What You Need To Know About Google PPC and Adwords For Investors » Dan Barrett

Joe:      Welcome, this is the Real Estate Investing Mastery Podcast.

Alex:    Hi everybody, it’s Alex Joungblood here with the Real Estate Investing Mastery podcast. I’ve got my friendly co-host, the one, and the only Joe McCall.

Joe:      Yes.

Alex:    We’re here. Hey, how are you doing?

Joe:      Awesome.

Alex:    Awesome, well we’ve got a great interview today, and it’s with Dan Barrett who’s a PPC expert, and that’s actually kind of one of the subjects that a lot of people are kind of scared of because there’s a lot of the different moving parts to it, but if you’re able to have somebody else do it like an expert or something like that you can get up and running pretty quickly, so we’ll talk about some of the ins and outs of PPC and getting leads online.

One thing I love about it is it’s something that you can activate and get going ASAP. You can literally start getting leads the next day, or the same day depending on how quick you are with implementing it. One of the things too is, everybody knows I have 1-800- Fair-Offer, it’s one of the brands I actually co-own it with Sean Terry and our licensees actually use that as a platform to get leads and pay-per-click is one of the big drivers behind that, and with 1-800-Fair-Offer somebody can just step right into, and start getting leads right away using pay-per-click, so…

Joe:      And it’s a great…

Alex:    Are you there, Joe?

Joe:      1-800-Fair-Offer is a great platform.

Alex:    Yes.

Joe:      It’s a great way to give branding and name recognition, I like the term fair offer, it communicates exactly what we’re trying to do, and it’s memorable. Isn’t it?

Alex:    Yeah and right out the gate you can step into the program and start getting, yeah you’ve got a brand, you’ve got a phone number, you’ve got websites, you’ve got all of these different tools that you can put into as to motion and start business right away with an established program. We are also licensed with the better business bureau, so a lot of good things there and you know we can talk more about that on a different podcast, but yeah, 1-800-Fair-Offer is the brand that I use in my local market, and Sean Terry uses this as well. You know if you’re interested just check out 1-800-FairOffer.com.

Joe:      We all know Sean, good guy, and I think he’s told me recently he exclusively uses 1-800-Fair-Offer; he doesn’t even use a local phone number on any of his marketing any more.

Alex:    Yeah, he’s full blown into it.

Joe:      Which says a lot, that says a lot, I mean I don’t know if I know anybody else who actually does send more direct mail than Sean Terry does.

Alex:    He is a mailing machine.

Joe:      He’s cool.

Alex:    The thing with being able to remember you know we send out so many post cards and they, you know and for tracking purposes and technical purposes. Yeah it is a good idea to use different phone numbers from different extensions and all that stuff, but when it comes to long term memorability, if I was to send you a postcard that said you know this 1-800-492-6578 and a phone, and a post card that says call 1-800-Fair-Offer, which one you’re going to remember? You probably don’t even remember the number I just said, but you remember 1-800-Fair-Offer.

Joe:      Point well taken.

Alex:    Let’s get going.

Joe:      Well, Yeah and then don’t forget also guys if you go to real estate investing mastery you get our fast cash survival kit, and we have some really cool stuff on there that you will find useful and helpful and valuable, and a lot of good stuff on how Alex and I do deals. How we flip properties remotely, even though Alex you are a home buddy and you pretty much…

Alex:    A homebody?

Joe:      You work in your pajamas all day. What are those pajamas, a Big Bird or Elmo? What’s one of your pajama pants?

Alex:    Let’s see what was one of my pajama pants? Actually no, Big Bird didn’t make it on there. It’s more a Cookie Monster, Elmo and Oscar the Grouch, I believe.

Joe:      My God.

Alex:    I actually haven’t worn those in a while because it’s been so hot here.

Joe:      Right okay, so anyway you can do deals in your underwear and you can… in fact we talked one time about creating a course deals in your underwear something like that, but we decided not to…

Alex:    We never did it.

Joe:      No we decided not to, I was thinking, let’s see in if I asked my wife if that was a good idea I think she’ll say no, and I trust her judgment and I better not, but then you know that’s what you can do. It’s… The great thing about what we’re going to be talking about today with Dan is we just turned on our Google AdWords campaign about a month ago, maybe a month and a half I’ll have to ask Dan. We’ve already got three properties under contract; we’re just wholesaling them…

Alex:    Boom.

Joe:      Yeah we just wholesaled one a few days ago, we’re supposed to close on the other one this week and we’re supposed to do another one I think next week or the week after, I am not sure, but it’s pretty cool. We’ve only been doing it for a month and a half. The key to it, and we’ll talk about the keys, I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but guys go to RealEstateInvestingMastery.com, check out the show notes and the transcriptions and previous episodes that we’ve done. I also want to thank everybody for leaving us reviews in iTunes, it really means a lot.

Alex:    Yeah, we haven’t… Have you checked those out in a while?

Joe:      I did last one or two episodes I read some, I was looking at a… I want to read one recent review and I want to read our most critical review.

Alex:    Oh boy.

Joe:      Let’s start with the most critical one first, like in iTunes you can sort them by most critical or most recent or most favorable or whatever.

Alex:    Nice.

Joe:      Okay, so this one is by somebody called Actual Real Estate Pro. He says this is not real estate investing, it is contract flipping. Real estate investing involves long term horizons and an asset that produces cash flow. Do yourselves a favor and pass on this one, and ignore all the positive self-reviews, one star.

Alex:    Wow.

Joe:      You know the cool thing is we only have one star… one, one star review.

Alex:    That would be the one?

Joe:      That would be the one, yeah, but we have 274 ratings total, 251 five-star reviews.

Alex:    You did every single one of those, didn’t you?

Joe:      Yes I did. Every day in the morning first thing I’ll come up with a new name and I’ll come up with a new review and I’ll…

Alex:    And a new IP address, you’re pretty amazing.

Joe:      We do have 251 five star reviews and we want more. Let me read you the newest one here because I wanted to bring up a podcast that we just did recently. Have you heard, I know you couldn’t be on the podcast I did with Britney, but have you listened to that one yet Alex with Britney Turner?

Alex:    Britney, Britney?

Joe:      I am putting you on the spot, Britney Turner. I interviewed her a few months ago. I just released it a few weeks ago.

Alex:    No, I did not listen to it.

Joe:      It’s one of the best interviews we’ve ever done, and it’s amazing. Britney Turner is a young lady in her mid-twenties; I think she’s 25 or 27. She’s done; she has an average I think like what 90 million dollars a year. She’s got a huge development company…

Alex:    No, wow.

Joe:      She has like over…

Alex:    I will have to listen to that one.

Joe:      Well, I am getting my numbers all screwed up, but I’ll find it here and let you know. She’s got a huge business, she’s one of the most successful, she’s probably the most successful investor we’ve ever interviewed as far as number of deals, the number of volumes that she does. She has like 50 million dollars that she owns in developing assets, and I’m probably getting those numbers all wrong, but she gives a lot back to charity. Anyway this first interview, I mean, I’m sorry this latest review we got was a five star from Kent Nabobs, inspirational. He says the August 6th interview with Britney Turner was great, I listened to it in the morning, and by evening I had my wife and daughters listening to it as well.

Alex:    Wow.

Joe:      Britney is a great role model; it is easy to talk about making the world a better place. Brittney is taking action to change lives, great job by Joe McCall to find her and share her story. I am not trying to put Kent… I mean Dan on the spot here, but, because we’re talking about one of the best podcast interviews that we’ve ever done with Britney Turner, but you know…

Alex:    He can be the best PPC interview that we’ve done.

Joe:      Yes that’s right Dan.

Dan:    Yeah well, let’s just say that I think 90 million people have viewed my ads maybe, so there you go, I can compete directly head on, head to head.

Alex:    Wow.

Joe:      That sounds good.

Dan:    I made that number up, that’s probably not true, that’s probably way of line so that cool.

Alex:    Did you know that 56% of numbers are actually made up?

Dan:    I’ve heard that. That’s amazing. Statistics are incredible.

Joe:      There are only… There are two kinds of people in the world, those who can count and those who can’t.

Alex:    Nice.

Dan:    I want to add my own to these which is the famous quote, don’t believe everything you read on the internet by Abraham Lincoln, quote, Abraham. I like that one.

Joe:      Okay, so here it is. She… I am correcting my numbers. This is episode… I don’t know it doesn’t have an episode number, but it’s called if at first you don’t succeed try and try again with Britney Turner. She has, she does over $50 million a year in revenue, and she has over $95 million in developing assets.

Alex:    Where did you meet her, or find her or…

Joe:      You have to listen to the interview.

Alex:    I will listen to it, but I might send a review.

Joe:      You should, so everybody should go and listen to that episode, it’s from August 6, 2015, and it’s amazing. I’m getting incredible feedback from people on it, it’s really amazing. Her story is inspiring; I mean she was living out of her car when she first moved to Nashville. She went to the same Bible school that my brother went to, and that’s kind of…

Alex:    Where was that?

Joe:      It was. It’s called Morning Star, I think, in Nashville. No, it’s in Charlotte North Carolina.

Alex:    Wow, interesting.

Joe:      It’s a small little school I don’t know that much about it. Yeah she’s got an amazing story, so we need to talk start talking to Dan I think, because Dan is the guest on this show and Dan how are you?

Dan:    I am doing well guys, thank you so much for having me on, it’s really cool.

Joe:      I’m super excited about this, because we started working together, when we first started talking about two months ago I remember very clearly I was at Yogi Bear Park which is at RV camp ground, and it was boiling hot outside, and I was really wanted to talk with you. It was hard, because I didn’t have really good cell phone reception. My kids were swimming, and we were getting ready to leave like the next day to Europe. We’ve… this is our second or third podcast we’ve tried to schedule with you, and I’ve had to change it because we’ve been hoping around moving travelling and stuff. I am glad to finally have you here, and one of the things we’ve talked about was Google AdWords. I had talked about my skepticism. I remember I was telling you, you know I’ve bought leads before from your house buyer network and zee buyer.

Dan:    Right.

Joe:      And some of those guys and they’re just not good leads, and I just like direct mail. Why try some? Why do something else when direct mail is working? You talked me into let’s just try it out, I said okay. And you helped us set it up, and you started running the campaigns and before I know it we’re not getting a ton of leads, but I am not kidding the quality of the leads have been really, really good.

Dan:    Right.

Joe:      I would say you know if you look at direct mail, you maybe need one out of 30 leads to get a deal, right? Maybe one out of 30, one out of 40. If you’re Alex you know you need one out of 60 leads with… I am just kidding, so with our Google AdWords we’ve had three contracts out of 22 leads. What is that 22 divided by three, that’s like one contract out of every seven leads?

Dan:    Yeah.

Joe:      That’s the huge difference, and one of the reasons why we’ve had a lot of success with this and we’re going to talk about this is because I knew these leads are going to be expensive and valuable, okay? And so I told, and it’s really not expensive when you look at the money that we’re making on these leads, but I have a personal admin assistant in St. Louis who normally helps me with a bunch of other stuff, but I made all of the calls go to her cell phone, and that was huge. Dan, talk about… Before we get into what Google AdWords is, maybe you could talk about why it’s so important to take these kinds of leads on the phone live.

Dan:    Yeah, it’s, that’s a really good point. You know we’ve worked with a lot of investors at this point, we you know our agency only works with investors now. One of the really common themes between the people that are able to use AdWords really successfully is the strength of their follow up process, it’s the strength of their phone sales process, and I think that comes from understanding how online leads are really. They are fundamentally different than direct mail leads, and really any other kind of leads, right?

It’s about understanding the environment that person is in when they are going online, right? When you’re able to get someone via AdWords you can very specifically sort of cherry pick them out based on what they’re searching, so you can know for example when you show an ad to someone that they’re interested in selling their home, or they’re interested in selling quickly, or they’re interested in selling because of you know inheritance or whatever it is.

Even though they’re so intentional, those leads are very specific; you’ve also got to understand that they’re online, right? And online is like being in a carnival funhouse but you’re also listening to an iPod at the same time, like it’s just insanity right? There’s things popping up, and you’ve got multiple tabs and there’re stuff going on. I always talk about you know we always try to imagine an online lead as they’re just about to give you a bunch of money, and the kids starts screaming in the other room, and the dog starts barking, and then they leave, and a lot of them just forget to come back. Great, they just forget, so you know things happen.

Joe:      That’s a great analogy.

Dan:    Yeah, so it’s like one of the things that I would say is that for investors a lot of the time the person that follows up first, and the person that follows up the strongest is the one that’s going to get the deal. People have a lot of options and so they might get multiple quotes, they might you know get multiple offers whatever it is, but it’s that follow up that following up on the phone, making that personal connection, or even doing every an automated system like you know you’re sending e-mails by podia or whatever it is, really helps to cement the relationship early and actually get that deal.

I think a lot of people run into trouble because you know for example I was speaking with an investor, he was talking about potentially becoming a client, and I said you know what’s your follow-up process look like? And he said like well when I get a lead, I call them back and if they don’t pick up I call them back the next day, and if they don’t pick up, then I just don’t call them anymore because they are obviously not interested. And I was like okay, my wife told me to take that garbage…

Alex:    I hope that got online?

Joe:      Are the guys in your market?

Dan:    Yeah, I mean I told them I was like my wife told me to take out the garbage six times last night, and I love my wife and I didn’t even do it, you know. It’s not, you can’t write people off that easily and so, yeah the follow up is incredibly important and makes these leads close, which is obviously what it’s all about.

Joe:      What I love about these leads is that they’re typing right now into Google. Sell my house fast, we buy houses, they are looking for me, right? Then they’re motivated for the most part, and it’s different than if you just get a letter. If you get a letter in the mail or a post card you’re like I’ll call this guy and see what this is about. This is something where they’re looking for me and the quality of that lead is so much better. Alex what are you… I know, Alex, you’ve done pay-per-click for a long time.

Alex:    Yeah.

Joe:      What would you say how many deals do you average per month from pay-per-click, or what would you say like what percentage of your deals come from pay-per-click?

Alex:    Well most percentage is being made up now.

Dan:    Yeah.

Joe:      Well, just a guess, approximate.

Alex:    I would say 60, 40. Direct mail, pay-per-click being 40.

Joe:      Okay. And what’s…? Is your process different, Alex, for pay-per-click leads?

Alex:    It might be more than that. This year it’s been a lot of pay-per-click leads that have turned into deals. Maybe I don’t know, maybe its 50-50 actually.

Joe:      Okay.

Dan:    Cool.

Alex:    Yeah.

Joe:      Alex, is your procedure different for pay-per-click leads when they come in?

Alex:    Yes, see, here’s the thing. When I… I actually sometimes what I do is work with another investor in their market, and I’ll turn on my system in their area because it’s just that easy to turn on. And sometimes I work with these people and I am like dude you just got a lead, call them now and they say, yeah I’m out of field right now, when I get back in the next half hour 45 minutes, or I am out right now I’ll get back at… when I get home and I’ll call them, and I was like okay we’re done.

Joe:      You’re working with the wrong guy or girl.

Dan:    One of the things that makes it really cool to be doing this right now, and kind of working with online leads and stuff is that there’s a lot of technology out there that’s makes the callback process very similar. For example, I use CallRail a lot for our clients to do call tracking, and CallRail has an integration available where if someone comes to the site and fills out your forms, so they fill out your allegiance forms. They put in their phone numbers and their e-mails, and they just click, “Hey, send me an offer.” CallRail will actually call you immediately, tell you that you have a lead on the other line, and then if you are available connect you immediately with them.

So from the leads point of view, you know I came to your site, I filled up the form and then they get a call maybe like 30 seconds to a minute later, and you are on the other line say, “Hey, this is Joe McCall. I just saw that you filled up my form. I’d love to talk with you. Do you have a second right now?” And it really closes the gap between that moment when they fill up the form, when they are the most warm; they’re ever going to be as a lead. And it just closes the gap between then and when you actually can follow up and talk with them, and it’s all automatic which is really amazing.

Joe:      The really good thing about doing this, when they are on the phone, I mean when they are on their computer and they are typing these search terms, they see a bunch of your competitors on there. And they will many times go to four, five different of these sites to put in their information. And believe it or not, if you are the one who answers the phone, or calls them back as soon as they fill up the information, I mean within minutes, you are standing already miles above ahead of your competition by doing that. And a lot of times when you call them, you get them on the phone and you set up an appointment to see the house or whatever you are doing, they will stop going to the other websites and calling the other people, most of the time.

Dan:    Yeah, absolutely.

Joe:      Alex, we got you back.

Alex:    Yeah, I’m back. Are we recording again?

Joe:      Yes, so, but that’s okay. You just interrupted our conversation.

Alex:    Oh, sorry.

Dan:    How dare you on your own podcast interrupt my conversation?

Joe:      So Alex, we’re talking about obviously, how important it is to answer these phones, these lead really, really quickly. And one of the big reasons why is it stops them, for the most part, from going to other websites to put their information, because you got them on the phone, there’s motivation, you set up an appointment that typically…

Alex:    You know what the psychology behind that is, have you ever… I mean especially when I built this house, and there are different services often to the side that you are looking for that, you put yourself in that situation. Do you want to fill out five different forms, and meet with five different contractors, get five different bids, and follow up with five different people? Or would you rather get a decent person right off the bat that you could work with and call it a day and say, “Okay, I’m putting this task to a risk.”?

Joe:      And think about this, how many of you would want to do business with a company when you call them, all you get is their voice-mails, and they may or may not call you back and if they do, it will be a couple of days later? Who would want to do business?

Alex:    What purpose are you going to get when it comes to where the rubber meets the road at that point. If I have to beg you to come to my house, what is it going to be like when it’s time when money hits the table?

Joe:      That is why, and I know Dan you work with a lot of folks, but every investor I know that is doing a lot of deals gets this. I mean we are talking kindergarten level, basic 101 real estate, but so few people actually do it.

Alex:    Fails in business 101.

Joe:      Sure, so few people do it. They don’t answer the phones or if the lead goes to voice-mail, it takes them a couple of hours, a couple of days to call that lead back, and they don’t follow up. They give up after one or two tries, two or three tries. What’s the statistics? We’ve seen it all the time. And I posted it a couple of times in the Facebook group, “The wholesaling houses full time,” where like most 81, 80-something percent of the sales, we are talking statistics again here, so 87% of all sales in any sales industry happen after like the fifth or sixth touch, and only something like 10% of sales guys, will actually make more than five attempts to follow up to touch somebody.

Dan:    Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of the reasons that I’m such a huge fan of automation, because obviously if you are dealing with a lot of leads, you can’t necessarily follow up with everyone, 8 times, 10 times, you just can’t keep it straight in your head. But if you are using some sort of automated follow up system, or even if your system, your quote and quote “system” is just, you’ve got a team of people that are getting notifications and they are following up by phone at the right time, whatever it is, if it’s consistent, that’s where all the money is. Right, it’s in consistency in anything. And that’s true across any business.

Alex:    Follow up, right?

Dan:    Absolutely, it’s always in the follow up.

Alex:    And two you’ve got to set your expectations right that you are not always going to get that 100% lay down close. You’ve got to put in the effort, you’ve got to put in your sales skills and all that good stuff, but you’ve got to follow up because not everybody is going to close on the first shot. But if you go out there and put in a good enough effort and put on enough, I don’t want to say dog and pony show, but if you do all that, when the time comes for them to be ready to go to make that decision, you are going to be at the top of the list of the people that are going to call back.

Joe:      Yeah.

Alex:    One of the leads, actually while I was away visiting my father and mom and such, I got a call from a guy and… Or I should say, four weeks earlier I ran in an appointment. Went out on the appointment, did the deal… I mean did the whole dog and pony show if you want to call it that and met with the guy and then made them an offer, blah, blah, blah, real analytical type of guy. So I’m thinking, “Okay, this guy is either going to go or it’s not going to be much of a game.” I got a call a phone call from him probably two weeks later and he said, “Oh I got an offer for $120,000 on the table. I know you are at 105, but we like this offer 120.” And I said, “Okay, great. Run with it.”

So then, probably about two weeks later, I get another call from him. And actually shame on me, I didn’t pick up the phone, I didn’t answer it, I saw it was his number and I was like, “Oh yeah, I’m not getting into a bidding war. I’m going to just leave this one alone.” Sure enough though, probably a week or so after that, I said, “Okay, I’m going to call this guy just because it’s….” So I call him back and he’s like, yeah, actually the guy 120 has kind of disappeared into thin air and we actually have an offer that’s higher than yours but we want to go with you. So “All right, let’s do it.” So that’s the importance of building credibility, going out there with an established brand, an established way of people being able to identify with you and have confidence in you. And then even if you are at that lower price, if you come across this trustworthy and likeable, you will get the deal even though it’s less of a price.

Joe:      When I give my numbers out of how well I did on this first campaign, we can’t say that is typical because you may not get a deal your first one or two or three months doing Google AdWords, but…

Alex:    If plans succeed.

Joe:      Yes, and you will find, and I know this is statistically guaranteed, how about that, that if you do your follow ups like you are supposed to, I bet you a glass of iced tea that 40-60% of your deals will come from your follow up.

Alex:    That’s right.

Joe:      I bet you, I bet you. So Dan, I want you to go back a little bit into your history Dan. How did you get started, what makes you, how did you get started interested in Google AdWords.

Dan:    Yeah, it’s sort of a circuitous route. But the way it started for me was I was always a big nerd. I was back when the internet was, you had to dial up someone actual computer via your weird modem, and you could only do text-based stuff and all that stuff. So I really very quickly got into designing websites and building and some white coding and stuff like that and I was also really into music. And when, so basically when you are that guy, whenever you are in a band, you become the, “Hey can you make the website for the band. Set up a My Space profile, or make the t-shirts, or whatever.” I was that guy.

And so that was kind of my entry into marketing was using it to market the bands I was in, because they were usually pretty bad and they needed a lot of help. And so when I had the skillset, I started building skill set, I very quickly started freelancing and doing stuff like that, and got into AdWords very early on when Google was rolling out its really early attempts at advertising platform, and just kept it up. And so we became a Google certified partner a couple of years ago, which basically means, as a company we’ve had, whatever it is. I think it’s $10,000 of client assets under management over a course of six months, and we kind of passed all the tests to do all the certifications and really made our bones that way. Just kind of doing it for whoever, very broad kind of base company.

And the way I got into real estate investing was really very random. Because I didn’t know that real estate investing was a thing until I went to, it was a Tony Robbins event. So they ran these business kinds of events. And I try to go to at least one kind of big thing every year and I was like, “This year I’m going to see tony Robbins. He’s 8 feet tall, he looks like Frankenstein. There’s got to be something to this.” So I went to this event and I ended up sitting, I was like, “I don’t want to get picked on, I don’t want to get caught on. I was like, I know like he touches the crowd and all this weird stuff.” So I was like, “I’m going to sit all the way back.” That’s sound like all the way back in the back row.

And the people that sat next to me were these just happened to be investors. It’s really great. Glen and Amber Schworm, they are up in Albany, really fantastic real estate investing company. They are doing like 60, they are trying to do a deal a week basically and supporting their family that way. And I was talking to them and they just said, “What do you do?” And I said, “Well, primarily it’s lead generation online. I use a lot of AdWords.” And Glen kind of turned to me and he said, “Well you should work with real estate investors, because you know who needs help with that is real estate investors.” And I was like, “Okay cool.”

Then Tony Robbins literally five minutes later was like, you really need to pick a really specific target market. And I was like, “Real estate investors it is.” And so really just very randomly got my start there and just really fell in love with it very quickly. From a nerd point of view, it’s a group of people that really need leads who get a lot of value out of the leads so you don’t need to get a tone of leads via AdWords to be very, very profitable in real estate investing. For a lot of people that don’t have necessarily the kind of technical know-how to do it themselves and from a purely kind of AdWords guy perspective, the real estate market is very complex. It’s very sophisticated. So it’s evolving. So there’s a lot of stuff to kind of be interested in and not nerd about. So I’m really enjoying it. So we literally reoriented the entire company around real estate investors and just having moved back.

Joe:      That’s interesting. And is it just Google AdWords or do you do other pay-per-click as well?

Dan:    So we do Facebook advertising as well. You know I’ve been focusing on AdWords because I think it’s the best fit for almost all investors because it’s the easiest to start up. Like you said, the leads are very motivated and intentional. It’s very easier to reach out and targets those people. Platforms like Facebook or once you start getting into the more secure platforms like AdRoll or whatever you are doing, it gets much more complex because AdWords you are getting someone… they sit down with the computer and they type in like “please help I need to sell my house tomorrow.” Like that’s a very motivated person. And they are what we call very far along in the buying cycle.

They basically have their money in hand. That’s the people that I want in my AdWords. “I’ve got my money in my hands and I’m typing with my left hand.” Facebook you can’t really target that way because people aren’t really going out and liking the page, “please help I need to sell my house tomorrow.” It’s much more about, much more similar to direct mail and that we are targeting people on Facebook based on who they are, not necessarily what they want or need. And because of that, they are much earlier in the buying cycle. That’s much more like you are doing research. Maybe I want to sell my house, maybe I want it for sale by owner, I’m not totally sure. So we are working on a system for investors that are going to target those folks. But it’s so kind of embed us something that we are just testing with a few clients. So right now it’s mostly AdWords.

Joe:      Can you maybe talk about… well I don’t even know if I want to get into this kind of granular detail, but I am interested to know, what are some of the key words in audiences that you are targeting in Google AdWords?

Dan:    Yeah, it’s really fascinating. So one of the things I did not expect when I started working with investors they very quickly became an apprentice when we got like our first ten clients or so. Was that… there’s a huge amount of variability form client to client, from region to region. So it’s not necessarily the case that there’s a core group of key words that are always going to work. There are the main phrases that you are always going to have. So you are always going to include, “Sell my house fast.” You are always going to include something about ugly houses. You are always going to include something about “We buy houses.”

But something that I think a lot of people don’t quite understand is that it isn’t necessarily that people in your area aren’t going to search that stuff – they usually are. If you are in any sort of populous area that people are trying to know about investors doing anything like that, you are going to get those views. You are going to get those clicks from those key words. The problem has a lot more to do with who else is around you because for me I don’t actually care about clicks or impressions or anything like that. What I care about is client profitability. I need my clients to make a lot of money that’s why they hire me. You know what I mean?

And what ends up happening is that when let’s say, you say, “Okay sell my house fast is my best keyword. I’m going to put a lot of my money into it.” And then Alex is in your area and he does the same thing and I’m in your area and I do the same thing. Well, AdWords is a bid system, it’s an auction. And what ends up happening is that everybody bids each other up. So it might have been that “sell your house fast” would get you…

Alex:    It’s a wonderful system, isn’t it?

Dan:    Oh it’s a lovely system. So it might have used to be like in your area, “Sell my house first” would get you leads at $5 a lead, really great, right? But if everybody thinks that and everybody piles on everybody bids on it, that could very easily go up to $50 a lead to anywhere from… I mean literally we see key words in some areas converting like $100 a lead or $150 a lead. And that might be appealing to you but it might not be depending on your business goals.

So there’s always going to be those core guys, the really obvious ones, like “We buy houses,” “We buy ugly houses,” “I want to sell my house fast,” “Going into foreclosure,” and that kind of stuff. But it isn’t the case that for example, you can always kind of rely on those. So typically when we start with a client, we start with a list of… I think it’s almost at this point it’s about 550 starting key words, we’ll start an average client with. And I don’t know, about 20% of those are going to be our real money makers and I’ve got no idea which 20% it’s going to be. I just know that they’ll probably going to come from that list of about 550.

You just kind of use the data to figure where you want to go. And that’s going to vary from person to person. So that’s the horrible answer that no one ever wants, which is just that it depends. But it really is the case.

Joe:      Okay, and is it just as easy as, you create a campaign, you put in your keywords, you press play and just let it run. You don’t have to really go back and manage it at all. How much work is involved with this?

Dan:    I wish it was no work because I would a lot more time. But instead it’s a lot of work. And so it doesn’t necessarily need to be a lot of work I should rephrase that. Very similar to what we were just talking about when we were saying the money for leads coming online is in the follow up. In AdWords, all the money is in the management after the fact. It’s not hard to set up a campaign. The problem is that the day you start using AdWords, the day you set up your campaigns, set everything up and you let it go, that’s its worst day or it should be its worst day. And everything that you do from that point on to improve it, to cut out the things that aren’t working, to adjust your bids, to try new ads, whatever it is, everything you do from that point gives you this percentage increases.

You might be a percent more profitable. You might get 2% more clicks. You might get 3% more leads this way, all these little tweaks that you are making. But because those changes are accumulative, the percentage increase that you can get at the end of the year is massive. And that’s the big difference between people that do this really effectively and people that don’t, is that people that don’t do it well, they kind of try to set it and forget it. And AdWords is not a system that does well with that approach, it just isn’t. If I could figure out a way to do it, I would, but it just isn’t in the nature of the [piece] because things are always changing. So it’s that management that really makes the difference. It doesn’t need to be a ton of time, like the number that I give my clients for example is… we teach people a system to manage their thing and about an hour and a half a month right?

So it’s a very specific list of tweaks, very specific list of changes, it’s going to take not a whole lot of time, but you do have to do that consistently, whether it’s 15 minutes a week, whether it’s an hour a week whatever you feel comfortable with, it’s the consistency that gives you all the benefit. So I’m a huge believer in that, for us when we work directly with the client we are managing them, we are usually in there about two hours a week. We do a lot of stuff sort of outside the account as well; we do landing page design, all that stuff. So it adds up to about to two hours a week for us. But we are very hands on, and so it kind of works out that way.

Joe:      Very good.

Alex:    Hey Dan, you’ve been… in my account recently playing with some numbers and stuff like that, and obviously those are what’s driving the 1-800-Fair-Offer campaign. I don’t manage that like 100% like what you are talking about, I kind of do set it and forget it, and then I come back and make some little tweaks here and there if there’s something that’s crazy. But overall how would you say those campaigns look?

Dan:    Yeah, your campaign looks pretty good. Here is the thing, I think that you are getting a pretty decent kind of cost per lead, number of leads right? I think if rather than managing the emergencies, you were to set aside let’s say half an hour a week to just come in and do a consistent kind of list of things, whether it’s adding negative keywords, splitting out exact match keywords, split testing adds, you could probably get in the course of year twice the results that you are getting from the account now, okay?

Yeah, so it’s not necessarily that you can’t do this well, I don’t want to make it seem like that. But it is the case that you can always do better if you are steering the ship right? Just like you are more likely to get to where you want to go if you are steering rather than you just kind of let go on its own. And the other thing that’s a little weird about AdWords is that things change very rapidly. So for example let’s say right now Alex I’m not going to talk about your actual account data on the podcast obviously, but let’s say for example you are getting $30 a lead right? It’s pretty good; it’s lower than your average buyer lead, anything like that. So let’s say you are really happy with that. If a big competitor were to come into your market, not even a big competitor, a dumb competitor. Let’s say dumb competitors…

Alex:    Either folks, right?

Dan:    Yeah, exactly and they just say, look I want the top spot no matter what, I’m going to dump a bunch of money into this. What that will do is very quickly raise your average cost per click, and that’s also going to raise your average cost per lead. Your cost per lead might rise to 55 bucks even though you didn’t touch anything right? So there are ways to avoid that, there are ways to deal with that, but it’s never going to be static, and so minimal management is always going to be preferable to no management at all.

Joe:      Yeah.

Dan:    Does that make sense?

Alex:    Oh, absolutely.

Dan:    Cool.

Joe:      That make sense, so Dan if somebody wants to get involved and start doing AdWords for their own business, is there a book that they can go get, is there a course that they can buy, or can they just go to YouTube and watch some videos. What’s involved with all of that?

Dan:    Yeah, it largely depends on… how deeply they want to get into it okay? If they are… that personally depends on their budget, what you can spend on this form of marketing. If you can afford management whether it’s a management company like us or someone else, I would do that because it’s going to get you the best results in shortest amount of time with the least amount of work, and I’m all about networking right? So if you can afford a management company that’s great, management is going range anywhere from $350 to $2,000 a month, we typically we’ll charge 997 a month.

So whether that makes sense for you depend on how much money you are going to put into it. If you’ve got 500 bucks to buy Google ads don’t pay me a $1,000 to manage it right? Because I would just rather… you spend that money on ads not on me. If you are spending around $1,500 to $2,000 that’s really the point at which you want to think about hiring a manager. In terms of learning to do it yourself there’s a lot of great resources. Like we are launching a coaching program soon that’s really going to be specifically for investors, I think that’s like a really great option if you like that kind of small group coaching environment I think that’s going to be really cool. There’s another… There’s a book that I recommend that everybody read which is called Advanced Google AdWords. The author’s name is Geddes, G-E-D-D-E-S.

It says advance on it, it is a little bit advanced, but it has incredibly well written, incredibly just well researched well thought out content in it. And it’s kind of the book that the serious people read. Like your average kind of Google AdWords for dummies it’s only going to tell you enough to get you in serious trouble. And that’s kind of like the thing that really frustrates me about that kind of market the sort of beginner’s AdWords market. One of the reasons that we wanted to launch the coaching program is because it’s… There’s stuff out there but there’s a lot of holes and it just kind of irritates me that it’s of the quality that it is. So definitely that book Advanced Google AdWords by Brad Geddes I think is his name, you can find it on Amazon.

Joe:      Yeah, I’m looking; the guy even has a website here.

Dan:    Yeah, he is very good, he is very good.

Joe:      How big is that book, how thick is it?

Dan:    It’s thick, but you don’t read it cover to cover. So I’ll give you an example it is actually holding up my computer monitor right now. Because my computer monitor broke, and it’s literally the book I keep on my desk. So it’s propping everything up right now. But that’s… It’s a really good kind of primer.

Joe:      Good and the reason I asked that is it was soft ball question because I know…

Dan:    I’m not good at softball; I don’t do the softball question.

Joe:      Well, I’m glad you recommended the book because what you offer is not for everybody, your management of the services. But if somebody definitely wants to do it themselves that’s a good book to look at. What’s that guy’s name who wrote Perry Marshall, didn’t he write a book on Google Adwords?

Dan:    Yes, so Perry Marshall is great, he came out with a book I think it’s called ultimate Google AdWords or something like that. And if you just Google Perry Marshall on Amazon, Google it on Amazon that’s right, you just type his name into one of those things you are going to find a bunch of stuff. Perry Marshall is great; I have actually taken his coaching course in the past. I don’t want to say I don’t recommend it, what I’ll say is that just the business model that he runs kind of means that for example the book is kind of incomplete.

It sort of gives you enough, but it doesn’t give you enough to really get started. So I would usually recommend him to people that already know a significant amount of AdWords who kind of want to see his specific approach. But if you are just starting off you are looking to do this yourself, I wouldn’t start there necessarily.

Joe:      All right so talk about the coaching program you are starting.

Dan:    Yeah, so it’s called the REI AdWords mastery program. We are starting it… I think it’s going to start probably in the middle of September or towards the end of September. Basically it’s an eight week small group coaching course. And it is designed from the ground up to teach investors our investor specific system. So since we started working in the real estate investment space, we built an incredibly highly tested sort of campaigns, set of key words, set of ad and set of landing pages. I mean we really test these things into the ground in order to find the best thing that works the most for everyone right off the back.

So I want to teach people that system, because for us it’s only good to have more people in the market. So I really want to make sure that we kind of put the highest possible quality stuff out there. So the eight week course basically will set up your account for you, we set up everything for you in the beginning so there’s no excuses, there’s no kind of technical hurdles we get everything up and running. And then we train you over the course of those eight months how to manage it, how to…

Joe:      Eight months, or eight weeks?

Dan:    Oh eight weeks, I’m sorry, eight weeks yeah. Eight months would be a bit much for anybody, for AdWords, so we try to keep it fast. We boil everything down, so we don’t go into the stuff you don’t need to know. Well, we don’t go into like shopping ads for example, because investors don’t need shopping ads right? We talk about the stuff works for investors now and then we talk about how to manage it and maintain it and make it better over time. And our specific target for everybody is that hour and a half a week a month.

If you can dedicate an hour and a half a month to getting in there and we kind of running through our checklist and our specific system, you are going to be able to scale that account up, get it generating a lot of leads and deals for you. And then hopefully make so much money that you want us to just take it over for you right, but that’s the idea. I think and obviously I’m a little biased, but we are really building it to be the single best way to get started in Google AdWords and really start generating deals our goal for everyone it’s always a deal a month. And our thing is just if we can teach people to generate a deal a month that’s going to completely change their business and their lives and that’s really the end goal.

Alex:    So what I hear Dan, is that you are single handedly going to be the reason that I’m going to be paying more cost per clicks and cost per deals?

Dan:    Yes, I’m going to flood your local market. Well, yes, so these are all the savvy people right? So they won’t bite everybody up so crazy but I think there’s a lot of room in AdWords for competition, actually competition is really good for a lot of people as long its smart competition. So it’s not for everybody, AdWords is not going to be for everybody right? There are going to be people that just… they don’t want to deal with it or they are afraid of the online space. But I really truly believe that for investors it’s like this is where this is all going. And if you think about my generation, so like say generation X.

I’m right on that cost of like generation X and millennial or whatever, I’m born in the 80s. But I’m the kind of person that is coming into the market now. I’m kind of person that needs to sell the first house that I bought, or that I need to purchase my first home, like I’m that person. For people like us, people in my generation everything is online. I wouldn’t look at a post card if it had my face on it right? It’s just and not in my nature, and so I’m so trained to go to Google first. And if you think about the market kind of moving that way, I just really believe that the people who don’t have a presence here, somehow whether it’s SEO or AdWords or Facebook or something, they are going to get left behind.

And I think it’s really important work that we do, and so that’s… you can hear me get fired up about it. I get fired up about the dumbest stuff, but I just… I really believe in the stuff, I think it really works…

Joe:      You know what’s amazing and I’m not saying that… Well, I do… I’m pretty tech-savvy right? If I step back and think about everything I do on my mobile phone, it’s shocking. And like I was just thinking this morning we were having lunch and my wife wanted to take our boys to the train museum. Where did I go? I went to Google Maps and did a search for train museum. And it pops right up. The Google is just everywhere I use Gmail, I use Google calendar, I use Google maps or that I use Google voice. And it’s amazing to me how… You even said it in the vernacular that we are using, you Google something on Amazon right?

Dan:    Oh, yeah.

Alex:    2005… What were phones like in 2005 and what were you able to do on those phones to what you can do now? I mean remember it was like the biggest thing. I remember one of the ads was like; it looks like the internet because it is the internet.

Dan:    Yeah, there’s something crazy right, it was like the average smartphone now has… It’s like 100 times the computing power that they had when we went to the moon right?

Alex:    Do you still remember what the internet used to look like on the smartphone it was just like on a Blackberry it was just annoying, it was terrible.

Dan:    Yeah, it was awful, and now we have learning pages that are just for mobile it’s just… This world is changing so fast, right? And it’s not a big deal if you are in it already, and if you are involved in it, and you are keeping track of it. Because when something changes you can change with it, actually that’s one of the things that I’m really proud of about our coaching courses, is there’s all these online training materials and everything. But we give you free access for life, so whenever anything changes in AdWords we are going to update the course.

And so if it’s like hey, in the future there are no more typical ads instead Google injects an ad into your eyeball and that’s how you get ads, we are going to have a module about how to do that for investors. And to me it’s… That’s what’s important.

Joe:      Well, does it changes all the time and you have to be prepared for that for sure I get it.

Dan:    Yeah, absolutely.

Joe:      Well, good do you have any just parting advice; I’m going to ask you in a minute to give us a website where people can get more information on this coaching program, I think this is going to be really good. Obviously it has my stamp of approval because I have seen the results that you’ve given me. And I’m looking at thins long term thinking at least half of my marketing budget needs to be in pay-per-click without a doubt. And I’m not giving up on direct mail, I probably never will because it does work really well. But for people who are serious about doing a lot of deals it’s imperative, you’ve got to have some money budgeted in your marketing budget for paper click, Google AdWords.

Going forward in fact I would say the last couple of months, I’m thinking about it now we’ve… I did slow down my direct mail, but I haven’t slowed down the paper click, we are actually spending more money on pay-per-click now than we are with direct mail. So what is some parting advice you give to somebody Dan who has interested in Google AdWords, wants to get started, and maybe some mistakes to avoid just in general?

Dan:    Yeah, so my first piece of advice would be… I think everybody needs to try it out. And I think if you’ve got $50 bucks, if you’ve got $100 bucks a month it doesn’t matter you could be… We got big guys spending like $10,000 a week it doesn’t have to be like that. Take the amount that you are comfortable with and read into it and try it out. Because if you think about it, if you can set up a system where this source of leads is going to consistently generate even if it’s just five leads a week or four leads a week or whatever, it’s going to consistently generate some leads. And you know that one out of every 30 of those is going to turn into a deal for you.

That’s a game changing events right? That is you can project for the next year what you are going to make and how many deals you are going to make, and how many… what you are going to do. And to me it’s a business changing life altering thing to have a system like that set up, and AdWords can do that with some loving right? With some hand holding, and so no matter how much money you got, take a stab out of it, because its where everything is going, its where you are going to need to be. You don’t need to work with me, there’s tons of stuff out there, but I think it’s something that everybody needs to try. And then in terms of kind of mistakes to avoid, I wish I had had a coach earlier on in my career.

And I have coaches all the time now for my business and everything… I really believe in the coaching model. So whether it’s us whether it’s someone else, whether it’s a friend that’s done this before and kind of has some experience, hook up with someone that you can you ask questions up and that you can kind of bounce ideas off of. Because that I think more than anything is going to really cut your learning curve and save you a lot of money over time. The only other thing I would say is, I think our coaching program is an incredible way to start. Obviously we do management; I would love for people to reach out to me. So what I do for people is you can go on the website, you can request a call with me and no obligation. I will sit down with you and talk about what are your numbers, what’s your average deal value, what’s your close rate right now?

And what’s your local market look like? And I will be able to tell you like is AdWords a really good fit for you or not. And I never say it is when it isn’t. I’m a painfully honest man, the perfect curve which is the state paper here in Connecticut where I am, they did an article about the company, they literally headlined the article, it says… It’s like local nerd does… finds success on the internet despite being world’s worst salesman. Like that was the headline, and so I was like okay, this is really true, I will talk people out of AdWords all day if I think it’s not going to be good for them. So if people are interested they can kind of go on and go find me online, request a call you know request some information about the coaching course. I won’t try to hard sell you anything but I will you know sit down with you and kind of help you figure out if this is a good choice for you or not. Yeah I think it’s, hopefully I am fine to talk to I’ve got no idea.

Joe:      Yeah, you are.

Dan:    Cool.

Alex:    Definitely you’ve got…

Joe:      Yeah.

Dan:    Got it, awesome.

Joe:      Dan what is the website that people can go to, to get more information about you, your management company, and the course, the coaching course?

Dan:    Yeah, absolutely. So that, yeah. Yes, LearnToMarketWithYourOwnCompetitors.edu. Yeah, so that. The website is AdwordsNerds.com, so AdwordsNerds.com. You’re going to find us on there, and I’ll have some information about the coaching program and our management stuff, and you can also request a call with me there.

Joe:      Good, Adword ends in an S, AdwordsNerds.com?

Dan:    Yep, AdwordsNerds. It just rolls right off the tongue like peanut butter or something like, yeah.

Joe:      Yeah, it does, good. Well, I think we’ve had enough statistics for one show. Don’t you think Alex?

Alex:    I think it wasn’t that bad, come on now?

Joe:      It could have been worse.

Dan:    I like it.

Alex:    I think let’s talk about 16.3% that was…

Dan:    Yeah, that’s… I had 24.7% it’s really that our numbers are off.

Joe:      It’s funny-funny-funny, you know, but I was just remembering I was, three years ago when we were here in Prague and I met a guy who was living here in Prague travelling around the world just managing Google Adwords campaigns for people and for businesses.

Dan:    Wow.

Joe:      It’s definitely if you’re really are excited about this and want to get into it, you could not only learn how to do this for your own business, you know join a coaching program like what Dan has, but you can start managing Google AdWords campaigns for other people as well and for other businesses, for other real estate investors, once you learn this stuff. It could be a possibly another source of revenue for people, just thinking out loud.

Alex:    Yeah I mean if it’s always possible that you could generate enough leads that you could just turn around and sell those leads, because you just don’t have the time or, yeah it’s very cool.

Joe:      And real, I am sorry. Real quick you’re doing something, Alex you mentioned this with your fair offer, 1-800-Fair-Offer campaign, Dan, how was Dan helping you guys with that, can you just talk about that real quick?

Alex:    Yeah all right, now we’re in the very beginning stages of it, but I said to Dan hey play with my campaigns, see which you can get them doing better, and let’s see how this works, but in the future what we’ll be doing is having Dan setup campaigns, well potentially as an option, be setting up campaigns for our fair offer licensees so that they can literally just…

Joe:      Literally…

Dan:    To just drop right off the call.

Joe:      Literally just disappear.

Dan:    Yeah, I can finish this.

Joe:      Yeah please do.

Alex:    Yeah so in the future it’s going to be an option for Fair Offer licensees. They can have us set up their campaign, and do a little bit of training on it so they can just kind of get started. And it’s really for people who, they want to get started, they don’t have a lot of money, so they want something that you can use fairly easily and quickly, and just you know take a little bit of the technical huddle away from forks, because we want to get, we want people to get started generating leads as quickly as possible.

Dan:    Good, very good.

Alex:    Yeah.

Joe:      All right so, thanks Dan, I sure appreciate it. The website, guys, for Dan is Adwords with an S, Nerds with an S, dot com, AdwordsNerds.com.

Dan:    Yap.

Joe:      I definitely recommend Dan’s services and his coaching program, because I’ve seen the success, I’ve been a doubter, I’ve been a skeptic for several years, and I am not anymore, to be honest. Because of what Dan has been doing for us the last one to two months, and I definitely see this growing and being a bigger part of my business. So thanks for being on this show Dan, I sure appreciate it.

Dan:    Yeah, thank you guys so much for having me, it was a blast I really appreciate it.

Joe:      Guys go to RealEstateInvestingMastery.com to get the show notes, to get a transcription of this, to get the links, to get more information about previous episodes, to listen to an interview we did with Brittney Turner like we were talking about before. I think we got Alex back.

Alex:    Yeah I am back.

Joe:      Okay, welcome back, we were just saying goodbye to everybody.

Alex:    That’s fine you know, just…

Dan:    Just finish the show without me guys; it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.

Joe:      All right. Hey, thanks everybody.

Alex:    Thanks.

Dan:    Thank you guys so much.

Joe:      See you.