All Forum Posts by: Jason Fraser

a lot of your marketing will need to consistent. Meaning if you mail out to a list of 1000 people, you will need to be prepared to mail out to them four more times (once a month) to see results. Your efforts today will likely see results 90 days from now. It is possible to get calls from one round of mailings but to get the results your looking for you will need to do multiple mailings to the same people.

If it's a matter of cost or being flooded, then focus your marketing. For example out of state absentee owners in a few zip codes vs the whole county or several counties.

Brandon Turner wrote a great article on the BP blog on apps a few months ago.

http://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2013/07/26/real-estate-apps/

It pretty much covered most of the ones I use including, Trulia, Zillow, Realtor, Google Drive.

One that isn't covered is Evernote, it's great for keeping notes and docs in the cloud for quick access anywhere.

your welcome.

If Realtors are a big part of your of customer base, realtor.org has several reports that will give you plenty of insight into Realtors. From demographics to technology usage.

Have you looked into local REIAs? The one I'm part of in Salt Lake City, Utah (I'm also a board member), sells sponsorship opportunities where a contractor (I.e. A home inspector such as yourself) can pay to make a presentation in front of our members during one of our monthly meetings and/or set IPA table with their marketing material. The audience we have includes realtors as well.

You could see if there are local REIAs that offer something similar. You can also google local realtors networking groups. I believe there is a networking group for realtors that may have local groups called YPN Young Professional Network. These groups may have events and meetings that could provide you an audience for your business.

Are you part of a local REIA? It would be a great source to meet other landlords and rehabbers who could provide you with referrals and testimonials on the people they have used. Plus it's a great way to find future properties.

The one that I'm part of in Salt Lake City is made of mostly rehabbers and buy and hold investors so for me to get referrals on contractors is pretty easy.

You could do a hybrid, some of it open (like limit it to let's say 10 searches a month for free) and other parts closed with more benefits (like unlimited searches) if you become a member.

BP has this model with the File Place area. You can download three documents per week as a free member but if you have a BP Pro account you can download more documents per week.

By doing a hybrid, you don't lose people who aren't interesting in creating account altogether (and could convert later on) yet you can focus your time and energy on the people on the people who have taking the next step by creating an account.

it's going to depend on the audience that you're interested in attracting to your business.

If you're a wholesaler looking to generate cash buyer leads, a ebook on "50 ways to save on your next rehab project" is going to attract a different audience compared to "How to prevent foreclosure and save your house".

Identify your audience and then identify a problem that is common to them. That should give you the foundation of what your ebook should be about.

Another idea....start small with offering a free report and see what response and results you get before investing too much time into an ebook. You can always hire someone to write it for you.

And there is always video as an alternative. Just make sure it's a great quality video since it's a marketing piece for your business.

done

Craigslist made a change recently overall. Now it's just placing a text based ad and uploading a limited number photos. So no more embedding HTML.

thanks for starting this thread. It actually inspired me to take another action step. Technically this was yesterday, but I reviewed the absentee owners list i received, identified the best targets to mail to, went to the post office to get stamps, and mailed out my first set of post cards.

Today's agenda items including reviewing a marketing podcast and reviewing my marketing plan to make sure it's the most cost effective strategy.