Joe McCall:
Back to my PowerPoint, how much marketing should you do? This is the marketing that I do in Craigslist. I do what’s called my 123 Punch and I’m going to show you right now what I’m looking for in Craigslist and I’m going to show you what my VAs do.
I’m just going to create a new spreadsheet here and I’m going to start copying and pasting just a couple of them so I can show you why I don’t do this anymore.
I’m going to track in the spreadsheet the date, the title, the phone number, email, and link of these Craigslist ads.
This is what I used to do every day. I would go into Craigslist because I didn’t have any money to spend on postcards. Nobody else I knew was doing this at the time. I’d go into Craigslist, I’d go into apartment/housing right here.
I’m in Craigslist For Rent and I use these things that are called positive and negative keywords. When you do a search in Craigslist, you have to have some kind of word that you’re looking for.
Every ad has the word “Map” or “Location” in it, so I’m going to do “Map, Location”.
I’m going to ad in negative keywords because I want to take out the ads that have words like “Realty, Broker, Apartment, Condo,” and things like that. I’m going to do a negative “Realty, Realtor.” This isn’t going to take out every realtor’s ad, but it’s going to take out every ad that has the word “Realtor” in it. I’m also going to take out any apartment, I’m also taking out anything that has apartments with an “s”, etcetera.
By the way, if you got lost in what I just did, in Craigslist go to Help and do a search for keywords and they’ll show you how to search through ads and remove the ads that have certain words in them. Just go to help and figure it out.
Jason Medley:
Joe, when you just put that minus sign in there, does that signify that it’s a negative keyword and you want to remove those words?
Joe McCall:Yeah.
Jason Medley:
Okay, I got you.
Joe McCall:
You don’t have to do this. You could have your VA go through every single ad. Putting those negative keywords in removes about 50% of them right off the bat. I’m only looking for nice houses, so I’m looking for homes that have rents of over $1,000.00 a month.
I’m going to do minimum rent $1,000.00, I don’t do a maximum. I only want three plus bedrooms.
I’m going to click search and I got 551 ads. What I do is I have this URL up here. All I’m going to do is just copy that URL and send it to my VA. You don’t have to type in all this stuff, you just copy this URL and it already has your search parameters in that URL up there. I just copy that.
Here I have all these houses, so I’m just going to start going through them and looking for a house that I can send some marketing to. I actually like ads that don’t have pictures in them. What I do is I used to do this every day.
I’d put in today’s date, July 12.
I put the title of the ad and copy the title. Then I’d put the phone number, just copy and paste this stuff. If there was an email in there I’d copy it. Sometimes I copy this email. I copy the link for the ad itself right up there.
That’s an ad I’m going to send some marketing to. I go back a page and I click the next one. I’m looking for houses that are not posted by realtors, that don’t look like they’re professional investors or property management companies.
Rentlinx, interesting. This is probably a realtor that has listed this property, so I’m just going to skip it and go to the next one. I’ll just do two or three of these for you guys, all right?
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