Category: On Marketing

Baseball legend Cal Ripken Jr. played a whopping 2,632 consecutive games. Achieved 400 home runs and 3,000 hits. And most notably redefined the short stop position. 

Imagine that. Never having a sick day at work. Being called to play at the highest level at the most competitive environment in baseball, day after day. 

How did he do that? Consistency. 

“My greatest strength was being able to analyze and see my job. My greatest weakness was that I could take myself in all different directions. So I had to constantly focus what is relevant and what is not relevant.”

Cal Ripken Jr

There are moments when it’s easy to look forward and know what you want in life. Attend a conference. Listen to a talk. Everything’s clear, all you need to do is take action. You know the feeling. But sustaining the energy to achieve it, is something else entirely. Almost as soon as you go to work it feels hard. Sometimes before you’ve even taken the first step.

So how do you reach legendary status?

1. You need a vision
2. Get really okay with where you are
3. Remove all distractions

Then it becomes a simple matter of HOW.

Principle 1. Vision

Arnold Schwarzenegger gave an incredible talk on success. “You need a vision.” He shared that he grew up among small farms. His folks wanted him to stay in Austria. But that was their vision for him. Not his. “I didn’t want to be around farm houses and little buildings. I wanted to be in America.” Most people close to you have a vision for your life. But when you are clear on your vision, they may say no, hear “yes”. When they say that’s impossible. Hear, “That’s possible.” When they say “not yet.” Hear, “now.”

One day Arnold stumbled upon a magazine of Reg Park on the cover. Reg Park was a 3 time Mr. Universe and Arnold saw him on the big screen as Hercules. “I read that and I said to myself, this is the blueprint for my life. This is exactly what I want to do.” Arnold had a vision. “Do you know how great I felt when I knew where I was going,” he said.

It was just a question of “How do I do it.” 

When people saw him in the gym they would ask. Why is it you are working out so hard? 5 hours a day. 6 hours a day. Arnold had a vision. “For me I am shooting for a goal. Every rep that I do gets me closer to accomplishing that goal.” 

Principle 2. Satisfied with where you are

What stops people from achieving their vision? What make’s it hard to be consistent? They become unsatisfied with the journey. They become tired of where they are. And they make a change when they were on the right path. 

Get really comfortable with your situation. Love who you are. Love where you are. Love the way you live. Love your friends. Love your family. Love your situation. I mean this. Change happens when we get sick and tired of being sick and tired. But there are times when we don’t need to change. When we need to persist.

Change happens when we get sick and tired of being sick and tired. But there are times when we don’t need to change. When we need to persist.

Pete Adeney retired at age 31. This is a true story. He started work as a computer engineer in his 20s. And got really comfortable with having less. He road his bicycle to work. Didn’t have a car or a payment. He lived in a small house. But was happy with his life. He was able to live on $25,000 per year. So he saved the majority of his income.

Meanwhile his friends were living on $120,000 a year. They drove nice cars, were purchasing bigger homes, and spending everything they made. When he retired at 31 they were broke.

He had a vision, to retire. And he could achieve that vision because he was satisfied with his quality of life. This may sound crazy but it’s the biggest secret that I know of. Being satisfied with where we are in life makes achieving where we are going possible.

Principle 3. Remove all distractions

Cal Ripken Jr had a vision of playing in the big leagues. A very humble guy, some days he felt he was playing beyond his ability. But then he would remember he put in the work and could do the drills and would ground himself. 

But there’s a lot of noise that can try to knock you off your goal when you’re focused. Distractions come from left, right and centre. Cal spoke of how he would notice subtle changes in a game and could see an opposing team getting ready for retribution. Maybe they’d start throwing balls wide toward the batters. This could throw him off his game. Obviously you don’t want to get hit by the ball. Yet it was all mental. He’d watch other batters step up to bat completely ignorant to what was happening and then crush the ball. He wondered, “Didn’t they notice what was happening?”

“Sometimes being so much in the moment that you don’t see what’s going on around you. That’s a good thing. My battle all the time was to stop those other things from coming in that could take away from that concentration of that moment,” said Cal.

Removing distractions isn’t about doing one thing for the rest of your life. It’s about removing the noise that contradicts your vision. That your goal is worth it. That the world is good. That there is hope for your future. That you can play at this level.

Mike Ferry, world famous coach, shared that he stopped reading the news 40 years ago. He shared that he was walking home one night and about 40 cop cars were surrounding a neighbouring condo. His wife asked, “What’s happening.” He responded, “It doesn’t matter. As long as they are not after me… ;)” 

His point is that distractions can take our mind away from what matters. Our vision. 

After I heard this I turned off Apple News on my phone.

Conclusion:

These 3 principles are foundational to achieving great accomplishments. But the key principle – the secret nobody talks about – is the second principle. The secret is that you’re already a success. And being satisfied with where you are on the journey is critical to sustaining it.

When you have a dream, a goal, or whatever you want to call it then you have a vision. There are times when that goal may feel out of reach. But it’s not. The only time it’s out of reach is the moment you stop making progress towards it.

Achieving a goal is much easier when you know where you are going. When you enjoy the journey. And when you are free of any mental distractions pulling you away from your destination.

So what is your vision? What are you grateful for? And what distractions will you remove?

The first issue of Superman was printed in 1938. Picked up in radio, movies, books, television and video games, it was a huge success. But it almost never happened. If it wasn’t for the tenacity of creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Seigel the world’s first superhero would never have been published.

It took an incredible 5 years of perseverance for the creators Joe Shuster and Jerry Seigel to get it picked up by a publisher. 

Initially they aspired to publish it as a syndicated newspaper comic strip. Jerry would write the script and Joe would illustrate it.

But rejections followed suit. Newspapers told them it needed to be more sensational.

So they tweaked their character and took their story to Consolidated book publishers. At first the publishers appeared to show interest, they even pitched it in person to a delegate, but ultimately Consolidated rejected them too. Writer, Jerry Seigel, even tried to switch up the illustrator and hired then established comic artist Russell Keaton. But that work was rejected by newspapers too – and to put the nail on the coffin, Russell Keaton abandoned the project.

Joe Shuster hadn’t been thrilled about his sudden replacement. But later that year they reconciled and in 1935 finally had a couple strips published. It would take another 3 years for their big breakthrough.

In 1938, while they thought they were negotiating a deal with McClure Newspaper syndicate for Superman Joe and Jerry were informed that McClure too would be rejecting them. But luck and timing would finally be on their side. At the same time as McClure was pulling the plug Action Comics were in the throes of publishing their first issue and were eager to have Superman featured. It was the perfect fit. The rest is, as one says, history.

With no guarantee of success, 5 years is a lot of time to continue with a project when receiving very little else than rejection. It reminds me of this famous cartoon below. You may never know how close you are to your dreams if you turn back.

With each rejection Jerry and Joe set to work to refine their story and their character. Had they had success from the get go Superman would have had psychic powers given by a mad scientist. But instead Superman progressed to develop super human strength, born on planet Krypton and raised by farmers in a small town on earth after being found in crashed space ship, where he was raised to have noble character. 

And the end result? A better character and storyline.

Business is like this. There’s a ten year story behind many an “overnight” success. With each new obstacle there’s an opportunity to improve and a decision to grow and continue. A mentor of mine used to say that when it comes to growing a business problems don’t go away, they simply get better.

Douglas Klein was running a Facebook ad campaign and funnel to advertise his listing and reach people buying homes in his market of central New Jersey. 

Using a simple method of testing the ad’s image he was able to reduce his cost per home buyer lead from $9.96 to $0.95 – that’s a whopping 10X improvement. Today I’m going to show you exactly what he did to achieve that – and how you can too in 5 simple steps.

Let’s get started

Step 1: Douglas launched an ad campaign on Facebook to advertise his listing and attract real estate buyers.

Douglas used StreetText to quickly post his real estate listing as a lead ad. That way he didn’t have to manually setup the FB lead form. Instead it’s done for him and any leads captured automatically show up in his dashboard. And it worked. He was getting leads at $9.96

Step 2: Douglas re-launched the same ad to tap into Facebook’s audience algorithm

Facebook gives ads a “score” based on their initial 500 impressions. The better your score, the better your cost per lead will be. But Facebook ads are in an auction and the conditions of that auction can be different at any time. Factors such as how many other ads are running, who’s logged in at that moment, and who sees your ad. The chance that you launched your ad in the perfect conditions the first time, is pretty low. The only way to ensure your ad is getting the best score is to relaunch it a few times. Giving FB’s algorithm many opportunities to get the right combination.

Douglas relaunched his ad using StreetText, so it was easy because he didn’t have to recreate the ad or the FB form. And he was able to reduce his cost per lead on one of his test to $5.27. That was an immediate savings of $4.70 per lead!

And all he did was relaunch the ad a few times.

Step 3: Douglas then tested this ad’s image against the same ad with different images

Have you heard of the concept of a Local Max? Basically, when you test the same ad against itself, eventually you will find the best results possible for that ad. That’s called a “Local Max” but… it’s not the “Absolute Max”

The way to find the Absolute Maximum is to test the ad against ads with different images. And that’s what Douglas did using a free tool called Canva. By using including multiple photos of his listing in the ad’s image he was able to reduce his cost per lead down to $3.74 That’s a 3X improvement.

But he didn’t stop there. This is where running your own ads get fun.

Step 4: Douglas then tried adding text to his image… and magic happened.

Using the lessons Douglas learned in his first tests he combined the 3 photos with some simple text.

By simply including the beds, baths and a “Broad Range” price, he dramatically increased his click-through rate. He dropped his cost per click to 0.95. That’s a 10X improvement. Hold your horses, whoa! 

Step 5: Douglas used Facebook’s ad text tool to optimize how much text he was displaying on the image.

Having text on an ad’s image can dramatically impact your ad’s result. But, text on an ad can easily look spammy. Facebook doesn’t want that. If there’s too much text, usually 20% or more of the image, they will disapprove the ad. So they actually have a tool that you can use to ensure the image is optimized to have just enough text.

Facebook tool to optimize your ad image’s text.

You can see that Douglas’ ad’s text is at the limit of what Facebook wants. So optimizing it will improve results further.

That’s all there is to it!

Let me know how this works for you.

If you already are using StreetText you can easily create your own Listing ads from the funnels page. Simply select the Property Listing V1 (Lead Ad) from within your market-ready funnels. And you’re off to the races!

Have a great day!

Have you heard of the 80/20 rule? It’s a fantastic law of nature first observed by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in 1896. After noticing that 20% of his crops produced 80% of the harvest he pondered if this could be true for human activity as well. Pareto discovered that it was. Through a simple observation he uncovered what economists now refer to as the 80/20 rule.

When you’re wearing 5 hats, serving your clients, answering emails, and scrambling to stay on top of your tasks its very easy to go through a week having done a lot without doing anything to help improve the business itself.

If you were to take account of the possible tasks you could do in a week, you would see that some of them will have a big impact on the growth of your business while the rest barely move the needle at all.

In fact we now know that less than 20% of your activities account for 80% of the results you want. This begs the question, are you prioritizing the right activities? The people that consistently grow their business have developed a knack for getting the stuff that matters done, no matter what.

But how do you know which task is going to have the biggest impact?

Fortunately there’s a really simple framework created by Sean Ellis known as ICE. Sean Ellis was Dropbox’s first full-time marketer as the company exploded in growth. 

Doing the right things is more important than doing things right.

Mark Suster

When I first heard of the ICE framework, I began implementing it immediately. It was so easy.

ICE stands for Impact, Confidence and Effort. 

To use the ICE model, first you need a goal. Let’s say you plan to grow your business by 10 extra deals this year. That’s a good target.

Impact: On a scale of 1 to 10 how much of impact will this task/idea have on the goal.

Confidence: On a scale of 1 to 10 how much experience do you have with this task and did it work before? Have you tried this task before? Did it work? If the answer is no, give it a 1. If the answer is yes and it worked give it a 9.

Effort: On a scale of 1 to 10 how much time will this task take? If you’re working with a team, sometimes you have to ask the personal responsible to give you an estimate.

Then simply add up the numbers and divide them by 3. That will give you an average score. Sort all your ideas by the score and you will have a list of items that you implement in your business in order of the biggest impact.

All you have to do now is prioritize that task each week. No matter the tornado of your daily tasks, get it done. Look back at the end of the year and you will see your business has grown.

Here’s an example of the ICE framework in action.

If your company is venture backed and it takes off (think hockey stick curve) then it’s known as a Unicorn. But if you’re self-funded and things takes off like a rocket ship, then it’s something else,… it’s a Bigfoot.

Well… Our heart is all about helping authentic business professionals grow. And… We just so happen to be founded in the Pacific Northwest, home of the mythical Bigfoot. And what does Bigfoot love? Evergreen forests. And who doesn’t love an evergreen funnel. And Bigfoot just so happens to be a very humble and friendly ad expert. 

So when Bigfoot approached us about joining our team we couldn’t say no. For us, having the mythical Bigfoot part of StreetText just made sense.

The mythical Bigfoot loves digital advertising. Who knew. He’s a real pro at it. So you may see him pop up on your screen here and there as he does his favorite thing in the world and make your ads shine.

He’s working hard, behind the scenes, letting you know if your ad is working, getting leads, and turning driving results.

Sarah Allen is a real estate agent based out of Mankato Minnesota. In a previous article I shared how she doubled her business in 12 months. 

She runs Facebook funnels to capture leads using StreetText and follows up with personalized video to get more walkthroughs using BombBomb. 

Having been in real estate for only 2 years how did she get traction so quickly? Well being a professor of Communications Studies probably didn’t hurt. And neither did applying what she learnt at a recent NAR conference.

While at a NAR convention one of the panelists were using StreetText and BombBomb together. “He said he’s been able to get so many clients just because of the video interaction.” 

A first impression is a lasting impression. And it’s hard to convey sincerity in an email. Video captures your facial expression, your tone, and gives you a chance to be personal in your introduction.

Sarah shares that in her first video she says…

“Hey I’m Sarah Allen. Nice to meet you, Greg. How’s your day going? Saw that you wanted your home evaluated, would love to do that for you. I need to get inside your home to get a more accurate assessment. So why don’t we set up a home walkthrough, usually only takes me about an hour to do. Let me know what day works for you.”

You can find part 1 of Sarah’s story here. How Sarah went from 12 to 24 closings in her second year of real estate

Sarah Allen has been an agent for two years. Things didn’t click right away. “It was a lot of trial and error, which was frustrating the first year. Trust me, there were plenty of nights where I was like, ‘Why am I doing this? Real estate’s not for me. This deal, this client, I don’t know if I can handle this and the stress.’ That’s what you don’t see in those TV shows, is the stress behind real estate.”

Markus Willard conferenced called Sarah to learn why she got into real estate, how things are going, and how she doubled her business in her second year of real estate.

“I’ve always had a really strong passion for connecting with people.”

“I’m probably like millions of other people who watch HGTV and I’m like, ‘Oh, that looks fun.’ I remodelled two of my bathrooms. I increased the value of my home just through equity and made a great profit on it.”

“At this time I was a college professor in Mankato, Minnessota. I’ve been a professor going on for 11 years teaching Communication Studies.  If you know where Minneapolis Minnesota is, I’m about an hour and 20 minutes south of Minneapolis.”

“In the summers I only teach one or two classes. So, real estate would naturally work with my schedule. I thought about if for 3 months and finally I said, ‘Okay. I’ll take the classes and see what this is all about.’ It’s another one of those instances where the first moment I got into it, I was like, ‘Yeah. This is what I want to do.’ It’s nice that it’s a career where I can balance both my passions.”

“My first year was just a lot of trial and error and messing up, and realizing, ‘Okay, never doing that again. This is what works, and that worked really well,’ but the whole time has just been focusing on the relationship aspect and making sure they feel comfortable and confident with me as an agent.”

In her first year of real estate Sarah did 12 transactions. “That was my goal and I hit it.” This year Sarah’s goal was to double that. “I want to do 24 transactions, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to do it. I’m on pace to do it. This month was huge. I had six closings this month.“

So what strategies is Sarah using to hit her goals? And what strategies work best?

“First writing goals is important and then coming up with strategies for reaching the goals. I’ve increased my marketing a bit this last year… and trying to build my personal brand. I know I’m being recognized a little bit more within the community because of that marketing.”

“I also got a few referrals this year from my clients that I worked with last year and I had a couple repeat clients. But really with StreetText I can’t stress it enough because I’m having good success.”

“I joined StreetText right after the NAR convention, that was December of last year.”

“I went to a panel, and there was a guy on there that actually was using StreetText, and then he said that … StreetText and BombBomb, use them together. He said he’s been able to get so many clients just because of the video interaction.”

“I heard a lot of different ideas at NAR and different generation programs that you could use but this one just kind of stuck out and then having the free trial was a huge bonus. And then it just worked so well that I was like, okay yeah I don’t need to try any other ones ’cause this one is clearly going to work.”

“Just the overwhelming amount of leads that were coming in from StreetText was crazy, especially because a lot of agents that I was working with on my team… a lot of them use Zillow. But hearing how much they were paying for those leads and hearing how many of those leads were just bad, bad leads. Then, seeing through StreetText that I was getting real people who really wanted their home evaluations.“

“I’ve gone to 15 or 16 walk throughs and then 3 listings as a result of those and I’ve got my next listing next week. And there’s a percentage of those walkthroughs that are just not ready yet.” But Sarah left a lasting impression, so she’s creating a relationship there.

“A lot of my colleagues are like, ‘How are you getting all these leads? What are you using?’ And I really don’t want to tell them, but at the same time, I like healthy competition.”

“That’s a pretty strong ROI. Most people would say, it’s about converting leads at a high percentage but I was like, in real estate that’s actually really good.” Homes in her area are on the market for around $200,000. In one year she’ll have closed 5 deals from StreetText. She is spending about $9/day on Facebook and $200 per month on StreetText or around $2400 for the year. That’s a good ROI, “I would say.” 

Sarah says, that if she were starting out again she’d give herself this advice, “Patience is key and just that perseverance that it will pay off. And not saying the stress is gonna go away but it just gets a little bit easier knowing that you can get through those difficult times and be able to have a lot.”

Also, “It’s about always being willing to go the extra mile for a client. My family has always had a very hard work ethic and always wanting to help people and never expecting something in return if you are going to help somebody. And so I’ve had that really instilled in me. I’ve helped several clients move. Just two days ago I was over at a clients house filling in nail holes with putty and then I went back the next day and painted them because they’re out of the country. People obviously really appreciate that.”

Prospecting and following up with leads can be scary at first. Sarah has been practicing and teaching others on how to overcome fears.

“The biggest understanding you need to know about yourself is where is that fear coming from? Inside, you have to rationally ask yourself why am I so fearful? So, on the first day of class I ask, ‘What’s the worst that could happen when you’re up here talking?‘ Some people say, ‘Oh, I’m going to forget what I’m going to say,’ and I respond, ‘You’re going to see me forget what I’m going to say several times this semester, and I’ve been doing this for how many years? So, it’s not a big deal. You move on.”

“Or they say, ‘Oh, these people don’t care what I’m saying and now they’re judging me.’ And getting over that fear just comes from personal growth.“

Sarah has applied her can-do attitude to real estate, she’s invested in learning, attended conferences, she’s been willing to try new things, proactively overcome her fears and implemented the strategies that she’s seeing working. In all that, she’s given back to her clients – willing to go that extra mile. This year she’s doubled her business, can’t wait to see where she takes her business next.