An Effective Newspaper Marketing Technique for Real Estate Investors

Today I’m writing from my hotel room in Vegas. If you’ve never come to Vegas for March Madness, I highly encourage it. There are few things as fun in life as sitting in a giant stadium, with dozens of games on the screen, while crazy drunk people scream at each other when their team scores.

So, since I’ve got to get back to the action, let me share with you this week, one of my most “secret” marketing techniques, which helps pay for my trips to Vegas and the many vacations I get to take each year. (In the last year, I’ve been to Switzerland, Florida, Vegas three times, California and will soon be heading back to California and then the Caribbean.)

Here’s what it’s all about: The first thing you do is write a ¼ page ad marketing your company. The ad should include all of the marketing ‘tricks’ of a good advertisement, such as offering a free special report and showing the benefits of working with your company.

Once you’re done with the ad, you place it in your local newspaper.

Pick a cheap paper to run it in, and run it during the week – not on a weekend. On the day your ads runs, grab a few of the papers. The point of running this ad is to not get a bunch of calls and do deals that way. (You will get calls and if you do a deal or two, that’s a bonus.) But, what you’re going to do is photocopy your ad from the newspaper.

And, surprise… you’ll have a marketing flyer from a credible source. You see, you’re going to make a ton of copies of the ad and then you can pass them out on people’s doorsteps. Or, when you pass a ‘for rent’ sign on a particular street, you can write down the address.

Next, you’ll mail the person a copy of the ad with a yellow sticky note attached that says, “I though you’d be interested in this.” Pretty much, your own creativity is the limit of what you can do with this new flyer you created.

What you may not realize…

Is that anything in a newspaper adds a ton of credibility to the source. So even though it’s an ad you placed, if people see your copy, they’ll think to themselves, “XYZ Realty was in the Johnson Times, they must be a great company to work with.”

More importantly, all you have to do is place the ad once and you can use the copies for years to come. This is one of the most inexpensive, yet profitable marketing techniques you can put in action today, to differentiate yourself from the competition.

I’ve used it many times (testing out different ads) and it’s never failed me. Plus, you can hand a copy of the ad to someone you’re talking to and say “we specialize in buying houses in this neighborhood, perhaps you saw the information we ran in the Johnson Times, here it is.” Try this today, don’t be lazy, it works. Now back to the ball games.

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.