The Land Geek Podcast #5

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Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the Land Geek. And again, I've got the multi talented, multi entrepreneurial serial entrepreneur, Duran Frazier from reserveland.com with me from beautiful Carlsbad, California. And let's just be clear, Duran, you have lost all complaining privileges in my book simply because. What did you do today?

I surfed for about three hours.

Yeah, you had like a family day on the beach.

I did have. And in fact, I actually snuck in a little family day yesterday evening as well and surfed again till sunset.

It's just wrong. What's the temperature there today?

Today, Yesterday. I'm right around 80, 82 degrees.

It's so good, but so, so good. So what can you possibly have to complain about? You've lost all complaining privileges. You're making a lot of money, your family's healthy and happy, you're living off the beach. You can do whatever you want. I don't ever hear you complaining about anything anymore. So this podcast, I'm not taking any of your crap deal.

Dude, nothing will ever change. I will always give you crap. That's number one. Number two is I don't normally complain unless I just looking back on it, we've talked about this numerous times. When you've taken your. What's the word I can use for you mark? Your creativity, your genius in real estate and using it against me when you do this.

Fine.

You'Ve done a few times, but it's always come out good because I don't hold grudges. But that's okay. We've already talked about this. It's water under the bridge. Until the next episode.

Yeah, I can tell. I can tell. You've let it go. We'll talk about that another time. Joanne and I. Whatever. I'm not talking about it now.

We have a love. We have a love. Love, love, Hate relationship.

Yeah, right. Look, when you've known somebody for over 12 years, things are going to happen. It's a relationship. You're going to have downs. I just don't like that you're always dwelling on that one. Deal.

No, not. It's not. I don't even know what deal you're talking about. But hey, we have. Look, you got the looks and I got. And I don't know what I got. I got, I don't know, gray hair, balding. But again, I'm not complaining. Oh, I got a beautiful wife. That's right. You do, too. So we can't really talk about that.

Right? Right. No, my wife's beautiful, but she's not a model. She's not professionally beautiful.

Stop it. Just stop it.

It's fine. All right, listen, thank you. Let's. Let's start the show. Okay.

Okay.

Nobody wants to hear about our personal lives and your personal vendetta against me.

Yes.

Like five years ago. So this. This is the deal. Last week we talked about social media and. Okay, I want to know your experiences with social media. I'll tell you my experiences with social media and whether or not we can both agree that this is something worth exploring, worth doing, something that's important for your marketing in land. So what do you think?

First of all, I'm going to give you my two favorite sites, so you guys might want to take note of this. One is MySpace.com and second is friendsters, friendster.com. both of those have changed my life dramatically. And I heard there's a couple of small ones dragging right behind, like maybe Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter. Anyways. No, I'm kidding. Obviously, social media, for me, being such a social butterfly, it's even to open the door of opportunities for me in business relationships. I have several virtual friends I've never met before, which is really neat. And then when it comes to business, obviously what I'm learning is your business actually has a personality and it can be shown through social media online, so. And that's what Google has discovered as well.

Yeah, but how do you do that? How do you. Okay, I'll tell you my experience with social media, I suck at it. And I think it's just my age, Honestly, I think I'm just. I'm at that point in my life where I think, like, growing up, you know, privacy was like, a big deal right now there's no privacy. I wrestle with that. And then you kind of wrestle with the fact that, you know, are we friends with our customers? Is this business? Like, are they blended? So, you know, finding that voice for me on social media has been very difficult. And it's like, I don't know what to do. It's hard for me.

Yeah, I'm a little different than you, but, you know, you know, if you're younger than me. Yeah, but if you think. If you think about this for a moment, your real Life personality is very similar to your social personality, whereas my real life personality is really, really similar to my social personality. Meaning I like to talk about things with people and discuss things on Facebook, you know, have a conversation. I like commentary. I like discussing whether it's politics or religion or whatever it is. I like to debate. I'm a debater.

Yeah, but is that really okay, so from reserve lands point of view, how does that serve reserve land?

No, no, I'm talking more, more from a personal level, but then into a business. And I'll share this with you as you, as, as, as a business and running a business, how that interacts with, from a, from a business level is totally, is totally similar in terms of your business. The way you work, the way you run your operation. If you are hip, if you are young, if you are open to talking with your customers and your clients, if you are open to commentary, they will come and they will, they will respond. But you have to do things that intrigue the cl. You have to do different things. You can't be. It's not. There's no status quo anymore. You have to be creative. What, what draws the marketing eyes to your brand? What draws the marketing attention to your land? So it's doing things that, you know, dressing up like a ninja, standing on your land, doing something fun, creative, and, and for your, for your, you know, for your people listening here. Obviously we can, we can talk about some of the funny things that we've come up with, but one of them was just being land ninjas, because I feel like Mark and I dressed up in a fancy samurai suit would be really funny. But again, to me, it's kind of a marketing piece that you can play to in your social media. And it does. And sure, not everyone's going to enjoy it, is going to listen to it. But at the end of the day, if they know you're successful, they like what you do, they're going to listen to you and they're going to watch it. So.

Right.

Right.

Okay. This is how I think about social media. It's like a big party, right? So you go to your friend's house, there's 500 people there, everyone's having a good time, there's a big party. But when you go up to meet somebody, you don't say to them, hey, I'm Mark from Frontier properties, I've got 40 acres in Nevada, Nice to meet you. Like, you gotta talk to them and establish a rapport first. Right. But as Frontier Properties in that business mode, I don't that's where I struggle because I don't know how to say. I'm really having a hard time finding my voice. Like, what do you do as reserve land? You say, do you just give them valuable information about land and then say, oh, by the way, here's land I just recently bought. And then they feel like they have a connection to you. See, this is the part in social media where I have trouble, okay? I really do. And I don't spend as much time as I probably should given the price. It's free. It's just my time. I just.

Yeah, but here's what you said. You're talking to me like I know what I'm doing when it comes to social media for my, my, my land business, and I don't. You don't.

So you struggle with the same thing.

Well, it's not that I struggle. It's that I know what I don't know. And I know enough to know that I'm not trying to build a social media land brand. Because at the end of the day, there's a lot of things that people do, and I've seen it a hundred times where they try to build a social media brand around their, their company and their, and they're, you know, a B2B or a, you know, a B2C. But not realizing exactly how to build that brand online and not even looking at the fact that maybe their customers don't want to interact with them, if that makes sense. And that comes back to us.

Now wait a second. Why wouldn't they want to inter with them? We all know the. We want to do business with people we know, we like and we trust. And if your friends can recommend, hey, I just bought land from this guy, isn't that, isn't that great? If somebody posts on Facebook, they like your page and I just bought this property from Duran and it was a great deal. You should too. You don't think that has value?

No, I definitely think it has value. Obviously, another thing that you can, you can look at and it is kind of under the blanket of social media, is the review aspect. So there is something that I believe that you could do, but not necessarily creating, trying to create or focusing on creating a brand or social media brand behind your real estate company. Now look at how many people have failed. I mean, social media is fail. I mean, literally, it's failed 99% of the time trying to build a brand online. And it's simply because you have to put your eyes in your customer's head so you can Understand exactly what your customer is looking for and what he's going to want to see. Now, the problem is with Land is buyers are so different and it's hard to really grasp which buyer is buying, what, why is he buying. And so as the algorithm of social media kind of comes to a head and we start learning how to really understand each of these people's personalities and why they do the things they do, that's something we could utilize to sort of build the social media brand. But to be honest with you, Twitter, to me, I mean, unless you're really trying to. And for most people that don't know, Twitter is indexed in Google. So it helps sort of build and I think Facebook fan pages as well. So it helps kind of build your social authority with Google and the algorithm and the search engines. So that is helpful.

Do you have a reserved land business page?

I do. I don't. But. But rare. Rare. Rarely utilized. Rarely utilized.

Okay, I'm going there now. If I can find it. Do I look under Duran or do I look under Reserve land? I can't find it.

Look under. Look under Duran. No, I'm sorry. Look under reserve. I'm sorry. Look. What am I. I'm not with you. Here, look on a reserve land. Not my name.

They're going to reserve one word.

It might be reserve. It actually might be Reserve land Management.

Reserve Land management. Three were. Okay. Reserve land management. Oh, I think I found it. I think I can't even find it. Yeah, here it is. 111. People like you. That's pretty good.

Thank you. I've been really working super hard at that.

This is beautiful. I love this picture you've got up here. Okay, so how do you do this then? I'm gonna like your page. Here we go. I didn't do it right. See, I'm really bad at this. Okay, liked learning.

I'm learning.

Now you have 112 likes. So do you spend a lot. How much time do you spend on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn? Those are the three big ones for land. We're not going to spend time on Pinterest or any of these other groups.

Are we are so wrong.

I'm wrong. You like Pinterest?

I don't like Pinterest personally, but it's very, very valuable because what Pinterest is, it's a visual marketing tool for clients. So if we can find a way. Right now it's a lot more female oriented, but it's starting to change. So you're. We're getting to a point where A lot of guys are getting on Pinterest because, you know, whether it's an infographic or a photo, it's all about photos. And photos are what sells our land. So it's a very interesting tool and it's becoming more utilized and they're finding ways to integrate the male specie in Pinterest.

Okay, so are you doing this yourself or do you have a virtual assistant or your assistant doing your social media.

I actually own a social media company with about 30 people, so they do all my. I'm just kidding. Could you imagine that? And I only have 100 likes on my page. That'd be hilarious. No, I do. To be honest, I do a lot of it myself. And I actually am, because I'm well versed on Facebook and LinkedIn and that kind of stuff. I do it myself and I don't spend enough time. And I'll have to be dead honest with you, I don't spend a lot of time there.

So you don't think it's worth the time then? So, okay, if someone's asking us, hey, I'm going to get into the land business, do I need to have. Should I be spending time marketing on social media? What would you say at this point? Is it worth their time?

Hmm. You know, that's really a tough question to ask, because if I asked it, if I felt like it was. It was valuable, I'd be doing it. But the problem is it costs a lot of money to get it right. And at that level, obviously there's. There has to be a measurable ROI in terms of understanding what the value is for creating the brand and continuing to build the brand online. So to create a social media brand, you are spending money. I mean, you know, there's a. I had a company pitch me on, I think it was $1,500 a month to run a Facebook. To run our Facebook campaign for another company that I'm invested in. And it was just interesting to me. But I realized that they are. They. I mean, they go to these conferences and they learn. I mean, these things change every day. I mean, Google changes the algorithms just to make sure that they know that they're in control, let you know they're in control. You know, Facebook does the same thing. I mean, they control everything. So at the end of the day, they can change. When Facebook fan pages changed, whatever it was nine months ago, it literally changed everything. I had built a really neat page, and three months later, it was lost. And it was a page you could click to. I think you could search on it. It was really neat. It was a back end, like an API that was built into an iframe that was on the Facebook fan page. It was really neat. Anyway, so I don't want to get too technical here, but I don't yet. See, and again, it's not that it's that there's no value. It's just that I haven't quite figured out the value.

You know what I think it could be valuable that we should probably be doing is after we make our sale, we have that customer. That's when we say, hey, let's connect more socially. Because now they've done business with you, right? They already understand what you're doing, what you're all about. They've already. Obviously they trust you and like you to give you money and buy from you. So maybe that's how you extend that relationship and add another layer on so that when they are ready to buy another piece or refer their friends, now you're on that platform with them. Hey, we're Facebook friends, you know, Jim or whatever. Hey, let people know about Frontier Properties USA or the Land Geek or Reserve Land or tweet about it, whatever it is. See, that's the thing. I don't even have the right language for it. I don't even know how to do that. Is that something you do? How do you even do it? I don't know.

Okay, so there is. And as you're talking, I was thinking of a way, like having them give you a review. So you set up the process, whether it's Yelp, whether it's Google reviews, and that's not. I don't want to get into Yelp, but I don't trust Yelp. In fact, you have 10 good reviews on Yelp, and then Yelp calls Yelp a week later and tells you you need to join their market marketing program. Pay them 300 bucks a month, they'll wipe all your bad reviews away and keep your good ones. But if you don't, if you decline that, they'll wipe all your reviews away and including your good ones. So it's a silly system based around one thing, which is money. But then again, that's what makes the world go round. But discussing that, you're right. If I had somebody that bought for me and I said, hey, go to my Facebook fan page or our Facebook fan page and just let us know what you thought. You know, give us your opinions. And if anybody comes out, and if you do that, we'll give you $20 off your next monthly payment, or we'll create some sort of affiliate. And for those that don't know what affiliate marketing is, basically it's a percentage of a sale that somebody else brings to you. So if you're typing in organic shampoo and it comes up with a site that isn't Amazon but has like an Amazon box inside, and you click the box and it takes you to Amazon for the cart you buy, that's called an affiliate marketing site. And that person that initially got the click has a cookie on his computer for 30 days, at which point he gets a commission not just on what you buy there, but for the next 30 days, whatever you buy, unless you clear your cash. And that's how affiliate marketing works, that same system, basically, you probably wouldn't have something as integrated as Amazon and put a cookie on the screen, but you could certainly go back and track, hey, I was referred by this guy from the Facebook fan page. Said he liked the property, whatever the case is, and then you find a way to reward him.

Right? Right. You know what I'm going to do?

What's that?

I'm going to commit to 90 days of being on social media. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to blog every other day. Okay. I'm going to take that blog. I'm going to push out to Facebook and Twitter. I don't do Pinterest though.

Right. Try it, learn it, Go on a limb and just do it.

All right, I'm going to try it. I'm definitely going to commit to Twitter and Facebook and I'm sort of blog every other day. I'm going to go to Twitter and I'm going to tweet it. I'm going to go to Facebook, I'm going to try to build my fan page with likes and, and then see what happens and see if I can get a really good analytic of return on investment for my time.

I'd love to see how that works out. The virtual assistants aren't going to help you, so you have to be personally involved.

Okay. So, Duran, what are you going to do to test your social media strategy or are you going to do anything?

Maybe I'm going to watch you actually, and I'm going to steal all your ideas.

See, that's right. I'm a moving target, baby. You can't copy me. I'm constantly innovating.

That is almost true.

No, you know what? Let's do the Pinterest Facebook challenge. You do something on Pinterest, I'll do Facebook and Twitter and see if we get anything from it.

That's actually a good idea. And here's how we can track. Let's track, you know, what your current traffic is in your site. And you can also track, obviously, your. Your Google Analytics. Why don't you track your analytics and then look at the source of the analytics?

Okay.

And then from there, we can. We can probably track what percentage you got from. From Facebook, from Twitter, and then I can track what I got from Pinterest.

Okay, so next week then. So we can both agree that social media could be valuable if you committed to it. We don't know. Neither one of us are doing anything with social media right now. Neither one of us have a strategy, and we haven't needed one. But we can both agree that it's probably not a bad idea. Is that true?

That is 100% true. Now another. Another thought, actually. I don't want to give you this tip, Mark.

What that's going to ask you is, I know you got to go, so you're gonna have to give me the tip of the week.

Okay. Well, it's not a tip, but it's just something that's sort of useful. And for those that don't know Facebook very well, obviously Facebook has an ad platform. And within Facebook's ad platform, which has actually morphed several times in the last six months, there's ways to actually promote a particular post. And if you're not on Facebook, you don't see it. If you are, you'll see it. Now, even under a private post, if you post something that you feel is important and you want to broadcast that, you can promote the post. You can Pay, like, literally instantly, 20 buc. And you can promote that post to 1,000 people or 2,000 people, or broadcast to friends of friends or however you want to do it. In this case, we're talking about land. So there's a way you can actually broadcast a particular post, and you can circle that post around people. So when you're creating these marketing campaigns, you can kind of hone in your demographic by clicking male, female, age. You can buy people that like a certain page. So if someone likes off grid.net, whatever that website is, you can track people that like a particular page, and then that will broadcast to those people. So it's a little secret tip, Mark. Don't steal it from me. But I just. I kind of thought about now and again because it evolves so much. It's so hard to be. You know, we're always land, land, land Land. Land. Where are we buying? What are we acquiring? You know, we're looking at different, you know, you know, different places to go and purchase property. It's hard to really go, okay, well, you know, what are we going to do? How are we going to attack the social media? Because at the end of the day, we could go to a social media company and say, hey, could you help us out? We get a virtual assistant. But are they really going to have the ability to understand land? Like, we do know our clients who are buying that. The answer is probably no.

Yeah. And that's the thing is I actually looked into that and they're like, I can't be you. Yeah, no one can be you or me, but they can just provide, you know, articles on land and just that's it, really. That's what they can do. They can search for articles and say, hey, this is interesting, but no one can be us.

I'm not gonna lie. I've always wanted to be you, Mark.

Well, of course. Who wouldn't want to be? I mean, you know, after your day today.

Yes.

You'd rather be in 100 degree weather in Scottsdale, sitting in an office.

Exactly.

I don't blame you. All right, well, hey, that's a good tip of the day. Facebook. This is called Facebook ads.

Correct.

Okay, so since we're along the lines of social media, my tip of the week is going to be a WordPress plugin. And let me go to find it here, if I can find it. Here we go. I think it's s. Is it Yoast? Dran. You know WordPress really well. You know this plugin, it's been like downloaded like 2 million times.

Yes.

I'm logging in now. Let me check. Take a look here. Posts. All posts. This thing's incredible because it really helps you with your search engine optimization. And it's really, it's really easy. Okay. It's WordPress SEO by Yoast. It's a WordPress plugin and I highly recommend it. I highly recommend you blog. And when you blog, use this plugin. WordPress SEO by Yost Y O A S T Duran I know you got it wrong.

Yep. I will tell you that one of the things that I've been doing for several years and it's really important and on WordPress only because we're there. I want to talk about it. I have several WordPress websites and I always have problems with them because I don't update them constantly. So always remember that if you're going to build a WordPress website and you're going to do social media, you're going to blog that you're going to want to be very careful of protecting your site. There's a couple sites and we'll mention them and next time we talk about it, that you pay whatever it is, 10 or 20 bucks a month and they are your security. Because I have my own server and on my server I get hit frequently by these different people that for whatever reason want to attack your website and put in malware and viruses.

So anyway, I like the reserve land site. I want to get it.

Yes, yes.

I get a lot of.ru on my Colorize. That's when I, when I check my traffic. What are they doing?

They're probably guys that are living next door to you that, that have a, what do they call that? A man. I'm forgetting a. Gosh, that doesn't. Where you say starts with a P. And I'm just at the top of my head where you can, it's a proxy and so it's a proxy server where you basically can go to any. You can, you can pretend like you're in another country or you'll use a different country's domain and you will, and you'll basically just try to break into sites. And I don't know what they're doing. They're probably trying to steal information, but most of the time they're bots. So they're bots that are created. They just send these bots out over and over and over and they find these vulnerabilities in WordPress especially because it's open source, it's easy to find vulnerability and they attack it. So, and that's the unfortunate part. But it happens frequently. It's happened to me a couple times and it's been a couple of. There's actually sites that I've had to absolutely erase and I never even put them back up again.

Yeah. But I want to tell everybody, don't be afraid of WordPress out there because Google loves WordPress.

Oh no.

For marketing, which really is what we're talking about here. I mean, I know we're talking about social media, but it all goes down into inexpensive marketing use. You know, definitely use WordPress.

100%. I 100% agree with you. I would never go on anything else. I mean, look, I'm not paying when I have the problem. And again, I have a full server, so that's why I'm, that's why I deal with the issue. And, and, and generally speaking, the hacks happen all the time and if you're on it, if you're using HostGator or using GoDaddy for your servers, you're not going to have problems like I have because I control my own. I control my own server. So. But, and don't be. Yeah, definitely don't be scared of WordPress. I wouldn't use anything else. So.

All right. All right. Are we good? Are we good this week?

I think we're good, Mark.

So next week I can count on you 100%? Duran Fraser, reserveland.com Check out his site. Leave a comment. Friend him on Facebook at. What is it? Reserve Land Management. Go to his Reserve Land Management page.

Please don't friend me on Facebook because I will decline you if I don't know you.

Fine, then go to his. Just go to his Facebook. What is it? Your. Your business page, right? Like Reserve Land Management.

Like the fan page.

Like my. Yeah, like. And like my fan page, which is Frontier Properties usa. And like the Land Geek. And leave me a comment on the blog. Thelandgeek.com whether or not you like this blog or not, I hope you do. I hope you're getting something out of it. I really do. This is Mark Podolsky, the Land Geek, signing off. Anyways, check out www.thelandgeek.com check out frontierpropertiesusa.com and if you have to go check, go check out Duran's site. I feel badly for the guy. He's wasting away in San Diego. Reserveland.com thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.

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