Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

This blog has been in existence for over a year now and I have evolved its following the growth of my business and the challenges that I have faced with my family along the way. In the last couple of months it has assumed its final shape and I have been explicitly addressing the Real Estate investing market with a specific attention to the leveraging of foreign capital which is my specialty.

Commercial Short Sales are going to be the next big investment wave.

Here and there I have been sharing with you also some advice on Internet and Social Media marketing tools and tactics since these are my major tools of the trade. I am building relationships in other countries and other continents, so electronic marketing is a must. Since this specific knowledge on social media is growing every day and it deserves its own space, I will launch soon another blog that will be only devoted to that, while this one, robertomazzoni.com, will remain my major vehicle for the real estate investment market with a specific focus on three subjects:

Residential real estate investment, rehabbing and selling techniques.

International relationship building and selling.

Commercial real estate investment, management and selling techniques.

It was an inevitable evolution that, after being successful in the residential markets, my investors would ask me to also open the commercial real estate investment market for them and I am doing it with a strong local partnerships that will allow me to cut the learning curve and share with you some of the most advanced and recent strategies and secrets of this exploding market.

The official beginning of this new huge evolution is going to be an event that will be held in Tampa and that you can sign on on Meetup. It is going to be a ground breaking event on the whole subject of commercial shortsales and loan modifications. There are ample opportunities to make money in this new field with rules of the game that are totally different from the residential world.

The best experts in the field will be there, ready to give you the full picture and to answer your questions. The seating is limited and I strongly advise you to be there is you are in the real estate investing field or would like to get in.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. Pass along this invitation to the people you know would be interested in commercial real estate investing, they will be grateful for the quality of information they will receive and for the opportunity of networking with some of the top players in the area.

Did you ever attend to a seminar or a presentation and the guy on the stage was saying the right things, was wearing the right dresses, was moving in the right way and yet you did not feel like buying his words or products?

Do you ever work with some customers that you simply hate? Do you feel that you are making too little money with your real estate job? Or maybe you are making enough money but can’t really enjoy what you are doing? It all looks like another job, but with a 12 hours a day schedule?

Are you dealing with the right type of customer?

I want to borrow a presentation from one of the most respected and influential Internet marketers to date because I think there are some key points that everyone has to assess in order to be really successful and which have to do with choosing a business and a customer that fully resonate with you as a person and which feel completely comfortable for you.

People perceive more than meets the eye and they can feel when you are doing something just because you have to and when you are not really “sold” yourself on the subject and on the actions and activities that such a subject entails.

Frank Kern’s “Core influence” presentation is 2 hours long and is definitely worth watching. I don’t personally agree with some aspects of it, like the “brain or subconscious theory” (I have a much more spiritual approach to life), but the process that he describes is definitely important when it comes to actually find your perfect market and your perfect customer. And he also gives an account of his personal experience with this process.

My take on it is that you’ll never be successful if you don’t take the time to:

1.Define what is the type of life you want to experience and where you want to experience ti and with whom. Having stuff is really not important if you can’t use money or object to live the life you really want to live.

2.Establish what you really enjoy most doing, that is the type of professional life you want to live and what kind of work exactly fits you best. In real estate for example there are a number of strategies and professions one can undertake. Often people look for the most lucrative one that can give the most results in the minimum time and with little or no effort. And they fail or commit to a job that they hate.

3.Figure out exactly what you customer wants to experience, how your properties or services can enhance his life. This brings us into selecting a segment of the market or a type of customer that is closest to your personal inclinations. Some people hate dealing with home buyers and they focus only on wholesaling properties to other investors. Some other people prefer rehabs and like dealing with hammers and drywall. Other people like me prefer the marketing side of it and specialize in creating relationships between people and in tutoring them. In my international real estate work, for example, I am translating between different cultures and actually sell by teaching.

4.Make sure that what you do aligns perfectly with what you desire to do most and is targeted to a customer that is just like you or that needs exactly what you have to offer.

By putting these four elements in play, you will get sales effortlessly and you will naturally attract the right type of customers. This is not something esoteric or complex. It is simply looking at what honestly you would like to do, regardless of constraints or potential consequences, and steer your boat into that direction.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. If you want an example of this approach in action look at Frank’s presentation. It’s free.

Gathering testimonials for your business is one of the key activities in any marketing effort and it is a key ingredient of many selling pages on the web, but the quality of the testimonial is a key factor in its credibility. We have all seen lame videos, recorded by people who were overly enthusiastic or who simply didn’t know much what to say except praising some product or person without telling us why we should consider it.

I have just found two very relevant posts, both written by Sean D’Souza on the site Copyblogger that give valuable advice on how to get a valuable testimonial and how to present it so that it contributes to out credibility, rather than subtracting from it.

The first article is titled: “The Secret Life of Testimonials” and the second: “Six Questions to Ask for Powerful Testimonials”. Sean introduces us to the interesting concept of the “reverse testimonial”, namely “ a testimonial that starts off in reverse” and instead of beginning with praise and ending with even more praise, they begin instead by describing some kind of problem the person was trying to solve, the uncertainty she was going through before deciding on the purchase.

In this way you obtain several benefits: first of all you mimic the state of mind in which your new potential customer is right now, you first emphasize the “pain” or trouble he is trying to solve, could it also be just his inability to take a decision and then to stick with it. I would add that you are not pushing the decision toward your customer or reader, but are initially withdrawing a bit so that HE reaches a bit, lowers her screens that have been developed in listening to overly sugary testimonial that nobody would believe. Also you address and solve, in the testimonials, many of the objections that would come in the mind of your potential customer.

The article suggests to structure the testimonial, which is not a new idea as such, but which is always a good idea because the person delivering the testimonial will have a track to follow and will feel, look and SOUND more natural. It is like when you interview some important person as a journalist: they always want to have the questions in advance, so to be ready to answer properly and intelligently. This also helps getting testimonials from people that are far away and that have bought your product or service much time ago.

The article suggests six questions you can ask as a routine. They are quite good, but you can develop your own. The key factors being addressed are

1.Objections to the purchase (so that you can defuse them with the rest of the testimonial).
2.Reason for buying despite the obstacles.
3.Key benefit received from the product or service (note it is just one).
4.Additional benefits
5.Reasons for recommending it
6.Additional comments

I would personally add a presentation of the customer herself, who she is and what she does. I know it’s kind of understood but it always an important to give further credibility and also offer her the chance of promoting herself or her company during the testimonial.

Roberto Mazzoni

Despite all the technical aspects that can be part of your business, the only thing you are really selling is the desire to do or have something and the purpose to get it. This is true of real estate as much as anything else. More and more I see people around me focusing on tools, techniques, marketing funnels and all that goes with it. It is all very fine and you need to be able to use any of these elements in order to keep your business running, but focusing on them is going to defeat any enterprise. You can only focus on people and their desires and on making sure that they can achieve them with your help.

give people motivation and make them win and they will get you money.

This evening I participated to a meetup in the area of Tampa focused on Internet Marketing. The special guest was one of the top professional bloggers in the nation who happens to live in the area and that I know because I have bought some of his materials on blogging. It was the perfect situation where the people present could have picked the brain of somebody who has managed to gain a five figure income online only by himself and through his own efforts and by blogging alone.

But the majority of the people present were asking what platform should they use to publish their blog, which theme (graphic layout) they should chose for their WordPress installation and so on, and the majority were not even asking questions. I could not believe my ears! They had a really successful blogger within their reach and they could have asked for free advice on how to establish their own success online and they were silent.

After the event, very few people exchanged some chat and I was the only one to reach the speaker, whip out my business card and fire many more questions in addition to the ones I had already done, trying to establish how his business was working and, more importantly, how his customers (students who try to become professional bloggers) were succeeding. And he told me that the vast majority of people got bogged down in technical issues and really didn’t believe they could make it, have trouble in staying focused and don’t know whether they are coming or going.

It looks a lot like the type of feedback that I hear from many fledging real estate investors: they have never done a deal and they wonder where to start from looking for the perfect “system”. Exactly the same happens in Internet Marketing training circles or affiliate marketing training circles. The fact is that where people are involved you cannot have a system: people are different, they react differently to things and therefore you need to become an expert in dealing with THEM not in technology.

There are many techniques for selling a house, but then again it boils down to people and how well you can motivate them. For example I have started marketing a house I have just finished rehabbing few days ago. I decided I was going to have a buyer fast and I already have a hot prospect: he lives just next door with his mom. He has seen the house change under his eyes, he knows it inside out and knows the neighborhood perfectly and would like to say close to mom but have his own space. He is VERY motivated. Do you thinks it is going to be an hard sale, if he can qualify for a loan? I don’t think so. Did I have to argue about the price? No. Did I have to explain the intricacies of the contracts? No. Did I have to show the house, pitching all of its amenities? No!

It’s a world made of people. They want to communicate with you and being helped, even if sometimes it looks like the contrary. Do that, and the rest will fall into place.

Roberto Mazzoni

There are always four key steps in developing or redeveloping your business activities online. I have borrowed a video from the famous Thirty Day Challenge, a free Internet Marketing training prorgram, that you can use to get the basics of this challenging world.

Four elements for your online business strategy.

Here is the video taken from the Thirty Day Challenge:

And here is my summary of the four basic elements:

1. Market research – this is the area where people make most mistakes. They start developing or redeveloping a product without first finding out what the market wants. This results in a lot of useless activity and frustration.
2. Traffic – when you have found a potential market you need to check if there if traffic online or any other communication line you might be using. If there is no traffic (which mean interest) you won’t be able to attract people’s attention.
3. Conversion – if there is traffic, are people really willing to spend money on this market? For example political views and comments attract lots of attention and could have a ton of people interested in them, but nobody would be willing to pay for them (you could sell advertisement only during election periods).
4. Product – once you have checked the preceding three items, you are now ready to develop or find a product to resell. You need to use the market to tell you what type of product they want. You can also start without having your product, but reselling somebody else’s product (affiliate marketing) that is already selling well. In this way you can familiarize and then find out what you can develop.

Market research won’t tell you what will be successful, but will definitely tell you what will NOT work so avoiding you a lot wasted time and resources.

Roberto Mazzoni

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