I focus mainly in Des Moines due to quantity and potential.

It takes time but the leads are more quality than quantity and generate a wonderful consistent income for my business.In my experience most blind mailers have a very low ROI (return on investment) because the blind mail lists used are repetitively  and the mail piece (yellow letters & postcards) is unoriginal, blatantly commercial and discarded quickly by the prospect in the shredder .  

I believe this business is all about marketing so beginning tomorrow I'm going to detail for 30 days the marketing types, quantity, frequency and prospect groups.

Though, I don't think that quality of the good information has changed so much as the quantity of bad information has doubled, thereby obscuring things...This, interestingly enough, is reflective of the audience, Bill.

I'd love to discuss opportunities to work in harmony with those that are interested in revitalizing my hometown of CLE!!!

You might do better to spend more per piece and drastically reduce the quantity.

Because of that, any & all markets are susceptible to being saturated with newbie & seasoned investors sending out mailers as a way to get into the REI.Quantity over Quality - You can create the most prettiest and heart warming mailer, but the game of Direct Mail (or marketing in general) is about quantity (i.e how many mailers can you send out and over what period of time before you get a response) rather than the quality.  

I personally dont know of any marketing company that would do small quantities of letters/postcards (less than 100) so you could either wait until you have a big list, call the people you want to follow up with or get some postcards printed up that you address and send yourself.

Yeah, we also use the this algorithm, but we're looking for at least a 3.5 ;-)Seriously though, we are looking more for a QUANTITY of potential opportunity.  

Focus on getting lead quality, not lead quantity, and you'll get a better ROI from your marketing.