I would recommend that you go as a visitor once, even pay the $100 to join the REIA (I feel it would be $100 well spent for the networking possibilities, chalk it up to marketing expense) so you can continue going to the monthly meetings.  

2 I can track where my visitors came from either by giving the mailings a specific website i.e. housebuyers.com/sellnow or, even better, by having them enter a "code", similar to what you see in commercials for draftkings 

What worked best for me was getting out of the office, driving around my town (picked up a map from the Visitor's Center, and marked off streets as I went down them), looking for run-down properties, calling listing agent's on signs, and quite honestly just going out making some noise.

As an Agent, you would have access to several different themes and plug ins at Wordpress that would allow visitors to your site to search local listings.

I haven't got an easy way to filter the data currently, but using our Google Analytics, I can tell you that California is easily our largest user base, followed by Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois -- within Cali, our visitors are mostly from the LA area, followed by SF and San Diego.In terms of Metro areas, NYC is tops, followed by LA, DC, Chicago, SF, Dallas-Ft.

Do not visit or talk to the tenant without someone else to support you.

If you're consistently giving unsupervised access to visitors/guests that will undermine those security concerns.