If I could show you how to leverage your marketing efforts to get tens of thousands of dollars worth of added value, added reach, added impact and added sales — would you be willing try on some new ideas?

Pre-script: Here’s one of the secret benefits of working at BloodhoundBlog: If you screw up in really interesting ways, Direct Response provocateur Richard Riccelli will phone or email to tell you what you’re getting wrong. I’ve recast this post in response to a very instructive voicemail from Richard.

 
I had an email from Matt McGee — I had had it around Christmas, too, but Matt was kind enough to send it again. I’m going to deal with it as a colloquy.

Cari and I were chatting last night about Unchained ’09 and we’re both curious about the way you’ve been describing it on the blog:

We’re not going to tell you how we work. We’re not going to show you how we work. We’re going to work with you, hands-on, step-by-step as we overhaul your marketing strategy from the ground up.

Can you provide some more detail on what you mean there — the stuff about not teaching, but doing? For example, if Cari’s there, she’s not going to be able to (nor does she want to, nor will I want her to) FTP in to her main web site or her blog and start rewriting pages, updating page titles and other SEO stuff, tweaking keywords, etc., on the fly.

Why wouldn’t she want to know how to do this? It’s easy to do, more unfamiliar than arcane, and we’re going to be right there, talking about what to do, how to do it — and what to do if something goes wrong.

BloodhoundBlog was less than a month old when I first wrote about the skills Realtors will need to compete in the age of the internet. We each of us should know how to do these things, both to solve our own problems, when we need to, and to make sure that hired vendors aren’t ripping us off. A big part of the work I have done here since then has been talking about the kinds of tasks Realtors and lenders can and should be doing on their own — to control costs and quality and simply to make sure these jobs are getting done in the first place.

Are you expecting attendees to show up armed with FTP information and ready to start changing their web site/blog?

Oh, you bet. That’s the point. People can work in copies of their sites, if they’re afraid of making mistakes, and I’m all in favor of working on copies of files, in any case. But no one learns anything without actually doing it, so we’re going to dig in and do the stuff we’re talking about.

I’m just talking about my slice of the pie, for now, and we’re going to be doing a lot more than just technical chores. But there is nothing to be wary of about any of this. We’re not going to be rebuilding engines, just changing tires. But we need to know how to change our own metaphorical tires, so we’re going to go through everything step-by-step, in a safe, fun environment.

I’m not so much alarmed about the hands-on stuff related to social media. I’m sure there’ll be great value in a hands-on approach to peoples’ Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts. Mostly concerned about the plan for web sites and blogs.

Here’s the big picture: Matt and Cari and everyone else has gone to a zillion and one seminars. We each took careful notes (well, not me), and made big plans to put those notes to work as soon as we got back to the office. And then… Nothing happened. Events intruded, as they always do. And the ideas that seemed so clear in the seminar became cloudier day by day. And by the time we finally sat down to make an earnest effort with our notes, everything was forgotten.

I talk a lot about geek stuff, because it’s where my attention is focused right now. But at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix, Eric Blackwell is going to teach real, hard-headed, hands-on Search Engine Optimization. And Kelley Koehler is going to put students through the paces on Search Engine Marketing. And Brian Brady is going to help you set up your presence on Social Media Marketing sites. And that’s all still on the hardware side of the quad. We’re also going to go though Direct Marketing and Direct Response and belly-to-belly selling techniques — and we’re going to learn all of this by actually doing it.

We’ll work in three-hour labs, so there’s plenty of time to do the coursework while we’re talking about it. And each class will be taught by an expert in that particular subject, so you’ll be learning best-practices from the person best-qualified to teach you. But you’ll actually be doing the work, hands-on, step-by-step, so that you will learn not just the theory — not just the rapidly-scribbled notes — but the actual practice — the praxis as we say around here. And when you go home, you’ll know it in your bones…

Plus which, there will be plenty of time between labs to work in small groups perfecting your new marketing profile. This is the “scenius” idea I’m always talking about, the shared genius that erupts spontaneously when smart, passionate, motivated people work together to master difficult tasks.

But there’s more to this than that. Why do you need to learn the techniques we’ll be teaching — and why do you need to learn to do them yourself? Because if you don’t learn how to do this stuff yourself, it will never get done.

Witness: The Heap-optimized contact form I made available earlier this week would have cost each individual user at least $1,000 if they had had to go out and contract for it. The real deal, though, is that none of them would have contracted for it, they would have kept on entering their contact information by hand — or not at all. That’s the kind of highly-leveraged solution I’m always interested in. (But I won’t be teaching anything quite that arcane at Unchained.)

But consider engenu. Cathleen Collins and I built more than 1,400 new engenu pages in 2008, this on top of all our other work. If we had had to pay a teenager to build those pages, they would have cost us at least $15 each — except that we wouldn’t have done any of those new pages at that price. Instead, we got the cash equivalent value of $21,000 worth of new web pages — at the expense of the time we would have spent doing the same work by inferior means.

That’s leverage, and by leverage I don’t mean borrowing money to invest it, I mean the leverage of Archimedes: “Give me a lever and a firm place to stand and I will move the Earth!” There is no excuse for anyone not to know how to use an FTP client, but, if you will put your mind in my hands for three hours, I will show you amazing things that can be done by FTP.

We as real estate professionals need to learn how to hold our own hands, that’s a given. It’s a travesty that Realtors and lenders are always the victims of crap vendors selling crap products.

But more than that, we need to learn how to compete in the modern marketplace. Within our teams, we need to learn how to do the jobs we need done, and we need to learn to do them with what will seem at first to be an unimaginable efficiency. It’s not a matter of, “Do I do this myself or do I hire out?” For most of the stuff we will be teaching at Unchained, the cost of hiring the work out will be so steep that, if you don’t learn how to do it yourself — rapidly and at minimal expense — it will not get done at all.

BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix will deliver to its students tens of thousands of dollars in value — the ability to do things that would cost tens of thousands of dollars it those jobs were farmed out to vendors. But looked at the other way, Unchained will deliver infinite value, since the tens of thousands of dollars students will save will almost certainly be money they could not have afforded to spend in the first place.

I’m very glad to talk about this, since I think the hands-on nature of the curriculum is the unique selling proposition for Unchained. Just think: You’ll save thousands by doing jobs you could never have afforded to do with contractors, and — for the first time in your life — you’ll reap actual productivity benefits from a real estate conference!

But this is not without a price. You’ll pay for your seat, of course, and your airfare and hotel room and your ground expenses. But the larger price, perhaps, is that you have to give your mind over to this way of working. I can’t speak for the other instructors, but I intend for my students to work my way — by which I mean learning to think in terms of a world that can be moved with the right leverage. At an absolute minimum, that means that, in my class, we’re going to really learn how to use an FTP client.

It’s Friday, the day we all say, “I’m sick of spinning my wheels. I’m going to learn a better way of working.” I’m all for it. Come to Phoenix and let’s get to work. I guess we’re asking more from our students — our colleagues, our guests — than we had foreseen. Stretching yourself to take on new roles might be a little bit scary. But it’s empowering, too, and we’ll be right there, right beside you, every step of the way.

If you want to learn how to convert more sales in the coming wired world of real estate, no one is doing the work we’re taking on. Click the appropriate button below to sign up now.

CyberProfessionals: $397

Unchained Alumnus: $597

Regular Price: $697

Each three-hour lab will be taught by an expert, by a working real estate professional balanced on the bleeding edge of hi-tech marketing. We’re building this curriculum for our own self-improvement, too, so we know there is simply no better investment you can make in your career this year.

We’re looking forward to seeing you in Phoenix!

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