Craigslist Real Estate Lead Generation

Josh: Hey everybody this Josh Schoenly and I’ve got Ryan Hartman my partner on the line here for this special online workshop where we’re going to be talking about Craigslist Real Estate Lead Generation Secrets for Real Estate Professionals. On the line we’ve got real estate brokers. We’ve got real estate agents. We’ve got loan originators and mortgage professionals and we’ve also got real estate investors.

And we’re going to give you some great tips, tricks and strategies to help all of you in the real estate profession generate more leads and ultimately generate more sales by using Craigslist, which is a great, free marketing medium that if you’re not already utilizing you need to and you’ll have the skills and the knowledge to be able to after this call. And if you are already using it we’re going to show you some tips and tricks to take your lead generation efforts on Craigslist to the next level.

Before we get into that some housekeeping items. You’re going to want to have a pen and paper handy. If you’re listening, if you’ve called in, you’ve dialed in you’re going to notice that the slides and the audios are not going to match up perfectly. In fact if you’re on the web cast I recommend that you just listen to the audio through the web cast rather than through the call in function. If you are calling in you should be able to follow along without the slides. We’re going to do our best to be as descriptive as possible. But understand that there’s some things that we’re going to show on the slides that might not make sense.

If you haven’t already noticed I’ve got a little web cam fired up. I’m actually going to pull that down so we can go full screen on the presentation but you may see it pop up time and again here and we just do that just to let you know that hey we’re real people here and just to let you see my smiling face I guess.

So we’re going to go to a full screen here. And so there’s Ryan who we don’t have on the web cam, on the bottom right and there I am on the bottom left. And Ryan and I are partners in Retechulous.com and the Real Estate Lead Generation League. That’s actually an image from our Facebook fan page, which you can find us on there and become a fan of the page. We share great information on lead generation – tips, tricks and strategies on there as well. I love that picture of Ryan. I’m so glad he picked that picture for this presentation.

Mistakes Real Estate Agents Make On Craigslist & More

Here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to cover the following information. We’re going to give you the three biggest mistakes that agents make when posting online advertisements and we’re actually going to five. So we’re going to, I always like to under promise and over deliver. So we’re actually going to give you five mistakes, not only the mistakes but we’re going to give you what to do instead of making those mistakes. So we’re going to tell you what not to do and then show you what to do.

We’re going to give you the best times of day to post your advertisements to generate more leads. So you’re going to get more leads from less effort simply by some real simple things that we’re going to cover as far as the time of day that you’re posting your ad. Then we’re going to give you some little sneaky marketing tricks that you can use to beat out your competition and to get better results. Plus I’m going to give you access to a special bonus report toward the end of the call. So you want to hang on, you want to make sure that you stay on for the entire call because I’ll give you a great special report that’s going to show you how you can convert more of your leads and database through some really interesting e-mail marketing tips and you’re actually going to get sample e-mails that I use to convert leads into more sales.

We’re going to briefly cover, we’re just going to talk about our background very briefly because we want this call to be about the information and not self serving to us. But I’ll just give you a real quick, this is a screen shot of my contact management system and what you see here is that I’ve generated 4,285 leads over the last 12-months for myself and my small team. I’m a licensed real estate agent.

Ryan: Josh I’m sorry to butt, that’s your Craigslist campaign, right?

Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s my Craigslist campaign, okay? So this is the amount of leads I’ve generated in the last 12-months from Craigslist. Now what I was saying is I’m a licensed real estate agent. I started out using Craigslist as a real estate investor and I’ve been using Craigslist for about four or five years. Initially I was using it to fill vacancies on properties that I had but I’ve since used it to find retail buyers for properties that I’ve renovated with partners. We’ve bought fixer uppers, renovated and resold. We’ve been able to find our retail buyers through Craigslist.

Number of Leads Generated On Craigslist by one Realtor

And what you’re seeing here, again, this is the number of leads that I’ve generated on Craigslist just in the last 12-months. Now this has been an evolution. This is not something that was easy or just happened overnight. I’ve been using it I mentioned for four or five years and it’s been, like I said, kind of an evolution of figuring out what doesn’t work and then figuring out what does work and creating a system and strategies to not only generate a large volume of leads as you see here, but do it with very little effort. Not little effort, it takes consistent effort but compared to early on when I first started using Craigslist I was spending several hours a day. Now with the system and the strategies that we’re going to share with you today I’m able to do this in a lot less time with a lot less effort and much better result.

I am a licensed agent. We didn’t mention on the page previous to this but we’re both in Pennsylvania. I’m in Harrisburg. Ryan’s in New York. They’re about a half an hour apart. So I’ve got a small team. I’m with a small independent broker. And these leads I disperse to my team members. So the leads that we generate I kind of disperse out to a small team.

In a minute I’m going to click to the next slide. Ryan’s going to show you his experiences with Craigslist and his experience has been a little bit different in that he was generating leads for himself. So this system and these strategies you can use if you’re a one person shop or you can use them if you’ve got a team or a large office of professionals.

So Ryan why don’t you maybe talk about how you use Craigslist and some of the results that you saw?

When To Post Real Estate Listings On Craigslist

Ryan: Right, right. The last time I was actively using it, I still had my practice going sort of part-time. And the only marketing I was doing was Craigslist. I would go out and video properties, usually distressed properties but all different kinds and put the videos on my blog. And then every morning usually around 8:00, 8:30, right after or before I checked my e-mail I would go ahead and do one post on Craigslist and that’s it. And the post would just have a picture of the video I took and it would link over to my blog and auto play the video inside the post. This technique was enough just to keep the practice going. It actually surprised me. I was getting enough warm interaction just off the video combined with the Craigslist postings. So I didn’t do any other advertising and I was basically, I was yielding probably a showing a day on average, three to five showings a week. And the last two months that I was doing it yielded 11 transactions.

Josh: Wow.

Ryan: That’s just one post.

Josh: Yeah, that’s what I was just going to iterate. We’re talking about one post a day.

Ryan: And a big one.

Josh: Yeah. In a large market, exactly. So that’s a good point as well. We come at it with different experiences. And so we’re going to share, again, we’re going to share lots of great information. We’re going to get right into I’m sharing some great stuff that you can use and really start using immediately and we encourage you to start using the information immediately. If you don’t already have your pen and paper handy definitely get that ready, unless, of course, you’re listening on the call in and you’re riding around town. But I’ll also say, if you’re listening on the web cast close out everything else and give us your undivided attention because the information is really going to be helpful for you. And again take notes and start using the information.

So we’re going to start with the five biggest mistakes that we see people making and the first one is posting at the wrong time of day. Now when I first started seeing results with Craigslist I wanted to kind of ramp it up. So I was seeing results even though I didn’t have a lot of the strategies and the tricks that we’re going to share with you today, I was still seeing results. And so I wanted to kind of ramp it up and the only way I could figure to ramp it up was to do a whole lot of posts and do them in different areas. Not only my market, Harrisburg, but also do them in other areas. So what I would do is I would get up first thing in the morning, which usually, for me, was like 5:30, 6:00 and I would post ads in a number of different areas. And my thought process was well I’m getting this out of the way, okay? I know that this works and I’m getting it out of the way first thing in the morning so then I can focus on other things.

But there was a couple of things wrong with that strategy and I’ll go into both of them. The first one is if you’re not familiar with Craigslist basically when you post an ad on Craigslist your ad is at the top of the list of ads at the time that you post it. And as new people post ads your post gets pushed down farther and farther. Well, and this took me several years to think about this, which is silly but you don’t realize things until you realize them. What would happen is I posted 6:00 in the morning. There’s not a whole lot of traffic on Craigslist at 6:00 in the morning. Most people aren’t waking up and going right to their computer to check Craigslist. They’re either not awake at 6:00 in the morning or they’re getting ready to drive into work for their morning commute.

So the other time I was posting was I would post at like 3:00 in the afternoon because that’s when there would be like a lull in my schedule and so I’d post again then. And again that was not an ideal time because most people are either then coming home from work and obviously not surfing the net or they’re at work and not necessarily on break or anything, they’re actually working. So we’re going to give you three rules of thumb to follow that it’s going to have a positive impact. Honestly if you only get this out of the call you’re going to see a lot better results by just following this one thing and the rules of thumb as far as time that we’re going to give you.

Before I give you those I want to say this – it is critical, critical, critical that you test and track all of your marketing. Not just the marketing that you spend money on. Just because Craigslist is free doesn’t mean there’s not a cost. There’s still a time cost whether you’re doing it or your assistant is doing it. There’s still a time involved in it. So you definitely want to track and monitor your results and find the optimal best times of day for your market because that can vary by market.

So Ryan already mentioned, I think you mentioned the time Ryan, you would go in between like 8:00 and 8:30 each day and make your post, was that right?

Ryan: Yeah. Yeah just coincidentally that was a good time I guess.

Josh: Right. Well and here’s why, if you think about it if you reverse engineer it people getting in early to work, they might be checking e-mail, surfing the net a little bit or people who are ready for work and not heading in but they’ve already gotten ready and maybe they have a few minutes so they pull it up and they start searching on there. So that’s a really good time.

The other two times I’ll give you are around lunch time because people are on lunch break. They might have some free time, some ability or availability to be searching. And then after dinner. Okay? Those are the rules of thumb. Now again I stress this, those are just rules of thumb. You need to test and track in your own market but if you just start using those times as a rule of thumb, and you don’t have to post three times a day, we’re just giving you some ideas of when are optimal time.

The other thing I’ll mention about the evening is Ryan and I are in the northeast so we have, our seasons change and they’re pretty harsh changes. The evening may vary by season even. So right now or in the summertime you’ve got the days are longer. It’s warmer out. People are out and active. So they may not be searching until later in the evening versus the wintertime where it’s cold and it’s dark early. They may start searching earlier. Okay? So again these are just rules of thumb but again I really encourage you to use these times of day because you’re definitely going to see improved results. All right enough with that one.

Ryan: Josh, I just want to mention, the key thing is probably that these times are going to end up being the times that may not be the most convenient for you, [inaudible] opposite. It’s when you usually be on your leisure time is when everybody else is going to be on their leisure time.

Josh: Yeah.

Ryan: The evening when you’re about to start your fun time and start cruising the web is probably a great time to pop in there and do a post or two.

Josh: Right but if you’ve got a system and you follow the strategies that we share you’re talking about a few minutes that will yield tremendous results for you. So it’s worth that little bit of pain or inconvenience to you if you really want to build a business and generate more leads. So great, great point.

All right, the second biggest mistake is being boring. AKA, just like everyone else. We pulled this screen shot of, this is a post from our local area and it says, “40,000 dollars,” that’s the price, it says, “2BR,” as in two bedroom and then the title of the post is, “Two bedroom home,” and then it’s got the location. Now that is pretty boring. How many people are going to click that unless that’s exactly what they’re looking for? Not that many. So would someone be more likely to click that or would they be more likely to click this – 15,000 – and again the prices don’t matter. So don’t fixate on the price. This just happens to be what we pulled up. We’ll show you an ad in a minute or two that much higher price point but again the headline is interesting.

So here’s the headline on this one – Bank Owned Fixer Upper with Free Car? Now that’s an interesting headline. That’s going to get people to click on it to find out what do you mean free car? And here’s what we mean with that. That’s actually a property that I shot a quick video on. It was a bank owned property. And there happened to be an abandoned car in the garage of the property. So I just kind of mentioned on the video that I shot of it and it was something that we could use to bring interest into the marketing of the property. And there’s lots of ways to do that. You don’t have to have an abandoned car sitting in a garage to be creative. And in fact, again, we’re going to show you another example of creativity and being interesting which will get you more clicks. So again boring here, interesting here. You’re going to get more clicks, more people to click on your ad and be taken to the full screen of your ad.

All right, no real call-to-action or CTA as we like to call it. So we’ve got three examples on the page here and here’s the other sample headline that I was alluding to. I won’t take credit for either of those actually. Ryan is the one that came up with the creativeness on both of those. So I won’t claim to take credit for either of those. So this one reads, “Lake it? You’ll love it!” And then in parenthesis (Can you believe the price on this gem?)

Now that’s interesting. That’s much more interesting than if it had said, “Lake Front 4 bedroom home with great view.” You’re just going to get more curiosity, people being more curious about the ad. That’s another way to be more interesting and not boring. But what we’re talking about on this screen, particularly, is calls to action.

So what you’ll notice below that is a hyperlinked text that reads, “Click here to see other juicy deals like this one in the Houston area, includes foreclosures and bank owned listings. Now what happens is if someone clicks on that link they’re going to get taken to a lead capture page. And we’re going to show you a sample lead capture page that’s absolutely crushing it for us on the next slide or two. So that’s a real call to action. That’s going to get people to sign up and become a lead for you versus just having the plain Jane rank and file information on the property.

Now what’s interesting about this is this ad, this call to action was at the top of the ad but the information about the property mentioned in the headline was still in the ad it just happened to fall below this call to action.

Ryan: Yeah and Josh can I talk about what’s at play here is you’ve got a hundred people, 200, a thousand people a day cruising on Craigslist for deals. What you’re doing is by burning their eyeballs into your house so to speak right?

Josh: Yep.

Ryan: So that link causes them to pause and go one step further away from Craigslist and into your house

Josh: Yep. It’s kind of like a pattern interrupt. It’s different than what they’re seeing everywhere else and so the same thing with the headline. It just creates curiosity and makes them want to click on it. So two other examples, if the whole lead capture page is kind of over your head right now or you’re just not that techie and that kind of scares you you don’t have to have that. I’ll give you two other examples of calls to action that you could use. So you could say something like, “Call Bill right now at [phone number] 717-555-1212,” or whatever, “For the absolute best buy real estate deal in the Central PA region.” So you’re again peaking their curiosity and getting them to call you. And obviously a live call is, I mean that’s the best lead we can get in real estate is someone taking the time to make an outbound call to you. So that’s a great call to action versus something like particular to this, this ad above here. If we just said something like, “Call Bill for your showing today.” Well that’s not going to get people to take action, particularly if this ad, this property is not of interest particularly if they click on it and then they see something in there that they perceive as disqualifying it. So again you’re creating curiosity.

The last example of a call to action…

Ryan: Josh can I give you one more tip, it doesn’t work, is I called Bill because he’s a really good guy with a lot of integrity.

Josh: Right. Or call Bill, top five percent producer in Central PA.

Ryan: Nobody cares.

Josh: Right. They care about themselves. What’s in it for me? What’s in it for me? And what’s in it for them in this call to action is access to the best deal that Bill knows about right now. Last way you can use CTAs, Call to Action, is you could use text codes. Text codes are becoming pretty popular as a marketing tool for real estate agents. So you could do something like this, text number 45282411669 to see what your landlord is doing with your rent money right now. Again I won’t take credit for this creative. That was something that Ryan came up with. And actually if you do that right now you’ll see that it’s actually a lead capture function. Why don’t you explain it Ryan because you understand it a little better? It’s a lead capture function but go ahead and go into more detail.

Ryan: Yeah, yeah. They’ll basically, if you were text that number and invite everybody on the call to do so you’ll actually see a mobile website that shows what your landlord’s doing with your money right now and this has proven pretty useful. The second somebody hits that code the agent receives a text on their phone with the cell number of the prospect calling in.

Josh: Right. So you’re getting a real phone number in real time that you can literally click on a button on your phone, call them back and strike up a conversation and a relationship and find out what they’re looking for and so forth. So pretty powerful stuff here. If you’re not using strong CTAs in your advertising be at Craigslist or elsewhere you definitely, definitely need to start doing that. All right let’s move on. Next one.

So no real lead capture trap. We mentioned this on the page before. What we’ve got on the screen here is a screen shot of a lead capture trap as Ryan has coined the phrase that Ryan created that is absolutely crushing it for us right now. It’s a simple one page site. You explain it Ryan. You created it. It’s crushing it. You tell everybody listening about it.

Ryan: Yeah, so instead of sending somebody to a branded page with all your info on it, a bunch of different links the purpose of this page is to do one thing – collect contact info or not. This particular page is doing it pretty well. We’re in the 30 to 40 percent range on it, the percentage of people who visit who actually leave their contact info and the phone number, you’ll notice right now as being optional. There’s another sort of offer there that will call and tell you about the hot buys that we know about right now. The phone number’s being hit about a quarter of the time that people enter the contact info. So it’s pretty good stuff.

Josh: Well and then let me highlight a couple, let me reiterate a couple things and highlight a couple things. So the first thing I’ll mention is he talked about branded versus a lead capture site. 30 to 40 percent of the traffic that hits this page actually feed it information be it e-mail address or e-mail address and phone. If you’ve got an absolute killer branded site the best, the best you’re going to be doing at least that I’m aware of anybody is five percent and most of them it’s one or two percent. So you’re talking about six to 10 times as many leads from the same amount of visitors. So a hundred visitors visit a branded site, one to five leads. A hundred visitors visit a lead capture trap like this 30 to 40 leads. We’re actually going to go, towards the end of the training here we’re going to give you, we’re going to show you how you can get one of these sites for you in your marketplace that will have your information on them and you can start using almost immediately. So we’re going to show you how to get one of these but the point is…oh and the other thing I wanted to highlight is we’ve tested requiring the phone number and what we found is about the same amount, when we made it optional, when we made it optional and people put it in we actually get real phone numbers. Then we’re able to contact the folks.

When we required it we would get 50 to 75 percent would put either NA or they’d put a bogus number. So we tested a bunch of things and just found that this is better and they’re telling you by putting this in here, they’re telling you that they’re a pretty hot prospect. They’re actually looking for a property. If they want to know about the best buys or hot buys they’re saying that, “We’re ready to be sold,” essentially or, “We’re close to being ready to be sold,” anyway.

Ryan: Call me.

Josh: Yeah call me, yeah exactly. All right next. No consistency. Now Ryan talked about this early on in the call but I’m going to let him go a little bit more detailed into how you can create consistency and what this screen shot is exactly.

Ryan: Yeah the screen shot is just s snapshot from Google Calendar and all it is is a set up of a recurring appointment everyday, 15 minutes. In this case it just says, “Get free leads from CL.” Craigslist. And I think the point here is that I even noticed it in my own practice if I fall off the wagon and not post everyday maybe I’d only hit it two or three times a week over the span of a year or two, we’re talking two, three, four extra people in my database that I would’ve been missing. So the consistency over time really pays off because your GCI, gross commission income, is going to directly correlate to the size of your database, which you’re growing here.

Josh: And if you don’t use an online tool for your calendar just literally at the beginning of each month, if you’re a pen and paper kind of person and you’ve got a physical calendar at the beginning of each month pencil in the time every day, whether it’s 8:30 for you or if it’s 12:15 or if it’s 7:15 at night, whatever it is pencil that in and keep the appointment. Treat that like any other appointment because consistent lead flow to your business is the only way to grow and to stay consistently closing commissions. So it’s the most critical aspect of your business is your leads and your database. So there’s no better time you can be spending than on this type of activity.

Ryan: And this will help eliminate the peaks and valleys too if you can grow the database to a certain size because when you hit those valleys you just go ahead and send an e-mail or two and you can almost generate appointments and deals at will.

Josh: That’s a great point because I think there’s, I’m sure there’s plenty of people on the line who have been through those peaks and valleys. They have a great month and then a bad month and a great month and a bad month and what happens is when they’re active, for the agents on the line or even in the investors they’re showing properties and so forth they’re keeping busy and they forget about the lead gen. For mortgage people if you’re processing mortgages or taking applications and so forth everybody goes through those peaks and valleys but if you’re consistent with your lead generation you’re going to see less of those peaks and valleys and more of just of the peaking.

All right, so now we’re going to get into a couple of sneaky tricks, the best thing I could find to show this is this little sneaky guy up in the corner. But we’re going to show you some things that you can do that are going to outperform your competition and get you additional traffic that you may not have gotten just simply with Craigslist ads.

So the first one is something called image posting. What that means, and I’ll show you two examples right here, what that means is this image, what we’re looking at here is an image, okay? So for those of you just listening in we’re looking at an ad that has an image of You Tube player. So the player control and the video on You Tube. And it’s actually image. So with some very simple HTML code, which again, towards the end I’m going to show you, or tell you how you can get this and maybe some of you on the phone already know how to do this. With some very simple HTML code you can set this up so that if someone clicks on that they will go to your lead capture trap. It’s really simple but extremely, extremely effective.

Ryan: Remember you got to give them the video Josh.

Josh: Right okay. So the trick here, and this is kind of the bonus sneaky trick, you saw this at the beginning when Ryan mentioned it, this showing a player of the video has been extremely effective. Think about it for yourself if you open an ad in Craigslist and you see something that looks like a video, particularly in this example, a You Tube video it is darn near impossible not to try and play that video. I mean it is just about impossible. And when they click on it they’re going to get taken to a page.

Now here’s the critical part – you want to take them to a page that actually gives the video that they’re clicking on. If you’re using this trick you want to take them to a page that has the video. You don’t want to do the old bait and switch. So you want to stay congruent and so forth. But you don’t have to use this way. There’s other ways that you can use image posting and I’ll give you an example in the bottom right here. So the bottom right where it says below the date and reply to this is actually an image. Now it looks like just text. And actually if I could’ve captured more of the page, lower on the page of this ad there was a couple of pictures but it looks like it’s just text.

However, if you notice the last bullet point I actually say, “Click anywhere on this ad now for immediate access to the San Antonio Luxury Home Foreclosure and Bargain List,” and that’s a mouthful. But I tell them, “You can click anywhere on the ad,” and they’re going to get taken to the lead capture site. Another way you can do it is you could simply put a picture of the property in there and click it and make it clickable that takes them over. So there’s lots of ways to do that.

Now to do it there’s a couple of tools that you can try to actually take pictures of your screen. So the picture of the video, of the video player, that’s a picture that Ryan took of his You Tube video player and there’s several tools that you can use. You can try something called Snag It, which does cost like $50 bucks but I think they have a free trial and it’s a really good tool. There’s another tool called Five Clicks, which I use a lot. It’s like $10 or $20 bucks but if you’ve got Windows 7, there’s actually a function on it called the Snipping Tool, I believe. I don’t have Windows 7 but I think that’s what it is, is that right Ryan? It’s called the Snipping Tool.

Ryan: That’s right. Yeah, I’m checking it out now.

Josh: And MAC’s have this function as well. It’s like an F command of some kind I believe.

Ryan: Command shift forward.

Josh: Command shift forward, there you go. And then all you have to do is you upload to a picture server. Use some real simple HTML and you can link it up to, you can link it up to any webpage but again we recommend linking it up to a lead capture trap, which again we’ll show you how to get, how to swipe the one that’s crushing it for us right now, later on. So the last one, the last one I’m actually going to close out of this and I’m going to bring up a Google search because I’m actually going to show you this last one.

So the last one is how to use a free tool that Google offers called the Google Keyword Tool. So to find it just open a Google search and Google ‘Google Keyword Tool’ and the search result that comes back first is the one you want to click on. Now there’s a new version of this tool. I prefer the old version so I’ll show you in a minute as it pops up here. I prefer, it just makes you fill in this little captia. I actually prefer the previous interface, which is up here, top right, so I’m going to click on that.

Here’s how this works – you can put in a phrase and it will give you ideas and variations of the same keyword phrase and it will also tell you how many people are searching for that phrase. So, for example, I’m going to pop in foreclosure listings. You have to the do captia here again and click get keyword ideas. So it’s thinking, it’s thinking and you can use this a couple of different ways all right? So you see the results here. And here’s how you can use this, all right, first of all you notice I put in foreclosure listings. That actually showed up fifth on the list of suggested variations. So here’s how you can use this – one you can use it to get ideas for varying your headlines. And actually, I actually forgot to point out something. Another advantage to image posting is, and I think Ryan you just recently became aware of this, in Craigslist you can only post the same ad once every 48-hours. So you can’t post an identical ad more frequently than 48-hours apart. So if you go in and post an ad today at 2:00 you can’t post that same ad again until 48 hours and one minute later.

However, if you use image posting in your ads Craigslist does not recognize that as a duplicate ad. So if you do that and use variations of the price, of the title, of the location and maybe even vary some text, if you notice on the top one here there’s some text. If you vary that you can post more frequently essentially the same lead generating type of ad. So let me go back to this, that’s an advantage of using this little keyword tool. You can get ideas for variations for the headline.

Here’s how else to use it.

Ryan: Josh I just want to chime in to explain why that’s important and it’s real simple that Craigslist is such an authority site, right?

Josh: Yeah.

Ryan: That it’s going to get picked up on the search engines, your post.

Josh: Right. That’s the next thing I was going to mention. So if you use keywords that are being searched Craigslist because like Ryan said it’s such an authority site it has good search engine rank. So it is very possible and actually likely if you use good keywords in a post, in an ad when someone goes to Google to search that ad, I’m sorry to search that term your ad is likely to show up in the organic results of Google but it’s what’s showing up is your Craigslist ad. Really, really powerful and here’s what happens is you can get additional traffic and eyeballs on your ad that you would not have had if the person was only searching inside Craigslist itself. So really powerful. Two ways to use it. One to get title variations and two to put good keywords so that you can be found outside of the Craigslist site and search functionality itself.

Ryan: And I just want to chime in. You probably want to try to go after a mix of the less competitive keywords, the ones that are getting a little less traffic because you’re going to have a better chance of ranking some of those quicker.

Josh: That’s an excellent point.

Ryan: Right, right and you can also throw in the heavy ones too but it’s good to mix it up.

Josh: Definitely, yeah definitely mix it up. All right, so we’ve gone over some really great tips and strategies and we still have some more things to share but I just want to, I kind of mentioned a couple times that we now have a system that we follow and it incorporates a lot of the strategies that we just shared but it puts it into a systematized way of doing things. Okay? And this came about because I sort of mentioned in the beginning I had found Craigslist, I’m a former teacher. I got into the real estate profession as an investor. I ended up with a whole lot of properties and I was using Craigslist to fill vacancies.

Then I got into working with some partners and we were renovating and rehabbing properties and retailing them. Then I actually got into wholesaling properties, so finding distressed properties and selling them to investors and I finally got licensed. I realize the importance and the value of a buyers list and a database and I really started to use Craigslist but I mentioned, at one point I was spending several hours a day. So a while back and I’d say at this point it’s probably 12, 18-months ago I sat down and I started to brainstorm, what’s working and what’s not working and why is this working and why isn’t it working? And I created a more strategic approach and a system to follow with Craigslist. I’m a teacher so I’m a teacher at heart. I’m a licensed teacher but I’m full time real estate professional but I still have that drive to share and teach others.

So when I put the system together I wanted to share it with other agents but before I did that I wanted to be sure that the system would work for others, that it was duplicatable in other markets with other variables. So what I did when soon after I put this system together and as a part of kind of testing, before I made it available to other real estate professionals I did a one week test in a different market other than my own, Harrisburg here.

And what I did was part of the system I show you is how to create a campaign so that you are consistently posting ads and consistently generating leads. So what I did was I created one campaign in this other market and I spent a total of one hour, okay? It was a one week period but my time involvement was one hour. And here’s how the hour broke down. The first half an hour I spent creating the campaign and we’ve got a system that we follow, it’s actually a workbook that we follow to create the campaign. So you map out your campaign. The last half hour was spent simply posting the ads on a daily basis. Literally minutes a day.

Here’s the results. I posted 15 ads in a week period. I started on a Sunday night. I finished on a Sunday night. I posted a total of 15 ads. We’re not talking about hundreds of ads, far from it. 15 ads. The screen shot shows you, and the number actually ended up being slightly higher. I just couldn’t get a screen shot of what it ended up being because some of the ads stayed live and continued to get clicks and leads. We actually ended up with, I think, 112 or 113 leads in one week. And that’s when I knew that I had something that I could feel comfortable sharing with other real estate professionals so that they could use it and receive the same success that I’ve had.

So what I created and what we called it or what we call it is Buyer Leads by Tonight because with our system we give you the tools. We give you the system and the tricks and the tips to follow to literally generate Buyer Leads by Tonight. And we’ve actually, we’ve been tweaking, we’ve been adding things to it. So this is actually our 2.0 version of the system. So just bare with me here. I’m going to tell you what’s included in the system and then I’m going to tell you where you can pick up your copy of the system to start using in your real estate practice be a broker, real estate agent, be a mortgage professional or real estate investor. And for you mortgage pros on the line we’re actually, in a couple of minutes we’re going to show you how you can use it in your mortgage business to create great value for your real estate referral partners and close a whole lot more loans.

Ryan: Yeah Josh, the more I think about it the more we see what people are doing. I really think the system might be more useful for the mortgage guys out there.

Josh: Right. There’s definitely huge value for the mortgage pros on the line. So it’s a comprehensive system. So the main training is a video tutorial where you actually get to watch over my shoulder as I show you how to do the following things. And I’ve got a couple of pages of these little bullet point things out so I’m not going to necessarily read them all. The point is whether or not you’re a total newbie to Craigslist and you’ve never posted an ad before or you’re an advanced Craigslist user but just want to take your results to the next level we’ve got this system is going to be useful for all of those and everybody in between. So if you’re a total newbie we’ll show you where to start. If you’re advanced we’re going to show you killer, killer tricks and tips to take your results to the next level. So just a couple of things. We’re going to show you the best sections to post. We’re going to show you when and why to post. We’re going to show you how to determine what type of campaign. I mentioned part of the system is creating a campaign. The steps you need to create a campaign once you’ve made a decision on what you’re going to do. How to capture the leads because all the ads in the world are not going to do any good if you don’t capture them.

How to set up and use lead capture pages or landing pages that dramatically increase your lead capture and we’re actually going to show you how we’ll actually give you that same lead capture page that we showed you earlier on in the training. We’ll actually give you one of those for your own practice but I’ll get to that in a minute.

How to avoid getting flagged and/or ghosted. We didn’t talk a lot about that but some of our experienced Craigslist users may know about flagging and ghosting. I’m not going to go into much detail here but just know we give you tips and tricks to avoid that if that’s something that’s been a struggle for you. We’re going to go exactly, image posting what it is. We talked a lot about it but we’re actually going to give you the HTML code and actually three HTML code swipes that you can take, one of them similar to the one that we showed, which was the text that was clickable but also two others that are absolutely getting tons and tons of clicks and leads to the lead capture page. We’re also going to take you beyond Craigslist. We’ve got some new trainings in the members area for the Buyer Leads by Tonight Program. We’re giving you Facebook ad techniques and text messaging ideas.

Here’s the best part, you can actually, the way we’ve set this up you can actually turn this over to your assistant if you have one or even one of your kids and they can follow the training and implement the training for you. So you can do what you do best, which is selling or closing loans.

Ryan: And for you readers of the Four Hour Work Week out there we do have some people using the system. They’re outsourcing a lot of this to virtual assistants.

Josh: Yeah, exactly we’ve got a number of users that have actually outsourced it outside of their office even. So you’re going to get the video of this but you’re also going to get a copy of it transcribed in manual format including detailed screen shots and more. So if you like to consume information by reading, if that’s how you like to consume it better you can do that. You can download the PDF, follow along or even print it out if you like.

You’re also going to get a workbook. I mentioned this. This is what we use to set up campaign. So you’re going to get a blank workbook. You can follow along and set up each part of the campaign. So once you finish that part of it, implementing the campaign becomes a piece of cake. So the implementation part becomes super simple if you follow the workbook. You’ll also get a fast start guide. So if you’ve already got experience with Craigslist this fast start guide is going to get the ball rolling extremely fast and really speed up your results by just getting into the fast start guide and taking action very, very quickly.

We’ve also got an audio training and I used to participate in a very high level rather expensive coaching program that the fellow who runs the program actually asked me to run a training call on a lot of the topics that we discussed today but I go into even more detail and I go into what I call the little hinges that swing big doors. So little things that make a big difference. We talk about Craigslist on the audio but we also talk a lot about other online methods that are either no cost or very low cost that you can use to generate even more leads. Plus the same with the video training. We’ve actually transcribed this audio into a manual. You can print it out if you like and have it for easy reference or if you, again, if you prefer to read rather than listen.

Oh and the other thing is you can download this as an MP3, put it on your iPod, your iPhone or whatever MP3 player is, you can listen to it as you go out for a walk or you’re out on appointments or out running.

We’ve also put together a killer, killer bonus package for everybody on the call today. Here’s what we put together. You’re going to get Craigslist ad swipe files. I kind of mentioned this already but you’re going to get versions of these ads that you can edit and in a few minutes be popping them into Craigslist postings and generating traffic and leads.

Ryan: Hey Josh, I should add we’re constantly testing new swipes and the people using the system are very open, a lot of the folks share with us and on an ongoing basis we’ll just be adding more and more of those.

Josh: Exactly. So here’s the thing, this stuff isn’t theory. This is stuff that we put in practice okay that we use. And as we get users of the system that say, “Hey this little swipe is killing it. I wanted to share it with you so you can share it with other members.” And again we test and tweak stuff and track stuff in our business. So that’s a great point. As we do that you’re going to have access to those things of what’s working right now.

The second bonus you’re going to get is a Q&A audio. This is, again this is an audio that you can download. I think it’s about an hour long where it’s just Q&A. So we cover, I don’t even remember how many questions but we cover a whole bunch of questions, pretty much anything anybody was asking about – how to implement the system or questions about certain little intricacies within there. So we cover every last thing in this Q&A call and we’re throwing that in as a bonus for everyone today. That’s a value of about $47 dollars.

We’ve also, I’ve mentioned this a couple of times, you will actually get the exact landing pages or lead capture traps, as Ryan has coined, you get the exact ones that we use within literally a couple of minutes. You can edit them with your information and be using them within a matter of minutes. And as we mentioned these lead capture sites are performing like crazy. We have people that it’s converting 30 to 40 percent. Now that’s not going to hold for everyone but geez even if it’s half of that you’re going to be generating a whole, whole bunch of leads.

The next bonus is you’re going to get an e-mail swipe file. So if this is something that is of interest to you being able to send an e-mail to your ad database and generate a sale this is what we’re giving you with that swipe file. We’re going to give you e-mails that you can take, tweak and reword in your own voice and for your own market that you can send out and get buyers, people on your database contacting you so you get showings and you can take them out and sell them a property. Killer, killer stuff. Huge value.

Ryan: I know there’s a lot of brokers and agents out there who’ve been paying for leads over the years and they’ve probably got a big database, especially the folks who are driving traffic to their IDX property searches. And I hear all the time they don’t, people don’t know what to do with those stale leads as they call them, people who entered a property search maybe a year or two ago but they’re still sitting in the database.

Josh: Yep.

Ryan: That swipe file is awesome for that.

Josh: Yep.

Ryan: I just wanted to mention you can probably if you’re sitting on three, four, 5,000 in your database of just the IDX searches there’s in them hills I guess.

Josh: Well even if it’s two, three, 400 there’s gold in there too. So it doesn’t have to be timed. You don’t have to have a huge, huge database to use these e-mail swipes and generate activity and get the phone ringing and get e-mails pouring in and getting you out closing deals.

All right bonus number five for our mortgage pros on the line – once you have the system we’re going to give you access to a mortgage loan specific lead capture page. This is specific for our mortgage folks and we just kind of added that in because we found that we’re getting a lot of mortgage pros on these trainings so we wanted to throw that in as an additional value and bonus to all of them.

Here’s the thing, the bonus package we just mentioned here there’s about five things in. Honestly there’s actually more bonuses in the access area, the members area for this program. I just didn’t, I didn’t want to take 10, 20 minutes going over all the bonuses but there’s additional audio. There’s just tons of stuff in there, even more than we just shared right now. So you’re asking yourself right now what’s the cost? Well just in the stuff that I shared right now, in the bonus package alone and again there’s even more in there than the bonus package I just shared, but just in that package alone there’s about $315 dollars worth of value because there’s parts of that bonus package that we actually sell. So obviously there’s value associated with that.

But there’s also things in there that we do not release to the public. So the only people that have access to it is the users of the system. So just the bonuses alone, not including the actual core training system and the workbook and the fast start and the Q&A or not the Q&A, I’m sorry, the special training call that I did for this high level mastermind, not even including that. We’re talking about a $315 dollar value.

Ryan: And we host the squeeze pages too indefinitely.

Josh: Right. There’s no additional cost. This is a onetime fee for lifetime access. As we update the system you’re going to get access to all of that. So when you throw in the actual core training with the bonuses…I’ve had people tell me, “You could charge $497 for that,” because the value that you’re generating and the amount of leads that agents who take action with the information, that’s the key, taking action, are generating that you could easily charge $497. I can tell you, we’re not even charging close to that.

I’ve also had lots of people also say, I say, “You know I don’t really want to charge that.” And they say, “Well at least charge 297,” because even at 297 if your average commission in your area is let’s say 3,000, which is a pretty low average commission, all you need is one sale to get a 10 to 1 return on investment. But here’s the deal, the reason, again I’m a teacher at heart and the reason that we created the system is because we want share it with as many other real estate professionals as possible to help them see success, grow their business and ultimately generate a whole lot more sales and a better lifestyle as well.

So here’s what we’re doing – for one time cost of only $97 dollars you can pick up this full system, the whole bonus package that we mentioned, everything, lifetime access. If anything we update within this particular Buyer Leads by Tonight training you’re going to have access to it all for just $97 dollars and you get instant access to it. So immediately after you check out you’re going to be taken to the members area for this training module and have immediate access. So you can start using the information immediately.

If you haven’t figured out already here’s where to go pick up a copy. It’s www.BLBTSystem.com. It’s BLBTSystem.com and the BLBT stands for Buyer Leads by Tonight, BLBT.

Here’s what we’re going to do, we’ve got two more fast action bonuses for everybody on the call. The reason we offer these on these training calls is because there’s leverage for us to be able to communicate and basically communicate and share with so many of you at once. So we’ve thrown in two fast action bonus. The first one is everybody who orders from this training module is going to get access two seller squeeze lead generation pages. These pages will just take a couple minutes to set up and you can use a lot of the same traffic driving techniques within system to also generate seller leads. Ryan do you want to maybe just hit on what those two are? Yeah just hit on what those two are.

Ryan: They’re both video based so they auto play a video when you load them up. And one shows a progressive property marketing plan that folks can use. It’s designed to differentiate you from other agents in your marketplace. And the other one is short sale focused. So it’s geared towards people who are facing foreclosure.

Josh: Yep. So everybody on the call who takes action go to www.BLBTSystem.com to pick up instant access to this. Everybody who takes action on this you’re going to get those two additional lead capture pages at absolutely no charge. Then we’re getting to the point where just the lead capture pages alone are well in excess of the $97 dollar investment that you’re making here to get access to the course. I mean we literally sell those lead capture pages for anywhere from $27 to $47 to $97 dollars apiece to have access to them. And again there are no additional cost. We host them, you get to customize them with your information but we host them. So you don’t pay ongoing monthly fees with those because I know there’s lots of people on the call who are paying those monthly fees for various websites and so forth.

All right the last bonus is not for everyone. We might actually be out of these spots already if we’ve got some people who are already ordering. But the first seven people who takes action in order from this training you’re going to get a 20-minute one-on-one consultation with either Ryan or I. This is an additional $97 dollar value. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to help you optimize and maximize your results with the system. So after you’ve got the system using it for a little while, we’ll schedule a call so we can talk about…once you get a base line of an idea of what’s everything in there and how to do some of the baseline things we’re going to help you take it to the next level. We wish we could that for everybody but there’s only so much time in the day and we’re still in the sales business, the real estate sales business ourselves. So that’s only for the first seven. If you haven’t already done so www.BLBTSystem.com.

One last thing I’ll mention is we’ve got a 100 percent satisfaction money back guarantee. It’s a 60 day guarantee, no questions asked. If you don’t think it’s worth every penny just call, e-mail or fax we’ll return your money plus you’ll get to keep all the bonuses just for giving us a try. We’ve taken all the risk out of it. And again we do this because we really believe in it. We know it will make a difference in your business and we want to help you be successful.

Ryan: Okay, Josh I’m sorry to cut you off man. I’ve got to run. Family obligations. Kids’ football game. But thanks everybody for being on the call. Talk to you soon.

Josh: Okay thanks Ryan. All right so just to wrap up, I’m going to cover a couple of FAQs that we get a lot. What else is this going to cost me? I mentioned this a couple times, there are no additional cost even for the lead capture pages. We host all them. There’s no additional cost or fees with that. We get that question a lot. What’s the best kind of lead to generate with this system? It’s really limited only by your creativity.

A hot topic right now is foreclosures and short sales. So that one is a great one to generate a good volume of leads but there’s all different kinds of lead types. In our own business we generate those kinds of leads. We generate leads for lease options buyers, so people that can’t qualify outright for a home right now. We’ve generated tons and tons of leads for traditional tenants. So if we’ve got property managers on the line or investors, that you got properties that you need to fill vacancies, that’s great.

We’ve also built an extremely powerful and responsive database of leads specific for investors looking for apartment buildings and commercial buildings for investment. Okay? We don’t generate the same volume of leads but the people are, the quality is excellent. But there’s lots of other things you could do. You could capture leads, if you’re in an area where there’s huge, huge developments or neighborhoods you could capture leads specific. If you farm a specific area you could target that. If you’re in an area where you’ve got a big company moving in you could create a lead capture trap to capture those folks.

Or if you’re in an area of big military so you got to let the military move in. Really you’re only limited by your creativity as far as the type of lead that you can generate with the system.

All right, how can loan originators use this? Here’s how you can use it, you can generate the leads, call them, start the qualification process and then feed them to your real estate agent referral partners. Extremely, extremely powerful and you become the lynch pin for your agent. I mean if you’re giving your agents leads it’s a win/win. They get to sell them a house, you get to close a loan. It’s extremely powerful and it’s a no brainer as far as we can tell for loan originators to be doing this.

What happens as technology evolves and techniques, your detail change? Ryan hit on this already. This is an evolving training and with your one time investment you’re going to have a lifetime access to all updates as we make changes to it, make improvements to it and so forth. Okay? So if you haven’t already done so visit www.BLBTSystem.com.

I’m going to do one more thing. I’m just going to log in and I’m going to show you the members area and show you how you have access to the system. So I’ve logged in to the members area and this is basically, this is how the training breaks down. First we have an intro, which I didn’t even mention. It tells you everything that’s in here and what to do first and how to consume the information. Then we’ve got the core training. You can see there there’s a hyperlink to the fast start guide. We’ve got the core training module. We’ve got a link to the workbook, the training video transcription, the ad clinic audio, which is that training that did for the coaching program. Here’s some additional training videos. Okay. These are shorter videos with specific techniques.

Here’s a killer one that I forgot to even mention – how to analyze trends and the leads that are coming in and what time they’re coming in and so forth. How to analyze those things and leverage off of them to get even more leads from less effort. We didn’t even have that in the presentation there.

We also have how to set up your buyer’s squeeze page. Okay? With the buyer’s lead squeeze page, how to get analytics. Then here are some of the swipes that we’ve given you. Just a whole, whole slew of stuff. And then here’s taking it beyond Craigslist. So there’s just tons and tons of stuff in here.

What I want to do, one last thing I’ll do is I mentioned at the beginning I was going to tell you how to get a free report, a special report that I put together and here’s how to get it. You want to visit 4Emails4Weeks4Sales.com. It’s the number 4 in each of them, so 4Emails4Weeks4Sales.com. It’s a special report. It shows you how I used four emails in a four week timeframe to generate four commission for my business.

So I appreciate everybody on the call. I implore you to take the information that we shared and put it into practice. If you haven’t already picked up the full training we’ve taken all the risk away from you. Go pick up your copy. It’s BLBTSystem.com. We look forward very much to seeing you in the training area, the members area and go out and sell some houses, close some loans, make some money and have a great time doing it.