Episode #128 – Focus Is The Key

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 AdWords 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: All right, hello, everybody, and welcome to this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWordsNerds.com. How are you? I hope you are having a wonderful week, and, look, as always, if you want to talk to someone on my team about putting together an online marketing strategy for your market, you can get on the horn with us at AdWordsNerds.com/Strategy. [01:08.0]

All right, I'm going to try to keep this week a little shorter. I think the last couple podcasts I have rambled on a bit, and I want to get straight to the meat and potatoes and give you something you can immediately turn around and apply inside of your real estate investing business to get you more motivated seller leads online, and this is a common issue that I see across a couple of different domains.

I'm going to give you an example, both from the PPC side, the pay-per-click advertising side, and from the SEO side, the search engine optimization side. And you don't need to get into the specifics of those channels and how they work and the tactics and strategies and yada-yada-yada to understand this takeaway, which is simply this: you’ve got to have a focus. You’ve got to have a focus. [02:01.1]

And I don't necessarily mean you’ve got to pick one channel or the other, you can't do mail and online, you can't do PPC and SEO. That's not what I mean. I mean, within those channels, as you grow and improve and you test, or you run into difficulties or the market shifts underneath you, and you've got to adapt and you've got to innovate, as you go through that process, which, by the way, everybody will. No matter how successful you are, no matter how good you do at the beginning, you will go through these moments where you have to adapt, and when you do that, you have to have a focus.

Here's what I mean by this. It is very common for people in the PPC world, like you’re doing Google Ads, you're doing Facebook ads or whatever, you're doing ads to drive a bunch of traffic, let's say, you get a bunch of eyeballs, you get a bunch of clicks, you get people through to the website, but they aren't converting. By which I mean they're not turning into leads, right? They're hitting the website and they're bouncing off. [03:06.0]

And that's a common issue to run into, right? You can work really well for a while and have a drop-off or maybe it never worked at all and you're not sure why. It could be that the market is different. It could be that the economy is different. I don't know, it could be competitors. It could be .. who knows? It could be a lot of stuff.

So, when investors get into that position, they're like, Okay, I know I need to fix my conversion rate. What am I going to do? I'm going to test a different landing page. How do they go about this process of testing this landing page? Typically they do the kitchen sink approach. They change everything, change the logo, the color, the layout. How many fields are on the form? Now there are two forms and three forms. Now it's only a phone number, has a big phone number. Now it's a blue phone number. You change a million and one different things. [03:56.2]

If that test doesn't work, what that means is we don't know why. Was it the phone number thing? Was it the layout? Was it the color? Was it the form fill, form fields? What was it that prevented us from improving? It's really impossible to know at that point, whereas if you take some time in the beginning of that process to really sit down and you think and you say, Okay, what is the highest leverage thing I could be testing? Maybe it's a headline. Maybe it's the form. Whatever you think it is in your case, based on your experience, what you see in your account, what you see in your market, what you hear when you get on the phone with your sellers, you find that focus point, the highest leverage thing and you just test that.

Maybe you're just testing the headline and you test 10 of them, rather than testing the headline and the form field and the phone number and the color and the layout and everything else. It's about focus, because when you go into that focused experiment and you come out of it, you will learn something. [05:10.4]

Either one of those 10 headlines you tested gave you a lift and now you have an improvement to point to or nothing you did gave you a lift at all. And what did you learn in that case? It's probably not the headline that matters. That is incredibly valuable data. Even that, quote-unquote, “worst case scenario” where we don't see an improvement, that is incredibly valuable because we picked a focus going in.

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Now let me turn this concept around. Let's talk about SEO, search engine optimization. Some of this, some of you don't, I've been doing SEO for longer than I've been doing PPC and we do SEO every single day for investors around the country, so I've got a lot of experience in SEO and in PPC for real estate investors specifically.

But in any case, in SEO, I see this all the time. It's not necessarily that real estate investors don't know what keywords to target with their websites. You can probably guess, we're not really inventing new keywords and any great clip. What is it? “Sell your house fast.” “We buy houses.” Maybe you want to do a comparison with Opendoor or something like that. You get it. “Sell my house (your town).” You get it, right? Maybe you need some expert help. That's fine. You can jump on the phone with my team at AdWordsNerds.com/Strategy. We'll help you out. [07:15.7]

But, generally, you get it. You can come up with this list. It's not rocket science. Where investors fall down is that they essentially make every page about every keyword. You look at their homepage. What does it say? “We buy houses.” “sell my house fast.” Which is it? “Sell my house fast” or “we buy houses”?

Then you look at every other page. Let's take blog posts. You might have some kind of process going. Maybe you're blogging on your own. Maybe you've got a service that's providing you blog posts. Maybe you get four blog posts a week, one blog post about “sell my house fast”, the next blog post about “sell my house fast”, the third blog post about “we buy houses”, the fourth blog post about “we buy houses fast”. [08:06.0]

When Google looks at that website and it tries to understand what page it should rank for which keyword, how does it decide? And to make matters worse, most investors keep piling on more and more content that's optimized for the exact same stuff because somebody told investors 10 years ago that, hey, making a ton of content is really great, and that just isn't true anymore.

Look, content is awesome. Good content is awesome. Make one really great piece of content for a specific keyword and then move on to other stuff. But, instead, every single page gets ranked for every single thing. When everything has to compete for all that rank equity in Google, guess what? Nothing ends up ranking particularly well. This is why if you look across all of the content that real estate investors are putting on their websites every single week, how much of that stuff actually ranks in Google for anything? It's very, very little, the tiniest of tiny percentages. [09:15.4]

Again, let's come back to having a focus. Every page on the website, it's got to have a focus. It's got to have a keyword. It is designed to rank for it. Every other page that's connected to that page has to have a reason for being connected to that page, and it should be that it reinforces the fact that that original page has that focus keyword. Focus is the point. Focus is what makes it effective. You don't say, Here's a million things that could self-compete. You say, Here is the one thing I want you to rank, and you know what? All the work I would have put into those 5,000 200-word blog posts I was spewing out, I'm going to spend all of that, making this one piece of content awesome—and that's how you rank. It's by focusing. [10:05.5]

Whether you are in the PPC realm and you are testing a landing page, trying to improve your conversion rate and you need to pick a focus there, or whether you are in the SEO realm and you're trying to rank in Google for “sell my house fast” and you need to focus there, focus is the key. It's the same in your business as it is in mine, and let me tell you, this is something I have to remind myself all the time. If you're entrepreneurial, you know how this is. You're going a million different directions. That's how we all are. We're visionaries. But if you can focus your energy, focus your momentum, focus your attitude and your attention, you can crush it.

I hope that makes sense. I hope that was useful. [10:50.5]

Look, have you jumped into our Facebook group lately? I am in there every single week making posts. I put free stuff in there. I go live in there. I post this podcast in there and you can get there by going to AdWordsNerds.com/Group, or just go on Facebook.com, it's a little website, you might've heard of it, and do a search for “REI Marketing Nerds.” You will find us there, single best real estate investing group on Facebook.

This is Daniel Barrett from AdWordsNerds.com, signing off. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, and I will talk to you very soon. Cheers.

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