The Land Geek Podcast #25

This is a transcript of The Land Geek Podcast #25 (Mark J. Podolsky with guest Duran Frazier). The episode covers Land Hub's migration from Real Property Finder and its content-first SEO strategy, upcoming Stripe payment integration (replacing PayPal), plans for Craigslist and YouTube features, and a new offshore development service (SocialAchievement) to offer affordable dev work. The hosts emphasize list-building, landing pages + autoresponders, and newsletters as primary marketing tactics for selling land; discuss a recent deal anecdote (96-acre parcel; $30,000 property sold via an email list using a $500 down payment), note servicing with Evergreen Note Servicing, and recommend tools/resources (simpleology.com, warriorforum.com, forums.digitalpoint.com).
Questions this video answers
landhub.com; reserveland.com; ruralpropertyfinder.com (Real Property Finder); frontierpropertiesusa.com; thelandgeek.com; socialachievement.com; simpleology.com; warriorforum.com; forums.digitalpoint.com
A 96-acre parcel in northern Nevada; a $30,000 piece sold to their list (initial $1,000 down interest was weak; sale occurred after lowering down to $500).
Replacing PayPal with Stripe; Stripe holds payouts ~7 days and charges roughly 2.9% (AMEX noted as ~3% in discussion).
Land Hub completed migration from Real Property Finder and has content for all 50 states, with county-level content to be added.
SocialAchievement.com: an offshore development team (core ~30 people, networkable/scaleable to ~210) offering project managers and affordable dev work.
Chapters
Welcome to the Land Geek Podcast, your resource for information and tips to making money by buying and selling land. Let the Land Geek show you how to make a passive income by working smart, not working hard. Learn strategies and tricks to make money buying and selling raw land today. And here is the man that's gonna help you do that. The Land Geek.
Hey, it's Mark podolski with the landgeek.com and I'm with your favorite guest. My. Well, not really my favorite guest, but my guest, Joanne Frazier from landhub.com rural property finder.com reserveland.com and 100 other domains. If you listen to the 99 cent domain podcast, you know, he's always working, he's always got these ideas. The most innovative man in land. Duran, how are things in Carlsbad? What's going on, buddy?
Wow. It's a great intro. That's a great intro. You know, I'm losing you. Mark, are you there?
I'm here. I can hear you fine.
Okay, perfect. Yeah, I'm not the most innovative man in land, that's for darn sure. I think you take the credit for that one, but thank you. Everything's good, bud. I mean, San Diego, gosh, it's hard not to be outside today. 75 degrees here in San Diego. I guess one of the negatives is the waves are small, so I have to stay indoors and, and work. So.
And again, I'm playing the smallest violin ever for you.
I love it. I love it.
Yeah. So give us an update on Land Hub. What's going on with that?
So Land Hub, basically we are at the stage where we're adding a ton of content to the site. We've done that. We've done that. We've completed the migration from real property finder to Land Hub. So we are officially Land Hub and we have, I think we have, we have 50 states with the content and then we're going to be adding county, counties, content to counties and sort of pushing, pushing a real heavy content, heavy play on the website. And then we're going to move into a stripe integration which is going to take, take the payment PayPal platform away and integrate the, the stripe platform into the website, which will be a lot more user friendly.
Yes, stripe is great. Stripe is great. For those of you who don't know about stripe, you know, definitely Google it. But Duran, you want to give us like an overview of why stripe is better than say, paypal or authorize.net I.
Think stripe found that there's just so many. There's so many what's rules and regulations when it comes to credit card platforms.
So basically fees, there's tons of fees.
Correct. Like the 29 cents for transaction and it goes up to 2.9% but down to 2.5% or up to 3 point depending on how many transactions you do. So they just make it simple. 3% across the board on everything. No, no transaction fees. Really simple.
Right. And Amex is typically more expensive and it's just 3% for Amex, right?
Correct.
So that's it. One fee, no other. You know, no other. Figuring out what your fees are going to be now. The only thing I don't like about stripe, and this is literally just nitpicky, that they hold the money for seven days so they're making real money on that float. But that's fine. That's how they solve the no fee dilemma. I'd rather that than have to look at my, you know, 10 page statement every month and you know, try to dissect that and be like, what's my real percentage here that I'm paying?
Correct. So yeah, so that's, that's, that's finished up next week. And then we move into our software heavy milestone which is, which is focusing on the Craigslist aspect and the YouTube aspect of the, of the platform, which we think is going to be a big winner for our clients. So that, that begins to happen over the next, I would say three weeks. So I'm pretty excited about that.
So when can I sign up? Like can I start listing property now?
You can, but we, I prefer you to wait because we, we, we don't have the stripe platform integrated yet. I mean you can use PayPal, but what's going to happen is your account obviously is going to go away. You're not going to be subscribed, which makes it a little bit of a, a nightmare for us to resubscribe you. I mean it's not a nightmare. We just, we have to email you to resubscribe on the stripe system.
So are the podcast listeners going to get a discount? Do you. Discount coupon codes?
Yep, we're going to give a 1 1% off to listeners.
The, the land coupon code.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Forget, forget. No, I, we will, we'll set something up for listeners for sure.
Is it, is it going to be difficult to implement.
What a coupon code?
Yeah, yeah. Like with stripe. I mean how does that work?
Not, not at all. I think those, those, all those new platforms allow that. So they'll just have a separate area for Code to add, to add that, that bar space that says coupon code right now.
I, I paid.
What you want to, you want. Now what you want to be careful doing is when you, when you set that up for like in our situation is you don't want people to always go looking for coupon codes. So we, we, we're going to be very careful. I'd rather, I mean it's, we're, we're pricing this so reasonable that it's almost to a point where we don't want to give coupon codes because it is going to add a lot of value for, for a, for a seller.
No, I mean the, the. Yeah, I, I get that. I mean I would do it if it was twice the price because that's what my time's worth. So it makes a lot of sense for a full time land seller. You know what's interesting about all this and getting back to Stripe is I paid a developer $800 to make a custom checkout page for me and it's the most kludgy thing ever. I had to make a separate YouTube video just to explain to people. If you're going to frontierpropertiesusa.com and you are on that site and you're on listings and you buy a piece of property from me, it's not easy and I think I'd like to find a developer to use Stripe and fix that and just have a real clean, simple interface. You put in your information, I want to know your vesting information and check out. And that's it.
Here's the good news for you, Marcus. One of my new little ventures. And of course it's part and parcel of everything I'm doing now is I am, I'm, I have a team of people that I've put together and I'm actually going to be utilizing that team as a core team of people that I can actually sell to other people. So I will have a development team in place and I will be migrating a new site over to SocialAchievement.com and which will be basically creating the ability for anybody like you who needs just a simple developer. You can email, they'll get back to you and they'll give you a price quote and it's, and it's offshore developers. It's not, it's not here in the US So it's very reasonable.
I love that idea. That'll help a lot. Will they do landing pages?
They'll do everything.
Really?
Yep. So every project will have a project manager and they will help you. And again, they'll be in the Philippines. But everybody, you'll, you'll basically be able to utilize my team of people. And, and it'll be set up under social.social achievement.com. currently the site's up and running, but it's, it's an older, it's an older site that deals with just primarily San Diego. But we're going to focus kind of on a more national level to allow people to utilize that team. Because I have, I have a team of about 30 people, but that I, that I use. But we're going to, we have a, with that team, we have the ability to scale to about 210. So we have a huge network of people that you guys can utilize through my connections.
Fantastic. So I mean, if I want to do that, just have to go to social connection.com then. Right.
Social. Social achievement dot com.
Social achievement dot com.
Correct.
Got it. Correct. So you've been doing any deals? You want to talk about some deals?
You know, I have been doing non, a couple of non real estate deals this week that are just finance structures. So I, I don't have much on the real estate side we can talk about.
All right. Well, I, I just closed on a 96 acre parcel and in northern Nevada. And you know what, it's, it's interesting. I actually partnered with a coaching student on it. So he brought me the deal. Didn't want to go through the brain damage of every doing everything because I've already done so many deals in that county, so brought it to me. Didn't want to put out as much cash as that deal required either. And so we did it together. And the beautiful thing about this deal and what I want the point of it is, is how he sold it. So we didn't have to go to any major platforms. Right. We didn't have to go to Craigslist or an ebay or a land watch or Lands of America, whatever it may be. Right. We just went to our existing list and this is why I think list building is so critical today. And literally in a week and a half, we sold a $30,000 piece of property. Right. And that kind of, you know, is mind boggling to me that we're able to do that. So. And we got a pretty good down, too. We wanted $1,000 down and it was crickets when we did that. I had a lot of interest at $1,000 down, but nobody paid. But then when we lowered it to 500, we got our deal and now we're going through the process. Oh, Guess who I've got by the way, using managing that note now say it again. Evergreen Note Servicing. I'm back in the business with them.
Oh, how did you. Did you structure that note a particular way for them to allow you to do that?
You know what? I called Katharine Fritter over there, explained to her what we were doing, and she let us docusign that deal. As long as we've got a recorded deed in place on file with them in case Jeff and I die. And then the buyer can still get his deed, which is a good way to do it. I have everything set up with my attorney here. So in case I die and you're paying me on a note that the estate will just deed your property. And it doesn't have to be my signature, but they wanted it that way. I think it's smart.
Yeah. Most noticers, companies do not work with contract for deeds, at least the ones that I've called. Did they give you some specific parameters in order for you to work with them?
No, no, I mean, it's just, you know, they charge $100 setup fee and then they charge a monthly fee and that's it. They, you know, they, they don't love the land contract, but they'll do it. As long as everything's recorded, they're fine.
Got it. And so you actually record it in the county. That's it?
Yeah, that's it. Which, you know, standard anyways.
Yeah, for the most part.
So really happy with that deal. But you know, it got me thinking how important list building is. And you know, even if it's a slow drip, even if you're only getting one or two opt ins a day, I find I really. And you could argue with this with me. I really think landing page today and a good autoresponder series is more important than a good website. You want to debate this?
No.
You agree with me?
Well, I mean, you're, you're. It's kind of a broad. It's kind of a broad question. Question in terms of, of whether or not it's a. It's. It's a smarter move. But if you, if you have rankings of particular keywords that are, that are highly. Converting keywords for, for land itself, then I would disagree that landing page is important because I would say, hey, if you could sell land on your webpage and these are high. Converting keywords that go to your site, it's more important to have a web page. But.
Okay, well, let me ask you this. How many people go to your website and buy property Cold have no relationship with you, just like the deal and buy it.
Probably one to two a month.
Come on.
You know what? When you have my.
Come on, man.
When you have my sales ability. Are you kidding me?
No, no. I'm not saying they contact you, they just go on the website, they buy it.
No, I'm not. That doesn't happen. That doesn't happen.
It doesn't. That's what I'm saying. It doesn't happen. And you're like an SEO master samurai, right?
Yes, yes.
So you're getting, I guarantee you're getting more traffic to reserve land than I'm getting the frontier properties.
Yeah, there's no doubt about that. But, but like I said, I think that a list is important, but I think it depends on how you structure it whether or not I believe that one is more valuable than the other.
Okay, I see. This is. I disagree with you. I think we're seeing literally a glacial shift from the industrial economy. Right. To the connection economy. And until we make that connection, commerce is going to be much more sluggish. Once we make that connection, we establish that rapport. Right. We have a connection either, you know, through Facebook or Twitter, you're email list, whatever it is, we've provided some value for you first. Right. It's going to be very difficult to do any kind of big ticket sale in the future. Does that make sense?
I agree. I agree. Your, your list has to trust you. Your clients have to trust you.
Right. And the only way to do that is to provide value. So like you're doing freelandreport.com I'm doing three fatal land buyingmistakes.com I'm doing a coffee talk series. I don't know if you've watched any of those videos, but you know, all those things, they don't take much time, but they add value.
Yeah.
So yeah, I mean you were talking about what you were going to do as far as article writing for Land Hub and how that content's so important and can you kind of talk more about that?
Ask the question again, sorry.
You know how you're going to write more articles for Land Hub and create more content and you had like a whole system in place.
Well, I don't want to talk about that system publicly just yet.
You don't give us what you're going to do, the ins and outs, but just the broad strokes of it, why you're doing it.
Okay, so we all know that Google wants content heavy websites to rank in the search rankings. And so what I doing with Land Hub is basically taking all my pages from counties to states and adding content to each page to talk about each county, which will help build the organic rankings.
I see.
Does that make sense?
That makes sense.
Dumb. You know, I can go into further detail, but basically, and, and it would probably be over everyone's head, but it's more of a. It's a play at content because that's where Google's going.
It's a play in content because that's where Google's going.
Correct.
Okay, so the better the content, the better your search ranking. Basically.
The better the, the better. And the more unique content, the higher the chance you have a ranking on. On Google.
Okay. And then you're going to. So do you do keyword research first? Like, give me an example of what you need to do to rank in Google.
There's so many variables. I mean, you want to. You. Okay, you want to. First of all, if you're on a WordPress website, you want to. You want to. You want to try and use similar words. Right? So let's say your, let's say your target word is Nevada Land. You want to tag Nevadaland as many times as you can in an article without being overkill. But you got to be careful because. Because Google will read like six or seven times being too many. And they actually have a term for it. I forget what the term is called.
Keyword stuffing.
Yeah, but it's called keyword density. And then you want to tag the page, the title of the page, and then you separate paragraphs and you talk about Nevada Land for sale. You use Nevada Land in the headings. And then of course, throughout the article. And then of course, the meta tags are also going to have them in there which you, which you can't see from the front end, but if you right click and you view Source, you can read it.
I see.
So okay, if that makes sense.
That makes sense. That makes sense. Okay.
Go ahead, Mark.
No, no, it's, that's, it's interesting. I think it's helpful, especially, I mean, you know, this would be my advice if you're just starting out, right. And I want to see if you agree with this. Number one, a landing page. Number two, a good autoresponder series that includes valuable content to give to your. Your. Your list. Right. And then number three, blogging for. For traffic and YouTube videos. If you need traffic to your site or your landing page, I would do those four things first. Right.
I agree. I agree.
You do agree with that?
I do agree.
Okay. So, yeah, I think that's a good way to start. And then once you start getting that traffic, start getting those leads in, then start making offers and promotions to your list. Hey, gang, just bought 40 acres in Northern Nevada. You know, only $200 down, 200amonth. This expires on Monday. Right. So create some urgency there, too. And you're going to sell. You're going to sell property that way all day long. And I think it's more important than having this beautiful website that could cost you $2,000 to create. Where? I don't know. I think, you know, unless it's. I don't know. I just. I'm down on the website idea. I'd rather go to a landing page and have platforms to sell on than having spending a lot of time on the website now.
Yep. Well, I think one of the things. To mention about the website is that it does give you that foundation and sort of build kind of. It makes you a viable player in the space. People look at you and go, I can trust this guy.
He.
He's got a website. He's selling 10 properties, not one. So there's a couple of ways to look at it. But you're right. I mean, the idea from a marketing aspect, you want to bring them in, you want to educate them, and you want to sell them something. Right.
So you could create A very basic WordPress site for what, under 200 bucks? Right. And you could even go to like a fiverr, have someone do that. But then within that website, really focus on your landing page. Really put more of your effort into the landing page and the autoresponder series, because that's ultimately what's going to bring you revenue.
Yeah.
Would you agree with that? Rather than spending all this time and money making this beautiful website in a gorgeous logo and, you know, having it functional, you know, I'd rather see on a website some basic information about that, about the company, you know, some testimonials, you know, give me the basic warm and fuzzies. But then I want some. Something more like, informationally.
Yep. No, I agree. I agree.
Okay. I thought you were going to argue with me on that.
No, I mean, look, I think at the end of the day, I mean, to disagree with you. I mean, there's reasons why I think a website's important, but if you're just getting into the game and trying to sell land, I mean, the offline component when it comes to real estate is very viable. But when I say offline, I mean, like you sending a newsletter to me is somewhat offline because you're not utilizing your website directly and you're using a component of communication that will eventually turn to turn into a phone call, right?
Yeah. You know what? I like the idea of a physical newsletter as well. I really do. You know, you send somebody a physical newsletter. First of all, we're getting so much stuff in our email inbox now. It's almost going to come back around where, you know, marketers are going to go after our mailbox. I don't get as much junk mail as I used to. Do you?
I don't, I don't. I don't get as much, but I still get quite a bit. I take. I mean, it's interesting. It goes in spurts. I'll get a week where I get very little and then I get a week where I get a ton. So.
Yeah. So, you know, if you send out a physical newsletter, let's say a three, five page newsletter that has got great information in it about the land market, real estate market, you know, the properties you're selling, that thing's gonna live there for the entire month because people leave it on the counter, they can share it with their friends as opposed to you get an email, bing delete. You know what I mean?
Yep, totally. I agree, I agree.
You know, it's certainly, it's certainly something to explore. There's a site out there that was recommended to me that helps you make these newsletters. I can't remember it. I'm sure if you Google, you know, newsletter, newsletter Helper or something like that, it'll pop up. But I think it's like 79 bucks a month. And they create these templates for you and, you know, half the content is already kind of written and then you just write the rest of it and then they fulfill it. They send it out for you and they do everything for you. It makes writing newsletters really easy. So I'll find out, but the name's kind of not there for me. But yeah, I mean, go ahead.
No, no, I would say, like, so. So that kind of leads us into what some stuff we talked about earlier. But I'd love to hear a little more about that tip of the week that you have. Did you want to, you want to lead. Lead us into your tip of the week?
Yeah, I mean, this is. This came from Tory during a Gold Mastermind session. And I just started playing with it and I really like it. You know, we've talked about my add. You've got add and there's some days where I feel like I'm just doing Stuff and getting done, but I'm not getting the wigs done. My wildly important goals for that day. Right. And so there's a site called simpleology.com simple and then ology o l o g y.com and it's like a getting things done site. It's web based, it's free and I'm just getting into it so I can't go on, you know, on and on about it. But from what I've already done on it, it's really nice. That's going to be my tip of the week is simpleology.com. do you have a tip?
You know what? I don't really have a tip today because I honestly didn't have time to think about one.
Well, can you come up with one real fast? I love putting you on the spot. There's nothing finer.
Okay, let's see here. You know what? I do have one. There's a site called warriorforum.com.
Warriorforum.Com. Okay, what's Warriorforum?
Warrior Forum is the number one Internet marketing forum since 1997. It's basically a place where you can get, it's like a hub of ideas where you can get ideas from anything. You know that people create softwares, they put them on there for Internet marketing, for marketing newsletters, everything you could think of. But there's a lot of information and people speak back and forth to each other. I think it's pretty reasonable. I think you get paid one price and you sign up for it. It's like a lifetime membership, like 50 or 60 bucks. But really good information.
Really. Okay, I'm going there now. You've never been a warrior for mark Internet marketing forums? Oh yeah, I've been here.
Of course you've been here.
Yeah, this is, this seems so sketchy to me.
Are you serious?
Yeah.
Oh no, it's.
It seems like everybody's trying to sell somebody something.
Yeah, don't, don't, don't worry about the sales aspect. Just read into what you. There's a lot of helpful people there that have a lot of good tips and information.
Okay, so where do you go? There's like copywriting forum, AdSense forum, article.
Forum, whatever you want to, whatever you want to learn about. I learned a lot from this website. A lot.
But which forum? Which, where did you go?
I went to, I went to the main Internet marketing discussion forum, which is the first one. Then I, then I would. If I wanted to learn about social media marketing forum, I'd go there. Mobile market. I mean you, you can See whatever you want. AdSense, PPC, Copyright Inform. They've got all these different forms. You can get information. There's another one called. I think it's called. Let me find out. Let's see. Which I know you've been to, Mark. It's. It's really similar. It's called forums.digitalpoint.com.
Which one is it? Forums.digitalpoint.com forums.digitalpoint.com all right, I'm going to go there.
You got to know about this, Mark.
Forums, Digital. I don't know any of this stuff.
Wow.
I'm a land guy. I'm not a marketing guy.
I'm appalled.
All right, digitally advertising. Advertise virtually anything here with cpm, banner ads, cpm, email ads.
No, that's just that area. That area is for sale. But if you go down, you can see Google Questions, Yahoo, Bing, searching by. You can. You can get search engine information. You can ask questions about business and marketing. There's a really cool website with really intelligent people.
This is cool. Is this free?
This is free. And it's similar to Warrior Forum, but in the sense that this one is free and that one's not interesting.
Okay, cool. So I like this.
So educate yourself, educate your mind.
SEO, payment processing, social networks, general business, general marketing. Look at this. 44,845 discussions, 418,000 messages. General marketing. This is a vibrant platform here.
Very, very vibrant. Yep.
Huh.
So pretty cool.
Fantastic. Fantastic. All right, well, great tips, good podcast. So I guess we're, we're done. Anything else on your mind?
I think we're good.
We're good. All right, well, just a reminder to everybody, Duran needs some love. Please check out Landhub. But wait, just check it out. Give him some feedback. If you like it or not, he was, you know, asking about the logo. So give them some feedback on the logo, but check out landhub.com and then it's going to be ready in a couple weeks.
Yep.
Yeah, it's going to be ready in a couple of weeks. Stran.
I think that by the end of. By next Friday, by the time this is launched, we'll probably have a couple of days before it's actually live. Maybe even be live by the podcast.
Okay, great. We'll do that and then go to reserveland.com, send them some love there. You know, invest in some wholesale land. Or if Duran doesn't have anything you want, go to my site, frontierpropertiesusa.com and invest in some wholesale land with me. And if you haven't done it yet. Go to thelandgeek.com download for free. And you know what I should say register for free. And now if you register, yeah, a little bit more information from you. But in exchange for that extra information, instead of just getting the free passive income blueprint, now you're getting the passive income blueprint, the three fatal land buying mistakes. And we're emailing you the podcast each week, plus the coffee talk videos, which you don't have to then go to on YouTube as well. So all that absolutely free. So check out the site thelangeek.com and do us. Send us some comments. Let us know how we're doing. If there's any topics or tips you'd like us to discuss in the following weeks, let us know. And we'd appreciate that feedback and how we're doing. So, Duran, anything else?
I think we're good, Mark.
All right. Hey, I really. And Duran, thank you, good time sir, for taking the time out of your extremely busy week of deal making to spend time with me. So this is Mark Podolski, the Land Duran Fraser from landhub.com make it a great productive week and we'll see you next time. Thanks a lot.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the Land Geek. Join us next time for more tips, secrets and information that will help you succeed. Stay connected with the Land Geek on facebook@facebook.com thelandgeek.
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