Author Archives: Lee Van Der Heyde

About Lee Van Der Heyde

I am Lee and I am an online marketing expert and we specialize in online lead generation for the real estate industry, more specifically showing, training and mentoring real estate agents and real estate investors to generate an abundance of leads for their business at no or very little cost.

The Law of Patience

Achieving great success with lead generation is a learning process until you understand why it works. This may take some time.

This cannot be better explained than through a quote below by EPICTETUS, an influential Stoic and disciple of Socrates:

Another quote, this time by Elbert Hubbard deals with taking action:

Parties who want milk should not seat themselves on a stool in the middle of the field in hope that a cow will back up to them.

The lesson here is to learn, take action, be persistent, be diligent, be patient and rest assured that success will come.

For any comments or questions about real estate lead generation, just sent me an email – lee@releadgeneration.com

What’s Your Lead Generation Funnel?

Lead generation is a process and not an event…

What do I mean by that. The mistake many real estate agents make is to do online lead generation without having a process, also called a funnel.

Remember that when a person start their real estate search online they do not have any intention of speaking with a real estate agent. They just want information to educate themselves. This provide a great opportunity for the wise marketer to provide them with the information in a non threatening way and then use the funnel to become the go to for their questions. The wise marketer will automate this whole process so they personally only become involved when the prospect is ready to buy or sell.

The funnel and how to automate it is extremely easy to explain. It consists of only 5 items:

=> A free item, report or service to offer
=> A simple one page Squeeze page/ Lead capture page
=> An optimized Thank You Page
=> An auto responder service
=> Followup emails and broadcasts

Let me explain:

Create a one page landing page offering a solution to a real estate problem in exchange for their email. The prospect can immediately access the information to answer their questions. An example of such a landing page is http://flhomebuyer.weebly.com. In this page we offer a Free Flood insurance report. And who do you think will be interested in more information about flood insurance? You may offer a free home staging report for sellers, or a first time home buyer report, a free list of homes, etc. The possibilities are endless and it is always best to offer something that will be appealing to clients in your area. Remember the prospect will always ask what value will they get in exchange for their information.
The email will go into an autoresponder service such as Sendlane.
The thank you page. This is something that very, very few marketers utilize to their full potential. This is a great opportunity to share with your lead the services that you offer and how this will benefit them.
Automated followup emails to go out to your lead at regular intervals. This is supplemented by regular broadcasts about important new information or a newsletter.

How do you do this:

At a monthly fee of around $25 a service like Sendlane will provide you with easy to optimize lead generation pages (Such as the one above), capturing and storing your leads including a fully optimized auto-responder service where you will be able to setup your automated email sequence. You will also be able to distribute your newsletter or broadcast important news to your leads.

Full training is provided for free and you even get the opportunity to test out Sendlane for a full 14 days to see how it works for you.

I am personally using this service automate my own lead generation, lead capture and lead followup process.

For the full 14 days free trial Click Here!

Remember to reach out to me with any questions or comments. Just email me at lee@releadgeneration.com

Why Your Real Estate Leads Will Never Work with You!

So you have done your planning, you have spend a lot of time and also a lot off effort to setup your lead generation campaigns, and you are now generating a constant stream of exclusive real estate leads, enough to potentially earn you a substantial commission. But something is missing, very few of these leads actually has any potential.

The fact is that most of the leads you generate does not pan out to anything. You spoke with many of those leads, followed up and even felt you had report with some of them and then nothing.

You follow again and again but they do not take your calls or even answer to you emails and messages.

You know that in today’s world that everybody’s cell phone is always within reaching distance so by now you must realize they do not want to talk with you. You may even to think that you did something wrong.

You are dead wrong! The truth is that very few of the leads that you will ever generate online will work with you to buy or sell a home.

Extensive testing has been done with every type of online lead generation strategy, from SEO, to buying leads, to paid advertising to social media advertising, and the result is the same.

At most 3% of leads you will generate online will ever work with you. This is irrespective of how effective or good you are at following up and conversion. If you followup and conversion really sucks, this figure will go down significantly to perhaps 1% if you are lucky. So the reality is that out of every 100 leads you generate online, between 97 and 99 on your real estate leads will never work with you to buy or sell a home. THIS IS OKAY!

I will share with you how to overcome this, but 1^st I want to share why this is happening. The greatest majority of people who search online do not have any intention to buy or sell a home right now. Nobody wakes up one morning saying, “I am going to buy a home right now” and then goes online to find a home to buy. NO, they will start their research months and even years in advance and at that time they are not ready to speak with anybody, especially not a real estate agent who will attempt to sell them something. They are just not ready at this time so if they avoid you. For these leads your best course of action will be to automate your followup process. I dedicated a whole section on this website on followup automation.

Another aspect is that a large number of the leads never had any intention of buying something and was just fooling around online.

Believe me when I started out I wanted to work with every lead and I believed that every lead will buy or sell a home. So in essence I have tried to change the statistics and nearly burned myself out trying to work with unmotivated leads. Don’t do it, there is another solution.

The solution to this problem is actually really simple. If you want to work with more leads, doing more sales and listings, then generate more leads.

Simply generate more leads. Lead generation especially in the real estate industry is and will always be the easiest part of your business. This whole website and all the free information herein is dedicated to helping real estate agents to consistently generating more leads. https://releadgeneration.com/

You Don’t Want to Hear Their Answer…

This may be brutal and not something you want to hear, but this may just change your business forever.

Statistics shows that 79% of all leads are not followed up with and this is really a scary statistic. (check out my page at https://releadgeneration.com/the-money-is-in-the-followup)

The reason for this is most likely very different than you think and I will share that with you shortly.

Just think that you have spend a lot of money or time in generating a lead, just not to even give this lead a chance to work with you. That is crazy if you thing about it. By spending time on real estate lead generation already show that you are not lazy so why not follow up.

IT IS BECAUSE YOU ARE SCARED!

Not scared for picking up the phone and call, but scared to call because you do not want to hear the answer. The lead telling you that they may not work with you!

This is the typical paradox as per the experiment in 1935 by an Austrian Physicist Erwin Schrödinger. It goes as follows:

“Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin in 1935. There is a cat in a box and until the box is opened, an observer doesn’t know whether the cat is alive or dead, so while the box is closed the cat may still be alive!”

Marketers do not call (Open the box) because they want to keep their hope alive that the customer is going to work with them. They will spend a lot of time on excuses not to call the lead because they do not want to hear that the lead may not want to work with them.

The main reason for this simple, it is a scarcity of leads. If you have only a very few leads you want to keep all of them alive. The reality is that very few leads will ever work with you and there may be many reasons for this but it is a proven fact. (Only around 3%-5% of all leads you will generate will use you to buy or sell a house no matter how good you are!)

The solution to rectify this is a simple three step process:

Step 1: Become really good at lead generation so you always have an abundance of leads to work with. ( We already know that real estate lead generation is the easy part of the business)

Step 2: Become really proficient with you followup script so you can properly qualify leads based on motivation, timing and willingness to work with you. (This takes practice)

Step 3: Get rid of leads who do not qualify to work with you as fast as possible. They will steal your time! (This takes commitment)

So in summary I want to say – OPEN THE BOX – and identify the leads worthy of your time and spend your time cultivating and working to make them your clients.

Feel free to shoot me an email lee@releadgeneration.com

The Real Reason Why Clients Will Not Work With You!

If you are like most real estate agents you’ve spent a lot of money, effort and time to generate leads both online and offline. You are really successful in getting the leads because we already know that real estate lead generation is not the problem, right?

And as the leads comes in you followup diligently, and you have many meaningful conversations with prospective buyers and sellers and you have them in your followup system and you continue to reach out to them and you keep following up with them.

Now this is where the frustration comes in for most real estate agents, you get NO Response, it is as if they are either ignoring you or they forgot they had a conversation with you and not even know who you are.

You then start to doubt the quality of the leads and soon you will believe that these leads are bad and that you need to get different types of leads.

I want to tell you a story. Early in my real estate career I was with a broker who provided leads to his agents. One of the agents complained that the leads were all bad and I will never forget what happened next.

One morning I was in a meeting with the broker when an online lead came in. My broker said he wanted to show me something… He took the lead from the printer and called the agent in question and gave him the lead. He told the agent that this leads is a real motivated buyer and that he need to help this person immediately…

So what do you think happened next?

The agent converted this lead into a client and sold him a house. The agent then told the broker that this is the type of leads that is a good quality. The reality is that there was nothing special about this lead, it was exactly the same as all the other leads the broker generated.

The reality is that not all leads will be good, but a good percentage of them will be good leads to work with.

The moral of this story is like anything else in life, if you believe in it, it is true for you. If you believe that the leads are crap, the leads will be crap.However here is the real problem:

ALL leads only look for one thing, and one thing only, and that is a solution to their problem. In the eyes of a prospect they only need a real estate agent to get the transaction done. The truth is that home buyers and sellers see all real estate agents as more of the same.

In their minds they will have this question for you: “Why should I do business with you (agent) rather than with another agent?”

These prospects will most probably speak to many real estate agents to find the one that will best help them best to solve their problem.

If you do not have a compelling answer to question above so you can differentiate yourself from other agents and make you stand out, the prospect will see you as one of the pack.

So you have to ask yourself what you are going to do to stand out. What is your “offer” to your clients?

We cannot be everything to everybody so the most important aspect of creating a unique offer is to decide who is your ideal customer.

Some questions you can ask yourself about your ideal customers:

What are they looking for?
Where are they looking?
What are their price range?
What is their income?
What is their age?
What is their gender?
What do they look like?
What is their occupation?
What is their hobbies?

I am sure there are many other questions but once you know exactly who your ideal customer is you will have no problem in creating an offer that will appeal to this ideal customer.

You do need to offer something compelling so you stand out from other agents. So what makes you unique? What do you offer to them that other agents do not offer?

You have to define yourself, your message and your image to be attractive to your ideal customer. Once you have a unique selling proposition (USP), you will attract these customers to take your offer and work with you.

What is more the prospects will start chasing you to do business with you, because your offer is unique and nobody else offers this.

Please let me know if you have any comments or questions.

Feel free to email me at lee@releadgeneration.com

Free Book – Automate your Lead Generation

I found this awesome free book about building a lead generation and lead automation funnel. This book shows in detail how easily the process can be implemented. Check it out – https://releadgeneration.com/recommends/freebook

Before you check it out 1st read below – This is important.

Why Automation?

A major component of any marketing strategy should be automation of the process.

Getting the real estate lead is and will always be the easiest part of the process, and when both lead generation AND lead followup is automated, it is very powerful and will make a huge positive difference in the bottom line.

The downfall of many real estate agents and other professionals is the followup. To generate the lead is not only easy but it is a very small part of the whole process.

When generating real estate buyers leads online, the most important thing to remember is that the majority of the leads will be 6 months or more from buying a home. The reason is that buying a home is a long process and prospects will start this process months or even a year or two before they will be ready to buy. So think of it as building your real estate business of the future.

There are effective ways to generate NOW leads online as well, and I discuss and teach that in detail in my coaching sessions.

To qualify and establish the motivation of your lead is the 2nd most important aspect. It is very important to categorize your leads as not all leads are now buyers.

Qualifying the leads into categories such as now buyers, 6 months from buying, 1 year from buying, etc, will enable you to tailor your followup process. I am sure you will agree that the same followup effort will apply to a now buyer and a buyer who is 1 year from taking action.

The Money is in the Followup

To consistently and effective followup with all the leads is the most important thing you can do for your business.

Remember some of the leads may only buy in 2 years and by having a consistent approach will give you the biggest opportunity to get their business when they are ready. You have the opportunity to become their trusted adviser.

It is essential to automate this followup process because without a process you will loose leads you generated before they are ready to buy. The reason? You will not effectively followup with all the leads. This means you throw away leads you paid money for to generate. You not only lost the lead you also lost out on getting the commission from that lead.

Remember to followup with all your leads is fairly easy when you only have a few, buy once you automate and you have thousands of leads in your funnel, there is no way for anybody to do followup manually. So automate your lead generation process and followup process right from the start.

Free Book

I do advise that you get this free book now. I do not know how long this will remain available for free. This is a great roadmap to automate both your lead generation and followup in a simple process.

FREE BOOK

Get the book now and thank me later.

Go Viral with Instagram

Website Traffic from Instagram

The success of any website is determined by the traffic that website gets and more importantly, the quality of this traffic. Getting traffic from visitors that have no interest in your product of your offering is not profitable but provides a great opportunity to piggyback on these visitors to promote your website.

Instagram provides a great opportunity to getting your posts to go viral.

Instagram currently has more than 500 million users and is growing at close to 25% per year.

The Downside of Instagram

Instagram was created as a tool to share pictures on your mobile phone and as such limited the possibilities of both research and posting of pictures, videos and other content a lot.

Instagram on your PC

Software to Post from your PC or Mac was researched with the requirement to do the following:

Enable marketers to do research on trends and piggyback on these trends and posts for greater exposure
Enable marketers to automate their postings
Enable users to schedule postings
Enable marketers to post pictures and ads directly from their computer

Software that has the capability of not only posting pictures, videos and ads from a computer but also provide the ability to do research on the most popular trends, hashtags and posts are not readily available and in most instances are only available at a monthly subscription.

In achieve an Instagram account and posts to go viral in a relatively short period of time is highly unlikely without leveraging the system.

Instagram Software to Check out

Through research and testing we discovered a software that is available to achieve all the above and that is available at a one time fee (currently of $47) for a lifetime license. Full training and support is provided on how to achieve viral marketing by utilizing this software. There is also a 14 day no questions asked money back guarantee when you get this software.

Check out the software and demo at http://www.fastinsta.info

Please leave me some feedback on what you think about this software.

2 Tips to Save Money when Using Facebook Ads

Facebook and Relevance Scores!

Facebook updated their advertising system and clever advertisers save a lot of advertising dollars by using two simple techniques. But 1st let me explain. In the past the advertisers with the biggest budgets got the most impressions using Facebook dark posts, but this has now changed.

To make the user experience more pleasant Facebook now focuses on relevance, meaning how relevant the posted

ad is to the landing page. The users on Facebook has the opportunity to rate the ads they are seeing on their profile and if they perceive ads as lower quality those ads will receive a lower relevance score and be penalized by Facebook by increasing the Pay Per Click cost for those ads.

The solution is very simple: Make sure that there is no disconnect between the ad and the landing page. For example if you advertise a specific type of handbag, and users click on the link, they expect to view the detail of that handbag on the landing page. If the landing page features all types of handbags and other items there may be a disconnect and your ad may receive a lower relevancy score and your ad cost will increase.

Tip 1: Provide quality content on the landing page or provide the user exactly what you promised in the ad copy. This will create a pleasant user experience, increase the relevancy score and decrease your cost per click.

Image Text

This is a new rule change by Facebook. Previously Facebook disallowed all ads with images with more than 20% text. Facebook now changed that rule and they will allow ads images with more than 20% text, but beware, this does not mean that Facebook will not penalize you for images with more that 20% text.

The new Facebook rule is that although they will allow all images, those with more than 20% text on them will be penalized, and the more text the bigger the penalty. This penalty will be in the form of ads containing images with lots of text being shown less frequently than those fewer text, meaning your ads will receive less exposure thus increasing your advertising cost.

Tip 2: Only use images with fewer than 20 text on them. Before posting check the ad with the Facebook tool – https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay

Some facts:

Both the relevancy of the ad with the landing page and the quality of the image will have a major impact on advertising cost when using Facebook dark posts. I managed to reduce my cost per click from around $.50 per click to around $.15 per click just focusing on these aspects of my marketing.

Quality content, relevancy and playing by the rules are the name of the game.

Feel free to leave me a comment or ask a question: lee@releadgeneration.com

Are you also a Commodity Real Estate Agent?

All Real Estate Agents are the Same!

It is a fact that in the eyes of the public, real estate agents are all the same. We all sell the same homes from the same MLS, no wonder real estate agents are considered a commodity. The way real estate agents advertise themselves rather than what they can do does not help either. Looking at real commodity agents estate agent advertisements they are all “Honest”, “Sincere”, “will work hard for you”, “Have integrity” or are the “Top” agent just to mention a few of the hundreds of phrases they use to market themselves or “Brand” themselves. With more than 2 million real estate agents with active licenses in the US all branding themselves the same, no wonder real estate agents are considered a commodity.

Real estate agents are a commodity because you do not know any better. The first thing a real estate agent is told after getting his/her license is to “brand yourself”, because those who teach them was also taught this 40 years ago, and they also do not know any better. This is right up there with cold calling, just as ineffective and the worst possible way to spend time and money doing lead generation. No wonder that more than 90% of real estate agents are out of the business within the 1st 5 years.

The main reason why real estate agents quit the business within the 1st 5 years is because they do not make money and they do not make money because they do not have enough clients, and they do not have enough clients because they do not know how to get clients. They do not have the knowledge or understanding of effective prospecting for warm leads in the digital age.

Failing to acknowledge and understand the following 2 principles will make it increasingly harder to become effective in lead generation:

Home buyers and home sellers are are looking to buy or sell a home and not looking for a real estate agents to work with. They are actually trying to avoid real estate agents and will only work with an agent out of necessity.
Marketing for lead generation should not be about branding (we already acknowledged that all real estate agents are considered the same) but should be focusing on the benefit the home buyer or home seller will get working with you. WHY THEY SHOULD DO BUSINESS WITH YOU RATHER THAN ANY OTHER REAL ESTATE AGENT OUT THERE!

With any #leadgeneration strategy or campaign, 1st answer the above question before spending money on advertising and marketing.

Visit http://www.ReLeadGeneration.com and learn more about effective lead generation, Unique Selling Propositions, and why lead generation is and always will be the easy part of a business.

Feel free to leave a comment or email me at lee@releadgeneration.com

#releadgeneration #realestate #leadgeneration

Lead Generation with Pinterest

The Power of Pinterest!

Pinterest is currently receiving around 63 million unique US visitors every month, a growth of more than 11 million users in 10 months. This is very powerful and Pinterest rank No 13 in the USA for traffic.

This provide a huge opportunity for online marketers to generate massive traffic to their sites. Even more so within the real estate industry.

Data collected showed that there is a 4 times better chance that people who visit your website from your Pinterest account will actually buy your product that people who randomly found your product online or through other advertisements.

Steps to Start your Business off on Pinterest

The 1st step will be to register a “Pinterest for Business” account.

Then start pinning your pictures linking it to your website. Underneath is a link to a free training video that will show you step by step how to create a Pinterest board and how to pin to Pinterest linking back to your website.

This training video is provided courtesy of Wealthy Affiliate university so click and enjoy.

==> How to Pin to Pinterest

The power of Pinterest is truly amazing and any superior lead generation strategy should have several pillars to drive traffic to your website. It is strongly advised that Pinterest should be included as one of those pillars. With Facebook currently at 131 million us visitors, Pinterest is catching up fast as the fastest growing social media platform.

To learn more strategies about Pinterest feel free to subscribe to Wealthy Affiliate. It is free to join the basic program and will not even ask for a credit card or any payment.

Check it out at ==> WealthyAffiliate

Your comments are are always appreciated.

Lee