Learn how to market your real estate business online with LinkedIn. Allan McNabb and his guest Jorge Vazquez have successfully marketed real estate businesses online. Allan is with Image Building Media and helps businesses in various industries with their internet marketing, and Jorge is the CEO of Graystone Investment Group which heavily relies on internet marketing for lead generation.

Webinar Cheat Sheet

Here is the cheat sheet we provided the agents who attended the webinar. Although we did not cover all the items during the webinar, we are making all the information available here.

Download the complete PDF of the webinar cheat sheet: LinkedIn Marketing for Real Estate Professionals.

Topics Cover in the Webinar

Here are the general topics we cover in the webinar:

  • Optimize your personal profile and company page.
  • Determine your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
  • Connect with LinkedIn users.
  • Post to LinkedIn.
  • Groups.

Transcript

Allan: Okay so I’m going to share my screen really quickly here as we get started and I do want to pull up this info. This is an article I’ve got linked to on the cheat sheet for tonight and this has a lot of great information and a lot of it we’re not going to cover tonight and so I really encourage everyone to sort of go through there and check things out. There may be some little things you don’t have done yet as we’re talking about LinkedIn and we’re talking about marketing with LinkedIn and there may be just a few things that you don’t have done yet with your profile or something like that and so I really encourage everybody to sort of look over there, look over that and see if there might be something that you don’t quite have set up yet and some of the things, just making sure you’ve got your personal profile filled out and just try to fill out everything.

Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile and Company Page

Try to use keywords where you can about what you’re doing and this one’s about real estate and if you’re focused on investment real estate, really target in on that. If you’re focused on residential real estate, really target in on that but just try to put those keywords everywhere that you can because that’s going to help people when they’re searching with LinkedIn, it’s going to help them to find you and with the information about you, try to be really thorough about that.

With the recommendations, try to get some clients, try to get some friends, try to get co-workers to fill out the recommendations so that your personal profile is looking really good and then from your personal profile, you also have your business page and it’s very important to have that also so that you not only showcase yourself but also showcase your business and again, have that completely filled out. This article from HubSpot that I’ve got linked in our cheat sheet for tonight is going to give you a lot of good information about doing all of that.

Alright and I see that Jorge made it in and Jorge, we’re waiting on Ray to also make it in. He’s had a little trouble but Jorge, you wanted to say a little something to us tonight as we get started.

Jorge: Absolutely. Can you guys hear me and see me?

Allan: Yes. We can hear you and yes, we can see you also. Great job.

Jorge: Alright, thank you so much. So yeah, very excited about this webinar we’re going to be doing about marketing for real estate professionals and I’m excited, I’m here… Been in real estate for 20 years, Graystone, “You invest, we do the rest,” here to provide as much info as I can my friend.

Allan: Hey and Jorge if you would, as we get started because we are talking about real estate and I know that LinkedIn has been a really good channel for you for many years. Just if you can, tell us a little bit of the success that you’ve had with using LinkedIn.

Jorge: Absolutely and I wrote some numbers down just to give you some references. 2015, I closed about $300,000 worth of sales from LinkedIn. Typically, what I would do is go into groups, investor groups, I love international investor groups and syndicate the deals through them and if you stay persistent, I’ve gotten a lot of success from LinkedIn.

2016, we made about $125,000 on LinkedIn, that was with utilizing groups as well and it’s very simple guys. One of the reasons why I like LinkedIn is that unlike Facebook, 80% of the time people are using Facebook for personal stuff but LinkedIn, my friend, it’s pretty much… It’s a resume. People go there with intentions of doing business. That’s the big difference from LinkedIn and Facebook. I could go over every single year but on average, I would say Allan, that we’ve done probably $200,000 a year worth of real estate sales just from LinkedIn alone.

Very simple, just being persistent, providing good deals, providing the education to the groups, and by the way, one thing that is really cool about LinkedIn is that the groups themselves, they do such a good job monitoring who’s providing good information and who’s not. So in a way, when most of your postings are getting approved by the administrator, that’s just validating that the information you’re posting is great and one thing that happens to me often is that I would go to groups that have 200,000, 300,000 people, there’s a couple of big, big ass groups in LinkedIn and try to get to know the director, right?

But the minute guys, this is cool, the minute that the director feels that the content you’re bringing is valuable, they’re going to start pushing your post. I remember that one of the… Because of the persistency that I had in one of the groups years ago, the director of this group with about 300,000 people said to me, “Jorge, I love the content that you’re providing. Can I feature your article on the top for a couple of weeks?” And I said, “Hell yes. Do it.” I don’t know if you remember that, Allan. Do you remember that a few years ago? Where they…

Allan: Absolutely. I was thinking of the exact same thing while you were talking.

Jorge: And it went viral and all of a sudden we have 200,000 likes on it. It was insane. That’s a really cool thing about LinkedIn and the groups, that those groups are managed professionally and if your stuff is getting accepted, if you posts are getting accepted, it’s because you’re providing good content but I could tell you the same way that I’m telling you that you could make a lot of noise with your post in LinkedIn, you could also get banned very quick.

Look for those groups that are managed professionally. Look for the groups that you see post that relate to the topic, where you see that the way that they’re managing the group is very professional, making sure that the contents all relate to everything. Those are the groups that you want to post into and the minute that you get validated because it’s not going to be easy, the first few times you post, you’re not going to get your post approved and you’re going to email the director of the group and you’re going to say, “My friend, what type of content do you need? What can I do? I want to be in front of your 200,000 people.” and eventually, if you’re persistent enough, you get a hold of the manager of the page and he’ll say, “Okay, I’ll give you a shot. If you post things like this, I’ll go ahead and approve your post.” and after that, it just goes like wildfire.

You start getting a ton of connections. You get a lot of people saying “Well, wait a second. They’re approving this guy’s post on this massive group. He must be somebody.” and that’s how we collected a lot of the emails we have right now. I would say out of the 17,000 emails we have in the database, a big portion of them, if not half of them, came from doing exactly this. Going out to popular groups, investor groups, meeting the manager of the groups, asking for permission. “What do you need to make my post relevant? What do you need to feature my post?” And once you get to that level, the sky’s the limit because it just… Everybody else just starts following you.

Allan: And Jorge, I’m glad you mentioned your database because as you were talking, a term that’s really important to marketing, whether it’s real estate or anything else, a very important term is omnichannel and that is you just don’t do one thing and that’s like the golden goose that laid the golden egg but you do a lot of things together and you bring some synergy together and any of the big hitters in real estate, what’s the one most important thing? It’s their database and LinkedIn has been a big thing for you to grow your database because as we talked about, not long ago, the highest return on investment for marketing is email from your database and so although LinkedIn, hopefully, you’re going to get some sales off of that just as Jorge has but that database is where you’re really going to get those sales. So LinkedIn is super important to growing your database. Right. So go ahead, Jorge.

Jorge: I’m sorry to interrupt you.

Allan: Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.

Jorge: You have to be very vigilant and you have to have the right strategy because people think “Okay, let me join every single group.” Remember, LinkedIn only allows you to do 40 so you gotta be very strategically of what groups you join. You gotta make it serious. You have to make a serious decision what groups are you going to commit to, you need to participate, you need to comment on another post but once you find… And by the way, guys, if you find a group that has half a million people in it, there’s a few of them out there, chances are that that group has most of the active investors. They’re all ready for that industry, whatever the case might be, in this case real estate.

So there’s no point of going to the $500,000 group… Oh, I’m sorry, 500,000-people group and then joining all of these little groups that you’re not going to commit to. Just go for top three, top four or five, maybe. Get to know the directors of the group and just like you said Allan, just focus on really networking with the peers in that group.

Allan: Yeah and as you do that and as you do that, you’ve got engaging posts. You’re bringing people to your website. They’re eventually filling out your lead capture form. That’s how they get in your database and then you’ve got them in there for years to market to them and a lot of times, it does take years, especially when you get some of the big customers that are going to buy multiple properties for a year and in large part, that’s how you do it and LinkedIn is the best social channel for that.

Jorge: Let me put it to you in perspective. The last thing I want to say. I sold 75 properties to one client only in 2010, just one client. Where did it come from? LinkedIn. Drop the mic.

[laughter]

Allan: That is exactly right, guys. So I wanted to open up because we can all see how important LinkedIn is and if you’re doing residential real estate with someone that buys a home once every 7, 10, 15 years or something like that, then maybe Facebook is going to be better but if you’re going for the professional person who may be an investor or may be an executive, something like that, I mean LinkedIn is definitely going to be the place to go.

So let’s talk about… And for those of you who are new, I appreciate everybody coming in this afternoon. In the group chat, we have a link where you can download what I call my “Cheat Sheet.” We may or may not get through it all. At the very top, there is a link to a HubSpot article that’s very good and it’s got a lot of the basic stuff we’re not covering tonight. We’re not talking about filling out your profile, your business page, SEO-ing that, all that stuff and that’s important stuff but we’re not talking about that tonight so we do have that link for you and I encourage you to look at it even if you’ve been on LinkedIn a long time ’cause things have changed. Check it out. Look at that. There may be a couple of things you’ve not done yet, maybe you didn’t know that have changed and check that out when you get a chance.

Determine your LinkedIn Marketing Strategy

All right. When you are starting, Jorge and I think we’ve got Ray with us also. When we’re starting with LinkedIn, we need to have a strategy. Part of the strategy is going to be groups. We’ve talked about that a little bit but we’ve gotta have a strategy. I mean, what is the purpose with doing this? Because you can spend a lot of time on LinkedIn and be going the wrong direction and at the end of the day, you’ve just spent a lot of time and so the first thing is determine what are you using LinkedIn for and what is your strategy? I’ll give you just a little bit of our strategy that we… And I’m going to look at my chat. I’ve also got some chat coming in here. We appreciate those messages and I’ll be looking at those as we go. When we talk about our strategy, I’ll give you an example of ours. We’re not out there spending a lot of time and money trying to sell directly on Linkedin. Now, there’re a lot of people doing that and there’s like 93%, 94 or 95% of headhunters, that’s their main thing.

What we use LinkedIn to do is to drive traffic to our website so that we can get them in our database and we can market to them. Now that’s our strategy and so as a result of that, we’re not like a headhunter that’s spending many hours a week in LinkedIn and so what’s your strategy? We’re B2B. A lot of realtors are probably B2C, business to customer. If you are with an investment real estate, you too might be B2B and so you’re selling to other businesses and so what is your strategy? And that’s going to be very important when you target connections and so we’ll talk about getting these connections in just a second and we’ve got several ways of doing it. Jorge, we’re going to ask him to address one of those when we get to that in just a moment but Jorge or Ray, can you chime in with giving of us some information about what should the strategy be in using LinkedIn?

What should the strategy be maybe for getting and selling investment real estate and maybe even opposed to residential real estate? What are some suggested strategies? Can you guys chime in on that?

Jorge: Well if I could start, Ray?

Ray: All right. [chuckle]

Jorge: Do you mind? All right. So pretty much the beauty about selling anything, in this case real estate, especially if it’s a global product is something that it could be sold to anyone. Actually, I’m a realtor but I could sell an investment property to another realtor. In reality, your product applies to everyone and everywhere in the world. Not only the strategy, I agree with you Allan, 100% the strategy should always be online to educate people 100%. You don’t want to be soliciting. You want to be educating people. Let people come to you after they see everything you know. That has always been the easiest way for me.

Well first of all, if you start posting solicitations all over the place, your ratio of viewers is going to diminish. It’s going to go down because people don’t want to see that stuff, okay? If you go to really big groups, like the ones that I was talking about and if you start soliciting, the same thing. You’re going to get banned and people are not going to relate to what you’re saying. They don’t know you first. Investing in real estate is not a couple of dollars, right? So anybody that wants to invest with you is going to need a couple of hundred thousand dollars so they need to know you first. They need to know who you are. So I’m all about educating, educating, educating first and then letting people come to you with their needs.

I was talking to an agent today, to Marcus and he was telling me, “What type of videos should I do for social media? Everything that I’ve done right now, it seems like all I could teach is the stuff that I’m doing as an agent, that is making me more successful. The only thing I could think of is teaching other agents what I’m doing and how is that going to help me, Jorge? Because agents are on the same field.” and I said, “Are you kidding me? Teach agents everything you know, karma will take care of you.” Because what happens is, your audience at that moment could be a mix of agents, regular people but the regular people, the people that are not in the business, they’re going to say, “Well, he’s teaching other agents. He must be badass. Let me talk to the top, let me talk to the guy that’s teaching other agents.”

So don’t have this misconception of, “Let me just educate this segment of the population.” Make sure that you’re networking, educating other agents, educating people on your same market, being a value to competitors, even. Because we’re online, other people are looking at what we’re doing and these competitors won’t be your business, they’re not going to give you the business but the people looking at what you’re doing will be like “Wow! That guy’s teaching other companies what to do.” So, to make it sure, the strategy should always be “Let me educate my viewers and let them come to me.” That’s the first piece of advice from me.

Allan: That’s right and I’ll go over to Ray also. Ray, do you have any thoughts there with that?

Ray: Well also, just make sure that you’re engaging them because think about this. We all have different social media platforms and if we just see somebody always posting links and always giving out education, which is great but then when you post something, they’re not interacting with you, you’re less likely to post or interact with their things. So you just want to make sure that not only are you posting and giving encouragement so when people are posting and liking your stuff, thank them for it and thank them on a public forum as well. So I think that both things are correct.

I like what Jorge said about making sure that you’re giving out education ’cause that’s a benefit but also let people know that you’re personable and you want to also push them forward. Like for instance, us creating a platform for other people to talk about their businesses. I’ve noticed that I did a Facebook post yesterday and it’s over 200 people that responded to that because I was more interested in what they were doing. “What type of business are you in? What are you doing?”

And the post just kept going but as soon as I just posted a link and I was like “Hey, go check this out,” some of the people went but it wasn’t as effective as the one where I was actually asking them. I think, educate and interact. Put those things together and you have a good package.

Allan: That’s right.

Ray: Right, I totally, totally agree with you, Ray. Nadia, are you on the call? I showed Nadia an example of how we took two identical post, okay? One, zero interaction, one like, the other one we took zero interaction, one like, that one like, I went into the person and figured out where that person was from. The person said, real estate in California and the article was about ways of dealing with the Corona and how to stay busy in this time and I just said “Hey, how things are going in California? Thank you so much for liking my post.” Overnight, within 24 hours, this post that I didn’t do anything with, only had 25 views, the one that I started interacting and to Ray’s point, you have to be true for what you’re saying, you have to mean it, you gotta be nice, you gotta care about what other people are doing. It was at 340 views like this and 10 likes.

Jorge: So that interaction is very important. The problem with doing too much interaction, sometimes we tend to say “Oh, let’s get our VA to do it.” It’s not going to be the same. It’s not going to be the same and there’s no way of you interacting with all of them but if you put it in your schedule and you say “Hey listen, once a week, twice a week, I’m going to take two and I’m going to interact with those people” it’s going to go a long way.

Ray: Oh yeah.

Allan: And guys, if I can talk just a moment from a technical aspect, there’s a reason why that happened and before I do that, I do want to mention we’ve got Rich with us on Facebook live. He’s got a question about the top three LinkedIn groups for residential real estate. So be thinking about that. We want to answer that question in just a little bit but let me talk about the LinkedIn algorithm for just a moment. A lot of the social channels have changed. We talked about this the last couple of webinars with Facebook.

It used to be with Facebook, if you got a bunch of page likes, then a lot of people would see your post. That’s not true anymore, they changed that. The weight is given by how much engagement you have. Well, the same thing is true with LinkedIn. The amount of engagement, number one. Number two, the velocity of engagement. So Jorge, he got a comment or a like, he looks up who that person is, he responds to them, he tags them, he starts getting this conversation going. All of a sudden, now he’s got several comments, he’s got several likes. All of a sudden, now it’s seen by two, three, 400% more people and that’s the way LinkedIn works and so that’s all about their algorithm.

Alright, so any other thoughts from anyone else on Zoom? And we want to get to Rich’s question about the best three residential real estate groups on LinkedIn but if we’ve got any other thoughts or questions from anyone on LinkedIn, you can open up your microphone and just let us know or you can always chat that in. Any thoughts or questions?

Alright, we do have a chat message here, interactive posts definitely get more responses, especially based on the various algorithms tied into the various platforms. Alright. We appreciate that from Lisa. Very, very true. So as we talked about the last couple of weeks, you have to know the game and play the game and sometimes we’ll get frustrated. Well, why does Google do this? Or why does Facebook do this? Or why does LinkedIn do this? Well, you know what, they’re going to do what they’re going to do. It’s our job to know how to play the game so we can play it and we can get more business.

Connect with LinkedIn Users

Alright, Jorge, any thoughts before we move on there just a little bit and I do want to talk about getting more connections and the right connections, more connections, and the right connections and Jorge, you’ve shared a little bit of a technique that you use. You want to talk about that just a little bit with your Gmail. Oh your mic, you’ve muted there Jorge. Can you unmute?

Jorge: Oops, yes.

Allan: Yeah.

Jorge: Alright, guys and I created a video about this not too long ago. There’s a way, if you go under Connections, you could go under My Connections in LinkedIn. I don’t know if I’m allowed Allan, to share my screen.

Allan: Yeah, one second. Let me give you permission to do that. Okay, try it now.

Jorge: Alright, give me a second, hold on. Can you guys see that?

Allan: Yes, we see that.

Jorge: Okay, awesome. So this is a really cool concept guys and I’ve done it. I’ve done it with other people and it’s really cool. When you go to My Network, you’re going to get to this page, right? And you have this button here that says Connect, connect to more people pretty much. You’re going to click Continue on that and pretty much what it’s going to do, it’s going to allow you to put your email and in this case look at this, there’s 22 people that showed up on it real quick but the whole purpose of it is for you to connect every single lever you have and be able to, with the click of one button, be able to invite everybody that you have interacted with in the past.

In this case, I have my Graystone email connected, Ray so “You Invest, We Do The Rest.” had to plug a commercial there real quick but I have it connected there so anybody and everybody that I interact with in, through my email, I’m able to, once I connect my email to LinkedIn, I’m able to invite them all to be part of my group or friends, okay? So if you skip that one, this second set of list, list, this list is people that are not in LinkedIn already. That’s why you don’t see any faces or anything like that but look at all the people that you could invite to LinkedIn but what makes it even more powerful is that you, you could add all their emails.

One thing that I do that is really creative is let’s say that I have a really good mortgage lender that I work with and I’ve been working with him for 10 years and he’s got, I got 15,000 connections, he’s got 10,000 connections, whatever the case might be, okay? So what I can do is I could say to him, can you let me borrow your email? Let’s plug it into my LinkedIn so that way I could invite all your connections to be my friends and then in exchange, I’ll do the same for you and let me see if I could do it real quick to show you guys real quick, my email, internet is going kinda slow but try another email.

Boom, here. So I can say, “Nagib, can you lend me your email?” Okay nagib@graystoneig.com, okay? So I hit Continue and obviously, the person has to be able to be next to you, they’re going to have to provide you their login temporarily.

Once you do the connection, you could totally stop it. Well, let’s say that and I got a couple other agents here but let’s say that in this case Universal said, go for it, add my connections. Let’s see what happens but it would allow me to connect with all of you know, look at that, okay. So we got more people now, okay. So it’ll allow you to connect to all of your friend’s connections and vice versa and in reality, people might say, “Well, this could be spam.” The cool thing about any social media invitations is that they typically are not seen as spam for whatever reason but you’re very likely to, if you get an email about garbage, you’re very likely to make it a spam right away but typically, when you get an invite from a social media platform, you’re like “I don’t want to be your friend but I’m not going to make you a spam because you’re trying to invite me to network with you.”

So in the sense of worrying about spamming, it’s a non-issue, in the sense of any type of conflict, I usually do it with people that are in a different industry. So I would say “Hey a HR company, come here, let’s share connections. A mortgage company, come here, let’s share connections” and vice versa. It’s a really good way of you going from a couple of connections to thousands of connections right away. Hope you liked that tip.

Allan: Yeah, we appreciate that. That’s probably about the easiest way to do it. You could also upload a CSV file if you wanted to do that. You could sync your email accounts if you want to do that. So it does make it really, really easy. So that is a great way.

Alright. So let’s also talk about going out and finding people. It’s super important to figure out what type of people are good connections. So, let’s get some thoughts. Jorge, from the group, what make good connections for real estate agents, whether it be investment real estate, it be residential real estate? What is your targeted connection? What type of person? If you’re going to search for those types of people, what would sort of be your criteria?

Jorge: Okay. So that’s a tough question but what I will say is I like to always mimic people that are more successful than me. I would go to the profiles that I admire that are in the same industry that I am and I look at their connections and then I say “Okay, what type of connections they’re doing? They’re obviously successful. They’re making millions of dollars. So what type of connections they have? I’m sure that the connections they have, they have them for a reason.” I go for those first.

I identify my biggest competitors, people that I look up to, people that are in the same industry, people that are here locally and then I say “Okay, how can I go and connect with those people?” That’s the easiest way to do it. Another thing that I do is just go and search. Search the keyword “investor” ’cause if you search by the keyword “investor”, you will come up with profiles of investors locally. That’s the way, best way I do it.

Now, when it comes to people finding me, what I do is I Google different keywords and then I notice who’s coming up top on the search. Why is that person coming up top in the search and not me? What type of description they have on place that’s creating the SEO that is beating my own profile and we have the same product? What’s going on? So, often it’s the type of SEO they’re using on the description and the stuff that they have on the profile, the type of profile they have, ’cause I believe if you have a complete, you become like a premium profile or all star profile, which I am. So those some of the ways that I do but the easiest way to connect with people is let them connect with you because they see the value of the postings you’re doing in the good groups. You let them come to you. Going towards people individually, I don’t think it’s a really good idea, technique.

Allan: Yeah, especially once you get about 5000 connections, it just sort of becomes an animal unto itself but getting off the ground and getting going, you’re probably going to have to reach out to some folks and I prepared a couple of screens while Jorge was giving us that last bit of information and I’ve got a couple, I just pulled up a couple of searches and for me, realtors and people in the real estate industry, mortgage brokers, lenders, all of those types of folks are really good for me and so I want to show you, for example, I just went up here to the search, we’re searching for people. I just put “realtors Tampa.” But there are a lot of filters and I want to show you these and then what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you a different search.

But I can search for first, second or third connections. So now, a first connection is someone I’m already connected to. So, if I’m looking for real estate professionals that I’m already connecting to because maybe I’m wanting to know who am I already connected with and then they might know the person I’m trying to reach that I’m not connected with right now. So you could be searching for, let’s say, the second and third connections of Jorge Vasquez and then I can choose locations, could be Tampa, could be United States, could be somewhere else in Florida, could be another country, could be different companies that I’m searching for, industries and things like that and so this will allow me to reach out to them. I’m just going to apply that filter and up come a lot of people.

Let’s say, for example, I’ve got a lot of connections with Keller Williams and I just say I want to find all the Keller Williams people that I’m not connected with already and there you go and I’ll tell you just a really quick story to the importance with this, because I had gone through this and done this quite a bit. So I get a phone call, totally cold call from someone I’ve never talked to, never met before, this person has never met me, we’ve never talked and the person says, “Are you Allan MacNab, the social media guru of the world?” and I said, “Well, I don’t know about that.” Well, lo and behold, he says, “I called you because you are connected to a lot of people that I know.” This was a Keller Williams real estate agent.

Now the funny thing is, I didn’t know really any of those people I was connected to but it made me look like I knew them. As a matter of fact, we got business from that person and that person has given us referrals we’ve gotten other business from in other industries because he’s also a business broker. So some of his clients were business brokers.

Let me show you for a real estate investment, real estate investor USA… Here, I get a list of real estate investors and I can come over and I can filter if I want to see, well just the ones in United States or maybe I’m targeting China, maybe I’m targeting Canada, maybe I’m targeting… I just want to know are there any in Florida that I’m not connected with yet? And I can select these and then I can reach out, I can request a connection, I can send a message when I request the connection and I can begin to build my connections and talking about the LinkedIn algorithm, once we get a connection, we build a little rapport, this person starts to like, doesn’t have to comment, starts to like our posts, guess what? Every morning when he comes, he goes to work, he checks his LinkedIn, guess whose posts are at the top of his feed? They are yours because he’s been liking your posts.

So that’s the way it works and that’s how you can find people once you can decide this is my target connection, then you can find them, you can start building relationships with them and you can generate some business off of that. Okay Jorge, any comments on finding your target people or any comments for anyone else that we’ve got here? Just open your mic and tell us what’s on your mind there. Let’s…

Jorge: Like I said, I think that going for one person individually, I mean you could do that. I rather, if I were to put most of my focus on something, it would be to become really good friends of a top director of a top group and then provide quality content into that group and let people come to me but at the beginning, you definitely want to have more than 500 connections because then, in your profile it shows 500 plus so people don’t know whether you have thousands or just the 500, it’s all about perception guys. So definitely, at the beginning you want to try to connect to as many people as possible.

I go after competitors, to your point so I’ll go to competitors and find out who their connections are and you could put two and two together very easy. If you see that the owner of a big company here, like Beta-goth has a person that’s connected with them and they say millionaire investor and they’re liking all of their posts, then that’s a person that’s actually active. I typically go that route, I see what other companies and other clients at the other companies have and then I try to offer my services as well.

Allan: Yeah, guys and at the very beginning, I used to sit watching the television, connect, connect, connect, connect, you can put out like 2,000 requests out there, a bunch will respond after a span of… If they’ve not responded for a few months, I delete all of those and I put in a bunch more but once you hit about 5,000, they just start coming to you. I really don’t do that anymore and but you gotta do that to get started.

Okay, any other thoughts? Lisa had a good thought she chatted in, you may have seen it. I’d look for people with similar interests, well connected within the overall community and I think that’s a really good way to look at it. Similar interests so we’ve got a little common ground already going into it and well connected so that that’d be a good referral partner at least for one thing. So any other thoughts there with getting connections from anybody with us on Zoom?

I will say that I want to add to Lisa’s comment. Sometimes we feel that connecting with people that do the same thing that you do is an oxymoron because they’re doing the same, they’re your competitors but I’ve made so much money networking with people that do the same thing I do, just to give an idea Ray, we have three deals that we’re doing a JV with both. Okay, one of our top sometimes competitor, sometimes a guy that brings us deals but he’s bringing the deals to me and we’re making a ton of money. So I’ve made more money working with people in the same industry because it’s a big country too.

Jorge: So you might have somebody doing the same thing down in Orlando, like actually we do have an investor that we picked up a couple of days in Orlando, they have all the tools, the same tools that we have but they want to start investing in Zampa. You never know, you could be the backup option. Since we own a property management company, I talk to property management companies. I say “Hey listen, if one of your clients don’t like you for whatever reason, bring him in, I’ll give you a referral fee but at least you have a company that you can refer your fallouts to.” I just want to say that, that often I’ve made a ton of money working with people that “seemed” to be my competitors.

Allan: If I can say that, we’re the same way, we connect with everybody and it wasn’t but just a few months ago, we received a referral from another internet marketing company in town. Their websites, they start at $25,000 minimum. So what did they do? They say, “Hey look, our websites start at $25,000, that’s too much.” Say “Well, you should call Image Building Media.” And they did and we’ve done two websites already and looks like we’re going to do a third and we connect with everybody because there’s enough business for us all, enough business for us all.

Post to LinkedIn

Okay so if you have any thoughts there go on and open your mic, go on and chat in and let’s segue over to and we’ve talked a little bit about this. Let’s talk about the the kind of posts. You may know this but LinkedIn is starting to dabble with live video. Right now, you have to put a request in, they may accept, they may not accept your request to do live video. They want to know what kind of live video you want to do. If you’re doing live video on any other channels, they want to see a live video on another channel. So they’re being really super picky. This is probably their beta testing or something such as that but that is coming. Okay so what makes for a good post with LinkedIn and we’ve not forgot, we still need to talk about the best groups for residential real estate Rich sent in to us on Facebook.

Jorge: I got him.

Allan: Go for it, Jorge.

LinkedIn Groups

Jorge: Ray, I’m going to let you talk, I promise. [laughter] Okay, the best group in LinkedIn period is called Pete Asmus’ Real Estate Networking Group and I’m going to copy it and paste it here for you guys. The group has about 600,000 people interested in real estate investing. So I’m going to put it here and remember guys that I talked… I mentioned earlier that my article went viral is ’cause I met Peter. I was persistent like crazy, “Peter, Peter, Peter, Peter please, please, please what do I do with… ” But when he finally said, “Okay Jorge, you’re bugging me now. All right, I’ll let you do one or two.” The minute I did a post that he approved for me, then he was approving all the posts afterwards. In just that one post man, generated me thousands of contacts in this group. Peter Asmus’ Real Estate Networking Group is the number one group in LinkedIn.

If you get to join, if you’re allowed to join, it’s not going to be that easy. You gotta answer some questions, apply a few times, until you get in but if you get in and then if you get your post to be accepted, which is also hard, then you you’re in, you’re going to make… You’re going to do really well. Now, Pete has a few groups. He started this in the early 2000s. He started kinda when LinkedIn started so he knew exactly what he was doing. So he’s got other groups.

Group number two is also Pete Asmus’ Commercial Real Estate & Development, & Property Management. That group has 124,000 people. Okay? And Allan, I don’t have three, I have two but I would say anything that’s related to Peter Asmus is our good Gray groups but and you said this to me, Allan, like five, six years ago, you said, “Jorge, instead of connecting to so many groups, can you just focus on being really good at one?” In taking your advice, that’s exactly what I did with those two groups. I focus my attention being a provider, being a resource for that group. Eventually, people thought I was part of the group and I was doing very well. So those are the two groups that I would suggest as top groups for real estate.

Allan: Yeah and you said “Well, maybe they’re focusing on real estate or commercial real estate.” But you know what, if you’re doing investment real estate, you are buying and selling residential homes and people who buy and sell commercial real estate, they buy residential real estate also. So I agree with you completely and I remember when you made that change to say, “Let’s focus only on just a few super high quality because you know what, those other 600,000 people, they’re in all those other groups. Let’s focus on these super high qualities and most really genuinely put an effort into it.” And that was a game changer, 100% a game changer.

And the other thing, let me mention, criteria for groups is you want one that there’s a lot of people in my opinion, you want one there’s a lot of people, the people are active. So go through their feed and say, “Are people posting? And are they engaging? And is this legit stuff or just a bunch of spammy stuff nobody’s ever going to care about?” And so if you put those two things together, big group, people are active, it’s legit stuff, go for it and all you need is a few and just put in a genuine effort and that’s going to, it’s going to save you a lot of time ’cause you’re not messing with all the junk. All right, any other thoughts there with that?

Those are great ideas and maybe we answered Rich’s question there, at least a little bit with that. With residential real estate, those folks are buying and selling, even if they’re investors, residential real estate all the time. Okay so posts that do really well. Videos do really well. The videos that you upload, do very well. The articles you can click right there when you do a post, you can click post an article. Articles do really well if you’re going to do a nice job, you’re going to put images there and typically, the longer form articles not the 300 words, not the 200, 250 words but a really serious informative article does really well and it can go viral on LinkedIn and as we’ve been talking about just good educational posts and if you can bring at least some of them to your website, where you can do some lead generation get them in your database, that’s going to be super good also.

More About LinkedIn Post Types

Allan: All right, any other thoughts on the type of posts to do on LinkedIn? Videos is super important just like all the other channels.

Ray: Yeah, I was going to say videos and pictures as well. Anything that’s visually stimulating, people are going to click on. If it’s just a bunch of words people tend to just scroll past it.

Allan: Exactly. Alright so guys, look we’re coming up and we’re coming up at 6:30 this is time for us to be going. So let me get some closing thoughts. Ray, from you then Jorge and then I’ll close this out. Ray got any closing thoughts there?

Closing Thoughts

Ray: Closing thoughts, we’re going to be doing a lot of these different training seminars bi-weekly after next week. If you like what you what you saw today, you need to tune in to the next level of the the next level.

Allan: Yeah, we’ve got our Twitter one this coming Thursday that had been already announced and then after that, well, we’re going to go every other week and we’ve had some topics that have been suggested from Facebook ads to a lot of different things like that. That’ll be really cool. Jorge, how about some closing thoughts from you?

Jorge: Absolutely. Yes and I always talk about this karma. Okay so we preach… We do what we preach. Okay so we’re going to be out here, we do it in our time. All of us make a ton of money, we’re be very busy but we’re going to put the time to help you we’re going to be here in this group. So make the time to make it because it’s going to be really valuable information.

Allan: Right and Lisa, thank you very much. Thank you for the thanks and I appreciate you being here. Of course, Jorge and Ray and many of the agents are with Graystone, Graystone Investment Group, graystoneig.com and I’m just really thankful to have been working with Jorge even before Graystone was created, go back a long way and we both learned a lot and it has been a good ride and so our company is imagebuildingmedia.com and our website we have just for agents is expertrealtymarketing.com. Okay, guys, thanks so much. Appreciate everyone being here and we’ll close out for now. I hope you can be with us next Thursday; we’ll talk about Twitter. Thanks so much for being with us guys.

Jorge: Thank you, guys.

Ray: Good night.

Jorge: Thank you.

Allan: Thanks.

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