Marketing for Real Estate Investors

Getting a blog going is a fantastic way to create credibility, help people get to know you and become known as a real estate expert. The problem is that it is harder than ever to get people’s attention online unless you’re sharing pictures of kids doing cute things or crazy cute cats. It is not “build it and they will come”.

Too many people put up a blog, post a link on Facebook and think that they are going to get blog readers.

Maybe if you are really creative and hit a concept that goes viral that could happen, but that is hard to do. It is much more likely that your Mom will be your biggest fan unless you put in some work to build your audience.

WORD OF CAUTION – A WEBSITE IS NOT FOR ALL INVESTORS: I am not an advocate that all real estate investors need a website. In fact, I think many investors waste precious time on a website when the most important things they should be doing to grow their portfolio are looking at properties, building their expertise and networking. Just like a lot of small business owners waste a massive amount of time trying to perfect a business card instead of focusing on sales and marketing – THE thing that pays the bills – I think many real estate investors lack confidence and spend time on a website that won’t solve their biggest problems: deal flow & funding for deals.

Assuming creating an online presence with a website and blog is a strategic move for you to get to where you want to go (establishing yourself as a specialized expert, helping you get speaking gigs, published articles and create more opportunities for you to find deals and raise money) and it’s worth your time to build your audience, here are three suggestions to get readers and connect with people online.

3 Tips for Successful Real Estate Blogging:

Oh and keep your eyes open in the video … you’ll get to meet one of my coworkers. I had to wake her up though – she was asleep on the job. 🙂

Do you need a website as a real estate investor? Should you be active on social media?

The answer really does depend on YOU and what you are doing in your real estate business. If you’re actively seeking new deals, new partners or new team members then the easier it is to find you, the better. You can hand out business cards to every person you meet (although that is not my recommended networking strategy – I don’t even take business cards with me anymore but that is a topic for another day) but then what happens when someone wants to pass your name along? Maybe they happen to have your card handy when the topic comes up, but usually that is not the case. So, how do they find you? They pull out their smart phone or hop on the computer and GOOGLE YOU. The days of pulling out the white pages and looking someone’s number up are gone (sorry Mom but it’s true – nobody uses phone books anymore!). So, maybe you don’t need a website but you do need a strategy so people can find YOU and connect with YOU online.

We made an offer on a home a few years ago. They turned us down and decided to keep the home and rent it out instead. More than a year later when they absolutely had to sell and were in a time crunch, the seller remembered Dave’s name, and Googled him. The seller easily found us online, contacted us and asked us if we were interested in their home. We bought it for much less than we’d offered the year before because they absolutely had to sell and needed a firm deal quickly.

That’s what today’s video is all about. And before we get into it, I must thank Tim Collins for this. He doesn’t know it yet, but he made the perfect example for me to use to explain this (and by me linking his name to his website I just helped him a tiny bit solve his big challenge – which you’ll hear about in this video). 🙂