Real Estate List Building Secrets – How to capture emails and build your real estate list automatically- Part 1

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One of the best ways to build your real estate list and to drive traffic to your real estate website is by using video marketing.  That’s right, you can drive tons of traffic to your real estate website using videos that are uploaded around the entire internet on video sharing sites such as YouTube, Revver, Metacafe, Google Video, and dozens of other video sharing sites.

Today, I want to talk to you about one of the most important strategies that every real estate professional should use when building their business.  The strategy I’m referring to is list building.  That’s right; you need to build a list.  Why?  Because once you build a targeted and responsive list, selling and buying your real estate investments will be as easy as pushing the send button within your email client.

But before I go into how you can build your real estate list, I need to make a very important point.  If you have been online for a while now, you might have heard the phrase “The money is in the list.”  If you have heard that expression before, let me tell you something, that phrase is WRONG.  Here’s why…

First, that phrase should read. “The money is in the relationship you build with a targeted list.” You can have a list of 1 million people but if these people have no interest in real estate, you will never sell them anything.  Also, if you have never emailed them before and have never built a relationship with them, it’s going to be awfully hard to sell something to them.  Especially when you send them an email once a year.

You need to be in constant contact with your list.  You need to interact with them and talk to them as you would talk to your friend.  Always and I mean always, write your emails to one person.  When you write your emails to a list of thousands of people, write as you would write to just one person.  Why?  Because when that email hits John Doe’s mailbox, he is going to be the only one reading it.  John Doe needs to feel like you are writing just to him.  Use his/her name in the email to make it more personal, be open, friendly, and transparent.  Believe me, your subscribers will appreciate it and send emails back to you telling you how much they appreciate it and how they can’t wait for your next email.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about how you should capture those emails so you can build your real estate list.  You will need to create a squeeze page.  A squeeze page is a simple web page with the sole purpose of capturing the visitor’s name and/or email address.  That’s it.  The only thing that the visitor can do on the squeeze page is to either enter their name and/or email address in the opt in box or leave the page.

Why would someone want to leave their name and/or email address?  Once you figure out who your target market is, you’ll want to either create a pdf report, video, or audio to give away free to your visitors.  You have to make sure that the gift is something they will value and would be willing to pay some money for it.  For instance, if someone is heading for foreclosure, do you think they would give you their name and email address if you told them that you can give them the exact steps they need to take to save their home?  I bet you they would.

So the first thing you need to do is to create a killer PDF report, video or audio.

Sidenote: Typically, videos convert much better that PDF reports.

Next, you need to create the squeeze page that will include several critical ingredients.  Those ingredients include a headline, subheadline, benefits, testimonials, graphic, opt in form, SPAM disclosure and more.   I will explain all of those ingredients in my next post here next week.  Not only will I explain what each ingredient stands for but I will give you some solid examples you can swipe from me for some of the ingredients.  How does that sound?

For now, I want you to leave me a comment here and let me know your thought s on this subject.  Are you using a squeeze page in your business?  If so, how are the conversions?  Are you tracking your clicks and conversions?  I hope so.  Either way, let me know and I’ll try to address them on my next blog post.

To Your Success,

Peter Kolat

Photo Credit: Chad Jones

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