The Land Geek Podcast #60

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 from www.thelandgeek.com, your favorite niche land real estate website. And today I've got my continued guest. He's not really a guest because we don't treat him with that much respect, but we sure do love him. Geran Frazier, how you doing? Hello, sir, from landhub.com reserveland.com and we don't have a ton of time today, so we're going to get right into it. Last podcast, we were talking about Facebook marketing and we kind of ran out of time. So I want to continue it because Duran has some experience with it that is unique and I want to hear more about that issue. So, Duran, let's just get right into it. Let's skip the small talk.

What's going on? I'm not going to skip the small talk, Mark, because I'm hurting. I'm sore.

Why are you so sore? Come on.

Because I've gotten back into doing push ups every day, which is not really good for my back. But I was just telling you yesterday I was out golfing in the morning, 18 holes at La Costa. And then in the afternoon, I decided to play a little basketball for a couple hours. And then on top of that, I left and I drove by the surf, had my surfboard in the car and decided I'd get an hour surfing in. By the. I think right at about an hour, my entire body seized up. I was, every single muscle had just basically, I don't. If you guys have ever cramped multiple muscles at once, especially when you're in the water, it's not a good, it's not a good thing. So I'm sort of flailing a little bit in the ocean going, am I going to get in the beach here? I've got some cramps, like my leg cramps, my arms are cramping. So I just kind of floated in and just like laid on the sand for a second till the cramps went away. And then I walk up to the car and the next day I felt every ounce of what I just did, realizing I'm not 26, but I'm 36.

Old man, look at my life.

So, yeah, I'm not going to Complain about my life being hard. I'm just going to complain about the fact that I'm getting old and life isn't the way it used to be with my.

You poor man of leisure.

Yes, yes.

And the years are catching up to you.

Yes. That is so true. So I just want to let you know, I feel a little sore. But hey, I'm okay. I'm going to get through this. I'm going to push through it.

Good. All right. I'm glad to hear that.

Yes.

All right. So we were talking last week about Facebook, Facebook marketing. We like Facebook so much better, even though we don't have really good analytics to prove it. But hypothetically speaking, just shooting in the dark, we don't like Twitter as much. We don't like LinkedIn as much. Are there any other big social media sites out there that are even worth looking at?

You know what? One that people kind of overlook is Pinterest.

Calm Pinterest. Sure.

Now, I don't know.

I think 80% of it's women, though. I think more men buy land.

The demographics changing, but it's a, it's a, it's a photo driven site. So, you know, again, going back to what we sell, we sell based on what, Mark?

Yeah, pictures.

Pictures. The images of the property, what we're trying to portray.

Story. Yep.

It's all about the story that you, that you paint. And I think at the end of the day, Pinterest would be a great place. And you know, although I would say my buy, my, my buying pool is probably 9, 85%, 90% men.

Right.

If you find a niche within Pinterest, stick to it because I'm sure they're out there. It's. Again, people do post pictures of land, but I mean, how pretty is a piece of land? Well, if it's a piece of land showing, you know, a lake on, you know, lake view from a property, it is a pretty picture and I'm sure women would like that. So, you know, maybe like talking about my, you know, my dream piece of land or whatever it is, but that's certainly a place to look. But yeah, Facebook, Twitter, those are the two platforms that you really want to market with. And I don't have enough experience with Twitter to really give you my opinion.

I've tried Twitter and it's, I don't think it's for our niche, honestly. Yeah, I don't even understand Twitter from a market.

I think Twitter's for athletes and celebrities and everyone.

Yeah, I think that's what it's for. I think it's for athletes, celebrities. I think it's for people that want to engage very quickly within that type of celebrity. I don't, I mean, you can link to stuff and I don't know, I really don't understand. I've tried to sell land on Twitter and I don't think that they want to engage more with you on Twitter than just say, hey, here's a link, here's a link, here's the link. Buy my land. Buy my land. Buy my land. That, that's just noise on Twitter, you know.

You know, it might be your picture too, Mark. I mean, if I see a picture of you, I'm not going to be inclined to really want to buy something from you.

That's true. That's why I use the Apple car. I'll give you that. I'll give you that.

I'm just teasing, buddy. I am teasing. That is not nice. I'm not mean. I personally think that Mark's a lot better looking than me.

Oh yeah. It's a face for radio.

And now that I'm losing my hair and gray and everything else, I for sure 100 wish. And Mark has a six pack of abs and I have a six pack of jelly rolls. So there is something to be said for being in shape.

Yeah, yeah, whatever. All right. No, no one feels badly for you. For everybody that met Duran in Vegas, we all know he's joking.

Ok.

So, alright, so Pinterest is a viable option. I've been on Pinterest a little bit. I haven't spent a whole lot of time on it, to be honest. I, you know, I don't know. It's hard. How do you even measure it? Is there a way to do, get analytics on Pinterest like you can on Facebook? Is there paid advertising on there?

I don't know if yet, to be honest. Again, I don't know. I haven't looked into Pinterest that far. It's a funny story. My wife and I have been very successful with getting viral on both YouTube and on Pinterest. And I'll tell you just a quick backstory. We put some videos up on YouTube several years back and pictures of my kids. Nothing I thought was anything of a viral nature, but I guess when you have a pregnant belly and you see like a, you know, an arm protruding out of a pregnant belly or partially, it does go, could go viral. And so we've got a, we've got a couple of videos that hit the. I think they both hit the 10 million, Mark.

I think anything Lauren does on YouTube is going to go viral just because of the way she looks.

Thank you. Yes, she is a beautiful one. But what's funny is, so we get these. We get these. We have these viral accounts on YouTube and, you know, and we. People asked us, how did you go? I don't know. I mean, like, sometimes you just don't know why you go viral. I can't tell you specifically. I mean, I tagged it correctly. I did a couple of things creatively, you know, if, you know, people were mentioning the comment alien, so I probably tagged it alien baby or something funny. Anyway, but then we did Pinterest and my wife went on Pinterest and she pinned. My wife's really into health and wellness. And so we pinned something on her or she pinned something on her health board and she, I think within like three months had 75,000 followers on her on her Pinterest account. So, like, it's really interesting because we sort of. The accidental, you know, approach to that got me into doing some research on Pinterest and realizing how you can really go somewhere. Now, I don't from a measurable standpoint, you know, there's nothing near what Facebook offers in terms of understanding what your conversion rate is, but I'm sure there's stuff out there now built to measuring, you know, what Pinterest does for you.

Yeah, I think, you know, the management guru Peter Drucker is quoted as saying, whatever is measured is managed. Yeah, Right. So if you're not measuring it, you're really not managing it. So you should really know some key numbers within your any kind of pay per click campaign. Right. How much are you getting per click? What's your conversion rate? What's your allowable acquisition cost? Right. What's your lifetime customer value? Otherwise you're shooting in the dark.

I get that. But I think the other side goes like a Pinterest. Those are photos being pinned from your webpage. So you can in theory, track through Google Analytics, you can track the process of the referral process of where those clicks are going. If you built a page specifically to get pinned, like you built a viral image and then there's a call to action on that page. There are ways to track that for sure.

But yeah, like a Google Analytics tracking link.

But yeah, but look, if you're putting stuff out there, you can't track everything. So you're going to constantly put stuff out there and you're going to find out, like, why do I have. Why is this article that I wrote on this website like for me, I do a lot of, I write a lot of stuff. Like the other day I got, I got upset because like two guys.

I disagree. You should track everything. If you're not tracking, how do you know it's working?

Because. Because I'm not. There's no real, there's no real, like for me writing, for me writing a thing I wrote to basically vent. It wasn't to. There wasn't a conversion on the other side. I know.

Okay, well that's different. If you're just gonna do something for fun.

Yes, yes.

Okay.

Yeah. So anyways, my passion, I enjoy writing stories and talking about my journey in life. So I agree with what Mark's saying. But life to me isn't all about business and I don't think Mark's is either. But when it comes to things, Mark, you spend most of your time focused on what you get paid to do. I spend quite a bit of time focused on things I don't get paid to do. Which is stupid at some level. Right? It's not smart.

Well, not necessarily. There's no right or wrong. It's what you choose to do.

Exactly, exactly. So for me, I wrote the other day, I had a couple people hit me up on LinkedIn in the same day asking me to look at their potential investment. I said, great, I don't normally do this. I don't normally do like, I don't usually get back to people because I get a lot of, I get a lot of inmails on my. In LinkedIn Daily from people that want me to look at something. But I got back to both these guys and neither one of them got back to me. And I thought to myself, okay, you reached out to me as a favor to you to look at your investment and you didn't get back to me. So I offered to look at it and I know, and I even said, I know, normally I don't, but I'd love to help you out. Send it over to me. I got a little time. I was on vacation I want to take. I would have taken a look for them. And long story short is neither one. So within like 20 minutes I had written a nice 500 word blog post that's going to be, it's going to be in the next magazine here in San Diego, which talks about, which talks about poor communication. So fantastic. And all it talks about is the people's lack, how entrepreneurs that get into a business. The number one key to success, I believe in business is communication. Because if you can't communicate with Your customers, you can't communicate with your investors. How are you going to succeed? So to me, I said, poor communication is planned failure. That's it. There's no. So I went through, I wrote it and it wasn't too, to, you know, I wasn't trying to figure out, well, is it going to convert? I don't care. It's me. I'm writing about things that, that I want people to know.

Ultimately that kind of thing will convert because you're, you're expanding your sphere of influence in the community that you're writing to. Which is why you write in a magazine.

Right.

The magazine's already doing all that for you. Correct. So you're just building your, your influence.

But going back to like a Pinterest, I think, for, for. Here's what's funny is you may not even realize that you have something pinned on women, right? So the lowest paying job on the planet is blogging, right? Because you spend a ton of time blogging and generally if you're not in the top 3%, you don't get paid a stinking penny and no one's gonna.

How does anybody find you?

Well, you gotta blast it out to your friends and hope that your friend. And I've watched a lot of friends over the years. I can't say I've myself because I haven't. But I blog on other platforms and I have had articles that done, have done well. But, but if you're trying to create your own blog and there are very, I have friends that are very, very talented. They're talented chefs, they're talented at business. They write these blogs. They're, I mean, literally, I know one guy who's a brilliant marketing guy. Brilliant marketing guy, right? He just doesn't have any followers. But he writes.

Have any followers.

He just writes. I mean, he has a few, but like he's genius. He's genius. And yet his sphere of influence is so small because he hasn't gone out. And that's his life. His life is marketing. And so it's just interesting because blogging, there's so many bugs. But if you put an image to a blog, right? And the image goes viral, like let's say nobody's reading the blog, but the image went viral, like you created some sort of, you know what they call, they call those an infographic. An infographic is what you see like, you know, five bubbles or eight bubbles in the steps of, you know why you shouldn't drink Coca Cola? Because your belly will look like this kind of thing. So you may have an infographic on your page. It gets pinned to Pinterest, and all of a sudden you start getting traffic to your blog because of that picture. Because the picture, if you click on Pinterest, goes to your blog. So there are certain things that, you know, like someone could say, my favorite place to live, I want to live lakefront on this property. And that property picture is posted on reserveland.com or myfrontierproperties.com whatever it is it's going to be. Or Frontier Properties usa. It's going to be blasted on Pinterest and people will click it if it goes viral.

Right? And I want to give everybody an actionable step to take. You should not be spending your time posting on Pinterest and Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn. You should create one post. Your VA should be spending time going into those accounts because Durant, you can get lost in that stuff.

Totally.

You know, you start posting and all of a sudden you're like looking around, you're clicking around, next thing you know, an hour's gone by and you're looking at your, you know, sister in law's baby pictures on Facebook. So I think it takes some discipline to just say, okay, this is something that's really not a good use of my time. It's important to try to be ubiquitous on these sites in some respect. If you're going to measure it and manage it and do that, I think it's better to focus on Facebook, which we're going to get back to. But if you're going to do Facebook and Pinterest, you shouldn't really be the one doing it. Right. You should be focused on the two main important aspects of this business, which are deal flow, buying properties, pennies on the dollar, and marketing. Selling that property and the marketing aspect of it is, is it so important that you need to manage the VA's, but you shouldn't be the one creating it? Would you agree?

I would agree. I guess for me, this conversation isn't just about land. Obviously, as we talk and we do this podcast, I'm sort of speaking a little bit more broad in general. And I'm sure that half you guys just got lost in my 10 minute rant about Pinterest. But I'm just letting you guys know that in reality, as Mark said, it isn't simple to figure out not everything is measurable and let those who do understand it handle it right.

And I do disagree. Everything's measurable. You can have tracking links on everything and software can handle all this. Stuff. Dran. What are you doing?

Me?

Yeah. You're opening up mail.

It's a tax bill. I'm just reading. Sorry.

I'm listening to this scratching noise. Like, what are you doing? Can you. Can you wait till after the podcast?

I'm done. I'm sorry. I was. It looked. It looked really important until I actually opened it and read it.

Yeah. You know what? I'm gonna refer you to Adrian. And yes, he's. He can get you some ADD meds.

We'll trade.

Yeah.

Coaching for some. From ADD training.

Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. Okay, so Facebook. Let's get back to it. You're on there right now. You're testing it, and it's going great. So tell us what's going on with it.

I'm not giving you my secrets.

You don't have to give a secret. Just tell us what your results have been.

My results have been.

Just say, in general, you don't tell us how you're doing it, what you're doing, and what the results have been.

Well, I am targeting specific demographics for specific properties. Right. And again, going back to it, this is something that I know quite well over the years of selling thousands of parcels of land mark. And I sort of know our demographic quite well. We know who buys what and why they buy it, and even people that don't buy. We know where the inquiries come from and why the inquiries come to us and what they're looking for. So it sort of gauges. It gives us a gauge as to what maybe a direction and who to target. Like, you know, we've talked about the past. You know. You know, there's. There's certain people like Jeff Axton, who is a firefighter. Well, you target a specific demographic of firefighters, and it doesn't have to be. This is. This could be offline. You could go. You could do a direct mail campaign to a group of firefighters or something that are buying land because, hey, maybe you're close to retirement, whatever the case is, and you get. And that niche works for you, and then you continue to target that niche. Or maybe it's nurses or maybe. And we've talked again, we've discussed it before, so on Facebook, that platform sort of allows you to target specific demographics. And I've been successful at targeting these specific demographics for specific properties.

And you're paying like, 8 cents a click.

No, I mean, it goes. Depends on the actual ad, but yes, from 8 cents to $1.50 a click.

Okay, 8 cents to a dollar fifty a click. And what's. What are the results, how many leads have that generated?

My click conversion's astronomical and it clicks for me. I look at a conversion in terms of some of these things. To me, of course, the end conversion is the sale. The initial conversion is the click to the website and reading the website and time spent on the website. But obviously at the end of the day, the actual conversion to sales, what you're tracking. But I also like to see a nice conversion from Facebook to the website. And then of course, from the website to a conversion, I'm marketing specific properties. The ads will take you directly to that particular property, and then from that property there's a call to action.

Right. So now are you doing just a regular ad or a promotion? Like, for example, for me on Facebook, I like to do promotions, click here and register, you know, for the pool to win a free piece of land, right?

Yeah.

Or to get $250 off a piece of property. Some type of promotion to build my list and convert that list into a sale.

Yeah.

Are you doing something like that?

I'm working on that. So look, you gotta, you've gotta do. You've gotta figure out of the four or five or six different ideas that you have within, within that marketing platform, you gotta figure out which one converts best. I like the list aspect. I do have my list and I do send out emails list, but I also like campaigns that go directly because I can certainly convert a lot faster by getting someone to inquire on a property within 30 minutes, not having to build that entire campaign and sell the land. So here's the interesting part. The dynamic would be I build a list and then in a week I go market. Well, guess what? I may have sold that property in a week. And if I don't have something similar or like, I may not be able to sell it. So I can build that list. So for me, if I can sell a property in 30 minutes or an hour, when I say that, I mean I've got someone committing to buy, send me a down payment by just clicking and reading the website. That, to me, is something I'm trying and we'll see how successful in converting that is. And then of course, the list side as well. And see, and like, Mark's had a lot of success with that on the list side. Are you building lists, Mark, on Facebook?

Yeah, I'm building my list.

That's all you're doing?

Yeah, that's all I'm doing. I'm breaking even right on the list because I'm paying a lot more per click because My net so much wider than yours.

Yeah. I think that one of the things that Mark. That I'm going to be helping Mark out with is sort of targeting specific demographics, because I think once you target. If you have an extremely broad demographic, Facebook's going to charge you more money.

Exactly.

You've got to target groups. And if those groups aren't converting, you try different groups. But there's also what I told Mark, and I'm sure some listeners have seen Mark's campaigns pop up on their Facebook timeline or newsfeed, is that graphics are key in the conversion process of getting them to click and. And sign up. And you really want to have. I'm not a huge fan of all marsh graphics. I think some of them are cool. Some of them aren't so cool, but you really want to keep that. Like, it needs to be refreshed. It needs to be new. Like, if it's not working for a week, you got to try. You got to try a new image.

And we do new images every week.

Okay.

Yeah. And we're managing it and seeing which ads are converting, which ones aren't. So keeping the ads that convert, we're going to the images where you're scratching. The images don't convert.

Yeah.

We're just constantly tweaking and improving it. And it takes time. You can't do a campaign in one week and think that it's going to.

Be successful or, you know, and if it's unsuccessful, that's not going to. That's not a good gauge either. Meaning, like, if you spent 20 bucks or 50 bucks in a week or 100 bucks on Facebook and you're not. And there's no real success there. It doesn't mean you've done the campaign wrong. You may have to retarget the campaign.

Right.

From a demographic standpoint, that doesn't mean your image is bad. It just means that you may have targeted a completely wrong group of people.

Exactly.

That's why. That's why it's not your business to be doing that. Let people that know how to do it do it.

Yeah. Again, if you want Duran to help you do that, you know, email me. And there we might have a program for you.

Yeah.

If you qualify.

If you qualify.

If you qualify, which you probably. You probably do.

If you have a heartbeat.

If you have a heartbeat, you qualify. If you can listen to this podcast, you qualify. You qualify. So that's good.

Yeah.

So how are we doing time wise? Because I know you're short on time.

I've got. I've got a few more minutes, Mark. I mean, are there any other questions you want to talk about from, you know, maybe. Maybe tell me a little bit about how you did your Twitter campaigns just so the listeners can understand.

I mean, Twitter, here's. Here's what's not. Here's what not to do.

Hashtag land, hashtag buy, hashtag land, hashtag buy.

Here's a link to my property. That's. That's what not to do. If. So if someone's following you, you know they're a bot. Yeah, I mean, I. I don't even follow back. Like, you look at my Twitter thing, it's like I've got I don't know how many followers. Not that many, but maybe a couple hundred or whatever it is. Like, I don't follow anyone. I mean, I just don't spend any time on it. You've got to spend time and you've got to engage people on social media. I think we talked about this. It's like a big party, right? And you go to a party and the first thing you say to somebody isn't, hey, what do you do for a living? And oh, by the way, I do this, and do you want one? Like, that's not how you engage at a party. You just kind of start talking about, you know, hey, what do you do? Or, you know, this is what I like to do. And you would build rapport, and then eventually you'd get to the point that says, hey, this is what I do. You might have some interest in it, or maybe you have some friends that have some interest in it. Unless, of course, you're an insurance salesman and that's the first thing you lead with. I'm not kidding.

And just so everyone knows, Mark and I, and I'm sure all of you have dealt with people that literally the number one thing on their mind. They don't care about you, they don't care about anything around them. They care about one thing, and that's the sale.

The same.

Exactly. And unfortunately, that's the most frustrating part of life, is that some people have their head wrapped around money, and that's all. And I get that money is a ways to a means to live a good life, but in reality, don't stress and don't live your life focused that way. Because guess what? That is planned failure. Because you want to walk into a place and get to know people and let them know that you, you know, you do business a certain way and you have integrity. And a lot of guys, I mean, I watched. I'VE watched people recently that have like, hounded me and my wife and other people about one thing and I'm like, leave me alone. Like, it's instant pushback, you know?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, and the economy is different. You know, maybe 10 years ago that might have been effective. Maybe, maybe. But now it's definitely not effective. And we're more in a connection economy. How big are you? How big is your network? Yeah, right. How much influence you have in that network? And the result of that being of having that network like you and trust you eventually will bring in money. That's, that's just how it works today.

Because if you're trying to sell something, the fact of the matter is they're going to go home and they're going to see that same exact thing cheaper on their Facebook. On their. On their Facebook newsfeed.

Yeah, exactly.

That's just if they're searching for it, if they're in reality is they're looking for new car insurance. GEICO is going to pop up, Right?

Exactly.

GEICO is going to be cheaper than you today.

You've got to give to get.

Yep.

Would you agree?

Totally.

Yeah. But if all you're looking for is if in your heart you're only giving to get, then there's a disconnect there as well, which is why I think your why is so important. And you know, we talked about that a lot. We don't have time to talk about that now. All right, so, Duran, I know you gotta go. What's your tip of the week?

My tip of the week is a website called Overnight Prints dot com.

Overnight prince dot com. All right, let's check it out.

And what they do is they print. You got to go find a coupon code. So one thing that Mark and I will always tell you to do is go search whatever website you're at and then the next word is going to be coupon code. Next words behind that, you can get a great coupon code. You can print anything from business cards to flyers. They do it all. I like, I've had a couple of problems with them in the past, but they've been really good from a customer service standpoint of fixing the problems. You can get business cards or flyers shipped literally overnight. Overnight shipping can be a little bit expensive, but. But they get things done quickly. They do.

And they do good work.

Yep.

All right. I love it. Overnight prints. In fact, I'm going to need a land brochure printed up pretty soon anyways. So I'll try overnight prints for my land brochure and see how that goes. All right, so my tip of the week is a little meditation app. Everybody knows I meditate and keeps.