Fred Rewey (00:11):
Welcome to Note Investing 101 with Fred Rewey and Tracy Z.
If you'vehttps://www.noteinvestor.com/101 been following along, this is like our seventh (eight) one that we did of this. We're just pulling back the curtain a little bit. Unveiling the basic, how to's, fundamentals of the note industry. Why do we like it so much? We have a combined 50 years experience in the industry. You'll find anybody you talk to that work with us. We pretty much knew no nonsense. We're going to tell you the way it is. We've done that on every session and this one is not to be excluded of that
Tracy Z (00:45):
Today, we're going to talk about taking your note business online.
When I got started in the note business in 1988, there weren't a lot of websites running around. Al Gore hadn't invented it yet. We had our first personal website, I think 1997. We got involved with websites for the note business earlier than that with our corporate job but our own personal website, we started in 1997. Then we went into doing a blog and we've really expanded. It's been a big part of our growth in the last 10 to15 years. Today we're here to talk a little bit about how to take your note business online.
Fred Rewey (01:25):
But first let’s do a disclaimer. We are not attorneys. We don't pretend to be one on TV. We don't pretend to be one on YouTube. We are not security people. We are not accountants. We are not going to give you legal advice or financial advice. You need to do that on your own. Did I leave anything else out?
Tracy Z (01:41):
I think you covered it all. Today we're going to talk about marketing your note business.
Fred Rewey (01:44):
First I wanted to go through some questions. The most popular questions when it comes to running an online note business. Then we're going to walk you through some sites and show you some demos and some things of how you want to build them yourself.
Very first off is, "Do I need a website? And what's the purpose of a website related to notes?"
I hope we're not talking anymore about whether someone should have a website when it comes to a company.
Tracy Z (02:13):
Yes, everybody, in our opinion, any business, not just the note business, pretty much needs a website. Now there are some exceptions every once in a while, you'll hire somebody up on Facebook marketplace or something that doesn't have a website. But in the financial world, when you're buying someone's important asset, like a real estate note, they want to know that you're real. And the way that they will see if you're real is if they'll go out on the internet and search for you. You do want to have a professional looking website. Now, good news you don't have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars anymore to get a professional looking website. Besides just looking professional, what are the other benefits to having a website.
Fred Rewey (02:46):
I think it's guaranteed credibility. As you're saying, people are going to check you out.
Another thing is a website is working 24/7. When we started a website long ago, like Tracy in ‘97 it was kind of an experiment. I didn't know that people are going to do this. Now people search you online, not only to see if you're real, they're searching for information about the note industry, about their current situation.
A lot of times it’s happening after hours. That is at two in the morning when they're stressed and worried about what to do. That's when they're looking for the solutions and you're not going to be there on the phone. Your website is doing the talking for you.
The other thing about a website is that you have to remember this is a people’s business. Nothing replaces talking to somebody one-on-one. The only purpose of your website is to give enough information for credibility and get them to want to talk to you and learn more. And that's it.
A lot of times people think, Oh, they get overwhelmed by a website or I need too much. Yes, you want to educate. Yes, you want them to know about you, but it only has one goal and that's to get them on the phone.
Tracy Z (04:00):
The other great thing about a website is most of us work from home. Some people have physical office space. We'd done both over the years. But the nice thing about a website, it's kind of like your brick and mortar business. You don't have to have a brick and mortar business, but it's like your office space but online. It just adds that level of credibility. As Fred said, it works 24/7. People can get information to actually submit a request for a quote. We've experienced that we’ve woken up in the morning and had people requesting quotes on notes just off of our website.
Fred Rewey (04:27):
It's the great equalizer. No one knows when they go. If you have a good looking website, it doesn't have to be the, all the bells and whistles. Sometimes you can overkill it in that sense. But a good looking website no one will ever know whether there are two employees or 200,000 employees working behind that website. You're all on an equal playing field.
The next question is, "What platforms should my website be on?"
This may be a bit of an advanced question for some of you. Going, "Well, wait a minute. I didn't know there were multiple things. I just knew the internet". There are a couple of different things out there. Do you want to talk about this though, in relation to WordPress?
Tracy Z (04:59):
Well, we have a preference. We like using the WordPress platform to build our websites. It's a self hosted version. You have a hosting, an SSL certificate and your own domain name. We like WordPress because we find it's simple for most people to use. We found over the years with its blog feature that you have the ability to post articles, that it's very search engine is optimized friendly. Now that is not the only type. Some people like to program HTML. Some people like Wix. Some people like GoDaddy's website builder. There are lots of other choices but we really like WordPress because you can find lots of professionals to help you with it. The interface and the search engines are very easy.
Fred Rewey (05:43):
I think, for me, one of the biggest takeaways as Tracy said is that it's easy for you to work on. It's easy in a sense that you might see there are so many themes out there. You can go, "Oh, I love to look at this". You can buy it bolted on. The nice thing is when you want to make changes you're not paying somebody $50 or $100 an hour. If the back interface of that is going, "Oh, I want to change my phone number. I want to change my address, or I want to change the sentence." It's very easy to use behind the scenes. That's why it's a platform. In addition to the fact, Google loves it. It's streamlined and everything else.
Tracy Z (06:13):
It's a little hard at the beginning to get the site to set up. Sometimes it's to your benefit to buy a premade theme or to hire someone to implement the theme. But once it's set up and operational, it's very simple to go in and post a new article. Then you can have that article shared out on social media.
Fred Rewey (06:30):
Next question. “If you're just starting out and you're searching for, where can I get a website?”
You probably see a lot about free sites, companies that offer you a free site. If you buy the domain name there, which is whatever the name of your company is, ours is www.Noteinvestor.com or whatever it is for you. And they'll say, "Hey, if you buy that here, you can have a free website or you can have a free email." Our advice to you, it doesn't cost a lot to host a website and it doesn't cost a lot to build a whole website but there are a lot of traps that go along with a free site.
Tracy Z (07:01):
A lot of times if they're offering it for free, because there is a physical cost associated with the domain name and hosting. Then if they're offering it for free, it's usually because either you don't get to have your own domain, your own website, you're sharing resources. Or perhaps it's because they're going to put a bunch of advertising on your site, which is just going to distract your customer.
We recommend you buy a domain name. They only cost about $15 a year, and then you get hosting. We like to get flywheel hosting. There are lots of other hosting companies. Somebody will say they like to Go daddy. Some will say that they like HostGator. They had some like BlueHosts, but the thing is, you don't want to be on this big shared hosting platform.
You want your own hosting. You want to be able to have an SSL certificate. That ranges about under $150 a year for that kind of hosting. And then you want an email at your domain name, and that is usually provided by an email provider at your domain name. It's usually different from hosting. Sometimes it's combined with it.
Fred Rewey (07:57):
The other thing about free sites that I think becomes the even bigger issue is what happens when you outgrow them and want to move it. A lot of times you're held hostage there. They may own your URL and you didn't know that. You've built this business and you think you own the URL. Now you want to move it but you can’t because they own the URL.
Sometimes you do own the URL but they're offering these astronomical prices to release it to you. I would avoid the free sites. There may be a couple of good ones out there off the top of my head but I'm not going to recommend anybody because everybody is changing every day.
If you have a question, you can certainly email one of us either Fred@noteinvestor.com or Tracy@NoteInvestor.com Or info@NoteInvestor.com. We'll be glad and try to steer you in the right way if we can.
Tracy Z (08:47):
But we're not going to steer you towards the free site though.
Fred Rewey (08:52):
Next, "What should my website contain?"
Tracy Z (08:56):
All kinds of good stuff, right? It should contain a Contact Us Page. This is very important so that people get a hold of you. It should contain an About Page. These are some basic pages that should be on a website. I think in the note business it should contain a Quote Request Worksheet. It’s important to have a Frequently Asked Questions page. That’s five or six main pages like that.
Then I think it should have an Article Sections. Like some people call it a blog. You can try to post something at least once a month, preferably every other week, if you're really feeling Gung ho once a week but at least once a month to show that you're keeping things up to date and fresh. What else do you think?
Fred Rewey (09:35):
Well, you pretty much named everything. You covered everything. I mean it's a combination of all those things.
Tracy Z (09:46):
Also you can add video. You can upload videos to let's say YouTube or Vimeo, and then you can share embedded on your website. The video would be another more advanced technology, but you don't have to do that. All the WordPress sites are compatible with that.
Fred Rewey (10:05):
"How much does it cost?" It depends.
It could be free. You can do it yourself. I'm not going to say free completely though, because yes, you can do most of it free. But you are going to have to buy a domain like Tracy says anywhere from $99.5 to $159.5 a year. You're going to need to buy hosting, which at the base level is probably going to be somewhere around 10 bucks a month.
At the high level, somewhere around, well, let's see $10 to $15, maybe somewhere between say $75 and $100 for some decent hosting. And then you're probably going to want to buy a theme, in which there are free things out there that are very good. By the way, there's a big difference between a free website and a free theme. If you find a theme that you liked and it’s free then that's certainly good. But if you want to have one built, you're probably going to get quotes of anywhere from $1000 to $2,000. I'm going to tell you right now on an average custom site and correct me if I'm wrong because you got your more that side of the business, but if you're spending more than 750 bucks for a custom site, you probably have a lot of bells and whistles.
Tracy Z (11:10):
Because we've gotten so good at building websites and we found that our members have a need for websites, because they are getting charged from $1000, $2,000 up to $3000 for a simple website. For this reason we created a division of our company that helps people set up their notes on our website. It's run by our daughter. We decided we were going to try to provide people a platform to have a website just like we had with www.NoteInvestor.com for an affordable entry level.
If you want a custom site, they'll start at the $899, like Fred mentioned. We also have ready to go note buyer website templates that are only $497. We offer a discount to our Note Investing tools members as well. There are other affordable options, we're not the only ones that provide that. But from us we got the www.NoteBuyerSites.com
Fred Rewey (12:01):
And we are going to show you that site. We'll use it as an example.
Next question is a big question actually. "How do I get visitors to my website?"
Because just having a website alone doesn't necessarily work.
Tracy Z (12:15):
That's very true. There are many strategies for it. You have to realize that you can't just build it and they will come. You still have to market your website. It's just like if you had a brick and mortar office, you might have a couple of people that happen to walk by, but you have to advertise and market that your business is there. It's the same way with your website. There are several strategies for that. You can do offline methodology to bring people to your website. That might be your networking, your referrals or your direct mail. There are also the online methods to drive people.
Fred Rewey (12:45):
You can advertise. You can use Pay Per Click. You can pay for an ad on Google and immediately have somebody click through it. You can have alliances with other people, maybe doing banner swaps for example. If that's something you want to do. You have the SEO aspect of it.
Tracy Z (12:58):
SEO stands for search engine optimization. Now that's done harder and harder over the years. It does still work. You just have to consistently add fresh, new and unique content.
Preferably we used to say over 350 words, but then we sell over 500 words. But now we're really talking 750 to a thousand words of good quality, unique content that you add. And if you consistently add content that uses good SEO practices, then you will slowly but surely work your way up in the rankings. But there is some longevity that it takes now compared to what it used to be.
Fred Rewey (13:33):
If somebody's watching this money right now, chances are you're going to get contacted. Someone will probably promise you a number one ranking for $1000, $2000 up to $3000 a month. The only way to be on the number one page of Google is if you have an advertising budget, you buy ad words, you're paying so much for someone to click on it and things like that. But people that say they're going to optimize your website to get you a number one ranking and all this other stuff. That game has sailed. It's not there anymore. Just save yourself some money, do a little bit of research and realize that is just not where to direct your efforts.
Tracy Z (14:16):
We have a question from a viewer.
Fred Rewey (14:19):
"If you add a squeeze page, how do you collect the data?"
Tracy Z (14:23):
There are lots of choices. I'll start with the simplest version then I'll let Fred talk about a more complex version. The simple version that all our websites come with, it's called input form. We use gravity forms, people input their information, it is stored in the website and it sends you an email to let you know that someone did that and then you can manually respond back to them. That's the very simplest form but there are other really cool automated ways that can happen for you. You want to talk about those?
Fred Rewey (15:01):
I'm real big in automation of it though but from an expense standpoint, you pretty much start out from what Tracy is talking about because it's the simplest, cheapest and it's the easiest. When you get going, though, what I like is automating everything. The way I automated is the same thing.
Let me show you an example. This here as they get into the websites, when they enter their input triggers in my contact management system, it collects their name, email and whatever data I want specifically collected. Then what happens is that they go into an email sequence per se. They'll get a welcome email. "Hey, thanks for that. Thanks for requesting this." It will create a system of triggers. For example maybe it sends them a video.
Fred Rewey (15:43):
Maybe it gives them a certain tag when they watch the video. Maybe it sends them an email when they did not watch the video versus when they did watch the video. It automates all that behind the scenes. And I love that. There's some very inexpensive ways to do that. You can do that at a very basic level with something like a MailChimp or an Aweber. You can also get into something like a Karcher, which is what I use. It may cost a little bit more, but it can also create the landing pages and everything else for you. I'll show you some examples of that as we get into it. But that's a great question.
Tracy Z (16:12):
It is a great question. I always say start with the inexpensive and then when the manual methodology takes too long to keep up with it then you've got enough business going that you want to pay for the automation.
Fred Rewey (16:25):
All right, let's jump in. Let me share my screen real quick and we’ll jump into a couple of these to show you exactly what we have going here.
If you go to www.NoteBuyerSites.com, this is the place that shows you where we have these sites that Tracy mentioned, these are turnkey sites. Now these are not accustomed to only you. Anybody buys them they get the same site. Obviously we customize your name and phone numbers and things like that.
This is your presence online. From here you can gradually build your website. This is your quick start in a turnkey operation.
Fred Rewey (17:06):
The first thing you would do is look at themes, you can build these yourself. You can choose whatever kind, look and feel that will work for you.
I'm just going to jump into one example. Let’s try “confidence” because that's one of our newest ones. This is exactly what a website would look for you. Of course it will have your name and information.
Let's talk about a couple of basic things that need to be in here. In the beginning it needs to have something kind of warm and fuzzy. You can see right here out of the gate is a request to quote.
Fred Rewey (17:41):
You also need to put action items right out of the gate. You can see at the very top on “Cash for your note” there's a “Contact us sell your note today".
When we go to the next tab there's another one "Get started today".
When you go to the next tab that scrolls through, it's "Get help now".
The visitors of your website, if they need some help, maybe they want to request a quote. Then right out of the gate, it will give them some options on what they can do. Now, remember we are talking about people looking at this in the middle of the night. This gives them several options.
Tracy Z (18:18):
Yes. You can download a PDF. They can call or the option we like is the online worksheet. You go to the online worksheet. It will contain the information that they will give you so that you can start to work up a quote.
Somebody wants to sell their real estate note. This is mostly geared for people who have sold property with seller financing. Then they could provide the basic information. You will be able to get back to them with a quote.
Then of course, you've got a "Contact us page". That page has your information, your logo, your company name etc.
Also it has a blog and the “About us page”.
Tracy Z (19:09):
This is the blog. This is just that little excerpt of the articles. One of the cool things about these websites that comes preloaded with 15 articles is it's ready to use content that you can modify to make your own or you can use as is.
Fred Rewey (19:28):
Let me just walk through the homepage a little bit. In here it will tell about your company, on this particular theme working with us means leaving your headaches behind and getting your money now.
As Tracy mentioned there are articles right here on this website. When someone goes, “Well wait a minute, what would be five reasons I would offer on our financing? “ There are multiple articles here that can answer that question.
Tracy Z (20:11):
Absolutely, all of our sites have the same basic content. They just have different themes that have different homepages. Some people like to modify these and add some customized content to speak to investors. Me, I kind of liked that new real estate theme that our daughter just did. Do you think that was theme four? Yes, right there. That's a nice one. Looks very much like your real estate thing.
Of course you change out any of the photos. Our web team does that at no additional cost, as long as you do it at setup you can switch out photos. You can also switch out colors. It can be customized to extra colors.
Fred Rewey (20:51):
Here's another one. And again, this is a sidebar. These lists are articles on the left side and of course they can also click on any of the recent posts. Plus it always has this “get in touch right away” tab so we know how to get a hold of somebody.
Tracy Z (21:04):
Both the “quote sheet” and the “contact us” page have a simple form. When somebody fills-out these forms it goes into the backend of your website and then it will notify you. That can be exported as well. If you want to get fancy, like Fred said, you can actually integrate it with the MailChimp or a Kartra, when somebody fills out a form that will be added to the database.
Fred Rewey (21:28):
Let me give you an example of that. When you go to www.noteinvestor.com many of you are getting the notifications for when we do these. You probably came in here at some point and one of the things you'll see, like this is how we do an opt-in on some of our pages. You can see someone that has what I call a bribe. Tracy says it's an incentive, but basically it is something to encourage them to give their email.
This is not necessarily directly to note sellers specifically, you would go to another site for that, but this moves towards investors. If they click on this it will open up this form. If they put in their name and email then they get to download the information and all the things that are happening behind the scenes.
And what immediately happened after that was they went into an email file. All those things exist as they go through there. So you can have something fancy like that. Or you can just have something simple as far as Tracy said what kind of dictates that is, well, how many emails you're getting. If you're getting 10 emails a day, then you probably want to automate that .If you're getting one or two, then that's something you want to think about.
Fred Rewey (22:32):
All right, well that's the walk- through of some of the websites. Thank you for following along on that. Now, any of those you can build like the turnkey sites. As we told you, we sell, we have 497 bucks or something, and that sets you up within like 72 hours. Assuming we get all the questions answered or you can build it yourself. You can go out and search for WordPress, you want to be self hosted and you want to go find a theme that you like, and then you start changing and building all the content on it.
Tracy Z (23:02):
Yes. The great thing about the websites is you build it, you own it. It’s your own domain. It has an SSL certificate. It comes with one year of hosting. You do have to purchase the domain name. Then after that renewing your hosting ranges between $96 and $120 a year. Then you just renew your domain name. The only thing you have to remember is if you want to use an email at your domain name, it just has to go through your domain provider. Websites are a great thing. We love them. If you go out and do very many searches in Google, you'll see that www.NoteInvestor.com pops up a lot. The www.NoteInvestor.com website is built on the exact same WordPress themes and platforms that we use to do the www.NoteBuyerSite.com
Tracy Z (23:43):
We give you the same kind of things that we use to promote our own business. We don't provide something that we don't use and believe in ourselves.
Again we invite you to go to www.NoteInvestor.com/101 that's where you get all the updates for what's going on with www.NoteInvestor.com.
Maybe just for a few moments, let's do a little bonus discussion about why websites are so great for sharing content for social media. We use that a lot. When we post a new article, we'll go out to our social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram then we'll share a link to that blog post. It becomes good information that's what I think social media, at least in our industry should be about, is sharing information and educating. I don't think social media is about a sale so much as people get to know, like, and trust you. So that is another way that if you write articles and blogs on your website, you can bring their visitors back to your website.
Fred Rewey (24:41):
Also understanding social media is kind of a blip on the radar. Let's say you write an article or you buy a website like ours that comes with 15 articles. It's not a share at once and never got to share it again. Chances are if you have a hundred people on Facebook that follow you and you post that maybe seven will see it. Then based on their reactions, maybe 14, we'll get to see it. So you have the opportunity of sharing that every six weeks or five weeks or four weeks. Share that same article but do a different reason or why you're sharing it on Facebook.
Fred Rewey (25:18):
Like if you're doing a different post but linking to that same article, you can recycle that. You can have excerpts of it. You can ask different questions that point to them. We have a whole part of our company that does social media services for people in the note business. And it does a lot of reusing those articles and getting it where you look like you're active that way. I mean, we're talking about Facebook. Linkedin is great for being able to share. Twitter's okay but not so much for deal flow. But some of it is really just being seen in lots of locations, search engines like Google and stuff like that. They pay attention to that. They see if you're active on other platforms that aren't just their own and that does have some weight.
Tracy Z (25:58):
It absolutely does. Then you can go another step further. You could list your website and your business on Google business pages, Facebook pages and LinkedIn business pages. All of those create valuable links. Think of them like breadcrumbs back to your website. That is the sort of thing search engines look for. One thing to think about, if you do get a website, remember to come up with content that other people have used. That's great when you're setting up a brochure site just to get started. But if you want to go to that next level, that extra effort, then you would want to go through and rewrite the content that’s unique to you. Put it in your own words and unique content, meaning somebody else's habit is something else that search engines like to see, but you've got a place to start and you can build and grow from it.
Fred Rewey (26:40):
I just want to say one more thing about social media that I just thought of. Social media can get overwhelming and I can do a whole webinar on how to make that a lot easier. There is some softwares and things you can do to make it a lot easier. But even if you don't think you're going to be involved in social media today, if you come up with a company name and you find out it hasn't been taken on Facebook, Twitter or whatever it may be. Go get it and lock it up with your email.
Fred Rewey (27:15):
Lock it up even if you don't use it, even if you don't broadcast it, make sure you lock it up and have your name because someday you may want to use it and I highly suspect you will.
Also you don't want someone else using it because if you build all this leverage and all this good promotion then someone else has your name on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn then you don't really want to get into that down the line.
Tracy Z (27:42):
Yes, also think about what domain name or URL you want. When we started out, we were Diversified Investment Services, Inc. hence our website name became www.DiversifiedInvestment.com and we still own that. We quickly realized that it’s a big mouthful, it was long and hard to spell. We then learned that your domain name does not have to match your company name. Then we decided to go with www.NoteInvestor.com.
That was a nice, short, catchy and easy to remember URL. It describes exactly what we do.
Make your domain name easy to spell and easy to remember. If that also matches your company name then great, but it doesn't have to. Remember the domain name, your website URL can be an asset of your company.
Fred Rewey (28:39):
If you want to see more of these videos, go to www.NoteInvestor.com/101 . We've got about, I think this is the eight one. I know we're doing at last one.
Tracy Z (28:53):
Can I talk about it for a second? For our next session we're going through the top questions you should ask before buying or investing in a note. We will deep dive into some of the very specific questions that need clarification before buying, selling or brokering a real estate note.
Fred Rewey (29:14):
If you want to check out the turnkey sites go to www.NoteBuyerSites.com. You can just cruise through there to get ideas of which ones you can buy or ideas for just building your own.
Now, don't take our content, but certainly take a look at the ideas behind it.
Once again, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for all the comments this week.
We did the 101 series. Like, share, subscribe, hit the bell. Share with a friend.
Tracy Z (29:42):
Hit the bell so that you'll be notified when we go live next time.
Fred Rewey (29:44):
Thanks everybody.
Tracy Z (29:47):
Happy note investing!
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