Episode 163 – The Best Mindset For Long-Term Success In an Uncertain World

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.

(00:42): All right. Hello. Welcome to this week's episode of the REI marketing nerds podcast as always. This is Daniel Barrett here from AdWords nerds.com. And look, if you need help with your online marketing to find more motivated, seller leads and deals online, you know where to go. It's AdWords nerds.com. We've got free strategy sessions. We've got a killer blog we've got in depth. The guides. In fact, our guide to PPC for real estate investors is close to 60,000 words at this point. So if you are interested in learning more or getting help, that's where you go. It's a nerds.com.

(01:23): And this week I wanna talk about something it's a bit high level. So I hope you are going to forgive me. We will, of course be returning to the tactical aspects of getting leads for your real estate investment business. But this piece I think is just as important. And it's something that I want to really stress with you because I think many investors, when they get involved in online marketing, they quickly become frustrated, right? And, and they become frustrated because there is this sense that everyone out there is having success. And when you actually get down to brass tax and you start to do this stuff, so start to run ads, you start to do SEO. You know, you start posting on your Facebook by page or whatever it is. You start to actually do this stuff. It's much more difficult to get high quality results than it seems like it should be.

(02:24): You can look out at many other investors who are saying, yes, you know, I'm having this result or that result, or I'm getting leads at this cost or that cost. And it's easy to feel like you are the only one who's struggling. And I wanna talk about two aspects of this feeling that I think are really important. And this is something that's on my mind because I'm actually creating kind of an operating system for my team at Edwards nerds. And the thing you want to realize, like from my point of view, when I'm working with my team, I can't tell them ahead of time, everything that's gonna happen in the world. Right? I can't tell them how online marketing is gonna shift or change. I can't tell them how the real estate market is gonna shift or change because those things are impossible to predict their big complicated systems in.

(03:18): And so as a leader, just like you are the leader of your real estate investing team, you know, your acquisitions people or whatever, as the leader of the AdWords nerds team, it's, you know, I view it as my responsibility to give them the mental models and tools and frameworks they can use to make their own decision and continue to safeguard the funds of our clients without me looking over their shoulder, ultimately right, the team as a whole is going to be way smarter than me as an individual. And so my role is to give them these frameworks. Okay. And there's two frameworks that I'm working very hard on in instilling into my team that I think are going to help you as you sort of go through this journey of marketing online and continuing to grow your real estate investing business. And in fact, this applies to all marketing you're ever gonna do online or not.

(04:13): Okay. And those two frameworks, those two things to keep in mind, okay, are survivorship bias and continuous learning, survivorship bias and continuous learning. Now let's start with survivorship bias, cuz this is the fastest one to get to. And it's simply an understanding that when you see people bragging about their metrics, their cost per lead, their number of lead, you know, I did, I put this amount of money in, I got this number of deals and it could be literally for everything. It doesn't have to be just for online marketing. This could be for direct mail or texting or whatever. What you are seeing almost by definition are the outliers.

(05:03): What you are seeing when people brag about their particular performance metrics are the outliers and they are the outliers for two reasons. One, you gotta realize that of everyone that gets involved in any marketing or business pursuit, some people make it work. And some people don't and that could be through no fault of their own right. Could be in their market. It's a particularly competitive you know, marketing channel or you know, I dunno, they got hit by a, a calamity or an economic disaster, right. Or it could be, you know, they didn't do a good job or they didn't have the requisite, maybe the closing skills or whatever, but of the entire group of everyone that pursues some kind of marketing pursuit, right? Some people make it. And some people don't. So immediately you're gonna just remove from this pile of people that are bragging about their stats online, everybody that didn't make it.

(06:00): And then out of the people that made it work and made that marketing channel or pursuit or business idea or whatever made it sort profitable for themselves out of that group, you're gonna single out the people that did well enough that they really want to go out and brag about their statistics, their metrics. And I'm gonna leave this, the idea that some people just flat out don't tell the truth, which is true, right? I've seen that more than a few times, but you've gotta understand that when you see people bragging about a certain number in their ad account or their nailing, you know, campaign or whatever, the, the number of deals that they close, these are people that are not only in the surviving group, but are in the top percentile of the surviving group and feel want, you know, willing to and eager to go out and broadcast that message. And so this is by death, a niche with a niche

(07:06): Want to find motivated seller leads online, but don't know where to start download our free motivated seller keyword report today, Edwards nerds have spent over $5 million this year researching the most pro profitable keywords for finding motivated seller leads. And you can grab these exact keywords when you download our report at www dot a words, nerds.com/keywords. And so the question to ask is whether or not that is actually indicative of the average performance level. And I would say usually it is not. So that's something to keep in mind. Now, the other thing to keep in mind is that this world of ours is constantly changing and it is shifting and it is evolving and it is adapting. The real estate market today is not the same as the real estate market yesterday. The online advertising marketplaces like Google ads or Facebook ads that work on an auction basis. They are not the same today as they were yesterday. Just like the stock market of today. It is not the stock market of yesterday. And so even if you land on a system that is incredibly efficient and produces lots of D deals at a great cost, there is no guarantee. It will stay that way.

(08:35): And in fact, I will go even further and I will guarantee it won't, it won't stay the way that it's. And it doesn't mean it's going to, you know, explode doesn't mean it's gonna land in a crater. Doesn't mean it's gonna be a disaster, but it's not going to stay the same because the only underlying truth of online marketing in particular, but really business in general is that nothing stays the same. We are constantly moving back and forth between different states, different states of competition, different states of underlying economic activity, different states of profit ability, different types of technology coming into and outta the market. There's so many things that can change. So when you are in this system, this process, and you are working on boosting your marketing and growing your business and you look out and you see people having success, you are struggling. You gotta remember for one, the people that are bragging are not always representative of what everyone is going through and that even if they are bragging right now, there is no guarantee they will still be bragging a week from now. Similarly, there is at absolutely no guarantee that your results will not noticeably improve either. And something that I try really hard to impart to my team, right? And this is where it kind of comes down to bras tax for you as well in your real estate investing business is that it is not enough to find the answer. The thing that works because the thing that works, doesn't always work. It might work today.

(10:27): Doesn't mean it's gonna work tomorrow instead what G and doesn't guarantee a success. But what gives us the highest percentile chance of success over time is the mindset of the continuous education and learning and curiosity, because it is only through long term adaptive thinking and flexibility that we allow ourselves to be successful. This is the story of evolution. E evolution is not the strongest survive. Evolution is the flexible survive. The adaptive survive. That is what evolution teaches. And over time, success can tend to breed the seeds of its own destruction. We tend to fall into rigid thinking. We say, this is the way it is done. This was the way it was successful. This is how the world works. And we think that all the way up until the moment where the world turns around and slaps us in the face with evidence that no, that was the world worked.

(11:45): So the thing I want my team to take away from this process and the thing that I would really try to impart to, to my clients and my friends in real estate investing and the people that listen to this podcast is there is a, a mental posture of curiosity towards the world and flexibility in our thinking, the, the willingness to examine our own biases, especially the biases that are, are based on evidence from the past and be open to change and be optimistic about our potential to change and to be steadfast when things don't look like they're going well and rely on this flexibility and openness to carry us through and let us find the way forward. And I think if you can do that, I know if my team can do that, that they will continue to not only safeguard the funds of our clients, but help them to grow and have incredible success.

(12:52): And I know that you in your marketing business will experience the same. So I hope you have a wonderful week. Thank you as always for listening to this podcast. If you have any questions, go to AdWords, nerds.com, check, click on the blog, link up at the top. There you'll find all these podcast episodes. Plus we publish a ton of blog posts on online marketing for real estate investors every single week. I would love for you to check that out. You go over to ad nerds.com and just click on blog and you'll find it as always. This is Daniel Barrett from ad nerds dot, signing off. I hope you have a truly wonderful one.

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