Top 3 Differences Between Extraordinary Real Estate Investors And Everyone Else

Recently, a student in one of my seminars asked a really interesting question. He asked: "What kind of results does your average student achieve?" What he really meant was: "How much money does your average student make?" That's not a question I get in that form every day, so I had to think about it for a moment. Some of my students go on to make literally hundreds of thousands of dollars and change their lives virtually overnight. But some other students never really do anything at all. That provoked me to think about the differences between those who end up being real winners versus the people who never achieve any real success... I'll tell you the answer to the question about the results of my "average" student in just a moment. But first, let's take a look at the differences between those who are big-time winners versus everybody else. Difference #1 - Forget The "Creative Strategies" - Focus on Marketing For the first 18 months of my experience as a real estate entrepreneur, I was a dismal failure. I spent a lot of time reading books and listening to tapes about creative real estate strategies, but I made no money at all. Not a penny. But then, as if by magic, things began to happen for me. Deals started to appear that I'd never seen before. Finding the fabled "motivated seller" was suddenly much easier than in the past. And that led to deals where I actually made real, spendable cash. It was truly amazing! What was the difference? Instead of focusing on learning every detail of the technical strategies of creative real estate investing, I began to focus on "marketing". Marketing is the process of reducing down the entire population of the world into a small subset of people with whom you can do business. Marketing requires you to answer these questions: 1. Who is your "ideal" prospect? If you're trying to find homes to buy, your ideal prospect would have certain characteristics, such as:

• The prospect is a home owner
• The prospect is "motivated" to sell their property
• The home is in a certain geographic area
• The home is in a certain price range
• The home is in (excellent, good, fair, poor) condition

There are a lot more variables to fully defining your ideal prospect, and you might even have different ideal prospects depending on which strategies you're using. But the point is simple: You must know who you want to do business with. Example - "My ideal prospect is a home owner who is motivated to sell their property as soon as possible. The home should be in average or better condition and should be located in the 30281 zip code. The home's value should be in the range of $100,000 to $195,000." 2. What are you going to offer to your prospect that will motivate him/her to do business with you? Another way to state this is: What is your "message"? What is the reason you'll offer for someone to do business with you? Your message must be simple and should convey a very clear benefit to your prospect. Some of the most commonly used "messages" among real estate entrepreneurs are:

• I Buy Houses
• Sell Your House in X Days
• Fast Cash For Your Home
• Stop Foreclosure
• Cash For Homes

Important Note:These are all very common marketing messages, but not all of them are particularly good messages. Here's a Better Example - "I offer immediate debt relief to home owners by buying houses in 7 days or less." 3. How will you physically communicate your message to your ideal prospect? Will you use

• Newspaper ads
• Road-side signs
• Cold Calling
• Direct Mail
• The Internet
• T.V. commercials

The list of available communications media is literally endless. Your job is to use a few (not just one!) of those types of media to communicate your message to your ideal prospect. To summarize - marketing means that you're communicating a desirable message to a suitable prospect, at a time when that prospect needs what you're offering. Why is marketing so important? Isn't it true that creative home-buying strategies are totally worthless unless you've got a relationship with a home owner who is willing to sell using your strategy? And isn't it true that unless you have a qualified buyer, it doesn't matter if you know 70 different ways to sell a house - you still won't sell your house. That's why marketing is so important...and why most new real estate investors fail so miserably. Instead of focusing on the people that they can help, they focus on the technical strategies that they'll use. And here's the hard truth of the matter: Nobody cares about how great your strategies are. All that people care about is what you can do to help them. So your job is to:

1. Identify your ideal prospect
2. Create an offer that motivates your prospect to do business with you
3. Make your prospect aware of your offer

Important note: That was a very short discussion of marketing and prospecting, both of which are very big topics. You can never know enough about marketing, prospecting and even sales! That's all for now...we'll cover Differences #2 and #3 in a future article.