Archive for Private Money Marketing
Getting Nickle & Dimed – How This Can Help w/ Private Investors
Posted by: | CommentsI hate getting nickel & dimed.
You know what I mean.
You go to your bank and you need a statement from 7 months back and they want to charge you $10…for printing out a sheet of paper. Or, you get charged fees for checking your bags on an airline or they charge you $10 for lunch on the plane, etc.
I was just at Panera this morning and they charged me $1.20 to get cream cheese with my bagel. $1.20 for cream cheese!
This fee pile-on bull**** is really getting on my nerves. It’s like these companies hire a consulting firm or a bunch of MBAs that see clear to boost revenue by 5% this quarter by creating a heap of ill-will from all of their customers. It’s just plain dumb. Just roll everything into one easy price. But, alas, that sort of simple and common sense thinking doesn’t crank up the billable hours for the consulting firms.
But I can’t shake the though of my bagel; it should have been $1.49 with cream cheese and they could have just rationed the cream cheese a little more. The worst car salesman is the one that tells the customer the total price of the car and add-on’s ($20,000 for the care, $1,500 for the sunroof, etc.), versus the successful car salesman that tells people the monthly payment amount and “for just $5 more per month you could have a sun-roof and power windows…”
Ok, anyway, I was going somewhere with this as it applies to raising private money. Read More→
Is Word of Mouth the Best Marketing for Private Money?
Posted by: | CommentsOk. By now I hope I have you really thinking that private money is a marketing process. It’s not a financing process.
People always look at me weird when I say this, like I’m from Mars or something.
A financing process is where you fill out an application, talk to a few bankers or mortgage brokers, and see if the marble on the roulette wheel lands on your number.
The wheel used to be small and there were less numbers. Now, it’s more like play Russian Roulette trying to get an institution to finance your real estate investment deals.
Unfortunately, many real estate investors like to take the same approach with private money that they do for banks. What you quickly realize, is that that the aspects of the deal that are important to financial institutions are less important (sometimes unimportant) to private investors. Read More→
Pushing the Envelope: Persistence vs. Annoyance
Posted by: | CommentsHow many ’success’ books have you read?
1?
5?
50?
If you’re anything like me, you have a entire library full of them. Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, Tom Hopkins, Brian Tracy, Jim Rohn…you name it and I’ve probably got it. What about all the self-help classics? You know; How to Win Friends and Influence People, Think and Grow Rich, Magic of Thinking Big, How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling? How many of those have you read?
Timeless classics – all of them. Get ‘em if you don’t have ‘em. I plan on my library being the greatest material thing I pass down to my kids.
For those of you that own and have read these great multitudes, you know that one of the most important principles advocated for achieving success is Persistence. Not giving up in the face of adversity. Sticking to your dream when there is no light to be seen at the end of the tunnel. Pursuing the sale until the customer has a restraining order placed on you.
These are all great examples where you should be persistent. No doubt about it.
But, when you’re raising private money, when does persistence start to have negative returns on investment? Read More→
“Help! I Need Private Money…”
Posted by: | CommentsDoes this sound familiar at all to you? Maybe you’ve perused a few online forums or craigslist.org and saw some posts like:
“Need partners for real estate project – 25% ROI”
“Earn 10% secured return on your money”
Are you guilty of this yourself? If so, how are the results?
Do you get a lot of tire kickers? Spammers? Loan sharks?
I can’t think of many worse ways to get private money than to randomly post your deal online somewhere. Most of the websites that claim to match investors with projects are a waste of time. In theory they are good, but practically they won’t get it done for you in most cases (there are exceptions, but rare from what I’ve heard through many sources for REI private placements for SFH, multi-family, etc).
Why is it not a good idea to post your projects online and hope and pray for a response? Read More→
How Well Do You Know Your Private Investors?
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s critical to know your private investor prospects if you want to market your opportunity effectively to them.
Take this quick quiz to see how well you know and understand your prospects. If you can’t answer these questions, how can you be sure that you are attracting the right people to invest money with you? How can you be sure you are reaching them with a compelling message about why investing with you beats the pants off of the stock market or any other investment? How can you be sure you are tapping into the conversation they are already having inside their own head with respect to placing funds with you?
I would argue that you can’t. And if you can’t do these things, you won’t know your investors well enough to pull seven figure sums.
Answer the following 10 questions. Give yourself 1 point for each question you can answer and 0 for each one you can’t. Read More→
The Right Way to Use the Internet for Getting Private Money
Posted by: | CommentsThere is a right way and a wrong way to use any marketing medium.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to use the Yellow Pages, newspaper ads and direct mail pieces. When marketing your private money opportunity, you must take care to use the most powerful marketing media available to small business owners today: the internet.
If you’re anything like me, it doesn’t seem like too long ago that we were first hearing about “the information superhighway” and Amazon.com started popping up everywhere (”what the heck is Amazon.com?” I remember thinking to myself on more than one occasion). Since it’s inception and now widespread use across the world, the internet is the most misused and misunderstood marketing medium. Just a tiny fraction of business owners are tapping into it’s vast power and only a small fraction above that use it the right way.
Getting private money investors to place money in your deals is a Read More→
Ready + Willing + Able = Private Investor Funding
Posted by: | Comments
Getting the right private investors to finance your investment property purchases comes down to a simple formula:
Ready + Willing + Able = Private Money
Keep this formula in mind as you prospect for private lenders and equity investors. It’s hard to sell ice to Eskimos.
What prompts me to write this is a simple fact I’ve discovered in my years of buying real estate with private funding: getting investors is a marketing process, much like looking for investment properties to purchase or getting qualified tenants for rentals or getting the right buyers for a retail house flip. Targeting is all important.
Far too many real estate investors don’t view private money as a marketing process – they view it as a finance process, sort of like getting a mortgage, where you just fill out some paperwork and pray the loan approval gods find in your favor. Your greatest success raising funds will be to provide an opportunity and to attract people to that opportunity. Very different from getting a mortgage.
Just like it won’t make you much money to try selling a Read More→
