Renegade Millionaire Blog

Sales letters have been my most valuable marketing tool in ALL of my businesses. The reason why is because they are automatic sales machines that work 24/7. They are extremely valuable assets that can be leveraged simply by generating more leads. Sales letters are powerful lead conversion tools and should be used by every real estate agent to automate their lead conversion.

A few weeks ago, I released a free report titled “Advanced Online Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Agents.” In this report I suggested copying businesses outside of real estate. A sales letter is something I watched other businesses outside of real estate use and decided to copy this strategy inside real estate.

I decided to write a sales letter for my real estate business. The goal of my sales letter was simply to convince my prospects that I was the best agent for them. I wanted to eliminate my competition and pre-sell prospects on my real estate services. This sales letter ultimately generated millions of dollars of commissions to my real estate business.  Needless to say, I’m a BIG fan of sales letters and use them extensively today.

The good news is you don’t have to be a great marketer to write a compelling sales letter for your business. Winning sales letters follow a proven template and you can easily write a compelling sales letter for your business, if you follow this proven template.

Here’s the proven template you should follow when writing sales letters for your business:

1. Grab the readers attention with a compelling headline.

2. Highlight the big problem the person faces.

3. Agitate the problem further.

4. Provide a solution to the problem. (This solution would be your services!)

5. Present your expertise and why you’re qualified to provide the solution.

6. Show the prospect what they’ll receive when using your services.

7. Provide testimonials to back up what you’ve promised.

8. Include a clear call to action to get the prospect to respond.

9. Add scarcity to create urgency.

10. Reverse the prospect’s risk by adding a guarantee.

This sales letter template is proven throughout history in almost every industry. I must admit that I’m not the one who figured out this winning template.  I simply followed the template I found in a little software program called http://www.OnlineSalesLetter.com. This sales letter software program forced me to follow the winning template and gave me suggestions for how to structure my sales letter. Looking back, this software was probably the best investment I’ve ever made. And believe it or not, I still use it today!

Throughout my journey in life, I’ve learned many lessons and I’ve always tried to keep notes of the lessons I was learning. I thought I would share some of these lessons with you in a short blog post. You may disagree with my lessons, but I’m calling things as I’ve experienced them. Here goes…

1. People cannot keep secrets.

2. Unfortunately in business, nice guys usually do finish last.

3. Time IS more valuable than money. (I used to think time was money. It’s not!)

4. It’s a lot easier to get into partnerships than it is to get out of them.

5. The old saying – “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” might actually be the secret to success.

6. The ONLY way to get and stay rich is to consistently live below your means.

7. It’s usually best to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. This applies to almost every area in life.

8. You can’t accomplish anything in your business, if your employees don’t fear you at some level.

9. Less really is more.

10. Golf is a waste of time.

Plus two bonus lessons…

11.  A good business book can and should turn into money in your bank account.

12. You only get half of what you deserve in live. Adjust your output accordingly.

Can you add to this list? I’m sure you can! Please add your life lessons in the comments to this post.

In this economy, we probably all know someone who has fallen on hard times. Maybe you have a family member who’s lost a job, or you know a friend whose income has dropped drastically.

Try to think of someone you know in this situation, and let me ask you a question about them:

Have they stopped eating?

Chances are, no matter how bad things have gotten, they have not given up food. Maybe they’ve had to change what and how they eat. Maybe they’ve had to be more careful about how they spend their grocery dollars – fewer meals out, more store-brand food items, more burgers and fewer steaks. They might have had to change what they’re doing when it comes to food, but it’s likely they have not stopped eating.

Heck, maybe they’ve given up cable TV, started taking the bus to work or clicked the thermostat down a few notches to saving on their heating bill. Those are the things people do before they stop buying food.

Why? Because no matter how bad things have gotten, we all have to eat.

Unfortunately, that simple logic doesn’t always transfer to our businesses.

I have seen it first-hand, and you probably have, too. As housing markets across the country have declined, agents have had to cut back. What I have seen is that one of the first areas to get cut is marketing. Want proof? Look at the size of your local newspaper’s real estate section or your area’s home buyer magazine this week compared to what it was just a couple of years ago.

Commission income drops, and so does marketing. And I’m not talking about agents simply doing less marketing; I’m talking about a virtual stop to ALL marketing. This is a mistake. And what follows when an agent stops marketing is almost unfailingly inevitable.

They are out of the business. Starved out.

Marketing generates the leads that are the food for our business. You have to have food to live, and so does your business. No matter how bad things get, food should be the last thing you cut.

Like food, lead-generation and lead-conversion are not luxuries; they’re necessities. Luxuries are the office that’s bigger than we need, the fancy phone system, the personal assistant. When times are tough, no doubt, fixed expenses need to be trimmed.

These luxuries in our businesses are the cable TV, dinners out and expensive car payments that a household trims before chopping the grocery budget. Marketing is that grocery budget, it’s the last thing you chop, not the first.

It’s vicious cycle, I know. Without selling houses, you can’t pay for marketing. Without marketing, you can’t sell more houses. But like you’d find a way to feed your family even if you had to cut everything else, you’ve got to find a way to continue to feed your business … even if it means cutting back everywhere else.

Look, we had it easy in the steak-and-lobster days of the housing boom. But just because you can no longer afford steak and lobster doesn’t mean you can afford to stop eating.

You might have to change the way you market – develop more affordable campaigns, tactics that get you more bang for the buck. You might have to get creative and find ways to stretch your marketing dollar, the way a struggling family stretches the grocery dollar, but you cannot stop marketing, just as that family can’t stop eating.

You wouldn’t let your family starve. Don’t let your business starve, either.

Believe it or not, you can learn a very valuable lesson on marketing in a unique story about two farmers. You can read the story and find the marketing lesson at   www.FreeFarmerReport.com.

Photo by  Chris Denbow

In order to bring innovation to your business, you must learn…

To study other successful businesses OUTSIDE of real estate and apply what they’re doing INSIDE real estate.

Please take a minute and read this sentence again – it’s critically important.

This is easier said than done because we have a tendency to look inside our industry and copy what we see. When you first get into real estate, you look for agents who appear to be successful and you copy them – right? I did it! Hell, every new agent has done it, too.

The problem with this approach is zero innovation happens in your business. To make more money, sell more homes and dominate your market, you need to be innovative. You need to stand out by doing something different.

A great example of finding something successful outside your industry and applying to your industry would be fractional jet ownership. This style of ownership wasn’t invented by companies selling smaller jets. They simply copied it from the real estate timeshare industry and applied to it to jet sales.

Several years ago, I copied something I saw outside of real estate and used it in my real estate business, and it had a dramatic impact on my business. I was participating in several memberships and coaching programs designed to help me improve my business. Each month, I paid a membership fee for access to information. This fee was charged directly to my credit card.

It was obvious how powerful this recurring monthly income was to the businesses offering these memberships and coaching programs. My goal was to do something similar in my real estate sales business.

My plan was to create a club of real estate investors and charge members a fee to participate. Each month, we would provide special expert interviews, a lengthy detailed newsletter with investing tips and strategies, special classes and more. I launched my membership in November of 2004 and had over 100 paying members by the end of 2005. When I sold my business in 2007, we had well over 400 members paying $29.95 a month. This membership provided over $12,000 a month of recurring income and doubled our home sales annually.

Some people have called me a genius for what I did. But in reality, any agent could have done the same thing simply by copying what they saw outside of real estate.

I’ve included this little story to show you the power of what’s possible when you look outside of the real estate industry instead of inside the real estate industry. The topic of this special report is Advanced Online Marketing strategies, and to be innovative with online marketing, we must look outside of the real estate industry.

So where do you go to find innovative online marketing strategies that you can apply to your business?

Internet Marketers

Internet marketers make their living online by selling information products. They live and die by their websites and follow-up marketing.

Internet marketers are constantly testing new strategies. More importantly, they’re tracking their results. This tracking allows them to see what works and what doesn’t work. It’s very powerful.

By copying internet marketers, you leverage their testing, tracking and knowledge of online marketing. And when I say copy, I don’t mean to copy their copyrighted or trademarked material. I mean to copy their process for selling. Their process for selling online can be very, very valuable to your business.

Here are just a few things Internet Marketers track in their online marketing:

1.  Every advertisement they run and how well it drives traffic to their website.

2.  The conversion percentage of every web page they have online. (The number of people visiting a web page vs. the number of people who fill in their contact information)

3.  Which email subject lines work the best?

4.  What time of day is best to send emails to get them opened.

5.  How many people watch videos they post vs. how many take action after watching the videos.

Do you track these things in your online marketing?

Probably not.

The good news is you can leverage their testing and tracking by copying their online sales process in your business.

This article is continued with detailed examples in my new report titled “Advanced Online Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Agents” which can be downloaded for free at http://www.OnlineStrategiesReport.com

One of the biggest overlooked marketing strategies by real estate agents is what I refer to as “Solo Email” marketing. A solo email campaign is one for which you pay to have an email you created sent to the advertiser’s email newsletter list.

This is significantly different than a banner advertisement on someone’s website. A banner advertisement is reactive because it waits for someone to come to the website and then click on the banner. Solo emails are proactive because they are actually delivered to the person’s email address. Because they are proactive, they are very effective in generating low- cost leads.

To give you an example of what I mean, think about a news-related website like a TV News station or a local newspaper’s website. In some of these websites, they offer to deliver news updates to their newsletter subscribers for free. Visitors can sign up to receive these emails and have access to up-to-date news. Below, I have included a screen shot from the website of a local newspaper in my area. You can see easily see that this newspaper is capturing email addresses of website visitors. I could contact my advertising representative and ask what it would cost to send an email to their email list of subscribers.

You can search the websites of your newspapers and TV news channels to see if they are capturing the email address of visitors. If they are, you might be able to send a solo marketing email to their list!

Imagine what would happen if you paid to have an email delivered to their list of subscribers? It would generate lead-after-lead.

How do I know?

Because I use solo marketing emails extensively in my business. An agent that I coach used this strategy with his local newspaper and generated 130 leads from one email. His cost per lead was under $3.00.

The best option would be to have one full email sent to their list.  In your email, offer something of value to the subscribers and have a link for them to click through to your website. Require the prospect to give you their name and email address to get the free item you offer. If you are unable to have a full email sent, than test a text advertisement within the articles included in the newsletter. These text advertisements pull very well and you might be surprised at how many new leads you generate using this strategy.

To get started with this new marketing strategy, I would suggest leveraging your best lead generation advertisement. You can do this by turning your advertisement into an email or text advertisement to be placed within a newsletter email. The reason I suggest  using your best lead generation advertisement is because you already know it works.  Leverage success!

In marketing, if an advertisement works in one place, it will more than likely work in other places too.

To learn a great way to find pretested email subject lines for your solo marketing emails, download my new report titled “Advanced Online      Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Agents” right now for FREE at:
http://www.OnlineStrategiesReport.com

Trulia founder Pete Flint and Realty Trac Senior Vice President
Rick Sharga estimated that we my see 4,000,000 foreclosures in 2010.
This would be the highest rate of foreclosures since the real estate crash.

“When the tax credit runs out, inventory will go up and interest rates will
go up. Prices will go down again. We have a long way to go until we have
a healthy real estate market.”

In their forecast, they cited several reasons why things will remain challenging in 2010:

* Mortgage interest rates will move into the 6 percent range.

* The record high unemployment rate will continue forward

* Negative equity will drive many home owners from their homes

* Expiration of the tax credits

* Difficulty buyers and investors have finding new financing for their
home purchases

* Large number of Alt-A and negative amortization loans that will
begin resetting starting July 2010.

For many of us in real estate, we want to be positive about a rebound in our market.
However, the economic factors influencing sales and home prices point to an “ugly”
year. We cannot simply try to hold on for a few more months. Instead, we need to
build our businesses and marketing campaigns around the spike in foreclosures.

To learn how, register to attend a teleseminar I’m hosting on Thursday, where I’ll
show you how to:

1. Generate foreclosure buyer and investor leads inexpensively
2. Create instant expert positioning as a foreclosure specialist
3. Automatically convert leads into clients using proven lead conversion systems

You can register to attend this foreclosure teleseminar at: http://www.DistressedHomes.com

This week I’ve been watching TED2010 from home. Last year, I had a blast in California at TED2009. Because of my travel schedule, I wasn’t able to attend live. If you’re not familiar with TED, I encourage to you to go to Ted.com and watch some of the presentations. They’re incredible and available for FREE!

So far this year, the best presentation has been Jamie Olivers.  It’s very powerful and what he reveals may shock you. It definitely shocked me and we are making some changes with our kids because of his presentation.

I’ve included his presentation for you here:

If you have a database, you’ll be happy to know that a certain percentage of prospects in your database are investors. You may not have advertised for investors, but you’ve got them anyhow! Simply by applying the 80/20 rule, we can estimate that 2 out of ever 10 people in your database would be considered an investor. This is actually very good news for you and your business.

Why you might ask?

Because an investor is always an investor. What I mean by this is an investor is ALWAYS interested in good deals. Take a second and think about this…

If you have investors in your database and they’re always interested in good deals, you have the ability to sell property anytime you want. All you have to do is find a great deal and market it to your database. It’s virtually impossible for a “real” investor to walk away from a great deal. I know because I’m one of them. Every time I hear about a great investment opportunity, I automatically start thinking how I can grab it for myself.

There are several ways for you to leverage this finding in your business and it might make sense for you to focus on larger investment properties because you’ll earn a great deal more for your efforts. Compare the commission earned on the sale of a 30 unit apartment building to the commission earned on the sale of a single-family home. Which commission check would you rather have?

The good news is that it might actually be easier to sell a larger investment property to your database than it is to sell a smaller deal. I’ve sold several larger investment properties to my database over-the-phone without a single showing appointment. You can see exactly how to do this yourself in a 12-minute video.  Here it is:

Thomas Stanley, Ph. D. is back at it again with his newly released book “Stop Acting Rich.” His name should be familiar to you because he is the author of “The Millionaire Next Door” and “The Millionaire Mind.”

I loved his first two books and when I saw his new book, I couldn’t resist buying it. The message that permeates each book listed above is that  most people look rich because they live in big homes or drive expensive cars, but when examined closely, they have accumulated very low levels of wealth. In other words, they wear big hats but have no cattle.

For some reason, we seem to measure our success in life by how we compare to others. Is our house bigger than theirs? Is my car nicer than Jim’s down the street? To feel successful, many people fall into the trap of buying things simply to impress others.

A few years ago, I almost made this same mistake myself. My dream was to own a large lakefront home in North Carolina. My wife and I toured numerous homes and finally made an offer on a 8,000-square-foot home in an exclusive residential community. During negotiations my wife shared that she didn’t think she would feel comfortable in the neighborhood. Almost as if we didn’t fit in. As we talked about it more, I realized she was right. Everyone in this community belonged to the country club, drove high-end cars and took exotic vacations. We don’t belong to a country club. Hell, I don’t even golf. I’m too busy working! I drive a 6-year-old car. Nothing exotic about us.

We decided to let this home go and stay put in Cleveland. Turns out it was one of the smartest decisions we’ve ever made because, soon after, the real estate market crashed and the economy took a nosedive.

One of the main lessons Mr. Stanley makes throughout this book is that the amount of wealth you accumulate in your life correlates directly to the size and value of your home. Here’s a very telling quote from the book:

“If you examine homes by value from the lowest to the highest, you would find that as the value of the homes increases, so does the proportion of people who are living well above their means.”

The more expensive your home, the more you’ll be forced to spend on home repairs, maintenance and upkeep. This is hard enough, before you factor in what you’ll have to spend to keep up with your neighbors. If you buy a high-end home, you’ll end up sending your kids to expensive private schools and you’ll be forced to buy them all of the expensive clothes and gadgets the other kids have in the neighborhood.

The reason this happens is because it’s hard to avoid copying what you see every day. You won’t want to look like some schmuck who drives a rusty old car and sends his kids to the public schools in out-of-style clothes from Kmart.

The trick is to live in a nice home in a nice neighborhood that allows you to live below your means. It’s better to be a high earner in an average neighborhood than it is to be a low earner in a high-end neighborhood. Remember the old saying about “buying the worst house on the best street?” Well, as it turns out, this “best street” might actually lead you to the poor house.

Most of the millionaires profiled by Mr. Stanley live on less than 80 percent of their income. They are frugal and focus their attention on investment rather than consumption. Their goal is to convert income into wealth, which is significantly different than people who act rich.

A psychology study by Ryan Howell, which was written about in the book, found that having “things” isn’t what usually makes us happy. If “things” do, it’s short-lived happiness.

Instead, what makes us happy are life experiences. The good news is that life experiences are free.

A brilliant marketer recently recorded a 13-minute video detailing how marketers can generate very targeted leads by advertising on Gmail. It’s probably the best lead generation strategy I’ve stumbled across in a long time. You can watch his video here:

http://www.ProfitWebinar.com

You’ll notice in the video that the examples are not for real estate agents. This doesn’t mean you can’t use this strategy to generate very targeted leads in your business. Using his approach, you can display advertisements that specifically match what’s included in the prospect’s emails. Pretty scary, huh?

For example, let’s assume someone using Gmail in your area types an email to a friend and writes something like the following:

“I’m thinking of buying a home this summer”

You could display the following advertisement:

Thinking of buying a home this summer?
Check out this free list of beautiful homes
in YOUR AREA available below value

http://www.YourWebsite.com

Do you think this advertisement would get clicked on by the person writing the email? I’m not a betting man, but I’d guess the odds of the person clicking on this advertisement are pretty high because the advertisement is a perfect match to what they’ve written their email. You could use this same strategy for seller’s, too! Consider a person writing the following email in gmail:

“I’m going to put my house up for sale in March”

You could have the following advertisement displayed:

Putting your home up for sale?
Download this shocking report detailing 7
costly mistakes sellers make when selling
their homes.

http://www.YourWebsite.com

This is very advanced marketing and the good news is you can dramatically reduce your advertising costs and increase the number of leads generated by using this Gmail Advertising strategy. To learn more about Gmail advertising watch this 13-minute video: