invaluable because they have already completed the screening process from you. If the person wasn’t worth their salt, they wouldn’t refer you to them. Secondly, when you go to this person, and you tell them you were referred by another investor, it helps give you credibility because you are associated with this other investor.

Now, if you’re still struggling, I can tell you by far the best way to network on a daily basis is to get on Facebook and join the conversation on real estate investing. Awhile back we dedicated another post to Facebook that you can find here, so I won’t go into details on the things you can do on Facebook to build your team. However, I will mention one thing – focus on the quality of the conversations you have with the people you meet. This is not a numbers game, it’s about building relationships. Remember, Facebook is a social network, and people expect to have excellent conversations on there. Do this, and you will build relationships that will enable you to build your power team very quickly. This one single resource has helped us build a great power team in literally less than a month’s timeframe.

So get our there and start building your team!

2010: 09/27
CATEGORY: Getting Started in Real Estate Investing
Networkding
Power Team
regular
Social Media Networking
Time Management
Video
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Day 46 – Facebook Helps Us Build Our Power Team

Today is Day 46 in our drive to $60,000 in 60 days through real estate investing. As you saw from the video, Facebook, and social media in general, is proving to be an excellent resource for our business. Not only are we finding potential buyers for our properties, but we are making excellent connections with many people in the real estate business every single day. The amazing thing to us is that we’ve only been using it for a couple of months, but we’ve already reaped many benefits from getting into the social media scene.

As we discussed in the video we were able to find what we think will be an excellent member of our power team, and all of this came about through one connection we made on Facebook. Thank you Drew Sygit!

So for today, our point is really simple. To build your power team you need to network. You should always be building your power team and so you should always be networking. You should always be working with others in the industry to develop contacts and make new connections. Our experience has shown that the best members of our team have come through referrals from other members on our team or other people in the industry. This really makes sense because more times than when you are given a referral, the person doing the referring normally has had a good relationship with the person they are referring you to. They have tested the waters, so you really are in a much better position to find someone this way rather than looking in the yellow pages or on google.

So it’s really that simple. Network, Network, Netwok…both in person and online through social media and you’ll be surprised how fast you can grow your power team!

2010: 08/12
CATEGORY: Networkding
Power Team
regular
Social Media Networking
Video
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Day 45 – Use Twitter to Grow Your Business

Today is Day 45 in our drive for $60,000 in 60 days through real estate investing. We are continuing to work our deals and market for new properties. In previous blog posts, we have talked about The Power of Social Media Networks and how to Use Facebook to Promote Your Business. Today we are going to continue this discussion and talk about how we are using Twitter to promote our real estate business.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social media platform that allows its users to “Tweet” about what’s going on in their life. Each tweet is limited to 140 characters so the message has to be concise and to the point. Now, I’ll admit I’m one of those in the camp that first heard about Twitter a couple of years ago, and thought it was the most ridiculous thing in the world. However, Twitter has grown and there are a whole lot of people using this social media platform. This represents an excellent opportunity for us as a real estate investor to market ourselves. So, we’ve embraced Twitter, and we’ve got a plan to continue to increase our presence there. Here’s what we’ve done and our plans for the future…

Create a Profile

Similar to most social media platforms, the first step in setting up your Twitter account is to set up your profile. Part of the beauty of Twitter is the simplicity of it. In your profile you have the option for putting a picture, your name, your location, your website, and your bio limited to 140 characters. That’s it! Now, when someone finds you and clicks on your name, they are going to see your bio, so keep this in mind. You will want to put information in your bio indicating who you are and what you do. The better job you do at this, the more likely someone is going to follow you or click on the link to your website. Here are some tips for filling out your profile:

Make sure to put a space between your first and last name when filling in your profile. Your name is not your username on Twitter, and if you do not put a space, anyone searching for you will not find you if you do not have a space between your first and last name.
Upload a picture of yourself. It is normally a good idea to use the same picture you use on Facebook and other social media platforms. This way, other users will recognize you from other encounters they have had with you.
Add your website to your profile. If you can remove the “www” from your website. When you are seen on Twitter, your website will normally be truncated to some extent, and removing the “www” from it is an easy way to get more of your URL seen by other users. Before you to this, make sure the link will work if you remove the “www”.
When making putting your bio together make it strong and make sure you get the point across about what it is that you do. You’ll also want to make it social because after all this is a social media platform.

Connect With People

Okay, now just like we’re doing on Facebook, we’re going to search for people on twitter that have similar interests to us. You should try to connect with all of your friends and acquaintances, but you should also try to connect with other people in your industry (for us, buyers & sellers). One of the easiest ways to find people who have similar interests is through a website called TweepSearch.com. Here’s how we use this website:

Go to TweepSearch.com
Conduct a search for something like “Real Estate Investor Michigan”
Tweepsearch will return all the users that have real estate investor and Michigan in their bio.
Now, scan through the list and look for users that have a lot of followers but are following fewer people. This is a good sign that their followers like what they have to say and are interested in what you searched on.
Click on their list of followers and begin to add followers that seem like they are interested in your search term…in our case they’re real estate investors. One other thing you should look at is when the last time the user has accessed the system. Normally we only add users that have been active within the last 24 hours.

Now, when you follow people, you’re likely to get about 40% of them to follow you back. Twitter has limits on how many people that you can follow, and this is based upon how many people are following you. The trick is to keep your number of followers and the number of people you are following as even as possible. So, for all the people who do not follow you back, you are going to need to unfollow them. You should do this about 24 to 48 hours after you follow them if they have not followed you back.

I will add that you can follow quite a few people on twitter at once, but there are limits. Check out Twitter’s Following Rules to understand what you should be doing. They don’t tell you how many people you can follow and unfollow without getting in trouble, but they do use the term “hundreds”. This tells me I can’t follow or unfollow more than 199 people a day on a regular basis. If you stick to these numbers you should be safe. Just remember they are monitoring you at all times, so don’t overdo it. If you do, your account can get suspended.

Turn Off Notices

Twitter allows you the choice of receiving an email every time someone follows you or sends you a message. When you’re following a large number of people at a time, you’re going to receive many email messages if you elect to leave these settings turned on. By default Twitter enables notices, so you will have to turn them off if to do not wish to receive emails. I made the mistake the first day I started adding followers in mass quantity to leave the notices on. If you’re going to be adding a lot of followers, I would highly recommend turning the notices off. You will literally have hundreds of emails in a matter of hours if you do not.

Additionally, if you have the Twitter application on your cell phone make sure to turn the notices off on it as well. I made this mistake too and my phone was ringing literally every 30 seconds. This is the power of Twitter in action.

Connect Your Other Social Media Platforms

Most of the social media platforms out there have the ability to automatically tweet on twitter every time you post on that site. In our case, we have our blog, Facebook and BiggerPockets.com connected to Twitter. This will allow you to maximize your message from the other social media websites you are using and get your message in front of all your Twitter followers.

So this is what we are currently doing on Twitter. We are learning more every day, and if you have additional recommendations for Twitter, please leave a response on this post.

2010: 08/11
CATEGORY: regular
Social Media Networking
Video
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Day 35 – Drive Leads to Your Website Using Videos

Today is Day 35 in our drive for $60,000 in 60 days by investing in real estate. Today we are going to talk more about online marketing and specifically how we are going to use video submission sites to generate buyer and seller leads. This requires a bit of work up front, but the good thing is that once it is in place, you can essentially forget about it, and your videos can generate traffic to your site even years later. I’ll mention that we haven’t actually done this yet, but below is what we plan to do…

Start With Keywords

The first thing we are going to do is generate our list of keywords. What we’re going to do is get a list of 100 keywords for buyers and 100 keywords for sellers. To find our keywords, we are going to use the Google Keyword Tool. This tool allows you to search for different keyword terms, and it generates a list of similar keywords that you should consider. It is very useful because for the various keywords listed it gives you an idea of their popularity because it tells you how many people search that keyword every month. So, we can search for broad terms like “Sell Home” or “Buy a House” to generate a very good list of keywords for buyers and sellers.

For the keywords we select, we are going to look for terms that have between 1,000 and 50,000 searches per month. We don’t want to look at search terms more popular than this because the more popular a search term is, the more difficult it will be to show up on the first page of a Google search. So, we will go for some of the less popular keywords because this will give us a greater chance of showing up at the top of the Google search.

Once we have our keywords selected, we are going to organize them into five different categories.

Create Videos

Now, that we have our keywords, we are going to create a series of videos. We have grouped our keywords into 5 different categories, so we are going to create one video for each category. So, we will have a total of 10 videos (5 for buyers and 5 for sellers).

When we create our videos, we will have essentially the same message outline:

Introduce who we are
Tell them how we can help them
Tell them the advantage to working with us
Provide them with our contact information (Phone Number, Email, Website)
Thank them for viewing

This is a fairly broad outline, and you can see that we can tailor our message to our keywords when we talk to them about how we can help them, and the advantage to working with us. For example, if one of our buyer keyword categories is “Buying Foreclosures” then we will talk about how we can help someone buy foreclosures and how it can be to their advantage to work with us.

Once we have our videos recorded, we will edit them to add transitions and include text displaying our company name, phone number and website. Below is a sample of two videos we recorded today. The first is for sellers, and the second is for buyers.

Submit The Videos to The Internet

Once we have our videos created we need to submit them to the internet. Now, there is a really cool video submission website called Tubemogul.com. This site allows you to upload your video one time, and then they will syndicate your video to a number of online video hosting sites like Youtube, Daily Motion, etc. You will have to create accounts on each of the various video websites that you want Tubemogul to submit your videos to, and this can take some time, but it is well worth the effort. So go through and create accounts on all the various video hosting websites.

Once you have all your accounts setup, you are ready to submit your videos to Tubemogul. When you upload your video through Tubemogul they will give you the ability to tag your video with keywords. Be sure to tag your videos with the keywords you have researched. Since we started with 100 keywords and we put all of these into 5 categories, we should have about 20 keywords for each video. After you have uploaded your video, Tubemogul will ask you which sites you want to syndicate your video to. It goes without saying that you should syndicate to every single one of them. You want to get your content out in as many places on the web as possible.

So this is our plan. We let you know in the next couple days our progress on this task and what kind of response we are getting…

2010: 08/01
CATEGORY: Marketing
regular
Social Media Networking
Video
1 comment

Day 18 – Use Facebook to Promote Your Business

]

Welcome back it’s Day 18 in our Drive for $60,000 in 60 days. First of all, I want to warn you that this blog post is going to be long. However, I’m convinced that the paragraphs that follow are laced with gold. We are going to be talking about how we are using Facebook to leverage our real estate investing business. I will mention though that these same principles can be applied for any business…not just real estate.

Before we start, I have to send out a big THANK YOU to Than Merrill and the rest of the Fortune Builder team. You may know them better from the television show Flip This House on A&E. Last week they held a webinar about using Facebook to promote your real estate business and we are putting a lot of stuff they talked about (plus more) to use. So thanks to everyone at Fortune Builders…and let’s jump right into it…

Networking on Facebook

If you’re not on Facebook, stop reading right now, crawl out of your hole, go to www.facebook.com and sign up. Let’s face it, everybody is on Facebook and this represents an awesome opportunity to network with other people in the business of real estate. So how do we find these people on Facebook? Well, its actually very simple…we’re going to search for them. First of all, you can easily search for things like “Michigan Real Estate” and a number of business pages are going to come up that are related to Michigan Real Estate. We’re going to check out each of these pages and “Like” them if they look like they are talking about real estate investing.

Okay, so what, we’ve found a few pages that are related to Michigan Real Estate. (At least this is what I was thinking listening to Than describe this). However, when you go to any business page, all the people that “Like” that page are listed there. You should be having an “ahah” moment right now. You can click on each of the people that like the page and check out their profile, and if they are real estate investors you can send them a friend request. You see, there are literally thousands of people on these business pages that you can connect with.

So, we have been doing this, and quite frankly I felt a little weird at first sending friend requests to people I don’t know, but it has really generated quite a few pleasant conversations. This is very important. You really want to connect with the people you friend. It’s more important to focus on the relationships you build rather than the number of friends you have. So get engaged in the conversations…you’ll be surprised at how much you can learn from the little snip-its on Facebook.

Now, the guys at Fortune Builder recommend that you don’t send more than 20-25 friend requests each day because you can get your account shut down that way…I think they are speaking from experience. Don’t worry though, you want to focus on generating good conversations with the people you friend, and it’s difficult to even get to 20-25 doing this.

Update Your Profile

Now, when you send a friend request to someone that you don’t know, there’s a good chance they’re going to look at your profile to see just who the heck you are. I have updated my profile to make it very clear that I am a real estate investor, so they can see that we have something in common. In fact many people have thanked me for sending the friend request which is pleasantly surprising. You can check out my profile at www.facebook.com/toddbrittingham.

Also, I’ll point out that you should create a cool URL like we have done. You can easily do this by going to www.facebook.com/username.

Create a Business Page

When you sign up for Facebook, you have a profile. You would think that you could just create a profile for your business, but Facebook doesn’t allow this. They have what are called business pages (formerly fan pages). So, you should create a business page. This is easily done by clicking on the “Ads and Pages” link located on the left side of your ”Home” page. Next click on the “Pages” link on the left side of the page. You will then be able to click “+Create A Page” to create your business page. Your business page will be the face of your business on facebook. You can post everything that your business is doing there and keep in touch with everyone that “Likes” your business page.

In the next few sections, we will talk about how you can setup your business page to really capture contacts.

Create an FBML Page

FBML stands for FaceBook Markup Language…it is a language Facebook has created, but quite frankly I don’t care about that. What I do care about is that you can use this to create a custom page for your business. Rather than describe how I did it I’m just going to refer you to a great blog post that describes how to do it. Now, you’re going to have to know how to generate HTML code to do this. If you cannot do this, then I would recommend hiring it out. It is actually quite simple to create the code, and it should not be to costly. Below is a screen shot showing how we have our welcome page setup. If you follow the steps from the blog post, this will be the page all of your new connections will land on.

www.facebook.com/MichiganPropertyBuyer

You can view the actual page by going to www.facebook.com/MichiganPropertyBuyer.

Now you’ll notice we are doing several different things here. We have recorded a video that people can click on to get an idea on who we are. In the video we are just introducing ourselves, and asking the view to like our page. This is really powerful, and I would encourage everyone to try to do this…it’s really much easier than you might think.

We have also added an opt in box for any potential investors that want to join our buyer list. This opt-in box was created using our email marketing site (Icontact). Icontact has a really easy tool that will generate the HTML code for your opt in box and you just paste it in. This is pretty cool because everyone that signs up here automatically gets added to our buyer list in Icontact. (Automation is wonderful!!!)

We think this is going to be really powerful because most everyone we are get to come to our page will be real estate investors and it will be a great way for us to grow our buyer list virtually for free. Of course we are also promoting our DrivetoFreedom.com blog and we have added links to follow us on the different social media platforms we are on.

Updated 8/16/2010: Facebook is changing all tab pages, and now will require that the page is only 520 pixels wide. This will require your page to be a little narrower than it currently can be, so you will need to take this into account when designing your content. The 520 pixel change will take effect on 8/23/2010. For more information on these changes you can click here.

Add Your Opt-In Box to The Wall on Your Business Page –

UPDATE 11/1/2010 – Facebook is no longer allowing this functionality

We also want to add our opt-in box to the wall on our business page. Once someone “Likes” our page, they will no longer land on our Welcome page, so we want our opt-in box on our wall…because this is where they will land. To do this, you can use the same opt-in box that is on your welcome page. You just need to add the same HTML code you used on your welcome page. Do this by going to “Ads and Pages” on your “Home” page and then click on the “Pages” link. Next click on “Edit Page” under the business page you have created.

You should see an application called “Profile HTML” listed here that you can edit. If you don’t see it, then search in Facebook for “Profile HTML”…go to the Profile HTML page and then click to add the application to your page.

Now, click on edit under the Profile HTML application. You will see that you can add HTML to either a tab or a box. You’ll want to add it to the box. This will create your opt-in box on the wall of your profile. You can also paste the code in tab which will add a profile HTML tab to your business page.

Promote Your Business Page

Next you can create an ad on Facebook to promote your business page. Just go to www.facebook.com/ads and you can walk through step by step to create your ad. Basically you will have 3 components to the ad: a headline, a picture and your message. You will want to have an attention grabbing headline so think carefully about this. You will also want to have a picture that captures people’s attention. In your message you want to ask people an intriguing question.

Now, with Facebook ads, you can set it up so only people in certain areas, and certain demographics will see the ad. What is really cool about Facebook ads is that you can setup keywords indicating the likes and interests of your viewers. For example, you can put “real estate investing” in as a keyword, and your ad will only be displayed to people who have indicated that they like real estate investing. You can also select a region where you want your ads to appear. So we have selected the metro Detroit area. Finally you need to select you bid for the ads along with your daily budget. This is a cost per click (CPC) ad, and Facebook will give you an idea on how much you should be bidding.

Note, if you’re not getting a 2% click rate (clicks / impressions) then you need to adjust your ad because it is not working. Facebook will start to show your ad less and less if you do not achieve a 2% click rate.

Select a URL for Your Business Page

Similar to selecting your URL for your personal profile, you should select a URL for your business page. Again you should think about this carefully because it cannot be changed in the future. I will add that Facebook does have one little restriction on this. You must have 25 people that like your page before you can change your URL. This is kind of annoying but it really shouldn’t take you too long to get 25 people that like your page.

So that’s about it. I know there is a lot of content here, but it really only took us a few days to set this up. But go at your own pace…we have been pretty aggressive with it, but you can spend a few minutes a day doing this and the results will start to add up…oh and please let us know what else you are doing by leaving comments…

2010: 07/15
CATEGORY: Networkding
regular
Social Media Networking
Video
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