Ep 002 – The 2 ingredients required to scale a real estate business

Welcome to episode number two. I want to talk about something that is probably the foundation of everything that every single real estate agent needs to understand at their very core. Without understanding this, nothing else in marketing is going to work in your business. And I want to make this super simple.

Before I tell you what it is, and it’s probably going to be in the title. So this is no secret. Nothing crazy here by any means. There is no such thing as a magic email. There is no magic video. There is no magic follow up. There is no magic script. There is no magic clothes. There is no NLP in regards to how to get more clients. Does great email matter? Yes, 100%. It matters. Does great text messaging matter? Yes, 100%. Do phone calls matter? 100%. Yes. Is the way that you create video content on an ongoing basis, will it make a difference? And the answer is 100%. Yes. But if you don’t understand the simple concepts that I’m going to talk about here in a second, you’re going to take all this time and you’re going to create all of this content, and it’s not going to work at all whatsoever. 

And I know plenty of you out there because I’m having conversations with you every day, or at least on a weekly basis. And you’ll say things like, I’m doing this, and I’ve done it for a while, and it’s not working. Or I’m doing this, and I’ve done that for a while, and it’s not working. Or I’ve tried the YouTube channel thing, and I didn’t really get any traction, right? Here are the things that I want you to write down. The two ingredients for scale boil down to something simple like this. Let’s not overcomplicate this. Traffic and content. Or said the other way, content and traffic. And they’re pretty much both mutually exclusive. And what I mean by that is one cannot exist without the other. You can create an amazing level of content, an amazing type of content. Could be any content, right? But if you have no traffic, meaning people that are coming from the internet to see that content, content doesn’t really exist. It’s kind of like, what is the old saying? If a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s there to hear it, does it actually make a sound? 

I would argue there’s probably a ton of great content on the web right now, and because you don’t know where it’s at, and I don’t know where it’s at, we really don’t know if it’s very good or not. We have to create content that is effortless for you. And when I say effortless, here’s what I mean. Over the 10 years or so that I coached in a previous profession or previous life, I would say six of those years were on video, meaning we were on Zoom calls back and forth having conversations. And I think that coupled with my history and music and performance and then all the sales experience I have, I’m very comfortable in front of a camera. Now, comfortable is not the same as I’m excellent in front of a camera. 

I just don’t get nervous, right? I look at the camera, I see it as another person. I can talk right in the lens. I’m no longer looking at myself over there. I literally look into the lens for the most part. And it’s easy for me. I don’t have to like psych myself up to do this. There’s no like, what am I gonna talk about? That just doesn’t happen. If I had to write a long form blog post, it would take me about,(…) I’m making this up 10 times longer to create that long form written blog post, then it would just to hop in front of the camera, turn on the lights, turn on the microphone and talk about something. So for me, the effortless content creation is the podcast style talking into a camera, directly to you and then adding some notes in the blog post below. That is effortless for me. Now, every single one that I create doesn’t do well. There are some that just, you know, nobody cares about and it falls on deaf ears and we don’t get views. The ads don’t work, right? 

That happens all the time. And there are some to do, there are some of them that do very, very well. That’s the joy about content. Now, if you told me that it was audio only, I do have all the equipment for audio. I tried to do an audio only podcast years ago and just the way that I had to create it and the way that I had to edit it and all that stuff, the actual process, it just wasn’t fun. I didn’t wanna do it. So I only made it 10 episodes into it and I quit because although I liked the ability for me to have a platform, for me to give away everything that I’ve coached you over the past, you know, 10, 12 years, the actual process of creating that content was not fun for me whatsoever. So fast forward to video. 

This is really easy for me. Is video better than audio? I don’t think so. Is audio better than written? I don’t think so. Is written better than video? I don’t think so. I think that if you really pour your heart and soul into that and you create top level content, you’ll do really well. The second part underneath the content thing that I wanna talk about really quick and just so I can kind of get this out of your head right now and what I’m about to tell you is gonna be a little bit from a contrarian viewpoint than everybody else. You hear a lot of people that say, hey man, don’t worry about it, just get started. You just put stuff out there. Well listen, if you’re doing something that’s so against the grain that you’re putting out crap, crap is never going to turn into diamonds. It will never happen, right? Crap is crap. It is what it is. Now, I do believe that what they’re saying that when they say just get started is your first one’s always gonna be rough. You’re always gonna learn. You’re always gonna need to know how to edit. Your mic’s gonna be off. All that stuff happened. That I 100% agree with. You gotta start somewhere. 

Everything that you put out, you should put out and you should look at that piece of content with, you know what, I am happy to put my stamp of approval on that and as long as you’re doing that, chances are it’s good enough. In video, audio matters. Lighting matters. Video quality matters. It all matters. It doesn’t matter on the first video, but I would be in a sprint to make that as high quality and I define high quality, not necessarily in the gear that you use or do you have a mic right here? Is it clipped on? I’ve got a backup mic up here in case it happened on the first podcast, right? I had both of them on and for some reason this wasn’t recording. So we do that on purpose just in case. So that way when we edit it in post, I have both of these files handy in case something goes wrong. So on the very first one that happened. We also film all this stuff in one take. If I screw up, I’ll pause for a second and I’ll just cut it in post. I don’t ever, ever, ever, ever start over on videos. I haven’t started over on videos probably in, I don’t know, six or seven years. I just, it just takes too long, right? So we edit it in post. 

If it’s an awkward cut, it’s an awkward cut and we’ll get better on the next time. If you’re gonna create video or you’re gonna create written content or it’s gonna be image content, I know somebody who runs a, and I actually don’t even know him personally, he’s an LA commercial broker if I’m not mistaken. I think all he does is leasing and his Instagram page is just him and a DSLR taking photos of downtown LA. You’d think he’d be talking about what it takes to lease a property in LA and the terms and what’s available and what’s sold and all that. And he doesn’t, it’s just, hey, if you live in LA and you work in LA, these are all the spots that I like. And the Instagram page does very, very well. I don’t know where he ranks in regards to all the leasing agents, but I’ve heard. He’s amongst, he’s definitely in the top 1%. I can tell you that much. The content that you’re thinking of doesn’t necessarily need to be, you always have to talk about how to buy a home in your market or how to sell a home in your market or what’s sold in your market. That’s one part. But if you think about what I talked about or where we started in the beginning of this podcast, content and traffic are the two magical ingredients of scale. It doesn’t matter really what the content is. 

A lot of you know that I’ve played drums since I was seven or eight years old. I’m sure that I could probably figure out a way to play drum covers every single day to drum a Carl’s Bad Real Estate business. And I’m sure you’re probably thinking like, okay, how would you do that? Well, I mean, it could be as simple as me uploading a cover every single day and wearing a shirt that says, I sell Carl’s Bad Real Estate. And you may think like, oh, come on, it can’t be that simple. And I’m telling you, it is that simple. If your passion is around playing drums and you can do that and it’s effortless and you can do it every single day and nobody has to tell you to do it, then that’s the thing that you need to do. If your gig is like one minute shorts or one minute TikTok videos and you’re funny, there are so many people on TikTok that I think are freaking hilarious. You don’t even need to parlay that with real estate. You just need to do it so much that everybody in your market’s like, oh, there’s that TikTok dude. Now, the challenge with TikTok is it’s not overly local. So you may rake in the views, but they’re not necessarily going to be in your specific market. So you’re going to have to overlay the ads product for that. YouTube’s a little bit different. It’s a little easier to target. Locale with organic content, TikTok. I can’t say it’s impossible, but it’s pretty hard to go local with it. If you’re thinking about the content thing on the other side of this podcast, whether you’re listening to this or watching on YouTube or watching it on our blog, the first thing that I would answer is not should I do audio, video, or written, or image content. 

The first thing that I would answer is what’s the content that I want to create right now that is effortless for me? And not only is it effortless, I can feel excited to go to my neighbors, my friends, my brothers, my sisters, and I can say, hey, this is what I’m talking about. Because if you’re creating content right now and you’re afraid to tell people about it, you’re creating the wrong content. Now, you could say, well, I have, I was going to say FOMO. That’s not the right word I’m looking for. Imposter syndrome, right? We hear about that all the time. And listen, whenever you start something new, you’re always going to have imposter syndrome. That’s never going to go away. So whether you create something you’re excited about or something that’s a big challenge for you, imposter syndrome definitely is going to set in. And I think the only way that you get with it through it is just cadence. That’s it. 

I’d love to tell you, like, you know, there’s something more sexy than that, but there’s really not. It’s just cadence that gets you through. Let’s talk about traffic really quick. Because again, the best content in the world without traffic, colossal waste of time, I’d never even do it, right? So where do we get traffic from? Well, it starts with what’s the medium of the content that you’re posting. So in our case, it’s video. So we’re going to go really heavy on YouTube because I know that when done right, and it takes a long time, this is not something that happens overnight. We can still get organic traffic from YouTube if we pay attention to the analytics, if we get better and better and better, if we master the cadence of putting these episodes out there. If you’re image driven, obviously Instagram and Facebook are going to be your game, right? Are you going to get any organic traffic from a Facebook business page? The answer is you could, but highly unlikely that that’s going to happen, right? So if you’ve got no money right now, Facebook business page is probably not where I would sink all my energy in. I would probably be going to Instagram, Instagram reels, TikTok or YouTube shorts. 

That’s where I would start because you’re going to get the biggest headstart there over everything else that you do. The second part of traffic, after you understand your medium of the content that you want to do, then you’re going to take that medium and you’re going to say all of the social media things that are out there, what is the easiest thing that I can use that based on the medium of content that I’m creating, who is going to give me the biggest headstart? One of the biggest mistakes that I see people in social media marketing do right now is believing that they need to be on every single social media platform and doing it all equal. And I’m telling you, I know some wildly successful entrepreneurs that don’t do anything on Facebook whatsoever. 

They don’t do anything on YouTube whatsoever. They’re only on Instagram or they’re only on TikTok or they’re only on YouTube. You don’t have to be everywhere. In fact, I will tell you that if you devise a plan to be everywhere, it’s probably going to stress you out significantly. So I wouldn’t go down that road whatsoever. What is the ideal medium of content that I want to create? And what is the easiest social media platform that I can stay on? And here’s what I’m going to tell you, only do that for one year. If you’re like most of the people that come into my schedule for the very first time, you’re probably not at that million dollar mark yet, but you know that, you know, with the right amount of coaching systems, automation, marketing, all of that fun stuff, you want to get there. In real estate, we really only need, this comes from Alex Hermosi. 

Alex, if you’re somehow watching or listening to this, thank you, I’m going to rip you off right now. You really only need one product, one offer, one sales pitch, one appointment, that’s it. And you need to do it enough times in one year to get to a million dollars. We don’t need 97 different marketing channels. We don’t need Zillow and 19 other lead sources. We don’t need two different CRMs. We don’t need all these different systems. We need one offer, one marketing channel, one content, and we just need to do that as many times as we can to get to that million dollar mark, right? Don’t over-complicate this. So we’ve got the medium, we’ve got the platform. Now we have paid ads. Paid ads are, it’s the same as organic. They just let you do it quicker. That’s how you have to look at paid ads. Stop thinking right now about top of funnel and bottom of funnel leads, cheap leads and expensive leads. I want you to completely get rid of that in your vocabulary because the more that you look at that, unless you’re spending 30K a month, plus or minus, I wouldn’t even worry about top of the funnel or bottom of funnel leads. I would worry how much it is going to cost me on my preferred platform to get as many eyeballs on my content as possible. 

With all the eyeballs on my content as possible, how many of them actually took an action after that and they scheduled a call or they joined the daily email or they registered for a live webinar or they took advantage of a squeeze page you have one form or another. Once you understand content out there versus eyeballs on the content, eyeballs on the content to ascend to a lead magnet or some level of a registration, now you have a mathematical formula to A, get better or B, get bigger. But before you commit to any of that or before you can analyze what works or what doesn’t work, you have to have some level of content. You’ve got to have a medium that it goes to and you have to have a strategy to get that content off of that medium onto your blog or into your email. The last secret or the last tip, none of these are really secrets. The last tip that I’m gonna give you right now is the number one thing that will get you out of what we call real estate depression, meaning not wondering where your next deal is gonna come from. The easiest way to get that is whatever you’re thinking in your head content wise, one a day, two a day, one a week, three a week, whatever the number is, whatever you think you need to do, you probably need to multiply it by 10, right? So if you think it’s one post a day for 30 days, I’d do 10 a day. And you might be thinking, well, man, that’s a lot of work. It is a lot of work. But your goal as a real estate agent is to do something, track something, improve something, do something, track something, improve something. 

Meaning go out there and do it, look at the results and then change based on the results that you got. Meaning if you spent $1,000 in ads this month and you didn’t get a listing, there’s only two things we can do. We can change the ad or we can change the spend. That’s it, can’t really change the demographic, right? Cause it’s your city plus 15 miles. That’s as great as it’s gonna get for us. So we can either change the ad or we can change the spend. You don’t wanna change both at the same time because maybe you just didn’t spend enough money or maybe you don’t need to spend enough money. Maybe you just missed the copy for the people that were seeing the ad. You get where you see where I’m going with this. The only two ingredients you need to scale any business are content and traffic. No magic squeeze page, no magic email, no magic, any of that, you need the traffic and the content first. All of that stuff is secondary. 

I hope this was valuable. Remember traffic and content, that’s all you need. Any questions, let me know. If you are not on the daily email, go to dailywithsteve.com and you can get all these emailed to you. And there’s also a bonus one every week that only the members there get. It’s totally free. If you want my help, there are other ways we can do that. Go check out the website. You can see there otherwise. I’ll see you on the next one, traffic and content. We’ll see you on episode three.