Episode #36 – Imperfect Action (Or, How To Succeed At Anything)

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. Welcome to this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett from AdwordsNerds.com. I don't know if you can hear but I have a bit of a frog in my throat, losing my voice and of course that is wonderful because I've got to go sing in front of a whole bunch of people later this week, so of course everyone in my family gets sick. [0:01:08.4] My wife gets sick. I've got to take care of the kids by myself. I'm getting sick, losing my voice. I had like a three-hour coaching call today. It's been a lot. It's been a lot, I won't lie but I wanted to do this podcast today because I've been thinking about this topic a lot today. This is going to a broader topic. It's going to be a little bit more philosophical but I'm going to tie it back to REI marketing specifically.

Some of you may know, we recently launched a program we call "The Search, Click, Convert Bootcamp". It was three live days of training and we took about forty real estate investors. We walked them through square one, so starting with absolutely nothing and we got an advertising systems setup that is generating motivated seller leads, driving traffic to their websites with the end that we are going to generate leads and appointments. [0:02:07.3] This program, you know, have you ever been through a coaching program – I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast have. Real estate investors are generally self-educators, self-starters so a lot of you have been through coaching programs, online course. I think it's like 90% of the people who take an online course don't finish it. It's just the way that it is. So we set the goal that we were going to have 80% of the people in the program – are going to have their ads up and running by the end of the very first week. So we did a lot of stuff to get there. I won't get into the specifics but we gave them incentives, I gave the financial incentives. I cajoled them. I reached out to them. A lot of stuff, we were really pressing it. I'm helping people live. I'm getting on the phone with people. We are doing coaching calls. All of this stuff and we had our first student within seven days of the boot camp ending got his first deal under contract which is amazing. [0:03:05.9] That’s an incredible result. We’re so happy. People are really excited.

The thing that was really interesting to me was that this person was someone that had a lot of issues and a lot of trouble getting their account set up. This isn't someone who was super technical. It wasn't someone who had had experience running ads before. It wasn't someone who had had a campaign kind of already set up. It was someone who was starting completely from scratch. He had a lot of questions about how to connect the Facebook to the Google Ads, the website, all this stuff. It was just not the person you would pick out. If you were going to bet money on like who is most likely to do a deal you would probably pick the person that had some experience or whatever, right? That wasn't this person. So really, really interesting. The thing that I told them when we were talking about this and the thing that I want to tell you now on this podcast is when it comes down to it, our success in so many avenues of our life is about taking imperfect action. [0:04:11.7] If you're like me, I'm a planner, like I plan things out. I was joking that the way that I solve any problem, business, personal or whatever, is by going on Amazon and buying five books about the topic. So if I have problems in my marriage, five marriage books. If I want to know how to learn a new marketing campaign, five marketing books, right, that's how it is. I'll read it and I will summarize it; I'll take notes and I'll put it all together and I will make it into a thing and then I'm like I know everything I need to know about it and I can get into it. That works a lot of the time. I'm not saying that's a bad way to do things but in reality, how often do I make it through five different books on a topic? Not often. Things happen, things change, life is chaotic. [0:05:03.1] The things that I’ve been most successful in and the things that I see my clients be most successful with in their investing businesses are things where they just took action regardless of whether it was perfect, regardless of whether they knew exactly what to expect, regardless of whether they knew how it was going to go, they took action, they got started. They iterated from that point. This is the philosophy in the boot camp, "The Search, Click, Convert Boot Camp" that we taught. The philosophy that I teach, one of the first videos that I make those students watch - I make them watch a video where I say, "The whole key to this is just launching and improving." If you want to line up every single duck in a row before you do anything, you're never going to get going because it's never going to be perfect. It's kind of like if you have friends that are thinking about having kids and they are like, “Well, I don't know if it's the right time to have kids” – well there is never a right time. [0:06:06.3] It's never a good time. You're never going to be like, “I can’t wait to get rid of all my free time and all my spare cash,” which is essentially what having kids is like, right? You just have to do it and figure it out.
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Dan: When we launch clients new marketing campaigns with Adwords Nerd whether it's pay per click or whether it's SEO (search engine optimization) for motivated sellers, we launch with a default campaign but we don't know what's going to happen. [0:07:07.4] We launch with our best guess about what's going to be successful and then we iterate from there based on what the data shows us. Recently I started lifting weights again after an injury and I was spending a lot of time trying to figure out, like do I do high volume and low weight or high weight and low volume or do I do some kind of – or do I do high-intensity training or you know, what do I do? There are so many options, what do I do? I just decided, like I just have to go to the gym and do something and figure it out. So, I started going with a trainer and I was training and I was just in the gym and I was like this is good but I don't feel like it's enough. I was not seeing the results that I wanted to do so I doubled; I went from two days a week to four days a week. [0:08:00.1] I started to see more results and then a friend of mine was like, "Hey, try this program" and I tried that program and it worked really well but if had I waited I wouldn't have been in this situation where I would have known what I needed to work on where I would have been asking the questions that led the friend to give me the program. So I had to start at an imperfect point in order to get to the point where I wanted to be. Everything in life is like this. Everything in life is like this. If we wait till it's perfect, it's never perfect and we wait till it's right, it's never right, so we never get started so we can't improve. There is nothing to improve on. So what that student did in that boot camp was they launched the Google Ads campaign with bids that they kind of just guessed on because they didn't know what the average bid was going to be. They didn't know if their area was going to have enough searches or not. They didn’t know how many keywords they needed but I gave them some rules of thumb and he made some decisions and he got it launched and he got a deal out of it. [0:09:06.5] Of course did everyone get deals, no. Most students didn't get deals. Most students, what they did was they launched and some things were good and some things weren't what they wanted. Maybe this student had enough views of the ad but they weren't getting the clicks and so I said, "Cool, well because you're not getting enough clicks, you need to work on your ad copy so let's work on that." Or we had students that were getting views on the ads and they were getting clicks and the price was right but no one is converting and I said, "Cool, well when you have a problem with conversion, you can look at the traffic or you can look at the landing page and here is how you do that." Or we had some students where they were getting clicks and they were getting conversions but they were way too expensive and I said, "Great, when things are way too expensive, you look at what keywords are spending money, the ones that are above your key performance indicator numbers, you bid those down. The ones that are below that number you bid those up." For every set of problems, there is a set of solutions. [0:10:01.9] But before you get started, you don't know where your problems are. Taking imperfect action, especially if you're a planner like me or researcher or someone who likes to have all your ducks in a row, it can be painful and when you're doing your marketing. No one likes to spend money and feel like they didn’t get the ROI from it.

It's so common when I talk to an investor, what they’ll tell me – I'll say, "Hey listen, how much money do you want to spend on this marketing campaign?" and they will say, "Well, you know I have about $2000 but you know what, I’ll will spend a lot more if I know I'm doing deals and I know I'm making money." I say, "Yeah, of course." Everyone would do that if you know for a fact you put in a dollar and you get out ten. Everyone is going to do that. The problem is you don't know that, at least not in the beginning and even if you've gone for a while there’s no guarantee that everything stays the same. [0:11:00.5] In fact, nothing stays the same. In fact, I can guarantee you it won't stay the same. So you don't know. You don't know what you're going to get. If you're a planner, you’re a researcher like me, that's painful. But if you don't take imperfect action, you can never improve. If you can't ever improve, you're never going to get the result that you want. So if there is something in your life that's bothering you that you just feel like you don't know enough, you're not ready, you're not sure what the result is going to be, I'm going to tell you that something that you can do that will change your life and change that thing forever is just do something, take an imperfect action, move towards your goal even if it's inefficient, even if it's not eventually what you want it to be, just do something. You will be so much further along in the next weeks and months and years than you ever would have been if you waited for things to be perfect. [0:12:05.6]

Hey guys, I hope this podcast was useful. As always, if you could go ahead and on iTunes leave me a review, I would really appreciate that. It helps other people find the show. It really does a lot to help me. I hope you get some value out of this. I love doing this podcast, I love talking to you every week. It means a lot to me that you like it and subscribe and you check out the show. So thank you. As always, you can get more information on the show, show notes all that fun stuff plus a lot of really high-quality blog articles at the Adwords Nerds blog that’s at AdwordsNerds.com just look for the link that says podcast. Love you all, talk you next week. Cheers.