How to generate leads for $60 a month

Posted Dec.30, 2008 by Joseph Bridges in Google Adwords

Leads for $60 a month Do you just have a little bit of money that you need to go a long way? If so let’s cover how to make your budget stretch as far as possible. When my brother and I started in real estate we had no savings, no money to invest in our business, & we weren’t sure when we would close our first deal. The idea of spending $60\month was terrifying to say the least. We realized that we had to spend some money because just hoping that someone would find our brand new websites wasn’t going to work so we took out our favorite friend “Mr. Mastercard” and decided we were going to generate some leads with Google Adwords. Back then it was kind of new now it isn’t and it provides one of the greatest platforms for finding customers that you can imagine.

Set a goal for the cost of leads

The very first part of that is necessary when you have a little (and even when you have a lot) is deciding how many leads you want to get for the dollars that you spend. To start with set an aggressive goal of how many leads that you think you can get for the money. To this day there are certain phrases that I advertise on that I get a solid lead for $2.60. Some of the leads cost me $5.54 and still others are $7.71. To start with shoot for at least 6 leads for every $60.00 and we can work our costs down from there.

We know that every single click costs money and we also know that getting 100% of the people who click to contact us in some way is not going to happen but we can set a goal to make sure we capture as many as possible. In fact we won’t be capturing them they will be surrendering their information to us.

Target a very specific customer

The more specific you are the better off you are going to be. For example if you lived in San Diego, CA you could choose to advertise for two types of home buyers.

San Diego homes for sale
la mesa homes for sale

La Mesa is a suburb of San Diego and someone looking for a home in La Mesa probably has already done a little bit of research on areas they want to live. Someone searching on “San Diego” may not know where in San Diego that they want to live and San Diego is a big place and you want someone who is closer to buying today.

Use exact & phrase match advertising

We don’t have time to go into a lengthy discussion on match types(See Choosing your words wisely) but let’s make sure that we only advertise when someone is looking for information really close to what we want.

In our case we want them if they are looking for La Mesa homes for sale. Our keyword list might look like:

[la mesa homes for sale]
[la mesa ca homes for sale]
“la mesa ca homes for sale”
“la mesa homes for sale”
“ca la mesa homes for sale”
[ca la mesa homes for sale]
“la mesa ca home for sale”
[la mesa ca home for sale]
-rent
-for rent

The [] and the “” are to let Google know we want to use exact and phrase match only and not broad matching. We also through a couple of negative keywords with -rent & -for rent. We don’t want anyone who is just looking for a rental to click on our ads.

Watch your results every day

When we have $60 to spend every month that means we have $2.00 a day (a cup of nice coffee). So we want to make sure that our daily budget is set to $2.00 and that we check in on it in the morning and in the afternoon to see how we are doing. If we aren’t getting clicks we may need to adjust our ad or the price per click that we are willing to pay.

Follow-up on every lead(no matter what)

No matter what your budget you want to follow-up on every lead. No matter what you think of their question, e-mail, or voicemail just keep calling them until you get an appointment or find out that their best friend is a real estate agent who isn’t doing the job but they are going to use them anyway.

If you follow-up on every lead and you know how much you are spending you will make your $60 go a long way and turn it into some really great clients really quickly.

Want more help with pay per click advertising? We created a free course on Google Adwords to help you generate massive leads quick and cheap. Get this free course at www.OnlineRealEstateSuccess.com/Adwords.