. :)*Cough* Do* SEO cough*

This will help you with SEO and keep your listing on the first page.

Find motivated sellers (direct mail, driving for dollars, seo, etc..) there are tons of bp articles on lead generation.Check out Carrot.com for custom lead generation site.

Sorry.I just have this feeling he is planing to use you to make more money, and shadowing is not enough a reward in my opinion for you to find him wholesale deals,But to answer your question..the SECOND there is a system that the general public can use to find deals the system ceases to be useful.That is why SEO is the best way to find deals because no one can invade your space.

there is no such thing as "before running SEO".

If your website has few pages then you don't need to hire anyone to do the SEO (search engine optimization) as you can do them by yourself. 

I'm very aware that it is super easy to waste a lot of money in DM, PPC, SEO, FB ads, etc. so paying someone who knows what they're doing is very appealing to me.

You get a website.You learn SEO, and you become an expert at it.Once you do you will rank #1 (if you know what you are doing).That is not enough.

I'm an internet marketer by profession, so all of my leads are through SEO, forums and PPC marketing.

The market doesnt change in 3 months drastically (time to flip a house).But alas.. that is not the point.If you want to get into this investing game this is what you do.You get a website and you use SEO to make it rank.It doesnt matter what you do (unless you buy houses at an auction), when you want to find off market properties people need to be able to find you and trust you enough to do business with.