All Forum Posts by: Lucas Machado

@Andrew Briggs The biggest problem with services like ListSource is that the listed don't really have any motivation targeting. There's also too generic.

There's lots of money to be made with a basic "out-of-state" owner list. I've made my fair share. However, it's cost prohibitive for a newbie to mail 2,000 postcards per month. It would be beneficial, particularly for newer investors, to bring data to the table beyond basic equity and location. Motivating factors like high equity foreclosures, tax certs/deeds applications, perhaps deceased not yet reflected in the public record. That is targeted cost effective marketing.

You can also expand on just e-mailing. Many businesses are now branching out into providing e-mails, telephones, social media profiles now to motivated leads. This can help a person on a shoe string budget because well, phone calls calls are free.

One thing to consider besides response rate is that it's about quality responses - not necessarily quantity. If a person calls you and isn't a real seller, it's just wasting your time taking the call, preparing an offer, analyzing the property. You can always get more spread via postcards. Really it's about profitability, not response rate, and that's very hard to measure. I always want to reach more prospects - as people who are seriously needing to sell don't need a special hand-written letter to call you back.

This is highly dependent on marketing and strategy.

However, just as a general rule, you should at least commit to $500/month. I'm sure some people will say that is "not enough" - but if you are very frugal with how you spend it you can get plenty of leads. Last month, my spend was $1,200 and I got 23 leads. So, you don't need to spend $50k per year to net some deals.

The key to keeping your budget in control is to have strong negative keyword base and to use very narrow tailoring. You can tailor to your market either by requiring the city as a keyword (which gets all good searches), but then you do lose out on people searching in your market not using the keyword. On the other hand, you can use Adwords targeting scheme to your market and use strong negative keywords to block out searches from leads you can't handle.

One thing about search engine optimization - it's a black-box. Google's algorithm is proprietary, and as hard as you study, there is an element of the unknown. I'm not saying there aren't facts. However, in the industry, many sites are fairly cookie cutter. There's only so much "on site" testing we are going to work or able to do.

As a quick example, depending on your market, you might be lucky to see about 50 organic visitors. I'm page one on all the key searches (goes up an down a bit to #1 through #10), and I get around 30 to 60 visitors per day.

I started a VWO site to run some A/B split tests. I was advised, at 50 visitors per day, a high certainty test was going to take nearly a year to run.

As a matter of perspective, conventional wisdom says buying back-links is bad? Spam links are bad? However, if you SEM rush competitors in my market, you see plenty of black hat tactics, including purchased links. I am dead serious when I say my competitors have built a business off black-hat. Where is Google to slam them? I reported this a long time ago. No action.

The conclusion I'm looking is that you simply can't put your eggs in one basket. Local directories, national directories, press releases, on-site blogs, off-site blogs, articles, follow links, no-follow links, off-site forums, comments on high domain authority sites, social media sites, guest blogging. All of these tactics have their place. 

Has Facebook marketing been successful for you? Good ROI? It's kind of been a bust for me - though I haven't invested heavily in it sufficient to draw any major conclusions. Budget is limited so I'm mostly in the Adwords space for paid digital. However, I'm always open to trying/learning a new strategy.

Here's a few of my favorites:

http://dreia.org/

http://breia.com/

http://reandb.com/

Hello BiggerPockets,

Does anyone have experience or recommendations for a Call Center services? 

I'd be interested for hearing from vendors that cruise these forums, as well as other investors.

Two things I'm looking for:

Manage Lead In-Take & Follow-Up Calls For Unmotivated Leads: Between online/direct-mail marketing, I open somewhere in the ranges of 100 to 200 leads per month into the CRM. The volume is daunting - I definitely can't handle the initial contact and script form. So, I need someone to take the call, follow the script, provide a description. Then, if it's a good lead, I can handle the follow-up. If it's a bad lead, I would need the call center or VA type to do the call back.

Next thing is general call backs on medium to poor leads. I subscribe to the "no lead left behind" philosophy, but also recognize that philosophy needs to be executed by cheap labor. I'd imagine this would take 3 to 4 hours a day contacting older or less motivated leads.

Cold Calling: Always more prospecting to do! I've been meaning to cold call as follow-up to direct-mail. The conundrum is though, direct-mail and cold call is about volume, and I don't have time to handle volume. Anyone have any solution for this?

Another issue that would be great to get insight on - my pipeline has thousands of leads and just grows every month. That pipeline is very valuable to me. What are others doing, when using a call center or VA type to protect the confidentiality of both the leads and systems? Just letting them into the CRM? Confidentiality contract? Printing out an excel sheet and asking for Evernote type updates?

Also - it would be great if the service had management of calls backs on nights, weekends.

It would be wonderful to combine the cold calling and lead follow-up into one service.

Budgeting wise, I'm definitely not looking to break the bank on cheap call labor that is essentially just reading a script. However, depending on the value of the service and available time, I would consider a decent work from home, no special degree required, salary equivalent (if I'm getting 9 to 5pm services).

Thank you all in advance!

InvestorCarrot is a solid platform. You can be up and running in a few weeks. Support is good if you have questions. If you only have one site, the $50/plan is fine.

Think of it this way, you could spend months upon months split testing a site you created on your own. Or, you could just get started on a site with easy forms and direction.

I've been firmly coming around to the opinion that, for the most part, if you use a solid platform like InvestorCarrot the key to success is exposure - not conversion optimization.

I did heatmaps on my site not too long ago using VWO. For the most part, people literally just connected to my page and immediately put their info in the box . I did remove my side-bars in many cases because it was distracting and people kept funneling to my FB page.

I've seen people create their own sites . . . and it's almost comical in some cases. I'm not going to link any examples here, but just Google around and you can see a beautiful site but not find a form. I saw a gorgeous site the other day, and you had to click through the menu to find the form. I probably only found the form because I know how to look for it - I doubt anyone would find that form.

And the site I'm talking about, was actually from a real estate company. At least with Carrot, you know you get a quality product. Not saying there can't be other solutions, but it's the easiest solid option without breaking your budget or taking a ton of time.

I completely agree with @Omar Ruiz on everything.

Tracking direct-mail . . . you have NO IDEA which mail piece they opened. I might mail a person 24 times over the course of 4 years. How would I even know what mail piece they opened? You have to look at it from a 12-month perspective, and even there, you could be missing. It's definitely a volume game like everyone is saying.

And with any marketing, you need to take a good hard look at yourself. I see way too many people asking why they didn't get deals. Well, perhaps you're not closing deals because you don't know how to close? Or, you're strategy is off. I've gone a while between deals because of being too conservative, and then watch competitors scoop my deals and make a good chunk of change.

Hell, I lost a big deal about 4 months ago because I made a very conservative initial offer because the seller said that was the price they wanted. Next day, under contract with a competitor with a price I would have gladly paid. Closed 20 days later. Painful.

Was my SEO the problem? I don't think so.

The response rate is somewhat irrelevant. Take a look at your leads - are they hot? Tire-kickers? There's no point in paying to fill up your pipeline with tirekickers. Just makes life harder.

Mailing 300 is extremely rough in terms of expecting a deal. Honestly, I can mail 6000 per month and expect a deal every other month. That ends up around $3,000 dollars to net around $10,000 dollars.

Unless your mailing probates (and pretty much only that niche), 300 isn't going to get it done (or you'd just have to be extremely lucky or in the perfect non-competitive market).