Thinking out loud about BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix

Here’s where we start, and we knew this last May in Phoenix, but we hadn’t yet figured out how to pull it off:

BloodhoundBlog Unchained is not a conference or a seminar, it’s a workshop, a lab. We don’t want to talk about or teach or lecture about our style of marketing strategies, we want to deploy them. We want for the people who entrust us with their time and their minds and their money to come away having implemented their own unique versions of our tools, tricks, tips, tactics and techniques.

So that’s the beginning: Unchained in Phoenix will be a hands-on overhaul of your online and offline marketing.

This is a Unique Selling Proposition — totally unlike all of the redundant twitwit echo-chamber festivals — but don’t get too excited yet.

Why? Because overhauling anything is a big job. What we’re planning will take a lot of time, a lot of hard work, a lot of skull sweat and possibly repeated conquests of your own self-imposed mental limitations. Translation: We plan to wear you out.

When we first started talking about this “boot camp” kind of approach, we thought about doing it in two tracks, one more advanced, one less so. In both cases, it makes sense to me to work toward the goal of a complete overhaul of your marketing profile. How do the journeymen gain access to the master-track material? Don’t worry. We have plans for that, too.

So now we look like this: BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix will be a hard-charging boot camp for journeymen and masters at modern real estate marketing. I worked out a class schedule yesterday, and I think we can cover — and I mean thoroughly cover — eight major topics over the course of three days.

We’re not set in stone on these, but here are some classes that make sense to us:

Search Engine Optimization
    Guerrilla SEO — Optimizing your blogsite
    Advanced SEO topics

Search Engine Marketing
    Maximizing organic SEO results
    PPC, Analytics and ROI

Social Media Marketing
    Establishing a ubiquitous presence
    Working in the salt mines to bring home the salted bacon

Living in a web-wise world
    Building, customizing and maintaining a web presence
    Practical PHP for non-geeks

Direct Response Marketing
    Building profitable offers
    Testing and analysis to maximize profits

Sales — You know, the stuff we do for a living
    The sales training no one gave you
    Pushing to a conversion in a pull-marketing world

The Art of Real Estate Sales
    Building your own marketing materials with DTP tools
    Cascading Style Sheets and you

What am I missing? Cathy talked to me last night about doing a class on staging, and Sean Purcell covered some aggressive listing ideas at Unchained in Orlando. What would you add or change in this curriculum?

Each class we offer will be a three hour lab, so we’re not going to gloss over an idea while you take notes at a furious pace. Instead, we’ll have lots of Wi-Fi power and lots of power strips so you can actually work out the details of the marketing ideas we’ll be covering live — on your existing file servers, web sites and collateral materials. Whether you take the journeyman or the master track, you will be revamping your marketing in class to reflect what you are learning.

Repeat that: We’re not going to send you home with notes, hopes and plans to rework your marketing. We’re going to send you home with a finished overhaul of your marketing strategy.

Repeat that yet again: We’re going to do everything we can in three days to help you dominate your local market.

In the schedule I worked out yesterday, I’ve got us working from 8 am to 8 pm on the first two days, and from 8 to 5 on the third. My plan is eight three-hour labs plus time for guest speakers — 30 hours of content in three days. That’s an exhausting pace by itself, but to get the most out of BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, you should anticipate starting your day at 6 am and working with your team-mates at least until midnight. We can build a big scenius for the entire event, smaller ones in each lab and tiny little scenius scenes when two to eight students get together to perfect what they are learning.

And that’s what we’re aiming for, a super-sized scenius of like minds exploring the outer reaches of excellence in real estate sales and marketing. We can come together as giants, each of us in our own way, and leave as giant-slayers. Who should dominate your market? We’re betting on the big dogs.

This is not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be cheap. For one thing, to make this work, we’re all going to have to stay at the same hotel, which means that Unchained is going to have to pay for the rooms. But the upside of that is that you’ll be able to work with your team-mates until the wee hours of the morning.

How much, total? The full, final price is going to run $997. Did I hear an ouch? It will cost you that much — plus the hotel — to go to Inman Connect in New York — where you will hear monkeys in monkey-suits recite spoken versions of their magazine articles and weblog posts. If you like that kind of stuff, then that’s the kind of stuff you like. But for the same money — less the cost of a Manhattan (or Phoenix) hotel room — we’ll put you directly on the path to more money and a greater market share. They’re an event. We’re an investment.

Emphasize that: The whole world of real estate marketing has been turned upside down, and all you hear, it seems, is facile instruction on how to forge relationships — with other Realtors and lenders. Unchained marketing is about conversations that lead to conversions. Not making buddies — making sales.

Even better: No vendors. Brian Brady and I certainly like the financial cushion provided by naming sponsors, but we exclude vendors and their wares from our shows for two reasons: First, we’re just plain vendor-hostile, for the most part. But, second, we don’t want for you ever to suspect that — if we should actually say something nice about a vendor — we’re doing so for any reason other than a sincere belief in the quality of the offering. A trade show like Inman or the NAR Convention is Vendorslut Central. We’ve never done it, and we never will.

There will be a limited number of spaces available, and the class-size for each lab will be 25 students. We’re interested in serious people who are looking for serious results. We’re going to charge you a ton of money for the thrill of being worked to death. But you will gain access to some of the best minds in online and offline real estate marketing, and you will go home with a brand new marketing plan, fully-formed and fully-armed.

We live on the strength of this online scenius, so now I need for you to jump in and tell us what we’re getting wrong. We’re planning to deliver a ton of value, so we need for you to tell us how we can deliver even more value to you. Bloodhound marketing is all about making the buyer crazy for the product, so please do let us know if we’re not all the way irresistible yet. This is a perfectible praxis, after all, as is all marketing.

Tell us what we’re getting right, tell us what we’re getting wrong, but, above all: Tell us you’re free this coming May. Because that’s when you’ll be perfecting your real estate marketing at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix.

Want to sign up today? How can we turn you down?

Click on the PayPal button shown below to get your $997 enrollment in BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, May 2009

Our final dates and location will be determined in the next few days. But if you want to make sure you snag one of the few available seats, make the commitment now. As always, we’ll refund every penny of your money if you find out you can’t join us.

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