Feeling good, but the timing!

So, in the last week I have made a couple of new agent contacts, which is bringing me many more potential deals than I was getting from my original agent. Awesome.

BUT, even better is I have gotten outside my comfort level as far as the areas where I am looking. For whatever reason, it has taken me quite a while to consider looking in areas that I am now excited about investigating further. Part of it is, to be honest, that I am from the burbs, so some of these areas are not where I would ever go because of some things that would make the news. These areas are not anything approaching war zones, but from my perspective they apparently were close enough to keep me away.

Now that I have gotten in there a little bit more (and have investors who like to buy there, which certainly helps), I am feeling really good about the prospects of making some serious money in the near future. In a way, the cruise that we are going on this weekend is coming at (I can't believe I am actually saying this)... a little bit of a bad time.

Don't get me wrong, I need to get out of this crappy weather ASAP and the time I will have to hang out with other investors and my mentors for a week will be incredibly beneficial. But there are some things that I am on the verge of that I need to put on the back burner for a week. Oh well. If they are not there when we return, there will be others, but an earlier payday beats the crap out of a later payday. I guess we will just use our tax refund as a sort of payday if we need to.

Hasta la vista!

Here is where I will be for the next week

www.celebrity solstice.com

I need to be better

I need to be better about posting here. I have a tendency to let things get in my way and then I do not post for a while. One of the big things right now is I coach a HS rowing team and we practice in the evenings, so I end my day by 4:30 and usually do not get back home until 7:30/8:00 and by that time the last thing I think of doing is going here to post...but that will be changed (though I make no guarantees that it will be everyday, just better than it has been, so no hate mail, please)

So, the last few days have been fairly productive, not counting the weekend. On Friday I met with a couple of investors I know and a mortgage broker and real estate agent. We discussed forming a group of sorts to do some other things to create passive income within our businesses, kind of an outlet for getting our buyers and sellers matched up more quickly. I know I have RTO buyers looking in areas I do not go and these guys have properties in these areas (or can find something since they know the areas a lot better than I do).

I spent time talking with the agent and now I have him looking for properties for me that would be of interest to other investors since I am focusing on wholesaling right now. He is also sending along RTO properties, but those are not as high on my priority list. He has been in the business for over 20 years and is super proactive, something my other agent was, let's say not-so-much.

Oh, and it appears an agent I have worked with for nearly 2 years has flamed out on me. I have not heard from her in about 2 weeks. My guess is that as her business has grown, she is not so interested in looking at the low end of the market quite so much anymore. Oh well.

Yesterday I met with another agent who also works with investors and I have him looking for properties in another part of Pittsburgh (East End out to county line). He invests some himself, so he knows what to look for in an investment property.

I have been talking to an out-of-town investor regarding a property that he bought to rehab then decided to sell instead because he is too far away. He was in town over the weekend to take pictures, but I was not able to meet up with him, so I asked for him to send along any pictures he has so I can see if it is worth pursuing. Not in the best area (maybe a 2 out of 10), so I may pass on it since I do not have anyone looking to buy in that neighborhood.

On the IM front, I have been using One Week marketing to create some Squidoo pages for an affiliate product campaign, no money yet but I still have some work to do to get everything optimized to drive traffic. I also got my Butterfly Marketing 2.0 materials...maybe I will get some time to read through it here...







but somehow I seriously doubt it :)


We leave Easter Sunday and the cruise is 7 days. Sun, sea, sand, warm breezes...everything that is not in Pittsburgh right now (I thought it was Spring already).

Anyway, lots to squeeze into the rest of my week before our little getaway. I am going with other members of a Mentoring/Mastermind group I belong to, so there will be some good stuff learned anyway that I can put to use as soon as I return. Looking forward to it!

Whew!

My days are slowing down, which is good. It turns out the big stressor was getting my websites up. For the first go-round of websites, I wanted to do them myself so I could learn about the process. As I move forward, whenever I upgrade what I have, I will definitely outsource that work.

Anyway, on Saturday I got my main site up and running, so now I have 3 self-made sites and 3 purchased sites. There will certainly be tweaks to my main site as I go along, but it is good enough to have out there (as far as I can tell, links and autoresponder work properly). Now most of the effort on it will be to drive traffic, but there will be some content updates from time to time as well, but the heavy lifting is finished. Whew!

Feel free to check out the sites and let me know if you see anything that needs to be fixed

www.TAERealEstateInv.com (main site)
www.WholesaleDealsInPittsburgh.com
www.PittsburghREI.com

My other sites
www.SellYourProperty-Fast.com
www.EliminateYourRent.com
www.Vitrual-Bird-Dog-Deals.com

Anyway, now that I have gotten the websites up, I can now get really down and dirty with my real estate activities and work more on some internet marketing projects. I am taking my business from an old school model of working pretty much in an offline manner (posted ads, MLS listings from my agent, networking) to more of a virtual model, so some of my real estate activity has slacked a bit in the last couple of months...time to get it back up again.

I have gotten some good stuff put in place, now I can put them to use to make more money. Of course, they share this week with me getting my tax stuff together for my CPA since we will be on a cruise on tax day :) , my deadline is a little bit earlier than usual.

Do today, enjoy tomorrow.

Getting it going

I had bigger plans for today than I actually was able to achieve. It was supposed to be a split real estate/internet marketing day, but it ended up being mostly centered around my real estate business. Here is what I had on my To-Do list:

1. Gym (check)
2. Print out my Investor surveys to compile areas I have buyers (check)
3. Get updated list of areas to my real estate agent (make that for tomorrow)
4. Send ad copy to Mark to for review (nope, turns out he is out of town, send tomorrow)
5. Post ads for Investors, Sellers, Buyers and Bird Dogs (Super check, total of 8 posted, focus on investors for my list)
6. Send a message out to my list (check)
7. Get started working on an affiliate campaign (1/2 check...still going over the step-by-step materials I have)
8. Attend Mark's Reverse Real Estate System call (sort of a check, apparently there was no call or I missed it due to my computer issue, see below)

The affiliate campaign was originally planned to be my afternoon activity, but no.

I am a HS rowing coach and I had a few items that came up today related to that, so that killed a part of my day, but mostly I was slow getting going this AM to the gym, which had a domino effect on the rest of my day.

Oh, I also had terrific computer issue again today. My computer was moving about as fast as a glacier, so I had to re-boot...it took, no joke, 25 minutes to get everything closed (lots of "Not Responding"), shut down, re-started and running again. Don't get me started on how Outlook was "working". I was ready to throw this thing right out my window.

My priority tomorrow is to get my affiliate campaign started (I need some supplemental cash flow for now, but the goal is to get it built up to be a true income source). It is not all bad that I did not get to it today because the real estate stuff is very important, BUT, affiliate marketing is something that I need to get going on. My goal is to have some serious flow going by June 1.

Til next time!