505: SEO and Social Media Marketing for Real Estate Investors

March 29, 2021bmanasseroUncategorizedNo comments

SHOW NOTES FOR EPISODE 505: SEO AND SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING FOR REAL ESTATE INVESTORS

Real estate marketing has come a long way since posting “For Sale” signs on front lawns as the sole way to attract potential buyers. In today’s podcast, the coolest guy in SEO Kris Reid shares how successful real estate businesspersons are utilizing the Internet, social media, and SEO to 10X their real estate marketing and sales efforts with explosive results.

What You Will Learn

What SEO is and how it can help you grow your real estate business
How to get your company’s name to rank in a top 10 Google search
The secret power of “backlinks” to boosting your Google search ratings
How do Google’s ranking algorithms work
What’s more effective: Social Media-generated traffic or Google-generated traffic
Successful SEO strategies for Realtors
How real estate investors use SEO to grow their portfolios and profits

About Our Guest

Kris Reid

Truth is most businesses fail. They don’t fail because the entrepreneur isn’t working hard enough and they don’t fail because they’ve got bad products or services. Most businesses fail simply because they can’t get enough customers. Our guest, developed a simple system to get your message in front of your ideal customer to predictably grow your business. And that’s exactly what he is going to share that system with us today. Our guest has designed and implemented this simple system for people like world-renowned business author Mike Michalowicz, the biggest business podcast on the planet Entrepreneurs on Fire with John Lee Dumas and Avery Carl one of the top 100 realtors in the US with over sales of $158 Million in 2020! This proven system is repeatable for any business, in any industry.

More About Kris

He’s originally from Brisbane, Australia
Studied software engineering in the university
There are only two ways to make money as a software engineer:
- Move to Silicon Valley, work for a tech start-up or work in finance
He choose the finance route and moved to London
- Worked for a bunch of big banks to “help billionaires make more money”
- Making tons of money
- Had Europe as his playground
  - Go to Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin on the weekends
- Living the good life!
2008 financial crisis hit
- Lost his job
- No jobs to be found
We went from feeling invincible to jobless
He went back to Australia to figure out what he was going to do with his life

Gamer

He was using his computer skills one day to build an online gangster game
But then he had to figure out how to get people to the website to play the game
That’s when he started dabbling in SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Put some backlinks on his website and it shot up in the rankings
Generated a bunch of traffic
He learned how to boost a website’s ranking and how to get people to a website
He has been doing SEO ever since

How SEO Works

Google has an army of software engineers constantly working on Google algorithms
- They try to determine exactly what you are searching for and to give you the best search results
- Backlinks are critical
Back in the 1990s, the search engines were
- Yahoo
- Alta Vista
- Ask Jeeves
- Excite
- But they all were terrible
Larry Page, the cofounder of Google, was in college (university) at that time
- Kris was drinking beers and chasing girls
- Larry Page was changing the Internet
- Larry thought, if you write a really good thesis in grad school and everyone references your thesis, it must be a really good thesis
- He applied the same idea to the Internet and websites. If someone references your website a lot of times, then, it must be a really good website
  - If other websites reference your website, with a link back to your website (a backlink), then it must be very good
  - That’s when Larry created the “page link algorithm”
  - For example, you could say you’re the best real estate investor in Florida. And, if someone is doing a search online for “the best real estate investor Florida,” how would Google know if it’s true? They can only know by what other people are saying about you, and they determine that by who is linking to you.
    - Therefore, the more backlinks you have to your website from other “credible” websites the more trust they have in you. Especially with links, using our example, from…
      - real estate websites
      - Florida websites
      - And the links would have to come from “important” websites
    - THAT’S THE SECRET TO HOW GOOGLE WORKS!
    - You need to build up your reputation
      - Warren Buffet said, “It takes a lifetime to build up a reputation and seconds to destroy it.”
      - And that’s the way Google works
        
        You put up a new website and Google doesn’t trust it
        
        It takes time to build up a reputation

Social Media-Generated Traffic vs. Google-Generated Traffic

Twitter & Facebook
- You used to be able to generate a lot of traffic to your website from Twitter and Facebook
  - They’re always playing around with algorithms because they make their money from ads
  - They don’t make money from people chatting with their friends, they make their money when someone clicks on one of their ads
  - They care more about advertisers than the people that just post things
Google
- The difference with Google is that they NEED to provide good search results
- But they still make 95% of their income from Google ads
- They always try to manipulate the search results so that people click on more ads
- But, they always need to provide the free listings, otherwise no one will use their search engine
- For example, if you did a real estate search on “real estate investors – Florida”
  - There will always be some “paid results” at the top of the search
  - Then, there will be the 10 “organic” free listings, followed by more paid results on the bottom
- Whenever someone clicks on the paid results, someone has to pay Google
  - And the ads can be very expensive
    - It can be as low as $2 per click, up to a search for ” Truck Accident Attorneys Chicago,” which can cost up to $300 per click
- SEO is the way to get into the top free “organic” listings
  - It takes a lot more time but it’s a much better return
The big difference between paid ads on Facebook, Twitter and Google and SEO is…
- Once you stop paying, you stop getting
- With SEO, the work you did last month, you get this month, next month, next year and the year after
  - It compounds and gets better and better
  - It’s slower to grow, but once you do, that snowballing effect and the compounding kicks in and it grows like crazy

Realtor Marketing

Some Realtors are spending $10-15K a month just on Zillow
They’re making Zillow richer
Whoever pays the most, gets the best returns (just like advertising on Twitter, Facebook and Google) and with direct mail
If your competitor is paying more, they can steal your traffic
Realtors who are using SEO are building a ring of defense around their business – no one can take that traffic away from your business
Avery Carl, one of Wall Street Journal’s Top 100 Agents in 2020, did $158 million in sales last year (300% growth in one year) — and she did that while pregnant and having a baby
- She uses SEO
- She wrote Kris complaining that they don’t have enough agents to close the deals
- Kris does reverse engineering. He first asks:
  - How many agents do you need?
    - She says they need to hire one a month
      - He asks: how many agents to apply do you need to get one good new agent?
        
        She says 3
        
        He asks: How many leads do you need into your website to get 3 good interviews?
        
        She says it takes 10 applicants to get one good interview. So for 3 good interviews, they would need 30 leads
        
        He asks what’s the conversion rate for the number of people searching to get an actual interview (this is in Florida and Tennessee)
        
        She says 10%
        
        He says: You’ll need 300 searching to click on your site
        
        That shows how predictable digital marketing is. But you need to know exactly, by trial and error, what your stats are
He has done similar strategies with people trying to raise money for a deal using the same reverse engineering approach

Finding Off-Market Deals With SEO

Case Study
- One of his clients (who is based in Los Angeles) and 4 of his friends work for a major nationwide realtor
- They were tired of the terrible leads they were getting
- They wanted to find distressed, off-market seller leads
- Kris conducted a Google “key word” research study
  - They tested “Sell My House Fast,” “Sell My House for Cash” and many other variations of those key words for the entire L.A. area (every single suburb)
    - They found out how many of these key word searches were happening in each community and there were thousands
    - They also looked at who was advertising on those Google searches and how long they have been advertising
      - If they have been advertising on those key words for a number of years, you can be sure it converts
  - They then built a website for their client with separate pages for every single suburb of the Los Angeles area, with key words that included the key words and that local suburb (i.e. “Sell My House Fast in Hermosa Beach”)

Biggest Mistake

He would have read more business books
He could have avoided a lot of the problems if he had done that early on
Especially, two books by Michael Michaelowicz (a client of his and a former Old Dawg guest) – Profit First (how to always have a profitable business and keep that front of mind) and Clockwork (how to build a business that does not revolve around you)
He was a software engineer and knew nothing about business and accounting
He made lots of mistakes
He had his head of HR steal $30K
He now uses a Profit First accountant to handle all his books and accounts
Your business needs to stick to its “Queen Bee” role
On his current conference, the Real Estate Masters Summit, they have hired a whole team of experts so that they can do it right – that’s a Clockwork tactic
If he would have employed these principles 10 years a go, he would be lightyears ahead of where he is

Biggest Success

“Niching down” – which means focusing on one particular target business type and becoming an expert in it
He is an Internet marketer and can apply his expertise to many types of businesses
However, the marketing is that much more effective the more you understand the business you are marketing
His primary niche is real estate and there results are outstanding

Advice for Old Dawgs Looking at Real Estate Investing to Help Them in Their Retirement Years

People who have a website and don’t market it are just wasting their money
It’s like a beautiful business card that you never hand out to anyone
Your website and the words on it sell people! But people need to see it to get sold
If you don’t have a marketing budget, don’t build a website
Once you have a digital asset that can provide you with predictable leads, there is no limit to where you can go
Whether you are selling a house, trying to find renters, buying rental properties or need accredited investors a good website can do that
If you’re trying to find Accredited Investors, great key words for a search are “How to invest $50,000”
Google gives you the information your customers are looking for… just type in your search
Look at your potential customers and find out what the problem is that they are trying to fix – what is the pain in their life?
He does his own marketing and he has a steady stream of new clients coming in
2020 was a terrible year for most businesses but it was his best year ever
The great thing about digital marketing is that you can buy what you need or want RIGHT NOW on your phone or computer screen

Real Estate Masters Summit – May 1-8, 2021

He’s so excited about it he can’t sleep
It’s an online “virtual” event
The host of the event in Tony Potts (host of Access Hollywood and 2021 Cannes Film Festival)
Production team worked on the Avengers movies
Some of the speakers scheduled for the event include:
- Bill Manassero, Old Dawg’s REI Network
- Sam Khorramian – Real Closers
- Jim Kirkpatrick – Vice President CBRE
- Ira Zlotowitz – President Eastern Union Bank
- Donald Miller, CEO of Business Made Simple and Author of ‘Building a StoryBrand’ & ‘Marketing Made Simple’
- Avery Carl, Top 100 real estate agent in the U.S. with $158 million in transactions
- David Greene, BiggerPockets.com, Keller-Williams broker and author
- Tristan Ahumada, Lab Coat Agents
Many real estate investors will also be sharing their stories – successes and failures
Topics to be Covered
- Commercial Real Estate
- Triple Net Leasing
- Fast House Sellers
- Luxury Real Estate
- Multifamily
The event is 100% FREE

Rap-It-Up

Favorite business book: 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall
Most valuable web site for success (other than your own): Facebook Groups and BiggerPockets.com and LinkedIn He prefers to network
Favorite app: GoogleMaps
Favorite quote: “You’re net worth is equal to your network.”
If you lost everything – all your assets – and had to start all over, knowing what you already know, and you only had $1,000, what would you do to launch your real estate investing business? I try to practice stoicism and reads The Daily Stoic every day. I try to imagine if I had nothing. I live a pretty frugal life and am confident that I could survive. I would start asking people I knew if they needed a website and would grow my business from there.

How to Reach Kris

Google: Go to Google and type in “The Coolest Guy in SEO” and his name will be plastered all over the search findings (Bill tried this AND verified that’s true).
Website: ArdorSEO.com
To Get a Free Video Evaluation of Your Website: ArdorSEO.com/OldDawgs

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Additional Episode Sponsor: Meno Studio – menostudio777@gmail.com

bmanassero

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