Episode #014 – The Bar Is Low – Do the Basics

You're listening to the REI Marketing Nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of Ad Words Nerds, a high tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition and live a freer, more awesome life. And now, your host, Dan Barrett.

Dan: Alright, hello everybody and welcome to this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. How are you people doing? Hope you're doing awesome. You may notice this episode is a little bit late. I apologize, I have been running around, I was traveling for work, I was actually down it North Carolina and masterminding with some really incredibly high level people. We're talking multi, multi, multimillionaires people who have launched companies that you have definitely heard of, sold them and been doing all sorts of really amazing things, people in manufacturing and food services and tech and all sorts of things. We're getting a ton of really great ideas about things that I can bring over into the real estate investing space, and I'm going to be announcing a lot of that stuff very soon, so it's just been a really exciting busy couple weeks and I've been, I was lazy on the podcast, I will admit it, I was lazy on getting this out.

But this is actually a pretty big episode because this is kind of the official beginning of REI Marketing Nerds Season Two. When I first started this podcast I had about 12 episodes planned out, I said no matter what is going to happen, I'm going to get these 12 episodes done, and I had all the titles of the subjects and everything planned out, that's been all the episodes that we've launched so far, including one on unfair advantage, which if you haven't checked definitely do, that's one of the big ones, the unfair advantage episode. Here we basically went through the subjects that I had planned out and said look, no matter what happens I'm proud of these, I want to put them out and then we'll see what happens. Honestly, the feedback on the podcast has been really amazing, super gratifying, we got way more listeners than I expected and I just had a lot of people come up and tell me that they really love the content, so I'm doing another season, I hope this one goes as well as the first one, that you get value out of it. And hey, if you have ideas for things you want me to get into, you have feedback, you have questions, you can always email me at Dan@oldsite.adwordsnerds.com, so that's Dan@oldsite.adwordsnerds.com. Email me there, let me know what you think of the about the show, and obviously you can always find me in our Facebook, the REI Marketing Nerds Facebook group, really, really active, really fun group, full of amazing investors and you can find that at oldsite.adwordsnerds.com.com/group, oldsite.adwordsnerds.com/group, go there, just search for REI Marketing Nerds on Facebook, you'll find it. So without further ado, this is an episode I am calling "The Bar is Low". This is an important one.

I talk to a lot of investors, in fact talking to investors is pretty much my, one of my main job priorities at this point. Almost always there's some kind of anxiety and fear about competition. Actually this is a really good example, I talked to a really amazing guy yesterday, I had a call with him. His name is Alexander. What's up Alexander if you listen this. He was a new mentorship student, came into our mentorship program. And so I'm on the phone with him, this is our first call, I'm learning about him, learning about his goals, learning about his market, helping him put together his specific unique online marketing strategy. So sort of a big call, it's a big part of this program. We're getting into it and he says, "You know, I'm really leading towards doing all pay per click. I want to do all pay per click marketing, I want to do all Ad Words, I want to focus on that." I said, "You know, that's cool. That's awesome, that's what I like to do too, but I'm curious why did you make the decision that that's what you wanted to focus on." And he said, "Well for two reasons. One, I'm really technically savvy." He's good with computers and he's worked in the kind of app space before, so he's comfortable with that, that's a really good reason to do pay per click. Then the second reason was, "You know, I just feel like I'm in a really competitive market, there's a lot of investors here and I'd like to do SEO, but I just feel like everyone got there before me, they're probably crushing it, their SEO's really good, so it's just going to be kind of impossible for me to, you know, make progress and really get leads this way." I probably hear some variation of that the least once or twice every single week. Because honestly as an investor you are in a really competitive space right now, that is absolutely the case, there are more real estate investors around now than there have ever been. There are more people out there trying to do deals, whether it's wholesale, flip, lease options, whatever it is. Everybody is out there trying to make this happen. There's a variety of reasons for that.

You've got the real estate investing coaching business has never been stronger and you've got more coaches putting out higher quality material than ever before in history. It's really amazing. You think about how people used to have to learn about real estate investing, you got a book our you bought a DVD package or CD package or tape package of the TV, or whatever it was, or from direct mail, that was kind of it. Now you got these really amazing coaches out there. You've got people like Mike Baird, Tom Krol, Sean Terry, Joe McCall. I mean the list goes on and on. There are just really amazing people out there showing how to do what they do, and so there's a bunch of new investors, just a bunch of new investors. So it's really exploded. That's not even to mention the popularity of flipping shows. I mean, man, there are shows up the much every network that talks about homes in any way. They're like flipping houses to flipping RV's, to flipping who know what, laser tag places, ice skating rinks. I'm sure that exists, right? And so way more people just kind of like, you know, "normal people", normies as you and I would call them, know that this is a thing. They know it's possible. So there's a lot of curiosity out there, a lot of investors out there. So the more investors there are, obviously the more competition there is. And the more people that are out there that you have to in some way overcome in order to get on top of the market whether, that's in ads or a SEO or whatever it is, right, so a lot of competition. You know it, I know it. I'd swear I'm going to stop talking about it.

It's very natural I think for people to think that hey you know there's so much competition, there's so many other people trying to do what I want to do, it's not really possible, it's not really going to be possible for me to make a lot of progress. And I want to tell you that it just isn't true, it just isn't true. The fact of the matter is that even though there is a lot of competition, the bar is very low. The bar is very low for that competition. Most investors, when they get started in this business are doing the bare minimum, the absolute, bare minimum. They are sending out a postcard that was created for them by someone else that they got from a seminar where a million other people got the same postcard. They are mailing the same lists, they are building the same websites, they are putting the same content on that website, that ad is the same as every other ad you're ever going to see for every other investor. The bar is low, both in terms of effort put in and the quality of the material that that effort produces. The bar is low.

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And so SEO, search engine optimization is really a good example of this. There are so many websites out there right now. Most you guys know that we partner with Investor Care, I love Investor Care, I think they make an incredible product, but kind of what happens is that most people just get an Investor Care website and they throw it up on the Internet and they say, "That's it, I've done what I need to do to optimize my website for search." and that's as far as they ever take it. That's the last time they ever think about it. Is that moment where they put that thing up. And they don't stop to think about the fact that, hey, if you just put it up the way it comes out of the box, yes, Investor Care makes incredible product, it comes out of the box better than any, literally any pre-packaged website product I've ever seen, and I mean that in any industry. But if you take it out of the box and you put it up, you're putting up the same thing that everybody else put up. It's not about how good it is out of the box, it's about what you do with it after that point.

I often talk about the ladder theory, which is, I imagine kind of real estate investing to kind of be a giant wall. There's a wall you have to get over in order to get to the land of profits or whatever you want to call it, the land of money, whatever it is, right. You've got to get over the wall in order to make money. When Investor Care and products like Investor Fuse and all these really awesome products that are on the market, when they do is give you a ladder. The ladder is an easy way to try to get least partially up over that wall.

Now imagine there's one thing if you're alone, if you're alone, you put the ladder on the wall, you climb over the wall and get the money is on the other side, it's awesome. But let's imagine now that instead what we're doing is we're racing. Alright? There's four, five other people that are trying to get over this wall and they're trying to get over to get the money on the other side and if they get it, we won't be able to get it. That's not exact metaphor for the way that investing actually works, but let's just imagine this for a second. And imagine that the ladders that give us don't take us all the way over the wall, let's say that give us half way. So everybody gets the same ladder, same height, same number of rows, whatever it is, we all run over the wall and we plop it down a wall and we climb up the ladder, now we're all halfway. And what we got to do? Now we got to climb, and we all got to climb the same distance. That's essentially what's happening. Investor Care, Investor Fuse is an incredible programs that give you a ladder, it's the same heights as everybody else's ladder. And so you get to the same point, and essentially you are the same situation you were before. Everybody's struggling, everybody is claiming, everybody is fighting each other, that's what it is.

Now imagine that it instead of this situation where everyone gets the exact same ladder and we're all plopping on the same wall and we get half way up and get to fight each other, imagine that you had an hour or so before everyone ran to the wall to add on to your ladder, and you are woodworker ,you could actually do this, and you could actually build a bigger ladder. So instead of taking you half way where then you got to fight everyone else, you built onto your ladders now, your ladder takes you all the way over the wall, all you got to do is just climb the ladder and jump over the wall. That's exactly what we're talking about, what we're seeing right now in the SEO space, in the organic marketing space. Everybody sets up the exact same stuff, even if they're not using Investor Care, they've got the same basic about page and same basic call page and same basic blog and everything's the same, everybody's ladder is the same height. But if you take that ladder that you get, which is a big jump start here, let's say you take that Care site and you work on it out of the box, you expand it, you make new pages, you change your copy, you add new photos, you put on video testimonials, you put on blog testimonials, you put on text testimonials, you blog once a week, you do keyword research, whatever it is, you put in the work and you make it better than what everybody else has. That's a huge advantage. You didn't have to start from scratch. Care got you half way, now you just have to take it the other half of the way. It makes sense, right? It makes sense. If everybody has the same advantage you need to build on top of that advantage in order to get ahead, that's how it works. But the fact of the matter is almost nobody does it. Almost nobody does it.

Organic marketing in this space does not have to be complicated, it really doesn't. Right now it's really about just did you show up. Did you show up? Did you put in some extra work? It doesn't have to be Ph D level work, it just has to be some work. I can tell you this, if all you did was pick a certain key word once a month and you wrote a 2000 word blog post about it once a month and you did that for three to six months, you would be far ahead of pretty much anybody in your market. This is with almost no special SEO knowledge. Much less actually paying decent money to have a team of skilled professionals work on it for you. Very few people actually do that, and even fewer people do any of the work themselves. So it's not a money thing. It's an effort thing. Are you willing to put in the effort? This is what I meant when I said the bar is low. You're not competing against a giant arena filled with SEO experts that are all breaking their backs every week, that's not what's happening. What you're doing is showing up to a place where almost nobody else even showed up. The bar for success is low. It is going to stay low in this industry until people kind of wake up and realize that.

I think the days of being able to do the cheap stuff, going on Fiverr, paying $10 for a guy to build you a hundred links, and that's going to somehow rank your website, well guess what, everybody else did that too. And it didn't even help, and in many cases it actually hurts. So the question is not do you need to be an expert or is it possible or is there too much competition, honestly, I don't even think about competition anymore. When we work with clients I don't even care. What I think about it is what is everybody else doing that I can do better, than I can go further, that I can take to a different place. If everybody else has got one quality link, can I build five. It doesn't matter if it's over a year, it doesn't matter. Can I build five? Everyone else is doing the same blog posts, can I make my own blog posts? Everyone's doing short ones, can I do long ones? Everyone's got five pages, can I make ten pages? It doesn't have to be complicated. The bar is low.
If you remember that and you realize that, you're going to stop standing in your own way, because right now you're not doing online marketing because you're afraid that there's too much competition, you are selling yourself short, you are leaving significant money of the table and you're sabotaging your long term, not even, I was going to say growth, you're sabotaging your long term survival. You have got to figure out a way to get into the online space because when it's too late, it's going to be too late. You've got to start now. So don't psych yourself out because you're worried about your competition, don't psych yourself out because you think it's going to be too difficult, you don't have the technical knowledge, you can do this. Remember, the bar is low. All you got to do is jump over it.

Alright people, I hope that makes sense. Let me know what you thought of this episode, you can email me, like I said, at Dan@AdWordsNerds.con. If you like these shows, and get value out of these episodes, go ahead and leave us a review, we'd really appreciate it, and subscribe wherever you're listening to this, hit the subscribe button so you can check our future episodes. As always, guys, the Facebook group, I'm in that group every single day and it's an amazing group filled with investors sharing marketing strategies and tips, it's a really fun place to be, it's the REI Marketing Nerds Facebook group, you can find us at oldsite.adwordsnerds.com/group, that's oldsite.adwordsnerds.com/group, and of course you find all our past episodes and show notes from this episode at oldsite.adwordsnerds.com, just click on the podcast link. Alright, that was a good one guys, I got a little fired up. I hope you have an awesome rest of your day, I'll talk to very soon, see you next week, we'll be on time next week, I promise, and have an awesome rest of your day.