advertising

Bandit Signs: The Ugly Way to Advertise Your Real Estate Business

by Marty Boardman | October 6, 2011

It didn’t feel right. As I walked out of the print shop with 50 signs I couldn’t help but wonder if this plan would backfire on me. The huge decal on the back window of my Ford Expedition, the cheap little classified ads in the local Super Shopper – and now this. Little white signs [...]

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Real Estate Marketing

The #1 Newspaper Marketing Technique for Real Estate Investors

by Jason Hanson | March 20, 2011

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. [...]

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Real Estate Marketing

How to Spend Your Real Estate Marketing Dollars

by Jason Hanson | December 19, 2010

I just got an email with the following question… “I recently found a money partner that has agreed to fund my marketing costs, so I am planning on increasing my yellow letters and post cards to 1,000 per month from 250. I can send a yellow letter out for about 48 cents and they seem [...]

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Real Estate Marketing

How Much Real Estate Market Research Do You Do?

by Jason Hanson | May 1, 2010

I’m not talking about the type of market research you think I am. You probably think I’m talking about knowing your zip codes, and the types of properties in your area, etc. Yes, that’s important but I want to share with you something just as important. I’m talking about researching your competition. Knowing everything they [...]

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Real Estate Marketing

Why I Want You To Stop Marketing Now

by Jason Hanson | December 9, 2009

Stop marketing. I’m serious. Have I lost my mind? Probably, but not when it comes to what I’m about to share with you. Yes, I know that marketing is the lifeblood of every real estate investing business. But if you’re a smart marketer you make sure your marketing dollars have a good return on investment. [...]

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Real Estate Marketing

The “Unusual” Way to Boost Your Real Estate Marketing Results

by Jason Hanson | November 4, 2009

I was driving around Baltimore City earlier this week. At a stoplight I got stuck behind an SUV with a sticker on its back window that read “lose 10 pounds in 10 minutes, call XXX”. I immediately laughed and thought to myself, “yeah right.” Why did I think this? Because it wasn’t honest and it [...]

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Real Estate Marketing

New FTC Advertising Guidelines Could Affect Real Estate Professionals!

by Christina Inman | October 24, 2009

Now, before I get started, please keep in mind that I am not a lawyer, nor should you consider what you are about to read as legal advice. I am just trying to pass something along that I think you should all be aware of.

In case you haven’t heard, on October 5, the Federal Trade Commission issued an update to its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising–the first update since 1980!

This update is mainly concerned with two things; first, stopping fake blog sites where the blogger is a totally made-up person with a totally made-up story designed to sell something (you know, those fake weight loss blogs, teeth whitening blogs, and money-making blogs we’ve all seen time and again), and second, how advertisements can use testimonials and endorsements.

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Real Estate Marketing

This Marketing Method Has Made Me a Small Fortune

by Jason Hanson | October 17, 2009

The marketing method I’m about to share with you always seems to elicit a lot of emotional responses. A lot of people hate it and bad mouth it, but guess what? I don’t care. Why? Because it makes money and it gets results. You should track all of your marketing methods and if they’re working keep doing them and if they don’t, then obviously stop.

I’m pretty much willing to bet that anybody who doesn’t like this method has never used it (the most likely reason) or has never gotten a deal from it because they don’t know what they’re doing (I’ll show you the perfect plan.) So what method am I talking about?

Here’s a blurb from an email I received last week, from one of my partners…

“Over the past week I have been putting out my new signs, I attached a pic of it, check it out. So far the signs have been pulling an excellent amount of calls. I’m getting an overwhelming response. For example, I put out 50 signs last night in high traffic areas and just today I got 11 calls.”

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Real Estate Marketing

How Online Classified Ad Syndication Can Help You Sell Your Properties Faster!

by J. Lamar Ferren | October 3, 2009

In this blog post, I want to tell you about 3 powerful websites that can post your property listing ads all over the net on autopilot for FREE.

I don’t know about you, but I hate manually posting ads because it takes up too much of my time. I’m always look for ways to make my business marketing easier so I can concentrate on putting more deals together. Although my assistant has taken a lot of this weight off of my shoulders (which is something you may want to consider getting, if you haven’t), I still feel that online ad syndication sites are top notch.

Automation is something I thrive for!

So, what is Online Ad Syndication

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Real Estate Marketing

How to learn from Junk mail

by Winston Westbrook | September 28, 2009

I go to my post office box once a week. I insert my key and kaplow out comes a pile of junk mail. Sometimes I think I am just paying for my post office box just so companies can send me junk, lol. Just a few years ago I would’ve been ticked off to be getting so much junk mail but now I embrace junk mail. I love junk mail.

I get junk mail from banks, auto dealers, insurance companies, fast food chains, super markets, travel, get rich quick schemes and the list goes on and on.

Fortune 500 companies spend millions hiring the top advertising agencies of the world to create and come up with the best advertising. These advertising agencies take into account every little detail and every word that’s said.

I know we don’t have millions of dollars to spend on the best advertising money can buy so why don’t we learn from these advertisers and put together the best of best for FREE. Let’s learn from our competition and such.

The next time you pull out a pile of junk mail and instead of just tossing it into the trash stop and look it over for a second. Separate the mail that catches your attention from the mail that is flat out junk mail and uninteresting. Take the mail that seems interesting and look for the following:

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Real Estate Marketing

How to use Postlets to Improve Your Craigslist Posts

by Justin McClelland | September 17, 2009

There are quite a few features that Postlets offers, some fee-based and some free. In this post I’m going to focus on the free features and show you how you can take your CraigsLists posts from this:

To This:

Postlets Tutorial for Craigslist

In this tutorial postlets.com does most of the work for you. However, in relation to my previous post, I’ll also show you how you can create the illusion of an embeded YouTube property video. The procedure is as follows:

Step 1:

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Real Estate Marketing

Can Split Testing Improve Your Real Estate Ad Response Rates?

by J. Lamar Ferren | August 29, 2009

I remember how frustrated I used to get whenever I would go to Craigslist.com or Backpage.com and post multiple ads for buyers, investors, sellers, or even my deals; I’d get responses here and there. I’d just keep re-posting the ads that wouldn’t get any responses, hoping they would eventually get me a lead.

Foolishly, I never saved all the ads that worked and I kept concentrating on the ads that had low responses. I kept re-posting to various sites because I thought they were awesome ads and I didn’t understand why nobody would respond…

BTW – If you have also been getting little to no response with your advertising, then keep reading!

I then came across and interesting concept… Split Testing.

Split Testing Can Improve Your Marketing!

I can’t tell you how crucial Split Testing is to your business. Split Testing will usually tell you if you have a good ad or not.

What is Split Testing? Split testing is an extremely powerful strategy for increasing the effectiveness of your marketing. You can use it for almost anything. It is a way of testing two or more marketing campaigns and identifying which one is more effective.

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Real Estate

7 Reasons Why Real Estate Investors Should Use Direct Response Marketing

by J. Lamar Ferren | August 15, 2009

Direct Response Marketing is hands down the best concept to use for Real Estate Investing…better yet, for any business!

Not using direct response marketing is like taking a bucket of money, hopping in your car, driving 100 MPH blindfolded, and sticking the bucket of money out the window as it flies all over the place.

Ok… maybe it’s not that insane, but my point is that if you’re not using direct response marketing you could be wasting a bunch of money, a lot of time, and you might not have a clue how much its really costing you overall.

Let me ask you something…

Are you still out there chasing motivated sellers and buyers?
Have you ever wondered why you’re not getting the response you want from your marketing?
Have you ever wondered how to improve the response of your marketing (meaning get more buyer & seller leads) without breaking your pockets, but you have no clue where to start?

If you said yes, to any of the questions above, then it could very well be that you aren’t using direct response marketing. If you are using it, then you may not be doing it right!

Before I tell you why you should use direct response marketing, let’s talk about what direct response marketing actually is:

Wikipedia says…

“Direct-response marketing is a form of marketing designed to solicit a direct response which is specific and quantifiable. The delivery of the response is direct between the viewer and the advertiser, that is, the customer responds to the marketer directly. This is in contrast to direct marketing in which the marketer contacts the potential customer directly.”

Notice the words I underlined above. We’ll discuss that in a second.

There are 7 reasons why you need to use direct response marketing in your business:

1. You Can Get Buyers and Sellers to Chase You

Just imagine your phone ringing off the hook with high quality leads that are ready to do business with you. It takes a lot of time and energy to cold call motivated sellers and knock on hundreds of doors in order to get a response. Although these methods can be effective, why should you do all the work? They need your services. It’s not the other way around.

Remember, part of this concept is for the customer (buyer or seller) to respond to you directly!

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Blogs

What The Yellow Pages Can Tell You About The Economy

by Richard Warren | July 27, 2009

“The new phone books are here, the new phone books are here!”That was a line from Steve Martin in the movie The Jerk, he

was finally “somebody” because his name was in the phonebook. Well, today I received the latest edition of the Dex yellow pages directory for Las Vegas. Without even opening it, I saw a snapshot of the local economy.

Las Vegas was a city that was growing so fast that the yellow pages were published twice a year, January and July, the only market in the country to do so. There were so many new businesses opening up that the publisher, R.H. Donnelley, felt that they couldn’t make someone wait as long as twelve months to advertise. With each edition the book was bigger and heavier as more and more businesses advertised.

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