start getting your website some exposure. You can’t be an investor in stealth mode, and you never know who will be interested in buying or selling. With your website URL in the signature of your emails, your website has the potential to be seen and shared with more people. #3 OFFLINE MARKETING You should list your website on your other marketing pieces. That includes your direct mail postcards, letters, door hangers, fliers, business cards, etc. Some people don’t recommend websites on direct mail because they are concerned that sellers will go online and get dis- tracted. That could happen. My take is that if they’re truly motivated and don’t want to make a phone call, your website will work very well. Plus, it will allow you to gain credibil- ity and build some rapport. This is also a reason for wanting a somewhat short domain name. You don’t want to have to make someone type out webuyallkind- sofhousesinthestateoftexas.com just to get to your site. Some investors add QR codes to their postcards and letters so that people can scan them and go straight to their website. There probably isn’t much of an issue with people going online to your web- site and then going to Google to search for competitors. The issue is people searching for your domain name and
getting other results because they didn’t type it in as a domain name. So keep those domain names easy to enter. This is also a reason to make sure you set up a Facebook page, Google My Business page, a listing on Yelp and other review sites. It’s important to also socially promote these. This way, if someone does search for your business, you can dominate the results! #4 PRESS RELEASES Press releases are more of an SEO strategy more than a way to promote yourself, but I’m going to include them here anyway. That’s because a good press release can get picked up by reputable news websites that you can then list on your website – an “as seen on” type deal. This is huge for credibility. You can find incredible press release writers on Fiverr.com. They should be cheap enough to allow you to try a couple and use the best ones. Some Fiverr workers will even send out the releases for you. Even so, I find that spending a couple hundred bucks on a more legitimate service to release the press release is worth it. I know a lot of investors use marketersmedia.com. PRWeb.com is another service, but is more expensive. The biggest thing to remember when having a press release written (or writ- ing one yourself, as I used to do) is that
you really need to try to come up with something that is actually newsworthy. Just having a piece written on “Sell Your House Fast” isn’t going to get picked up by too many news outlets. You need a story -- something like, “Guy loses hand in pinball machine and sells his house fast to an investor.” (Getting coverage really is a lot harder than you might think.) The more “newsworthy” your release is, the more legitimate news websites will pick it up. One time I even made it onto Yahoo! News. My dad still has a printout of the Yahoo! homepage with my article on it. #5 CRAIGSLIST Despite what you may think, motivat- ed sellers are searching Craigslist, so it’s very easy to get in front of them. Some- times they’re looking for a place to rent. Other times they’re considering putting their house up for sale and might want to post an ad on Craigslist. It’s easy to post ads on Craigslist. But with ease comes competition. > Continued on :: PG 95
Danny Johnson is the founder of Lead- Propeller and REImobile. He does a
weekly podcast at FlippingJunkie.com. You can download his best-selling book, “Flipping Houses Exposed: 34 Weeks in the Life of a Successful House Flipper,” for free at www.flippingjunkie.com/freebook.
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