Today on the Listing Agent Lifestyle podcast we're continuing our Money Making Ideas series and we're going to be talking about an exciting topic; generating more buyer leads than you can handle.
It's an interesting topic because from that abundance, from generating more buyer leads than you can handle, you'll see there are a lot of opportunities that come with it.
Let's get started.
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Transcript: Listing Agent Lifestyle Ep084
Dean: Hello, and welcome to the Listing Agent Lifestyle podcast. My name is Dean Jackson, and today we're continuing our series, and we're going to have an exciting topic today. We're going to talk about generating more buyer leads than you can handle. It's an interesting topic, because from that abundance, from generating more buyer leads than you can handle, you'll see that there's a lot of opportunities that come with that. I think you're going to enjoy this episode. Here we go.
Number five is generate more buyer leads than you can handle, as fast as you can. Ready. Shaun, I was talking with Shaun at lunch. He was saying, "Am I generating too many leads? Too much?" One of my things, understand. We talk a lot about this concept of portfolio value, and you start to think that's what it is. When people come into your GetResponse account, they come to your website, they leave their name and their email address, or they come to your website and they ask for MarketWatch, or your guide, or your home loan report. Any of those things that become a lead.
When you've got those people in that kind of container, now they're in that hopper, that there's a two year proven value of that bundle. If you put in a hundred leads today, and we know some of them are going to buy in 90 days, some of them are going to buy in six months, some in nine, some in 12, all the way out to 24. When we did the math with Chuck, it was a 55 45 split. First 12 months versus the second 12 months. Almost equal value in the second as in the first year.
Having that awareness really sets the stage for how you think about investing in those leads. Even if you're generating more leads than you can handle right now, there's still the view of the future of them, is still worth doing, so that you're securing your future business. A lot of times, the mistake that I see people make is they get busy right now. They pause their AdWords, they pause everything, to feel like they're slowing it down. Then when they're finally ready, then they've just did the process again of harvesting that. If you're planting an apple, and you want it to bear fruit two years from now, but you've got enough apples right now, and you dig up the tree in the middle of its growth period. It's just delaying the whole process.
When you start thinking about that, it really helps to think about what is the value of that over time, you know? To detach yourself from the putting pressure on it to multiply itself right away. You spend $600 on AdWords this month, and then 90 days from now, you're thinking, "Well, I've spent $1,800, but I haven't generated anything. This isn't working," To detach that, and to know that you've got an annuity, basically. I mean, you're creating this. Yes, you've got an investment that even if you stopped, if you continue to do those things, people are going to pop out. Like I was saying with Lillian, that we know we've talked about it, that you notice a huge spike this month, because it's all the people who were in last year. Now those ones are popping out, plus the new ones are coming in. You get the that layering effect.
The real value of it, even with living in Winter Haven, it's the oldest of the leads in there is just 12 months old. Because that was a year ago. Most of them are still not even in their first year. You start to look at that, and see that people start popping out at time. We had a lady, that lady on Ruby Lake was from last year at this time, right? She now is coming out, and has a lakefront house that she wants to sell. She responded to the very first postcards that we sent to the lakefront homes, for the getting listings program. You start realizing that the leads that you're generating have extended value. You've got that. If you do some rough math, like just realizing that the ongoing value, or the future value of what you're creating today is probably one of the best investments that you could put that money anywhere.
You think about if you put it in a mutual fund, or you put it in your IRA, or you put it in stocks, or anything else, it'd be a home run if you could get 20% on that money. Here, we're looking at if you could double, or triple, or five times, those are the kind of numbers that you want to realize. That investing in your own business it's the rocket fuel to wealth. I mean, that's the reason most of the wealthiest people in the world are business owners, because they're able to multiply money. That's a big thing.
Speaker 2: How do you take that concept, generate more buyer leads than you can handle, to where the buyer agent is, or the person is, trying to follow up with each of those leads, and connect with them, and so on? There's obviously a limit there in their time. Do you just let some of those, go through the organic situation, as opposed to not being touched personally?
Dean: That's good, because what you do, and we'll talk about it when we talk about converting leads, but you do kind of like what Chuck did when we had this idea that the leads were coming in too fast for them to be able to try and connect with everybody. Instead of going, getting leads, connecting, bonding, showing, connecting, doing the seven step connection process. "Hey Jeff, I got your request for Market Watch." You know, finding out if you're a five star prospect, that kind of thing. Is taking and flipping it around, and saying getting leads, and then just start bonding with everybody like they are a five star prospect. Then connect with the ones that jump out to connect with you, when they're ready to go, and move them into the showing. That's where Instead of investing an hour and a half, or two hours, in an evening, to maybe connect with five people, you invest 45 minutes to create a video that you send to 5,000 people, and you're bonding with all of them. Every day, he's just doing that Milton Daily Homes video. That's how you create a higher volume way of bonding with all of those leads. We'll talk about that in a couple of steps here, but just to understand that the value of the leads that you're generating today is not today's value. It's over the next two years it's going to manifest itself.
Speaker 2: That goes back to the days when I was spending 6,000 a month. There all those leads coming in. We were supporting 14 buyer agents with those leads, and a lot of them were being wasted. We weren't doing any of the videos. Well, frankly, there was no connection process going on at all. It was just everybody who wanted stuff was raising their hand, and we were skimming it off the top, in a sense.
Dean: Right. There's the thing where now all of those people are getting followed up with, and they're going to pop out. That's how it happens. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: That was equip the seven step connection process?
Dean: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The first part of it?
Dean: Now he's bringing it back. It's gotten to a point now the team has grown. Where now you can add the rocket fuel of doing the ongoing follow up, plus doing the seven step connection process. It's like tremendous difference. Yeah. That's all cool. What I wanted to talk about, particularly in this breakthrough, is the ways of maximizing the number of leads that you are able to generate, and the order that I would deploy capital to do that. Most of the time, the easiest thing, if we put this through our leverage checklist, where can we just leverage an idea, and money? Like if the idea of, "Well, I'm generating these leads right now on AdWords, and I'm spending $600 a month. If I just spent more money, I would get more leads."
That's kind of a strategy where I would 100% recommend that, if you're in a situation where you've proven that you can convert those leads into dollars. If you've been running your site for a year, and you spent $300 or $600 a month, and you've multiplied that money, you've proven that you're able to do that, and now it's a one decision thing, because you make that decision one time. You take the action one time, and you double your budget on AdWords, or you maximize whatever the budget is that you're spending, and you get the immediate benefit of all of those extra leads coming in. It's kind of a no brainer, if you have the capital to do that.
I'm always in favor of maximizing things before moving onto the next thing. Rather than doing a little of this, a little of this, a little of this, is let's get all of the Google AdWords leads that we can get. Then let's get all of the Yahoo and Bing leads that we can get, which we've found typically can add about 25% or 30% of what you can get at AdWords. Because there's not as much volume on Yahoo or Bing, but it's still the same model. You're only paying when people click, so it's the same model, and it's an easy way to generate an extra 20% or 30% once you've maxed out your AdWords.
Then Craigslist as an option for generating new leads. I mean, we've been posting Craigslist ads for the lake front homes, for bank owned homes, for our guide. All of those things that we recommend that people do, we've been actually doing, and can see that about half of the number of e-mails that we add by AdWords, we can add that amount by Craigslist. If we added a hundred people through AdWords, we were able to add, in the same amount of time, 50 people through Craigslist. That's kind of, again, ongoing system. Where you can get that going. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Do you have any idea what, if you were starting from scratch, what your financial amount would be to pay into the AdWords, or the Yahoo, or whatever it was. What time frame before you can effectively get a return? Is it a hundred dollars? Is it $1,000? Does it take two months? Does it take eight months?
Dean: Well, I don't think it's attached to the amount of money.
Speaker 4: If you're limited in money.
Dean: That's what I'm saying. Yeah, so if you're limited in money, then I would probably start with the Craigslist ads, and do that consistently. If you had the opportunity to advertise the HUD homes that we talked about, or if you can advertise the inventory list, the bank owned weekly stuff. Because there's more of an urgency around that, that people are kind of scouring Craigslist for those kind of things. You can sometimes generate people who have a higher likelihood to buy in the next 90 days, than people who are just starting a casual search on AdWords.
I would definitely start with that, but I'd also be looking to create a fund from a portion of the commissions that come, to start funding AdWords. If you can start out with $10 a day, is what we typically start within Project Cyrus. Yeah. Then as soon as it's feasible, to double that to $20 a day. Then at some point, get to where you turn it up as high as it can go. That's where a lot of people are now.
Speaker 2: You know, the best thing that I've seen on AdWords is of course to test it. In one of my accounts, on one of the websites I've got traffic going to, yesterday I shut it down. Albuquerque real estate goes from $2.50 to $5, depending on when and where. I set my spending limit at $80 or $100, and then I push my click costs for all of them that I'm working down to like 53 cents. Yesterday, I got nine clicks for Albuquerque real estate, at 31 cents a click. Because what happens is if you push it out that long, some people will put their budget at $10. They pay the $2.50 to $5 a click.
Dean: Yeah, and they get their four clicks.
Speaker 2: They go away. Then on a passive system like this one, where you don't call people up immediately when they come on, where a lot of the other systems people are, they want to know when the person comes on their websites, so they can call them up immediately. I had 68, somewhere a little over 60 clicks yesterday, for $21, and I had seven signups on that website. I think it was $21. I can't believe it. I'm getting right now about $3 a sign up.
Dean: Right. I'm going to write that number down, because when I start talking about the follow up here, I want to bring that out. We'll use that as an example. You're right, that a lot of times people run out of their budget. Google, it's not a ranking system. It's a suck all the money we can out of everybody who's willing to give it to us system. They'll put your ad in first position if it means they're going to get your $9 that you're willing to spend.
Speaker 2: I did have this pulled up. I got eight clicks for Albuquerque real estate, at $3.50, so it was 44 cents a click. Albuquerque homes for sale, and that's the website it's going to, I got six clicks at 38 cents a click. Homes for sale in Albuquerque, another great key word, six at 18 cents a click. That's a buy keyword for my website, Homes For Sale In Albuquerque. Then Albuquerque, New Mexico real estate, five at 39 cents. The least expensive of those was the 18 cents, but I got Albuquerque houses for sale, 27 cents.
Dean: That's why we have so many keywords set up for it. We've got 680 something combinations like that, and that's how it all works out.
Speaker 2: Dropping the cost, so you wouldn't know what you would pay for a click. Yeah, it's pushing my budget out.
Connie: It seems really high.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just $80 or $100, and then playing with the cost per click. Now, I know if I go up to 73 cents, or at least in the past, if I go up to 73 cents for my target, I can get 120 clicks, and I can right now, off that one website, I can get 20 signups to 25 signups a day.
Dean: Hang on. They have the mic here.
Speaker 6: Okay. What I thought I heard you say was at one point you didn't have a limit of what it would cost on a pay per click individual basis. Was that right?
Speaker 2: No, no, no. I always set it like right now, I'm set at 51 cents.
Speaker 6: Okay, but if you were to look at AdWords, as to what the cost is like in Washington. This is what I'm saying. In my market, the average cost per click from you right now is between $2 and $2.50. Was that your situation before, and then you dropped?
Speaker 2: Yes. If I set, if I go on automatic, I can burn $50 in no time. You know, in four hours, three hours. I set each click, and bid, yeah. I think it's your second to the left, of where you set your bid. I set all of them at a certain rate. Then I'll go in, and I'll take out, if I get my click through rate higher, if I'm too low on some of them, and I'm getting a lot of impressions on them, I'll take my high impressions out. Then if I decide I want more than 60 clicks a day, go up to a hundred again, I'll enable all of my keywords, and then play with it, and see which ones get clicked on it, and then I take those away. That my percentage stays higher on my click through. I think that's one reason that they're showing it so much, like on these, I've got a click through rate, 2.6, 4.6, 9.8 in Albuquerque. Homes for sale in Albuquerque. I've got almost 10% of the traffic.
Speaker 6: All of my click through rates are point something. 0.5, orIt's kind of counterintuitive.
Speaker 2: Take out the ones that you have on a high impression. If you've got 300 impressions, and no clicks, I disable that keyword. Then I've been trying to play with which is the best converting keywords? The ones that I'm seeing that are the best converting are what I have in the name of the domain.
Speaker 6: Okay, so you've narrowed it down. You had some that you could, if you let the system do it for yourself, you'd pay $2.50 for if it bills you automatically, but you're going, "No, I don't want to pay $2.50. I'm going to pay 75 cents for it."
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Your response rates actually gone up?
Speaker 2: Yes.
Dean: Because sometimes people might have a budget of $20, and they're paying $2.50, and they're going to get those 10 clicks, and then it stops showing their ads, and now what are they left with? You're willing to spend, like he said, $80. Let's try and get all that. Yeah.
Speaker 6: That's an aha for me.
Speaker 2: See, my position is like a 4.54, 3.8, 3.7, 4.4, 4.4. I'm either running at the top right hand side, or I'm running the top three [inaudible 00:22:14] Take it down to nine when everybody else is spending all their money. I'm up at the four.
Dean: Once they get all that other money, then they start taking your money. It's 24 hours a day.
Speaker 2: This is the bomb. This is the way to make your AdWords work. I bought that book, that I've just started reading. I learned one more thing, too. I've only read a third of it. I forget the guy's name. I got it on Amazon. It's the third edition of the PerryMarshall.com. One of the things that he talks about is stripping out. What does he call it? Strip and paste, or strip and cut, or something like that, where you take your best performing AdWords, and make a separate campaign just for it. I know that I'm getting ready to tear it up with that, because one thing that Dean always told me over the last 13 years was cost per click was way better than SEO. Well, I had to go spend about thirty, forty thousand dollars, to prove him right. To prove him right.
Dean: That's funny. Well, and Perry's a good friend of mine. Maybe what I'll do is have him come on a call with us and explain all that. That's something where I think that's great. That is what I would call an advanced strategy. Where there are things where, if we're making our way through this list of 10 ideas that are our breakthroughs for you, that sometimes we want to temper that with, if you are able to get traffic without going in and doing that kind of granular paying, that kind of attention to it, or that learning curve of what to do, or spending the time to do those. If you're in a situation where you can get that, that's kind of an advanced thing. That if some of you, if you're spending an acceptable amount on your clicks, and you're able to reach your daily budget, and you are getting leads, and going like that, sometimes it's not going to be an exponential gain in your productivity, or your net dollars, at the end of the day, as it would be if you maybe started doing something that you're not already doing. Do you understand what I mean by that? Because they have to think about what it actually costs time wise to do some of these things. If you can hire somebody to do it, that's even better. You're leveraging an idea with money. That's better than investing your time in doing stuff like that.
Speaker 7: Is there any advantage to someone setting up their Google account on the automatic thing? Because it doesn't seem like there is.
Dean: On what automatic thing?
Speaker 7: On the automatic. Just pay whatever it takes.
Speaker 6: Benefit sounds like it's to Google more than anything else.
Dean: Well, part of the benefit is what we do with Project Cyrus, when we set it up, is we do all the adjusting initially, what does it take to get to that third position, on average? We turn the knobs and dials to find out what's the bid amount that gets you at that, and then what's the budget amount. How high is high? What could you potentially get, to then go down to what your level is, knowing that you've got that extra potential if you wanted to. In a lot of ways, I look for the things that are very easy.
We look at it with Chuck, and I look at this thing. Chuck Charlton has probably the best track record in terms of conversion and yield from the website over time. Chuck has no idea what goes on in his AdWords account. The best thing about it is that it has the ability to be a set it and forget it type of thing. Could he get 20% more traffic if he were to go in and granularly do things? Unknown. You can do some magic with it, but it's not without cost of either time or money, or somebody else doing it.
Speaker 2: I spend about 20 minutes a week on it.
Dean: Yeah, and it's because you know how to do it. That's the thing, right? For somebody to start from zero, to go that, is like when we go through this whole list here, we're going to pick the things that are going to be the highest value for you, the things that are going to be an exponential increase. If you are not already sending the world's most interesting postcard to your top 100 people, that's going to be an exponential improvement in the orchestrated referrals that you get.
If you're not picking some of those 100 people every week to introduce, send one e-mail, just because you've noticed what's going on around you, and introduced that opportunity to them, that's going to be a big improvement. Because you're not doing it, and you start doing something, and you get a result. I was looking for where are the exponential increases available? A breakthrough is when you start getting something that you weren't getting. An incremental improvement is when you improve something that you're already doing. It's hard to get a breakthrough from something that you're already doing. That was my thought. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Just wanted to say this quickly into the microphone, because I said it off mic. It's The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords, Perry Marshall, third edition on Amazon. If you do want to get granular, which I do.
Dean: On ilovemarketing.com, we had Perry on as a guest.
Speaker 3: Brian Todd, yes.
Dean: Yes.
Speaker 3: I just listened to it last week.
Dean: Oh, did you? Okay. There's a great interview with them on there. I don't know what episode it was, sorry. You can just search for Perry Marshall up in the top.
Speaker 3: I think 51.
Dean: Probably in the fifties. That's probably right. Connie?
Connie: Just to simplify it, and put it into my language, if I'm understanding just a real simplistic way of what you're doing, is that the daily amount is what you're increasing, and the bid amount is what you're decreasing?
Dean: Yeah.
Connie: Okay.
Speaker 2: Then what I'll do sometimes I don't know if some of the settings that Google has in there allows positioning, or something along that line. It seems like sometimes I'll get placed where I think I should get more clicks, so I'll shock it. I'll raise it 25 cents a click, or something like that, for a day, or half a day, or something along that line. Then lower it back in a couple of days.
Dean: Well, because it probably artificially raises your click through rate. Then when it gets down, it's shown higher, because you've got that historical track record of having a higher click through rate. Google is looking at all of those algorithm things.
Speaker 6: We talk about outsourcing all this stuff. Are there virtual systems who do this kind of stuff.
Dean: There are. Yeah, there absolutely are. There's the thing where I have somebody who manages all of my Google AdWords for our stop your divorce product. All of the paper click advertising stuff that I do is managed by somebody who I pay them, it's like a thousand or $1,200 a month, right? For $1,200 a month, to manage all that. There are people who do everything, so you just got to look at it on a case by case basis. My advice to you, as a steward of your money, is that I would do these things that I'm talking about, in terms of maximizing things. First is spend all the money that you can, because it's easy. As long as you're getting leads, and converting them, that's a big improvement.
Speaker 7: Sometimes it says, you don't have enough bid to be on the first page.
Dean: Right.
Speaker 7: Your immediate inclination is, "Oh, I got to spend more here."
Dean: Right.
Speaker 7: What we're seeing here now is leave it that way, because those other guys will pay out theirs, and then you might get up there.
Dean: Yeah, but meanwhile, you look back, and you still got clicks on that one that said your bid's below first, like in orange. Warning, your bid's below first page, but you got 10 clicks today. It's funny how that, the whole psychology of the way it's set up. Oh, hang on a sec. Into the mic.
Speaker 6: Idealistically, at the end of the day, you still want to see your bid up there, your name, or your website.
Dean: Well, it doesn't matter, if you want. I mean, the thing is, if I'm willing to spend whatever amount of money, if you're reaching your daily budget, that means you're getting the clicks. If you're spending it consistently every day, you've got one of two choices. You can either raise your budget, so that you can get more clicks for the same price, or start lowering your thing, to see if you'll still spend the same amount of. For round numbers, if your budget is $20, and you're paying $1 per click, and you reach that every day, that means you're getting 20 clicks. If you were to lower your bid to 75 cents, you could perhaps get 25 clicks for the same amount of money. You see where that is, right? That's what we do initially for when we set everything up through Project Cyrus. We find those numbers. Most of it is, we don't really spend much more time than after the first 60 days.
Speaker 3: Set it and forget it is generally that medium.
Dean: Yes, that's exactly it. In terms of all the other things, like outside of the big three, AdWords, Yahoo, and Bing, and Craigslist, all the other things that you can do for just bringing eyeballs to your website, and on your info box flyers, on your display ads, on your public notice flyers, on anything that you're doing, where you have some something that could have your website on it, should be out there, too. All of those low cost things, that if you can do it one time and forget it, that would be a big win, too.
Speaker 4: Tellingly, my website on the Facebook business page I've got, too.
Dean: Yeah, all of that. Anything, all the collective stuff that you can do, but realizing that my favorite and your favorite is the thing that you can set and forget, and it's doing the job. That's really what you're looking for.
There we have it. Another great episode. If you'd like to continue the conversation, you can go to ListingAgentLifestyle.com. You can download a copy of the Listing Agent Lifestyle book, the manifesto that shares everything that we're talking about here. You can be a guest on the show, if you'd like to talk about how we can build a Listing Agent Lifestyle plan for your business. Just click on the be a guest link at ListingAgentLifestyle.com. If you'd like to join our community of people who are applying all of the things we talk about in the Listing Agent Lifestyle, come on over to GoGoAgent.com. It's where we've got all the programs, all the tools, everything you need to get listings, to multiply your listings, to get referrals, convert leads, and to find buyers. You can get a free, truly free, no credit card required trial for 30 days at GoGoAgent.com. Come on over, and I will see you there.