Everybody is doing direct mail, skip trace and calling or text campaigns, bandit signs, SEO, blah blah blah.

Your SEO power is not strong enough.; 2. 

Also they have greater SEO power than you ever will.Takeaways:1. 

PPC, seo, fb, other?

. ;) For example, he thinks we should work for free starting out, which is not realistic economically and also it's not like just 'working' makes you a good agent, as the many long-time mediocre agents can attest to.Content marketing for SEO and exposure is a long term game (unless you drive traffic with ads), most agents struggle with the consistency it takes to blog as much as you need to (including myself, and I love to blog. :), and overall it has gotten much harder to rank well on Google. 

One thing I'm looking into is if any excel more at SEO / getting found since that's are primary goal :)

You could have made 10X more deals at far less cost if you did it the right way.Here is what I do.I do not lift a finger nor do I pay a damn cent UNTIL I know they are motivated.Till then  I do NOTHING, and let them do all the work.By the time they call me they already convinced themselves I am legit, the man, the one to pick, and while they were convincing themselves I am the best choice I didn't even KNOW they EXISTED.You can either follow the masses, be a sheep following other sheep  or get out of that mold and seriously be smart, think, be intelligent and creative and do some serious dominating... like we do honestly.If you or anyone can see the logic in my post this is what you do.Get a website,  make it credible,  work on SEO, then ... if you want to make money right now, and don't want to wait till you rank, do PPC or facebook ads.

I understand to get the to the top with SEO this will take time, minimum 6 months. 

I read it until I came to your SEO optimized link.

Curious to methods people use to find distressed properties or is it truly just searching through listings on zillow/Redfin etc Yes that can be effective for finding deals but if you really want to rank out up you need a motivated seller website SEO optimized and you can run ads on google adds and social media.