Dear Friend,

This week I’m going to answer a very interesting question that somebody asked me and I think you’ll find it very helpful because I’ve had lots of people ask me this question in different ways but the question was basically they said Dean I’d love to see or hear a Marketing Monday where you talk about what you would do with different budget amounts, what you would spend money on if you were spending $250, $500 and $1000 on a monthly basis and I thought man that’s really a good question, I’m going to add to that and just say what I would do if I was spending zero dollars.

$0

Let’s get right to it. Here’s some of the strategies that I would use if I were spending zero dollars a month on marketing, if I had no money. Now the good news is that usually when you have no money to spend on marketing it’s usually a situation where you have an abundance of time so you have time on your side to do some marketing and use that as your currency. So with that in mind some of the things that I would do, the first thing I would is I would use craigslist.com. craigslist is a fantastic tool, a neat opportunity for you to reach lots of people who are doing real estate searches on craigslist. We’ve found that it’s an incredible strategy. If you look in our member breakthrough from a couple of months ago you’ll find a whole strategy all about how different members are using craigslist very successfully and coupled with your my phone leads and your my web leads craigslist is a wonderful opportunity for you to spend no money; takes a little of time to learn how to use it, to learn how to post ads, to learn how to create the html ads or put images or pictures in your ads but once you learn how to do it it’s very easy to maintain and it’s something that you can do again and again and something that will continue to get great results for you. So number one on my list if I had zero dollars would be craigslist.com.

The second thing that I would do if I was spending zero dollars on advertising and marketing is I would ask for referrals from every person that I run into. Now I’m going to post a link to a previous Marketing Monday where I talk about a thirty day orchestrated referral challenge so what I’m going to suggest for you is to do the steps in this thirty day orchestrated referral challenge and essentially what it is is to pick a price range, to pick a type of home that would be very popular in your area, to pick a zero down loan program, it could be an FHA program with seller concessions and to every time you run into somebody that you know you have a very short orchestrated referral dialogue with those people and you give them, and because we’re spending no money here, we give them, normally we would give them a lead generating business card that we’ve made up specifically for the purpose but since we’re spending no money I would give them one of your regular business cards and on the back of the card I would have handwritten the information about your my web leads number or your my phone leads number or your my web leads lead generating website address so that they can get more information so I’m not going to go into depth on that strategy, I’m going to post a link to it on MarketingMonday.com so that if you’re listening as a podcast on Itunes you can go to MarketingMonday.com and get the link to that strategy from the archives.

The third thing that I would if I were spending zero dollars is I would start a networking group. I would focus on finding people in my town or my city who are in complementary but non competitive industries and invite them to an after hours networking lunch or a networking get together maybe in the morning or in the evening or at lunchtime where the purpose of it is to start referring business to each other. I’ve done a previous Marketing Monday on this topic where I talk about seven cool things you can do for free to get business so I’ll post up a link to that Marketing Monday as well. I’m just realising this is going to be a very link rich Marketing Monday here, it’s like getting three in one.

If I had no money for marketing I would also partner perhaps with a realtor in my office who had listings or a listing that I could do some marketing for, that I could do open houses or that I could post on craigslist and do an open showing which is different than an open house where I would invite everybody to come to the property on Saturday at two o’clock sharp so that everybody would be there all at the same time.

Using listings is a fantastic way to generate buyer activity, to find buyers especially if you’re using things like craigslist and open houses. It’s a great situation for you to invest some time without having to spend any money.

So those are four great strategies that I would use if I had zero dollars and I’ll post up the links to those other strategies as well for you.

$250

Now if I had $250 to spend over the next thirty days the thing that I would immediately do is I would follow the steps in the thirty day lead blitz step by step. I would do everything in there. I would do the public notice flyers which is a very inexpensive way of generating new business. Public notice flyers are very inexpensive. Let’s say you do them even at a self serve copy machine you’re going to spend still five cents per flyer let’s say so let’s say you could get 100 public notice flyers for $5. Now you’re going to still invest some time in finding locations to put up your public notice flyers and if you remember public notice flyers are just a one page yellow flyer with little tear off tabs on the bottom where we would put pictures of homes and it would say lovely three and four bedroom homes, $250,00 to $450,000, zero down payment, free recorded message and your my phone leads number and your my web leads URL and put those everywhere that you can find an opportunity to put them. It could be in convenience stores, in grocery stores, in cafes, in community centres, at the library, there’s all kinds of different places where you see these bulletin boards or you see an open wall where you could ask permission to put up a flyer or if there are already a lot of flyers there you could put it up right there.

Now we have another version of the public notice flyer that does not have the tear off tabs that you could use to put everywhere that people wait. I’m remembering where we put them in Winter Haven where you put them at the tyre centre, at the oil change place, at a lot of different restaurants where people are sitting and there are things to read, at the walk in clinics, at the chiropractor office, at the dental office, at the hospital, at the * clinic, all kinds of different places where you can put these flyers where people are faced with a choice of reading either the December 2005 Reader’s Digest or something that can catch their attention so these flyers are the perfect ticket for that and what we also did was on the back of the flyers put some classified ads where we put ads about homes or ads about your home finder service or ads offering free reports, anything that you can do to get that message out to people who are just sitting around waiting for an opportunity for something to read.

Again one of the thirty day lead blitz strategies that I would use is the ugly yellow signs. Now the ugly yellow signs you’re going to spend a little money on to get 100 signs. You start off with your initial inventory of the signs but the good news is that you don’t use the signs again and again and again but it’s still going to cost you right around $100 for 100 signs and maybe another $50 for some of the H frames that you along with them but certainly $200 and you could have everything you need for doing the thirty day lead blitz strategies and included in that I would use the lead generating business cards where we’ve got little business cards that you can leave all over town where everywhere you go throughout your day if you make it your goal that if you print up 1000 of these lead generating cards everywhere you go throughout the day you could leave ten or so cards every single day. Going to the grocery store you could stop in the end of the row, leave some cards with the cars on the way. You could leave them at the cash registers of places that you frequently. You could take a newspaper, put the business card on the next newspaper. There’s all kinds of ways that you could distribute these cards and of course these cards are a great thing that you can use when you run into people and have your orchestrated referral dialogue with them.

Another strategy that I would if I had $250 to spend is to still continue to use craigslist. Everything that I’m talking about that I would do with zero dollars are still things that you can do even if you’re spending $250 so let’s bump it up now to $500 a month.

$500

If I had $500 a month to spend here are some of the things that I would do. First of all I would continue doing all the things that I’ve mentioned so far then I would add to that a getting listings campaign. I would choose a thousand homes with a good turnover.  I’d do a little bit of the research there and I would commit to sending those one thousand homes the lead generating postcard in the getting listings program to identify all the future home sellers. People will raise their hand, tell you who they are and you will have an opportunity then to send them your get top dollar newsletter, part of the getting listings program. Now I would do all of that in addition to the thirty day lead blitz so what you’re looking to do is to create little profit triangles where on one side you’re doing a thirty day lead blitz to find people who are looking for town homes in Georgetown let’s say and on the getting listings side you’re sending lead generating postcards to all the townhouse owners looking for people who are going to be selling their townhouse and your goal is to match everybody, to match your buyers to the sellers that you’re identifying with your getting listings campaign so that’s what I would do if I had $500 a month to spend.

$1000

If I had $1000 a month to spend you’re really in an opportunity where you could anything. Now you’re at a position where you can start using some of that money to save yourself some time. See the thing I really like about the getting listings campaign is that there’s not much time involved in it. Once you identify the area that you’re going to choose, once you learn how to get your postcards together, get your newsletters printed out, once you learn the mechanics of doing all that you’re going to have a ramp up period there and then once you’ve learnt how to do everything it’s very easy to maintain, in fact it’s so easy that you could have the entire process delegated where you don’t have to do anything and the only thing that happens is people call you up and say when can you come over and list my house or they’ll say when can you come over and tell me what I need to do to fix up my house or when can you come over and give me a price on my house. They call you and it’s a pretty freeing experience because you’re now getting a taste of purely investing money to generate leads which is a very satisfying place to come from if you can arrange things so that you can do that.

Now I would continue to do all the thirty day lead blitz strategies and I would add to that the finding buyers program where I would create a guide to the local real estate prices whether you were doing it for my town or whether you were doing it for a niche within that town but that’s a program that is a little bit of a front end loaded effort program meaning that you’re going to put in some effort, you’re going to spend a little money, you’re going to do a little research, get everything together but once you’ve created your guide what you’ve got then is a very valuable resource, something that you’ll be able to use again and again. The thing I like about programs like this is that there is a slight barrier to entry of any competitor coming in because it does take a little bit of disciplined effort to get it all together so you’re narrowing the field of people who are actually willing to do a little bit of work to get something valuable together like that.

What I would also look at doing if I were spending $1000 a month what that opens up for you is the opportunity to do display ads. I am a big fan of the homes magazines ads especially the ones that are the most popular in your areas. I still believe and still find that people even though they’re doing research on line there’s still something magical about being able to go up to the little box and pick up a magazine that has all the homes that are for sale in your area with nice pictures of those homes, something nice to look at over lunch or on your break or in the evenings and anybody who is a serious home hunter will be picking up that publication. So now your opportunity is to speak directly to those people and use a lead generating ad, matches perfectly with the finding buyers program, to offer information that people can get by calling the free recorded message or going to a website, lead generation, pure lead generation, nothing image building, nothing about branding yourself or anything like that. I look at the homes magazines as having a retail store in a busy mall and I use that comparison a lot because that’s really what it is. The reason that malls are very successful, the reason that every city has an auto dealer row where all the auto dealers congregate is because that creates a market, it creates a place where all the people who are looking for cars go and all the people who are looking for homes go to the homes magazines in addition to all the other things that they do.

Now if I had $1000 to spend every month another thing that I might do is look at doing some of the enhanced features on realtor.com, speaking again about where people go. Most people go on line looking for homes, we’ve got craigslist covered, we’ve got an opportunity now to enhance what you’re doing on realtor.com. I’m going to do a future Marketing Monday all about some of the lead generating things you can do using realtor.com but if you can use some of the enhanced features talking about some of the extra pictures, using the scrolling banner across the top and use that as a lead generator. It’s a very effective tool for you.

$2000

Then if I were spending $2000 what I would do is look at creating another complete profit triangle. See everything I’ve been talking about here is about choosing a niche market and going deep, completely deep into that one market. Now I would then mirror that with other markets so if I was doing town homes I might look at doing lakefront homes or I might look at doing country properties or another niche, kind of like what we talked about a couple of weeks ago on Marketing Monday.

So there’s a lot of opportunity if you start out investing your time in a way that’s going to help generate some money for you and then over time start replacing some of your time with some of that money so that’s how I would spend zero dollars, $250, $500 and $1000 and I hope you got some great ideas from that.

Again if you’ve got any questions or anything that you would like me to talk about on a future Marketing Monday just put up a little message on the message board, ask your question up there and I’ll be able to maybe look at your question and create a Marketing Monday specifically for you.

Thanks for tuning in. Tune in next time and we’ll talk about even more ways to find buyers, get listings and convert leads. Have a great week