Master marketing in real estate- Live conversation with the experts

What is going on everybody? Welcome to the Painless Flipping Podcast where we bring on experts to help you guys dial in your wholesaling, your real estate investing journey. I got Todd and I got Emmy on here who are marketing experts. They run a marketing agency, so we're just going to ask them some questions and see what's working for them, what they see working in the real estate space. And, uh, yeah, so without further ado, let's dive in. Todd and Emmy, do you just kind of want to give everybody kind of a 30-second, minute rundown of who you are, and then we can go into some other stuff?

Yeah, sure, sure. Uh, yeah, so I'm Todd Baldwin. I'm the founder of Investor Nitro. That is our full-service digital agency on the real estate investor side. Been working with real estate investors all around the country the past 10 years, dating back to April of 2016.

Love it.

And I am Emmy McAuley. I actually just changed my last name. I got remarried, and I've been helping Todd, I guess, for like a year and a half now., just on the sales side. I have 5+ years of experience in marketing for real estate investors, so I bring a wealth of knowledge and use that to actually help kind of coach people along the way as well.

All right, well, I'm glad that you guys are here. So I guess one of my questions I have just off the top of my head is, were you always in marketing for real estate, or were you— were either of you doing other marketing agencies, other services within another industry?

Yeah, I have some experience in direct mail, um, actually to travel around the country and speak in front of, um, like hundreds of people, um, flippers, wholesalers. Um, so I, uh, I love the coaching aspect of it because, you know, even though you may be selling one thing, it doesn't mean that someone doesn't need something else. So, um, it's, it's whatever is going to get them to that deal.

Yeah. What about you, Todd? What experience do you have in the marketing space?

I've been in marketing 20-plus years, right? So we have our legacy agency, which is Everyday Media Group. Uh, that agency is still, uh, obviously up and functioning, doing well. We started Investor Nitro 10 years ago because we wanted a separate brand all about real estate investing, and actually got into that space with the opportunity to present to WeBuyHouses.com, which is a national brand. Don't, don't confuse them with We Buy Ugly Houses. But yeah, we presented them back in April of, uh, 2016. Hard to believe we're coming up on 10 years, and Well, that introduction and that presentation was all about Google Ads and, and, uh, why it's important to have an agency or somebody that's been trained, certified from Google run your PPC campaign. But that got us into the space. Before that, we'd never worked with real estate investors, but since then we've made it one of our primary verticals. And like I mentioned earlier, just done a lot of work with wholesalers and fix-and-flip guys the past 10 years around the country.

Okay, so I got a question for you, Emmy. Um, you did direct mail. Do you still, do you still, uh, advise that people do it, or are you like, hey, you know, not a, not something I'd recommend anymore? What?

Yeah, you know, it's— I always tell people, if you find two really consistent forms of marketing and just do it really well and are consistent and don't constantly look for that next shiny object, that's— everybody's talking about this and that, and it's easy to start something and be like, oh my gosh, it's not working after 2 months. You just have to give it time. Any good marketing channel does take time. So no, I love direct mail. I mean, it's— there's a strategy around it and you have to consistently change that strategy. So if you're going to find a mailhouse, make sure it's someone who has obviously a lot of experience. And then, you know, obviously digital marketing is important because what do we all do when we want to know more about someone?

We Google them. Yeah. Do you, do you guys— I was talking to my brother-in-law the other day. He's a personal injury attorney and he says that he's investing into AI because a lot of people are searching AI, like, like ski accidents, what I do. And then he pops up because he's been investing in that. Have you guys explored any of that?

Yeah. Oh yeah, 100%. So AI, here's the deal with AI. First off, if you talk to an agency, they tell you, have it all figured out, run. That's a red flag because nobody's got it figured out. But yes, our clients are getting leads from AI, ChatGPT. Our brands get leads from ChatGPT. So we do a lot of high-end SEO, search engine optimization. It's been going on past, what, 10, 15 years. But we always put a premium on content. Content's still king within Google. And I really believe just having a passion for content and doing what we feel like the right way has really helped us kind of get ahead of the curve on the AI side. Keep in mind, like ChatGPT, it's scraping, right? It's scraping from Google, Bing, all these directories out there online. So a couple of things about AI. When we do an SEO campaign, we're currently including the AI part of that campaign. I mean, I haven't created a new package or trying to charge more because the reality is if you do really good SEO, proper organic work, it should resonate on the AIs. Now that may change, right? That could change. But right now, it's all about trust, authority, making sure you have schema markup in your website. Schema's been around for 20 years, right? It's a code that you put into your site so Google knows what's the site about. But yet there's 80% of the websites still have no schema markup. But schema, review generation is huge, building trust, authority, FAQs are huge, and just having really topping content can get you off to a good start in the AIs.

So when you say content, are you— what are you referring to specifically? Is that like videos, Shorts, Reels?

Like, uh, well, I'm referring to— so that's all part of the equation too. I think a good robust YouTube optimization can definitely help and add to the mix. But when I talk about content, I'm just talking about your content on your site, right? Every page should be 700 to 1,400 words, right? Uh, And then your, if you've got service pages on a site or if you've got city pages, which are, or pages all about the cities that you want to target, that is why referring to it content, right? Make sure that's all structured right, written properly. You can't just get content from ChatGPT and throw it on your site, right? Do we use AI to help content generate or generate content? 100%. But we then actually go and remark all that content up, right? And kind of humanize it. But that's what I mean by content. But any content with YouTube, especially that's tied to Google, it's a Google property, can be a big, a big value too.

Do you— so you, you've talked to me about websites, like you help whether someone's brand new or not, like you help people generate leads through their website, whether that's pay-per-click. Do, do people get a lot of leads from SEO, from search, like organic search?

Yeah. So here's— yeah, so a couple Couple of questions there. Yes, we do a lot of web dev for real estate investors. I'm really passionate about real estate investors owning their website. Look at your website just like you would a house, right? Your website is building— should be building digital equity over time, and you want to own that equity, right? Just like a house. So hey, there's companies out there that'll build you a site very quickly. You're going to pay a $99 to $199 monthly fee every month. Difference is you never own that site, right? So you own your URL but you don't own the site. So if you stop paying, that site goes down. So when it comes to SEO, especially if you're gonna start investing in SEO and an agency is gonna start putting, uh, content onto your site, they're gonna do link building, all this work and assets going into your site, you wanna make sure you own all those assets. So if you ever leave that company, you take all that work with you. That's how we operate. All of our guys own their websites once they're paid in full. Um, and yes, organic, Our clients tell us it's the best lead that comes off of Google. It's, it's higher grade than PPC, PPC being number 2. I think the reason being is people are searching online, they're actually doing some more due diligence, they're actually looking at reviews, they're actually, uh, reading websites. They're not just clicking on the first ad, right? Don't get me wrong, PPC can be a great channel. It's just totally different from organic.

Well, and one thing to add to that as well, um, I think people can relate to this. How often do we go to page 2, 3, and 4? It's maybe page 2, you know. So the whole point of SEO is to get you on that page 1. That's where everybody wants to be.

Yeah, yeah. Just a quick follow-up, you know, people search and they may click on that first ad, the sponsored results, really quick, and it may be, hey, I've had my house on the market, I've heard these cash buyers, they do a search, so they're not really motivated yet, right? And so I think the really motivated buyer does more do— when I mean do deals, just more searching on that page versus let me just click on this first ad because I'm kind of curious about what's going on.

Yeah, yeah. What are your thoughts on how search is going to change over time?

Man, that's a great question. I, I think, um, obviously AI is not going to go away. It's here to stay. I still think Google's going to have a, a pretty big share with their Gemini, their AI side of the house, right? Um, so how it evolves, that's a great question. I mean, we're— we are— if you've noticed, uh, Google has been running television commercials, uh, which they haven't in years. I noticed the first one last year in the NBA Finals. I was watching one of the games, but their whole tagline is just ask Google, right? And they have this whole commercial about how we've evolved from the young child, uh, into adult making decisions, and— but we've always gone to Google. Because the LLMs, large language models, the AIs, right? It's people are— it's called answer engine optimization, right? Because people are asking questions and really long-tail searches into those. So where does it evolve? I don't know. That's a million-dollar question. But I know people are going to be going to AI. They're going to be going to Google, and they're going to be looking for solutions, right? The power of Google has always been, I've got a problem. I need to find someone to help me. I just inherited this house, I need help, I don't want to deal with it, I want someone to buy it, I'm going through a divorce, I need to find someone to buy our house. So that doesn't change. Where do they go? That's, that's the big change. And, and for the first time, I think Google's— I don't think they're running scared because they got a kajillion dollars, but it's gotten their attention, right?

Yeah, I heard something about their market, like, never, never have— would anyone have thought that their market, like, their market share would be attacked, right? Like, or someone going for it.

I've been saying that for years because you look at Bing and Bing's Microsoft and they've got a kajillion dollars like Google, but Bing's never been able to penetrate the search engine market like Google. I mean, they did, they do have a share, but not, not like Google. I, I love it because, um, Google's to me this giant monopoly. They're, uh, they're hard to deal with. They give advertisers no help, they give agencies no help, but yet they're the king, you know, they're the king of, of search. So I like it that there's something new Yeah, me too.

I agree.

Our world, business owners are always going to need help. I'm a big believer of that. So it keeps us in the game. We just have to adapt and make sure that they can only be found on Google, but also found on these, all these AI models. So just like any business, I mean, there's always change in things coming down the pike. But we've been doing that for years because Google changes all the time. They constantly are updating, adding, tweaking. Changing their— the way the search page looks, going back to the old way it looks. So that hasn't changed, but AI is definitely, um, is, uh, disrupting the market for sure.

Yeah. And you said you started in 2016, so I was running a lot of PPC ads myself, uh, for a long time, in 2017 to 2021. And it's— it was difficult. Like, it was always changing. I felt like the platforms were always changing. Is it— you notice? Like, I haven't ran my own for a long time because I use pay-per-lead, uh, majority of the time now. Um, yeah, has it— is it continuously changing? Have they slowed down?

Like, it's always changing. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, campaigns kind of go like this. It's kind of like the stock market, but as long as we're always ticking upwards over time, we're heading in the right direction. But, you know, when Google wants to charge $80 for a click for Sell My House Fast It's ridiculous. You know, it's not sustainable for most people, right? So it is always changing. It is frustrating. They don't give you— even though we're paying for all that traffic, they, they still fragment the data that they give you back to help optimize it. In Google's world, they'd love everybody to do their own campaign, right? Because they'll offer suggestions and people don't know any better. They'll click on that suggestion to add it to their campaign, which they're thinking is going to help the campaign, but really it's just designed to make money for Google. So it's, it's always changing. It hasn't gotten any easier. Hadn't gotten any better from 10 years ago. If anything, it's gotten harder.

Yeah, that was kind of my issue is like, you know, you would, you would run it yourself. Like, I don't recommend anyone run their own pay-per-click. I don't know. Yeah, you'll run out of your budget real fast because you just don't know what you're doing.

One of the things you mentioned on Paper Lead, um, that we do that no other agency offers that I'm aware of. So We do a lot of high-end SEO work, and SEO is got— you have to have a commitment to it. I tell guys all the time, look, you've got to have a budget set aside for a year. You got to trust the process. We're going to talk to you every 6 weeks about the campaign. One of our core values, 100% transparency. So you're going to know what's going on. We track every lead. I can tell you if it's coming from paid, organic, Facebook, whether it's a phone call, web form. So we only do 12-month commitments on SEO, but here's the thing that no one else offers. As we're approaching into that campaign, and we go into month 13, before we hit month 13, the advertiser, we can talk to our client, hey, we can renew this as is on the retainer, traditional retainer model, or beginning month 13, we'll transition to pay, pay-per-lead. What does that mean in our world? That means we're going to keep doing all the SEO work we've always done. Nothing stops on our end. What stops, instead of you paying us our standard rate of $1,595 a month retainer, we're now only going to charge you for qualified leads that come in. We charge $300 per qualified lead. So our guys have really— our guys and gals, ladies too— they really like that. And it's a totally different mindset, um, with, uh, our clients because it just takes away what are they doing or what's, you know, the worry about it. Because now when a lead comes in, I give them 5 days. We don't run their payment when it comes in. You get 5 days to vet the lead, meaning see if it's qualified. And if it's not qualified send it back. So what does not qualified mean? If it's a wholesaler, if it's a can't get, you know, out of area, if it's can't get a hold of, um, any of these areas— I think there's 6— if it falls in those, send it back as not qualified, no questions asked. We'll move on. Um, we only do that with, uh, offer that if we have a really good relationship. Obviously there's a lot of trust in there, but literally if you send me back a, uh, like I've got a guy, hey, they they found our— they saw our sign, they looked up online and sent in a web form. Well, that web form comes in as organic, so I'm like, okay, um, this has an opportunity to be a qualified lead. But when they send that information back, I don't, I don't ask questions. So, and they appreciate that. I just trust that they're, um, abiding by the rules. So, so the only thing my team does is when we get a lead is we'll look on Zillow and see if it's off market. That way I know then, hey, it's off market, our team knows that's got a really good opportunity to be a qualified lead. But nobody offers that. That's kind of long-winded, but it's really, really cool way to invest 12 months. I want our guys to have skin in the game. Let us build that 12-month foundation, right? And actually start getting you a real organic presence. And then we'll transition to pay-per-lead. And now you're only, you're still getting the same work. You still have access to our deliverable sheet. You can see everything we're doing. But you're only paying for leads that are actually motivated sellers, which is what everybody wants, right?

And that's the same offer that you're— we were talking about where they own the website after.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, the website.

Yeah.

So when we, when we build a site for a client and I'll even— I love talking about pricing because a lot of agencies, they don't want to talk about pricing, right? Drives me crazy when I'm dealing with a vendor and I'm trying to buy something. Tell me how much it is, Nathan. You're like, well, I'll send it to you right now. Just tell me. All right, so here's what the website means. So we charge $2,340 for our basic site, right? 6-page website. Um, and if you want to build out more pages, we can definitely quote you for that. So I tell investors, hey, you can pay for that site however you want. I mean, you can pay one payment, 2, 3, or all the way up to 12. So if you're brand new and just getting started, that comes to $195 a month. At the end of that 12 months, you own the site. It's yours, right? As soon as it's paid in full, whether it's 3 months, 4 months, you own the site, meaning If we ever part ways, you take the site with you. So if I'm doing SEO for you, right, and we go a whole year campaign, at that point you probably already own your site. But yeah, I mean, we're going to pay-per-lead mode, you still own the site, right? So if I do SEO with you for 5 years and for some reason you leave, all that work we put in that site for 5 years, you take all that with you. So we don't hold anybody hostage. Same thing for PPC, Nathan. If I run a PPC campaign for you, we, we charge a setup fee. We're going to build out the campaign. If we work on that campaign for 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, and you leave, you take the campaign with you. There's a lot of agencies that will hold you hostage. They'll say, well, you don't own the campaign. Well, wait a minute, I just— I'm the one paying you to run the campaign. I know, but you don't own the campaign. We don't, we don't play the games like that.

That's awesome. So you're telling me What did you say? $23 a month? Is that what you said?

$2,340. Sorry, $2,340. That's our, that's our, our rate for our website.

But a month or just—

oh no, annual. That's, that's the total amount, $2,340.

I was about to be like, wow, that's $23. That's a deal.

But no, that's what we charge. But you can pay for that site whatever fits your budget. Whatever works best for you. So if you're brand new, cash flow's tight, and you want to do it for 12 months, that comes to $195 a month, man, we're going to sign the deal. I've had people look at me like, I can— you mean I can pick how many months to pay it off? Yeah, it doesn't matter to me. That's the least of my concerns. Because here's the deal, if you stop paying and you never pay in full, then we'll just take the site down, right? Yeah. But hey, so it just gives a lot of flexibility, uh, on how they want to pay for that. So $2,340 And then however many months— if you want to do one payment, great. If you want to do all the way up to 12, that's great too.

How many leads can someone expect to get in a year's time while it's amping up? Can they expect any, or does it take time and they get them later?

You mean like if we're doing SEO?

Yeah, like if you— if they pay for that website.

Well, if you pay— okay, so here's the deal. You pay for the website, right? We're going to build a site, we're going to, uh, build all unique content. We're gonna mark it up for all proper SEO. If, if that, that site goes live and it's never touched again, no one's working on it. SEO's about month after month ditch digging, right? Got it. Putting content, link building, optimizing Google Business Profile, seeing how that Google's reacting, how's the site moving up, rinse and repeat month after month with, with a lot of the same strategies, but also testing other strategies. Okay. So that's ongoing SEO. If all you do is build a site and it goes live, there's a good chance that site will, will never get to page 1. I say that, but we've had sites over time because of when we build it, we build it with proper SEO. Reason why we do that, so if you get to with me 3 months later, say I'm ready to start SEO, it's already got all the foundation built. Google's already crawled it, they already know what it's about. But we, we built sites where in 6, 7, 8 months we've seen organic leads come in and we haven't done anything. Right. And so, um, could you get some sites with no work and launching the site the right way? Sure. But if you do real SEO, then yeah, over that 12 months, our goal is for you to get 2 or 3 deals, right? And do the math, you know, if I'm charging what, $1,595, it's about an $18,000— no, was about $20,000 commitment. It just takes one deal to cover, cover all your expenses in a year-long SEO campaign.

Yeah. So, so I understand correctly, um, the— for you to build a website, it's $2,000. Give me the price again.

$2,340, or just think of it as $195 a month.

Okay. And that's SEO included or no SEO?

That's no SEO. That's just the site.

Okay.

And then if I'm doing SEO, we charge $1,595 a month. It's totally separate from, from the SEO or from the website build.

Got it.

Okay, you got to build a site. The thing about us, we built a custom site. I've got lots of designs and stuff you can choose from, but I'm still going to customize it to your color scheme, your logo, and we're also going to build all unique content out of the gate. That's, that's really important because content's king, but it's got to be unique in the world of SEO, right? So $2,340 for the site and can be breaking up all the way into 12 payments. And then if you do an SEO campaign We will start that once the site goes live and we charge $1,595 a month. So I tell investors, we've told investors many times, Nathan, they're not ready for SEO. They're too new in the game. They don't have the cash flow. They don't have a reserve because you've got to have a free mind, right? You got, when you go into SEO, you gotta be like, hey, I'm trusting you guys. I've seen results, case studies. I know you guys have had success and you've got to let us go to work and realize, hey, I've got this budget set aside. I'm not gonna worry about it. No, because when we talk to guys and they're— we can tell they're kind of desperate, like they need a deal like in next month, then yeah, the advertising gods are working against you. It's never going to work. So sometimes we just tell them, hey, you're not, you're not ready. Try some direct mail or maybe do some cold calling or something.

To be honest, anybody that's like, I need a deal in the next month, that's a, that's a tough situation to be in because I don't care like what marketing you do, it doesn't work out like that all time. Yeah, you could be doing— you get the hottest leads, that lead might need 2 months to close. They might have, you know, so yeah, I think—

yeah, we had a guy in Atlanta who's brand new, he's still working a W-2 job. We, and we built his site. It was fun. It's fun to go on the journey because, uh, now he's full-time, you know, in the real estate investor space. We did some paper, uh, PPC for him for 3 or 4 months. He got a couple of deals. He paused that 'cause he wanted to try some direct mail. And that's another thing, we don't, like, if you wanna try something, go for it. There's enough business for everybody. If direct mail's rocking, man, do direct mail. But he's the one, he was my example. He reached out about 8 months later and he said, hey, I'm getting some organic leads from the site. And so that was cool to see that our site had actually moved up for Sell My House Fast in Atlanta on its own. He was getting some organic leads that led him to actually invest in SEO 'cause he saw the power of it. And that was with us not doing any work. So that was cool. URL structure can be important too, because he had kind of a weird business name. He wanted that to be his URL, and we recommended, hey, let's go with some— let's try to get a keyword in there. So we came up with Sell My House Fast Atlanta GA.

It's long.

That's great. It doesn't matter. No one's going to not click on your listing on page 1 because the URL is long. But the thing is that Sell My House Fast in it, which is high level. What we call a high-level keyword in Atlanta in there, built the site, did all the proper SEO work. What I mean by that, proper content, proper data markup, metadata, H1s, H2s, all that SEO nerdy stuff that a lot of people goes over their head. But all that is set up properly, and that site actually started ranking well on its own in Atlanta in about 8 months. That is the exception and not the norm. We're very clear on that with expectations when it comes to organic because It's not— it's, it's, it's a grind and it's going to take time to actually get true rankings. And that's why a lot of people give up on it.

Yeah. Let me ask you this. So do you ever run a site for someone, they, they cancel or they're like, hey, I don't even want the site, or— and instead of taking it down, you leave it up and you, you get leads since you did all the work?

Yeah, that's a great question. We probably get— we, we have a handful of sites that we have one in Tampa, we have one in Stockton, California. But that's exactly what happened. They, they didn't want the site and they didn't want the URL. So we took it over and we sell leads from that site. We do SEO on that site. So I've got a buyer in Tampa that buys our, our SEO leads from us.

Got it. Okay.

So that's a site that we own.

Do you just sell to that buyer specifically or do you sell leads in general like PPL?

He's my exclusive buyer. I don't— I just— yeah, if he wants to buy all the leads that come in and I mean, listen, SEO is typically not a windfall of leads, right? It's not like you're going to get 20 leads in a month. If I can get you 10 qualified SEO leads, that's awesome in a month, right? If I can get you 5 or 6 qualified leads in a month, um, that's great. You're gonna— you're going to get some buys if you've had a good coach like Nathan Payne. And actually, no, that's the challenge too. They've got to be able to know how to handle the leads and deals, right? Um, but yeah, I mean, if you're getting true motivated seller leads from an organic channel, those are going to be good leads and there's going to be good opportunities to do deals. We've got a guy in Vegas, been with us 10 years, and he was just telling me he, he's working on a deal, um, came from a phone call, but it's like he's thinking it's going to be a $70,000 to $100,000 deal, you know? And so, and that's from organic. And so he's funny, he told me, I told him about my paper lease, I'd never, I would never do that with you, it'd cost me more money. But prop organic can be gold, right? Yeah. You just got to get to the other side. And once you get to the other side, I've never had a client— other side meaning it's actually working, you're ranking, you're getting leads, you see the value of it. I've never had a client after we get to that other side come back to me and say, man, that was a— I wish I hadn't done that, right? They're all happy that they actually went through that painstaking month after month after month with no leads or maybe one lead because in the early days it's going to be painful. That's why I say have a budget set aside, be committed to it. If you're that person, then yeah, we'd love to talk to you about building out a true organic presence.

I love that. Well, hey guys, that was awesome. I learned a ton. Um, is there anything else you want to say before we wrap up? Anything you want to leave the, the audience with?

Investornitro.com, uh, you can find us there. Everydaymediagroup.com is our legacy agency. We'd love to visit with you. Nathan, it was good to chat with you. I stole the show from Emmy, but she's a wealth of knowledge.

Yeah, hop on our calendar, you know, if you all have any questions or just want to, you know, pick our brains.

Yeah, yeah.

Nathan, we'd love to work with any of your guys too. If any of your guys need help, we do free strategy calls. All the time. We offer free Google Ads audits, no strings attached. We also offer free website audits. So if you really want to know and get our opinion of how your paid ads are doing, how your website's performing, uh, before, uh, performing, reach out to us. We'll do an audit, we'll set up a call to review it with you and take it from there.

Lovely. Um, and it's investornitro.com? Investornitro.com.

That is our REI-branded website. It's all about REIs. And, uh, yeah, you get all of our contacts info there. And, uh, yeah, we'd love to reach out to, to anybody. And, uh, anybody needs help with digital marketing, AI, all that fun stuff, Google Business Reviews, maybe your profile got suspended, uh, we can help you get it back live. Have a real high success rate with that too. So yeah, just reach out to us. We'd love to chat with you.

All right, guys. Well, thank you and appreciate everybody that tuned in, and we will see you on the next one.

Letter is pretty good.

Thank you.