EP 583 – Results-Driven Video Content Marketing For Real Estate Investors With Josh Culler

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Worth of property for pennies on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now here's your host, CEO of We Close notes, Scott Carson. Hey, not nation. Welcome to this new episode of the no Close show. As always, thank you for listening. Make sure you hit that subscribe button and leave us a five star review for our listing. And many of you may not know that we're also an iHeartRadio as well for you to be able to listen to these episodes. Our whole catalog of over 500 episodes are available there on iHeart. But many of us as real estate entrepreneurs are looking for a way to really boost our marketing, get more of our deals, find more deals in front of our buyers, sellers and funding sources out there. And one of the best ways that you can do that is, is with the inception of video into your market. Well, let's just face it, video's been around for years, but most people have been scared of it because of it. It was costly. It's very, very inexpensive these days. And I'm honored to have my buddy Josh Kohler from the Kohler Media Group and REI Marketing join us today in this episode of the nocia. Josh will share some of his insights into why video is so valuable and how he and his team can actually help you by doing all the dirty work and the heavy lifting for you in case you want to add video to your marketing. So stay tuned, take plenty of notes, and we'll see at the top. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Note Closer Show. As always, Scott Carson. Excited to be here with you today. We've got a special guest joining us who is out there doing some amazing things for his business along with working with a lot of other real estate investors and entrepreneurs to really kind of take their whole message, their whole marketing to a whole new level. All right? And I think so many people are stuck at home here right now and kind of figuring out what the heck to do. And this episode is dedicated to you all. For those of you that are like, ah, what am I going to do? How do I get this out? Maybe I need to do something more for my business to get the word out. This episode is for you listeners and then for those of you that are watching this. So we're honored to have an amazing guy I've known This guy for a while, met him originally when he was working with another buddy of mine on his podcast. His marketing. This guy in the last year has gone out and is just killing it, doing some amazing things, not only for himself, but other people as well too. He is the owner and founder of Color Media. It's a result driven content marketing for real estate investors. He's also the owner of REI Video. It's a platform for investors to have their videos produced by him and his team. So we're talking about the man, the Myth. Video legend Mr. Josh Kohler joins us this morning. How's it going, man?

Dude, what's going on? It looks like you're chilling on the beach right now. I'm a little jealous, but we got snow this weekend, so I got fake.

Sunshine, you know what I mean? You know, I might have to make a pina colada later just for the heck of it to tell us what's going on. It is. It's an interesting world we live in.

It's crazy. That's one of the places that you said doesn't have the coronavirus. So you're good, you're safe.

I'm safe. Keep drinking mai tais and coladas. It will be good. The alcohol will kill the virus, but.

Right, exactly.

Tell those folks who are listening or watching this video replay or listening on the podcast and already that works a little bit yourself how you got into what you're doing now.

Sure, absolutely. So first of all, I appreciate you having me on the show. I had Scott on my show, the REI Marketing Weekly, which started off as a newsletter, and then I had way too many people asking to turn it into a podcast. So I decided to do that. And not sure why it took me so long to do it, but I did it. I love podcasting, so it's always a pleasure to be on other people's shows as well. So I appreciate you having me on. And I've listened to the no Closer show for quite a while. So a little bit of a fanboy. So pretty cool being on the show, like listening to it for a couple of years and so it's flattering to be on the show. So anyway, yeah, a little bit about myself. Josh Kohler. I'm 26 years old. I've been in the real estate investing industry since I was 19 years old. So about seven years. Been a part of about a thousand real estate transactions. I was with a wholesaling company with. There was three guys that were partners in the wholesaling company doing wholesaling throughout The Midwest. I kind of swung back and forth between departments. I was in sales. Many of you guys know Gary Harper, who. He was actually the one that hired me on board for that. I was working with a competitor of theirs for about six, seven months, which gave me the full background of real estate investing. And everything that's going down, I've wholesaled on my own. I flipped one property on my own, and we'll never do that again. And so through this whole process, I realized that I don't actually love actual real estate. I love what it can provide, which is financial independence. It can provide legacy for your family and that kind of stuff. So currently, right now, the only investing that I really do is private money lending, which is where I want to be. It's good. But other than that, the reason why I niched into this investing industry with my media services when I did go full time was because of the network that I've grown in this industry and just the knowledge that I've grown inside of this. And I've been in the marketing world for real estate investors for quite a while. Five, six years of that, seven years that I've been in this industry. So then color media works with some of the top influencers in the country. My clients consist of Mike Hambright, Don Costa, John Martinez, Gene Guerino, many other influencers that you guys may or may not know. But I work with those people to get whatever it is, their podcast or their video content up and running. And then, like Scott said, we just launched a platform called REI Video, which is a platform where you guys can film your own videos and then submit those over to the platform. And my team gets those edited, produced all the heavy lifting for you, and send it back to you however you want to use it. So it's a little bit about me and my experience. Scott.

Awesome, man. Well, that's. I think you're hitting timing of the market, right? Because I think everything, as I've said before, we're all in the media business. Whether it's fix and flipping or wholesaling or note investing, these days, it's all about the media side. Everybody's clamoring for eyeballs and earballs, as I like to say. Earballs. Yeah. Well, we got your people listening right now. But that's the thing is if you're not upping your game and evolving, it's not the world of, hey, let's send out 5 million yellow letters or postcards to find the thing. It's all got to be top of mind, top of eyesight or top of ears listening. So you've seen that happening. We I've known Mike Ham Brighton, John Martinez for years and it's interesting seeing them evolve in their business. Going more to the video side too, right?

Absolutely. So Mike's been a client of mine since I believe last October, and this guy has his content marketing super dialed, more dialed in than any client I've ever worked with. And it's incredible seeing the growth that he's had on not just a lot of people think that this content marketing game relates to like podcast subscribers and YouTube subscribers and Instagram followers, LinkedIn connections, that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, all that smoke and mirrors, if you're truly trying to run a business because of the fact that like with all my clients, the reason why you opened it saying that our company does results driven content marketing, the results are relevant to whatever you're going after, which for Mike is to get people into his mastermind or get people on his platforms and stuff like that. And every John Martinez, it's to get people into his REI sales academy and that kind of stuff. So it's all relevant to the actual person that's running their business. But don't get caught up with the vanity metrics like I call them with the followers. Now it's all important if that's what your specific goal is. We got to remember, if Instagram decides to shut down tomorrow, you lose everything if you haven't built an audience somewhere else as well.

So that's a big thing. You know, you and I talked about that when I was on your podcast about spreading the message across different platforms. You don't want to be so you.

Don'T want to be a one trick pony.

Yeah, yeah. All those one trick MySpace ponies, friend feed meerkat. You know, we could go on and on for some of those things that vine viddler. Oh yeah, yeah, exactly. Now it's great to be spread out, but you want to go where everybody knows your name. You want to go to the Cheers sections where you're not just New York ideal clients are, but where your existing clients are already hanging out.

Right, right, absolutely. In addition to that too. I mean, like we just talked about influencers and a lot of those platforms are influencer platforms. So these are people that have masterminds that have online courses or they want to monetize their podcasts and stuff like that. Ways to make money on the education side. But Scott, I'm not sure about your audience specifically, but a lot of active real Estate investors are out there, like maybe you're a wholesaler or flipper and you're thinking like, yeah, but I don't have a course on my platform or I don't have a mastermind that I run or anything. Well, it's still the same principles. You still need to create content marketing with results driving that for you. It might be to get more leads in the door to close more deal. That's what your driver would be for your content marketing. And your content marketing is going to look a little different. You're not going to teach people how to flip houses. You're going to teach your sellers how they can get out of pre foreclosure. You're going to teach your sellers how they can sell a house without having to do repairs to it. You're going to teach your sellers how to sell their property to a home buying specialist like you, as opposed to with a realtor. Pros and cons with that. So it's still educating. That's all it is. And I think Scott, we're getting into the show now, maybe I think we can go that direction. But content marketing, and Scott knows this, but content marketing, the only definition for content marketing is answering questions that your target audience has that period. There's no other purpose for content marketing. And a lot of people think content marketing, it's all the free stuff that you put out essentially it's kind of true. There's a difference between content marketing, I believe, and advertising. Now don't get me wrong, content feeds everything in marketing, but it's its own little silo inside of this massive umbrella of marketing. So under the umbrella of marketing you might have advertising and then content marketing, understanding that content drives it. So if you don't know, for instance, I started a Facebook ad yesterday and I had to film a video for that. So I had to have good content, contextual content to feed that ad. But advertising is going direct to your consumer, chasing after them. Whereas content marketing is more of building longer term relationships. The know like and trust factor is what I like to say. It allows you to build authority, credibility and essentially allow people to latch onto you and get value from you in a world where everybody's just being sold.

I'm glad you bring that up. As we like to say, that's the number, that's where the money comes in.

I still need to get one of those.

I hook you up online, man. The biggest thing is that's the thing is like people, it seems like it's such a huge ocean that people get Intimidated and they don't know where to begin. So why don't we talk about a couple things that people can do very simply? Let me give you an example here. So, like, I talk all the time that people need to be sending at least one email out once a week to their database, once a week to their clients. And there's like the four principles. There's always a holiday going on each month for the most part. So you can talk about Happy St. Patrick's Day. Yeah, you know what I mean? You've got. Usually your real estate meetup group is meeting once a month so you can talk about the meetup group, who's speaking, what you learned, how you're implementing it, or hey, come on out and meet with me there, Talk about something fun you're doing. I mean, right now, if you're stuck at home, what are you doing to work out? Or maybe the menu of the week that you're cooking. And then maybe four is your ask, you know, if you got a deal, you're working, or the previous week could be a deal, throwback deal that you've worked on the facts, or somebody else's deal. So those are the four things, because there's basically four weeks each month just kind of rinse and repeating, but people still struggle with that. So what are you seeing as maybe the top three things people could talk about for diving and start doing their videos on? And then let's talk about time frame and the amount of it.

So let's start first of all with like, where to start. And Scott, hopefully you're cool with me, like, plugging a podcast I have, right?

Oh, yeah.

So I have a podcast called the Content Marketing Playbook, and this is not specific to real estate investors. Content marketing. The principles of content marketing stay the same no matter what industry you're in. And that's what I talk about on that podcast. But in the podcast, there's multiple episodes I have where I talk about where to start with a podcast, where to start with video content, where to start with, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what I always tell people, there's three essential things, but a fourth one that sometimes I add in that you need to be thinking about when you're going to start with content marketing. The first one is who is your target audience? And this is marketing 101, period. So if you don't know this already, you have no business getting into content marketing at all. Go start with that. So know your audience. That's who's your avatar. So demographics, agency, interests, likes, where Are they located? If you're in a very specific niched market, all that kind of stuff, those are things that you need to know. So who's your audience? Number two is where are they at? This is extremely important because you don't want to put content out. You don't want to put any kind of marketing out to a platform where your audience is not. Because it's just going to be throwing money directly into the trash can. You don't want to do that. So we talked about earlier, like going to these multiple platforms all at once. That's not always the best thing to do to go to like 20 different platforms. And people will say, yeah, but you never know. But I just want to tell you, like, you do know. You know they're not there, so don't do it. If you truly know your target audience, which that's step number one, you know where they're going to be at, you know where they're going to be spending their time. That's where you want to put your content marketing out. So if you're an influencer and you're marketing to active real estate investors, Facebook is like one of the biggest places that they're at right now. They're also listening to podcasts, as Scott and I talked about on my show. They're going to LinkedIn. Now, finally, they're going to Instagram. They're starting to merge over there. So these are places that you need to evaluate where they're at. And then the next thing, number three is kind of the context of the content that you're going to actually put out. So it's a do listen to podcasts, then create a podcast, like that's what you got to do. And then they consume video content. If you know that they're entrepreneurs and typically entrepreneurs, a lot of times they're not sitting down for a full one hour podcast and listening to that entire thing in one shot. So maybe you need to snip that up into four different segments that are 15 minutes long. So think about it in that context. And a lot of times I want to go back to number one, too. You need to get this through your head. You, more times than not are not your audience. So I know a lot of people that tell me, like, yeah, I know I should be on Facebook, but I don't want to be on Facebook because my audience, hey, listen, you may not want to be on Facebook, but your audience is there. And if you're going to do marketing the right way, you need to do that. So you need to bite the bullet and figure that out. But you, a lot of times are not your audience. So don't think about what you would do. You need to put yourself in your audience issues and figure that out. And so those are the things. And then lastly, what. The fourth thing that I sometimes throw in is knowing yourself. So, like, are you like, good on video? Are you a good writer? So blog that stuff. But essentially, a lot of times I leave that out because it doesn't matter if you're going to do marketing the right way. If you don't like being on video, but your audience loves video, then you just got to suck it up and do it. So.

So.

Or find somebody on your team that can do it. But those are the things.

I think the biggest thing is fail forward and embrace the suck. Because nobody is born good on camera to begin with, right?

Everybody starts at zero. Everybody starts at zero. The biggest influencers, Kim Kardashian, one of the biggest influencers on planet Earth, started at zero. Everybody starts at zero. So you gotta start somewhere. And it's always funny. I use the example of, like, I'm a big Gary Vaynerchuk fan just because of how real he is. And, like, I'm not like a fanboy. I love the stuff that he puts out, just the value.

We're all fanboys, whether you want to admit or not.

That's right. But you go back and you look at the very first video he ever put out. It's the crappiest looking video, like, of wine library tv. And he's got a text comes through over the video and covers his entire face and says, welcome to episode number one or whatever. And the audio's horrible. The video is super pixelated. But that just stands to tell you that everybody starts somewhere. Now, something, Scott, that, like what we're doing right now, I love this, right? So, like, I might have a nice little setup in the background. I've got a light here. I turned the overhead light above me off so that I get some nice contrast behind me, that kind of thing. But that's just me. Like, that's my preference, right? But you, I mean, you're on a beach and, you know, you're just sitting in front of your webcam, like that kind of thing. Guys, nowadays, people are more okay than ever. Green screen, right? Yeah, exactly. And you could throw whatever background you want on behind you and people know that it's not real. Like, people know you're not in a high rise in San Francisco with the golden gate behind you, right? But people are cool with that. The understanding nowadays that people, thanks to like platforms like TikTok and Snapchat and Facebook stories, Instagram stories, people are more okay than ever with raw content being put out. And YouTube was one of the starters of that. I mean, you go look at some of the largest YouTube channels on the planet, A lot of them are just like crappy productions. Like the aesthetics of them suck. So just because you don't have a studio, you don't have fancy equipment and all that kind of stuff, that shouldn't stop you from putting content out. One of the most powerful content creation tools that you can use is this right here. A cell phone. If you have a cell phone that is less than four years old, you have an extremely powerful marketing tool in your pocket right now.

Even a cell phone that's four years or older, you're grandma. Okay, you're listening on Grasshopper.

Yeah, you may be listening to this by way of radio, if that still exists.

Leva Bomber is.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. But that's the whole point here, guys, is that like put out content, you gotta start somewhere and it's okay to put non produced content out. It is totally okay with it. Focus on the value that you're delivering more importantly than the aesthetics of it.

Yeah, I'm a big believer that the easiest content to start off with is your FAQs, the questions that people ask you on a regular basis. People love that. Just having a Q and A session. And it's so much more affordable. It's so much easier. Like you said, if you've got a cell phone, do a Facebook Live. Put a little thing on the back here of your phone so you can clip it and hang it some place and then talk about what you're focused on. And just regularity is the biggest thing, I think more so than anything, it's being consistent in what you're doing and doing that you want to talk about some of those things, Josh?

Yeah, well, first of all, you just gave me an idea. So like, just to provide value to your audience. Hopefully. I don't know if I want to say this, but hopefully. So if anybody that's listening to this wants to get a couple of tools that I use to film video on my phone. So I film video on my phone all the frickin time. I use a $30 microphone from Amazon and then a little handheld tripod. Yeah, I guess it could be a selfie stick, but it's a tripod. Right. That you could stand up on your desk or whatever and it holds your Phone. If anybody wants one of those, shoot me an email and I'll ship you one. Like, totally. I'll pay for it and ship it to you. So reach out to me. Josholormedia.com is my email, and I'd be happy to ship one or both of those to anybody that needs those. So you don't have an excuse now. Let's just say you don't have an excuse to not put content out now. But yeah, so like something that you and I remember the question that you asked me going into this conversation before I started that, but something that you talked about that I actually wanted to hit on was one of the biggest things that I run into with people creating content, not putting content out, is they ask, what do I talk about? Like, what do I even put out? So you talked about FAQs. Big fan of that. So if you are not logging questions that your target audience are asking, you're missing out on a lot of opportunity. So every time a seller asks you a question about working with you, write that down. Write down the specific question, and if you get an email, if you get a text message from them or whatever, log all those questions. And that is the starting place for you to put content out. If a seller asks you, hey, what is the closing process? When I work with you? Shoot a video on that. Shoot a video specifically answering that question and put that out. And so then I'm going to give you a couple of ways you can create other ideas for that and then why this is super important. So obviously logging those questions like I talked about, that's a big piece of it. You can go to Quora, go to a platform called Answer the Public is one of my favorites.

Yeah.

And just the way they lay everything out. So you can literally type in a key phrase or keyword and it'll spit out a stupid amount of data for you. These are all the data that they spit out. These are all additional keywords or key phrases that somebody looks up in addition to what you searched. So answerthepublic.com is a place to go. And you can look up Sell my house. Or for me, it would be content marketing. What are questions that people are asking about content marketing? Well, that's the content that I need to shoot about. So those are great places to start. Like I said, Quora is a good one. Quora is literally the essential content marketing platform because all it is is people answering questions and then getting answers for it. So search specific key phrases and keywords. Now, the reason why this is super Important to do is, especially if you get a question consistently, if like every single seller is asking you what's the process of closing with you? Or how do I get paid? Or what's the difference between selling to you versus selling with a Realtor? When you create video content about that and you put that on your website or your Google my business page, what happens is this acts as your 24 hour salesman, which is incredible, right? So you don't have to pay your content to answer these questions. People can literally at 2 o' clock in the morning go to Google search, why sell to a real estate investor in Dallas, Texas? Your video pulls up, answers their question, and now you've built rapport with them without even answering a phone call. You've automatically built rapport with them. You've built value, you built credibility, authority, and just all these positive things with your seller. And then when they get on the phone with you, it's almost like they already know you. They know they want to sell to you, right? So this is a big piece. And everybody that I work with, a lot of active investors and they do this, I mean everybody that I've shot videos with, they say this works. So that's a big piece of it. I love it. Is that content marketing can be your 24 hour salesman answers. They don't take weekends, they don't get sick, they don't catch the coronavirus, they can answer any questions that your audience has.

So great, great stuff there, Josh. Now I have told people literally this. It's not what I did. For those that can't figure out FAQs, go to a website. Go to a real estate investor's website. Somebody will follow and I guarantee 90% of them will have some sort of frequently asked questions tab or training class or something like the FAQs and use those and tweak them for yourself. I mean, think about the questions that you had when you were first getting started, everybody. What's this? What's this? What's that? When you're going to a real estate club or virtual one in these days, for the most part, people are asking questions. Take note of those questions, write them down. And then you know what's also really good thing? If there's been a speaker or somebody that spoke at your club, go up to them at the end, say, hey, I'd love to interview you, I'd love to have you. Let's talk about this a little bit different. I know you're busy, but I'd love to schedule time interview on my show or Interview you to my audience and go from there. And I know you and I both love the fact that when we have somebody on it allows us to pick their brain. Interruption free, right?

Yep. And something that it goes back to making the statement of you are not your audience is you got to remember that. Let's just use active investors, for instance, your sellers. I found that more times than not, they don't even know what a real estate investor is. They think it's a suit on Wall Street. So it's your job to let them know what you are and what you do, because most people aren't familiar with that. But everybody's familiar with selling with a realtor, but they're not familiar with selling to an investor like yourself. So they have a lot of questions. So this is your opportunity to be able to answer those questions for them. And whether you think it's a trivial or it's a super elementary question or not, like answer it still. So if you think that question is stupid that a seller has, like, you may think it's stupid, but they don't. And this could be your opportunity to answer a very elementary question for them that they couldn't get from any other investor that they called and you answered the question for them. And they're like, huh, this guy knows what he's talking about. He's willing to kind of talk me through this and walk me through the entire process. So whether you think it's elementary question or not, still answer the questions, Advanced questions, simple things, short things. And your videos don't have to be five minutes long. They could be one to two minutes long. I found that those a lot of times, especially if you put that on a landing page, a two minute video on a landing page will actually help increase your conversion rate by up to like 85, 86%. So do it.

Yeah, let's talk a little about that. So we're doing a video, doing some marketing. What are some effective ways for people to grab those people that are listening or watching or things like that to help them get them into their pipeline? And besides just the video, what's some other things that people should be doing.

For content or following up something I really big. So let me ask you this, Scott. We want to talk about active investors or more on the influencer side, because we can go multiple different directions.

Let's go active, let's go with people. Active investors.

Okay. So for active investors, one of the best things that you can do. So there's a couple of things that I would highly, highly recommend Is number one, obviously populate your website with video content as much as you possibly can. Something that I see a lot of people doing that's working really well is they're actually creating specific pages for a specific pain point. So if you have a very high rate of pre foreclosures in your market, then create entire page, not a landing page, but a specific page specifically for your website that's about pre foreclosures. Shoot a video on pre foreclosures. What are the options when you're in pre foreclosure for directed towards the seller? You're answering their question, put that video at the top of your webpage, transcribe the entire video and then go through and lightly edit it. And by the way, if you're going to do transcriptions, don't go to Rev.com go to Temi.com T E M I because it's 25 cents a minute as opposed to Revs $1aminute and you get it back in four hours. And Temmie has is owned by Rev.com so they use the same APIs. So I don't know why they did that, but Temi.com so transcribe your video 25 cents a minute, throw that entire transcription under the video and you will see a lot of results. Now a good thing that you can do is to upload that video to YouTube because YouTube's a search engine as well. With that transcription that you get, add closed Captions to that YouTube video, embed that YouTube video on the page, transcription underneath it on the same page. So hopefully that makes sense. But that's like a really good way to get some traffic coming your way on specific pain points as opposed to making it generalized. Because if somebody's up at 2:00 in the morning and they can't sleep because they're in pre foreclosure, they're not going to go search a very general term. They're going to say what do I do when I'm in pre foreclosure? They're going to use that verbiage. So if your content shows up with that specific answer to their question, then they're more likely to give you a call than somebody else that just says we buy houses. So keep that in your brain there. Another thing that a lot of people are not taking advantage of is Google My Business. If you're an active real estate investor, you need to have a Google my business page. And Google My business actually works very similar to social platforms where you can populate your entire Profile. You can add posts, almost like a social media feed to that. So you can add videos, you can add blogs and all kinds of stuff to your feeds there. So populate all your content there as well. And that. And it's owned by Google, the largest search engine in the universe, so can't hurt.

Here's the thing. Oh, my God, this sounds crazy difficult to have captions in your video. And it's not really. Actually. If you have a business page on Facebook, this is a really simple thing you can do. Upload your video to Facebook and then go back in and edit it and enable your closed captions. Facebook will actually read it, and they're pretty good, about 90% effective in the closed captions. When I speak loud, sometimes it says the nose closures instead of the note closure.

Show nose closures.

Yeah, exactly. The note or the nose closures. Yeah, we were running around colds, but it'll actually do it all. Then you can download that video and it's got the captions already in it.

Yeah.

And then just re upload it to YouTube or use like Repurpose IO for 25 bucks a month to make it automatically happen. There's a whole variety of things. Here's the biggest thing, everybody don't get so bogged down and, oh, my God, it's gotta be perfect. Get rid of that perfection mentality. If you think about I've gotta be perfect, you're gonna be broke. Perfection equals broke. Delivered is where it's the most important thing. I mean, the iPhone, we were on version what, 14, 15, with how many software updates? If they waited to be perfect the first time, we'd still be sitting around on our freaking Nokia and we'd be.

Able to have a lot more phones that don't break. But, hey, let's just be real. But I like you going into that, because people are afraid to produce content that doesn't look good. And I think, honestly, Scott, like, and I'm not saying this because I'm a stupid millennial, but I think it's a generational thing too, because even when I was growing up, like, people didn't produce their own content. Like, if you wanted to shoot a video, you had to hire a crew to come out and shoot your videos. And a lot of people get stuck in that day and age and you just can't do that. So don't worry about it. Like, don't be afraid to pop out your phone. So if you're an active investor, maybe this is another segment we can go into. Scott, there's two ways to create content. Number one is produce, which is like similar to what we're doing right now, but kind of not. What we're doing right now is on hinges on both of these. So production is where you're actually going to sit down. You plan to sit down in front of a camera or shoot a podcast or whatever. Like that's a pre planned thing. The other way is documenting. Documenting is my favorite by far because this is something that's already happening. So let me give you an example. If you're a real estate investor, you got an appointment, maybe not right now, but you got an appointment and you're going to go pre look a house, right? So seller calls you and says, hey, I want you to come look at my house. So you're inspecting it and you walk through the house. Let's just say, for example, you see mold in the ceiling. You take your phone out and you record a selfie video of you talking about what you're going to do with that mold in the ceiling, right? 123 Main street and I got mold in the ceiling. But here's what I'm going to do about that. Now what happens with that is it's not going to help you buy the house, but what about dispositions? It's going to help you get to that dispositions a lot quicker because people are going to see what you're actually doing. It's going to build credibility and authority for you. And essentially what happens is you're letting people know that, hey, you're a wholesaler. So then if there's other wholesalers in your market, then who's one of the first people they're going to call? If they already know that you are a wholesaler and you can buy a house from them, they'll call you because essentially you could build a team of bird dogs just by putting content out. I see this happen all the time. I see this happen with investors that put out a lot of videos of them at houses is if there's newbie wholesalers, they just got a contract under, they got a contract locked down, they don't have a network yet, they don't know who to go to to dispo the property. But they know that you put videos out on Facebook that you buy properties, then they're going to look at you and give you a call and say, hey, I got a deal for you. Is this something that be interested in? So that's the power of content marketing is it's like it's not just meant for your Sellers, but it's also meant on the disposition side too, and building that credibility and the authority.

And it's a step above. Whereas wholesalers may just find the best looking piece. Picture to send an email blast out. You send a picture out to your database, but you've got walkthrough videos like, hey, here's a thing rehabbers. There's a little bit of this is not a deal killer, but this is why you're gonna get it better. Or hey, you can see the backyard. Yes, it looks like Jumanji, so bring your bushwhacker, you know what I mean? You know, we've all heard the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. It's the same thing with video. Video's worth a million words.

And that's all documenting content. It's stuff that's already happening. So you're already walking through the house. Why not just shoot a quick video while you're doing it? And that's content you can pull out. You can send that to your email list. Like you said, when you film that property, instead of sending photos of the house on the profoma, send a video of the walkthrough explaining showing the cracks in the foundation, showing the mold in the ceiling, showing the roof leaking and all that kind of stuff. Send that out because you're going to have people that are more likely to trust you as well. And that's powerful. But documenting content is again, like testimonials is another way of documenting content. So when you're at the title company closing on a deal and Mr. Seller sitting across the table from you, just say, hey, do you mind if I just shoot a quick video with you? Just asking about your experience with you. And more times than not, guys, you'll find that if you actually provided a good service for them and they were happy with what you did, they're going to say, yes. You'll have people that are squirrely and they'll say, no, I don't like being on camera. Then ask them, hey, do you mind if I talk about your situation? I won't use your name, I won't use your address, but do you mind if I talk about your situation, How I was able to help you out of this problem? And that's called a case study and that's documenting as well. Because that's you're shooting a video talking about a deal that you did for somebody and you could publish that. So that's another good way.

Yeah, I think that's a great thing. Testimonials, talking about Your vendors. That goes a long way because a lot of people just aren't savvy. So if you can say, hey, I met First American Title Company with Ginger here, who's my closer, she did an amazing job. And that's going to help referrals because, like, oh, Ginger, nobody else has done that for Ginger. Ginger is like, I guess I'm going to call Josh, I'm going to call Scott, I'm going to call George, who did the testimonials for me as a way of giving back. And that's really building a network of referrals. Helps out tremendously.

Absolutely, absolutely.

You've seen issues with people as. I mean, by that, that people like, okay, maybe they're not afraid to film it on their phone or film it, but they just don't have the time or aren't technologically savvy. Let's talk about what you're doing and what you're doing with REI Video.

Yeah, sure, absolutely. Well, again, I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk about that. I'm not going to sales pitch anybody. This is a platform that is meant to help real estate investors be able to get video content out if you do want to produce. So if you do a property walkthrough or if you do testimonial video and you want it to look maybe a little cleaner on your website than just posting it Raw. I built a website called REI Video. So you just type in in your browser REI Video, don't do com, just video. And it'll take you to the website and working on.com right now domain, and we'll see how that goes. But right now it's not available. So anyway, you go to this platform, so you shoot your own videos, take out your phone, record that property walkthrough, record that testimonial, then you'll throw that into Google Drive, Dropbox, mega, whatever, OneDrive, whatever online storage platform you use, and then you go to the websites. There's only really two options. There's a monthly option where you can send unlimited videos. If you're doing more than like 10 videos, this is worth it a month. That or you can do single video edits where you submit that you have a short form to fill out. We can add closed captions, we can add video wrappers, titles, music cuts, graphics, all kinds of crazy stuff. And then we send it back to you in less than 48 hours, unlimited revision. So you get the exact video that you're wanting and you're looking for. And then we can even let you know, where to distribute this and how to distribute the video and that kind of stuff. So good platform and pretty low price for comparison to what other platforms are out there. But this is specifically built for real estate investors, which is why it's called REI Video. For you guys to be able to do that. That's one of the things I noticed, Scott, was people were filming their own videos. They know that they should be doing it, but then they look at them and like, I don't want to post this directly to my Facebook page or directly to my website because it just doesn't look clean. I stumbled around at the beginning or whatever, or I messed up in the middle of the video. I don't know how to edit. And that's what this platform is meant to do, to take that heavy lifting out of you, out of the process for you.

I love it. I love it. I love it. It's definitely a needed service out there because that's. People can understand the A to B to C getting started, but it's the back end that they don't have the time, they don't have the experience. And you've got the experience. And I think you're feeling a big need for investors out there and people that want to market and go. Because that's what we talked about this. Because we're all in media, all in marketing, and the more effective you can do. A little extra ad does take you a long way, but don't let that stop you from at least doing the first part and shooting the content.

Right? Yep, Absolutely.

Let's talk about the myth of virality, things going viral, because that's the thing. It's so many people, hey, I want to do a video, and I want to have thousands and millions of views. I'm like, no offense, if you're getting 30 views from just normally posting, that's 30 eyeballs that didn't see yourself beginning with that's a good thing, right?

Yep. Okay, so there's two elements to this. Number one is that, like, that's why I always tell people, like, what are your goals for the content, period? Because that should be the driving force of what you're looking for. So let's just say, for instance, your video does go viral. So you film a video and you post it on Facebook and it gets 300,000 views. Right. If you don't get any leads from that, you don't close any deals. The video was worthless.

Yep.

Worthless. Completely worthless. Here's the reason why. It's because you didn't like I didn't prove anything. It didn't convert anything for you. But if you post a video and it gets 30 views, but you close three deals from that, that was a very highly successful video. Am I right, Scott?

Like, that's like, amen to that. Yes.

You know what I'm saying? So that's why even one of the first things that came out of my mouth when I jumped on the show here was don't pay attention to vanity metrics. A vanity metric is something that doesn't lead to a direct conversion for your content or for your marketing period. One of the funniest questions that I get, Scott, is when I do production, this was like, kind of early on in my career when I did, when I produced a podcast or I filmed a video for somebody and got it posted for them and that kind of thing. I'd get questions all the time like, why didn't this hit a hundred thousand views in the first week? Or we just launched the podcast. Why Isn't it gotten 50,000 downloads? I'm like, that's not how it works. You know? And so, like, when I go in with clients now, the first thing that we do in the content marketing plan with them is create the goals for them. Like, what is the purpose? Why are we doing this right now? And if your goal is truly to get 50,000 downloads on your podcast, and that's what we create the plan around. But for most people, if you're an active real estate investor, that should not be your goal. Your goal should be to close deals because that's what your business does. Now, if you do have a mastermind, if you do have a podcast and that's one of your primary sources of income, then, yeah, you need to focus on that. But don't worry about viral videos. That's all smoke and mirrors, guys. That's dragging you away from actually focusing on what is going to produce results for you and produce ultimately income for you. That's the true meaning here. And the truth about viral content is that there is no secret sauce. I have seen the most idiotic, stupid videos go viral. And that's normally the ones that go viral, by the way, and just ridiculous videos that go viral or podcasts or whatever piece of content you want to put out. And there's no rhyme or reason. It's not that they posted it at 6pm when everybody's home. It's not that they posted on a weekend or they added the right amount of hashtags with the perfect formula of, like, the social media cocktail and that kind of stuff like that wasn't at all what went down. And then I've also seen some incredibly produced video content and incredible podcasts go up. And I'll even be honest with you, there's some videos and podcasts that me and my team were produced that we thought were going to go crazy, and they didn't. There's just no rhyme or reason. And then there's also content that we produce that's like missile through the roof and gotten a hundred thousand downloads in the first week, and we had no idea why. So there's just no rhyme or reason for it. And for you to hear marketers and marketing agencies say that they can do this for you, it's false. Guys, don't get caught up in that. Don't get tricked into somebody that's a marketing agency saying, yeah, we can get your social media following to 100,000 in less than two weeks. There's probably a way that they're doing it, and it's probably not an ethical way. And again, going back to the metrics, if you get 100,000 followers on your Instagram and nobody's converting, then it's worthless. There's no point in it. You just threw money down the table or down the trash.

Yeah, right. There's a lot of people up there like, oh, hey, I got a hundred thousand followers. Well, if 99% of them are over in Bangladesh and don't speak English or they're bots, that's fake. Never Pay to promote 10,000 views. That stuff doesn't work. I only said it because I've done it before is when I started off. I've done it, too, here to try. And then you're like, nobody showed up, or, hey, you had a followers. And then in six months, all those followers, those fake accounts were closed or removed.

Yep.

Now, the only time a silly video would look like the cat riding around the Roomba. You know, that's a funny video.

Yeah.

But it's not going to convert anything unless you put an affiliate code to a Roomba sales thing in the description or the cat collar thing or something like that. So that's kind of a funny aspect of things.

And typically, you'll find too, Scott, that, like, most brand content doesn't go viral. I mean, you'll have super bowl commercials that go viral if they're hilarious and funny. And all that's more primarily focused on brand awareness, because those companies can afford brand awareness. Doritos can throw up a commercial because they have millions of dollars at their disposure to be able to throw into marketing like that. But you, Mr. Real Estate Investor, that's in Podunk, Texas, you can't afford to just do brand awareness. So don't do it. Focus on things that are going to convert. And that's what a lot of people get lost in the weeds. And again, going back, like, if you do spend the money and build a following of 100,000 followers on Instagram but you don't convert, convert that somewhere else and get that data. If Instagram decides to shut its doors tomorrow, and whether it's another Cambridge Analytica, that happens, and the government finally says no more Facebook, no more Instagram, you've lost everything. You lose everything if you didn't put effort into building that audience somewhere else directly to a conversion. So keep that in mind.

Yeah, I love that stuff. That's a good point there.

And that's why I'm so focused on results driven content marketing. Because if I get a client that I build a following of a hundred thousand followers on Instagram and then tomorrow Instagram shuts down because they're going to look at me and say, now what I'm going to say? I don't know.

Put it on Facebook.

Exactly.

Let's go to the Twitter. To the Twitter following, stuff like that. But that thing is, you said something really important. Know what your plans are. What is your ultimate goal to get people to invest with you. Either send you deals, buy deals from you, give you money to fund deals. Is it important to get downloads or followers? Having a goal and sticking to that goal is doing the most important thing. Otherwise you're just going to really flop from one thing to another and get frustrated and say, ah, social media marketing doesn't work. Content marketing doesn't work because you're all over the place. And the biggest thing too, this drives me bonkers, is the I want to be all to everybody aspect of thing. Niching it down is the most important thing you can do. Right, Josh?

Yeah. And it's something important to understand about that is that's truth number one. Truth number two is the more you niche, the less audience you have. So you got to keep that in mind. Right. So Scott has a very defined audience. And the note closer show, this is about like closing notes. And not every single person on the planet is interested in note investing. And so he's adapting to people like he's specifically niched into people that A, are already investing in notes or B, interested in investing in notes. And so that causes his audience to shrink and then the more that you niche, the more conversion you'll see, but the less audience appeal you will have. So that's important to keep in mind and understand. So, yeah, that's truth number two is the more you niche, the less audience you're gonna have. But gotta keep in mind again, what are your goals if your goal is to close more deals? If you're a real estate investor, you're active real estate investor, you're not gonna build a YouTube channel of 100,000 motivated sellers. You're just not gonna do that. You might get 30 subscribers from Bangladesh, but it's not truth. But if you get people closing deals from those YouTube videos, then it's a successful channel. So that's what you gotta focus on.

Yeah, that's definitely things. Just focus on your goal, focus on your niche. I never expected to have a hundred thousand subscribers. It's just not that many people in the industry. But I do dominate the 10 or 20,000 people that are out there that are doing this on a regular basis. And we see that on a month in, month out basis. You know, 20 to 25,000 downloads. On the podcast, we just surpassed 20,000 for the month just last night. We'll maybe get to 30. I don't know. Depends on if people are listening.

So let me ask you this, let me ask you this. How long did it take you to get to that point?

20,000 downloads. Oh, per month from the start you.

Show to the time you hit 20,000 downloads.

Oh, in one month. Oh, 20,000 downloads. I think it was month six or seven, actually, because we cranked, we went. We had 15 and we had 10 this first full month, 15 the second month, and then it kind of dipped down to six and seven.

Yeah.

And it built back up. So it all came from being consistent. That was the first and foremost. So anytime we've had any dips where we've gone a week or two without uploading, dips down. So it's a matter of, okay, it's the consistency that I need to stick. It's also versus just recording it and throwing up on itunes. We've also taken an extra facet and been much more dedicated. Okay, let's make sure when an episode does come out, we carve in the time each day to at least reshare it across the platform. And that's helped increase it from being 150 downloads or 300 downloads in a day up to 600 downloads the first day or 900 downloads the first day.

So a statistic that's gonna make you laugh here, Scott. So 90% of podcasts that are started actually die off within the first six months.

Oh, yeah, I know that. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy.

That's like. Yeah. And so the reason being is because people are impatient, they want to see instant results. And this is why I always tell people content marketing is not advertising. You can get instant results with advertising. I could run a really defined and really well built Facebook ad right now and get deals closed left and right. You could do that. It's possible. But with content marketing, that's not how it works. Content marketing is a word, is meant to be consistent and stay flowing. Right. So like if you start a podcast and you don't get a thousand downloads within the first month, don't give up, keep going. That's why your goals are so important, is you need to get to that goal. That's why it's so important to establish and define that. You know, we've started a couple of podcasts for people way back in the day where we didn't ask them what their goals were. They just wanted to start a podcast because everybody else was doing it.

Yeah.

And within month, two or three, we got a call saying, yeah, this isn't working, we're going to stop. And that's because you're not well defined. So it's important to understand that, be patient. And like you said, consistency is bar non like the most important thing. Just stay consistent with it. Stay focused on your goal. And if you don't get to a place in a year, year and a half where you want to be, maybe you consider like, hey, is this truly not where my audience is? And go somewhere else. Stick with it. That's important.

Yeah. So I just pulled up on the screen so you can actually see. So I keep track religiously of my numbers here.

Awesome.

You know, 2300 the first week, which is first week August. And 15, 13, 9000, 7000, 10, 11, 18, down to 8, 6. Because I was on a cruise.

Yeah.

12, 15, 12. Just under 2022, 13.

The fluctuation is crazy.

It is. And then. But also too is the video. We keep track of video views on a YouTube channel, basic, so we don't see a lot hits, but we see consistency going from when I keep start keeping track of it in January 2017 with 2000 views now, it's consistently hitting the 3000 to 4000, the 5000 mark on views, which is what I want.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you guys even go to like my social media profiles on my YouTube channel, my podcast and stuff like that. Like, I'm not getting groundbreaking numbers right now. Like, my podcasts are actually growing faster than anything. But if you go to my YouTube channel, I mean, I've got like 30 subscribers right now, right? I mean, if you go to my Instagram, like 700 followers or something like that. But the important thing is this is why I don't frankly care, is because I'm actually converting a lot of people through that content, right? So a lot of my YouTube videos, like, I'll get people that email me, shoot me an email and say, hey, I listen. I get probably 10 to 15 emails a week from people that heard my podcast or watched my YouTube video and said, hey, this brought value to me. How can we work together? That's truly why I don't care, because it actually converts. And I know a lot of people rebuttal that with, well, Josh, the more quantity that you get, the more people you'll have reach out to you. And that's not always true, obviously, the more quantity of quality people that I get, it's not like I can snap my fingers and make that happen. You've got to grow into that like Scott has here.

So you've got to give it patience. Yeah. You patient and water it and nurture it.

Nurture it.

Yeah. And realize it's a process. It's 80% comes after the fifth contact. Sometimes people need to watch it for three or six months until they get in that ready position to buy, connect, or to sell with you. We could sit here and talk for hours about this. Josh, we're coming up on the end of our hour here. What's the best way for people to reach out to you, to connect with you? What's your preferred social media? What's the best way for people to reach out to find out more about what you're doing?

Josh, Facebook and Instagram are good. So if you just go to Facebook, if you go to Instagram, search Josh color, I'll come up. You'll see me. I'll either have my hat on or my hair done. So right now my hair is not done because I'm quarantined. But so just Facebook or Instagram is good. Just connect with me. Or you can email me directly. JoshuaMedia colored spelled C U L L E R colormedia.com and I'd be happy to answer any questions that your audience has and hopefully brought some value to you guys.

Oh, definitely. We'll also, for you guys that are listening to this, go to over to the website weclosenotes.com and of course in the show notes we'll have all the links to what Josh talked about as well there and the ways to connect with them. But Josh, thanks for coming on the note close show man. Thanks for just bringing it and delivering some great stuff to our listeners out there, man.

I appreciate man, thanks for having me on.

Honored to have you buddy. All right guys and gals, so listen to what Josh said. Get started, pull out that cell phone, take some selfies, take some co contact, answer some questions and get it posted, get it out there. So you start adding content, adding value to your ideal clients lives and that's one of the biggest things. Keep giving, giving, giving and it'll come back tenfold. You just got to give it time to grow and nurture and let people realize, hey, you're not going anywhere. Let me reach out to you because you never know when they come across you and you want to be there at top of mind, top of funnel, top of the web search. We'll see you guys later and see you all at the top everybody. Bye. That.