Are you taking time to retool and rethink everything you’re doing in real estate investing? Don’t pass up opportunities. Today, Clint Coons of Anderson Business Advisors talks to Adam Adams from BlueSpruce Holdings. Adam took the plunge into part-time real estate investing, but it quickly became his full-time passion. He has educated and inspired thousands of investors and influencers to build and take their businesses to the next level.
Highlights/Topics:
- How did Adam get started in real estate? Christmas present that led to paying property taxes as a child, although he didn’t do anything wrong; eventually, sold it for profit
- What is BlueSpruce Holdings? Finds and manages apartment communities to allow passive investors diversification, cash flow, tax benefits, and freedom of time
- What is Adam’s primary role in the company? Attract capital, so far successfully raising millions of dollars from private investors and continuing to grow his company’s brand
- What leads to bigger and better deals? Whether people know, like, and trust you
- Why are we here? Why are we different? Because…don’t fake it till you make it
- What are the main components to success? Social media, live events, and meetup/mastermind groups
- Why do people keep coming back? Even if weekly topic isn’t perfect fit, they make sure that they’re there because they can start doing business with other serious people
- Why does marketing matter when launching a podcast?
- Episodes: Make sure to have more than one episode ready and post consistently
- Ratings and Reviews: Ask for ratings and reviews to gain traction and get noticed
- Avatar: Attract, understand, and think like your perfect client/target avatar
- What podcast services does Adam offer? Create, manage, edit, and promote for a fee
- What is Adam’s complete money back guarantee? By charging a set amount and understanding the algorithm, he can easily get a top 1% podcast
Resources
Steven Pesavento’s Investor Mindset Podcast
Anderson Advisors Tax and Asset Protection Event
Full Episode Transcript
Clint: Welcome everyone. Hi, it’s Clint Coons here with Anderson Business Advisors and this is another episode of our weekly podcast. Now on this podcast, what I want to do is take it a little different direction. We’ve been talking a lot about different aspects of real estate investing, where to find investments, tax strategies around real estate investing, but one of the aspects that we discuss a lot at Anderson, beyond just tax and asset protection, is to treat your real estate investing as a business. Many real estate investors struggle to make that intellectual leap and they don’t see how to turn what it is they’re doing into another entry business, because if you do turn into a business, you’re going to find you’re going to generate additional opportunities for yourself.
Right now, we’re in the middle of this pandemic in the United States and everybody’s into shut down mode. I’ve been interviewed by The New York Times and some other media outlets and one of the questions they keep asking me is what should people be doing today while they’re in this mode for their business, planning for the future, what do they think things are going to look like when things start to thaw out? What I’ve been telling them, these interviewers, is that this is the best opportunity real estate investors, small business owners have to retool, rethink what they’re doing. Everything’s been put on pause. You don’t have to be sitting out there focusing on your business, trying to do the daily grind. You’re at home, you’re wondering what’s going to happen when all this thaws out.
Well, you can make it happen if you take the time and invest in yourself and look at what your business needs to look like when we come out of this. That is why I thought I should bring onto this podcast a very special friend of mine. Someone that I’ve known for years, but I really didn’t know his entire depth of knowledge. I was recently at a conference in Colorado and I was talking to the sponsor. He’s a well known guy, his name’s Joe Fairless and he put on this called The Best Ever Conference. It was a great jam packed event, full of tons of information.
Before I was getting ready to go up on stage, I was talking to Joe and said Joe, how did you get to this point where you can bring in 800 people into an event like this to blow your business up? He said it was simple, there was a guy named Adam Adams. I was like you mean the Adam I know? Are we talking about the same one? He goes yeah, that’s the one. I was like you got to be kidding me.
Adam is very soft spoken but he’s not out there touting how effective he is at helping people. I called him up and I said Adam, I was talking to Joe. Is this true? He’s like oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s what I do. I help people take their business to the next level. I help the influencers out there build their businesses. I was just blown away because I’d always known him as this real estate guy who’s built up a massive portfolio of real estate. I said this needs to be one of my podcast episodes.
With that I want to welcome Adam. Thank you for coming on the show.
Adam: Thank you so much for having me.
Clint: Great, people are listening to this right now and they’re wondering what does it take to get started, how do I build my business, and those are great points we’re going to get to. Now everyone knows a little bit about you, other than what I said. What could you tell the audience that’s listening right now how you got started and where you’re at today?
Adam: I got started because of my dad. Growing up, we’ve always owned real estate, different types of real estate. My dad built self storage units ground up. We own land and agricultural investments, a tree farm, land all over the place, rentals, multifamily. I actually grew up, when I was eight, it was the first time I collected rent because one of our duplexes that was right next door to us, a very short walk, they were late on their rent and I thought it was interesting. I think I was about eight-years-old, maybe nine and my dad just called me and said would it be alright if you ran over, they just have a check for you. I can’t make it in time before they leave.
I collected rent when I was eight or nine-years-old, that kind of is the beginning of my journey into real estate. However, I always kind of told my dad that it wasn’t something that I was going to be interested in until I was much older. Interestingly enough in 2005, when I was in college, my dad gave me a piece of land for Christmas. He made me pay $100 for it because he’s a tax person, you would probably know better than I why he ended up having to take money from me. I was a little hurt or offended at the beginning because he paid $100 for this piece of land and I had to pay him $100 and I just thought to myself why didn’t I just buy it? What kind of Christmas present is this?
It got worse about a year later. In October, in Utah, where I was growing up, taxes are due once a year and I remember bringing that bill to my dad and I was so mad. I was like what is this? Do I have to pay this? He’s like of course you got to pay it. It’s your taxes. I was like, But I didn’t do anything wrong. Why would they be charging me? He just laughed.
That was the beginning of my real estate career, 2005. But when I sold it for a giant profit, I read Rich Dad Poor Dad. I started learning about apartments, so it was 2007 where I got involved in apartments, management and investments, and I felt the crash and went through it. That really just takes us all the way 10 years later, to about 2016-ish, when I started doing more flips, and tax deeds, and mobile homes. I was trying a lot of different things and I realized that I was getting some success and I started focusing on what’s making me the most successful.
It really had to do with three main components. Those three components really pointed to if people knew who I was, so it’s very hard for me to get a deal if nobody knew if they can trust me to close on a deal. It was very hard to raise money if nobody knew that I knew what I was doing to go through. I started really ramping it up in 2016 by just getting out in front of other people and that’s about the time that I was helping Joe with his meet-up group and growing his meet-up group. He’s been really crushing it with his meet-up, and I just am here to try to help other people make it easier on themselves especially during these hard times. Now is a really good time to start getting out in front of other people.
Clint: Well that’s great. As we were talking about, as I was saying as you come out of this, you need to be in that position to take your business to the next level. If I’m sitting back right now as a real estate investor and I want to get more deals, I want to have credibility in the marketplace, I want to get people to bring me deals, maybe I want to scale it, I want to go up to another level and raise money. All these things are going inside of my head but I don’t know how to execute on that. What is the first thing that you would say that people should look at doing to help build their business?
Adam: In my opinion, most of the people listening who are real estate investors, if they really want to be successful, I think you really nailed it earlier, if you want to treat real estate just as an investment, you can make some money for sure. But when you switch the process and focus on it like a business and get into marketing and things like that, that’s really the changer, what really makes the biggest difference. I would say there’s three major things that can help with that. It really is, and some people don’t want to be on social media, they’re afraid of social media.
I’ll say, for my clients, these three of what works best for them, it’s what’s been working for Joe Fairless. It’s been working for you, Clint, and your business, it’s been working for me. Those people who are really able to focus, I think they need to look at these three.
That’s some type of live event. Most everybody that I know that are really raising a significant amount of private money that allows them to close on better deals, bigger deals, more deals are doing some type of live event. Even if it’s having dinner with some investors, or dinner with the brokers that are going to bring you the deals. When you meet in person, that helps people really get to know you, some type of live event.
It could be a workshop, it could be a conference, like Joe’s conference. It could be a mastermind that you run around people that need your thing. There’s also going to be the social media that I kind of alluded to a little bit earlier. I have to brag for something—I always hate doing that because I never know how it comes across. You said earlier, I’m soft spoken, so it does put me out of my comfort zone. My meetup group is in the top six meetup groups in the entire world out of 225,000 meetups.
Meetup HQ flew me to Manhattan and I got to sit down with their engineers. They picked my brain on what I was doing differently so that they could grow their entire community. They invited me also to speak as one of the 6 keynote speakers to their top 150 organizers from around the world. Many different countries, I got to meet so many cool meetup organizers and learn the ins and outs of what you need to do to really grow a meetup, and get to understand the algorithms behind what the meetup application thinks about before they push your events in front of more people.
My podcast is in the top 1% of podcasts, it’s probably a little higher than 1%. We have had 400-and-something reviews. I know that the 0.6% of podcasts have more than 100 reviews, so we’re easily up there. The question is what are we doing differently to make my podcast really get in front of people, and what am I doing differently to make my meetup so famous. It all stands for me around what I do to promote myself on social media.
Those are the three things, if you can incorporate them all together, I think of it as a stool with three legs and I believe that it’s important that you must have at least the three legs of your stool. Some type of social media, you could be on bigger pockets or Facebook, I do Facebook. A lot of people are getting success with LinkedIn, or Instagram, or even TikTok these days, but some type of social media, then some type of leadership platform.
I use podcasting, but you could do a blog. If you’re not comfortable speaking in front of people or if you love your face, you could do YouTube, or the other option would be to run a Facebook community. Social media is your personal Facebook and what you do there, and then your thought leadership might be what you do on your Facebook community, so kind of running a group. If you do all three of those and put a good emphasis on what you do on social media, I can teach some really cool tricks if you’d like to go into it on social media, which allows for the most amount of people to see what you’re posting there.
Clint: Okay, let’s just start breaking this down then as far as social media. Let’s take the investor, they have a portfolio of properties, few properties, six or seven properties, and they’re wondering how to go to the next level. You talked about starting a post stuff or creating a social media presence, why would someone want to listen to me? What makes me unique or how do I find that uniqueness in myself? I know my wife tells me I’m unique and that’s only when I’m good, besides her, how do you do it?
Adam: Within your uniqueness, it needs to be with what you’re doing in your properties or in your meetup group or wherever, and you then need to really show it on your Facebook. Just to give you an example when I started the meetup group in Denver, I decided to do some recon before I even started the meetup. What I had to do is see what everybody else was doing.
There’s somebody who’s really good at marketing and has really done well with their funnels, Russell Brunson. He has this saying that really sings with me, it’s exactly what has made me successful. He talks about our Red Ocean and Blue Ocean. He talks about when you’re starting to niche down into a thing, it’s most important that you don’t find a niche. Other people say find a niche, pick something that’s out there that you want to do. For me, what we do is we create a niche. We make something happen that has never happened.
When I started that meetup group, I decided to make it the first ever and only lunch club. It’s the only meeting that met at lunch, everybody else was meeting at 06:00 or 06:30. There was a couple of breakfast clubs, but we were the first one that decided to do lunch. When you find out what your new niche is that you’ve created, now it’s just you creating your story behind it. If it’s on your investment thesis, or if it’s on your meetups, or what your podcast does, you create a new story, basically the why behind what you’re doing. What I would do is I would decide why do we meet at lunch? What does meeting at lunch do that not meeting at 06:30 doesn’t do?
One of the things that I realized is that at 06:30, there’s a lot of new people that can attend, because they generally have a full time job and the only time that they’re able to get out for a couple of hours plus drive time is in the evening when they have their spouse watching their kid and they’re off of work. In lunch, it was more difficult to meet, because you are unable to come to my meetup if you have a full time job. I started to create that story around that what I did was different and why.
I basically said the reason that we’re meeting at noon for a couple of hours in the middle of the day is because I only want serious people here. I’m not here to sell a coaching program, I’m not here to meet a bunch of people that might not even show up next month, they’re just kind of dabbling, they’re kind of curious. I only want really serious people and that’s why we’re meeting at lunch for two hours because it’s impossible for you if you have a full time job to get out in the middle of the day.
What I would do to prove that is I would have everybody raise their hands and I would say by a show of hands, I just want to show you who comes to this meeting. If you’ve legitimately done a deal, besides your own house, your own single family house that you live in, if you’ve legitimately actually done a real estate deal, please raise your hand. 90% plus of the people’s hands will go up and then I’ll illustrate that and say as you know, when we have a 06:30 meeting, it’s going to be completely reversed. There might be 5% or 10% of the people that are crushing it in there, but here you are all crushing it.
I go into the next part of the story, why are we here? What do we do differently? When I did my recon for meetups, I looked and I saw that most meetups were either completely sporadic or they had monthly meetings. They had regular monthly meetings on the second Tuesday of the month or whatever. I also looked to see how they are marketing each other. What they generally would do to market would be this is the monthly meeting, and that was it. All they were saying is it’s the monthly meeting. There’s no urgency, there’s no reason to attend because if I miss this, I just go to next month’s. It’s not a big deal.
Once I get close to that Tuesday night meeting, I realize how much I need to be with my wife, I need to be with my kids, I need to finish that project. There’s no reason for me to get a babysitter. There’s no reason for me that I must attend that meeting, because I could just go next month, because it’s just a monthly meeting.
I started thinking about that. For my branding what I said was each and every single week, we would meet, instead of monthly. Instead of advertising it as a weekly meeting or something like this, we would have a very specific topic and we would tell people why they must attend, how it’s going to change their business. We went into a lot of detail for that. Maybe we talk about scope of work for fix and flippers. I would basically tell all the fix and flippers that they’re doing it wrong and they need to learn how to do a proper scope of work or else they’re going to lose money, especially when we feel the next downturn, they’re going to be creamed. Out of all of the meetings that we have this year, they can’t miss this one.
Then I reach out to wholesalers and I say your perfect target avatar is going to be at this event. They’re going to be sitting ducks. There’s going to be the best fix and flippers, the most serious fix and flippers are going to be here next week. If you really want to be able to start off-loading more properties to solid people that are actually going to buy, you have to be there around all these fix and flippers. And then I call the private lenders and I say the same thing. I tell all the private lenders that the most serious fix and flippers are going to be here next week and if they really want to be able to make good money with good people, they need to attend and I’ll even make some introductions. Then I go to the title companies and I say I’ve already got 100 people coming next week at lunch, if you don’t attend this meeting, you’re going to miss out on a lot of business.
I call the brokers and I say if you want the most serious people, I’ve got a bunch of wholesalers, I’ve got a bunch of fix and flippers, and these are serious people. You go into your story with them and you’re able to show everybody why they must attend that meeting. While at the event, we go into the details of why do we meet weekly. We use the science behind how many times it takes you to start working with somebody that you just met. The science has said that it was 6 to 15 times that you need to meet in person before you start doing business.
That’s why when you go to those monthly meetings that you go once or twice and then you end up stop going. They always have more people attend that have never been there than have been there, because they’re cycling through a bunch of new people because these new people never have a chance to actually do business with you. That’s why we meet weekly, because the science would say in about six weeks you can already start doing business with the people in this room, which is why people come back to this meeting every single week. Even if the topic doesn’t fit them that week, they make sure that they’re here because now they can start doing business with other people in the room, serious people.
We just use that story and you use that story on Facebook and it doesn’t matter if it’s about your meet up, it doesn’t matter if it’s about your company. But once you understand what’s different about your company, you need to let it shine and you need to use the word because all the time. That’s why we do it like this. We do it like this because x, y, z. The word because allows your attendees to be drawn into the purpose behind it.
Once you say because, they feel like it’s completely justified and they are more likely to trust. When you can show them we’re different and here’s the reason why we’re different, here’s the because. BlueSpruce Holdings, my apartment vesting company, we’re different because x, y, z. Those passive investors have so many options. The two reasons why they’re probably going to pick me is because I’ve been doing it for a long time. I have a podcast that has hundreds of thousands of downloads, and hundreds of episodes that we published, and it’s unwavering, it never changes. Once I understand that I have those things in my corner, I just need to start sharing it with people.
They will start thinking and they’ll nod their head up and down with me and they’ll say yeah, that’s right, Adam is more trustworthy than this guy that doesn’t have a podcast. Adam is more trustworthy than this girl that doesn’t have a meetup. Adam is more trustworthy because he’s always on social media. I always see exactly who he is, how he is. He’s always so transparent with this and that.
How to wrap up all of this is once you are on social media, once you are talking about how your meetup’s different, how your company’s different, or how your podcast is different, what’s different about you. Once you start doing that, you need to not fake it till you make it. Everybody talks about how important fake-it-till-you-make-it is and that doesn’t resonate with anybody. It worked in 1940. It worked just fine in 1940 because that’s how things were back then.
The best salesmen back then, in 1940, were the pushy salesmen. The salesmen that were able to strong arm you into making a decision right then and there. But over the last 70 or 80 years since, we as humans have started to become less trusting of other people. Those old tactics don’t work as well. If we’re not being completely genuine, if people don’t understand who we are to the core, they will not do business with us. There’s too many options and there’s too much noise.
If you want to start attracting your people, you need to have your voice. It needs to be unique, it needs to be different. Me, I’m soft spoken. As you mentioned in the beginning, that’s just who I am, that’s just how I am. If I tried to act like somebody else that’s crushing it, I won’t crush it. They’ll crush it because that’s their natural personality, but as soon as I try to be somebody that I’m not, people won’t know why they’re not buying from me, they won’t understand it, but there is this dissonance, like a cord that’s too close together. It just doesn’t resonate, it doesn’t feel right. They’re not sure what it is, but he doesn’t seem genuine is what they might say.
Once you can be exactly who you are, don’t worry, there’s more than enough money for you to raise in the world. You will raise tons and tons of it even though there’s a lot of other podcasts out there. If you’re not your authentic real self, it’s going to be really hard. People’s money are going to stay in their hands. Just be you, share your story, share the why behind it, and it’s going to be much easier for people to start being drawn to you. I’m not going to attract everybody, but I will attract the people that like who I am.
Clint: Oh wow, there’s so much to break down in what you just said, because I can imagine that somebody who is listening to this right now, yes you’ve got the people that want to go out and raise money, and it makes total sense what you’re describing. How you build that network, and then they trust you, then they’re going to work with you and give you money so you can do these larger deals.
Other investors who aren’t quite at that level yet, my mind was just spinning when you were talking about this. Let’s say that I’m a real estate investor with those six homes, and I want to get more deals, but I’m struggling getting deals. Well, through that process that you just described, through the way it’s a path for you. If you just understand what you said, how to build that out. To start, I think the most difficult thing is for someone to find that they’re unique.
When you said build the niche, create it yourself, many people are going to listen and go, it’s just buying rental properties, right? But what is it about the way you buy and how you select your properties, your good deals, that make them unique? Would you say that’s what they should start with or something like that?
Adam: Yeah, definitely. What we were doing in the beginning before we get all the syndication we’ve done in the last couple of years, we were doing creative real estate. What my uniqueness back then was just to say that if you’re unable to get a deal closed, if you’re unable to see it from all the different angles, my team can help you. You would make money, we’ll make money obviously, but we can help you take a deal that you weren’t sure you would be able to close, just bring it to us and we can take it to the next level, and all make some money.
Once you find out whatever your uniqueness is, that you pay more for a deal than other people, because it’s just rental, or because you can do more creativity in the way that you buy. It’s owner financed or whatever, now you can pay more. Or maybe you have this niche for yourself where you put less money into it, maybe you’re doing something called a whole-tail. It’s like wholesale and retail in the middle of it where you’re doing it faster and you can talk about how people get their money, but it’s going to be important for you, the listener, as you’re starting to think about this, is to know that you are unique. We are all different from each other.
I have a son with autism and so I can bring that up and get a lot of people coming up for me at the end of the conference being like holy cow, now I’m connected with you because I have a son with autism, my daughter is the same age as your son, she has autism. The uniqueness doesn’t have to stay only within real estate, or only within your deals, your uniqueness can be about your own personality. If you’re talking about you’re a cross fitter, or you’re a yoga person, you’re somebody who is a runner. You’re a triathlete.
When you talk about you, you are going to start having other triathletes be like I could invest with a lot of people, but you’re my people. We both know what it’s like to get out of swimming, and go right onto a bike, and to go off of a bike when your legs are hurting and start trying to run, and your legs feel like jelly. You’re a good guy, let’s just invest with each other. How much money do you need for your next deal? Your uniqueness doesn’t have to be just your investment philosophy, it just needs to be who you are so you can resonate with people that are like you.
Clint: Using this time right now, they should be sitting down I would imagine and putting together that plan. First, starting out with how you see you’re unique. What you just said there I think should resonate with a lot of listeners, because we tend to for most people I would say is that, we don’t see ourselves as being unique. We’re not personalities that think look at me, I want all the attention. I want to suck up all the oxygen in the room. When you say well, how are you unique? They’re like I’m not unique, but you are, you just haven’t ever spent any time on it and you don’t realize that other people will see that if you just inform them of that, and then leverage it to build out your business.
There are so many different iterations there that I was thinking of. The single family investor, you go there, you build it out to get people to bring you deals. You’re going to teach them something. They bring you deals and then once they’re bringing you deals, and you go out like you stated, and then you bring in other investors that want to come to your group because there’s going to be deals to be had there. Those people eventually like you said, bring in the lenders. The people that are bringing you deals or want to be doing their own, I never thought of it that way, how you could leverage that to build something up and scale it up, and the result is then it would morph into when you want to do larger deals, multi family. Now you have that network. Wow, that’s really powerful.
You talked about the blog, podcasting. If you want to get started in podcasting, what are maybe one or two ideas that somebody should pay attention to, because there’s a lot of bad podcasts out there. What would you recommend?
Adam: I just found out a statistic that 90% of podcasts—this is one of the most insane are metrics that I’ve seen, and it’s something that you can easily look up—have less than 10 ratings and reviews. That means there’s a ton of podcasts that are not getting traction. You mentioned it a second ago, there are bad podcasts. I don’t know if they’re all that bad, I think that they didn’t get noticed. One of the most important things around a podcast is your marketing, is to be able to show people that you’re doing it so that you can slowly start attracting your target avatar.
The marketing, most important part, getting likes and reviews in the first two to three weeks of launching your podcast is going to be big, very big for you. If you’re going to launch a podcast or YouTube channel, or I don’t know if it works like this for blogs, but definitely podcast or YouTube channel, what you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to call hundreds of your closest friends and let them all know that you need somebody that you trust to just listen to the podcast, leave a rating, and a review. Then you’ll call them to action and ask them I can stay on with you while you leave the review just to walk you through it so it’s not confusing.
That type of thing works very well for human interaction. When you say can you do this for me, they have full intention of doing it. When they get off the phone, their kids are yelling at them, their wife’s yelling at them, their boss is yelling at them. They have a full intention of helping you but they’re unable to do it because they’re confused maybe by the process, they don’t know if they could learn it, and they have other pressing matters that are happening that there are fires that are coming out that they need to put out.
For you, when you call the people to ask them for the review just say that part, I can stay on with you and I can walk you right through it, it’ll be easy. When you do that, they’ll be like okay, so this will be fast and easy, I’ll help you out, and then I can get back to my other stuff, and I won’t have to think about this again. The psychology behind that process works very, very well. If you can help yourself get all the ratings and reviews in the very beginning of your podcast, something magical will happen. Completely magic.
Rather than iTunes saying this is probably another one of the 99% that nobody’s going to listen to, they’re going to say what the heck is going on here? This person is just getting subscribers, likes, ratings, reviews, and it’s all happening in the very beginning. This person must have a huge following, this person must have X, Y, Z, so the algorithms in iTunes say if you get this much traction in the beginning of your podcast, iTunes must put it out in front of other people.
I’ll give you one example of somebody that I helped with the marketing of their podcast and they didn’t even do all of the things that I tell my clients, and their podcast already has more downloads than my top 1% podcast, and they’ve had it for just a few months. When Steven Pesavento started his podcast, he has a podcast called The Investor Mindset. He was a member of my mastermind group and I say that I will help not only my one-on-one clients, but if you’re in my mastermind, I’ll give you some tools, tips, and tricks to launching that podcast.
With Steven Pesavento, that was the major thing that he did do, was to make sure that he got the ratings and reviews in the very beginning. Here’s what happened, he was launching The Investor Mindset and in the business category, there’s three categories that he applied his podcast to, business, real estate, and mindset. He was in the top 10 in four categories, those three plus the new one, noteworthy, the trending podcast. The interesting thing is BiggerPockets who was launching a business podcast in the business category who had millions of subscribers, and hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of thousands of email subscribers, was also launching at the same time. My client was number one in the business category, launching the same week as BiggerPockets.
BiggerPockets business by a good friend of mine who hosts it was in number four in the business category. They launched at the same time, but BiggerPockets sent it out to people, and left it up to chance, and failed. My client Steven Pesavento put matters into his own hands and said I need a couple of people that I trust to leave me a rating and review. I can even walk you through it right now.
That was one of the biggest things for Steven, because he was in top 10 in 4 different categories which means, if people are looking for real estate, they found him top 10. If people were looking for business, they found him in the top 10. If people were looking to see the new trending podcasts that were just out in case they were ready for a change, Steven Pesavento, The Investor Mindset podcast was right in front of them, top left, number one.
That’s a huge thing, but before you launch and start calling people, you want to make sure that you actually have a good podcast that’s attracting your perfect avatar. What I say to all my clients is out of the 17 steps that I give them to launching a top 1% podcast, the foundation, number one, is that you need to understand your avatar, you need to think like your avatar.
What is an avatar? It’s just your perfect client. Maybe it’s a 42-year-old male, Indian, engineer, with two kids, who’s invested passively in three deals plus already, and has more than $1 million liquid, and ready to start investing into the next deals. Now that you understand your avatar, and you give him or her a name, and a gender, and a race, and all these, you need to understand their entire psychology. It doesn’t mean that you won’t have people working with you that are not 42 years old, or male, or whatever, but once you understand that person, and what attracts them, and what they’re worried about, and what they’re looking for, now you can start building content that fits for somebody like that.
Step one is understand your avatar inside and out. Then you start doing your research around what the avatar would look for, and then you need to start creating a name for your podcast, number three is to select a name that is not just something that would naturally attract your perfect avatar, but also be searchable. You want it to be keyword rich.
I’m not going to go over 17 different steps or anything like that, but that’s what’s important, it’s to first understand how to get in front of your perfect person, what they’re looking for. Then whenever you launch, you need to be able to launch enough episodes in the beginning. This is some trick that HBO will do. HBO makes a lot of money selling videos. Selling you to sit in front of your TV for a long time.
One of the things that they do is they do a pre launch before the show ever comes out. You start stirring up people thinking I’ll check that out. But on the day that they launch, they don’t just launch one episode and then wait a month to launch the second episode, that is one of the dumbest things that new podcasters do is they ready, fire, aim. They move so fast, they throw out an episode, and then they wait, and they’re like I’m really excited about this, I can’t wait to record my next episode, who’s it going to be? Then when they finally record it and get it published, it’s been so long that the person who listened to the first episode has already forgotten about them.
They didn’t want to forget about them, they loved the first episode, but because you didn’t put out enough content right away, they already got tied into a different channel. They’re not on HBO anymore, now they’re on Netflix. Watching Netflix, sticking on Netflix, and they’re getting into a show that did it right. I want you to do it right. What I suggest is you launch six episodes just on the first day. If they start to listen to it, they’re going to be able to really start being so drawn into it, hooked into it. Then what I suggest my clients do is post one episode a day for the next 30-ish days. That takes a lot more work. This is ready, aim, fire, completely opposite what you naturally would have done, but if you launch it correctly, I can guarantee you, it’s going to be in the top 1% for sure.
Clint: You see, that is so key for podcasts, for YouTube, because one of things that I built on my YouTube channel and it was like you described. When I started out, it was ready, fire, aim. I just started throwing stuff up there. Over the last 10 years, I’ve started to really tone it down and hone in on my avatar who I’m trying to speak to.
Things that I’ve discovered is that releasing content as you stated, you have to know your market, and whether or not releasing a content is going to be effective, because I’ve seen in YouTube before, people I worked with will go out there and they’ll release a video every day. They think wow, this is going to give me tons of exposure, but in YouTube as far as that happens, it actually works the opposite with the videos that I found. You just become a background noise and you don’t rise in the search engines like Google has.
Knowing this stuff like on the podcast like you just described, that’s a different media dynamic. If you’re going to get started on this, people need to, I would say, get assistance. I was wondering, do you offer anything like that? If somebody was wanting to do this, because I know you work with the big guys, but how about for the person that’s just getting started, they’re trying to develop their plan. Do you have training on it?
Adam: I don’t have any recorded training, but I do sit down with people. There’s two things that I can offer for podcasting. I do what’s called a complete money back guarantee. I know that that’s not normal in this society right now, but I just understand the algorithm so well, and I know that I can easily get a top 1% podcast.
What we do is for a certain amount of money. They will pay it and then I will work my butt off until they have a top 1% podcast within the first few weeks. Once that happens, then we go our separate ways, it’s ready to go, and it’s all set up for them, and they have a top 1% podcast. I don’t help people if they don’t want to top. If they just want to start a podcast, they could probably just go—there’s a lot of free content on YouTube and stuff just to start one. I like giving people the ability to have the traction so that iTunes puts you in front of other people. Just like with Steven Pesavento, iTunes was pushing him in front of more people than they were pushing BiggerPockets in front of more people. Yes, I can do that. It’s 100% money back guarantee. I know you’re going to get it, or you don’t have to pay, that’s for sure.
The only other thing that I offer is to manage the whole account. I can do all of the backend stuff for podcasting, because it was hard to do it on my own in the beginning. When I was trying to figure it out and trying to stay consistent with it, it becomes so much work that it kind of gets falling by the wayside for most people. I hate that. I don’t want that to happen to other people who are excited about starting a podcast and then failing at it because their business is in the way.
The only other thing I offer is we can edit your podcast for you, we can create images that we send out to the guests of your podcast so that they’ll promote you when your episode drops. We can do all that email for you. The only thing that you really have to do is to schedule the podcast, tell the person to come on, and the second thing is you have to record the podcast. Once it’s recorded, we’ll write your show notes, we’ll put it out in front of your audience. That’s just a monthly recurring fee to be able to continue to maintain that. We can help with that. It’s actually pretty inexpensive compared to—it’s usually $100 at the minimum to $250 per episode. We’re less than that range to be able to help you on an ongoing basis.
Clint: Yeah. That’s just low value work for anyone who’s running a business and trying to do a podcast. Because I know when I first started out even on my YouTube channel, I was doing all the editing myself, and all the keywords. I was spending so much time on that, it was taking me away from where I should be focusing my time. Finally, I just hired someone. It was the best thing I’ve ever done. I never looked back, because you cut it out of sight, out of mind, it all does it on its own.
To get a hold of you then, I know we’re going to have it in the show notes, we have information where they can reach out to you, is there anything you want to leave in the parting comment to the listeners?
Adam: Yeah, get out and do it. You’re worth it and your audience will come. If you build it, they will come.
Clint: Well said. Well everyone, I hope you enjoyed this podcast with Adam Adams. This was about building your business, going out there, and finding the uniqueness in yourself, and how you can take it to the next level. There’s plenty of opportunities now for you to do that you have the time, I wish you all. I hope you’re staying safe and we’re going to see you on the other side of this in one of our upcoming events. Take care everyone.
As always, take advantage of our free educational content and every other Tuesday we have Toby’s Tax Tuesday, another great educational series. Our Structure Implementation Series answers your questions about how to structure your business entities to protect you and your assets. One of my favorites as well is our Infinity Investing Workshop.
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