real estate marketing system

Generate 100’s of Free Leads in

6 Easy Steps

A Proven, Easy-to-Follow System that Can Provide you with Free Craigs List Leads by Tonight!

By Josh Schoenly

Generate Thousands of Free Leads in 6 Easy Steps

Copyright © 2009 By Josh Schoenly. All rights reserved.

Robert Minton is a licensed Real Estate Professional in the state of Pennsylvania. He is not a licensed attorney, tax advisor, or any other licensed professional. Anyone considering

implementing these ideas and plans are advised to seek professional advice concerning any legal and tax matters.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means without the express written permission of the

author.

Printed in the United States of America

© Copyright 2009 by Josh Schoenly – All rights reserved 1

www.BLBTSystem.com

Chapter Index Introduction: Welcome to the World of Free Leads! Step 1 – Create an Account ……………………………… 6 Which CraigsList Starting Option is Best? Multiple Accounts “Flagging” and “Ghosting” Quick Recap Step 2 – Choose Your Campaign .…………………….. 16 The One Big Question when choosing a campaign Why Separate Campaigns? Use the Buzz to Your Advantage CraigsList Campaigns that Work Quantity vs. Quality Quick Recap Step 3 – Create Your Campaign ……………………… 23 How to Create Variations of the Same Ad What Ad Fields Are the Easiest to Alter A Sneaky Little Trick Get More Clicks on Your Ads A Call to Action Capturing Leads Quick Recap Step 4 – Implement (Post) ……………………………. 44 Results Follow Action, so Implement Don’t Do What I Did More Tips to Avoid Flagging and Ghosting Timing is Everything Weekend Warriors Actually Posting Your Ad Quick Recap Step 5 – Follow up ………………………………………… 53 How to Convert Leads Generated into Commission Income Short-Term vs. Long-Term … Sell Now and Later It’s a Numbers Game Lead Conversion Methods Auto-Responders Tours and Seminars

http://www.BLBTSystem.com


www.BLBTSystem.com

Relationship-Building Quick Recap Step 6 – Track and Improve ………………………………… 69 What You Measure Improves Test and Track Headlines and Other Variables Your Squeeze Page Conversion Being Lazy Costs Thousands of Dollars Quick Recap Conclusion: Time to Get Started!…………………… 97



www.BLBTSystem.com

Introduction

Welcome to the World of Free Leads If you’re reading this, you’re obviously interested in generating free leads on CraigsList. Before I take you through, step-by-step, exactly how to achieve that, let me give you a little background on myself. I think you’ll see that you don’t need to be some kind of computer expert or Internet genius to unlock the power of CraigsList for your business. I am a former teacher and athletic director. About five years ago, I got started in the real estate industry by buying my first investment property. While I was still teaching, I purchased multiple rental properties – I had some apartment buildings and did some “flips.” Late in 2006, when my wife and I had our first child, I had the opportunity to take a leave of absence from teaching. My idea was to take that leave and see if I could make real estate my full-time profession. And luckily, things worked out and here I am today. But when I took that leave, I was primarily thinking that I was going to be a full-time investor. I was going to continue to buy properties and live off the rental income and the income generated through turning properties over – buying and fixing them – and selling them. Before long, I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 55 units and was managing them myself. It’s not my favorite thing to do, manage rental properties. But I was doing that myself and, unfortunately, I had vacancies much more frequently than I would have liked. One of the things that I started to use to fill my vacancies, which really became my primary way of generating leads to fill my vacancies, was this thing called CraigsList. And I can still remember how I stumbled onto it. A buddy of mine, who is also an investor (now also a real estate agent) had this old, beat-up set of drums sitting in his living room when I was visiting one day.



www.BLBTSystem.com

I went in, saw them and asked, “What are you doing with these drums?” “Well these tenants of mine, they just left and they left these drums in the property,” he said. I said, “OK, so you’re just going to leave these sitting in your living room, or are you going to take up the drums?” He said, “No, I’m going to sell them on CraigsList.” “You’re going to what?” I asked. “Sell them to whom?” And so he explained to me, “CraigsList is this free site, and you can sell stuff on it and lots of people go there and check it out.” So that’s how I was introduced to it. That same night, I got online and started playing around and trying to figure out what the site is. I guess you could say I was hooked immediately. I was struggling a little with vacant properties, so I started to use CraigsList to generate leads for my vacancies. And it quickly became the No. 1 way that I was filling my vacancies, for two reasons:

1. It was free.

2. I was getting far better results than with the ads I was doing in the newspaper.

While I had plenty of success using CraigsList to fill vacancies, I realized not long after becoming a “full-time investor” that income from my rental properties was not going to be enough to support my family. So I turned to something known as “wholesaling.” A simple definition of “wholesaling” would be “putting buyers and sellers together,” similar to how a real estate agent would work. However, the difference – and the reason I was able to do it legally, without a license – was I was a principal in the transaction. Wholesaling is what I did to supplement my income. When I started that endeavor, I truly began to realize that I really needed to become an expert marketer. I needed to learn more about marketing because I hadn’t really focused a lot on it, and I learned



www.BLBTSystem.com

very quickly that it was going to be of major importance in the wholesaling business. So I really started to immerse myself in marketing information of all kinds. Because I didn’t have a lot of money and I didn’t have a true “budget” set aside, I kept playing with this CraigsList thing to try to keep a steady stream of buyers for the wholesaling business. I also had some success with it in finding sellers, so, like when I was trying to fill vacancies, CraigsList became the primary source of my property sales. When I say “primary,” I mean 75 percent to 90 percent of the properties I was selling came from either people who were responding directly to an ad put out specifically to sell a property, or people who had signed up originally for a list from CraigsList. I easily generated over a hundred thousand dollars in net income in a relatively short time, just from working buyers and some sellers on CraigsList. It wasn’t easy, mind you. I spent a lot of time, a lot of trial-and-error hours in front of a computer, making CraigsList work for me. But over time, I learned ways to streamline the process. I tested and tweaked. Eventually, I had a system that gave me consistent, predictable results. I was able to build a huge list of buyers without spending all my time in front of the computer. In fact, in the last three years, I’ve generated more than 7,000 free leads on CraigsList using the system outlined in this book. It’s this system that allowed me to generate enough leads to put buyers and sellers of real estate together before I had my license, and it’s the same system I use today as an agent to generate hundreds of free leads each and every month. High-quality, responsive leads. It’s the same system I’m going to show you in this book. I will explain to you how to avoid my mistakes, give you all kinds of shortcuts and teach you how to generate hundreds of free leads each month for your business.



www.BLBTSystem.com

I think it will have a profound impact on your business, and it’s something you can put into play quickly. Like I said, you don’t have to be an Internet marketing expert or computer genius to use this system – I sure wasn’t when I started. So let’s get YOU started!



www.BLBTSystem.com

Step 1

Create Your Account Craigslist (www.CraigsList.org) is kind of like one of those garage bands that start playing school dances and wind up selling platinum albums. What began as a smallish site with a loyal but relatively small following has evolved into a widely used, high-traffic site that can easily drive prospects to your side business at no cost to you. There are similar sites out there now, but nothing has yet come close to knocking the original off its perch. CraigsList started in the mid-1990s in San Francisco, when a man named Craig Newmark created an email list of friends to let them share news of events going on – one of the earliest social networking ideas to go online. It grew and grew and now gets something like 20 billion page views per month, making it one of the world’s biggest web sites. CraigsList earns revenue solely from selling paid job ads in bigger cities, but its primary use remains as a free classified service for private users. It’s the biggest classified medium in the world, free to most users, and many, many people make their buying decisions from ads on this convenient, simple service. Maybe you’ve bought or sold something on CraigsList. When you go to CraigsList.org, you can immediately start posting ads, which brings us to the title of this first step, “Create an Account.” You don’t necessarily have to create an account in order to post an ad on CraigsList. You could simply go through the posting process, enter an email and have your ad published. Maybe you’ve done this before. You just enter an email address, hit “submit,” and the site will send you an email with a link that, if clicked, will make your ad go live. This process, this manner of posting ads, is not the one I recommend.


http://www.CraigsList.org


www.BLBTSystem.com

Yes, it’s simple. But the problem with this approach is that if you want to delete an ad, edit an ad or re-post an ad – which are critical components of the system I use and vital to consistent results – then you have to save all those ads offline and sort through all those emails the site sends you. It becomes a time-consuming and very tedious procedure. Even if you don’t plan to use CraigsList quite as extensively as I do for buyer leads in my business, I still encourage you to go another route. To use CraigsList effectively to generate free leads for your business, the first step – as simple as it sounds – is to…

Create an Account From the main page of the site, select your area from the list of options. Then click on “My account” from the links near the top of the left-hand side of the page. You will be taken to a login page. From there, click on the link that says “Click here to sign up.” Then just type in the information it asks. Really, all you need is an email address. That means that you can have as many accounts as you have email addresses. And with all the free web-based email options out there, it’s easy and quick to set up multiple email addresses in order to set up multiple accounts. Why multiple accounts? There are a couple of reasons. One, we will get into in a minute. The other will be covered in Step 3. Once your account is up and running (you will get an e-mail confirmation to that effect), you will be able to start posting ads. Seems easy enough, right? Well, there are a couple of things I should tell you about here. First, it says above to “pick your city.” Let me tell you about my experience with that. I’m from a relatively small area of central Pennsylvania. It’s the state capital, Harrisburg, but our population in this area is not huge.



www.BLBTSystem.com

It’s not a major city. So there are only so many people that are on my local CraigsList site. What I did to combat this rather small audience was to post to all the larger cities that are in relatively close proximity to my home town. This worked to get my posted ads in front of more people, more sets of eyeballs, but it also meant setting up separate accounts for each metropolitan area. You might be in the same position with your business, which means you will be faced with the same challenge. You can elect to post only in your immediate local area, which might not have a huge population, or you can set up accounts and post ads in several surrounding areas that might have larger populations. I am not going to try to sway you one way or another here. I will say that my experiences early on with posting in multiple areas led to some problems. For example … I would get up early in the morning, between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. depending on the day, and I would post all these ads thinking “I got that out of the way.” But there are a couple of things wrong with that. The way CraigsList works, for those of you who don’t know, is when you first place an ad, your ad is at the top of the list. At 6 a.m., my ads would on top, very visible. The problem is not many people are getting up at 6 in the morning to look for houses. When I posted to larger cities, by the time there would be optimum traffic to CraigsList, my ad would be buried. Depending on what area you’re in, you’re going to have different numbers of ads. You may have one page of ads on your local area, which is the equivalent of one page. But there are some cities with several pages of new ads each day, literally several hundred ads. So my ads in the larger population areas would get buried very, very quickly. You want to be on the first page of results, and ideally you want your ad to be above the



www.BLBTSystem.com

point at which you have to scroll down to view the bottom half of the page. Even though I was getting these leads, it took me several years to even figure out that I was doing something completely off-base strategically. So the lesson here is that if you’re going to set up multiple accounts to try to take advantage of larger population areas, keep in mind the time at which you need to post in order to keep your ads most visible will vary. Here’s a screen shot of the page with your initial geographic choices:

Because I use CraigsList, I do check it frequently. I’ll go in from time to time and I’ll see a single listing agent with, let’s say, 15 listings. They’ll go in and post all 15 of their listings all at once and do the same thing that I did. They’ll do it first thing in the morning or maybe they’re a night owl, so they do it at midnight. And then



www.BLBTSystem.com

they’re frustrated and don’t understand why they spent all this time posting 15 ads and no one called. While we’re on the subject, let me point out something to always remember:

You want to be at the top of the list when the most people are searching.

It’s a basic rule that should be taken into account whenever you are making a decision about advertising on CraigsList, including what cities in which you open accounts. You want to be posting, ideally, during lunch time, when there’s a lot of traffic, people on their lunch break surfing. Also, after dinner is a big one. People sit down after dinner to look for a home or look for property. If you’re at or near the top of the page at these times, you are doing OK. We will go into this in greater detail in Step 4, but this basic idea of being at or near the top of the page should be a factor in every decision you make.

Managing Your Account The great thing about having a CraigsList account is that when you log in, all your advertising information is at your fingertips. All your ads are stored on the site – you can see them all when you log in. You can delete ads, edit ads, re-post ads. And you can see if your ads have been “flagged.” “Flagging,” if you are unfamiliar with the term, is kind of a CraigsList-specific reference to ads that don’t conform to the site’s guidelines. The site’s administrators and users may flag ads they deem prohibited, mis-categorized or considered “spam.” These ads are subject to removal. When you create an account, you can see if this is happening to your ads. You can make adjustments. Without the account, flagging can be a problem that gets away from you, as you will often not even know it’s happening.



www.BLBTSystem.com

Another CraigsList phenomenon is known as “ghosting.” This occurs when you post an ad and click on the activation link to make it live, but it doesn’t appear on the site. You might think it’s posted, but nobody can see it. That’s no use, right? It’s even more frustrating than flagging. And while the only way to know if you’re ghosted is to look at the live site – your account summary list of ads won’t alert you – having an account, for some reason, seems to reduce the number of instances you’ll be ghosted. Using this system, I have been flagged and ghosted much less frequently than when I was just a beginner, trying to feel my way around CraigsList in the dark. So believe me, creating an account, which you can monitor and adjust, is the right start for you. Without one, CraigsList can (and will) police you, but you can’t keep an eye on, or “police” your own ads.

Quick Recap With this seemingly simple “Create an Account” step, you begin on your way to free leads on Craigslist. Remember, creating an account, rather than just posting away, allows you to:

1. Manage your ads effectively. You can view, edit, delete and re-post ads all in one place.

2. Better avoid the problems associated with flagging and ghosting.

Creating an account is quick and easy. In order to create your account:

1. Go to www.craigslist.org

2. On the main page, select your metropolitan area from the list of U.S. cities, or click on your state or country to see more options. Then choose the site nearest you.

3. From the left side, near the top of the page, select “My Account.”

4. Click the link that says “Click here to sign up.”


http://www.craigslist.org


www.BLBTSystem.com

5. Provide the information for which you are prompted.

6. You’ll receive a confirmation email at the address you provide. Click the link to CraigsList to confirm activation of your account, and you’ll be ready to go.

Now we’re ready to move on!



www.BLBTSystem.com

Step 2

Choose Your Campaign In the next chapter, Step 3, you’ll see that I create specific campaigns for marketing on CraigsList. Before we get there, however, I want to explain to you the importance of choosing the campaigns you’re going to use. There is one primary question you must ask yourself when choosing your campaign or campaigns …

What type of lead are you trying to generate?

It seems a simple enough question, but it’s one that many real estate agents seemingly fail to ask themselves. Sure, in our business there is the obvious difference between buyer leads and seller leads. We can all recognize that – we farm and market differently for sellers and buyers. That’s with good reason. But there are also different types of leads within those groups, and the untargeted, throw-enough-mud-on-the-wall-and-some-of-it-will-stick marketing approaches many agents employ are often a waste of time, effort and money. For example, there are many different kinds of buyers, including …

• First-time home buyers

• Investors

• Foreclosure bargain hunters

• Multi-family buyers

• Luxury home buyers

• Vacation home buyers

If your goal is working with first-time home buyers, you wouldn’t market to luxury home buyers. The problem is, agents do what they know works. They don’t always adapt to the market, adapt to their



www.BLBTSystem.com

target audience. The marketing that would attract first-time buyers will not generate a ton of luxury home buyer leads, but if that’s the marketing you know, you’re likely to use it anyway. Now, I’m not trying to pick on agents for their marketing; I’m just trying to illustrate how important it is to choose the right campaign for your CraigsList marketing. Back to our question …

What type of lead are you trying to generate? Your answer might be that you want to generate ALL types of leads. Maybe you work in an area where there are a lot of vacation homes and luxury homes. Maybe you work with first-time home buyers and investors looking for distressed properties. That’s fine. The thing to keep in mind, though, is …

You want separate campaigns for each type of lead you are trying to generate

Again, you wouldn’t use the same kind of ads to generate luxury home buyer leads as you would first-time home buyers. So before you start posting ads on CraigsList, you have to establish what campaign or campaigns you’re going to use.

Foreclosures and Short Sales As I write this, for example, foreclosures and short sales are at the front of everybody’s minds. Foreclosure rates are everyday headlines in the news; other agents and companies are advertising foreclosed properties; and everybody’s got a story of somebody getting “steal” on an REO purchase or short sale. Since foreclosures are such a “buzzword” then, it’s something I want to capitalize on as a marketer. Now, foreclosure buyers might not be the only leads I want to generate, and advertising foreclosures will likely attract first-time home buyers as well as investors, but I have chosen foreclosures (and short sales) as one of my campaigns for my CraigsList marketing.



www.BLBTSystem.com

In fact, my foreclosure and short sales buyers campaign is my No. 1 campaign right now. That can certainly change in the future, and one of the best things about having a system for working CraigsList is that you can change your marketing quickly and inexpensively.

Rent to Own Another campaign with which I have had success is for “rent to own” (lease option) buyers. This group of leads is made up of people who want to buy a home but can’t qualify for a mortgage right now. As lending standards tightened after the subprime mortgage meltdown, this group of home buyers grew quite a bit. This group of leads is actually my second-best campaign. For me, personally, being an investor and working with other investors, these leads make a lot of sense for my business. Just as separate campaigns for both buyers and sellers of distressed properties help me meet demand with supply, it’s the same with my Rent to Own campaign. I have investors looking for tenants or buyers, and I have tenant/buyer leads looking for homes. This may or may not be ideal for your business, as every market is different. I’m simply sharing with you that it works in mine.

Luxury or Executive properties Like Rent-to-Own buyers, those in the market for executive estates and/or luxury homes are a pretty specific type of lead. Keep in mind that because of the system I use for CraigsList, I can easily tailor my marketing to specific target audiences, such as this one. I have had success generating leads for buyers of luxury homes and larger estates on CraigsList. Campaigns that generate these types of leads don’t bring in the same volume of leads, but the tradeoff is that one sale of an expensive property can provide a substantial commission.

Multi-Family and Apartment buildings



www.BLBTSystem.com

This category actually has many possibilities, all of which seem to be great fits for CraigsList. You can be looking for apartment buyers – investors who are interested in multi-family properties. If you do property management or provide tenant-placement services, you could target people who are looking to rent housing. You can even go after sellers, as there seem to be plenty of people – at least at the end of 2009, when I am writing this – who are all to ready to sell their properties.

The Other side of the Coin Another great (and profitable) thing about choosing multiple campaigns is your ability to use them together. For instance, my foreclosure and short sales campaign on the buyers side has given me a ton of leads, both investors and regular buyers, who are looking to purchase distressed properties. That means it is useful to me to attract sellers of distressed properties, as well. Then I have a supply of buyer and seller leads. These, of course, would be two separate campaigns. You generate foreclosure buyer leads with one campaign and generate distressed seller leads with another campaign. I personally work with both. Normally, in other media, separate marketing campaigns for two opposite groups such as these would require considerable time, money and effort. With CraigsList, I don’t spend a ton of any of the three in order to create and manage effective separate campaigns. I should tell you that I don’t generate the same number of seller leads as I do buyer leads. There are several reasons for that, probably not the least among them being that there are more people on CraigsList looking to buy or rent than looking to sell. But I have done deals for which I have gotten both the buyer and seller lead through CraigsList. In fact, I recently completed a transaction for which I received a $15,000 total commission, and both the seller and buyer were leads I generated on CraigsList. The entire process took just 45 days –



www.BLBTSystem.com

from the time my ad hit CraigsList to the day the money was in my hand – and I didn’t spend a penny to market this deal. When your ads are free, it keeps your cost-per-sale low!

More Ideas Another nice thing about CraigsList and having multiple campaigns is that it’s easy and inexpensive to manage campaigns that are kind of pegged to niches. For example, my list of rent-to-own leads might seem like a pretty specific niche. And it is, though the number of people unable to qualify for a mortgage has grown lately. But since my campaign is free and it doesn’t require a ton of my time, I’m not putting all my eggs in one basket, the way a typical print or television marketing campaign might do. With my CraigsList system, I’m able to have pretty specific campaigns, which lead to pretty specific types of leads, without having to ignore larger parts of my business. For example, I have been able to use CraigsList campaigns to farm specific communities and even individual subdivisions. Ordinarily, this sort of activity would probably not be income-producing enough to spend time on. But since I’ve tested and tweaked ads and campaigns and know what works, the time spent is minimal. Since the ads are free, my investment into more “specialized” prospects is literally only minutes of my time. In other words, with CraigsList, you can afford to “dabble.” And for me, a few minutes is a worthwhile investment to explore new income streams. For example, by testing and trying a couple of different campaigns, I discovered a market for new-construction townhomes in an area near me. I was able to pull sales from that trend that I normally wouldn’t have found. It’s not my bread-and-butter business … more like gravy on top!



www.BLBTSystem.com

Quality vs. Quantity Your business is your business – it’s personal to you, just as mine is to me. So by sharing with you the information above, I am not telling you what the focus of your real estate business should be. I am merely conveying to you the types of campaigns that I have seen first-hand work well on CraigsList. I have heard other agents say “Sure, you can get a bunch of free leads on CraigsList, but they are low-quality.” I would say that if you’re getting “low-quality” leads on CraigsList, then you are doing something wrong. And it really does go back to the question “what kind of leads are you trying to generate?” If you are trying to sell luxury homes and use the same ads or campaigns you use to attract first-time home buyers – just as the case would be in ANY medium – you are going to attract what seem to be low-quality leads. They are looking for first-time home buyer-type homes, starter homes, NOT executive or luxury homes. If you were hunting deer in the woods, you wouldn’t be using a turkey call. It’s the same with marketing. I would say that if you have tried CraigsList and found you were generating low-quality leads, then it was likely a mismatch of message to market. With very specific campaigns, CraigsList advertisers must match their message to the audience they are trying to attract. THAT is how you get high-quality leads on CraigsList. The less cheery side of that reality is the fact that you might not be operating your business in the areas of expertise – niches – that pull a ton of leads. For example, if you’re like me and running simultaneous campaigns for investors and foreclosure buyers, you are probably generating a ton of leads. But if your business is not in those areas – say, for example it’s beachfront vacation property and beachfront vacation property only – you will probably not get as many leads. It’s just a more narrow market area.



www.BLBTSystem.com

But if your campaign is done properly, the leads you get should be very HIGH-quality. One last word about quantity vs. quality: What may seem to you like a poor-quality lead now still has an ultimate value. They might not buy now, but there is value in building a list of leads whether they have bought from you or not. The most consistently successful real estate agents are the ones who:

1. Consistently generate many leads

2. Consistently generate high-quality leads

3. Follow up with those leads so they have a large database of responsive buyers

Now, you might say you can’t do all three of those things with CraigsList, but I’m living proof that you can! Let me share with you a big mistake I see real estate agents making. And I’m not trying to insult anyone here, just pointing out something I’ve noticed a lot on CraigsList. Agents are posting what I call the “same old, same old” kind of ad. They’re posting an ad that says, “Hey, I’m selling this three- bedroom, one-bath brick house that has 1,200 square feet and .32 acres and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you’d like to see it, call me at this number.” That’s not going to get a maximum response. If I’m a buyer and I’m looking at that listing, I’m not going to call. Using CraigsList ads as lead-generation tools has had a greater impact for me than trying to sell specific properties. And if you do sell specific properties, if that’s your main intention with this, I would actually recommend you give just very sketchy details that kind of force prospects to call you to get better information. Then you can start a conversation, start engaging them



www.BLBTSystem.com

and if that property doesn’t work, they may turn into a buyer for another property. By choosing various campaigns, and by not necessarily trying to sell specific properties, you will build various lists that contain many potential buyers of any future properties you have to sell. This impacts the long-term success of your business.

Quick Recap To maximize your CraigsList advertising, you must choose a campaign or campaigns that are effective means to your desired end. So …

1. Ask “What type of leads do I want to generate?”

2. Pick campaigns that capitalize on buzzwords

3. Focus on quantity AND quality of leads, and think both short-term and long-term



www.BLBTSystem.com

Step 3

Create Your Campaign Now we’re getting into the meat and potatoes here. Not that the first two steps aren’t important; they are. If this were a recipe, the first two steps would be like gathering the ingredients and prepping your kitchen. Now it’s time to turn on the stove and get cooking. With my system, once I decide what lead type I’m after, what campaign I am choosing, then I have to create the campaign. There are a couple of key components to start with, which I want to particularly highlight. When you are creating ads in CraigsList, you have several fields that you have to fill out. You have spots to fill in information for:

• Price

• Number of bedrooms

• Title of the ad

• Location

• The body of the ad

• Address

• Photos

I generally tell people that if they’re using some sort of classified ad that’s working for them in some other medium, that’s a good starting point for a classified ad campaign on CraigsList. To create a true campaign, we take the type of campaign we’ve chosen, and we have to create variations of posts that fit that campaign. We need several variations of ads that fit the specific campaign so that we can post multiple times (we will get into the details of actually posting a little later). What I teach with my system is to post a minimum of two times a day during the week and a minimum of once on the weekends.



www.BLBTSystem.com

That’s a minimum. If you want to supercharge your results, certainly feel free to post more. The reason you need to create varying ads within each campaign is simple: To be effective, you must post multiple times per day each day. And CraigsList regulations prevent you from posting the exact ad – or even a very similar ad – within 48 hours. So what we have to do is create different ads, so that we can post the same lead-generation message – but not the same ad – multiple times. This is an absolute must if you want to consistently generate leads. So with that in mind, let’s go back to our list of various fields for a CraigsList ad. It’s these multiple fields that will allow us to make changes to the same message so that it becomes multiple ads. The first thing we want to look at is the title field. Let’s use the foreclosure leads campaign as our first example. What you want to do is come up with possible titles of the ad that essentially say the same thing, or very similar things, but in a different way. So a foreclosure campaign’s various titles might consist of the following titles:

1. Foreclosure listings

2. Bank Foreclosures

3. REO Listings

4. Public Notice – Must sell immediately

5. HUD homes

6. Corporate owned

7. Short sale

8. Motivated sellers

You probably get the picture. There are lots of titles you can use to generate the same type of lead you want (remember, you asked yourself that question in Step 2!). The first thing you want to do when you’re creating a campaign is create variations of titles.



www.BLBTSystem.com

The second thing, and it’s a little more difficult, is to create variations of the body of the ad, the text within the actual ad itself. The reason I say this is a little more difficult is the simple fact that, as you can see above, it’s not difficult at all to come up with multiple titles. The other fields I listed that are available to you to change are kind of customized. It’s easy to use different prices, addresses, locations, number of bedrooms, etc. The variations take care of themselves. For example, let’s say you are generating leads for REO listings in the town of Smallville. Well, Smallville is probably in a county. So you can vary the location field by using the county name here. Or if there’s a more general or more specific area – “Suburbs of Metropolis” or “Old Town area” – you can use, it’s pretty easy. It’s a bit more involved to alter the actual body of the ad. After all, you want the message to be the same, and if it’s a good ad, you don’t want to mess with it too much. In other words, you don’t want to slap together poor ad just for the sake of being able to post it multiple times. What you want to do is post multiple GOOD ads! For this, I teach what I call a “sneaky little trick.” It’s called “Image Posting.”

Image Posting Normally with CraigsList, when you make an ad, you have a headline that you put in. There’s a spot for the price, the location and so forth. Then there’s a body to the ad, which you typically will type in text. Here’s an example of the body of what might be a typical CraigsList ad:

MOTIVATED SELLERS Free List of Homes for Sale with Motivated Sellers. Includes Pictures.

(123) 123-1234



www.BLBTSystem.com

Well, my sneaky image posting trick allows you to do a couple of things. First, I found through experience that my ads get flagged much less frequently when I use image posting. Secondly, I’m able to essentially post the same ad. I basically make an image of the same ad, and post the entire image. To CraigsList, it’s a different ad, so I can post it more frequently. To me, it’s the same ad. I’ll try and sketch this out for you. There’s a couple of ways you can do image posting, but I’ll just tell you one simple way for now. If you have Microsoft Publisher or something similar – a desktop publishing program that allows for basic page design – you can create your advertisement using that tool. Ideally, you would make it look like it would look in a CraigsList ad. You would type your details, probably want to even insert some pictures because pictures in ads pull much better than ads with no pictures. But the idea is that you can create this duplicate ad using, for example, Publisher, and then you save it as a JPEG. A JPEG is just a picture, an image file. And then using a simple bit of HTML code, you literally just paste it into your browser, make a couple of simple changes in the CraigsList posting, and you’ve got an identical ad that now shows up as an image versus regular text. If you don’t have Microsoft Publisher, you can use just about any word processor layout software that allows you to save your file as an image. Or, if you use a program such as 5 Clicks (www.5clicks.com) you can write an ad in any program and take a screen shot to save as an image. Here’s an example of an image posting. As you can see, it’s essentially the same message as in the text ad above.


http://www.5clicks.com


www.BLBTSystem.com

So now you have two ads with the same message that you can rotate to get around CraigsList rules for not repeating posts within a 48-hour period. But, wait, it gets even better. By using the same image ad, but varying your title, headline, price, location, etc., you are can actually create several different ads – not just two. And once the ads are created, they are saved in your account. So, voila, you have a campaign. See why I call it a sneaky little secret? One more thing that bears mentioning here: Make sure that, in your posting, you follow your state’s rules for real estate advertisement. As you see above, there is a spot for a company name. Maybe you just have to disclose that you’re a broker. Whatever the case, make sure your posts – whether simply text or an image posting – follows the rules.



www.BLBTSystem.com

Also keep in mind that if you’ve created multiple accounts, you will have to repeat this process of varying the ads for each campaign for each account you have. This may or may not be worth the time for you. If you live in a less densely populated area, you might want to test an account in a nearby larger area. The variations of ads will take a little time to set up, but it might be worth the time to have a larger audience. Or, you might end up not getting many more leads from another area and decide it’s not worth the time to manage multiple accounts.

Get More Clicks on Your Ads Another thing to keep in mind when you’re putting together the ads for your campaign is that, first and foremost, you want visitors to the site to click on your ad. It doesn’t matter how effective the body is if everybody just skips clicking on the ad. The first key here, of course, is the headline. You must have a headline that compels a reader to click on your ad. Otherwise, your great message never gets delivered. With my system, there is a simple way to help your results in that regard. Call it “Sneaky Little Secret No. 2.” You want to make sure that your headlines or subject lines of your ad are loaded with keywords that are relevant to the kind of leads you’re trying to attract. The little trick that I use to accomplish this is Google’s free keyword tool. If you go into Google (www.Google.com) and you search for “Google Keyword Tool,” the first result will be this little tool. What you can do is type in a phrase, and it’ll show you how much traffic variations of that phrase gets. What you’ll find is that a slight difference in a phrase gets extraordinarily more traffic than a slightly different variation of it. Here’s how that’s powerful, in two reasons.

1.If that particular phrase is very common, and people are typing it into Google – searching, for example, “free foreclosure listings” – and that phrase gets lots of traffic


http://www.Google.com)


www.BLBTSystem.com

on Google, it stands to reason that if you put that in your CraigsList ad, it’s going to also draw attention for the same reason.

2.The other big thing is, because CraigsList gets so much traffic, CraigsList ranks very highly in the organic results of Google. So let’s say somebody isn’t searching directly on CraigsList, but they go to Google and put in “free foreclosure listings Harrisburg, PA.” If your ad has that general content or those keywords in it, you are very likely to show up very highly in the organic results because CraigsList ranks very highly. So you get additional traffic that you wouldn’t have gotten because the people didn’t start on CraigsList, but the result came up and they ended up clicking through.

I am not a computer expert, as I mentioned at the beginning of this book, so I don’t fully understand all the ins and outs of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but I know enough about it to understand it helps get clicks to your ads! Here’s a screen shot of the Google Keyword Tool, with comparison on variations of “Foreclosure:”



www.BLBTSystem.com

You can tell from above that even though “Foreclosed Homes” and “Foreclosures” might seem really similar, about 43 million more people typed in the latter. That’s a big difference and one that should be paid attention to when posting your ads. Google Keyword Tool is really simple to use and, it’s very important to start implementing that with your lead-generation ads. I found that a huge difference for me is loading up with keywords. Another good way to get your ad clicked more often is to use pictures. Whether it’s an image post, like I described earlier, or just a picture inside the ad, ads with pictures get more response. Here’s a screen shot from a CraigsList “real estate for sale” list. You can see that some ads say “Pic” or “Img,” which tells readers that there is a picture in that ad.



www.BLBTSystem.com

Call to Action Another big mistake I see real estate agents make in their CraigsList advertising – in addition to poorly timed posts and “same old, same old” ads – is they are often lacking one very important element of advertising. The call to action. For me, “Call me if you want to see this property” is not a real call to action. A call to action would be “Go here to sign up for this free list of foreclosure properties in so-and-so county.” That’s a call to action. “Call this 24-hour recorded message to sign up for a free list of foreclosure properties” – THAT’s a call to action. Every ad you post should have a call to action. If you’re writing a new ad, it might help to start at the end of the process. Ask “what EXACTLY do I want the person reading this to do next?” Then, write the ad so they do it. A call to action should be a part of any advertisement. It is especially important on CraigsList because, on the internet, people are often kind of just clicking around. You have to get people to take action. In order to do that, you have to have a strong call to action. That is how you capture leads, which is where we’re headed next.

Capturing Leads There are basically four ways that I’ve used, and continue to use, to capture leads generated by CraigsList ads:

1. A “squeeze page” If you don’t know what a squeeze page is, don’t worry – I’m sure you’ve seen one. They are the simple, one-page websites that offer something free – a list of foreclosures, for example – in exchange for a prospect’s contact information. Somebody lands on the page, enters their contact information and gets whatever it is you’ve promised them. I like it because it forces prospects to decide “yes or no” right then and there. And it’s an automated process.



www.BLBTSystem.com

NOTE: Not to insult anybody reading this, but another major mistake many real estate agents make with their online marketing is driving prospects to a website that tries to do too much. We’ve all seen them. A fancy site with eight million links and pictures, but no real way for a prospect to directly “opt in” to any marketing. The simple “squeeze page” is a much more practical (and profitable) option. Below is a screen shot of a simple, one-page “squeeze page.”

2. A 24-Hour Recorded Message – I’m sure many

people already use this. It’s just a toll-free number that can be called anytime and contains a recorded message that offers, say, that list of foreclosed homes, and asks prospects to leave their contact information.

3. A 24-Hour Live Answer Phone Number – Hold on, hold on; don’t roll your eyes just yet! I am not suggesting you answer your phone 24 hours a day.



www.BLBTSystem.com

There’s a company called PatLive that I use that can be given a script and, 24 hours a day, will go through that script live with anyone who calls. PatLive takes the prospect through a script of questions, then e-mails you the lead in real time.

4. E-mail – You simply say “e-mail me for your free list” (or whatever it is you are offering.

I’ve listed the above lead-capture devices in my order of preference. I like the squeeze page the best. That’s me, personally. You should definitely test the other mechanisms – they might make more sense in your business. This kind of marketing, by the way, is called “direct-response” marketing. It kind of goes against what you’ve been taught about branding and name recognition and all that. But I have found that, especially with CraigsList, direct-response marketing is effective for selling homes and even more effective for building a database.

Quick Recap Now that you’ve created an account and chosen a campaign, Step 3 is the meat and potatoes – the creation of the ads you will use in that campaign. Here are the general steps to follow:

1. Start with a classified ad. This can be as simple as the four-liner you run in your local newspaper.

2. Create variations of the same ad. You can accomplish this by swapping titles, location, price, address, body, etc. The purpose for multiple ads is to re-post more frequently than the 48 hours CraigsList allows for identical ads. You want to post at least twice a day during the week and once on weekends.

3. To use the same body but have CraigsList recognize ads as separate (allowing you to re-post more frequently), use Image Posting. Create an ad outside of CraigsList, save it as an image and simply post the image file into the CraigsList ad.

4. Use Google Keyword Tool to research variations of headline words that draw the most interest from online viewers. This will help to ensure more people read your ads.



www.BLBTSystem.com

5. Make sure you have a call to action. Direct prospects who click on your ad to do something, take the next step you want them to take.

6. Capture leads. This can be done with an online squeeze page; a 24-hour recorded message; a 24-hour live phone number; or a directive to email you.

OK, now you have your campaign … time to start posting!



www.BLBTSystem.com

Step 4

Implement (Post) Not long ago, I heard a quote that I’m probably going to butcher here. But to paraphrase:

“Results follow action, and implementation is the key.”

The main idea is that, great, we now have an awesome plan. But to achieve any results, we have to implement it. What you want to always remember – and you’ve already read it several times, but I am going to drive it home …

• Post at least twice a day during the week

• Post at least once on the weekend I cannot give you, in this entire book, any more succinct, basic or vital advice than this. What I can give you, so that you may avoid it, is a little taste of the trial-and-error I went through to arrive at this conclusion. Like I said, when I first started getting into the sales side of real estate I was still relatively new to CraigsList. What I was doing was posting ads to many different cities because my area is a small area. My CraigsList area would be 400,000 or 500,000 people, which isn’t a huge area. Not tiny, but not a huge area. So I was posting in the bigger metros nearby. I was posting multiple times a day, and that became very, very time-consuming. I was starting to get burned out. But I was making money, I was seeing results, so I just kept plowing through. To help with the time-consumption, I started to use a posting software that would help automate posts in CraigsList. I would not recommend this, and don’t go looking for posting software because as far as I know, CraigsList has tried to crack down



www.BLBTSystem.com

on anybody creating that kind of software to interface with CraigsList because it kind of defeats their overall “grassroots” focus of their site. The first thing that happened when I was using this software was flagging and ghosting, two frustrating concepts I explained earlier in this book. If you post an ad and either the CraigsList system administrators or the users, people on CraigsList searching, deem it to be “spammy” they can flag it, and it will get your ad deleted. Now, an administrator can just flag it themselves. But for users to flag it and get it removed, more than one person has to actually flag it. One person flagging your ad won’t get it deleted, but multiple will. It’s somewhere between two and four. I know because I’ve played around with it trying to flag my own ad. Which brings us to one little, ugly fact about the industry in which we real estate agents work… In our business, there are a lot of real estate agents out there, with a lot of time on their hands, and they hate to see other people succeed. Unfortunately, there are what I would call less-than-ethical folks out there. And I know for a fact that there are agents who flag other agents’ ads. It happens. They’d rather see you fail than work to achieve their own success. The good news is most agents who work in an office work typical office-hour times. One way to avoid being flagged by other agents, then, is to post after 5 p.m. You’re much less likely to be flagged by those types of folks. And the other thing about that is you want to be posting in the evening anyway. I like to post – and sometimes it’s not the most enjoyable thing for you to be doing at that time – between like 5 and 7 p.m. because you’re going to hit those people, like I said, right after dinner.



www.BLBTSystem.com

Not only will that time frame help you avoid flagging, potentially, but you’re also going to be hitting an optimal time to be getting that traffic. Back to my struggles … I was spending all this time and was having as much as 50 percent of my ads deleted, by either flagging or ghosting. Getting ghosted is even more frustrating because when you’re ghosted, you post an ad, and your ad looks to you as though it’s live, but if you go to the CraigsList site to try and find it, it’s not there. So you don’t even know without some digging that you’ve had it happen. With flagging, you can find out that your ad is flagged, so at least you know that it’s happened. With ghosting, you actually have to spend time and search for it. That was happening before I had my system, when I was posting hundreds of ads. And with my system I don’t have to do that anymore. I post far fewer ads, spend far less time, and therefore I don’t show up as a red flag in the CraigsList world. It’s not throwing up red flags about me – “hey this guy’s posting hundreds of ads, something strange is going on.” I was doing that, which was essentially spamming and breaking CraigsList rules and regulations, I had one account that was shut off. Like I said, I was new to the game. Since I’ve started using my system, because I don’t need to post nearly as frequently, and I can fall within their regulations and so forth, that issue has almost completely gone away. In fact, I was talking with a client recently and I brought up one of my accounts on the computer, and of 75 ads I posted, only two were flagged. That’s a pretty good ratio. So we’re clear on this, flagging is not the end of the world … but it’s not a goal. It’s something you’re trying to avoid. It does not end up



www.BLBTSystem.com

negating you from CraigsList. Well, not often, at least – I only had one account deleted. Also, I mention CraigsList “system administrators,” but that’s probably a misnomer. They do have computer algorithms that look for certain words and certain key things in sequence that will flag stuff automatically. So this isn’t a human element. There’s simply no way with all of the CraigsList postings for a human to do all of this. But let’s make this perfectly clear: When you’re flagged you will see it on your account. It will show up. The green ads have been posted. They’re okay. The ones that are not green show up in pink. That means they’re flagged. Again, I mention all this because it might happen to you and I don’t want you to panic. Using my system, like I said, I have been able to cut this down a lot. Not that it won’t ever happen to me, but what I was doing before, I mean, it was rampant. I had to almost check every single ad to make sure it was live, which adds lots of time to what you’re doing. While we are on the subject, there are a couple of other things that could increase your likelihood of getting flagged. If you place a text ad, and you include a website address that has the “HTTP,” which will make it a live hyperlink, it will increase your chances of getting flagged. It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get flagged, but it will increase your chance of getting flagged. However, if you just put the “www.” or just “YourWebsiteName.com” without that “HTTP,” I have found that that the likelihood of that getting flagged is next to none. In other words, make it a website that someone has to copy and paste, and not a live hyperlink, and you’ll be less likely to get flagged. The other way around this, I already showed you. Use an image posting and link the image to your site instead of typing the HTTP in text.



www.BLBTSystem.com

Another thing you must pay attention to are certain words. For example, the combination of the words “foreclosure” and “properties” for some reason got me flagged a lot. Now, I make sure I use other words with the same meaning, or add words to “foreclosure properties,” and I get flagged far less often. You should also try to avoid the word “free.” If you absolutely MUST use it, put spaces between the letters or underscores or something. “Free” gets you flagged. Of course, I wouldn’t have known these things – and wouldn’t have been able to develop a system to beat them – if I wasn’t paying attention and learning from my mistakes. I have included my mistakes here for you to learn from as well, but your business is different from mine, so there will be things that happen to you that I can’t necessarily prepare you for. So remember to learn as you go.

Timing is Everything I mentioned before that it’s not a good idea to get up at 5 a.m. and try to get your posting done for the day. Unless, of course, you’re in a really small town, to which I’d suggest that you post in other towns! It’s also good to post after 5 p.m. so that other real estate agents can’t flag your ads. With the system that I’ve created, we’re not talking about a huge amount of time spent managing or posting ads. In fact, in the evenings, most of the time I post when I’m out and about using my iPhone. That’s how simple it is. In a couple minutes, you can have a couple of ads up that are going to be generating leads. So we’re not talking about spending an hour during every evening posting ads. It’s literally a couple of minutes once you get the hang of things and get it up and going. And another point to build on here is that if you’re in a huge market, you’re going to need to test and REALLY track what you’re doing,



www.BLBTSystem.com

because posting 15 minutes one way or the other could make a huge difference, depending on the market. If you’re in a market that gets 800 to a thousand ads a day, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes one way or the other could mean a difference. It could mean a HUGE difference in the amount of leads that you generate. So the times I have given you in this book are a general guideline. Particularly if you’re in a huge market, where there are a ton of postings, you’re definitely going to need to test, and by test I mean actually track your results in detail. You want to note, “OK, I posted two ads at 11:45 a.m. on Monday. And between then and the next time I posted an ad, I got this many leads.” We will get into this in a little greater detail later in this book. I just want you to understand now that you must track your responses in order to know exactly when you should be posting. Think of it this way: The same rule applies for making phone calls. If you are going to have a call night, it’s better to call when people are likely to answer the phone. I see people who always make calls between 10 and 11 in the morning. Who’s home then? If you’re calling, or in this case you’re posting ads, think about the habits of the people who you are trying to reach. But no matter what, remember …

• Post at least twice a day during the week

• Post at least once on the weekend Are you getting sick of reading that yet?

Weekend Warriors Weekends are a little trickier because people have different habits. I’m just throwing this out there, but posting between 8 a.m. and noon on a Sunday, when most people are at church, may not be the most favorable time to post to your ad.



www.BLBTSystem.com

I’ve personally seen a huge difference on Sunday when I post at 8 a.m. vs. when I post at 2 p.m., and I’m talking many multiples -- several hundred percent difference posting later. And the time of year can play into that, too. When it’s football season on Sunday, for example, kickoff time isn’t exactly great. In the summer, when people are doing outdoor activities, you especially have track your results to learn when to post. In the fall, when it starts to get dark earlier and earlier, I’ve found that evenings are good. As a very general rule, follow the sun as it’s setting. This isn’t an open house, remember. You are trying to generate a lead. So while your competitors have their Sunday open house ads out of the way on Wednesday or Thursday, you have to put in a few minutes on the weekends if you want to generate leads on the weekends. I suggest you do just that, because for some reason, people are in “house” mode on weekends. That’s just how they’ve been trained. Agents show houses on weekends. Agents have open houses on weekends. The Sunday paper has the big real estate section. Just because you’re using a relatively new tool to generate real estate leads doesn’t mean you should ignore existing real estate dynamics. Stop thinking of your CraigsList posting as something to get done, get through with, early in the day or early in the week. Instead, spread it out throughout the day and throughout the week. Look at it as a week-long process. That increases the odds of you being consistently successful. I’ve personally found that for me to do what I need to do, I only post twice a day. I post twice a day consistently during the week, but only sometimes twice a day on the weekends. Again, if you’re in a big market, you may have to be a little bit more frequent. For me, posting two times a day – that’s a total of 10 to 12 minutes a day. I’m willing to put the 10 to 12 minutes even on weekends.



www.BLBTSystem.com

Remember, you want to be near the top of the list of ads. Always. You want your ads to be visible to people as soon as they get to the page. I have found that, through all my efforts, for me that meant posting right before lunch time and right after dinner time. If you get nothing else out of this book, at least take away from it the importance of posting enough so that your ad is near the top of the first page.

Actually posting your ads Once you have created the ads for your campaigns, posting is pretty simple. You have to access the “My account” screen in CraigsList, where you will be shown all the ads stored. Below is a screen shot of the top of that page, which shows you the status of your saved ads.

Ads shaded in green are active. Grey means pending; blue means you have deleted them; purple means they expired; and pink means they’ve been flagged and deleted. So say I posted an ad at noon (lunchtime) on a weekday. When I go back into my account around dinner time the same day, it will show up highlighted in green, as active. Keep in mind that by now it might not be near the top of the ads page. In fact, depending on your city, it probably isn’t. That is why you’re re-posting it. To do this, simply delete it. The system will remove the ad from the list, and you won’t be able to post that same ad for 48 hours.



www.BLBTSystem.com

Now, you should have created a different ad with an identical message to use in its place – either by image posting or tweaking location, price, headline, etc in the different fields. That ad will most likely be in blue, having been removed by you. You will see a hyperlink near the right-hand side of the page that has the title of the ad. Click on that hyperlink, and you will be taken to a page that has a button that gives you the option “Re-post this ad.” Click the button, and your ad will be active in a few minutes … at the top of the list, just as it was at lunch time. Now keep in mind that the ad you took down cannot be used again for 48 hours. The one you posted just now – at dinner time – you will (if you’ve been paying attention!) take down at lunch time tomorrow. That’s why it’s important to have at least four variations of each ad you post. Once you have at least four, you only spend a few minutes each day managing (re-posting).

Quick Recap Hopefully, you can learn through my own experiences with CraigsList, which I’ve shared here. There is a right way and a wrong way to go about posting. Just to summarize some of the key points:

1. Don’t post first thing in the morning. Don’t post at midnight or 1 o’clock in the morning. Try and find the sweet spot in your market for the best time to post. I’ve found lunch time is great, dinner time is great. You’ve got to test in your own market.

2. We talked about flagging and ghosting. I gave you some words

that raised red flags, as well as the “bulk” posting practices that will bring attention to yourself.

3. There’s a start-up phase, but once you get the thing going 10,

15, 20 minutes a day is really all you need to keep it going and keep driving leads for your business.



www.BLBTSystem.com

4. Twice a day during the week and at least once on the weekends (are you getting that yet?). Keep in mind that, especially on weekends, viewers’ habits change, even more so with the change of the seasons.

Through this step, you are now officially a CraigsList advertiser. Now you need to follow up.



www.BLBTSystem.com

Step 5

Follow Up A lead means nothing unless you can convert it into income, obviously. In this chapter, Step 5, I’m going to share with you a couple of things you can do to convert these leads into real commission income. The step is titled “Follow Up,” for conciseness, but it should really say something ike “Follow up and systematically convert leads into clients.” Our goal is to convert leads into commission income. We’ve done very little until we actually get a sale, right? Before we get into that, let me start by saying that I believe it’s important to get a sale. I don’t necessarily believe, however, that it’s absolutely imperative to get a sale today. As you read this step, keep this in mind. We want to get sales. Plural. I think this is a concept many agents miss the boat on completely. We want one buyer, one seller. It’s a mistake. When I started using CraigsList, I was having luck selling properties by putting specific properties on the site, but indirectly, I was building my buyer’s list. I was getting to the point, and am still at the point, at which I can write an e-mail, push send and sell a property. Not every time, but very frequently, I’m able to do that because I’ve built a large list of buyers using Craigslist. I mentioned finding tenants, buying and re-selling, finding retail buyers and working with investors. But because of our government’s first-time buyer tax credit in 2009, and because investor financing can be a bit more difficult now, I’m also working more with first-time homebuyers. This was an adjustment to market conditions that I had to make on the fly. I was able to do so because I have a big database of



www.BLBTSystem.com

different types of buyers, which I generated completely for free on CraigsList. Some of those buyers are probably leads I generated some time ago, but because I valued them and cultivated them, they have become part of my success after the market changed. Too many agents generate leads and then just ignore them if they don’t buy right away. There are two reasons to advertise on Craigslist. One is to sell something; that’s where you’re advertising one of your listings. The other reason is to build lists. And that means building a list of buyer e-mails, people who have responded to a typical type of property, and that helps you in a number of ways. Obviously, when you have a property to sell, a buyers e-mail list makes it easy to get it out to them, present them with a deal. But also it’s extremely enticing to be able to mention that on a listing appointment to sellers say, “I have built these huge lists on CraigsList of people looking for properties in your price range in your area.” It’s the old “I may already have a buyer for you” line, but it’s really true! Another cool thing is if I get a little slow, I can send an e-mail to get my phone ringing. And I can get it ringing from people on my list who I maybe haven’t talked to or at least haven’t talked to in a while. If I have a slow week and I’ve got to get something going, I send out an e-mail or two and my inbox starts getting loaded up with messages, or my voicemail fills up fast. In fact, I did it yesterday and in 24 hours, I got eight or 10 people to contact me from two e-mails I sent to two different lists. So the list-building, the long-term for your business, is extremely valuable. Short-term thinking alone only gets you short-term results.



www.BLBTSystem.com

On top of that, today’s buyers lists are much less expensive to communicate with than the old traditional geographic farming with direct mail pieces. So this is huge. It’s so important to focus on growing your list, and it’s not something we hear very much in the real estate industry. Everybody’s looking for a buyer or a seller, and they’re not thinking long-term about that list, which can very well be the make-or-break asset for your business. So start thinking about generating leads and creating those lists!

It’s a Numbers Game I have a client for whom I generate leads on CraigsList. I run the ads, capture the leads and turn them over to him. He, in turn, has a system he uses to convert these leads into buyers. It’s one system, and every lead that goes through it is handled in exactly the same manner. I think of it as a kind of funnel; he dumps this high volume of leads into it, and out comes a narrowed-down, easy-to-sell stream of ready-to-go buyers. This particular system of his currently converts 1 out of 10 leads into a sale. This is a good conversion ratio. He tweaked and tested and developed this system along the way to get it to the point at which it predictably and consistently generates this rate of sales. The beauty in that is this: Let’s say he has a goal of 10 sales per month. He knows, because he has a system in place that converts at 10 percent, he needs to generate 100 leads per month. If he can generate 100 leads per month on CraigsList, he has to do no other advertising. If he wants to sell more homes, he can simply choose to advertise in other places. If he wants to double his monthly sales, for example, he has to simply generate 100 more leads per month. I mentioned systems at the outset of this book. This above example of my client highlights the powerful tool that this lead-conversion system is.



www.BLBTSystem.com

And, by the way, since my CraigsList system generates the leads and his system converts them, his business is practically on autopilot. At least the marketing of it is – he still has the problem of closing 10 transactions a month. But that’s a good problem to have!

Conversion Methods In the example above, my client’s sole lead-conversion tool is the outbound phone call. He makes an outbound call to get some information to send the prospect a custom list. Once he knows they have received the list, he makes another call to get them to sit down and pick out five to seven of their favorites from among the houses listed. From there, he promises to get them more information on those particular homes and asks any questions that they may have. He then calls them back, gets them on the road and, before long they’re writing an offer and he’s closing a sale. It doesn’t sound complicated, does it? It’s not, and it works for him with great effectiveness. If I were him, I’d change nothing. Now, this is not to say the same thing will work for you. Some people are great at selling on the phone. Some are much, much better than others. You have to play to your own strengths. Personally, I would recommend you do multiple things – employ multiple steps – to convert clients. This is simply because not every lead responds to the same marketing delivery. Unless, apparently, you’re like my client, who is a Superman of sorts on the phone.

Auto-responder e-mails I hate to be so blunt, but here goes: If you’re not using an auto-responder, you are in the dark ages. You have to have this for your business. An e-mail auto-responder allows you to, with the push of a few buttons, stay in contact with your entire list.



www.BLBTSystem.com

Let me give you an example using a tool we already looked at: That “squeeze page” website offering a free list of foreclosed homes. Each week, you update this list of homes. It doesn’t matter how. Pick homes you’re listing; pick some cherries off the MLS, whatever. Just change the list so that you can email something fresh each week to your unconverted leads. What’s an “unconverted lead?” An unconverted lead is simply someone who has responded to a lead-generation ad of yours and has given you their contact information but has yet to be “converted” into a sale. Hence the term “unconverted.” It’s someone who hasn’t signed a listing agreement or an exclusive buyer’s agent agreement or someone whom you haven’t had out on the road. You simply keep them in your database and, in the case of those who responded to an ad for a list of foreclosed homes, they receive from you a list of homes each week, sent by your e-mail auto-responder. This is kind of an automatic conversion tool as well. You’ve got your contact information in the email and, inevitably, you’ll have people “raise their hand” – call you, email you – about the information you’re sending. As I mentioned above, because I have lists of buyers or would-be buyers, I do sometimes send out emails with specific properties. This might be with the goal of selling that property, but it also lets me know – by the number of people who contact me – who might be ready to buy in the near future. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m usually working on this sale, and my next two or three sales simultaneously. So, in addition to my automated list of foreclosed homes that goes out each week, I might also send, from time to time, individual deals via email. Again, the goal isn’t necessarily to sell that property, although it’s a nice bonus when I do, but to get people to tell me they’re interested.



www.BLBTSystem.com

Here’s an example email I recently used: -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi <First Name>, We just found a great deal on a rehab property in Midtown. It's right in the area of the HACC project and has HUGE upside potential. It will need a complete rehab, so seasoned investors are probably the best fit. 16xx 4th St., Harrisburg, PA 17102 Comps: 1 1712 SUSQUEHANNA ST $125,900 1900 5 1 06/03/2009 1,484 915 0.15 2 1718 SUSQUEHANNA ST $130,000 1910 2 1 08/19/2009 1,596 1,002 0.15 3 335 REILY ST $154,000 1880 5 1 06/29/2009 1,859 828 0.17 4 337 REILY ST $130,000 1880 5 1 06/23/2009 1,734 871 0.17 5 1804 N 3RD ST $126,000 1900 4 1 10/05/2009 1,486 3,180 0.17 6 1617 PENN ST $168,000 1900 5 2 03/26/2009 1,680 1,133 0.18 7 216 HARRIS ST $178,000 1900 4 1 04/21/2009 1,968 1,481 0.19 Also, one on this same block sold last September for $149,900! Asking $57,000 or Best Offer (MAKE US AN OFFER!) For more info or to take a look call me ASAP at xxx-xxxx Best, Josh Company name Company phone Company email P.S. These kind of deals in Midtown are now few and far between call act quickly before it's gone, Call me NOW at xxx-xxxx.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now, emails such as this DO sometimes sell the property. I have investor clients who have worked with me long enough whose loyalty



www.BLBTSystem.com

and responsiveness lets me just put this out there and they are like sharks to blood in the water. The real value is the knowledge of what leads in my database, and how many of them, are interested in deals like this. I set myself up for success for future sales.

Tours and Seminars These lead-conversion tools might not be for everyone, but if you’re game, they can be an awesome strategy. Here’s why: You have the ability convert multiple leads at the same time. For example, you could do property tours – foreclosure tours for which you line up several properties, five or six, to show on a single Saturday. Preferably, the homes are in the same general area, so that you can easily go from house to house. You can set up showing appointments if they’re not your listings, and then send out two or three emails to your lists, inviting your leads to attend this special tour. I suggest putting a tour “packet” together, information for which you can gather almost exclusively from the MLS. Put the listings in there, a CMA and a map of the area so that if you caravan (renting a bus or limo can get expensive!) people can get to each house. Boom, you’ve got your packet. It’s a great conversion tool, and I suggest that you don’t make an attempt to sell every house on the tour. In fact, I would purposely include a really ugly house on the tour, just so you can point out how awful the house is. When you’re NOT selling people, you gain their trust. The goal instead would be to build rapport with the group. Ask questions of them – “What do you like about this home?” “Can you see the biggest problem here?” – and let them ask questions of you. You might not sell any of the houses on the tour, but if you leave your attendees trusting you and opening up to you, you will be able to get them on the road looking at properties they WILL buy.



www.BLBTSystem.com

And the best thing about it is you’re leveraging your time. You are showing homes to multiple prospects all at once. The other way to leverage your time by converting multiple clients all at the same time is with a seminar or a class. For example, in my local area, I teach “Foreclosure Buying Secrets” seminars, which have some educational components regarding the foreclosure process, but really are subtle sales presentations for the services and expertise I provide for my clients. Because have established myself as an “expert” – I’m teaching a class, after all – I have great positioning with these clients. Because they’re all in one room at the same time, I have done it with much less effort and time involvement than if I met with each of them individually. One word of caution with these seminars, or classes: You want to give them enough information that they find it useful, but you don’t want to give them enough of an education so that they can go off and do it on their own.

Relationship Building I think we all realize that another component of real estate sales is relationships. When we nurture leads over time, we draw them to us – we connect with them and our message resonates with them. So if they aren’t buyers now, or next month, when they ARE ready to be buyers, we are the ones they call. So there is a component to ongoing lead-conversion that is not simply a list of homes or a deal on a distressed home. What I do to build these relationships is to send them content that is not strictly sales-related. I send a weekly electronic magazine, or “e-zine,” to my unconverted leads. It does not usually contain a sales pitch. Instead, I share what’s going on with me, as well as some real estate-related articles. The goal is to inform, entertain, and get buyers to know to me, feel a personal connection to me. This is accomplished without a lot of effort, but it goes a long way to building relationships.



www.BLBTSystem.com

For my investor clients who have bought homes from me, I also send out a monthly hard-copy newsletter. The idea is similar to the e-zine, even though these are current clients: You want to build a relationship that’s strong enough that they don’t want to leave you. Again, I’m not trying to tell you how to run your business. If you have a good lead-conversion process already, by all means keep using it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as they say. I merely want to share with you ideas that come from my experiences in working with leads from CraigsList. These are things that have worked in my business, as well as with other clients who generate CraigsList leads. The point is, if you’re generating a ton of leads, you have to have a way to convert them into commission income.

Quick Recap Let’s just go over some ideas you can use to follow up with and convert into income the leads you generate with your CraigsList posts. These ideas for follow-up and conversion include:

1. Outbound phone calls

2. Auto-responder emails, both with general lists of homes and specific listings

3. Tours and Seminars

4. Relationship-building newsletters or e-zines

Whatever manner you choose to convert your leads, remember to be consistent and persistent. Develop a system for cultivating the leads you generate, and you will make sales.



www.BLBTSystem.com

Step 6

Track and Improve

A mentor of mine likes the saying “What you track improves.” I can’t argue. Let’s think about it for a minute. If your goal is to, say, lose weight, what things must you do to achieve that goal? Well, first you might want to set a specific goal for exactly how much weight you want to lose. Are you going to lose 10 pounds, 20 pounds, or will you be happy to lose 5 pounds and just maintain? If your goal is to lose 20, how will you know when you’ve gotten there? How will you know if you’re making progress along the way? Well, for one, you’re going to get on a scale from time to time and measure your progress. You’re also probably going to document what you eat, so that you can see how your diet is affecting your progress toward the goal. If you’re into working out, you’re going to track how much cardio you do or weights you lift, so that you can measure your progress. By measuring as you go along, you will improve. The same thing goes for your business. To use another analogy besides the weight loss – you can’t win if you’re not keeping score. What I’m saying is, it’s important to track your progress. You must also constantly be testing new things, and tracking them, so that you know how to improve. I am not going to lie to you – it’s sometimes a tedious process, not fun. Not exciting. But it’s extremely necessary. Getting on a scale is no fun either, but you have to do it if you want to lose weight.



www.BLBTSystem.com

Tracking your results, then testing new things and tracking those, too, is probably the least-glamorous part of this system. It’s also probably the most valuable, and even more so, it’s probably where the most people slip up. In any marketing, any advertising, any lead-generation process, you have to track and improve. There are many components of any campaign that you want to track.

Headlines First and foremost among the items to track are your headlines. It’s essential that you know what headlines, or titles of your ads, are generating the most leads. Remember, the headline is what draws readers in. Compelling headlines, then, are necessary to deliver your message. One of the things I have discovered is different headlines seem to get different responses in different markets. As I wrote earlier, using the Google Keywords Tool can give you an idea of what words people respond to. But what works in my market may be different than what works in yours. So you want to test different headlines. If you have an ad that you think is good, but it did not generate leads the way you thought it would, try a different headline. If you have an ad that generates what you believe is a decent number of leads, test another headline on that ad to see if you can get an even better response. Test and track. It’s vital. And one of the beautiful things about CraigsList advertising is that it’s free. You can afford to run tests with CraigsList marketing that would be expensive in other media. For example, a print ad that bombs in your local paper or homebuyer magazine might be good except for the headline. To test another headline on the same ad would cost you the price of the ad. Test yet another headline and, well, it just keeps getting more expensive. On CraigsList, each test is free.



www.BLBTSystem.com

There is a converse advantage to this situation as well. Remember in Step 2, when I said that if you have a good classified ad that generates leads for you in another medium, it’s a good bet it will work well on CraigsList, too? Well, if you test a few different headlines on CraigsList and you get a good response, chances are the ad will work well in other media, too. So if you’re supplementing your CraigsList advertising with ads in other places, your free testing on CraigsList should enable you to run more effective ads in other places. Hopefully, you are seeing how valuable testing and tracking can be. Have you ever heard of Parretto’s Principle? It’s also known as the 80/20 principle. It states that 80 percent of your results will come from 20 percent of your activities, or efforts. Translated to lead-generation, it stands to reason that 80 percent of your leads will come from the best 20 percent of your ads. That means 1 out of every 5 ads will bring most of your results. I have found this to be true. Test and track to find that 20 percent.

Images and text You also want to test and track different image ads, different images within the ads themselves and the text that is the body of your ads. Try running an image posting as explained in Step 3. Then see if you can change the picture and improve your results. The old saying goes, “A picture tells a thousand words.” That means if you’re using pictures in your ads, they can be powerful influences over whether an ad is working. This is where it gets tricky. It’s a lot of testing because there are a lot of variables. That’s why I say “test and track,” because testing requires extensive tracking. And I mean extensive.



www.BLBTSystem.com

For example, when I post a new ad, I document everything about it. That means:

1. The headline

2. The body, or text

3. Any picture I used

4. When I posted it

5. How many leads it generated

If the ad doesn’t work well, I don’t just give up on it. I will change the headline, keeping all the other variables the same. And I document that. Then, depending on which result was better, I will change something else. The picture maybe, or some of the wording in the body, and I will document those results. And I keep plugging along, as tedious as it is, until I can safely determine it’s a winner with a certain combination of variables or a loser no matter what different combinations I put together. So you can probably see that by tracking, I don’t mean “I ran this ad on this day, and it didn’t work.” I mean trial-and-error until you’re satisfied that you have a valid answer one way or another. It’s time-consuming, I know. But the end result is that eventually, you can run a solid stable of winning ads, over and over, generating a lot of leads, almost at will. Now, you will have to test and track something at first that I don’t do too much with any more. That is the time of day at which you post. I have determined, as I mentioned in the previous step, that my best times for posting ads are right before lunch and right after dinner. That’s my market; it might be different in yours. And, as I wrote earlier, 15 minutes either way – earlier or later – could make a big difference.



www.BLBTSystem.com

Again, it’s somewhat time-consuming but necessary.

Squeeze Page Conversion There is more to this testing and tracking thing than just how many leads you generate with different variations of ads and the times that you post them. If you recall, I showed you earlier how I drive leads to a “squeeze page,” my simple one-page websites that get people to give me their contact information in exchange for access to a free “something” – a list of homes, report, etc. Well, let’s say I run an ad that I know gets clicks (you can determine this by the number of emails you get from readers of an ad on CraigsList). But that same ad, when I have it take readers to my squeeze page, doesn’t produce a good number of people who type in their contact information. The weak link in that chain of events is likely the squeeze page. Which, if you’re paying attention, you know means you have to change that. Changing the squeeze page itself is a lot like changing your ads. You can change the headline on it – it’s usually very important that the headline on the squeeze page matches the one on the CraigsList ad – or change the picture, the text, etc. The good news is that this tracking is a lot more automated than the process of tracking your ads. For my squeeze pages, I use an online provider called www.BuyerLeadLandingPages.com. With this site, I can easily make and change various landing pages. It’s about $30 or $40 per month, but it’s the best $30 or $40 I ever spend. It lets you create and publish these squeeze page (landing page) websites in literally minutes. It’s also really easy to link to most contact management software, which helps you automate your lead-conversion processes even further.


http://www.BuyerLeadLandingPages.com


www.BLBTSystem.com

Better yet, it tracks your conversion for you. It tells you how many people have landed on the page and how many people have put in their information. So if you have a CraigsList image ad, for example, that links to your squeeze page, this software tells you how many clicks it got. It then tells you how many of the people who clicked on the ad entered their contact information on your squeeze page. I try to aim for a 50-percent conversion rate at a minimum. You may find that in your market, that conversion rate is too high or too low a goal. Again, you must test. I am also currently working with a developer on an application that will allow us to see which of our image ads are being viewed the most. That will give us information that will tell us which of our headlines are getting clicked on the most. It’s all information that is invaluable to your business. Remembering that fact will help keep you motivated to test and track relentlessly. Let me illustrate how important this testing and tracking can be. Let’s say you have a CraigsList posting that generates 25 clicks per week, taking readers to your squeeze page. That’s 100 clicks per month – not bad from one ad. Now let’s say that squeeze page of yours converts visitors at a 40-percent rate, meaning 40 out of every 100 people who click through actually enter their contact information, thereby “opting in” to your marketing. If you get 40 such leads per month, that’s 480 per year. Again, not bad. But what if your squeeze page converted at 50 percent, just 10 percent better? That would be 10 more leads per month opting in, or 120 leads per year. Let’s go a little further and say you’re like the client of mine whose phone-sales skills give him a lead-conversion ratio of 1 in 10,



www.BLBTSystem.com

meaning he turns one out of every 10 leads into a sale that gives him commission income. All of a sudden, that 10-percent conversion ratio on your squeeze page – a difference of 120 leads per year – just cost you 12 closed sales. I don’t know what your average commission is per sale, but let’s say it’s $3,000. By having a squeeze page that converts at 40 percent rather than 50 percent, you just lost $36,000 worth of commission in a year. That’s just at the squeeze page. Not getting maximum results from your ad itself – the initial clicks – costs you even more. Little hinges swing big doors. So test and track!

Quick Recap Testing and tracking are not the most fun or exciting parts of advertising on CraigsList, but they are of utmost importance. What you measure tends to improve, and it’s the little things that often make the biggest differences. So remember to test and track:

1. Headlines

2. Pictures

3. Body text

4. When you posted the ad

5. How many leads it generated

On to Step 7. Wait, what’s that you say? There were only supposed to be six steps? Yes, you’re right. I kind of joke about Step 7 – it’s a simple and obvious one. After you’ve done Steps 1 through 6, just …



www.BLBTSystem.com

Rinse and repeat

That’s right, once you get everything up and running with the six easy steps, the next thing to do is … just do it over again. And keep doing it!



www.BLBTSystem.com

Conclusion

What are you waiting for? Get started!

Like I said at the beginning of this book, I wasn’t a computer expert when I started this journey of generating massive amounts of leads on CraigsList. Heck, I wasn’t even a licensed agent. The nice thing about this system is that you can literally start generating leads tonight – even if you’re not exactly tech-savvy. Really, we’re not splitting atoms here. One of the objections to CraigsList I hear from other agents is that they just don’t have the time to “mess around” with it. I have two things to say to that:

1. If you don’t take time to “mess around” with your marketing, you will be out of business soon.

2. Once you have a system, it really doesn’t take that much time.

Another objection I sometimes hear – one I mentioned earlier in this book – is that CraigsList leads are “low-quality.” But I can honestly attribute more than $100,000 worth of income in about a year’s time directly to leads I generated on CraigsList. I don’t know about you, but if low-quality leads will put $100,000 in my pocket, I’ll take low-quality leads for as long as I can! Truthfully, the agents who make these objections aren’t totally at fault. They are programmed a certain way. CraigsList is a newer thing. And “new” can be intimidating to some people. Believe me, when I went from full-time teacher to full-time real estate investor, “new” was intimidating! I am here to tell you now that there’s no reason to be intimidated by CraigsList. Especially now that you know all my secrets!



www.BLBTSystem.com

I really believe you can generate thousands of leads from CraigsList with a little work up front, a few minutes a day of posting and a lot of vigilance in testing and tracking. It requires a system, plain and simple, just as I wrote at the beginning of this book. Before I go, just let me summarize the big, key points of this system. Remember, you don’t have to invent one for yourself; you can simply copy mine! Here is a picture of it in a nutshell (I can’t take credit for this drawing; my mother actually made it for me):



www.BLBTSystem.com

There it is, the entire system in six easy steps.

So what are you waiting for? It’s time to get started!
